At the fall of the Villele ministry, Monsieur Louis-Jerome Thuillier,
who had then seen twenty-six years’ service as a clerk in the ministry
of finance, became sub-director of a department thereof; but scarcely
had he enjoyed the subaltern authority of a position formerly his
lowest hope, when the events of July, 1830, forced him to resign it.
He calculated, shrewdly enough, that his pension would be honorably and
readily given by the new-comers, glad to have another office at their
disposal. He was right; for a pension of seventeen hundred francs was
paid to him immediately.
When the prudent sub-director first talked of resigning, his sister, who
was far more the companion of his life than his wife, trembled for his
future.
“What will become of Thuillier?” was a question which Madame and
Mademoiselle Thuillier put to each other with mutual terror in their
little lodging on a third floor of the rue d’Argenteuil.
“Securing his pension will occupy him for a time,” Mademoiselle
Thuillier said one day; “but I am thinking of investing my savings in
a way that will cut out work for him. Yes; it will be something like
administrating the finances to manage a piece of property.”
“Oh, sister! you will save his life,” cried Madame Thuillier.
“I have always looked for a crisis of this kind in Jerome’s life,”
replied the old maid, with a protecting air.
Mademoiselle Thuillier had too often heard her brother remark: “Such
a one is dead; he only survived his retirement two years”; she had too
often heard Colleville, her brother’s intimate friend, a government
employee like himself, say, jesting on this climacteric of bureaucrats,
“We shall all come to it, ourselves,” not to appreciate the danger her
brother was running. The change from activity to leisure is, in truth,
the critical period for government employees of all kinds.
Those of them who know not how to substitute, or perhaps cannot
substitute other occupations for the work to which they have been
accustomed, change in a singular manner; some die outright; others take
to fishing, the vacancy of that amusement resembling that of their late
employment under government; others, who are smarter men, dabble in
stocks, lose their savings, and are thankful to obtain a place in
some enterprise that is likely to succeed, after a first disaster and
liquidation, in the hands of an abler management. The late clerk then
rubs his hands, now empty, and says to himself, “I always did foresee
the success of the business.” But nearly all these retired bureaucrats
have to fight against their former habits.
“Some,” Colleville used to say, “are victims to a sort of ‘spleen’
peculiar to the government clerk; they die of a checked circulation;
a red-tapeworm is in their vitals. That little Poiret couldn’t see the
well-known white carton without changing color at the beloved sight; he
used to turn from green to yellow.”
Mademoiselle Thuillier was considered the moving spirit of her brother’s
household; she was not without decision and force of character, as the
following history will show. This superiority over those who immediately
surrounded her enabled her to judge her brother, although she adored
him. After witnessing the failure of the hopes she had set upon her
idol, she had too much real maternity in her feeling for him to let
herself be mistaken as to his social value.
Thuillier and his sister were children of the head porter at the
ministry of finance. Jerome had escaped, thanks to his near-sightedness,
all drafts and conscriptions. The father’s ambition was to make his son
a government clerk. At the beginning of this century the army presented
too many posts not to leave various vacancies in the government offices.
A deficiency of minor officials enabled old Pere Thuillier to hoist his
son upon the lowest step of the bureaucratic hierarchy. The old man died
in 1814, leaving Jerome on the point of becoming sub-director, but with
no other fortune than that prospect. The worthy Thuillier and his wife
(who died in 1810) had retired from active service in 1806, with a
pension as their only means of support; having spent what property
they had in giving Jerome the education required in these days, and in
supporting both him and his sister.
The influence of the Restoration on the bureaucracy is well known. From
the forty and one suppressed departments a crowd of honorable employees
returned to Paris with nothing to do, and clamorous for places inferior
to those they had lately occupied. To these acquired rights were added
those of exiled families ruined by the Revolution. Pressed between the
two floods, Jerome thought himself lucky not to have been dismissed
under some frivolous pretext. He trembled until the day when, becoming
by mere chance sub-director, he saw himself secure of a retiring
pension. This cursory view of matters will serve to explain Monsieur
Thuillier’s very limited scope and knowledge. He had learned the Latin,
mathematics, history, and geography that are taught in schools, but
he never got beyond what is called the second class; his father having
preferred to take advantage of a sudden opportunity to place him at the
ministry. So, while the young Thuillier was making his first records
on the Grand-Livre, he ought to have been studying his rhetoric and
philosophy.
