Steinbocks!
“WENCESLAS.”
Mademoiselle Fischer, deeply touched by the dying man’s honesty, opened
the drawer and found the five five-franc pieces to pay his rent.
“Poor young man!” cried she. “And with no one in the world to care about
him!”
She went downstairs to fetch her work, and sat stitching in the garret,
watching over the Livonian gentleman.
When he awoke his astonishment may be imagined on finding a woman
sitting by his bed; it was like the prolongation of a dream. As she sat
there, covering aiguillettes with gold thread, the old maid had resolved
to take charge of the poor youth whom she admired as he lay sleeping.
As soon as the young Count was fully awake, Lisbeth talked to give him
courage, and questioned him to find out how he might make a living.
Wenceslas, after telling his story, added that he owed his position
to his acknowledged talent for the fine arts. He had always had a
preference for sculpture; the necessary time for study had, however,
seemed to him too long for a man without money; and at this moment he
was far too weak to do any hard manual labor or undertake an important
work in sculpture. All this was Greek to Lisbeth Fischer. She replied
to the unhappy man that Paris offered so many openings that any man with
will and courage might find a living there. A man of spirit need never
perish if he had a certain stock of endurance.
“I am but a poor girl myself, a peasant, and I have managed to make
myself independent,” said she in conclusion. “If you will work in
earnest, I have saved a little money, and I will lend you, month by
month, enough to live upon; but to live frugally, and not to play ducks
and drakes with or squander in the streets. You can dine in Paris for
twenty-five sous a day, and I will get you your breakfast with mine
every day. I will furnish your rooms and pay for such teaching as you
may think necessary. You shall give me formal acknowledgment for the
money I may lay out for you, and when you are rich you shall repay me
all. But if you do not work, I shall not regard myself as in any way
pledged to you, and I shall leave you to your fate.”
“Ah!” cried the poor fellow, still smarting from the bitterness of his
first struggle with death, “exiles from every land may well stretch out
their hands to France, as the souls in Purgatory do to Paradise. In what
other country is such help to be found, and generous hearts even in such
a garret as this? You will be everything to me, my beloved benefactress;
I am your slave! Be my sweetheart,” he added, with one of the caressing
gestures familiar to the Poles, for which they are unjustly accused of
servility.
“Oh, no; I am too jealous, I should make you unhappy; but I will gladly
be a sort of comrade,” replied Lisbeth.
“Ah, if only you knew how I longed for some fellow-creature, even a
tyrant, who would have something to say to me when I was struggling in
the vast solitude of Paris!” exclaimed Wenceslas. “I regretted
Siberia, whither I should be sent by the Emperor if I went home.--Be my
Providence!--I will work; I will be a better man than I am, though I am
not such a bad fellow!”
“Will you do whatever I bid you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, then, I will adopt you as my child,” said she lightly. “Here I am
with a son risen from the grave. Come! we will begin at once. I will go
out and get what I want; you can dress, and come down to breakfast with
me when I knock on the ceiling with the broomstick.”
That day, Mademoiselle Fischer made some inquiries, at the houses to
which she carried her work home, as to the business of a sculptor.
By dint of many questions she ended by hearing of the studio kept by
Florent and Chanor, a house that made a special business of casting and
finishing decorative bronzes and handsome silver plate. Thither she went
with Steinbock, recommending him as an apprentice in sculpture, an idea
that was regarded as too eccentric. Their business was to copy the
works of the greatest artists, but they did not teach the craft. The old
maid’s persistent obstinacy so far succeeded that Steinbock was taken on
to design ornament. He very soon learned to model ornament, and invented
novelties; he had a gift for it.
Five months after he was out of his apprenticeship as a finisher, he
made acquaintance with Stidmann, the famous head of Florent’s studios.
Within twenty months Wenceslas was ahead of his master; but in thirty
months the old maid’s savings of sixteen years had melted entirely. Two
thousand five hundred francs in gold!--a sum with which she had intended
to purchase an annuity; and what was there to show for it? A Pole’s
receipt! And at this moment Lisbeth was working as hard as in her young
days to supply the needs of her Livonian.
When she found herself the possessor of a piece of paper instead of her
gold louis, she lost her head, and went to consult Monsieur Rivet,
who for fifteen years had been his clever head-worker’s friend and
counselor. On hearing her story, Monsieur and Madame Rivet scolded
Lisbeth, told her she was crazy, abused all refugees whose plots for
reconstructing their nation compromised the prosperity of the country
and the maintenance of peace; and they urged Lisbeth to find what in
trade is called security.
“The only hold you have over this fellow is on his liberty,” observed
Monsieur Rivet.
Monsieur Achille Rivet was assessor at the Tribunal of Commerce.
“Imprisonment is no joke for a foreigner,” said he. “A Frenchman remains
five years in prison and comes out, free of his debts to be sure, for
he is thenceforth bound only by his conscience, and that never troubles
him; but a foreigner never comes out.--Give me your promissory note; my
bookkeeper will take it up; he will get it protested; you will both be
prosecuted and both be condemned to imprisonment in default of payment;
then, when everything is in due form, you must sign a declaration.
By doing this your interest will be accumulating, and you will have a
pistol always primed to fire at your Pole!”
The old maid allowed these legal steps to be taken, telling her protege
not to be uneasy, as the proceedings were merely to afford a guarantee
to a money-lender who agreed to advance them certain sums. This
subterfuge was due to the inventive genius of Monsieur Rivet. The
guileless artist, blindly trusting to his benefactress, lighted his pipe
with the stamped paper, for he smoked as all men do who have sorrows or
energies that need soothing.
One fine day Monsieur Rivet showed Mademoiselle Fischer a schedule, and
said to her:
“Here you have Wenceslas Steinbock bound hand and foot, and so
effectually, that within twenty-four hours you can have him snug in
Clichy for the rest of his days.”
This worthy and honest judge at the Chamber of Commerce experienced
that day the satisfaction that must come of having done a malignant good
action. Beneficence has so many aspects in Paris that this contradictory
expression really represents one of them. The Livonian being fairly
entangled in the toils of commercial procedure, the point was to
obtain payment; for the illustrious tradesman looked on Wenceslas as
a swindler. Feeling, sincerity, poetry, were in his eyes mere folly in
business matters.
So Rivet went off to see, in behalf of that poor Mademoiselle Fischer,
who, as he said, had been “done” by the Pole, the rich manufacturers for
whom Steinbock had worked. It happened that Stidmann--who, with the
help of these distinguished masters of the goldsmiths’ art, was raising
French work to the perfection it has now reached, allowing it to hold
its own against Florence and the Renaissance--Stidmann was in Chanor’s
private room when the army lace manufacturer called to make inquiries as
to “One Steinbock, a Polish refugee.”
“Whom do you call ‘One Steinbock’? Do you mean a young Livonian who was
a pupil of mine?” cried Stidmann ironically. “I may tell you, monsieur,
that he is a very great artist. It is said of me that I believe myself
to be the Devil. Well, that poor fellow does not know that he is capable
of becoming a god.”
“Indeed,” said Rivet, well pleased. And then he added, “Though you take
a rather cavalier tone with a man who has the honor to be an Assessor on
the Tribunal of Commerce of the Department of the Seine.”
“Your pardon, Consul!” said Stidmann, with a military salute.
“I am delighted,” the Assessor went on, “to hear what you say. The man
may make money then?”
“Certainly,” said Chanor; “but he must work. He would have a tidy sum by
now if he had stayed with us. What is to be done? Artists have a horror
of not being free.”
“They have a proper sense of their value and dignity,” replied Stidmann.
“I do not blame Wenceslas for walking alone, trying to make a name, and
to become a great man; he had a right to do so! But he was a great loss
to me when he left.”
“That, you see,” exclaimed Rivet, “is what all young students aim at as
soon as they are hatched out of the school-egg. Begin by saving money, I
say, and seek glory afterwards.”
“It spoils your touch to be picking up coin,” said Stidmann. “It is
Glory’s business to bring us wealth.”
“And, after all,” said Chanor to Rivet, “you cannot tether them.”
“They would eat the halter,” replied Stidmann.
“All these gentlemen have as much caprice as talent,” said Chanor,
looking at Stidmann. “They spend no end of money; they keep their girls,
they throw coin out of window, and then they have no time to work. They
neglect their orders; we have to employ workmen who are very inferior,
but who grow rich; and then they complain of the hard times, while, if
they were but steady, they might have piles of gold.”
“You old Lumignon,” said Stidmann, “you remind me of the publisher
before the Revolution who said--‘If only I could keep Montesquieu,
Voltaire, and Rousseau very poor in my backshed, and lock up their
breeches in a cupboard, what a lot of nice little books they would write
to make my fortune.’--If works of art could be hammered out like nails,
workmen would make them.--Give me a thousand francs, and don’t talk
nonsense.”
Worthy Monsieur Rivet went home, delighted for poor Mademoiselle
Fischer, who dined with him every Monday, and whom he found waiting for
him.
“If you can only make him work,” said he, “you will have more luck than
wisdom; you will be repaid, interest, capital, and costs. This Pole has
talent, he can make a living; but lock up his trousers and his shoes,
do not let him go to the _Chaumiere_ or the parish of Notre-Dame
de Lorette, keep him in leading-strings. If you do not take such
precautions, your artist will take to loafing, and if you only knew what
these artists mean by loafing! Shocking! Why, I have just heard that
they will spend a thousand-franc note in a day!”
This episode had a fatal influence on the home-life of Wenceslas and
Lisbeth. The benefactress flavored the exile’s bread with the wormwood
of reproof, now that she saw her money in danger, and often believed
it to be lost. From a kind mother she became a stepmother; she took the
poor boy to task, she nagged him, scolded him for working too slowly,
and blamed him for having chosen so difficult a profession. She could
not believe that those models in red wax--little figures and sketches
for ornamental work--could be of any value. Before long, vexed with
herself for her severity, she would try to efface the tears by her care
and attention.
Then the poor young man, after groaning to think that he was dependent
on this shrew and under the thumb of a peasant of the Vosges, was
bewitched by her coaxing ways and by a maternal affection that attached
itself solely to the physical and material side of life. He was like
a woman who forgives a week of ill-usage for the sake of a kiss and a
brief reconciliation.
Thus Mademoiselle Fischer obtained complete power over his mind. The
love of dominion that lay as a germ in the old maid’s heart developed
rapidly. She could now satisfy her pride and her craving for action; had
she not a creature belonging to her, to be schooled, scolded, flattered,
and made happy, without any fear of a rival? Thus the good and bad sides
of her nature alike found play. If she sometimes victimized the poor
artist, she had, on the other hand, delicate impulses like the grace
of wild flowers; it was a joy to her to provide for all his wants; she
would have given her life for him, and Wenceslas knew it. Like every
noble soul, the poor fellow forgot the bad points, the defects of the
woman who had told him the story of her life as an excuse for her rough
ways, and he remembered only the benefits she had done him.
One day, exasperated with Wenceslas for having gone out walking instead
of sitting at work, she made a great scene.
“You belong to me,” said she. “If you were an honest man, you would try
to repay me the money you owe as soon as possible.”
The gentleman, in whose veins the blood of the Steinbocks was fired,
turned pale.
“Bless me,” she went on, “we soon shall have nothing to live on but the
thirty sous I earn--a poor work-woman!”
The two penniless creatures, worked up by their own war of words, grew
vehement; and for the first time the unhappy artist reproached his
benefactress for having rescued him from death only to make him lead the
life of a galley slave, worse than the bottomless void, where at least,
said he, he would have found rest. And he talked of flight.
