The Baron went upstairs again with a beaming countenance, convinced that

he was the only man in the world to that shameless slut, as treacherous,

but as lovely and as engaging as a siren.

Crevel and Marneffe had begun a second rubber at piquet. Crevel was

losing, as a man must who is not giving his thoughts to his game.

Marneffe, who knew the cause of the Mayor’s absence of mind, took

unscrupulous advantage of it; he looked at the cards in reverse, and

discarded accordingly; thus, knowing his adversary’s hand, he played

to beat him. The stake being a franc a point, he had already robbed the

Mayor of thirty francs when Hulot came in.

“Hey day!” said he, amazed to find no company. “Are you alone? Where is

everybody gone?”

“Your pleasant temper put them all to flight,” said Crevel.

“No, it was my wife’s cousin,” replied Marneffe. “The ladies and

gentlemen supposed that Valerie and Henri might have something to say

to each other after three years’ separation, and they very discreetly

retired.--If I had been in the room, I would have kept them; but then,

as it happens, it would have been a mistake, for Lisbeth, who always

comes down to make tea at half-past ten, was taken ill, and that upset

everything--”

“Then is Lisbeth really unwell?” asked Crevel in a fury.

“So I was told,” replied Marneffe, with the heartless indifference of a

man to whom women have ceased to exist.

The Mayor looked at the clock; and, calculating the time, the Baron

seemed to have spent forty minutes in Lisbeth’s rooms. Hector’s jubilant

expression seriously incriminated Valerie, Lisbeth, and himself.

“I have just seen her; she is in great pain, poor soul!” said the Baron.

“Then the sufferings of others must afford you much joy, my friend,”

retorted Crevel with acrimony, “for you have come down with a face that

is positively beaming. Is Lisbeth likely to die? For your daughter, they

say, is her heiress. You are not like the same man. You left this room

looking like the Moor of Venice, and you come back with the air

of Saint-Preux!--I wish I could see Madame Marneffe’s face at this

minute----”

“And pray, what do you mean by that?” said Marneffe to Crevel, packing

his cards and laying them down in front of him.

A light kindled in the eyes of this man, decrepit at the age of

forty-seven; a faint color flushed his flaccid cold cheeks, his

ill-furnished mouth was half open, and on his blackened lips a sort

of foam gathered, thick, and as white as chalk. This fury in such a

helpless wretch, whose life hung on a thread, and who in a duel would

risk nothing while Crevel had everything to lose, frightened the Mayor.

“I said,” repeated Crevel, “that I should like to see Madame Marneffe’s

face. And with all the more reason since yours, at this moment, is most

unpleasant. On my honor, you are horribly ugly, my dear Marneffe----”

“Do you know that you are very uncivil?”

“A man who has won thirty francs of me in forty-five minutes cannot look

handsome in my eyes.”

“Ah, if you had but seen me seventeen years ago!” replied the clerk.

“You were so good-looking?” asked Crevel.

“That was my ruin; now, if I had been like you--I might be a mayor and a

peer.”

“Yes,” said Crevel, with a smile, “you have been too much in the wars;

and of the two forms of metal that may be earned by worshiping the

god of trade, you have taken the worse--the dross!” [This dialogue

is garnished with puns for which it is difficult to find any English

equivalent.] And Crevel roared with laughter. Though Marneffe could

take offence if his honor were in peril, he always took these rough

pleasantries in good part; they were the small coin of conversation

between him and Crevel.

“The daughters of Eve cost me dear, no doubt; but, by the powers! ‘Short

and sweet’ is my motto.”

“‘Long and happy’ is more to my mind,” returned Crevel.

Madame Marneffe now came in; she saw that her husband was at cards with

Crevel, and only the Baron in the room besides; a mere glance at the

municipal dignitary showed her the frame of mind he was in, and her line

of conduct was at once decided on.

“Marneffe, my dear boy,” said she, leaning on her husband’s shoulder,

and passing her pretty fingers through his dingy gray hair, but without

succeeding in covering his bald head with it, “it is very late for you;

you ought to be in bed. To-morrow, you know, you must dose yourself by

the doctor’s orders. Reine will give you your herb tea at seven. If you

wish to live, give up your game.”

“We will pay it out up to five points,” said Marneffe to Crevel.

“Very good--I have scored two,” replied the Mayor.

“How long will it take you?”

“Ten minutes,” said Marneffe.

“It is eleven o’clock,” replied Valerie. “Really, Monsieur Crevel, one

might fancy you meant to kill my husband. Make haste, at any rate.”

This double-barreled speech made Crevel and Hulot smile, and even

Marneffe himself. Valerie sat down to talk to Hector.

“You must leave, my dearest,” said she in Hulot’s ear. “Walk up and down

the Rue Vanneau, and come in again when you see Crevel go out.”

“I would rather leave this room and go into your room through the

dressing-room door. You could tell Reine to let me in.”

“Reine is upstairs attending to Lisbeth.”

“Well, suppose then I go up to Lisbeth’s rooms?”

Danger hemmed in Valerie on every side; she foresaw a discussion with

Crevel, and could not allow Hulot to be in her room, where he could hear

all that went on.--And the Brazilian was upstairs with Lisbeth.

“Really, you men, when you have a notion in your head, you would burn

a house down to get into it!” exclaimed she. “Lisbeth is not in a fit

state to admit you.--Are you afraid of catching cold in the street? Be

off there--or good-night.”

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the Baron to the other two.

Hulot, when piqued in his old man’s vanity, was bent on proving that he

could play the young man by waiting for the happy hour in the open air,

and he went away.

Marneffe bid his wife good-night, taking her hands with a semblance of

devotion. Valerie pressed her husband’s hand with a significant glance,

conveying:

“Get rid of Crevel.”

“Good-night, Crevel,” said Marneffe. “I hope you will not stay long with

Valerie. Yes! I am jealous--a little late in the day, but it has me hard

and fast. I shall come back to see if you are gone.”

“We have a little business to discuss, but I shall not stay long,” said

Crevel.

“Speak low.--What is it?” said Valerie, raising her voice, and looking

at him with a mingled expression of haughtiness and scorn.

Crevel, as he met this arrogant stare, though he was doing Valerie

important services, and had hoped to plume himself on the fact, was at

once reduced to submission.

“That Brazilian----” he began, but, overpowered by Valerie’s fixed look

of contempt, he broke off.

“What of him?” said she.

“That cousin--”

“Is no cousin of mine,” said she. “He is my cousin to the world and to

Monsieur Marneffe. And if he were my lover, it would be no concern of

yours. A tradesman who pays a woman to be revenged on another man, is,

in my opinion, beneath the man who pays her for love of her. You did not

care for me; all you saw in me was Monsieur Hulot’s mistress. You bought

me as a man buys a pistol to kill his adversary. I wanted bread--I

accepted the bargain.”

“But you have not carried it out,” said Crevel, the tradesman once more.

“You want Baron Hulot to be told that you have robbed him of his

mistress, to pay him out for having robbed you of Josepha? Nothing can

more clearly prove your baseness. You say you love a woman, you treat

her like a duchess, and then you want to degrade her? Well, my good

fellow, and you are right. This woman is no match for Josepha. That

young person has the courage of her disgrace, while I--I am a hypocrite,

and deserve to be publicly whipped.--Alas! Josepha is protected by

her cleverness and her wealth. I have nothing to shelter me but my

reputation; I am still the worthy and blameless wife of a plain citizen;

if you create a scandal, what is to become of me? If I were rich, then

indeed; but my income is fifteen thousand francs a year at most, I

suppose.”

“Much more than that,” said Crevel. “I have doubled your savings in

these last two months by investing in _Orleans_.”

“Well, a position in Paris begins with fifty thousand. And you certainly

will not make up to me for the position I should surrender.--What was

my aim? I want to see Marneffe a first-class clerk; he will then draw

a salary of six thousand francs. He has been twenty-seven years in his

office; within three years I shall have a right to a pension of fifteen

hundred francs when he dies. You, to whom I have been entirely kind, to

whom I have given your fill of happiness--you cannot wait!--And that is

what men call love!” she exclaimed.

“Though I began with an ulterior purpose,” said Crevel, “I have become

your poodle. You trample on my heart, you crush me, you stultify me, and

I love you as I have never loved in my life. Valerie, I love you as much

as I love my Celestine. I am capable of anything for your sake.--Listen,

instead of coming twice a week to the Rue du Dauphin, come three times.”

“Is that all! You are quite young again, my dear boy!”

“Only let me pack off Hulot, humiliate him, rid you of him,” said

Crevel, not heeding her impertinence! “Have nothing to say to the

Brazilian, be mine alone; you shall not repent of it. To begin with, I

will give you eight thousand francs a year, secured by bond, but only as

an annuity; I will not give you the capital till the end of five years’

constancy--”

“Always a bargain! A tradesman can never learn to give. You want to stop

for refreshments on the road of love--in the form of Government bonds!

Bah! Shopman, pomatum seller! you put a price on everything!--Hector

told me that the Duc d’Herouville gave Josepha a bond for thirty

thousand francs a year in a packet of sugar almonds! And I am worth six

of Josepha.

“Oh! to be loved!” she went on, twisting her ringlets round her fingers,

and looking at herself in the glass. “Henri loves me. He would smash

you like a fly if I winked at him! Hulot loves me; he leaves his wife in

beggary! As for you, go my good man, be the worthy father of a family.

You have three hundred thousand francs over and above your fortune,

only to amuse yourself, a hoard, in fact, and you think of nothing but

increasing it--”

“For you, Valerie, since I offer you half,” said he, falling on his

knees.

“What, still here!” cried Marneffe, hideous in his dressing-gown. “What

are you about?”

“He is begging my pardon, my dear, for an insulting proposal he has

dared to make me. Unable to obtain my consent, my gentleman proposed to

pay me----”

Crevel only longed to vanish into the cellar, through a trap, as is done

on the stage.

“Get up, Crevel,” said Marneffe, laughing, “you are ridiculous. I can

see by Valerie’s manner that my honor is in no danger.”

“Go to bed and sleep in peace,” said Madame Marneffe.

“Isn’t she clever?” thought Crevel. “She has saved me. She is adorable!”

As Marneffe disappeared, the Mayor took Valerie’s hands and kissed them,

leaving on them the traces of tears.

“It shall all stand in your name,” he said.

“That is true love,” she whispered in his ear. “Well, love for love.

Hulot is below, in the street. The poor old thing is waiting to return

when I place a candle in one of the windows of my bedroom. I give you

leave to tell him that you are the man I love; he will refuse to believe

you; take him to the Rue du Dauphin, give him every proof, crush him; I

allow it--I order it! I am tired of that old seal; he bores me to death.

