Such conduct implied a plan, and Madame Schontz had, as you may well
believe, a plan. Jealous for the last two years of Madame du Bruel, she
was consumed with the ambition to be married by church and mayor. All
social positions have their forbidden fruit, some little thing magnified
by desire until it has become the weightiest thing in life. This
ambition of course involved a second Arthur; but no espial on the part
of those about her had as yet discovered Rochefide’s secret rival.
Bixiou fancied he saw the favored one in Leon de Lora; the painter saw
him in Bixiou, who had passed his fortieth year and ought to be making
himself a fate of some kind. Suspicions were also turned on Victor de
Vernisset, a poet of the school of Canalis, whose passion for Madame
Schontz was desperate; but the poet accused Stidmann, a young sculptor,
of being his fortune rival. This artist, a charming lad, worked for
jewellers, for manufacturers in bronze and silver-smiths; he longed
to be another Benvenuto Cellini. Claude Vignon, the young Comte de la
Palferine, Gobenheim, Vermanton a cynical philosopher, all frequenters
of this amusing salon, were severally suspected, and proved innocent.
No one had fathomed Madame Schontz, certainly not Rochefide, who
thought she had a penchant for the young and witty La Palferine; she
was virtuous from self-interest and was wholly bent on making a good
marriage.
Only one man of equivocal reputation was ever seen in Madame Schontz’s
salon, namely Couture, who had more than once made his brother
speculators howl; but Couture had been one of Madame Schontz’s earliest
friends, and she alone remained faithful to him. The false alarm of 1840
swept away the last vestige of this stock-gambler’s credit; Aurelie,
seeing his run of ill-luck, made Rochefide play, as we have seen, in
the other direction. Thankful to find a place for himself at Aurelie’s
table, Couture, to whom Finot, the cleverest or, if you choose, the
luckiest of all parvenus, occasionally gave a note of a thousand francs,
was alone wise and calculating enough to offer his hand and name to
madame Schontz, who studied him to see if the bold speculator had
sufficient power to make his way in politics and enough gratitude not
to desert his wife. Couture, a man about forty-three years of age, half
worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant sonority of his name by birth;
he said little of the authors of his days.
Madame Schontz was bemoaning to herself the rarity of eligible men, when
Couture presented to her a provincial, supplied with the two handles by
which women take hold of such pitchers when they wish to keep them. To
sketch this person will be to paint a portion of the youth of the day.
The digression is history.
In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, son of a chief-justice of the Royal
court at Caen (who had lately died), left his native town of Alencon,
resigning his judgeship (a position in which his father had compelled
him, he said, to waste his time), and came to Paris, with the intention
of making a noise there,--a Norman idea, difficult to realize, for he
could scarcely scrape together eight thousand francs a year; his mother
still being alive and possessing a life-interest in a valuable estate
in Alencon. This young man had already, during previous visits to Paris,
tried his rope, like an acrobat, and had recognized the great vice of
the social replastering of 1830. He meant to turn it to his own profit,
following the example of the longest heads of the bourgeoisie. This
requires a rapid glance on one of the effects of the new order of
things.
Modern equality, unduly developed in our day, has necessarily developed
in private life, on a line parallel with political life, the three great
divisions of the social _I;_ namely, pride, conceit, and vanity. Fools
wish to pass for wits; wits want to be thought men of talent; men of
talent wish to be treated as men of genius; as for men of genius, they
are more reasonable; they consent to be only demigods. This tendency
of the public mind of these days, which, in the Chamber, makes the
manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous
of the writer, leads fools to disparage wits, wits to disparage men of
talent, men of talent to disparage those who outstrip them by an inch or
two, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the throne, or whatever
does not adore them unconditionally. So soon as a nation has, in a very
unstatesmanlike spirit, pulled down all recognized social superiorities,
she opens the sluice through which rushes a torrent of secondary
ambitions, the meanest of which resolves to lead. She had, so democrats
declare, an evil in her aristocracy; but a defined and circumscribed
evil; she exchanges it for a dozen armed and contending
aristocracies--the worst of all situations. By proclaiming the equality
of all, she has promulgated a declaration of the rights of Envy. We
inherit to-day the saturnalias of the Revolution transferred to the
domain, apparently peaceful, of the mind, of industry, of politics; it
now seems that reputations won by toil, by services rendered, by talent,
are privileges granted at the expense of the masses. Agrarian law will
spread to the field of glory. Never, in any age, have men demanded
the affixing of their names on the nation’s posters for reasons
more puerile. Distinction is sought at any price, by ridicule, by an
affectation of interest in the cause of Poland, in penitentiaries, in
the future of liberated galley-slaves, in all the little scoundrels
above and below twelve years, and in every other social misery. These
diverse manias create fictitious dignities, presidents, vice-presidents,
and secretaries of societies, the number of which is greater than that
of the social questions they seek to solve. Society on its grand scale
has been demolished to make a million of little ones in the image of the
defunct. These parasitic organizations reveal decomposition; are they
not the swarming of maggots in the dead body? All these societies
are the daughters of one mother, Vanity. It is not thus that Catholic
charity or true beneficence proceeds; _they_ study evils in wounds and
cure them; they don’t perorate in public meetings upon deadly ills for
the pleasure of perorating.
Fabien du Ronceret, without being a superior man, had divined, by the
exercise of that greedy common-sense peculiar to a Norman, the gain he
could derive from this public vice. Every epoch has its character which
clever men make use of. Fabien’s mind, though not clever, was wholly
bent on making himself talked about.
