A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who
enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a Parisian
can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he had been
to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very sensibly said to
his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so agreeable and satisfactory
an existence. This opinion will oblige us to give certain details on the
life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after his wife had placed him in the
position of a _deserted husband_. The reader will then be enabled to
understand the enormous difference which our laws and our morals put
between the two sexes in the same situation. That which turns to misery
for the woman turns to happiness for the man. This contrast may inspire
more than one young woman with the determination to remain in her own
home, and to struggle there, like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as
she may select) the most aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.
Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an
only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife
of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole
master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d’Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two
hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich
inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he
married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his
wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature
such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to
Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in
her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this
immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the
faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure
he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that
authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the
matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a
reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage
and the _petits journaux_, by his method of repeating them, and applied
them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had served
in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point that women
without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest did not dare
to contradict them.
This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the
convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously.
Thus without any taste of his own, he knew how to be the first to adopt
and the first to abandon a new fashion. Accused of nothing worse than
spending too much time at his toilet and wearing a corset, he presented
the type of those persons who displease no one by adopting incessantly
the ideas and the follies of everbody, and who, astride of circumstance,
never grow old.
As a husband, he was pitied; people thought Beatrix inexcusable for
deserting the best fellow on earth, and social jeers only touched
the woman. A member of all clubs, subscriber to all the absurdities
generated by patriotism or party spirit ill-understood (a compliance
which put him in the front rank _a propos_ of all such matters), this
loyal, brave, and very silly nobleman, whom unfortunately so many rich
men resemble, would naturally desire to distinguish himself by adopting
some fashionable mania. Consequently, he glorified his name principally
in being the sultan of a four-footed harem, governed by an old English
groom, which cost him monthly from four to five thousand francs.
His specialty was _running horses;_ he protected the equine race and
supported a magazine devoted to hippic questions; but, for all that, he
knew very little of the animals, and from shoes to bridles he depended
wholly on his groom,--all of which will sufficiently explain to you that
this semi-bachelor had nothing actually of his own, neither mind, taste,
position, or absurdity; even his fortune came from his fathers. After
having tasted the displeasures of marriage he was so content to find
himself once more a bachelor that he said among his friends, “I was born
with a caul” (that is, to good luck).
Pleased above all things to be able to live without the costs of making
an appearance, to which husbands are constrained, his house, in which
since the death of his father nothing had been changed, resembled those
of masters who are travelling; he lived there little, never dined, and
seldom slept there. Here follows the reason for such indifference.
After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the
kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around
happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain
Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du
Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,--of which
one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera
_galop_, “When one thinks that all _that_ is lodged and clothed and
lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!”--this world has
already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and
customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the
historian should proportion the number of such personages to the diverse
endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in
poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often
self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.
Madame Schontz, known at first under the name of La Petite-Aurelie, to
distinguish her from one of her rivals far less clever than herself,
belongs to the highest class of those women whose social utility
cannot be questioned by the prefect of the Seine, nor by those who
are interested in the welfare of the city of Paris. Certainly the Rat,
accused of demolishing fortunes which frequently never existed, might
better be compared to a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame
de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers
in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the
heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of carved
free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of Amsterdam,
Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes where the
wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged by the
words, _Apartments to let_.
The situation of these dames is determined by that which they take in
the apocryphal regions. If the house is near the line traced by the rue
de Provence, the woman has an income, her budget prospers; but if she
approaches the farther line of the Boulevard Exterieur or rises towards
the horrid town of Batignolles, she is without resources. When Monsieur
de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on the third
floor of the only house that remained in the rue de Berlin; thus she was
camping on the border-land between misery and its reverse. This person
was not really named, as you may suppose, either Schontz or Aurelie.
She concealed the name of her father, an old soldier of the Empire, that
perennial colonel who always appears at the dawn of all these feminine
existences either as father or seducer. Madame Schontz had received the
gratuitous education of Saint-Denis, where young girls are admirably
brought up, but where, unfortunately, neither husbands nor openings
in life are offered to them when they leave the school,--an admirable
creation of the Emperor, which now lacks but one thing, the Emperor
himself!
“I shall be there, to provide for the daughters of my faithful legions,”
he replied to a remark of one of his ministers, who foresaw the future.
Napoleon had also said, “I shall be there!” for the members of the
Institute; to whom they had better give no salary than send them eighty
francs each month, a wage that is less than that of certain clerks!
Aurelie was really the daughter of the intrepid Colonel Schiltz, a
leader of those bold Alsacian guerillas who came near saving the Emperor
in the campaign of France. He died at Metz,--robbed, pillaged, ruined.