Keep your man all night in the Rue du Dauphin, grill him over a slow

fire, be revenged for the loss of Josepha. Hulot may die of it perhaps,

but we shall save his wife and children from utter ruin. Madame Hulot is

working for her bread--”

“Oh! poor woman! On my word, it is quite shocking!” exclaimed Crevel,

his natural feeling coming to the top.

“If you love me, Celestin,” said she in Crevel’s ear, which she

touched with her lips, “keep him there, or I am done for. Marneffe is

suspicious. Hector has a key of the outer gate, and will certainly come

back.”

Crevel clasped Madame Marneffe to his heart, and went away in the

seventh heaven of delight. Valerie fondly escorted him to the landing,

and then followed him, like a woman magnetized, down the stairs to the

very bottom.

“My Valerie, go back, do not compromise yourself before the porters.--Go

back; my life, my treasure, all is yours.--Go in, my duchess!”

“Madame Olivier,” Valerie called gently when the gate was closed.

“Why, madame! You here?” said the woman in bewilderment.

“Bolt the gates at top and bottom, and let no one in.”

“Very good, madame.”

Having barred the gate, Madame Olivier told of the bribe that the War

Office chief had tried to offer her.

“You behaved like an angel, my dear Olivier; we shall talk of that

to-morrow.”

Valerie flew like an arrow to the third floor, tapped three times

at Lisbeth’s door, and then went down to her room, where she gave

instructions to Mademoiselle Reine, for a woman must make the most of

the opportunity when a Montes arrives from Brazil.

“By Heaven! only a woman of the world is capable of such love,” said

Crevel to himself. “How she came down those stairs, lighting them

up with her eyes, following me! Never did Josepha--Josepha! she is

cag-mag!” cried the ex-bagman. “What have I said? _Cag-mag_--why, I

might have let the word slip out at the Tuileries! I can never do

any good unless Valerie educates me--and I was so bent on being a

gentleman.--What a woman she is! She upsets me like a fit of the colic

when she looks at me coldly. What grace! What wit! Never did Josepha

move me so. And what perfection when you come to know her!--Ha, there is

my man!”

He perceived in the gloom of the Rue de Babylone the tall, somewhat

stooping figure of Hulot, stealing along close to a boarding, and he

went straight up to him.

“Good-morning, Baron, for it is past midnight, my dear fellow. What

the devil are your doing here? You are airing yourself under a pleasant

drizzle. That is not wholesome at our time of life. Will you let me give

you a little piece of advice? Let each of us go home; for, between you

and me, you will not see the candle in the window.”

The last words made the Baron suddenly aware that he was sixty-three,

and that his cloak was wet.

“Who on earth told you--?” he began.

“Valerie, of course, _our_ Valerie, who means henceforth to be _my_

Valerie. We are even now, Baron; we will play off the tie when you

please. You have nothing to complain of; you know, I always stipulated

for the right of taking my revenge; it took you three months to rob me

of Josepha; I took Valerie from you in--We will say no more about that.

Now I mean to have her all to myself. But we can be very good friends,

all the same.”

“Crevel, no jesting,” said Hulot, in a voice choked by rage. “It is a

matter of life and death.”

“Bless me, is that how you take it!--Baron, do you not remember what you

said to me the day of Hortense’s marriage: ‘Can two old gaffers like us

quarrel over a petticoat? It is too low, too common. We are _Regence_,

we agreed, Pompadour, eighteenth century, quite the Marechal Richelieu,

Louis XV., nay, and I may say, _Liaisons dangereuses_!”

Crevel might have gone on with his string of literary allusions; the

Baron heard him as a deaf man listens when he is but half deaf. But,

seeing in the gaslight the ghastly pallor of his face, the triumphant

Mayor stopped short. This was, indeed, a thunderbolt after Madame

Olivier’s asservations and Valerie’s parting glance.

“Good God! And there are so many other women in Paris!” he said at last.

“That is what I said to you when you took Josepha,” said Crevel.

“Look here, Crevel, it is impossible. Give me some proof.--Have you a

key, as I have, to let yourself in?”

And having reached the house, the Baron put the key into the lock; but

the gate was immovable; he tried in vain to open it.

“Do not make a noise in the streets at night,” said Crevel coolly. “I

tell you, Baron, I have far better proof than you can show.”

“Proofs! give me proof!” cried the Baron, almost crazy with

exasperation.

“Come, and you shall have them,” said Crevel.

And in obedience to Valerie’s instructions, he led the Baron away

towards the quay, down the Rue Hillerin-Bertin. The unhappy Baron walked

on, as a merchant walks on the day before he stops payment; he was lost

in conjectures as to the reasons of the depravity buried in the depths

of Valerie’s heart, and still believed himself the victim of some

practical joke. As they crossed the Pont Royal, life seemed to him

so blank, so utterly a void, and so out of joint from his financial

difficulties, that he was within an ace of yielding to the evil

prompting that bid him fling Crevel into the river and throw himself in

after.

On reaching the Rue du Dauphin, which had not yet been widened, Crevel

stopped before a door in a wall. It opened into a long corridor paved

with black-and-white marble, and serving as an entrance-hall, at the end

of which there was a flight of stairs and a doorkeeper’s lodge, lighted

from an inner courtyard, as is often the case in Paris. This courtyard,

which was shared with another house, was oddly divided into two unequal

portions. Crevel’s little house, for he owned it, had additional

rooms with a glass skylight, built out on to the adjoining plot, under

conditions that it should have no story added above the ground floor, so

that the structure was entirely hidden by the lodge and the projecting

mass of the staircase.

This back building had long served as a store-room, backshop, and

kitchen to one of the shops facing the street. Crevel had cut off

these three rooms from the rest of the ground floor, and Grindot had

transformed them into an inexpensive private residence. There were two

ways in--from the front, through the shop of a furniture-dealer, to whom

Crevel let it at a low price, and only from month to month, so as to be

able to get rid of him in case of his telling tales, and also through a

door in the wall of the passage, so ingeniously hidden as to be almost

invisible. The little apartment, comprising a dining-room, drawing-room,

and bedroom, all lighted from above, and standing partly on Crevel’s

ground and partly on his neighbor’s, was very difficult to find. With

the exception of the second-hand furniture-dealer, the tenants knew

nothing of the existence of this little paradise.

The doorkeeper, paid to keep Crevel’s secrets, was a capital cook. So

Monsieur le Maire could go in and out of his inexpensive retreat at any

hour of the night without any fear of being spied upon. By day, a lady,

dressed as Paris women dress to go shopping, and having a key, ran

no risk in coming to Crevel’s lodgings; she would stop to look at the

cheapened goods, ask the price, go into the shop, and come out again,

without exciting the smallest suspicion if any one should happen to meet

her.

As soon as Crevel had lighted the candles in the sitting-room, the Baron

was surprised at the elegance and refinement it displayed. The perfumer

had given the architect a free hand, and Grindot had done himself

credit by fittings in the Pompadour style, which had in fact cost sixty

thousand francs.

“What I want,” said Crevel to Grindot, “is that a duchess, if I brought

one there, should be surprised at it.”

He wanted to have a perfect Parisian Eden for his Eve, his “real lady,”

his Valerie, his duchess.

“There are two beds,” said Crevel to Hulot, showing him a sofa that

could be made wide enough by pulling out a drawer. “This is one, the

other is in the bedroom. We can both spend the night here.”

“Proof!” was all the Baron could say.

Crevel took a flat candlestick and led Hulot into the adjoining room,

where he saw, on a sofa, a superb dressing-gown belonging to Valerie,

which he had seen her wear in the Rue Vanneau, to display it before

wearing it in Crevel’s little apartment. The Mayor pressed the spring of

a little writing-table of inlaid work, known as a _bonheur-du-jour_, and

took out of it a letter that he handed to the Baron.

“Read that,” said he.

The Councillor read these words written in pencil:

“I have waited in vain, you old wretch! A woman of my quality does

not expect to be kept waiting by a retired perfumer. There was no

dinner ordered--no cigarettes. I will make you pay for this!”

“Well, is that her writing?”

“Good God!” gasped Hulot, sitting down in dismay. “I see all the things

she uses--her caps, her slippers. Why, how long since--?”

Crevel nodded that he understood, and took a packet of bills out of the

little inlaid cabinet.

“You can see, old man. I paid the decorators in December, 1838. In

October, two months before, this charming little place was first used.”

Hulot bent his head.

“How the devil do you manage it? I know how she spends every hour of her

day.”

“How about her walk in the Tuileries?” said Crevel, rubbing his hands in

triumph.

“What then?” said Hulot, mystified.

“Your lady love comes to the Tuileries, she is supposed to be airing

herself from one till four. But, hop, skip, and jump, and she is here.

You know your Moliere? Well, Baron, there is nothing imaginary in your

title.”

Hulot, left without a shred of doubt, sat sunk in ominous silence.

Catastrophes lead intelligent and strong-minded men to be philosophical.

The Baron, morally, was at this moment like a man trying to find his

way by night through a forest. This gloomy taciturnity and the change in

that dejected countenance made Crevel very uneasy, for he did not wish

the death of his colleague.

“As I said, old fellow, we are now even; let us play for the odd. Will

you play off the tie by hook and by crook? Come!”

“Why,” said Hulot, talking to himself--“why is it that out of ten pretty

women at least seven are false?”

But the Baron was too much upset to answer his own question. Beauty

is the greatest of human gifts for power. Every power that has no

counterpoise, no autocratic control, leads to abuses and folly.

Despotism is the madness of power; in women the despot is caprice.

“You have nothing to complain of, my good friend; you have a beautiful

wife, and she is virtuous.”

“I deserve my fate,” said Hulot. “I have undervalued my wife and

made her miserable, and she is an angel! Oh, my poor Adeline! you are

avenged! She suffers in solitude and silence, and she is worthy of my

love; I ought--for she is still charming, fair and girlish even--But was

there ever a woman known more base, more ignoble, more villainous than

this Valerie?”

“She is a good-for-nothing slut,” said Crevel, “a hussy that deserves

whipping on the Place du Chatelet. But, my dear Canillac, though we are

such blades, so Marechal de Richelieu, Louis XV., Pompadour, Madame du

Barry, gay dogs, and everything that is most eighteenth century, there

is no longer a lieutenant of police.”

“How can we make them love us?” Hulot wondered to himself without

heeding Crevel.

“It is sheer folly in us to expect to be loved, my dear fellow,” said

Crevel. “We can only be endured; for Madame Marneffe is a hundred times

more profligate than Josepha.”

“And avaricious! she costs me a hundred and ninety-two thousand francs a

year!” cried Hulot.

“And how many centimes!” sneered Crevel, with the insolence of a

financier who scorns so small a sum.

“You do not love her, that is very evident,” said the Baron dolefully.

“I have had enough of her,” replied Crevel, “for she has had more than

three hundred thousand francs of mine!”