“Flight!” cried Lisbeth. “Ah, Monsieur Rivet was right.”
And she clearly explained to the Pole that within twenty-four hours he
might be clapped into prison for the rest of his days. It was a crushing
blow. Steinbock sank into deep melancholy and total silence.
In the course of the following night, Lisbeth hearing overhead some
preparations for suicide, went up to her pensioner’s room, and gave him
the schedule and a formal release.
“Here, dear child, forgive me,” she said with tears in her eyes. “Be
happy; leave me! I am too cruel to you; only tell me that you will
sometimes remember the poor girl who has enabled you to make a
living.--What can I say? You are the cause of my ill-humor. I might die;
where would you be without me? That is the reason of my being impatient
to see you do some salable work. I do not want my money back for myself,
I assure you! I am only frightened at your idleness, which you call
meditation; at your ideas, which take up so many hours when you sit
gazing at the sky; I want you to get into habits of industry.”
All this was said with an emphasis, a look, and tears that moved the
high-minded artist; he clasped his benefactress to his heart and kissed
her forehead.
“Keep these pieces,” said he with a sort of cheerfulness. “Why should
you send me to Clichy? Am I not a prisoner here out of gratitude?”
This episode of their secret domestic life had occurred six months
previously, and had led to Steinbock’s producing three finished works:
the seal in Hortense’s possession, the group he had placed with the
curiosity dealer, and a beautiful clock to which he was putting the last
touches, screwing in the last rivets.
This clock represented the twelve Hours, charmingly personified by
twelve female figures whirling round in so mad and swift a dance that
three little Loves perched on a pile of fruit and flowers could not stop
one of them; only the torn skirts of Midnight remained in the hand of
the most daring cherub. The group stood on an admirably treated base,
ornamented with grotesque beasts. The hours were told by a monstrous
mouth that opened to yawn, and each Hour bore some ingeniously
appropriate symbol characteristic of the various occupations of the day.
It is now easy to understand the extraordinary attachment of
Mademoiselle Fischer for her Livonian; she wanted him to be happy,
and she saw him pining, fading away in his attic. The causes of this
wretched state of affairs may be easily imagined. The peasant woman
watched this son of the North with the affection of a mother, with the
jealousy of a wife, and the spirit of a dragon; hence she managed to
put every kind of folly or dissipation out of his power by leaving him
destitute of money. She longed to keep her victim and companion for
herself alone, well conducted perforce, and she had no conception of
the cruelty of this senseless wish, since she, for her own part, was
accustomed to every privation. She loved Steinbock well enough not to
marry him, and too much to give him up to any other woman; she could not
resign herself to be no more than a mother to him, though she saw that
she was mad to think of playing the other part.
These contradictions, this ferocious jealousy, and the joy of having a
man to herself, all agitated her old maid’s heart beyond measure. Really
in love as she had been for four years, she cherished the foolish hope
of prolonging this impossible and aimless way of life in which her
persistence would only be the ruin of the man she thought of as her
child. This contest between her instincts and her reason made her unjust
and tyrannical. She wreaked on the young man her vengeance for her own
lot in being neither young, rich, nor handsome; then, after each fit
of rage, recognizing herself wrong, she stooped to unlimited humility,
infinite tenderness. She never could sacrifice to her idol till she had
asserted her power by blows of the axe. In fact, it was the converse of
Shakespeare’s _Tempest_--Caliban ruling Ariel and Prospero.
As to the poor youth himself, high-minded, meditative, and inclined to
be lazy, the desert that his protectress made in his soul might be seen
in his eyes, as in those of a caged lion. The penal servitude forced on
him by Lisbeth did not fulfil the cravings of his heart. His weariness
became a physical malady, and he was dying without daring to ask,
or knowing where to procure, the price of some little necessary
dissipation. On some days of special energy, when a feeling of utter
ill-luck added to his exasperation, he would look at Lisbeth as a
thirsty traveler on a sandy shore must look at the bitter sea-water.
These harsh fruits of indigence, and this isolation in the midst of
Paris, Lisbeth relished with delight. And besides, she foresaw that
the first passion would rob her of her slave. Sometimes she even blamed
herself because her own tyranny and reproaches had compelled the poetic
youth to become so great an artist of delicate work, and she had thus
given him the means of casting her off.
On the day after, these three lives, so differently but so utterly
wretched--that of a mother in despair, that of the Marneffe household,
and that of the unhappy exile--were all to be influenced by Hortense’s
guileless passion, and by the strange outcome of the Baron’s luckless
passion for Josepha.
Just as Hulot was going into the opera-house, he was stopped by the
darkened appearance of the building and of the Rue le Peletier, where
there were no gendarmes, no lights, no theatre-servants, no barrier to
regulate the crowd. He looked up at the announcement-board, and beheld a
strip of white paper, on which was printed the solemn notice:
“CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF ILLNESS.”
He rushed off to Josepha’s lodgings in the Rue Chauchat; for, like all
the singers, she lived close at hand.
“Whom do you want, sir?” asked the porter, to the Baron’s great
astonishment.
“Have you forgotten me?” said Hulot, much puzzled.
“On the contrary, sir, it is because I have the honor to remember you
that I ask you, Where are you going?”
A mortal chill fell upon the Baron.
“What has happened?” he asked.
“If you go up to Mademoiselle Mirah’s rooms, Monsieur le Baron, you will
find Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout there--and Monsieur Bixiou, Monsieur
Leon de Lora, Monsieur Lousteau, Monsieur de Vernisset, Monsieur
Stidmann; and ladies smelling of patchouli--holding a housewarming.”
“Then, where--where is----?”
“Mademoiselle Mirah?--I don’t know that I ought to tell you.”
The Baron slipped two five-franc pieces into the porter’s hand.
“Well, she is now in the Rue de la Ville l’Eveque, in a fine house,
given to her, they say, by the Duc d’Herouville,” replied the man in a
whisper.
Having ascertained the number of the house, Monsieur Hulot called a
_milord_ and drove to one of those pretty modern houses with double
doors, where everything, from the gaslight at the entrance, proclaims
luxury.
The Baron, in his blue cloth coat, white neckcloth, nankeen trousers,
patent leather boots, and stiffly starched shirt-frill, was supposed to
be a guest, though a late arrival, by the janitor of this new Eden. His
alacrity of manner and quick step justified this opinion.
The porter rang a bell, and a footman appeared in the hall. This man, as
new as the house, admitted the visitor, who said to him in an imperious
tone, and with a lordly gesture:
“Take in this card to Mademoiselle Josepha.”
The victim mechanically looked round the room in which he found
himself--an anteroom full of choice flowers and of furniture that must
have cost twenty thousand francs. The servant, on his return, begged
monsieur to wait in the drawing-room till the company came to their
coffee.
Though the Baron had been familiar with Imperial luxury, which was
undoubtedly prodigious, while its productions, though not durable in
kind, had nevertheless cost enormous sums, he stood dazzled, dumfounded,
in this drawing-room with three windows looking out on a garden like
fairyland, one of those gardens that are created in a month with a made
soil and transplanted shrubs, while the grass seems as if it must
be made to grow by some chemical process. He admired not only the
decoration, the gilding, the carving, in the most expensive Pompadour
style, as it is called, and the magnificent brocades, all of which any
enriched tradesman could have procured for money; but he also noted
such treasures as only princes can select and find, can pay for and give
away; two pictures by Greuze, two by Watteau, two heads by Vandyck, two
landscapes by Ruysdael, and two by le Guaspre, a Rembrandt, a Holbein, a
Murillo, and a Titian, two paintings, by Teniers, and a pair by Metzu,
a Van Huysum, and an Abraham Mignon--in short, two hundred thousand
francs’ worth of pictures superbly framed. The gilding was worth almost
as much as the paintings.
“Ah, ha! Now you understand, my good man?” said Josepha.
She had stolen in on tiptoe through a noiseless door, over Persian
carpets, and came upon her adorer, standing lost in amazement--in
the stupid amazement when a man’s ears tingle so loudly that he hears
nothing but that fatal knell.
The words “my good man,” spoken to an official of such high importance,
so perfectly exemplified the audacity with which these creatures
pour contempt on the loftiest, that the Baron was nailed to the spot.
Josepha, in white and yellow, was so beautifully dressed for the
banquet, that amid all this lavish magnificence she still shone like a
rare jewel.
“Isn’t this really fine?” said she. “The Duke has spent all the money on
it that he got out of floating a company, of which the shares all sold
at a premium. He is no fool, is my little Duke. There is nothing like a
man who has been a grandee in his time for turning coals into gold.
Just before dinner the notary brought me the title-deeds to sign and the
bills receipted!--They are all a first-class set in there--d’Esgrignon,
Rastignac, Maxime, Lenoncourt, Verneuil, Laginski, Rochefide, la
Palferine, and from among the bankers Nucingen and du Tillet, with
Antonia, Malaga, Carabine, and la Schontz; and they all feel for
you deeply.--Yes, old boy, and they hope you will join them, but on
condition that you forthwith drink up to two bottles full of Hungarian
wine, Champagne, or Cape, just to bring you up to their mark.--My dear
fellow, we are all so much _on_ here, that it was necessary to close
the Opera. The manager is as drunk as a cornet-a-piston; he is hiccuping
already.”
“Oh, Josepha!----” cried the Baron.
“Now, can anything be more absurd than explanations?” she broke in with
a smile. “Look here; can you stand six hundred thousand francs which
this house and furniture cost? Can you give me a bond to the tune of
thirty thousand francs a year, which is what the Duke has just given
me in a packet of common sugared almonds from the grocer’s?--a pretty
notion that----”
“What an atrocity!” cried Hulot, who in his fury would have given his
wife’s diamonds to stand in the Duc d’Herouville’s shoes for twenty-four
hours.
“Atrocity is my trade,” said she. “So that is how you take it? Well, why
don’t you float a company? Goodness me! my poor dyed Tom, you ought to
be grateful to me; I have thrown you over just when you would have spent
on me your widow’s fortune, your daughter’s portion.--What, tears! The
Empire is a thing of the past--I hail the coming Empire!”
She struck a tragic attitude, and exclaimed:
“They call you Hulot! Nay, I know you not--”
And she went into the other room.
Through the door, left ajar, there came, like a lightning-flash, a
streak of light with an accompaniment of the crescendo of the orgy and
the fragrance of a banquet of the choicest description.
The singer peeped through the partly open door, and seeing Hulot
transfixed as if he had been a bronze image, she came one step forward
into the room.
“Monsieur,” said she, “I have handed over the rubbish in the Rue
Chauchat to Bixiou’s little Heloise Brisetout. If you wish to claim
your cotton nightcap, your bootjack, your belt, and your wax dye, I have
stipulated for their return.”
This insolent banter made the Baron leave the room as precipitately as
Lot departed from Gomorrah, but he did not look back like Mrs. Lot.
Hulot went home, striding along in a fury, and talking to himself; he
found his family still playing the game of whist at two sous a point, at
which he left them. On seeing her husband return, poor Adeline imagined
something dreadful, some dishonor; she gave her cards to Hortense, and
led Hector away into the very room where, only five hours since, Crevel
had foretold her the utmost disgrace of poverty.
“What is the matter?” she said, terrified.
“Oh, forgive me--but let me tell you all these horrors.” And for ten
minutes he poured out his wrath.