In 1814 Napoleon put the little Josephine Schiltz, then about nine
years old, at Saint-Denis. Having lost both father and mother and being
without a home and without resources, the poor child was not dismissed
from the institution on the second return of the Bourbons. She was
under-mistress of the school till 1827, but then her patience gave way;
her beauty seduced her. When she reached her majority Josephine Schiltz,
the Empress’s goddaughter, was on the verge of the adventurous life of
a courtesan, persuaded to that doubtful future by the fatal example of
some of her comrades like herself without resources, who congratulated
themselves on their decision. She substituted _on_ for _il_ in her
father’s name and placed herself under the patronage of Saint-Aurelie.
Lively, witty, and well-educated, she committed more faults than her
duller companions, whose misdemeanors had invariably self-interest for
their base. After knowing various writers, poor but dishonest, clever
but deeply in debt; after trying certain rich men as calculating as
they were foolish; and after sacrificing solid interests to one true
love,--thus going through all the schools in which experience is
taught,--on a certain day of extreme misery, when, at Valentino’s (the
first stage to Musard) she danced in a gown, hat, and mantle that were
all borrowed, she attracted the attention of Arthur de Rochefide, who
had come there to see the famous _galop_. Her cleverness instantly
captivated the man who at that time knew not what passion to devote
himself to. So that two years after his desertion by Beatrix, the memory
of whom often humiliated him, the marquis was not blamed by any one for
marrying, so to speak, in the thirteenth arrondissement, a substitute
for his wife.
Let us sketch the four periods of this happiness. It is necessary
to show that the theory of marriage in the thirteenth arrondissement
affects in like manner all who come within its rule.[*] Marquis in
the forties, sexagenary retired shopkeeper, quadruple millionnaire
or moderate-income man, great seigneur or bourgeois, the strategy of
passion (except for the differences inherent in social zones) never
varies. The heart and the money-box are always in the same exact and
clearly defined relation. Thus informed, you will be able to estimate
the difficulties the duchess was certain to encounter in her charitable
enterprise.
[*] Before 1859 there was no 13th arrondissement in Paris,
hence the saying.--TR.
Who knows the power in France of witty sayings upon ordinary minds, or
what harm the clever men who invent them have done? For instance, no
book-keeper could add up the figures of the sums remaining unproductive
and lost in the depths of generous hearts and strong-boxes by that
ignoble phrase, “_tirer une carotte!_”
The saying has become so popular that it must be allowed to soil this
page. Besides, if we penetrate within the 13th arrondissement, we are
forced to accept its picturesque patois. _Tirer une carotte_ has a dozen
allied meanings, but it suffices to give it here as: _To dupe_. Monsieur
de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being
_carotte_. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his
passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was,
therefore, very _rat_, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The
word _rat_, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one
entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast
who is niggardly.
Madame Schontz had too much sense and she knew men too well not to
conceive great hopes from such a beginning. Monsieur de Rochefide
allowed her five hundred francs a month, furnished for her, rather
shabbily, an apartment costing twelve hundred francs a year on a
second floor in the rue Coquenard, and set himself to study Aurelie’s
character, while she, perceiving his object, gave him a character to
study. Consequently, Rochefide became happy in meeting with a woman of
noble nature. But he saw nothing surprising in that; her mother was
a Barnheim of Baden, a well-bred woman. Besides, Aurelie was so well
brought up herself! Speaking English, German, and Italian, she possessed
a thorough knowledge of foreign literatures. She could hold her own
against all second-class pianists. And, remark this! she behaved about
her talents like a well-bred woman; she never mentioned them. She picked
up a brush in a painter’s studio, used it half jestingly, and produced
a head which caused general astonishment. For mere amusement during
the time she pined as under-mistress at Saint-Denis, she had made some
advance in the domain of the sciences, but her subsequent life had
covered these good seeds with a coating of salt, and she now gave Arthur
the credit of the sprouting of the precious germs, re-cultivated for
him.
Thus Aurelie began by showing a disinterestedness equal to her other
charms, which allowed this weak corvette to attach its grapnels securely
to the larger vessel. Nevertheless, about the end of the first year, she
made ignoble noises in the antechamber with her clogs, coming in about
the time when the marquis was awaiting her, and hiding, as best she
could, the draggled tail of an outrageously muddy gown. In short, she
had by this time so perfectly persuaded her _gros papa_ that all
her ambition, after so many ups and downs, was to obtain honorably a
comfortable little bourgeois existence, that, about ten months after
their first meeting, the second phase of happiness declared itself.