“Where is it? Where does it all go?” said the Baron, clasping his head

in his hands.

“If we had come to an agreement, like the simple young men who combine

to maintain a twopenny baggage, she would have cost us less.”

“That is an idea”! replied the Baron. “But she would still be cheating

us; for, my burly friend, what do you say to this Brazilian?”

“Ay, old sly fox, you are right, we are swindled like--like

shareholders!” said Crevel. “All such women are an unlimited liability,

and we the sleeping partners.”

“Then it was she who told you about the candle in the window?”

“My good man,” replied Crevel, striking an attitude, “she has fooled us

both. Valerie is a--She told me to keep you here.--Now I see it all. She

has got her Brazilian!--Oh, I have done with her, for if you hold her

hands, she would find a way to cheat you with her feet! There! she is a

minx, a jade!”

“She is lower than a prostitute,” said the Baron. “Josepha and Jenny

Cadine were in their rights when they were false to us; they make a

trade of their charms.”

“But she, who affects the saint--the prude!” said Crevel. “I tell you

what, Hulot, do you go back to your wife; your money matters are not

looking well; I have heard talk of certain notes of hand given to a low

usurer whose special line of business is lending to these sluts, a man

named Vauvinet. For my part, I am cured of your ‘real ladies.’ And,

after all, at our time of life what do we want of these swindling

hussies, who, to be honest, cannot help playing us false? You have white

hair and false teeth; I am of the shape of Silenus. I shall go in for

saving. Money never deceives one. Though the Treasury is indeed open

to all the world twice a year, it pays you interest, and this woman

swallows it. With you, my worthy friend, as Gubetta, as my partner in

the concern, I might have resigned myself to a shady bargain--no, a

philosophical calm. But with a Brazilian who has possibly smuggled in

some doubtful colonial produce----”

“Woman is an inexplicable creature!” said Hulot.

“I can explain her,” said Crevel. “We are old; the Brazilian is young

and handsome.”

“Yes; that, I own, is true,” said Hulot; “we are older than we

were. But, my dear fellow, how is one to do without these pretty

creatures--seeing them undress, twist up their hair, smile cunningly

through their fingers as they screw up their curl-papers, put on all

their airs and graces, tell all their lies, declare that we don’t love

them when we are worried with business; and they cheer us in spite of

everything.”

“Yes, by the Power! It is the only pleasure in life!” cried Crevel.

“When a saucy little mug smiles at you and says, ‘My old dear, you don’t

know how nice you are! I am not like other women, I suppose, who go

crazy over mere boys with goats’ beards, smelling of smoke, and as

coarse as serving-men! For in their youth they are so insolent!--They

come in and they bid you good-morning, and out they go.--I, whom you

think such a flirt, I prefer a man of fifty to these brats. A man who

will stick by me, who is devoted, who knows a woman is not to be picked

up every day, and appreciates us.--That is what I love you for, you

old monster!’--and they fill up these avowals with little pettings and

prettinesses and--Faugh! they are as false as the bills on the Hotel de

Ville.”

“A lie is sometimes better than the truth,” said Hulot, remembering

sundry bewitching scenes called up by Crevel, who mimicked Valerie.

“They are obliged to act upon their lies, to sew spangles on their stage

frocks--”

“And they are ours, after all, the lying jades!” said Crevel coarsely.

“Valerie is a witch,” said the Baron. “She can turn an old man into a

young one.”

“Oh, yes!” said Crevel, “she is an eel that wriggles through your

hands; but the prettiest eel, as white and sweet as sugar, as amusing as

Arnal--and ingenious!”

“Yes, she is full of fun,” said Hulot, who had now quite forgotten his

wife.

The colleagues went to bed the best friends in the world, reminding each

other of Valerie’s perfections, the tones of her voice, her kittenish

way, her movements, her fun, her sallies of wit, and of affections; for

she was an artist in love, and had charming impulses, as tenors may sing

a scena better one day than another. And they fell asleep, cradled in

tempting and diabolical visions lighted by the fires of hell.

At nine o’clock next morning Hulot went off to the War Office, Crevel

had business out of town; they left the house together, and Crevel held

out his hand to the Baron, saying:

“To show that there is no ill-feeling. For we, neither of us, will have

anything more to say to Madame Marneffe?”

“Oh, this is the end of everything,” replied Hulot with a sort of

horror.

By half-past ten Crevel was mounting the stairs, four at a time, up to

Madame Marneffe’s apartment. He found the infamous wretch, the adorable

enchantress, in the most becoming morning wrapper, enjoying an elegant

little breakfast in the society of the Baron Montes de Montejanos and

Lisbeth. Though the sight of the Brazilian gave him a shock, Crevel

begged Madame Marneffe to grant him two minutes’ speech with her.

Valerie led Crevel into the drawing-room.

“Valerie, my angel,” said the amorous Mayor, “Monsieur Marneffe cannot

have long to live. If you will be faithful to me, when he dies we will

be married. Think it over. I have rid you of Hulot.--So just consider

whether this Brazilian is to compare with a Mayor of Paris, a man who,

for your sake, will make his way to the highest dignities, and who can

already offer you eighty-odd thousand francs a year.”

“I will think it over,” said she. “You will see me in the Rue du Dauphin

at two o’clock, and we can discuss the matter. But be a good boy--and do

not forget the bond you promised to transfer to me.”

She returned to the dining-room, followed by Crevel, who flattered

himself that he had hit on a plan for keeping Valerie to himself; but

there he found Baron Hulot, who, during this short colloquy, had also

arrived with the same end in view. He, like Crevel, begged for a brief

interview. Madame Marneffe again rose to go to the drawing-room, with a

smile at the Brazilian that seemed to say, “What fools they are! Cannot

they see you?”

“Valerie,” said the official, “my child, that cousin of yours is an

American cousin--”

“Oh, that is enough!” she cried, interrupting the Baron. “Marneffe never

has been, and never will be, never can be my husband! The first, the

only man I ever loved, has come back quite unexpectedly. It is no fault

of mine! But look at Henri and look at yourself. Then ask yourself

whether a woman, and a woman in love, can hesitate for a moment. My dear

fellow, I am not a kept mistress. From this day forth I refuse to play

the part of Susannah between the two Elders. If you really care for me,

you and Crevel, you will be our friends; but all else is at an end, for

I am six-and-twenty, and henceforth I mean to be a saint, an admirable

and worthy wife--as yours is.”

“Is that what you have to say?” answered Hulot. “Is this the way

you receive me when I come like a Pope with my hands full of

Indulgences?--Well, your husband will never be a first-class clerk, nor

be promoted in the Legion of Honor.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Madame Marneffe, with a meaning look at

Hulot.

“Well, well, no temper,” said Hulot in despair. “I will call this

evening, and we will come to an understanding.”

“In Lisbeth’s rooms then.”

“Very good--at Lisbeth’s,” said the old dotard.

Hulot and Crevel went downstairs together without speaking a word till

they were in the street; but outside on the sidewalk they looked at each

other with a dreary laugh.

“We are a couple of old fools,” said Crevel.

“I have got rid of them,” said Madame Marneffe to Lisbeth, as she sat

down once more. “I never loved and I never shall love any man but my

Jaguar,” she added, smiling at Henri Montes. “Lisbeth, my dear, you

don’t know. Henri has forgiven me the infamy to which I was reduced by

poverty.”

“It was my own fault,” said the Brazilian. “I ought to have sent you a

hundred thousand francs.”

“Poor boy!” said Valerie; “I might have worked for my living, but my

fingers were not made for that--ask Lisbeth.”

The Brazilian went away the happiest man in Paris.

At noon Valerie and Lisbeth were chatting in the splendid bedroom where

this dangerous woman was giving to her dress those finishing touches

which a lady alone can give. The doors were bolted, the curtains drawn

over them, and Valerie related in every detail all the events of the

evening, the night, the morning.

“What do you think of it all, my darling?” she said to Lisbeth in

conclusion. “Which shall I be when the time comes--Madame Crevel, or

Madame Montes?”

“Crevel will not last more than ten years, such a profligate as he is,”

replied Lisbeth. “Montes is young. Crevel will leave you about thirty

thousand francs a year. Let Montes wait; he will be happy enough as

Benjamin. And so, by the time you are three-and-thirty, if you take care

of your looks, you may marry your Brazilian and make a fine show with

sixty thousand francs a year of your own--especially under the wing of a

Marechale.”

“Yes, but Montes is a Brazilian; he will never make his mark,” observed

Valerie.

“We live in the day of railways,” said Lisbeth, “when foreigners rise to

high positions in France.”

“We shall see,” replied Valerie, “when Marneffe is dead. He has not much

longer to suffer.”

“These attacks that return so often are a sort of physical remorse,”

said Lisbeth. “Well, I am off to see Hortense.”

“Yes--go, my angel!” replied Valerie. “And bring me my artist.--Three

years, and I have not gained an inch of ground! It is a disgrace to both

of us!--Wenceslas and Henri--these are my two passions--one for love,

the other for fancy.”

“You are lovely this morning,” said Lisbeth, putting her arm round

Valerie’s waist and kissing her forehead. “I enjoy all your pleasures,

your good fortune, your dresses--I never really lived till the day when

we became sisters.”

“Wait a moment, my tiger-cat!” cried Valerie, laughing; “your shawl is

crooked. You cannot put a shawl on yet in spite of my lessons for three

years--and you want to be Madame la Marechale Hulot!”

Shod in prunella boots, over gray silk stockings, in a gown of handsome

corded silk, her hair in smooth bands under a very pretty black velvet

bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to the Rue

Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering whether sheer

dejection would at last break down Hortense’s brave spirit, and whether

Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when, with such a character,

everything is possible, would be too much for Steinbock’s constancy.

Hortense and Wenceslas had the ground floor of a house situated at the

corner of the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Esplanade des Invalides.

These rooms, once in harmony with the honeymoon, now had that half-new,

half-faded look that may be called the autumnal aspect of furniture.

Newly married folks are as lavish and wasteful, without knowing it or

intending it, of everything about them as they are of their affection.

Thinking only of themselves, they reck little of the future, which, at a

later time, weighs on the mother of a family.

Lisbeth found Hortense just as she had finished dressing a baby

Wenceslas, who had been carried into the garden.

“Good-morning, Betty,” said Hortense, opening the door herself to her

cousin. The cook was gone out, and the house-servant, who was also the

nurse, was doing some washing.

“Good-morning, dear child,” replied Lisbeth, kissing her. “Is Wenceslas

in the studio?” she added in a whisper.

“No; he is in the drawing-room talking to Stidmann and Chanor.”

“Can we be alone?” asked Lisbeth.

“Come into my room.”