“But, my dear,” said the unhappy woman, with heroic courage, “these
creatures do not know what love means--such pure and devoted love as you
deserve. How could you, so clear-sighted as you are, dream of competing
with millions?”
“Dearest Adeline!” cried the Baron, clasping her to his heart.
The Baroness’ words had shed balm on the bleeding wounds to his vanity.
“To be sure, take away the Duc d’Herouville’s fortune, and she could not
hesitate between us!” said the Baron.
“My dear,” said Adeline with a final effort, “if you positively must
have mistresses, why do you not seek them, like Crevel, among women who
are less extravagant, and of a class that can for a time be content
with little? We should all gain by that arrangement.--I understand your
need--but I do not understand that vanity----”
“Oh, what a kind and perfect wife you are!” cried he. “I am an old
lunatic, I do not deserve to have such a wife!”
“I am simply the Josephine of my Napoleon,” she replied, with a touch of
melancholy.
“Josephine was not to compare with you!” said he. “Come; I will play a
game of whist with my brother and the children. I must try my hand at
the business of a family man; I must get Hortense a husband, and bury
the libertine.”
His frankness so greatly touched poor Adeline, that she said:
“The creature has no taste to prefer any man in the world to my Hector.
Oh, I would not give you up for all the gold on earth. How can any woman
throw you over who is so happy as to be loved by you?”
The look with which the Baron rewarded his wife’s fanaticism confirmed
her in her opinion that gentleness and docility were a woman’s strongest
weapons.
But in this she was mistaken. The noblest sentiments, carried to an
excess, can produce mischief as great as do the worst vices. Bonaparte
was made Emperor for having fired on the people, at a stone’s throw from
the spot where Louis XVI. lost his throne and his head because he would
not allow a certain Monsieur Sauce to be hurt.
On the following morning, Hortense, who had slept with the seal under
her pillow, so as to have it close to her all night, dressed very early,
and sent to beg her father to join her in the garden as soon as he
should be down.
By about half-past nine, the father, acceding to his daughter’s
petition, gave her his arm for a walk, and they went along the quays by
the Pont Royal to the Place du Carrousel.
“Let us look into the shop windows, papa,” said Hortense, as they went
through the little gate to cross the wide square.
“What--here?” said her father, laughing at her.
“We are supposed to have come to see the pictures, and over there”--and
she pointed to the stalls in front of the houses at a right angle to
the Rue du Doyenne--“look! there are dealers in curiosities and
pictures----”
“Your cousin lives there.”
“I know it, but she must not see us.”
“And what do you want to do?” said the Baron, who, finding himself
within thirty yards of Madame Marneffe’s windows, suddenly remembered
her.
Hortense had dragged her father in front of one of the shops forming the
angle of a block of houses built along the front of the Old Louvre, and
facing the Hotel de Nantes. She went into this shop; her father stood
outside, absorbed in gazing at the windows of the pretty little lady,
who, the evening before, had left her image stamped on the old beau’s
heart, as if to alleviate the wound he was so soon to receive; and he
could not help putting his wife’s sage advice into practice.
“I will fall back on a simple little citizen’s wife,” said he to
himself, recalling Madame Marneffe’s adorable graces. “Such a woman as
that will soon make me forget that grasping Josepha.”
Now, this was what was happening at the same moment outside and inside
the curiosity shop.
As he fixed his eyes on the windows of his new _belle_, the Baron
saw the husband, who, while brushing his coat with his own hands, was
apparently on the lookout, expecting to see some one on the square.
Fearing lest he should be seen, and subsequently recognized, the
amorous Baron turned his back on the Rue du Doyenne, or rather stood at
three-quarters’ face, as it were, so as to be able to glance round
from time to time. This manoeuvre brought him face to face with Madame
Marneffe, who, coming up from the quay, was doubling the promontory of
houses to go home.
Valerie was evidently startled as she met the Baron’s astonished eye,
and she responded with a prudish dropping of her eyelids.
“A pretty woman,” exclaimed he, “for whom a man would do many foolish
things.”
“Indeed, monsieur?” said she, turning suddenly, like a woman who has
just come to some vehement decision, “you are Monsieur le Baron Hulot, I
believe?”
The Baron, more and more bewildered, bowed assent.
“Then, as chance has twice made our eyes meet, and I am so fortunate as
to have interested or puzzled you, I may tell you that, instead of doing
anything foolish, you ought to do justice.--My husband’s fate rests with
you.”
“And how may that be?” asked the gallant Baron.
“He is employed in your department in the War Office, under Monsieur
Lebrun, in Monsieur Coquet’s room,” said she with a smile.
“I am quite disposed, Madame--Madame----?”
“Madame Marneffe.”
“Dear little Madame Marneffe, to do injustice for your sake.--I have a
cousin living in your house; I will go to see her one day soon--as soon
as possible; bring your petition to me in her rooms.”
“Pardon my boldness, Monsieur le Baron; you must understand that if
I dare to address you thus, it is because I have no friend to protect
me----”
“Ah, ha!”
“Monsieur, you misunderstand me,” said she, lowering her eyelids.
Hulot felt as if the sun had disappeared.
“I am at my wits’ end, but I am an honest woman!” she went on. “About
six months ago my only protector died, Marshal Montcornet--”
“Ah! You are his daughter?”
“Yes, monsieur; but he never acknowledged me.”
“That was that he might leave you part of his fortune.”
“He left me nothing; he made no will.”
“Indeed! Poor little woman! The Marshal died suddenly of apoplexy. But,
come, madame, hope for the best. The State must do something for the
daughter of one of the Chevalier Bayards of the Empire.”
Madame Marneffe bowed gracefully and went off, as proud of her success
as the Baron was of his.
“Where the devil has she been so early?” thought he watching the flow
of her skirts, to which she contrived to impart a somewhat exaggerated
grace. “She looks too tired to have just come from a bath, and her
husband is waiting for her. It is strange, and puzzles me altogether.”
Madame Marneffe having vanished within, the Baron wondered what his
daughter was doing in the shop. As he went in, still staring at Madame
Marneffe’s windows, he ran against a young man with a pale brow and
sparkling gray eyes, wearing a summer coat of black merino, coarse drill
trousers, and tan shoes, with gaiters, rushing away headlong; he saw him
run to the house in the Rue du Doyenne, into which he went.
Hortense, on going into the shop, had at once recognized the famous
group, conspicuously placed on a table in the middle and in front of the
door. Even without the circumstances to which she owed her knowledge
of this masterpiece, it would probably have struck her by the peculiar
power which we must call the _brio_--the _go_--of great works; and
the girl herself might in Italy have been taken as a model for the
personification of _Brio_.
Not every work by a man of genius has in the same degree that
brilliancy, that glory which is at once patent even to the most
ignoble beholder. Thus, certain pictures by Raphael, such as the famous
_Transfiguration_, the _Madonna di Foligno_, and the frescoes of the
_Stanze_ in the Vatican, do not at first captivate our admiration, as
do the _Violin-player_ in the Sciarra Palace, the portraits of the Doria
family, and the _Vision of Ezekiel_ in the Pitti Gallery, the _Christ
bearing His Cross_ in the Borghese collection, and the _Marriage of
the Virgin_ in the Brera at Milan. The _Saint John the Baptist_ of
the Tribuna, and _Saint Luke painting the Virgin’s portrait_ in the
Accademia at Rome, have not the charm of the _Portrait of Leo X._, and
of the _Virgin_ at Dresden.
And yet they are all of equal merit. Nay, more. The _Stanze_, the
_Transfiguration_, the panels, and the three easel pictures in the
Vatican are in the highest degree perfect and sublime. But they demand
a stress of attention, even from the most accomplished beholder, and
serious study, to be fully understood; while the _Violin-player_, the
_Marriage of the Virgin_, and the _Vision of Ezekiel_ go straight to the
heart through the portal of sight, and make their home there. It is
a pleasure to receive them thus without an effort; if it is not the
highest phase of art, it is the happiest. This fact proves that, in the
begetting of works of art, there is as much chance in the character of
the offspring as there is in a family of children; that some will
be happily graced, born beautiful, and costing their mothers little
suffering, creatures on whom everything smiles, and with whom everything
succeeds; in short, genius, like love, has its fairer blossoms.
This _brio_, an Italian word which the French have begun to use, is
characteristic of youthful work. It is the fruit of an impetus and fire
of early talent--an impetus which is met with again later in some happy
hours; but this particular _brio_ no longer comes from the artist’s
heart; instead of his flinging it into his work as a volcano flings up
its fires, it comes to him from outside, inspired by circumstances, by
love, or rivalry, often by hatred, and more often still by the imperious
need of glory to be lived up to.
This group by Wenceslas was to his later works what the _Marriage of the
Virgin_ is to the great mass of Raphael’s, the first step of a gifted
artist taken with the inimitable grace, the eagerness, and delightful
overflowingness of a child, whose strength is concealed under the
pink-and-white flesh full of dimples which seem to echo to a mother’s
laughter. Prince Eugene is said to have paid four hundred thousand
francs for this picture, which would be worth a million to any nation
that owned no picture by Raphael, but no one would give that sum for the
finest of the frescoes, though their value is far greater as works of
art.
Hortense restrained her admiration, for she reflected on the amount of
her girlish savings; she assumed an air of indifference, and said to the
dealer:
“What is the price of that?”
“Fifteen hundred francs,” replied the man, sending a glance of
intelligence to a young man seated on a stool in the corner.
The young man himself gazed in a stupefaction at Monsieur Hulot’s living
masterpiece. Hortense, forewarned, at once identified him as the artist,
from the color that flushed a face pale with endurance; she saw the
spark lighted up in his gray eyes by her question; she looked on the
thin, drawn features, like those of a monk consumed by asceticism; she
loved the red, well-formed mouth, the delicate chin, and the Pole’s
silky chestnut hair.
“If it were twelve hundred,” said she, “I would beg you to send it to
me.”
“It is antique, mademoiselle,” the dealer remarked, thinking, like
all his fraternity, that, having uttered this _ne plus ultra_ of
bric-a-brac, there was no more to be said.
“Excuse me, monsieur,” she replied very quietly, “it was made this year;
I came expressly to beg you, if my price is accepted, to send the
artist to see us, as it might be possible to procure him some important
commissions.”
“And if he is to have the twelve hundred francs, what am I to get? I am
the dealer,” said the man, with candid good-humor.
“To be sure!” replied the girl, with a slight curl of disdain.
“Oh! mademoiselle, take it; I will make terms with the dealer,” cried
the Livonian, beside himself.
Fascinated by Hortense’s wonderful beauty and the love of art she
displayed, he added:
“I am the sculptor of the group, and for ten days I have come here three
times a day to see if anybody would recognize its merit and bargain for
it. You are my first admirer--take it!”
“Come, then, monsieur, with the dealer, an hour hence.--Here is my
father’s card,” replied Hortense.
Then, seeing the shopkeeper go into a back room to wrap the group in a
piece of linen rag, she added in a low voice, to the great astonishment
of the artist, who thought he must be dreaming:
“For the benefit of your future prospects, Monsieur Wenceslas, do not
mention the name of the purchaser to Mademoiselle Fischer, for she is
our cousin.”
The word cousin dazzled the artist’s mind; he had a glimpse of Paradise
whence this daughter of Eve had come to him. He had dreamed of the
beautiful girl of whom Lisbeth had told him, as Hortense had dreamed of
her cousin’s lover; and, as she had entered the shop--
“Ah!” thought he, “if she could but be like this!”