While grinding the ministerial machine, he had no leisure to cultivate
letters, still less the arts; but he acquired a routine knowledge of his
business, and when he had an opportunity to rise, under the Empire,
to the sphere of superior employees, he assumed a superficial air of
competence which concealed the son of a porter, though none of it rubbed
into his mind. His ignorance, however, taught him to keep silence, and
silence served him well. He accustomed himself to practise, under the
imperial regime, a passive obedience which pleased his superiors; and it
was to this quality that he owed at a later period his promotion to the
rank of sub-director. His routine habits then became great experience;
his manners and his silence concealed his lack of education, and his
absolute nullity was a recommendation, for a cipher was needed. The
government was afraid of displeasing both parties in the Chamber by
selecting a man from either side; it therefore got out of the difficulty
by resorting to the rule of seniority. That is how Thuillier became
sub-director. Mademoiselle Thuillier, knowing that her brother abhorred
reading, and could substitute no business for the bustle of a public
office, had wisely resolved to plunge him into the cares of property,
into the culture of a garden, in short, into all the infinitely petty
concerns and neighborhood intrigues which make up the life of the
bourgeoisie.
The transplanting of the Thuillier household from the rue d’Argenteuil
to the rue Saint-Dominique d’Enfer, the business of making the purchase,
of finding a suitable porter, and then of obtaining tenants occupied
Thuillier from 1831 to 1832. When the phenomenon of the change was
accomplished, and the sister saw that Jerome had borne it fairly well,
she found him other cares and occupations (about which we shall hear
later), all based upon the character of the man himself, as to which it
will now be useful to give information.
Though the son of a ministerial porter, Thuillier was what is called a
fine man, slender in figure, above middle height, and possessing a
face that was rather agreeable if wearing his spectacles, but frightful
without them; which is frequently the case with near-sighted persons;
for the habit of looking through glasses has covered the pupils of his
eyes with a sort of film.
Between the ages of eighteen and thirty, young Thuillier had much
success among women, in a sphere which began with the lesser bourgeois
and ended in that of the heads of departments. Under the Empire, war
left Parisian society rather denuded of men of energy, who were mostly
on the battlefield; and perhaps, as a great physician has suggested,
this may account for the flabbiness of the generation which occupies the
middle of the nineteenth century.
Thuillier, forced to make himself noticeable by other charms than those
of mind, learned to dance and to waltz in a way to be cited; he was
called “that handsome Thuillier”; he played billiards to perfection; he
knew how to cut out likenesses in black paper, and his friend Colleville
coached him so well that he was able to sing all the ballads of the
day. These various small accomplishments resulted in that appearance
of success which deceives youth and befogs it about the future.
Mademoiselle Thuillier, from 1806 to 1814, believed in her brother as
Mademoiselle d’Orleans believed in Louis-Philippe. She was proud of
Jerome; she expected to see him the director-general of his department
of the ministry, thanks to his successes in certain salons, where,
undoubtedly, he would never have been admitted but for the circumstances
which made society under the Empire a medley.
But the successes of “that handsome Thuillier” were usually of short
duration; women did not care to keep his devotion any more than he
desired to make his devotion eternal. He was really an unwilling Don
Juan; the career of a “beau” wearied him to the point of aging him; his
face, covered with lines like that of an old coquette, looked a dozen
years older than the registers made him. There remained to him of all
his successes in gallantry, a habit of looking at himself in mirrors, of
buttoning his coat to define his waist, and of posing in various dancing
attitudes; all of which prolonged, beyond the period of enjoying his
advantages, the sort of lease that he held on his cognomen, “that
handsome Thuillier.”