In this room, the hangings of pink-flowered chintz with green leaves on

a white ground, constantly exposed to the sun, were much faded, as was

the carpet. The muslin curtains had not been washed for many a day. The

smell of tobacco hung about the room; for Wenceslas, now an artist of

repute, and born a fine gentleman, left his cigar-ash on the arms of the

chairs and the prettiest pieces of furniture, as a man does to whom love

allows everything--a man rich enough to scorn vulgar carefulness.

“Now, then, let us talk over your affairs,” said Lisbeth, seeing her

pretty cousin silent in the armchair into which she had dropped. “But

what ails you? You look rather pale, my dear.”

“Two articles have just come out in which my poor Wenceslas is pulled

to pieces; I have read them, but I have hidden them from him, for they

would completely depress him. The marble statue of Marshal Montcornet

is pronounced utterly bad. The bas-reliefs are allowed to pass muster,

simply to allow of the most perfidious praise of his talent as a

decorative artist, and to give the greater emphasis to the statement

that serious art is quite out of his reach! Stidmann, whom I besought

to tell me the truth, broke my heart by confessing that his own opinion

agreed with that of every other artist, of the critics, and the public.

He said to me in the garden before breakfast, ‘If Wenceslas cannot

exhibit a masterpiece next season, he must give up heroic sculpture

and be content to execute idyllic subjects, small figures, pieces of

jewelry, and high-class goldsmiths’ work!’ This verdict is dreadful to

me, for Wenceslas, I know, will never accept it; he feels he has so many

fine ideas.”

“Ideas will not pay the tradesman’s bills,” remarked Lisbeth. “I was

always telling him so--nothing but money. Money is only to be had for

work done--things that ordinary folks like well enough to buy them. When

an artist has to live and keep a family, he had far better have a design

for a candlestick on his counter, or for a fender or a table, than for

groups or statues. Everybody must have such things, while he may wait

months for the admirer of the group--and for his money---”

“You are right, my good Lisbeth. Tell him all that; I have not the

courage.--Besides, as he was saying to Stidmann, if he goes back to

ornamental work and small sculpture, he must give up all hope of the

Institute and grand works of art, and we should not get the three

hundred thousand francs’ worth of work promised at Versailles and by the

City of Paris and the Ministers. That is what we are robbed of by those

dreadful articles, written by rivals who want to step into our shoes.”

“And that is not what you dreamed of, poor little puss!” said Lisbeth,

kissing Hortense on the brow. “You expected to find a gentleman, a

leader of Art, the chief of all living sculptors.--But that is poetry,

you see, a dream requiring fifty thousand francs a year, and you have

only two thousand four hundred--so long as I live. After my death three

thousand.”

A few tears rose to Hortense’s eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her

eyes as a cat laps milk.

This is the story of their honeymoon--the tale will perhaps not be lost

on some artists.

Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one

of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory

in Art--for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind--is

courage above all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have no

conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.

Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept

by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the right

and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the personification

of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born poet and dreamer,

had gone on from conception to execution, and overleaped, without

sounding it, the gulf that divides these two hemispheres of Art. To

muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation.

It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the life of a courtesan who

follows her own fancy. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy,

in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and

the aromatic juices of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as

a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But

gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it

to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning

with the inexhaustible affection of a mother’s heart, licking it clean,

dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly

destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this

headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in

sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in

painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--This is the task of

execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward and

obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at command

than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which

makes a mother--that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly

understood--the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so difficult

to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the opportunity

of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor’s edge, she is in the

air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a crow; she wears

no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is a flame; she

vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the sportsman’s

despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike dreaded and

delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are often broken

by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of this overwhelming

labor, “I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it with regret.” Be it

known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does not throw himself into

his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a soldier leads a forlorn

hope without a moment’s thought, and if when he is in the crater he does

not dig on as a miner does when the earth has fallen in on him; if he

contemplates the difficulties before him instead of conquering them

one by one, like the lovers in fairy tales, who to win their princesses

overcome ever new enchantments, the work remains incomplete; it perishes

in the studio where creativeness becomes impossible, and the artist

looks on at the suicide of his own talent.

Rossini, a brother genius to Raphael, is a striking instance in his

poverty-stricken youth, compared with his latter years of opulence. This

is the reason why the same prize, the same triumph, the same bays are

awarded to great poets and to great generals.

Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in

production, in study, and in work under Lisbeth’s despotic rule, that

love and happiness resulted in reaction. His real character reappeared,

the weakness, recklessness, and indolence of the Sarmatian returned to

nestle in the comfortable corners of his soul, whence the schoolmaster’s

rod had routed them.

For the first few months the artist adored his wife. Hortense and

Wenceslas abandoned themselves to the happy childishness of a legitimate

and unbounded passion. Hortense was the first to release her husband

from his labors, proud to triumph over her rival, his Art. And, indeed,

a woman’s caresses scare away the Muse, and break down the sturdy,

brutal resolution of the worker.

Six or seven months slipped by, and the artist’s fingers had forgotten

the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be

felt, when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of

subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable

byword of the idler, “I am just going to work on it,” and he lulled his

dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes of

the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever; she

dreamed of a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Montcornet would

be the embodied ideal of bravery, the type of the cavalry officer, of

courage _a la Murat_. Yes, yes; at the mere sight of that statue all the

Emperor’s victories were to seem a foregone conclusion. And then such

workmanship! The pencil was accommodating and answered to the word.

By way of a statue the result was a delightful little Wenceslas.

When the progress of affairs required that he should go to the studio

at le Gros-Caillou to mould the clay and set up the life-size model,

Steinbock found one day that the Prince’s clock required his presence

in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being

finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had

business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of

indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home to

toy with his adored wife.

Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the

clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other

hands. It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong

language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the

plaster-cast. Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired,

complaining of this “hodman’s work” and his own physical weakness.

During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess

Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War Minister.

She went to see him; she told him that great works of art were not to be

manufactured like cannon; and that the State--like Louis XIV., Francis

I., and Leo X.--ought to be at the beck and call of genius. Poor

Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace, had the sort of

motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every wife who carries

her love to the pitch of idolatry.

“Do not be hurried,” said she to her husband, “our whole future life is

bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a masterpiece.”

She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted

five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at

it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to him

was all-important.

When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who had

looked on at her husband’s toil, seeing his health really suffer

from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor’s frame and arms and

hands--Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew

nothing of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a

triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by

them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a

favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon

took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were

indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried

to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a

newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of

good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was

contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works

in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be the

test.

“In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble,” wrote Claude Vignon, “a

masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster

is the manuscript, the marble is the book.”

So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son.

The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.

The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the young

couple’s debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he went to

the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in the eyes

of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist by his

powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men in Paris

who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are content with a

sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating these emasculated

but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard work. As soon as

he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the

discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the

frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of

this effete lover.

Sculpture--like dramatic art--is at once the most difficult and the

easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is

done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or

a woman--this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals

of sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among

men. Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles,

Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton,

Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an

achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a

man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized

Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.

Superficial thinkers--and there are many in the artist world--have

asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the

Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible. But, in the first

place, the Ancients have left sublime statues entirely clothed--the

_Polyhymnia_, the _Julia_, and others, and we have not found one-tenth

of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and

see Michael Angelo’s _Penseroso_, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and

behold the _Virgin_ by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman

out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing,

the softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the

ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give

mind to drapery, to armor, to a robe, and fill it with a body, just as

a man leaves the stamp of his individuality and habits of life on the

clothes he wears.

Sculpture is the perpetual realization of the fact which once, and never

again, was, in painting called Raphael!

The solution of this hard problem is to be found only in constant

persevering toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties

to such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and

obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with

the elusive moral element that he has to transfigure as he embodies it.

If Paganini, who uttered his soul through the strings of his violin,

spent three days without practising, he lost what he called the _stops_

of his instrument, meaning the sympathy between the wooden frame, the

strings, the bow, and himself; if he had lost this alliance, he would

have been no more than an ordinary player.

Perpetual work is the law of art, as it is the law of life, for art is

idealized creation. Hence great artists and perfect poets wait neither

for commission nor for purchasers. They are constantly creating--to-day,

to-morrow, always. The result is the habit of work, the unfailing

apprehension of the difficulties which keep them in close intercourse

with the Muse and her productive forces. Canova lived in his studio, as

Voltaire lived in his study; and so must Homer and Phidias have lived.

While Lisbeth kept Wenceslas Steinbock in thraldom in his garret, he was

on the thorny road trodden by all these great men, which leads to the

Alpine heights of glory. Then happiness, in the person of Hortense, had

reduced the poet to idleness--the normal condition of all artists, since

to them idleness is fully occupied. Their joy is such as that of the

pasha of a seraglio; they revel with ideas, they get drunk at the founts

of intellect. Great artists, such as Steinbock, wrapped in reverie, are

rightly spoken of as dreamers. They, like opium-eaters, all sink into

poverty, whereas if they had been kept up to the mark by the stern

demands of life, they might have been great men.

At the same time, these half-artists are delightful; men like them and

cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists, who

are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of society.

This is why: Great men are the slaves of their work. Their indifference

to outer things, their devotion to their work, make simpletons regard

them as egotists, and they are expected to wear the same garb as the

dandy who fulfils the trivial evolutions called social duties. These

men want the lions of the Atlas to be combed and scented like a lady’s

poodle.

These artists, who are too rarely matched to meet their fellows, fall

into habits of solitary exclusiveness; they are inexplicable to the

majority, which, as we know, consists mostly of fools--of the envious,

the ignorant, and the superficial.

Now you may imagine what part a wife should play in the life of these

glorious and exceptional beings. She ought to be what, for five years,

Lisbeth had been, but with the added offering of love, humble and

patient love, always ready and always smiling.

Hortense, enlightened by her anxieties as a mother, and driven by

dire necessity, had discovered too late the mistakes she had been

involuntarily led into by her excessive love. Still, the worthy daughter

of her mother, her heart ached at the thought of worrying Wenceslas;

she loved her dear poet too much to become his torturer; and she could

foresee the hour when beggary awaited her, her child, and her husband.

“Come, come, my child,” said Lisbeth, seeing the tears in her cousin’s

lovely eyes, “you must not despair. A glassful of tears will not buy a

plate of soup. How much do you want?”

“Well, five or six thousand francs.”

“I have but three thousand at the most,” said Lisbeth. “And what is

Wenceslas doing now?”

“He has had an offer to work in partnership with Stidmann at a table

service for the Duc d’Herouville for six thousand francs. Then Monsieur

Chanor will advance four thousand to repay Monsieur de Lora and

Bridau--a debt of honor.”

“What, you have had the money for the statue and the bas-reliefs for

Marshal Montcornet’s monument, and you have not paid them yet?”