Madame Schontz then obtained a fine apartment in the rue
Neuve-Saint-Georges. Arthur, who could no longer conceal the amount of
his fortune, gave her splendid furniture, a complete service of plate,
twelve hundred francs a month, a low carriage with one horse,--this,
however, was hired; but he granted a tiger very graciously. Madame
Schontz was not the least grateful for this munificence; she knew the
motive of her Arthur’s conduct, and recognized the calculations of the
male _rat_. Sick of living at a restaurant, where the fare is usually
execrable, and where the least little _gourmet_ dinner costs sixty
francs for one, and two hundred francs if you invite three friends,
Rochefide offered Madame Schontz forty francs a day for his dinner and
that of a friend, everything included. Aurelie accepted.
Thus having made him take up all her moral letters of credit, drawn
one by one on Monsieur de Rochefide’s comfort, she was listened to with
favor when she asked for five hundred francs more a month for her dress,
in order not to shame her _gros papa_, whose friends all belonged to the
Jockey Club.
“It would be a pretty thing,” she said, “if Rastignac, Maxime
de Trailles, d’Esgrignon, La Roche-Hugon, Ronqueroles, Laginski,
Lenoncourt, found you with a sort of Madame Everard. Besides, have
confidence in me, papa, and you’ll be the gainer.”
In fact, Aurelie contrived to display new virtues in this second phase.
She laid out for herself a house-keeping role for which she claimed much
credit. She made, so she said, both ends meet at the close of the month
on two thousand five hundred francs without a debt,--a thing unheard
of in the faubourg Saint-Germain of the 13th arrondissement,--and
she served dinners infinitely superior to those of Nucingen, at which
exquisite wines were drunk at twelve francs a bottle. Rochefide,
amazed, and delighted to be able to invite his friends to the house with
economy, declared, as he caught her round the waist,--
“She’s a treasure!”
Soon after he hired one-third of a box at the Opera for her; next he
took her to first representations. Then he began to consult his Aurelie,
and recognized the excellence of her advice. She let him take the clever
sayings she said about most things for his own, and, these being unknown
to others, raised his reputation as an amusing man. He now acquired the
certainty of being loved truly, and for himself alone. Aurelie refused
to make the happiness of a Russian prince who offered her five thousand
francs a month.
“You are a lucky man, my dear marquis,” cried old Prince Galathionne as
he finished his game of whist at the club. “Yesterday, after you left
us alone, I tried to get Madame Schontz away from you, but she said:
‘Prince, you are not handsomer, but you are a great deal older than
Rochefide; you would beat me, but he is like a father to me; can you
give me one-tenth of a reason why I should change? I’ve never had the
grand passion for Arthur that I once had for little fools in varnished
boots and whose debts I paid; but I love him as a wife loves her husband
when she is an honest woman.’ And thereupon she showed me the door.”
This speech, which did not seem exaggerated, had the effect of greatly
increasing the state of neglect and degradation which reigned in the
hotel de Rochefide. Arthur now transported his whole existence and his
pleasures to Madame Schontz, and found himself well off; for at the end
of three years he had four hundred thousand francs to invest.
The third phase now began. Madame Schontz became the tenderest of
mothers to Arthur’s son; she fetched him from school and took him back
herself; she overwhelmed with presents and dainties and pocket-money the
child who called her his “little mamma,” and who adored her. She took
part in the management of Arthur’s property; she made him buy into the
Funds when low, just before the famous treaty of London which overturned
the ministry of March 1st. Arthur gained two hundred thousand francs
by that transaction and Aurelie did not ask for a penny of it. Like
the gentleman that he was, Rochefide invested his six hundred thousand
francs in stock of the Bank of France and put half of that sum in the
name of Josephine Schiltz. A little house was now hired in the rue de
La Bruyere and given to Grindot, that great decorative architect, with
orders to make it a perfect bonbon-box.
Henceforth, Rochefide no longer managed his affairs. Madame Schontz
received the revenues and paid the bills. Become, as it were,
practically his wife, his woman of business, she justified the position
by making her _gros papa_ more comfortable than ever; she had learned
all his fancies, and gratified them as Madame de Pompadour gratified
those of Louis XV. In short, Madame Schontz reigned an absolute
mistress. She then began to patronize a few young men, artists, men of
letters, new-fledged to fame, who rejected both ancients and moderns,
and strove to make themselves a great reputation by accomplishing little
or nothing.