The look that passed between the lovers may be imagined; it was a flame,
for virtuous lovers have no hypocrisies.
“Well, what the deuce are you doing here?” her father asked her.
“I have been spending twelve hundred francs that I had saved. Come.” And
she took her father’s arm.
“Twelve hundred francs?” he repeated.
“To be exact, thirteen hundred; you will lend me the odd hundred?”
“And on what, in such a place, could you spend so much?”
“Ah! that is the question!” replied the happy girl. “If I have got a
husband, he is not dear at the money.”
“A husband! In that shop, my child?”
“Listen, dear little father; would you forbid my marrying a great
artist?”
“No, my dear. A great artist in these days is a prince without a
title--he has glory and fortune, the two chief social advantages--next
to virtue,” he added, in a smug tone.
“Oh, of course!” said Hortense. “And what do you think of sculpture?”
“It is very poor business,” replied Hulot, shaking his head. “It needs
high patronage as well as great talent, for Government is the only
purchaser. It is an art with no demand nowadays, where there are no
princely houses, no great fortunes, no entailed mansions, no hereditary
estates. Only small pictures and small figures can find a place; the
arts are endangered by this need of small things.”
“But if a great artist could find a demand?” said Hortense.
“That indeed would solve the problem.”
“Or had some one to back him?”
“That would be even better.”
“If he were of noble birth?”
“Pooh!”
“A Count.”
“And a sculptor?”
“He has no money.”
“And so he counts on that of Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot?” said the
Baron ironically, with an inquisitorial look into his daughter’s eyes.
“This great artist, a Count and a sculptor, has just seen your daughter
for the first time in his life, and for the space of five minutes,
Monsieur le Baron,” Hortense calmly replied. “Yesterday, you must know,
dear little father, while you were at the Chamber, mamma had a fainting
fit. This, which she ascribed to a nervous attack, was the result of
some worry that had to do with the failure of my marriage, for she told
me that to get rid of me---”
“She is too fond of you to have used an expression----”
“So unparliamentary!” Hortense put in with a laugh. “No, she did not use
those words; but I know that a girl old enough to marry and who does not
find a husband is a heavy cross for respectable parents to bear.--Well,
she thinks that if a man of energy and talent could be found, who would
be satisfied with thirty thousand francs for my marriage portion, we
might all be happy. In fact, she thought it advisable to prepare me for
the modesty of my future lot, and to hinder me from indulging in too
fervid dreams.--Which evidently meant an end to the intended marriage,
and no settlements for me!”
“Your mother is a very good woman, noble, admirable!” replied the
father, deeply humiliated, though not sorry to hear this confession.
“She told me yesterday that she had your permission to sell her diamonds
so as to give me something to marry on; but I should like her to keep
her jewels, and to find a husband myself. I think I have found the man,
the possible husband, answering to mamma’s prospectus----”
“There?--in the Place du Carrousel?--and in one morning?”
“Oh, papa, the mischief lies deeper!” said she archly.
“Well, come, my child, tell the whole story to your good old father,”
said he persuasively, and concealing his uneasiness.
Under promise of absolute secrecy, Hortense repeated the upshot of her
various conversations with her Cousin Betty. Then, when they got home,
she showed the much-talked-of-seal to her father in evidence of the
sagacity of her views. The father, in the depth of his heart, wondered
at the skill and acumen of girls who act on instinct, discerning the
simplicity of the scheme which her idealized love had suggested in the
course of a single night to his guileless daughter.
“You will see the masterpiece I have just bought; it is to be brought
home, and that dear Wenceslas is to come with the dealer.--The man who
made that group ought to make a fortune; only use your influence to get
him an order for a statue, and rooms at the Institut----”
“How you run on!” cried her father. “Why, if you had your own way, you
would be man and wife within the legal period--in eleven days----”
“Must we wait so long?” said she, laughing. “But I fell in love with him
in five minutes, as you fell in love with mamma at first sight. And he
loves me as if we had known each other for two years. Yes,” she said in
reply to her father’s look, “I read ten volumes of love in his eyes. And
will not you and mamma accept him as my husband when you see that he
is a man of genius? Sculpture is the greatest of the Arts,” she cried,
clapping her hands and jumping. “I will tell you everything----”
“What, is there more to come?” asked her father, smiling.
The child’s complete and effervescent innocence had restored her
father’s peace of mind.
“A confession of the first importance,” said she. “I loved him without
knowing him; and, for the last hour, since seeing him, I am crazy about
him.”
“A little too crazy!” said the Baron, who was enjoying the sight of this
guileless passion.
“Do not punish me for confiding in you,” replied she. “It is so
delightful to say to my father’s heart, ‘I love him! I am so happy in
loving him!’--You will see my Wenceslas! His brow is so sad. The sun
of genius shines in his gray eyes--and what an air he has! What do you
think of Livonia? Is it a fine country?--The idea of Cousin Betty’s
marrying that young fellow! She might be his mother. It would be murder!
I am quite jealous of all she has ever done for him. But I don’t think
my marriage will please her.”
“See, my darling, we must hide nothing from your mother.”
“I should have to show her the seal, and I promised not to betray Cousin
Lisbeth, who is afraid, she says, of mamma’s laughing at her,” said
Hortense.
“You have scruples about the seal, and none about robbing your cousin of
her lover.”
“I promised about the seal--I made no promise about the sculptor.”
This adventure, patriarchal in its simplicity, came admirably _a propos_
to the unconfessed poverty of the family; the Baron, while praising
his daughter for her candor, explained to her that she must now leave
matters to the discretion of her parents.
“You understand, my child, that it is not your part to ascertain whether
your cousin’s lover is a Count, if he has all his papers properly
certified, and if his conduct is a guarantee for his respectability.--As
for your cousin, she refused five offers when she was twenty years
younger; that will prove no obstacle, I undertake to say.”
“Listen to me, papa; if you really wish to see me married, never say a
word to Lisbeth about it till just before the contract is signed. I have
been catechizing her about this business for the last six months! Well,
there is something about her quite inexplicable----”
“What?” said her father, puzzled.
“Well, she looks evil when I say too much, even in joke, about her
lover. Make inquiries, but leave me to row my own boat. My confidence
ought to reassure you.”
“The Lord said, ‘Suffer little children to come unto Me.’ You are one
of those who have come back again,” replied the Baron with a touch of
irony.
After breakfast the dealer was announced, and the artist with his group.
The sudden flush that reddened her daughter’s face at once made the
Baroness suspicious and then watchful, and the girl’s confusion and
the light in her eyes soon betrayed the mystery so badly guarded in her
simple heart.
Count Steinbock, dressed in black, struck the Baron as a very
gentlemanly young man.
“Would you undertake a bronze statue?” he asked, as he held up the
group.
After admiring it on trust, he passed it on to his wife, who knew
nothing about sculpture.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it, mamma?” said Hortense in her mother’ ear.
“A statue! Monsieur, it is less difficult to execute a statue than to
make a clock like this, which my friend here has been kind enough to
bring,” said the artist in reply.
The dealer was placing on the dining-room sideboard the wax model of the
twelve Hours that the Loves were trying to delay.
“Leave the clock with me,” said the Baron, astounded at the beauty of
the sketch. “I should like to show it to the Ministers of the Interior
and of Commerce.”
“Who is the young man in whom you take so much interest?” the Baroness
asked her daughter.
“An artist who could afford to execute this model could get a hundred
thousand francs for it,” said the curiosity-dealer, putting on a
knowing and mysterious look as he saw that the artist and the girl were
interchanging glances. “He would only need to sell twenty copies
at eight thousand francs each--for the materials would cost about a
thousand crowns for each example. But if each copy were numbered and
the mould destroyed, it would certainly be possible to meet with twenty
amateurs only too glad to possess a replica of such a work.”
“A hundred thousand francs!” cried Steinbock, looking from the dealer to
Hortense, the Baron, and the Baroness.
“Yes, a hundred thousand francs,” repeated the dealer. “If I were rich
enough, I would buy it of you myself for twenty thousand francs; for by
destroying the mould it would become a valuable property. But one of the
princes ought to pay thirty or forty thousand francs for such a work to
ornament his drawing-room. No man has ever succeeded in making a clock
satisfactory alike to the vulgar and to the connoisseur, and this one,
sir, solves the difficulty.”
“This is for yourself, monsieur,” said Hortense, giving six gold pieces
to the dealer.
“Never breath a word of this visit to any one living,” said the artist
to his friend, at the door. “If you should be asked where we sold the
group, mention the Duc d’Herouville, the famous collector in the Rue de
Varenne.”
The dealer nodded assent.
“And your name?” said Hulot to the artist when he came back.
“Count Steinbock.”
“Have you the papers that prove your identity?”
“Yes, Monsieur le Baron. They are in Russian and in German, but not
legalized.”
“Do you feel equal to undertaking a statue nine feet high?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Well, then, if the persons whom I shall consult are satisfied with
your work, I can secure you the commission for the statue of Marshal
Montcornet, which is to be erected on his monument at Pere-Lachaise.
The Minister of War and the old officers of the Imperial Guard have
subscribed a sum large enough to enable us to select our artist.”
“Oh, monsieur, it will make my fortune!” exclaimed Steinbock,
overpowered by so much happiness at once.
“Be easy,” replied the Baron graciously. “If the two ministers to whom
I propose to show your group and this sketch in wax are delighted with
these two pieces, your prospects of a fortune are good.”
Hortense hugged her father’s arm so tightly as to hurt him.
“Bring me your papers, and say nothing of your hopes to anybody, not
even to our old Cousin Betty.”
“Lisbeth?” said Madame Hulot, at last understanding the end of all this,
though unable to guess the means.
“I could give proof of my skill by making a bust of the Baroness,” added
Wenceslas.
The artist, struck by Madame Hulot’s beauty, was comparing the mother
and daughter.
“Indeed, monsieur, life may smile upon you,” said the Baron, quite
charmed by Count Steinbock’s refined and elegant manner. “You will find
out that in Paris no man is clever for nothing, and that persevering
toil always finds its reward here.”
Hortense, with a blush, held out to the young man a pretty Algerine
purse containing sixty gold pieces. The artist, with something still
of a gentleman’s pride, responded with a mounting color easy enough to
interpret.
“This, perhaps, is the first money your works have brought you?” said
Adeline.
“Yes, madame--my works of art. It is not the first-fruits of my labor,
for I have been a workman.”
“Well, we must hope my daughter’s money will bring you good luck,” said
she.
“And take it without scruple,” added the Baron, seeing that Wenceslas
held the purse in his hand instead of pocketing it. “The sum will
be repaid by some rich man, a prince perhaps, who will offer it with
interest to possess so fine a work.”
“Oh, I want it too much myself, papa, to give it up to anybody in the
world, even a royal prince!”
“I can make a far prettier thing than that for you, mademoiselle.”
“But it would not be this one,” replied she; and then, as if ashamed of
having said too much, she ran out into the garden.
“Then I shall break the mould and the model as soon as I go home,” said
Steinbock.
“Fetch me your papers, and you will hear of me before long, if you are
equal to what I expect of you, monsieur.”
The artist on this could but take leave. After bowing to Madame Hulot
and Hortense, who came in from the garden on purpose, he went off to
walk in the Tuileries, not bearing--not daring--to return to his attic,
where his tyrant would pelt him with questions and wring his secret from
him.