“For the last three years,” said Hortense, “we have spent twelve

thousand francs a year, and I have but a hundred louis a year of my own.

The Marshal’s monument, when all the expenses were paid, brought us no

more than sixteen thousand francs. Really and truly, if Wenceslas gets

no work, I do not know what is to become of us. Oh, if only I could

learn to make statues, I would handle the clay!” she cried, holding up

her fine arms.

The woman, it was plain, fulfilled the promise of the girl; there was

a flash in her eye; impetuous blood, strong with iron, flowed in her

veins; she felt that she was wasting her energy in carrying her infant.

“Ah, my poor little thing! a sensible girl should not marry an artist

till his fortune is made--not while it is still to make.”

At this moment they heard voices; Stidmann and Wenceslas were seeing

Chanor to the door; then Wenceslas and Stidmann came in again.

Stidmann, an artist in vogue in the world of journalists, famous

actresses, and courtesans of the better class, was a young man of

fashion whom Valerie much wished to see in her rooms; indeed, he had

already been introduced to her by Claude Vignon. Stidmann had lately

broken off an intimacy with Madame Schontz, who had married some months

since and gone to live in the country. Valerie and Lisbeth, hearing of

this upheaval from Claude Vignon, thought it well to get Steinbock’s

friend to visit in the Rue Vanneau.

Stidmann, out of good feeling, went rarely to the Steinbocks’; and as it

happened that Lisbeth was not present when he was introduced by Claude

Vignon, she now saw him for the first time. As she watched this noted

artist, she caught certain glances from his eyes at Hortense, which

suggested to her the possibility of offering him to the Countess

Steinbock as a consolation if Wenceslas should be false to her. In point

of fact, Stidmann was reflecting that if Steinbock were not his friend,

Hortense, the young and superbly beautiful countess, would be an

adorable mistress; it was this very notion, controlled by honor, that

kept him away from the house. Lisbeth was quick to mark the significant

awkwardness that troubles a man in the presence of a woman with whom he

will not allow himself to flirt.

“Very good-looking--that young man,” said she in a whisper to Hortense.

“Oh, do you think so?” she replied. “I never noticed him.”

“Stidmann, my good fellow,” said Wenceslas, in an undertone to his

friend, “we are on no ceremony, you and I--we have some business to

settle with this old girl.”

Stidmann bowed to the ladies and went away.

“It is settled,” said Wenceslas, when he came in from taking leave of

Stidmann. “But there are six months’ work to be done, and we must live

meanwhile.”

“There are my diamonds,” cried the young Countess, with the impetuous

heroism of a loving woman.

A tear rose in Wenceslas’ eye.

“Oh, I am going to work,” said he, sitting down by his wife and drawing

her on to his knee. “I will do odd jobs--a wedding chest, bronze

groups----”

“But, my children,” said Lisbeth; “for, as you know, you will be

my heirs, and I shall leave you a very comfortable sum, believe me,

especially if you help me to marry the Marshal; nay, if we succeed in

that quickly, I will take you all to board with me--you and Adeline. We

should live very happily together.--But for the moment, listen to the

voice of my long experience. Do not fly to the Mont-de-Piete; it is the

ruin of the borrower. I have always found that when the interest was

due, those who had pledged their things had nothing wherewith to pay up,

and then all is lost. I can get you a loan at five per cent on your note

of hand.”

“Oh, we are saved!” said Hortense.

“Well, then, child, Wenceslas had better come with me to see the lender,

who will oblige him at my request. It is Madame Marneffe. If you flatter

her a little--for she is as vain as a _parvenue_--she will get you out

of the scrape in the most obliging way. Come yourself and see her, my

dear Hortense.”

Hortense looked at her husband with the expression a man condemned to

death must wear on his way to the scaffold.

“Claude Vignon took Stidmann there,” said Wenceslas. “He says it is a

very pleasant house.”

Hortense’s head fell. What she felt can only be expressed in one word;

it was not pain; it was illness.

“But, my dear Hortense, you must learn something of life!” exclaimed

Lisbeth, understanding the eloquence of her cousin’s looks. “Otherwise,

like your mother, you will find yourself abandoned in a deserted room,

where you will weep like Calypso on the departure of Ulysses, and at an

age when there is no hope of Telemachus--” she added, repeating a jest

of Madame Marneffe’s. “We have to regard the people in the world as

tools which we can make use of or let alone, according as they can serve

our turn. Make use of Madame Marneffe now, my dears, and let her alone

by and by. Are you afraid lest Wenceslas, who worships you, should fall

in love with a woman four or five years older than himself, as yellow as

a bundle of field peas, and----?”

“I would far rather pawn my diamonds,” said Hortense. “Oh, never go

there, Wenceslas!--It is hell!”

“Hortense is right,” said Steinbock, kissing his wife.

“Thank you, my dearest,” said Hortense, delighted. “My husband is an

angel, you see, Lisbeth. He does not gamble, he goes nowhere without me;

if he only could stick to work--oh, I should be too happy. Why take us

on show to my father’s mistress, a woman who is ruining him and is the

cause of troubles that are killing my heroic mother?”

“My child, that is not where the cause of your father’s ruin lies. It

was his singer who ruined him, and then your marriage!” replied her

cousin. “Bless me! why, Madame Marneffe is of the greatest use to him.

However, I must tell no tales.”

“You have a good word for everybody, dear Betty--”

Hortense was called into the garden by hearing the child cry; Lisbeth

was left alone with Wenceslas.

“You have an angel for your wife, Wenceslas!” said she. “Love her as you

ought; never give her cause for grief.”

“Yes, indeed, I love her so well that I do not tell her all,” replied

Wenceslas; “but to you, Lisbeth, I may confess the truth.--If I took my

wife’s diamonds to the Monte-de-Piete, we should be no further forward.”

“Then borrow of Madame Marneffe,” said Lisbeth. “Persuade Hortense,

Wenceslas, to let you go there, or else, bless me! go there without

telling her.”

“That is what I was thinking of,” replied Wenceslas, “when I refused for

fear of grieving Hortense.”

“Listen to me; I care too much for you both not to warn you of your

danger. If you go there, hold your heart tight in both hands, for

the woman is a witch. All who see her adore her; she is so wicked, so

inviting! She fascinates men like a masterpiece. Borrow her money, but

do not leave your soul in pledge. I should never be happy again if you

were false to Hortense--here she is! not another word! I will settle the

matter.”

“Kiss Lisbeth, my darling,” said Wenceslas to his wife. “She will help

us out of our difficulties by lending us her savings.”

And he gave Lisbeth a look which she understood.

“Then, I hope you mean to work, my dear treasure,” said Hortense.

“Yes, indeed,” said the artist. “I will begin to-morrow.”

“To-morrow is our ruin!” said his wife, with a smile.

“Now, my dear child! say yourself whether some hindrance has not come in

the way every day; some obstacle or business?”

“Yes, very true, my love.”

“Here!” cried Steinbock, striking his brow, “here I have swarms of

ideas! I mean to astonish all my enemies. I am going to design a service

in the German style of the sixteenth century; the romantic style:

foliage twined with insects, sleeping children, newly invented monsters,

chimeras--real chimeras, such as we dream of!--I see it all! It will be

undercut, light, and yet crowded. Chanor was quite amazed.--And I wanted

some encouragement, for the last article on Montcornet’s monument had

been crushing.”

At a moment in the course of the day when Lisbeth and Wenceslas were

left together, the artist agreed to go on the morrow to see Madame

Marneffe--he either would win his wife’s consent, or he would go without

telling her.

Valerie, informed the same evening of this success, insisted that Hulot

should go to invite Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Steinbock to dinner;

for she was beginning to tyrannize over him as women of that type

tyrannize over old men, who trot round town, and go to make interest

with every one who is necessary to the interests or the vanity of their

task-mistress.

Next evening Valerie armed herself for conquest by making such a toilet

as a Frenchwoman can devise when she wishes to make the most of herself.

She studied her appearance in this great work as a man going out to

fight a duel practises his feints and lunges. Not a speck, not a wrinkle

was to be seen. Valerie was at her whitest, her softest, her sweetest.

And certain little “patches” attracted the eye.

It is commonly supposed that the patch of the eighteenth century is out

of date or out of fashion; that is a mistake. In these days women, more

ingenious perhaps than of yore, invite a glance through the opera-glass

by other audacious devices. One is the first to hit on a rosette in

her hair with a diamond in the centre, and she attracts every eye for a

whole evening; another revives the hair-net, or sticks a dagger through

the twist to suggest a garter; this one wears velvet bands round her

wrists, that one appears in lace lippets. These valiant efforts, an

Austerlitz of vanity or of love, then set the fashion for lower spheres

by the time the inventive creatress has originated something new. This

evening, which Valerie meant to be a success for her, she had placed

three patches. She had washed her hair with some lye, which changed

its hue for a few days from a gold color to a duller shade. Madame

Steinbock’s was almost red, and she would be in every point unlike her.

This new effect gave her a piquant and strange appearance, which puzzled

her followers so much, that Montes asked her:

“What have you done to yourself this evening?”--Then she put on a rather

wide black velvet neck-ribbon, which showed off the whiteness of her

skin. One patch took the place of the _assassine_ of our grandmothers.

And Valerie pinned the sweetest rosebud into her bodice, just in the

middle above the stay-busk, and in the daintiest little hollow! It was

enough to make every man under thirty drop his eyelids.

“I am as sweet as a sugar-plum,” said she to herself, going through her

attitudes before the glass, exactly as a dancer practises her curtesies.

Lisbeth had been to market, and the dinner was to be one of those

superfine meals which Mathurine had been wont to cook for her Bishop

when he entertained the prelate of the adjoining diocese.

Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Count Steinbock arrived almost together,

just at six. An ordinary, or, if you will, a natural woman would have

hastened at the announcement of a name so eagerly longed for; but

Valerie, though ready since five o’clock, remained in her room, leaving

her three guests together, certain that she was the subject of their

conversation or of their secret thoughts. She herself had arranged

the drawing-room, laying out the pretty trifles produced in Paris and

nowhere else, which reveal the woman and announce her presence: albums

bound in enamel or embroidered with beads, saucers full of pretty rings,

marvels of Sevres or Dresden mounted exquisitely by Florent and Chanor,

statues, books, all the frivolities which cost insane sums, and which

passion orders of the makers in its first delirium--or to patch up its

last quarrel.

Besides, Valerie was in the state of intoxication that comes of triumph.

She had promised to marry Crevel if Marneffe should die; and the amorous

Crevel had transferred to the name of Valerie Fortin bonds bearing ten

thousand francs a year, the sum-total of what he had made in railway

speculations during the past three years, the returns on the capital of

a hundred thousand crowns which he had at first offered to the Baronne

Hulot. So Valerie now had an income of thirty-two thousand francs.