The conduct of Madame Schontz, a triumph of tactics, ought to reveal
to you her superiority. In the first place, these ten or a dozen young
fellows amused Arthur; they supplied him with witty sayings and clever
opinions on all sorts of topics, and did not put in doubt the fidelity
of the mistress; moreover, they proclaimed her a woman who was eminently
intelligent. These living advertisements, these perambulating articles,
soon set up Madame Schontz as the most agreeable woman to be found in
the borderland which separates the thirteenth arrondissement from the
twelve others. Her rivals--Suzanne Gaillard, who, in 1838, had won the
advantage over her of becoming a wife married in legitimate marriage,
Fanny Beaupre, Mariette, Antonia--spread calumnies that were more than
droll about the beauty of those young men and the complacent good-nature
with which Monsieur de Rochefide welcomed them. Madame Schontz, who
could distance, as she said, by three _blagues_ the wit of those ladies,
said to them one night at a supper given by Nathan to Florine, after
recounting her fortune and her success, “Do as much yourselves!”--a
speech which remained in their memory.
It was during this period that Madame Schontz made Arthur sell his
race-horses, through a series of considerations which she no doubt
derived from the critical mind of Claude Vignon, one of her _habitues_.
“I can conceive,” she said one night, after lashing the horses for some
time with her lively wit, “that princes and rich men should set their
hearts on horse-flesh, but only for the good of the country, not for the
paltry satisfactions of a betting man. If you had a stud farm on your
property and could raise a thousand or twelve hundred horses, and if all
the horses of France and of Navarre could enter into one great solemn
competition, it would be fine; but you buy animals as the managers of
theatres trade in artists; you degrade an institution to a gambling
game; you make a Bourse of legs, as you make a Bourse of stocks. It is
unworthy. Don’t you spend sixty thousand francs sometimes merely to read
in the newspapers: ‘Lelia, belonging to Monsieur de Rochefide beat by a
length Fleur-de-Genet the property of Monsieur le Duc de Rhetore’? You
had much better give that money to poets, who would carry you in prose
and verse to immortality, like the late Montyon.”
By dint of being prodded, the marquis was brought to see the hollowness
of the turf; he realized that economy of sixty thousand francs; and the
next year Madame Schontz remarked to him,--
“I don’t cost you anything now, Arthur.”
Many rich men envied the marquis and endeavored to entice Madame Schontz
away from him, but like the Russian prince they wasted their old age.
“Listen to me,” she said to Finot, now become immensely rich. “I am
certain that Rochefide would forgive me a little passion if I fell in
love with any one, but one doesn’t leave a marquis with a kind heart
like that for a _parvenu_ like you. You couldn’t keep me in the position
in which Arthur has placed me; he has made me half a wife and a lady,
and that’s more than you could do even if you married me.”
This was the last nail which clinched the fetters of that happy
galley-slave, for the speech of course reached the ears for which it was
intended.
The fourth phase had begun, that of _habit_, the final victory in these
plans of campaign, which make the women of this class say of a man, “I
hold him!” Rochefide, who had just bought the little hotel in the name
of Mademoiselle Josephine Schiltz (a trifle of eighty thousand francs),
had reached, at the moment the Duchesse de Grandlieu was forming plans
about him, the stage of deriving vanity from his mistress (whom he now
called Ninon II.), by vaunting her scrupulous honesty, her excellent
manners, her education, and her wit. He had merged his own defects,
merits, tastes, and pleasures in Madame Schontz, and he found himself
at this period of his life, either from lassitude, indifference, or
philosophy, a man unable to change, who clings to wife or mistress.
We may understand the position won in five years by Madame Schontz from
the fact that presentation at her house had to be proposed some time
before it was granted. She refused to receive dull rich people and
smirched people; and only departed from this rule in favor of certain
great names of the aristocracy.
“They,” she said, “have a right to be stupid because they are
well-bred.”
She possessed ostensibly the three hundred thousand francs which
Rochefide had given her, and which a certain good fellow, a broker named
Gobenheim (the only man of that class admitted to her house) invested
and reinvested for her. But she manipulated for herself secretly a
little fortune of two hundred thousand francs, the result of her savings
for the last three years and of the constant movement of the three
hundred thousand francs,--for she never admitted the possession of more
than that known sum.
“The more you make, the less you get rich,” said Gobenheim to her one
day.
“Water is so dear,” she answered.
This secret hoard was increased by jewels and diamonds, which Aurelie
wore a month and then sold. When any one called her rich, Madame Schontz
replied that at the rate of interest in the Funds three hundred thousand
francs produced only twelve thousand, and she had spent as much as that
in the hardest days of her life.