Hortense’s adorer conceived of groups and statues by the hundred; he
felt strong enough to hew the marble himself, like Canova, who was also
a feeble man, and nearly died of it. He was transfigured by Hortense,
who was to him inspiration made visible.
“Now then,” said the Baroness to her daughter, “what does all this
mean?”
“Well, dear mamma, you have just seen Cousin Lisbeth’s lover, who now, I
hope, is mine. But shut your eyes, know nothing. Good Heavens! I was to
keep it all from you, and I cannot help telling you everything----”
“Good-bye, children!” said the Baron, kissing his wife and daughter; “I
shall perhaps go to call on the Nanny, and from her I shall hear a great
deal about our young man.”
“Papa, be cautious!” said Hortense.
“Oh! little girl!” cried the Baroness when Hortense had poured out her
poem, of which the morning’s adventure was the last canto, “dear little
girl, Artlessness will always be the artfulest puss on earth!”
Genuine passions have an unerring instinct. Set a greedy man before a
dish of fruit and he will make no mistake, but take the choicest even
without seeing it. In the same way, if you allow a girl who is well
brought up to choose a husband for herself, if she is in a position to
meet the man of her heart, rarely will she blunder. The act of nature in
such cases is known as love at first sight; and in love, first sight is
practically second sight.
The Baroness’ satisfaction, though disguised under maternal dignity, was
as great as her daughter’s; for, of the three ways of marrying Hortense
of which Crevel had spoken, the best, as she opined, was about to be
realized. And she regarded this little drama as an answer by Providence
to her fervent prayers.
Mademoiselle Fischer’s galley slave, obliged at last to go home, thought
he might hide his joy as a lover under his glee as an artist rejoicing
over his first success.
“Victory! my group is sold to the Duc d’Herouville, who is going to give
me some commissions,” cried he, throwing the twelve hundred francs in
gold on the table before the old maid.
He had, as may be supposed concealed Hortense’s purse; it lay next to
his heart.
“And a very good thing too,” said Lisbeth. “I was working myself to
death. You see, child, money comes in slowly in the business you have
taken up, for this is the first you have earned, and you have been
grinding at it for near on five years now. That money barely repays me
for what you have cost me since I took your promissory note; that is
all I have got by my savings. But be sure of one thing,” she said, after
counting the gold, “this money will all be spent on you. There is enough
there to keep us going for a year. In a year you may now be able to pay
your debt and have a snug little sum of your own, if you go on in the
same way.”
Wenceslas, finding his trick successful, expatiated on the Duc
d’Herouville.
“I will fit you out in a black suit, and get you some new linen,” said
Lisbeth, “for you must appear presentably before your patrons; and then
you must have a larger and better apartment than your horrible garret,
and furnish it property.--You look so bright, you are not like the same
creature,” she added, gazing at Wenceslas.
“But my work is pronounced a masterpiece.”
“Well, so much the better! Do some more,” said the arid creature, who
was nothing but practical, and incapable of understanding the joy of
triumph or of beauty in Art. “Trouble your head no further about what
you have sold; make something else to sell. You have spent two hundred
francs in money, to say nothing of your time and your labor, on that
devil of a _Samson_. Your clock will cost you more than two thousand
francs to execute. I tell you what, if you will listen to me, you will
finish the two little boys crowning the little girl with cornflowers;
that would just suit the Parisians.--I will go round to Monsieur Graff
the tailor before going to Monsieur Crevel.--Go up now and leave me to
dress.”
Next day the Baron, perfectly crazy about Madame Marneffe, went to see
Cousin Betty, who was considerably amazed on opening the door to see who
her visitor was, for he had never called on her before. She at once said
to herself, “Can it be that Hortense wants my lover?”--for she had heard
the evening before, at Monsieur Crevel’s, that the marriage with the
Councillor of the Supreme Court was broken off.
“What, Cousin! you here? This is the first time you have ever been to
see me, and it is certainly not for love of my fine eyes that you have
come now.”
“Fine eyes is the truth,” said the Baron; “you have as fine eyes as I
have ever seen----”
“Come, what are you here for? I really am ashamed to receive you in such
a kennel.”
The outer room of the two inhabited by Lisbeth served her as
sitting-room, dining-room, kitchen, and workroom. The furniture was such
as beseemed a well-to-do artisan--walnut-wood chairs with straw seats,
a small walnut-wood dining table, a work table, some colored prints in
black wooden frames, short muslin curtains to the windows, the floor
well polished and shining with cleanliness, not a speck of dust
anywhere, but all cold and dingy, like a picture by Terburg in every
particular, even to the gray tone given by a wall paper once blue and
now faded to gray. As to the bedroom, no human being had ever penetrated
its secrets.
The Baron took it all in at a glance, saw the sign-manual of commonness
on every detail, from the cast-iron stove to the household utensils, and
his gorge rose as he said to himself, “And _this_ is virtue!--What am I
here for?” said he aloud. “You are far too cunning not to guess, and
I had better tell you plainly,” cried he, sitting down and looking out
across the courtyard through an opening he made in the puckered curtain.
“There is a very pretty woman in the house----”
“Madame Marneffe! Now I understand!” she exclaimed, seeing it all. “But
Josepha?”
“Alas, Cousin, Josepha is no more. I was turned out of doors like a
discarded footman.”
“And you would like...?” said Lisbeth, looking at the Baron with the
dignity of a prude on her guard a quarter of an hour too soon.
“As Madame Marneffe is very much the lady, and the wife of an employe,
you can meet her without compromising yourself,” the Baron went on, “and
I should like to see you neighborly. Oh! you need not be alarmed; she
will have the greatest consideration for the cousin of her husband’s
chief.”
At this moment the rustle of a gown was heard on the stairs and the
footstep of a woman wearing the thinnest boots. The sound ceased on the
landing. There was a tap at the door, and Madame Marneffe came in.
“Pray excuse me, mademoiselle, for thus intruding upon you, but I failed
to find you yesterday when I came to call; we are near neighbors; and
if I had known that you were related to Monsieur le Baron, I should long
since have craved your kind interest with him. I saw him come in, so I
took the liberty of coming across; for my husband, Monsieur le Baron,
spoke to me of a report on the office clerks which is to be laid before
the minister to-morrow.”
She seemed quite agitated and nervous--but she had only run upstairs.
“You have no need to play the petitioner, fair lady,” replied the Baron.
“It is I who should ask the favor of seeing you.”
“Very well, if mademoiselle allows it, pray come!” said Madame Marneffe.
“Yes--go, Cousin, I will join you,” said Lisbeth judiciously.
The Parisienne had so confidently counted on the chief’s visit and
intelligence, that not only had she dressed herself for so important
an interview--she had dressed her room. Early in the day it had been
furnished with flowers purchased on credit. Marneffe had helped his
wife to polish the furniture, down to the smallest objects, washing,
brushing, and dusting everything. Valerie wished to be found in an
atmosphere of sweetness, to attract the chief and to please him enough
to have a right to be cruel; to tantalize him as a child would, with all
the tricks of fashionable tactics. She had gauged Hulot. Give a Paris
woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.
The man of the Empire, accustomed to the ways to the Empire, was no
doubt quite ignorant of the ways of modern love-making, of the scruples
in vogue and the various styles of conversation invented since 1830,
which led to the poor weak woman being regarded as the victim of
her lover’s desires--a Sister of Charity salving a wound, an angel
sacrificing herself.
This modern art of love uses a vast amount of evangelical phrases in the
service of the Devil. Passion is martyrdom. Both parties aspire to the
Ideal, to the Infinite; love is to make them so much better. All these
fine words are but a pretext for putting increased ardor into the
practical side of it, more frenzy into a fall than of old. This
hypocrisy, a characteristic of the times, is a gangrene in gallantry.
The lovers are both angels, and they behave, if they can, like two
devils.
Love had no time for such subtle analysis between two campaigns, and in
1809 its successes were as rapid as those of the Empire. So, under the
Restoration, the handsome Baron, a lady’s man once more, had begun by
consoling some old friends now fallen from the political firmament,
like extinguished stars, and then, as he grew old, was captured by Jenny
Cadine and Josepha.
Madame Marneffe had placed her batteries after due study of the Baron’s
past life, which her husband had narrated in much detail, after picking
up some information in the offices. The comedy of modern sentiment might
have the charm of novelty to the Baron; Valerie had made up her mind as
to her scheme; and we may say the trial of her power that she made this
morning answered her highest expectations. Thanks to her manoeuvres,
sentimental, high-flown, and romantic, Valerie, without committing
herself to any promises, obtained for her husband the appointment as
deputy head of the office and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
The campaign was not carried out without little dinners at the _Rocher
de Cancale_, parties to the play, and gifts in the form of lace,
scarves, gowns, and jewelry. The apartment in the Rue du Doyenne was not
satisfactory; the Baron proposed to furnish another magnificently in a
charming new house in the Rue Vanneau.
Monsieur Marneffe got a fortnight’s leave, to be taken a month hence
for urgent private affairs in the country, and a present in money;
he promised himself that he would spend both in a little town in
Switzerland, studying the fair sex.
While Monsieur Hulot thus devoted himself to the lady he was
“protecting,” he did not forget the young artist. Comte Popinot,
Minister of Commerce, was a patron of Art; he paid two thousand francs
for a copy of the _Samson_ on condition that the mould should be broken,
and that there should be no _Samson_ but his and Mademoiselle Hulot’s.
The group was admired by a Prince, to whom the model sketch for the
clock was also shown, and who ordered it; but that again was to be
unique, and he offered thirty thousand francs for it.
Artists who were consulted, and among them Stidmann, were of opinion
that the man who had sketched those two models was capable of achieving
a statue. The Marshal Prince de Wissembourg, Minister of War, and
President of the Committee for the subscriptions to the monument of
Marshal Montcornet, called a meeting, at which it was decided that the
execution of the work should be placed in Steinbock’s hands. The Comte
de Rastignac, at that time Under-secretary of State, wished to possess a
work by the artist, whose glory was waxing amid the acclamations of
his rivals. Steinbock sold to him the charming group of two little boys
crowning a little girl, and he promised to secure for the sculptor a
studio attached to the Government marble-quarries, situated, as all the
world knows, at Le Gros-Caillou.
This was a success, such success as is won in Paris, that is to say,
stupendous success, that crushes those whose shoulders and loins are not
strong enough to bear it--as, be it said, not unfrequently is the case.
Count Wenceslas Steinbock was written about in all the newspapers and
reviews without his having the least suspicion of it, any more than
had Mademoiselle Fischer. Every day, as soon as Lisbeth had gone out to
dinner, Wenceslas went to the Baroness’ and spent an hour or two there,
excepting on the evenings when Lisbeth dined with the Hulots.
This state of things lasted for several days.
The Baron, assured of Count Steinbock’s titles and position; the
Baroness, pleased with his character and habits; Hortense, proud of her
permitted love and of her suitor’s fame, none of them hesitated to speak
of the marriage; in short, the artist was in the seventh heaven, when an
indiscretion on Madame Marneffe’s part spoilt all.
And this was how.
Lisbeth, whom the Baron wished to see intimate with Madame Marneffe,
that she might keep an eye on the couple, had already dined with
Valerie; and she, on her part, anxious to have an ear in the Hulot
house, made much of the old maid. It occurred to Valerie to invite
Mademoiselle Fischer to a house-warming in the new apartments she was
about to move into. Lisbeth, glad to have found another house to
dine in, and bewitched by Madame Marneffe, had taken a great fancy to
Valerie. Of all the persons she had made acquaintance with, no one had
taken so much pains to please her. In fact, Madame Marneffe, full of
attentions for Mademoiselle Fischer, found herself in the position
towards Lisbeth that Lisbeth held towards the Baroness, Monsieur Rivet,
Crevel, and the others who invited her to dinner.