Crevel had just committed himself to a promise of far greater magnitude

than this gift of his surplus. In the paroxysm of rapture which _his

Duchess_ had given him from two to four--he gave this fine title to

Madame _de_ Marneffe to complete the illusion--for Valerie had surpassed

herself in the Rue du Dauphin that afternoon, he had thought well to

encourage her in her promised fidelity by giving her the prospect of

a certain little mansion, built in the Rue Barbette by an imprudent

contractor, who now wanted to sell it. Valerie could already see herself

in this delightful residence, with a fore-court and a garden, and

keeping a carriage!

“What respectable life can ever procure so much in so short a time, or

so easily?” said she to Lisbeth as she finished dressing. Lisbeth was to

dine with Valerie that evening, to tell Steinbock those things about the

lady which nobody can say about herself.

Madame Marneffe, radiant with satisfaction, came into the drawing-room

with modest grace, followed by Lisbeth dressed in black and yellow to

set her off.

“Good-evening, Claude,” said she, giving her hand to the famous old

critic.

Claude Vignon, like many another, had become a political personage--a

word describing an ambitious man at the first stage of his career. The

_political personage_ of 1840 represents, in some degree, the _Abbe_ of

the eighteenth century. No drawing-room circle is complete without one.

“My dear, this is my cousin, Count Steinbock,” said Lisbeth, introducing

Wenceslas, whom Valerie seemed to have overlooked.

“Oh yes, I recognized Monsieur le Comte,” replied Valerie with a

gracious bow to the artist. “I often saw you in the Rue du Doyenne,

and I had the pleasure of being present at your wedding.--It would be

difficult, my dear,” said she to Lisbeth, “to forget your adopted son

after once seeing him.--It is most kind of you, Monsieur Stidmann,”

she went on, “to have accepted my invitation at such short notice;

but necessity knows no law. I knew you to be the friend of both these

gentlemen. Nothing is more dreary, more sulky, than a dinner where all

the guests are strangers, so it was for their sake that I hailed you

in--but you will come another time for mine, I hope?--Say that you

will.”

And for a few minutes she moved about the room with Stidmann, wholly

occupied with him.

Crevel and Hulot were announced separately, and then a deputy named

Beauvisage.

This individual, a provincial Crevel, one of the men created to make

up the crowd in the world, voted under the banner of Giraud, a State

Councillor, and Victorin Hulot. These two politicians were trying to

form a nucleus of progressives in the loose array of the Conservative

Party. Giraud himself occasionally spent the evening at Madame

Marneffe’s, and she flattered herself that she should also capture

Victorin Hulot; but the puritanical lawyer had hitherto found excuses

for refusing to accompany his father and father-in-law. It seemed to

him criminal to be seen in the house of the woman who cost his mother so

many tears. Victorin Hulot was to the puritans of political life what a

pious woman is among bigots.

Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to

_pick up the Paris style_. This man, one of the outer stones of the

Chamber, was forming himself under the auspices of this delicious and

fascinating Madame Marneffe. Introduced here by Crevel, he had accepted

him, at her instigation, as his model and master. He consulted him on

every point, took the address of his tailor, imitated him, and tried to

strike the same attitudes. In short, Crevel was his Great Man.

Valerie, surrounded by these bigwigs and the three artists, and

supported by Lisbeth, struck Wenceslas as a really superior woman, all

the more so because Claude Vignon spoke of her like a man in love.

“She is Madame de Maintenon in Ninon’s petticoats!” said the veteran

critic. “You may please her in an evening if you have the wit; but

as for making her love you--that would be a triumph to crown a man’s

ambition and fill up his life.”

Valerie, while seeming cold and heedless of her former neighbor, piqued

his vanity, quite unconsciously indeed, for she knew nothing of the

Polish character. There is in the Slav a childish element, as there

is in all these primitively wild nations which have overflowed into

civilization rather than that they have become civilized. The race has

spread like an inundation, and has covered a large portion of the globe.

It inhabits deserts whose extent is so vast that it expands at its ease;

there is no jostling there, as there is in Europe, and civilization is

impossible without the constant friction of minds and interests. The

Ukraine, Russia, the plains by the Danube, in short, the Slav nations,

are a connecting link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and

barbarism. Thus the Pole, the wealthiest member of the Slav family, has

in his character all the childishness and inconsistency of a

beardless race. He has courage, spirit, and strength; but, cursed with

instability, that courage, strength, and energy have neither method nor

guidance; for the Pole displays a variability resembling that of the

winds which blow across that vast plain broken with swamps; and though

he has the impetuosity of the snow squalls that wrench and sweep away

buildings, like those aerial avalanches he is lost in the first pool and

melts into water. Man always assimilates something from the surroundings

in which he lives. Perpetually at strife with the Turk, the Pole has

imbibed a taste for Oriental splendor; he often sacrifices what is

needful for the sake of display. The men dress themselves out like

women, yet the climate has given them the tough constitution of Arabs.

The Pole, sublime in suffering, has tired his oppressors’ arms by sheer

endurance of beating; and, in the nineteenth century, has reproduced the

spectacle presented by the early Christians. Infuse only ten per cent

of English cautiousness into the frank and open Polish nature, and

the magnanimous white eagle would at this day be supreme wherever

the two-headed eagle has sneaked in. A little Machiavelism would have

hindered Poland from helping to save Austria, who has taken a share of

it; from borrowing from Prussia, the usurer who had undermined it; and

from breaking up as soon as a division was first made.

At the christening of Poland, no doubt, the Fairy Carabosse, overlooked

by the genii who endowed that attractive people with the most brilliant

gifts, came in to say:

“Keep all the gifts that my sisters have bestowed on you; but you shall

never know what you wish for!”

If, in its heroic duel with Russia, Poland had won the day, the Poles

would now be fighting among themselves, as they formerly fought in their

Diets to hinder each other from being chosen King. When that nation,

composed entirely of hot-headed dare-devils, has good sense enough to

seek a Louis XI. among her own offspring, to accept his despotism and a

dynasty, she will be saved.

What Poland has been politically, almost every Pole is in private life,

especially under the stress of disaster. Thus Wenceslas Steinbock, after

worshiping his wife for three years and knowing that he was a god to

her, was so much nettled at finding himself barely noticed by Madame

Marneffe, that he made it a point of honor to attract her attention.

He compared Valerie with his wife and gave her the palm. Hortense was

beautiful flesh, as Valerie had said to Lisbeth; but Madame Marneffe had

spirit in her very shape, and the savor of vice.

Such devotion as Hortense’s is a feeling which a husband takes as his

due; the sense of the immense preciousness of such perfect love soon

wears off, as a debtor, in the course of time, begins to fancy that the

borrowed money is his own. This noble loyalty becomes the daily bread of

the soul, and an infidelity is as tempting as a dainty. The woman who

is scornful, and yet more the woman who is reputed dangerous, excites

curiosity, as spices add flavor to good food. Indeed, the disdain so

cleverly acted by Valerie was a novelty to Wenceslas, after three years

of too easy enjoyment. Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.

Many men desire to have two editions of the same work, though it is in

fact a proof of inferiority when a man cannot make his mistress of his

wife. Variety in this particular is a sign of weakness. Constancy will

always be the real genius of love, the evidence of immense power--the

power that makes the poet! A man ought to find every woman in his wife,

as the squalid poets of the seventeenth century made their Manons figure

as Iris and Chloe.

“Well,” said Lisbeth to the Pole, as she beheld him fascinated, “what do

you think of Valerie?”

“She is too charming,” replied Wenceslas.

“You would not listen to me,” said Betty. “Oh! my little Wenceslas, if

you and I had never parted, you would have been that siren’s lover; you

might have married her when she was a widow, and you would have had her

forty thousand francs a year----”

“Really?”

“Certainly,” replied Lisbeth. “Now, take care of yourself; I warned you

of the danger; do not singe your wings in the candle!--Come, give me

your arm, dinner is served.”

No language could be so thoroughly demoralizing as this; for if you show

a Pole a precipice, he is bound to leap it. As a nation they have the

very spirit of cavalry; they fancy they can ride down every obstacle and

come out victorious. The spur applied by Lisbeth to Steinbock’s vanity

was intensified by the appearance of the dining-room, bright with

handsome silver plate; the dinner was served with every refinement and

extravagance of Parisian luxury.

“I should have done better to take Celimene,” thought he to himself.

All through the dinner Hulot was charming; pleased to see his son-in-law

at that table, and yet more happy in the prospect of a reconciliation

with Valerie, whose fidelity he proposed to secure by the promise of

Coquet’s head-clerkship. Stidmann responded to the Baron’s amiability by

shafts of Parisian banter and an artist’s high spirits. Steinbock would

not allow himself to be eclipsed by his friend; he too was witty, said

amusing things, made his mark, and was pleased with himself; Madame

Marneffe smiled at him several times to show that she quite understood

him.

The good meal and heady wines completed the work; Wenceslas was deep in

what must be called the slough of dissipation. Excited by just a

glass too much, he stretched himself on a settee after dinner, sunk

in physical and mental ecstasy, which Madame Marneffe wrought to the

highest pitch by coming to sit down by him--airy, scented, pretty enough

to damn an angel. She bent over Wenceslas and almost touched his ear as

she whispered to him:

“We cannot talk over business matters this evening, unless you will

remain till the last. Between us--you, Lisbeth, and me--we can settle

everything to suit you.”

“Ah, Madame, you are an angel!” replied Wenceslas, also in a murmur. “I

was a pretty fool not to listen to Lisbeth--”

“What did she say?”

“She declared, in the Rue du Doyenne, that you loved me!”

Madame Marneffe looked at him, seemed covered with confusion, and

hastily left her seat. A young and pretty woman never rouses the hope of

immediate success with impunity. This retreat, the impulse of a virtuous

woman who is crushing a passion in the depths of her heart, was a

thousand times more effective than the most reckless avowal. Desire was

so thoroughly aroused in Wenceslas that he doubled his attentions to

Valerie. A woman seen by all is a woman wished for. Hence the terrible

power of actresses. Madame Marneffe, knowing that she was watched,

behaved like an admired actress. She was quite charming, and her success

was immense.

“I no longer wonder at my father-in-law’s follies,” said Steinbock to

Lisbeth.

“If you say such things, Wenceslas, I shall to my dying day repent of

having got you the loan of these ten thousand francs. Are you, like

all these men,” and she indicated the guests, “madly in love with that

creature? Remember, you would be your father-in-law’s rival. And think

of the misery you would bring on Hortense.”

“That is true,” said Wenceslas. “Hortense is an angel; I should be a

wretch.”

“And one is enough in the family!” said Lisbeth.

“Artists ought never to marry!” exclaimed Steinbock.

“Ah! that is what I always told you in the Rue du Doyenne. Your groups,

your statues, your great works, ought to be your children.”