The truth of 1806 has, however, become a fable, in 1826. He retains a
few vestiges of the former costume of the beaux of the Empire, which are
not unbecoming to the dignity of a former sub-director. He still wears
the white cravat with innumerable folds, wherein his chin is buried, and
the coquettish bow, formerly tied by the hands of beauty, the two ends
of which threaten danger to the passers to right and left. He follows
the fashions of former days, adapting them to his present needs; he tips
his hat on the back of his head, and wears shoes and thread stockings in
summer; his long-tailed coats remind one of the well-known “surtouts”
of the Empire; he has not yet abandoned his frilled shirts and his white
waistcoats; he still plays with his Empire switch, and holds himself so
erect that his back bends in. No one, seeing Thuillier promenading
on the boulevards, would take him for the son of a man who cooked the
breakfasts of the clerks at a ministry and wore the livery of Louis
XVI.; he resembles an imperial diplomatist or a sub-prefect. Now, not
only did Mademoiselle Thuillier very innocently work upon her brother’s
weak spot by encouraging in him an excessive care of his person, which,
in her, was simply a continuation of her worship, but she also provided
him with family joys, by transplanting to their midst a household which
had hitherto been quasi-collateral to them.
It was that of Monsieur Colleville, an intimate friend of Thuillier. But
before we proceed to describe Pylades let us finish with Orestes, and
explain why Thuillier--that handsome Thuillier--was left without a
family of his own--for the family, be it said, is non-existent without
children. Herein appears one of those deep mysteries which lie buried in
the arena of private life, a few shreds of which rise to the surface
at moments when the pain of a concealed situation grows poignant. This
concerns the life of Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier; so far, we
have seen only the life (and we may call it the public life) of Jerome
Thuillier.
Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, four years older than her brother, had
been utterly sacrificed to him; it was easier to give a career to one
than a “dot” to the other. Misfortune to some natures is a pharos,
which illumines to their eyes the dark low corners of social existence.
Superior to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte had one of
those natures which, under the hammer of persecution, gather themselves
together, become compact and powerfully resistant, not to say
inflexible. Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof from the life
of the household; choosing to make herself the sole arbiter of her own
fate. At fourteen years of age, she went to live alone in a garret, not
far from the ministry of finance, which was then in the rue Vivienne,
and also not far from the Bank of France, then, and now, in the rue de
la Vrilliere. There she bravely gave herself up to a form of industry
little known and the perquisite of a few persons, which she obtained,
thanks to the patrons of her father. It consisted in making bags to hold
coin for the Bank, the Treasury, and the great financial houses. At the
end of three years she employed two workwomen. By investing her savings
on the Grand-Livre, she found herself, in 1814, the mistress of three
thousand six hundred francs a year, earned in fifteen years. As she
spent little, and dined with her father as long as he lived, and, as
government securities were very low during the last convulsions of the
Empire, this result, which seems at first sight exaggerated, explains
itself.
On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being
twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother
and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome, then
at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister, clothed
in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with which she
sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte’s eyes Jerome
was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole French Empire. To
keep house for this cherished brother, to be initiated into the
secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his handmaiden, his spaniel,
was Brigitte’s dream. She immolated herself lovingly to an idol
whose selfishness, always great, was enormously increased by her
self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her fore-woman for fifteen
thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier in the rue d’Argenteuil,
where she made herself the mother, protectress, and servant of this
spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural caution of a girl who
owed everything to her own discretion and her own labor, concealed the
amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing, no doubt, the extravagance
of a man of gallantry. She merely paid a quota of six hundred francs
a year to the expenses of the household, and this, with her brother’s
eighteen hundred, enabled her to make both ends meet at the end of the
year.
From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to his
sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs, kept
none of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit of
despotism which was, in truth, the one little sin of her nature. But the
sister had sacrificed everything to the brother; she had staked her all
upon his heart; she lived by him only. Brigitte’s ascendancy over Jerome
was singularly proved by the marriage which she procured for him about
the year 1814.