The Marneffes had excited Lisbeth’s compassion by allowing her to see
the extreme poverty of the house, while varnishing it as usual with
the fairest colors; their friends were under obligations to them and
ungrateful; they had had much illness; Madame Fortin, her mother, had
never known of their distress, and had died believing herself wealthy to
the end, thanks to their superhuman efforts--and so forth.
“Poor people!” said she to her Cousin Hulot, “you are right to do what
you can for them; they are so brave and so kind! They can hardly live on
the thousand crowns he gets as deputy-head of the office, for they have
got into debt since Marshal Montcornet’s death. It is barbarity on the
part of the Government to suppose that a clerk with a wife and family
can live in Paris on two thousand four hundred francs a year.”
And so, within a very short time, a young woman who affected regard for
her, who told her everything, and consulted her, who flattered her,
and seemed ready to yield to her guidance, had become dearer to the
eccentric Cousin Lisbeth than all her relations.
The Baron, on his part, admiring in Madame Marneffe such propriety,
education, and breeding as neither Jenny Cadine nor Josepha, nor any
friend of theirs had to show, had fallen in love with her in a
month, developing a senile passion, a senseless passion, which had an
appearance of reason. In fact, he found here neither the banter, nor the
orgies, nor the reckless expenditure, nor the depravity, nor the scorn
of social decencies, nor the insolent independence which had brought him
to grief alike with the actress and the singer. He was spared, too, the
rapacity of the courtesan, like unto the thirst of dry sand.
Madame Marneffe, of whom he had made a friend and confidante, made the
greatest difficulties over accepting any gift from him.
“Appointments, official presents, anything you can extract from the
Government; but do not begin by insulting a woman whom you profess to
love,” said Valerie. “If you do, I shall cease to believe you--and
I like to believe you,” she added, with a glance like Saint Theresa
leering at heaven.
Every time he made her a present there was a fortress to be stormed, a
conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep stratagems
to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of having at last
met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In this primitive
household, as he assured himself, he was the god as much as in his own.
And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues from suspecting that
the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on his wife in a shower of
gold; he was his august chief’s humblest slave.
Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful
middle-class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know
nothing of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could
no longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm
of recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the
utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes.
The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it is
not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the secret of
the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock and Hortense
Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who hesitates
long before becoming his mistress, there are contests, uttered or
unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as, in fencing,
the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a prudent man
follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron had hinted at
the greater freedom his daughter’s marriage would allow him, in reply to
the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed:
“I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly
hers.”
And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for
five-and-twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and
himself.
“And they say she is so handsome!” replied Madame Marneffe. “I want
proof.”
“You shall have it,” said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by which
his Valerie committed herself.
Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being
carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he
intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his
lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence
of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife, leaving
her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The Baroness would
then spend all her time with Hortense or the young Hulot couple; he was
sure of her submission.
“And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue
Vanneau.”
“Bless me, how you dispose of me!” said Madame Marneffe. “And my
husband----”
“That rag!”
“To be sure, as compared with you so he is!” said she with a laugh.
Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock’s history, was frantically eager
to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle of his
work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity so
seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she would
never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the reward
of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old Sevres _pate
tendre_, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as if written on
tablets.
So one day when she had begged “_my_ Cousin Betty” to come to take
coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover, to
know how she might see him without risk.
“My dear child,” said she, for they called each my dear, “why have you
never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short time
he has become famous?”
“He famous?”
“He is the one subject of conversation.”
“Pooh!” cried Lisbeth.
“He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of great
use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame Montcornet
cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful thing
done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor
mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome.”
Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting
under the Empire.
“He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?”
“Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have
you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government is
going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-Caillou,
the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I should not
wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his finger.”
“How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?” said
Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement.
“Now, my dear little Cousin Betty,” said Madame Marneffe, in an
insinuating voice, “are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any
test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to have
a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I will
be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me either
to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it was I who
told you----?”
Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth frightened
her. The peasant-woman’s face was terrible; her piercing black eyes
had the glare of the tiger’s; her face was like that we ascribe to a
pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from chattering, and her whole
frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed her clenched fingers under
her cap to clutch her hair and support her head, which felt too heavy;
she was on fire. The smoke of the flame that scorched her seemed to
emanate from her wrinkles as from the crevasses rent by a volcanic
eruption. It was a startling spectacle.
“Well, why do you stop?” she asked in a hollow voice. “I will be all to
you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-blood!”
“You loved him then?”
“Like a child of my own!”
“Well, then,” said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, “if you
only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to
be happy?”
Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman’s.
“He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month’s time.”
“Hortense!” shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting
to her feet.
“Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?” asked
Valerie.
“My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I,” said Mademoiselle
Fischer. “Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they are sacred. Your
vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need your vices!”
“Then did you live with him?” asked Valerie.
“No; I meant to be a mother to him.”
“I give it up. I cannot understand,” said Valerie. “In that case you are
neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to see him
so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate, your day is
over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot’s every evening as soon as you go
out to dinner.”
“Adeline!” muttered Lisbeth. “Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I
will make you uglier than I am.”
“You are as pale as death!” exclaimed Valerie. “There is something
wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have
suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this affair
since they have kept it from you,” said Madame Marneffe. “But if you did
not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater puzzle to me
than my husband’s feelings----”
“Ah, you don’t know,” said Lisbeth; “you have no idea of all their
tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I
had to bruise my soul! You don’t know that from the time when I could
first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she
was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a
lady’s; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she
never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She
married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor’s Court, while I
stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable
match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a
work-woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a
husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like
the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb which
is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-lamb and
steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has meanly robbed me
of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the mire, and sunk
lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and she has cheated me.
The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again what is really true of
all this.”
“Be calm, my dear child.”
“Valerie, my darling, I will be calm,” said the strange creature,
sitting down again. “One thing only can restore me to reason; give me
proofs.”
“Your Cousin Hortense has the _Samson_ group--here is a lithograph from
it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-money, and
it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is pushing him,
getting everything for him.”
“Water!--water!” said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below which
she read, “A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d’Ervy.” “Water! my
head is burning, I am going mad!”
Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap, unfastened
her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new friend held
for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times, and checked the
incipient inflammation. After this douche she completely recovered her
self-command.
“Not a word,” said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--“not a
word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is forgotten. I
am thinking of something very different.”
“She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain,” thought
Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid.
“What is to be done?” Lisbeth went on. “You see, my angel, there is
nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the
grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I should
like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--all to
dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It would be
the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot.”
“Yes; you are right,” said Valerie. “You can only pull as much hay as
you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in
Paris.”
“Besides,” said Lisbeth, “I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose
that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I
counted on living all my days----”
There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this woman
made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder.
“Well, at any rate, I have found you,” said Lisbeth, taking Valerie’s
hand, “that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall
be true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross
your track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would
have married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot’s
interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it to
procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is martyrdom,
my dear, and I have withered under it.”
She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe’s
blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman’s soul, as the point
of a dagger might have pierced her heart.
“And what is the use of talking?” she exclaimed in reproof to herself.
“I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned
yet!” she added after a pause. “As you so wisely say, let us sharpen our
teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get.”
“You are very wise,” said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by
this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. “I am
sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and
we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to our
enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought up a
spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot me, after
making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen’s daughter! My poor
mother, who filled my head with splendid visions, died of grief at
seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve hundred francs a year,
at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened libertine, as corrupt as
the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on you, as a means of
fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found the best of husbands.
He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the street corners, and
leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to himself, he never asks
me where I get money to live on----”
And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself
carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by
Lisbeth’s eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth
before revealing her last secrets.
“You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!” she presently
added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod.
An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court
of justice.
“I keep up every appearance of respectability,” Valerie went on, laying
her hand on Lisbeth’s as if to accept her pledge. “I am a married
woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the morning, when
Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into his head to say
good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without a word. He cares
less for his boy than I care for one of the marble children that play
at the feet of one of the river-gods in the Tuileries. If I do not come
home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly with the maid, for the maid
is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out every evening after dinner, and
does not come in till twelve or one o’clock. Unfortunately, for a year
past, I have had no ladies’ maid, which is as much as to say that I am a
widow!
“I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who
went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his estates,
to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What will he find
left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault and not mine;
why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been wrecked--like my
virtue.”
“Good-bye, my dear,” said Lisbeth abruptly; “we are friends for ever. I
love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting me
to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau; but
I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece of
kindness----”
“Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!” said Madame Marneffe.
“That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity,” replied Lisbeth. “In
Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of ingratitude
are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to rats to whom
you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron’s offer, for this
house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit enough to hold our
tongues about everything that would damage us, and tell all that needs
telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends.”
“Through thick and thin!” cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a
sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. “Listen to me; the
Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----”
“I believe you!” interrupted Lisbeth. “He has spent thirty thousand
francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don’t know, for Josepha
the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck,” she went on. “The Baron
would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white satin
hands like yours!”
“Well, then,” said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such
creatures, which is mere recklessness, “look here, my dear child;
take away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new
quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet,
the curtains----”
Lisbeth’s eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such a
gift.
“You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have done
in thirty years!” she exclaimed. “They have never even asked themselves
whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a few weeks ago,
the Baron made a rich man’s face on seeing how poor I was.--Thank you,
my dear; and I will give you your money’s worth, you will see how by and
by.”
Valerie went out on the landing with _her_ Cousin Betty, and the two
women embraced.
“Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!” said the pretty little woman to
herself when she was alone. “I shall not embrace you often, my dear
cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully
managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune.”
Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had
the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when
urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure
without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were brought to
her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her
own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie inherited
these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had
lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had
seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal,
squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has
been lost since the fall of Napoleon.
The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great
nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot
forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three
exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short,
bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793.
In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses,
unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee.
Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The wisest invest in
annuities. Family pride is destroyed.
The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on
the day when, to use Marneffe’s expression, she had “caught on” with
Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make
a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had been
feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a
mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be
hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think
for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life. Now,
she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron’s motives for
fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself.
Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed,
who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her
detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and
intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This supremely
rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature
of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to
attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the stone
a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And Madame
Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago
and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to
be feared.
For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican
and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under,
had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies
up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green
fruit.
To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of
astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with
which an idea develops in a virgin nature.
Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its
absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized,
assumes in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and
endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved
energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of
body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles
of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical
strength, or the black magic of the Will.
From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as
a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo,
Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, _magna parens
rerum_, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper worlds. In
short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the honors decreed
to her by the Catholic Church.
Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose
snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose swift
decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of every organ
of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as they are
in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the obverse of
friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only in lands
scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of Lorraine, bent
on deceit.
She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by
making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children
do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement.
But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative
is the privilege of the Criminal Bench.
As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur
Rivet, and found him in his office.
“Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet,” she began, when she had bolted the
door of the room. “You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low
villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity.”
“And who want to set Europe on fire,” said the peaceable Rivet, “to
ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is all
bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of the
Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by mistake with
human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we live in; we are
no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear mademoiselle; it
went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of triumph for commerce, and
industry, and middle-class prudence, such as were the making of Holland.