“What are you talking about?” Valerie asked, joining Lisbeth.--“Give us

tea, Cousin.”

Steinbock, with Polish vainglory, wanted to appear familiar with this

drawing-room fairy. After defying Stidmann, Vignon, and Crevel with a

look, he took Valerie’s hand and forced her to sit down by him on the

settee.

“You are rather too lordly, Count Steinbock,” said she, resisting a

little. But she laughed as she dropped on to the seat, not without

arranging the rosebud pinned into her bodice.

“Alas! if I were really lordly,” said he, “I should not be here to

borrow money.”

“Poor boy! I remember how you worked all night in the Rue du Doyenne.

You really were rather a spooney; you married as a starving man snatches

a loaf. You knew nothing of Paris, and you see where you are landed. But

you turned a deaf ear to Lisbeth’s devotion, as you did to the love of a

woman who knows her Paris by heart.”

“Say no more!” cried Steinbock; “I am done for!”

“You shall have your ten thousand francs, my dear Wenceslas; but on one

condition,” she went on, playing with his handsome curls.

“What is that?”

“I will take no interest----”

“Madame!”

“Oh, you need not be indignant; you shall make it good by giving me a

bronze group. You began the story of Samson; finish it.--Do a Delilah

cutting off the Jewish Hercules’ hair. And you, who, if you will listen

to me, will be a great artist, must enter into the subject. What you

have to show is the power of woman. Samson is a secondary consideration.

He is the corpse of dead strength. It is Delilah--passion--that ruins

everything. How far more beautiful is that _replica_--That is what you

call it, I think--” She skilfully interpolated, as Claude Vignon and

Stidmann came up to them on hearing her talk of sculpture--“how far more

beautiful than the Greek myth is that _replica_ of Hercules at Omphale’s

feet.--Did Greece copy Judaea, or did Judaea borrow the symbolism from

Greece?”

“There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of

the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--most

foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof

of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all

the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he

demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he

was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue.”

“I had no idea I was so learned,” said Valerie, annoyed at this

interruption to her _tete-a-tete_.

“Women know everything by instinct,” replied Claude Vignon.

“Well, then, you promise me?” she said to Steinbock, taking his hand

with the timidity of a girl in love.

“You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow,” cried Stidmann, “if madame

asks a favor of you!”

“What is it?” asked Claude Vignon.

“A small bronze group,” replied Steinbock, “Delilah cutting off Samson’s

hair.”

“It is difficult,” remarked Vignon. “A bed----”

“On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy,” replied Valerie, smiling.

“Ah ha! teach us sculpture!” said Stidmann.

“You should take madame for your subject,” replied Vignon, with a keen

glance at Valerie.

“Well,” she went on, “this is my notion of the composition. Samson on

waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot.

The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it,

covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among

the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at

Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like

Canova’s Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I

see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but

she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is

bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She

hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she

reads forgiveness in Samson’s weakness. Such a group as this, and one of

the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head;

vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!”

And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in

concert with the critic.

“It is impossible to be more bewitching!” cried Stidmann.

“Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met,”

said Claude Vignon. “Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so

rare.”

“And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can

pronounce such a verdict,” replied Stidmann, “what are we to think?”

“If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count,”

said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who

had heard what had been said, “I will give you a thousand crowns for an

example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand

crowns!”

“Shell out! What does that mean?” asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon.

“Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then,” said Steinbock to

Crevel. “Ask her--”

At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was

more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language

in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women

are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their

movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform

this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, “Do you

take tea?”--“Will you have some tea?”--“A cup of tea?” coldly asked,

and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the

eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand,

towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it

in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises,

a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from

aversion or indifference to Phaedra’s declaration to Hippolytus. Women

can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to

the expression of Oriental servility.

And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she

crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in

her hand.

“I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me,” said the artist,

murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, “to

have them given to me thus!”

“What were you saying about sitting?” said she, without betraying that

this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her

heart.

“Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group.”

“He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?”

“Yes--if you will sit for Delilah,” said Steinbock.

“He will not be there to see, I hope!” replied she. “The group would

be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah’s costume is rather

un-dressy.”

Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious

gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You

may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at

her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another

makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the

cornice. Madame Marneffe’s triumph, however, was not face to face like

that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at

the tea-table. This ballet-dancer’s pirouette, whisking her skirts, by

which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock.

“Your vengeance is secure,” said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper.

“Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed

you of Wenceslas.”

“Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful,”

replied the cousin; “but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This

morning I went to Victorin’s--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots

have bought up their father’s notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and

to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at

five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on

their house. So the young people are in straits for three years;

they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully

distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing

to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice.”

“The Baron cannot have a sou now,” said Valerie, and she smiled at

Hulot.

“I don’t see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in

September.”

“And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is

high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this

evening.”

“My dear cousin,” said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, “go home, I beg. You are

quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough

to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in

your father-in-law’s footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting

up for you.”

“Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little

business with you and her,” replied Wenceslas.

“No, no,” said Lisbeth; “I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for

her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow

at eleven o’clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin

Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her

to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure

of it,” she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at

Valerie, “I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is

lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense.”

Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually

interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient.

Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected

him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had

listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had

her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat

sewing by the child’s cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman’s pay

for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a

suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering:

“Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He

put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took

as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of

herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!”

But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past.

From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the

quarter where they lived was now deserted.

“If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened,” thought

she. “A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to

see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped

by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six

hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one

but me.”

Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on

account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime

regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation

to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the

magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the

mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen

as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the

ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a

clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say

so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry

of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form

of worship.

In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a

safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship

a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such

manifestations?

By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish,

that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband’s ring at the

bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother.

“At last--here you are!” cried she, finding her voice again. “My

dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the

torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone,

with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I

should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--Bad

boy!”

“What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh

caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to

whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the

Montcornet statue. There were--”

“Were there no ladies?” Hortense eagerly inquired.

“Worthy Madame Florent--”

“You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents’?”

“Yes, at their house; I made a mistake.”

“You did not take a coach to come home?”

“No.”

“And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?”

“Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as

the Madeleine, talking all the way.”

“It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the

Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!” said Hortense, looking at

her husband’s patent leather boots.

It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue

Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled.

“Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to

lend me,” said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination.

He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for

Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs’ worth of

debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and

his workmen.

“Now your anxieties are relieved,” said he, kissing his wife. “I am

going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get

up early, by your leave, my pet.”

The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense’s mind vanished; she was miles

away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her.

Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street

prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for

their wild dissipations, had alarmed her.

Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o’clock, and was quite

reassured.

“Now he is at work again,” said she to herself, as she proceeded to

dress her boy. “I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we

cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto

Cellini!”

Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and

she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of

onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o’clock, the cook,

who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann.

“I beg pardon, madame,” said he. “Is Wenceslas gone out already?”

“He is at the studio.”

“I came to talk over the work with him.”

“I will send for him,” said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair.

Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain

Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed

in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook

appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the

studio.

“You had an amusing dinner last night?” said Hortense. “Wenceslas did

not come in till past one in the morning.”

“Amusing? not exactly,” replied the artist, who had intended to

fascinate Madame Marneffe. “Society is not very amusing unless one is

interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great

flirt.”

“And what did Wenceslas think of her?” asked poor Hortense, trying to

keep calm. “He said nothing about her to me.”

“I will only say one thing,” said Stidmann, “and that is, that I think

her a very dangerous woman.”

Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth.

“So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe’s that you dined--and not--not with

Chanor?” said she, “yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----”

Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had

blundered.

The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The

artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress

into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent

hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has

overthrown the structure built on a husband’s lie to his wife, could not

conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed

that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest

contradiction was mischievous.

The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that

her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense

heard, and the hysterical fit came on again.

“Go and fetch madame’s mother,” said Louise to the cook. “Quick--run!”

“If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!” exclaimed

Stidmann in despair.

“He is with that woman!” cried the unhappy wife. “He was not dressed to

go to his work!”

Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe’s, struck by the truth of this

conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion.

At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask

for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly

up to the second floor, arguing thus: “If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she

will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed

at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!”

Reine appeared in answer to his ring.

“Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--”

Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise.

“But, sir--I don’t know--did you suppose----”

“I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very

ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress.” And

Stidmann turned on his heel.

“He is there, sure enough!” said he to himself.

And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau,

he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After

telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann

scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of

yesterday’s dinner.

“I am done for,” said Wenceslas, “but you are forgiven. I had totally

forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not

telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say?

That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is

well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am

in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?”

“I! advise you! I don’t know,” replied Stidmann. “But your wife loves

you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you

were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate,

will set this morning’s business right. Good-bye.”

Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up

at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish

artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few

words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had

no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward

place in his conjugal affairs.

At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst

into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the

hysterical attack.

“Treachery, dear mamma!” cried she. “Wenceslas, after giving me his word

of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last

night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If

you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel,

and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that

I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but

that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came

of my love for him; that I had my father’s blood in my veins as well as

yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and

capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him,

his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself

after--and so on.

“And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all

our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all

to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that

good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been

arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with

having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?--I

will go to see her and stab her!”

Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense

was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic

efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter’s

head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses.

“Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot

be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear

Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have

been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a

Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?”

“You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----”

She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts.

“Do as I have done, my child,” said her mother. “Be gentle and kind, and

your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, ‘My

wife has never cost me a pang!’ And God, who hears that dying breath,

credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would

have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would

have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear

of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete

ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of

a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible,

heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither

your brother nor you could have married.

“I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last

connection of your father’s, the world has believed me happy. My

serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened

Hector; he is still respected; but this old man’s passion is taking him

too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil

I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held

that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind

it--motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in

religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----”

Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and

of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears

rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection,

overcome by her mother’s noble heroism, she fell on her knees before

Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics

kiss the holy relics of a martyr.

“Nay, get up, Hortense,” said the Baroness. “Such homage from my

daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no

sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose

joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to

have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to

the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I

spoke.--God will forgive me!

“Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the

world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love

with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and

twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--”

“But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!” said the

self-absorbed girl.

“Nothing is lost yet,” said Adeline. “Only wait till Wenceslas comes.”

“Mother,” said she, “he lied, he deceived me. He said, ‘I will not go,’

and he went. And that over his child’s cradle.”

“For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most

infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem.

We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended,

and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by

suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that

you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them

be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has

been.”

Hortense started; she had heard her husband’s step.

“So it would seem,” said Wenceslas, as he came in, “that Stidmann has

been here while I went to see him.”

“Indeed!” said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who

uses words to stab.

“Certainly,” said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. “We have just met.”

“And yesterday?”

“Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall

judge between us.”