Seeing the tendency to enforced reduction which the new-comers to power
under the Restoration were beginning to bring about in the government
offices, and particularly since the return of the old society which
sought to ride over the bourgeoisie, Brigitte understood, far better
than her brother could explain it to her, the social crisis which
presently extinguished their common hopes. No more successes for that
handsome Thuillier in the salons of the nobles who now succeeded the
plebeians of the Empire!
Thuillier was not enough of a person to take up a politic opinion and
choose a party; he felt, as his sister did for him, the necessity of
profiting by the remains of his youth to make a settlement. In such a
situation, a sister as jealous of her power as Brigitte naturally would,
and ought, to marry her brother, to suit herself as well as to suit him;
for she alone could make him really happy, Madame Thuillier being only
an indispensable accessory to the obtaining of two or three children. If
Brigitte did not have an intellect quite the equal of her will, at least
she had the instinct of her despotism; without, it is true, education,
she marched straight before her, with the headstrong determination of
a nature accustomed to succeed. She had the genius of housekeeping, a
faculty for economy, a thorough understanding of how to live, and a
love for work. She saw plainly that she could never succeed in marrying
Jerome into a sphere above their own, where parents might inquire
into their domestic life and feel uneasy at finding a mistress already
reigning in the home. She therefore sought in a lower grade for persons
to dazzle, and found, almost beside her, a suitable match.
The oldest usher at the Bank, a man named Lemprun, had an only daughter,
called Celeste. Mademoiselle Celeste Lemprun would inherit the fortune
of her mother, the only daughter of a rich farmer. This fortune
consisted of some acres of land in the environs of Paris, which the
old father still worked; besides this, she would have the property of
Lemprun himself, a man who had left the firms of Thelusson and of Keller
to enter the service of the Bank of France. Lemprun, now the head of
that service, enjoyed the respect and consideration of the governors and
auditors.
The Bank council, on hearing of the probable marriage of Celeste to
an honorable employee at the ministry of finance, promised a wedding
present of six thousand francs. This gift, added to twelve thousand
given by Pere Lemprun, and twelve thousand more from the maternal
grandfather, Sieur Galard, market-gardener at Auteuil, brought up the
dowry to thirty thousand francs. Old Galard and Monsieur and Madame
Lemprun were delighted with the marriage. Lemprun himself knew
Mademoiselle Thuillier, and considered her one of the worthiest and most
conscientious women in Paris. Brigitte then, for the first time, allowed
her investments on the Grand-Livre to shine forth, assuring Lemprun that
she should never marry; consequently, neither he nor his wife, persons
devoted to the main chance, would ever allow themselves to find fault
with Brigitte. Above all, they were greatly struck by the splendid
prospects of the handsome Thuillier, and the marriage took place, as the
conventional saying is, to the general satisfaction.
The governor of the Bank and the secretary were the bride’s witnesses;
Monsieur de la Billardiere, director of Thuillier’s department, and
Monsieur Rabourdin, head of the office, being those of the groom. Six
days after the marriage old Lemprun was the victim of a daring robbery
which made a great noise in the newspapers of the day, though it was
quickly forgotten during the events of 1815. The guilty parties having
escaped detection, Lemprun wished to make up the loss; but the
Bank agreed to carry the deficit to its profit and loss account;
nevertheless, the poor old man actually died of the grief this affair
had caused him. He regarded it as an attack upon his aged honor.
Madame Lemprun then resigned all her property to her daughter, Madame
Thuillier, and went to live with her father at Auteuil until he died
from an accident in 1817. Alarmed at the prospect of having to manage
or lease the market-garden and the farm of her father, Madame Lemprun
entreated Brigitte, whose honesty and capacity astonished her, to wind
up old Galard’s affairs, and to settle the property in such a way that
her daughter should take possession of everything, securing to her
mother fifteen hundred francs a year and the house at Auteuil. The
landed property of the old farmer was sold in lots, and brought in
thirty thousand francs. Lemprun’s estate had given as much more, so that
Madame Thuillier’s fortune, including her “dot,” amounted in 1818 to
ninety thousand francs. Joining the revenue of this property to that of
the brother and sister, the Thuillier household had an income, in 1818,
amounting to eleven thousand francs, managed by Brigitte alone on her
sole responsibility. It is necessary to begin by stating this financial
position, not only to prevent objections but to rid the drama of
difficulties.