“Yes,” he went on with animation, “we live in a period when nations must
obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties and by
the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what the
Poles do not see, and I hope----
“You were saying, my dear?--” he added, interrupting himself when he
saw from his work-woman’s face that high politics were beyond her
comprehension.
“Here is the schedule,” said Lisbeth. “If I don’t want to lose my
three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into
prison.”
“Didn’t I tell you so?” cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter.
The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in the
Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by that
illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered round
the Louvre.
“Yes, and I blessed you on my way here,” replied Lisbeth.
“If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o’clock in
the morning,” said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour
of sunrise; “but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be
imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ,
with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----”
“What an idiotic law!” exclaimed Lisbeth. “Of course the debtor
escapes.”
“He has every right to do so,” said the Assessor, smiling. “So this is
the way----”
“As to that,” said Lisbeth, interrupting him, “I will take the paper and
hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the money, and
that the lender insists on this formality. I know my gentleman. He will
not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe with it.”
“Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind
easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in
prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to indulge
in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay you?”
“Those who give him money.”
“To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him
to erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has
supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them
with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the nail.”
A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; “He
paid on the nail” will always be the highest praise he can have from a
tradesman.
“Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat
tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going to
live in the Rue Vanneau.”
“You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which,
in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I
repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du Carrousel.
I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the august and
exact representative of the class on whom he founded his dynasty, and
I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by restoring the
National Guard----”
“When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why
you are not made a deputy.”
“They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty,” replied Rivet. “My
political enemies are the King’s. He has a noble character! They are
a fine family; in short,” said he, returning to the charge, “he is our
ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre
is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil
list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris
in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in favor
of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in
a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying.
You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so your Monsieur
Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come to us, I hope,
for his big epaulette.”
“I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you.”
Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by cutting
him off from all communication with the outer world. If he could no
longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a man buried
in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she had two
happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the Baroness and her
daughter.
To go to Crevel’s house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the Pont
du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d’Orsay, the Rue
Bellechasse, Rue de l’Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the
Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of
passion, always the foe of the legs.
Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept watch
on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had guessed
rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once understood that,
as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would go off to the
Baroness’ by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she wandered along by
the parapet of the Quai Voltaire, in fancy suppressing the river and
walking along the opposite bank, she recognized the artist as he came
out of the Tuileries to cross the Pont Royal. She there came up with
the faithless one, and could follow him unseen, for lovers rarely look
behind them. She escorted him as far as Madame Hulot’s house, where he
went in like an accustomed visitor.
This crowning proof, confirming Madame Marneffe’s revelations, put
Lisbeth quite beside herself.
She arrived at the newly promoted Major’s door in the state of mental
irritation which prompts men to commit murder, and found Monsieur Crevel
_senior_ in his drawing-room awaiting his children, Monsieur and Madame
Hulot _junior_.
But Celestin Crevel was so unconscious and so perfect a type of the
Parisian parvenu, that we can scarcely venture so unceremoniously into
the presence of Cesar Birotteau’s successor. Celestin Crevel was a world
in himself; and he, even more than Rivet, deserves the honors of the
palette by reason of his importance in this domestic drama.
Have you ever observed how in childhood, or at the early stages of
social life, we create a model for our own imitation, with our own
hands as it were, and often without knowing it? The banker’s clerk, for
instance, as he enters his master’s drawing-room, dreams of possessing
such another. If he makes a fortune, it will not be the luxury of
the day, twenty years later, that you will find in his house, but the
old-fashioned splendor that fascinated him of yore. It is impossible to
tell how many absurdities are due to this retrospective jealousy; and
in the same way we know nothing of the follies due to the covert rivalry
that urges men to copy the type they have set themselves, and exhaust
their powers in shining with a reflected light, like the moon.
Crevel was deputy mayor because his predecessor had been; he was Major
because he coveted Cesar Birotteau’s epaulettes. In the same way,
struck by the marvels wrought by Grindot the architect, at the time
when Fortune had carried his master to the top of the wheel, Crevel had
“never looked at both sides of a crown-piece,” to use his own language,
when he wanted to “do up” his rooms; he had gone with his purse open and
his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite forgotten. It
is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation may survive,
supported by such stale admiration.
So Grindot, for the thousandth time had displayed his white-and-gold
drawing-room paneled with crimson damask. The furniture, of rosewood,
clumsily carved, as such work is done for the trade, had in the country
been the source of just pride in Paris workmanship on the occasion of
an industrial exhibition. The candelabra, the fire-dogs, the fender,
the chandelier, the clock, were all in the most unmeaning style of
scroll-work; the round table, a fixture in the middle of the room, was
a mosaic of fragments of Italian and antique marbles, brought from Rome,
where these dissected maps are made of mineralogical specimens--for all
the world like tailors’ patterns--an object of perennial admiration
to Crevel’s citizen friends. The portraits of the late lamented Madame
Crevel, of Crevel himself, of his daughter and his son-in-law, hung
on the walls, two and two; they were the work of Pierre Grassou, the
favored painter of the bourgeoisie, to whom Crevel owed his ridiculous
Byronic attitude. The frames, costing a thousand francs each, were quite
in harmony with this coffee-house magnificence, which would have made
any true artist shrug his shoulders.
Money never yet missed the smallest opportunity of being stupid. We
should have in Paris ten Venices if our retired merchants had had the
instinct for fine things characteristic of the Italians. Even in our own
day a Milanese merchant could leave five hundred thousand francs to
the Duomo, to regild the colossal statue of the Virgin that crowns the
edifice. Canova, in his will, desired his brother to build a church
costing four million francs, and that brother adds something on his own
account. Would a citizen of Paris--and they all, like Rivet, love their
Paris in their heart--ever dream of building the spires that are lacking
to the towers of Notre-Dame? And only think of the sums that revert to
the State in property for which no heirs are found.
All the improvements of Paris might have been completed with the money
spent on stucco castings, gilt mouldings, and sham sculpture during the
last fifteen years by individuals of the Crevel stamp.
Beyond this drawing-room was a splendid boudoir furnished with tables
and cabinets in imitation of Boulle.
The bedroom, smart with chintz, also opened out of the drawing-room.
Mahogany in all its glory infested the dining-room, and Swiss views,
gorgeously framed, graced the panels. Crevel, who hoped to travel in
Switzerland, had set his heart on possessing the scenery in painting
till the time should come when he might see it in reality.
So, as will have been seen, Crevel, the Mayor’s deputy, of the Legion
of Honor and of the National Guard, had faithfully reproduced all the
magnificence, even as to furniture, of his luckless predecessor. Under
the Restoration, where one had sunk, this other, quite overlooked, had
come to the top--not by any strange stroke of fortune, but by the force
of circumstance. In revolutions, as in storms at sea, solid treasure
goes to the bottom, and light trifles are floated to the surface. Cesar
Birotteau, a Royalist, in favor and envied, had been made the mark of
bourgeois hostility, while bourgeoisie triumphant found its incarnation
in Crevel.
This apartment, at a rent of a thousand crowns, crammed with all the
vulgar magnificence that money can buy, occupied the first floor of
a fine old house between a courtyard and a garden. Everything was as
spick-and-span as the beetles in an entomological case, for Crevel lived
very little at home.
This gorgeous residence was the ambitious citizen’s legal domicile. His
establishment consisted of a woman-cook and a valet; he hired two extra
men, and had a dinner sent in by Chevet, whenever he gave a banquet to
his political friends, to men he wanted to dazzle or to a family party.
The seat of Crevel’s real domesticity, formerly in the Rue Notre-Dame
de Lorette, with Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, had lately been
transferred, as we have seen, to the Rue Chauchat. Every morning the
retired merchant--every ex-tradesman is a retired merchant--spent two
hours in the Rue des Saussayes to attend to business, and gave the
rest of his time to Mademoiselle Zaire, which annoyed Zaire very much.
Orosmanes-Crevel had a fixed bargain with Mademoiselle Heloise; she owed
him five hundred francs worth of enjoyment every month, and no “bills
delivered.” He paid separately for his dinner and all extras. This
agreement, with certain bonuses, for he made her a good many presents,
seemed cheap to the ex-attache of the great singer; and he would say to
widowers who were fond of their daughters, that it paid better to job
your horses than to have a stable of your own. At the same time, if the
reader remembers the speech made to the Baron by the porter at the Rue
Chauchat, Crevel did not escape the coachman and the groom.
Crevel, as may be seen, had turned his passionate affection for his
daughter to the advantage of his self-indulgence. The immoral aspect
of the situation was justified by the highest morality. And then the
ex-perfumer derived from this style of living--it was the inevitable,
a free-and-easy life, _Regence, Pompadour, Marechal de Richelieu_, what
not--a certain veneer of superiority. Crevel set up for being a man of
broad views, a fine gentleman with an air and grace, a liberal man with
nothing narrow in his ideas--and all for the small sum of about
twelve to fifteen hundred francs a month. This was the result not of
hypocritical policy, but of middle-class vanity, though it came to the
same in the end.
On the Bourse Crevel was regarded as a man superior to his time, and
especially as a man of pleasure, a _bon vivant_. In this particular
Crevel flattered himself that he had overtopped his worthy friend
Birotteau by a hundred cubits.
“And is it you?” cried Crevel, flying into a rage as he saw Lisbeth
enter the room, “who have plotted this marriage between Mademoiselle
Hulot and your young Count, whom you have been bringing up by hand for
her?”
“You don’t seem best pleased at it?” said Lisbeth, fixing a piercing
eye on Crevel. “What interest can you have in hindering my cousin’s
marriage? For it was you, I am told, who hindered her marrying Monsieur
Lebas’ son.”
“You are a good soul and to be trusted,” said Crevel. “Well, then, do
you suppose that I will ever forgive Monsieur Hulot for the crime of
having robbed me of Josepha--especially when he turned a decent girl,
whom I should have married in my old age, into a good-for-nothing slut,
a mountebank, an opera singer!--No, no. Never!”
“He is a very good fellow, too, is Monsieur Hulot,” said Cousin Betty.
“Amiable, very amiable--too amiable,” replied Crevel. “I wish him no
harm; but I do wish to have my revenge, and I will have it. It is my one
idea.”
“And is that desire the reason why you no longer visit Madame Hulot?”
“Possibly.”
“Ah, ha! then you were courting my fair cousin?” said Lisbeth, with a
smile. “I thought as much.”
“And she treated me like a dog!--worse, like a footman; nay, I might say
like a political prisoner.--But I will succeed yet,” said he, striking
his brow with his clenched fist.
“Poor man! It would be dreadful to catch his wife deceiving him after
being packed off by his mistress.”
“Josepha?” cried Crevel. “Has Josepha thrown him over, packed him off,
turned him out neck and crop? Bravo, Josepha, you have avenged me!
I will send you a pair of pearls to hang in your ears, my
ex-sweetheart!--I knew nothing of it; for after I had seen you, on the
day after that when the fair Adeline had shown me the door, I went back
to visit the Lebas, at Corbeil, and have but just come back. Heloise
played the very devil to get me into the country, and I have found out
the purpose of her game; she wanted me out of the way while she gave a
house-warming in the Rue Chauchat, with some artists, and players, and
writers.--She took me in! But I can forgive her, for Heloise amuses me.
She is a Dejazet under a bushel. What a character the hussy is! There is
the note I found last evening:
“‘DEAR OLD CHAP,--I have pitched my tent in the Rue Chauchat. I
have taken the precaution of getting a few friends to clean up the
paint. All is well. Come when you please, monsieur; Hagar awaits
her Abraham.’