This candor unlocked his wife’s heart. All really lofty women like the

truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched;

they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to.

There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to

their Czar.

“Now, listen, dear mother,” Wenceslas went on. “I so truly love my sweet

and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty.

What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would

have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty,

youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--She believes that we

owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before

yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us

artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I

knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings.”

“Poor soul!” said Hortense.

“Poor soul!” said the Baroness.

“But what are Lisbeth’s two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing

to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe,

who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor,

will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the

Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we

needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free

of interest for a year!--I said to myself, ‘Hortense will be none the

wiser; I will go and get them.’

“Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me

to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have

the money. Between Hortense’s despair on one hand, and the dinner on the

other, I could not hesitate.--That is all.

“What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous,

and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her

since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled

creature?” said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to

convince his wife by the vehemence that women like.

“Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!” cried the Baroness.

Hortense threw her arms round her husband’s neck.

“Yes, that is what I should have done,” said her mother. “Wenceslas,

my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it,” she went on very

seriously. “You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!”

She sighed deeply.

“He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman,” thought she to herself,

as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married.--“It seems

to me,” she said aloud, “that I am miserable enough to hope to see my

children happy.”

“Be quite easy, dear mamma,” said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this

critical moment end happily. “In two months I shall have repaid that

dreadful woman. How could I help it,” he went on, repeating this

essentially Polish excuse with a Pole’s grace; “there are times when a

man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the

family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all

if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?”

“Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!” cried Hortense.

The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter’s lips, aggrieved by

this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so

heroically screened by her mother’s magnanimous silence.

“Now, good-bye, my children,” said Madame Hulot. “The storm is over. But

do not quarrel any more.”

When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the

Baroness, Hortense said to her husband:

“Tell me all about last evening.”

And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him

by the questions that crowd on a wife’s mind in such circumstances.

The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal

dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company.

“Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon,

Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?”

“I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was

saying to myself, ‘My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.’”

This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment

to say:

“And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved

guilty?”

“I,” said she, with an air of prompt decision, “I should have taken up

Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!”

“Hortense!” cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and

theatrical emphasis. “You would not have had the chance--I would have

killed you!”

Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to

stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying:

“Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go

plunging into such horrible bogs.”

“I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more,

excepting to redeem my note of hand.”

She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something

for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a morning’s work, went off to his

studio to make a clay sketch of the _Samson and Delilah_, for which he

had the drawings in his pocket.

Hortense, penitent for her little temper, and fancying that her husband

was annoyed with her, went to the studio just as the sculptor had

finished handling the clay with the impetuosity that spurs an artist

when the mood is on him. On seeing his wife, Wenceslas hastily threw the

wet wrapper over the group, and putting both arms round her, he said:

“We were not really angry, were we, my pretty puss?”

Hortense had caught sight of the group, had seen the linen thrown over

it, and had said nothing; but as she was leaving, she took off the rag,

looked at the model, and asked:

“What is that?”

“A group for which I had just had an idea.”

“And why did you hide it?”

“I did not mean you to see it till it was finished.”

“The woman is very pretty,” said Hortense.

And a thousand suspicions cropped up in her mind, as, in India, tall,

rank plants spring up in a night-time.

By the end of three weeks, Madame Marneffe was intensely irritated by

Hortense. Women of that stamp have a pride of their own; they insist

that men shall kiss the devil’s hoof; they have no forgiveness for the

virtue that does not quail before their dominion, or that even holds its

own against them. Now, in all that time Wenceslas had not paid one visit

in the Rue Vanneau, not even that which politeness required to a woman

who had sat for Delilah.

Whenever Lisbeth called on the Steinbocks, there had been nobody at

home. Monsieur and madame lived in the studio. Lisbeth, following the

turtle doves to their nest at le Gros-Caillou, found Wenceslas hard at

work, and was informed by the cook that madame never left monsieur’s

side. Wenceslas was a slave to the autocracy of love. So now Valerie, on

her own account, took part with Lisbeth in her hatred of Hortense.

Women cling to a lover that another woman is fighting for, just as

much as men do to women round whom many coxcombs are buzzing. Thus any

reflections _a propos_ to Madame Marneffe are equally applicable to any

lady-killing rake; he is, in fact, a sort of male courtesan. Valerie’s

last fancy was a madness; above all, she was bent on getting her

group; she was even thinking of going one morning to the studio to see

Wenceslas, when a serious incident arose of the kind which, to a woman

of that class, may be called the spoil of war.

This is how Valerie announced this wholly personal event.

She was breakfasting with Lisbeth and her husband.

“I say, Marneffe, what would you say to being a second time a father?”

“You don’t mean it--a baby?--Oh, let me kiss you!”

He rose and went round the table; his wife held up her head so that he

could just kiss her hair.

“If that is so,” he went on, “I am head-clerk and officer of the Legion

of Honor at once. But you must understand, my dear, Stanislas is not to

be the sufferer, poor little man.”

“Poor little man?” Lisbeth put in. “You have not set your eyes on him

these seven months. I am supposed to be his mother at the school; I am

the only person in the house who takes any trouble about him.”

“A brat that costs us a hundred crowns a quarter!” said Valerie. “And

he, at any rate, is your own child, Marneffe. You ought to pay for his

schooling out of your salary.--The newcomer, far from reminding us of

butcher’s bills, will rescue us from want.”

“Valerie,” replied Marneffe, assuming an attitude like Crevel, “I hope

that Monsieur le Baron Hulot will take proper charge of his son, and

not lay the burden on a poor clerk. I intend to keep him well up to the

mark. So take the necessary steps, madame! Get him to write you letters

in which he alludes to his satisfaction, for he is rather backward in

coming forward in regard to my appointment.”

And Marneffe went away to the office, where his chief’s precious

leniency allowed him to come in at about eleven o’clock. And, indeed,

he did little enough, for his incapacity was notorious, and he detested

work.

No sooner were they alone than Lisbeth and Valerie looked at each other

for a moment like Augurs, and both together burst into a loud fit of

laughter.

“I say, Valerie--is it the fact?” said Lisbeth, “or merely a farce?”

“It is a physical fact!” replied Valerie. “Now, I am sick and tired

of Hortense; and it occurred to me in the night that I might fire this

infant, like a bomb, into the Steinbock household.”

Valerie went back to her room, followed by Lisbeth, to whom she showed

the following letter:--

“WENCESLAS MY DEAR,--I still believe in your love, though it is

nearly three weeks since I saw you. Is this scorn? Delilah can

scarcely believe that. Does it not rather result from the tyranny

of a woman whom, as you told me, you can no longer love?

Wenceslas, you are too great an artist to submit to such dominion.

Home is the grave of glory.--Consider now, are you the Wenceslas

of the Rue du Doyenne? You missed fire with my father’s statue;

but in you the lover is greater than the artist, and you have had

better luck with his daughter. You are a father, my beloved

Wenceslas.

“If you do not come to me in the state I am in, your friends would

think very badly of you. But I love you so madly, that I feel I

should never have the strength to curse you. May I sign myself as

ever,

“YOUR VALERIE.”

“What do you say to my scheme for sending this note to the studio at a

time when our dear Hortense is there by herself?” asked Valerie. “Last

evening I heard from Stidmann that Wenceslas is to pick him up at eleven

this morning to go on business to Chanor’s; so that gawk Hortense will

be there alone.”

“But after such a trick as that,” replied Lisbeth, “I cannot continue to

be your friend in the eyes of the world; I shall have to break with you,

to be supposed never to visit you, or even to speak to you.”

“Evidently,” said Valerie; “but--”

“Oh! be quite easy,” interrupted Lisbeth; “we shall often meet when I am

Madame la Marechale. They are all set upon it now. Only the Baron is in

ignorance of the plan, but you can talk him over.”

“Well,” said Valerie, “but it is quite likely that the Baron and I may

be on distant terms before long.”

“Madame Olivier is the only person who can make Hortense demand to

see the letter,” said Lisbeth. “And you must send her to the Rue

Saint-Dominique before she goes on to the studio.”

“Our beauty will be at home, no doubt,” said Valerie, ringing for Reine

to call up Madame Olivier.

Ten minutes after the despatch of this fateful letter, Baron Hulot

arrived. Madame Marneffe threw her arms round the old man’s neck with

kittenish impetuosity.

“Hector, you are a father!” she said in his ear. “That is what comes of

quarreling and making friends again----”

Perceiving a look of surprise, which the Baron did not at once conceal,

Valerie assumed a reserve which brought the old man to despair. She made

him wring the proofs from her one by one. When conviction, led on

by vanity, had at last entered his mind, she enlarged on Monsieur

Marneffe’s wrath.

“My dear old veteran,” said she, “you can hardly avoid getting your

responsible editor, our representative partner if you like, appointed

head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor, for you really have done

for the poor man, he adores his Stanislas, the little monstrosity who is

so like him, that to me he is insufferable. Unless you prefer to settle

twelve hundred francs a year on Stanislas--the capital to be his, and

the life-interest payable to me, of course--”

“But if I am to settle securities, I would rather it should be on my own

son, and not on the monstrosity,” said the Baron.

This rash speech, in which the words “my own son” came out as full as

a river in flood, was, by the end of the hour, ratified as a formal

promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the future boy. And

this promise became, on Valerie’s tongue and in her countenance, what

a drum is in the hands of a child; for three weeks she played on it

incessantly.

At the moment when Baron Hulot was leaving the Rue Vanneau, as happy

as a man who after a year of married life still desires an heir,

Madame Olivier had yielded to Hortense, and given up the note she was

instructed to give only into the Count’s own hands. The young wife paid

twenty francs for that letter. The wretch who commits suicide must pay

for the opium, the pistol, the charcoal.

Hortense read and re-read the note; she saw nothing but this sheet of

white paper streaked with black lines; the universe held for her

nothing but that paper; everything was dark around her. The glare of the

conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness lighted

up the page, for blackest night enfolded her. The shouts of her little

Wenceslas at play fell on her ear, as if he had been in the depths of a

valley and she on a high mountain. Thus insulted at four-and-twenty, in

all the splendor of her beauty, enhanced by pure and devoted love--it

was not a stab, it was death. The first shock had been merely on the

nerves, the physical frame had struggled in the grip of jealousy; but

now certainty had seized her soul, her body was unconscious.

For about ten minutes Hortense sat under the incubus of this oppression.

Then a vision of her mother appeared before her, and revulsion ensued;

she was calm and cool, and mistress of her reason.

She rang.

“Get Louise to help you, child,” said she to the cook. “As quickly as

you can, pack up everything that belongs to me and everything wanted for

the little boy. I give you an hour. When all is ready, fetch a hackney

coach from the stand, and call me.

“Make no remarks! I am leaving the house, and shall take Louise with me.

You must stay here with monsieur; take good care of him----”