“My dear fellow, a man must make himself talked about, if he wants to
be anything,” he said, on parting from the king of Alencon, a certain
du Bousquier, a friend of his father. “In six months I shall be better
known than you are!”
It was thus that Fabien interpreted the spirit of his age; he did not
rule it, he obeyed it. He made his debut in Bohemia, a region in the
moral topography of Paris where he was known as “The Heir” by reason
of certain premeditated prodigalities. Du Ronceret had profited by
Couture’s follies for the pretty Madame Cadine, for whom, during his
ephemeral opulence, he had arranged a delightful ground-floor apartment
with a garden in the rue Blanche. The Norman, who wanted his luxury
ready-made, bought Couture’s furniture and all the improvements he was
forced to leave behind him,--a kiosk in the garden, where he smoked, a
gallery in rustic wood, with India mattings and adorned with potteries,
through which to reach the kiosk if it rained. When the Heir was
complimented on his apartment, he called it his _den_. The provincial
took care not to say that Grindot, the architect, had bestowed his best
capacity upon it, as did Stidmann on the carvings, and Leon de Lora
on the paintings, for Fabien’s crowning defect was the vanity which
condescends to lie for the sake of magnifying the individual self.
The Heir complimented these magnificences by a greenhouse which he built
along a wall with a southern exposure,--not that he loved flowers, but
he meant to attack through horticulture the public notice he wanted to
excite. At the present moment he had all but attained his end. Elected
vice-president of some sort of floral society presided over by the Duc
de Vissembourg, brother of the Prince de Chiavari, youngest son of the
late Marechal Vernon, he adorned his coat with the ribbon of the Legion
of honor on the occasion of an exhibition of products, the opening
speech at which, delivered by him, and bought of Lousteau for five
hundred francs, was boldly pronounced to be his own brew. He also
made himself talked about by a flower, given to him by old Blondet
of Alencon, father of Emile Blondet, which he presented to the
horticultural world as the product of his own greenhouse.
But this success was nothing. The Heir, who wished to be accepted as
a wit, had formed a plan of consorting with clever celebrities and so
reflecting their fame,--a plan somewhat hard to execute on a basis of
an exchequer limited to eight thousand francs a year. With this end in
view, Fabien du Ronceret had addressed himself again and again, without
success, to Bixiou, Stidmann, and Leon de Lora, asking them to present
him to Madame Schontz, and allow him to take part in that menageria of
lions of all kinds. Failing in those directions he applied to Couture,
for whose dinners he had so often paid that the late speculator felt
obliged to prove categorically to Madame Schontz that she ought to
acquire such an original, if it was only to make him one of those
elegant footmen without wages whom the mistresses of households employ
to do errands, when servants are lacking.
In the course of three evenings Madame Schontz read Fabien like a book
and said to herself,--
“If Couture does not suit me, I am certain of saddling that one. My
future can go on two legs now.”
This queer fellow whom everybody laughed at was really the chosen
one,--chosen, however, with an intention which made such preference
insulting. The choice escaped all public suspicion by its very
improbability. Madame Schontz intoxicated Fabien with smiles given
secretly, with little scenes played on the threshold when she bade
him good-night, if Monsieur de Rochefide stayed behind. She often
made Fabien a third with Arthur in her opera-box and at first
representations; this she excused by saying he had done her such or such
a service and she did not know how else to repay him. Men have a natural
conceit as common to them as to women,--that of being loved exclusively.
Now of all flattering passions there is none more prized than that of
a Madame Schontz, for the man she makes the object of a love she calls
“from the heart,” in distinction from another sort of love. A woman like
Madame Schontz, who plays the great lady, and whose intrinsic value is
real, was sure to be an object of pride to Fabien, who fell in love with
her to the point of never presenting himself before her eyes except in
full dress, varnished boots, lemon-kid gloves, embroidered shirt and
frill, waistcoat more or less variegated,--in short, with all the
external symptoms of profound worship.
A month before the conference of the duchess and her confessor, Madame
Schontz had confided the secret of her birth and her real name
to Fabien, who did not in the least understand the motive of the
confidence. A fortnight later, Madame Schontz, surprised at this want of
intelligence, suddenly exclaimed to herself:--
“Heavens! how stupid I am! he expects me to love him for himself.”
Accordingly the next day she took the Heir in her _caleche_ to the Bois,
for she now had two little carriages, drawn by two horses. In the course
of this public _tete-a-tete_ she opened the question of her future, and
declared that she wished to marry.
“I have seven hundred thousand francs,” she said, “and I admit to you
that if I could find a man full of ambition, who knew how to understand
my character, I would change my position; for do you know what is
the dream of my life? To become a true bourgeoise, enter an honorable
family, and make my husband and children truly happy.”
The Norman would fain be “distinguished” by Madame Schontz, but as for
marrying her, that folly seemed debatable to a bachelor of thirty-eight
whom the revolution of July had made a judge. Seeing his hesitation,
Madame Schontz made the Heir the butt of her wit, her jests, and her
disdain, and turned to Couture. Within a week, the latter, whom she
put upon the scent of her fortune, had offered his hand, and heart, and
future,--three things of about the same value.
The manoeuvres of Madame Schontz had reached this stage of proceeding,
when Madame de Grandlieu began her inquiries into the life and habits of
the Beatrix of the Place Saint-Georges.