“Heloise will have some news for me, for she has her bohemia at her
fingers’ end.”
“But Monsieur Hulot took the disaster very calmly,” said Lisbeth.
“Impossible!” cried Crevel, stopping in a parade as regular as the swing
of a pendulum.
“Monsieur Hulot is not as young as he was,” Lisbeth remarked
significantly.
“I know that,” said Crevel, “but in one point we are alike: Hulot cannot
do without an attachment. He is capable of going back to his wife.
It would be a novelty for him, but an end to my vengeance. You smile,
Mademoiselle Fischer--ah! perhaps you know something?”
“I am smiling at your notions,” replied Lisbeth. “Yes, my cousin is
still handsome enough to inspire a passion. I should certainly fall in
love with her if I were a man.”
“Cut and come again!” exclaimed Crevel. “You are laughing at me.--The
Baron has already found consolation?”
Lisbeth bowed affirmatively.
“He is a lucky man if he can find a second Josepha within twenty-four
hours!” said Crevel. “But I am not altogether surprised, for he told me
one evening at supper that when he was a young man he always had three
mistresses on hand that he might not be left high and dry--the one he
was giving over, the one in possession, and the one he was courting for
a future emergency. He had some smart little work-woman in reserve, no
doubt--in his fish-pond--his _Parc-aux-cerfs_! He is very Louis XV., is
my gentleman. He is in luck to be so handsome!--However, he is ageing;
his face shows it.--He has taken up with some little milliner?”
“Dear me, no,” replied Lisbeth.
“Oh!” cried Crevel, “what would I not do to hinder him from hanging up
his hat! I could not win back Josepha; women of that kind never come
back to their first love.--Besides, it is truly said, such a return
is not love.--But, Cousin Betty, I would pay down fifty thousand
francs--that is to say, I would spend it--to rob that great good-looking
fellow of his mistress, and to show him that a Major with a portly
stomach and a brain made to become Mayor of Paris, though he is a
grandfather, is not to have his mistress tickled away by a poacher
without turning the tables.”
“My position,” said Lisbeth, “compels me to hear everything and know
nothing. You may talk to me without fear; I never repeat a word of what
any one may choose to tell me. How can you suppose I should ever break
that rule of conduct? No one would ever trust me again.”
“I know,” said Crevel; “you are the very jewel of old maids. Still,
come, there are exceptions. Look here, the family have never settled an
allowance on you?”
“But I have my pride,” said Lisbeth. “I do not choose to be an expense
to anybody.”
“If you will but help me to my revenge,” the tradesman went on, “I will
sink ten thousand francs in an annuity for you. Tell me, my fair cousin,
tell me who has stepped into Josepha’s shoes, and you will have money to
pay your rent, your little breakfast in the morning, the good coffee you
love so well--you might allow yourself pure Mocha, heh! And a very good
thing is pure Mocha!”
“I do not care so much for the ten thousand francs in an annuity,
which would bring me nearly five hundred francs a year, as for absolute
secrecy,” said Lisbeth. “For, you see, my dear Monsieur Crevel, the
Baron is very good to me; he is to pay my rent----”
“Oh yes, long may that last! I advise you to trust him,” cried Crevel.
“Where will he find the money?”
“Ah, that I don’t know. At the same time, he is spending more than
thirty thousand francs on the rooms he is furnishing for this little
lady.”
“A lady! What, a woman in society; the rascal, what luck he has! He is
the only favorite!”
“A married woman, and quite the lady,” Lisbeth affirmed.
“Really and truly?” cried Crevel, opening wide eyes flashing with envy,
quite as much as at the magic words _quite the lady_.
“Yes, really,” said Lisbeth. “Clever, a musician, three-and-twenty, a
pretty, innocent face, a dazzling white skin, teeth like a puppy’s, eyes
like stars, a beautiful forehead--and tiny feet, I never saw the like,
they are not wider than her stay-busk.”
“And ears?” asked Crevel, keenly alive to this catalogue of charms.
“Ears for a model,” she replied.
“And small hands?”
“I tell you, in few words, a gem of a woman--and high-minded, and
modest, and refined! A beautiful soul, an angel--and with every
distinction, for her father was a Marshal of France----”
“A Marshal of France!” shrieked Crevel, positively bounding with
excitement. “Good Heavens! by the Holy Piper! By all the joys in
Paradise!--The rascal!--I beg your pardon, Cousin, I am going crazy!--I
think I would give a hundred thousand francs----”
“I dare say you would, and, I tell you, she is a respectable woman--a
woman of virtue. The Baron has forked out handsomely.”
“He has not a sou, I tell you.”
“There is a husband he has pushed----”
“Where did he push him?” asked Crevel, with a bitter laugh.
“He is promoted to be second in his office--this husband who will
oblige, no doubt;--and his name is down for the Cross of the Legion of
Honor.”
“The Government ought to be judicious and respect those who have the
Cross by not flinging it broadcast,” said Crevel, with the look of an
aggrieved politician. “But what is there about the man--that old bulldog
of a Baron?” he went on. “It seems to me that I am quite a match for
him,” and he struck an attitude as he looked at himself in the glass.
“Heloise has told me many a time, at moments when a woman speaks the
truth, that I was wonderful.”
“Oh,” said Lisbeth, “women like big men; they are almost always
good-natured; and if I had to decide between you and the Baron, I should
choose you. Monsieur Hulot is amusing, handsome, and has a figure; but
you, you are substantial, and then--you see--you look an even greater
scamp than he does.”
“It is incredible how all women, even pious women, take to men who have
that about them!” exclaimed Crevel, putting his arm round Lisbeth’s
waist, he was so jubilant.
“The difficulty does not lie there,” said Betty. “You must see that a
woman who is getting so many advantages will not be unfaithful to
her patron for nothing; and it would cost you more than a hundred odd
thousand francs, for our little friend can look forward to seeing her
husband at the head of his office within two years’ time.--It is poverty
that is dragging the poor little angel into that pit.”
Crevel was striding up and down the drawing-room in a state of frenzy.
“He must be uncommonly fond of the woman?” he inquired after a pause,
while his desires, thus goaded by Lisbeth, rose to a sort of madness.
“You may judge for yourself,” replied Lisbeth. “I don’t believe he has
had _that_ of her,” said she, snapping her thumbnail against one of her
enormous white teeth, “and he has given her ten thousand francs’ worth
of presents already.”
“What a good joke it would be!” cried Crevel, “if I got to the winning
post first!”
“Good heavens! It is too bad of me to be telling you all this
tittle-tattle,” said Lisbeth, with an air of compunction.
“No.--I mean to put your relations to the blush. To-morrow I shall
invest in your name such a sum in five-per-cents as will give you
six hundred francs a year; but then you must tell me everything--his
Dulcinea’s name and residence. To you I will make a clean breast of
it.--I never have had a real lady for a mistress, and it is the height
of my ambition. Mahomet’s houris are nothing in comparison with what I
fancy a woman of fashion must be. In short, it is my dream, my mania,
and to such a point, that I declare to you the Baroness Hulot to me will
never be fifty,” said he, unconsciously plagiarizing one of the greatest
wits of the last century. “I assure you, my good Lisbeth, I am prepared
to sacrifice a hundred, two hundred--Hush! Here are the young people,
I see them crossing the courtyard. I shall never have learned anything
through you, I give you my word of honor; for I do not want you to lose
the Baron’s confidence, quite the contrary. He must be amazingly fond of
this woman--that old boy.”
“He is crazy about her,” said Lisbeth. “He could not find forty thousand
francs to marry his daughter off, but he has got them somehow for his
new passion.”
“And do you think that she loves him?”
“At his age!” said the old maid.
“Oh, what an owl I am!” cried Crevel, “when I myself allowed Heloise to
keep her artist exactly as Henri IX. allowed Gabrielle her Bellegrade.
Alas! old age, old age!--Good-morning, Celestine. How do, my jewel!--And
the brat? Ah! here he comes; on my honor, he is beginning to be like
me!--Good-day, Hulot--quite well? We shall soon be having another
wedding in the family.”
Celestine and her husband, as a hint to their father, glanced at the old
maid, who audaciously asked, in reply to Crevel:
“Indeed--whose?”
Crevel put on an air of reserve which was meant to convey that he would
make up for her indiscretions.
“That of Hortense,” he replied; “but it is not yet quite settled. I have
just come from the Lebas’, and they were talking of Mademoiselle Popinot
as a suitable match for their son, the young councillor, for he would
like to get the presidency of a provincial court.--Now, come to dinner.”
By seven o’clock Lisbeth had returned home in an omnibus, for she was
eager to see Wenceslas, whose dupe she had been for three weeks, and to
whom she was carrying a basket filled with fruit by the hands of Crevel
himself, whose attentions were doubled towards _his_ Cousin Betty.
She flew up to the attic at a pace that took her breath away, and found
the artist finishing the ornamentation of a box to be presented to the
adored Hortense. The framework of the lid represented hydrangeas--in
French called _Hortensias_--among which little Loves were playing. The
poor lover, to enable him to pay for the materials of the box, of which
the panels were of malachite, had designed two candlesticks for Florent
and Chanor, and sold them the copyright--two admirable pieces of work.
“You have been working too hard these last few days, my dear fellow,”
said Lisbeth, wiping the perspiration from his brow, and giving him
a kiss. “Such laborious diligence is really dangerous in the month
of August. Seriously, you may injure your health. Look, here are some
peaches and plums from Monsieur Crevel.--Now, do not worry yourself so
much; I have borrowed two thousand francs, and, short of some disaster,
we can repay them when you sell your clock. At the same time, the lender
seems to me suspicious, for he has just sent in this document.”
She laid the writ under the model sketch of the statue of General
Montcornet.
“For whom are you making this pretty thing?” said she, taking up the
model sprays of hydrangea in red wax which Wenceslas had laid down while
eating the fruit.
“For a jeweler.”
“For what jeweler?”
“I do not know. Stidmann asked me to make something out of them, as he
is very busy.”
“But these,” she said in a deep voice, “are _Hortensias_. How is it that
you have never made anything in wax for me? Is it so difficult to design
a pin, a little box--what not, as a keepsake?” and she shot a fearful
glance at the artist, whose eyes were happily lowered. “And yet you say
you love me?”
“Can you doubt it, mademoiselle?”
“That is indeed an ardent _mademoiselle_!--Why, you have been my only
thought since I found you dying--just there. When I saved you, you vowed
you were mine, I mean to hold you to that pledge; but I made a vow to
myself! I said to myself, ‘Since the boy says he is mine, I mean to make
him rich and happy!’ Well, and I can make your fortune.”
“How?” said the hapless artist, at the height of joy, and too artless to
dream of a snare.
“Why, thus,” said she.
Lisbeth could not deprive herself of the savage pleasure of gazing at
Wenceslas, who looked up at her with filial affection, the expression
really of his love for Hortense, which deluded the old maid. Seeing in
a man’s eyes, for the first time in her life, the blazing torch of
passion, she fancied it was for her that it was lighted.
“Monsieur Crevel will back us to the extent of a hundred thousand francs
to start in business, if, as he says, you will marry me. He has queer
ideas, has the worthy man.--Well, what do you say to it?” she added.
The artist, as pale as the dead, looked at his benefactress with a
lustreless eye, which plainly spoke his thoughts. He stood stupefied and
open-mouthed.
“I never before was so distinctly told that I am hideous,” said she,
with a bitter laugh.