Brigitte began, from the first, by allowing her brother five hundred
francs a month, and by sailing the household boat at the rate of five
thousand francs a year. She granted to her sister-in-law fifty francs a
month, explaining to her carefully that she herself was satisfied with
forty. To strengthen her despotism by the power of money, Brigitte laid
by the surplus of her own funds. She made, so it was said in business
offices, usurious loans by means of her brother, who appeared as
a money-lender. If, between the years 1813 and 1830, Brigitte had
capitalized sixty thousand francs, that sum can be explained by the rise
in the Funds, and there is no need to have recourse to accusations more
or less well founded, which have nothing to do with our present history.
From the first days of the marriage, Brigitte subdued the unfortunate
Madame Thuillier with a touch of the spur and a jerk of the bit, both
of which she made her feel severely. A further display of tyranny
was useless; the victim resigned herself at once. Celeste, thoroughly
understood by Brigitte, a girl without mind or education, accustomed
to a sedentary life and a tranquil atmosphere, was extremely gentle by
nature; she was pious in the fullest acceptation of the word; she would
willingly have expiated by the hardest punishments the involuntary
wrong of giving pain to her neighbor. She was utterly ignorant of life;
accustomed to be waited on by her mother, who did the whole service
of the house, for Celeste was unable to make much exertion, owing to
a lymphatic constitution which the least toil wearied. She was truly a
daughter of the people of Paris, where children, seldom handsome, and of
no vigor, the product of poverty and toil, of homes without fresh air,
without freedom of action, without any of the conveniences of life, meet
us at every turn.
At the time of the marriage, Celeste was seen to be a little woman, fair
and faded almost to sickliness, fat, slow, and silly in the countenance.
Her forehead, much too large and too prominent, suggested water on the
brain, and beneath that waxen cupola her face, noticeably too small and
ending in a point like the nose of a mouse, made some people fear she
would become, sooner or later, imbecile. Her eyes, which were light
blue, and her lips, always fixed in a smile, did not contradict that
idea. On the solemn occasion of her marriage she had the manner, air,
and attitude of a person condemned to death, whose only desire is that
it might all be over speedily.
“She is rather round,” said Colleville to Thuillier.
Brigitte was just the knife to cut into such a nature, to which her own
formed the strongest contrast. Mademoiselle Thuillier was remarkable for
her regular and correct beauty, but a beauty injured by toil which, from
her very childhood, had bent her down to painful, thankless tasks, and
by the secret privations she imposed upon herself in order to amass her
little property. Her complexion, early discolored, had something the
tint of steel. Her brown eyes were framed in brown; on the upper lip
was a brown floss like a sort of smoke. Her lips were thin, and her
imperious forehead was surmounted by hair once black, now turning to
chinchilla. She held herself as straight as the fairest beauty; but all
things else about her showed the hardiness of her life, the deadening of
her natural fire, the cost of what she was!
To Brigitte, Celeste was simply a fortune to lay hold of, a future
mother to rule, one more subject in her empire. She soon reproached her
for being _weak_, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous
old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in
her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the
languid inertness of the feeble creature. Celeste, ashamed to see her
sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to
help her, and fell ill in consequence. Instantly, Brigitte was devoted
to her, nursed her like a beloved sister, and would say, in presence
of Thuillier: “You haven’t any strength, my child; you must never do
anything again.” She showed up Celeste’s incapacity by that display of
sympathy with which strength, seeming to pity weakness, finds means to
boast of its own powers.
But, as all despotic natures liking to exercise their strength are full
of tenderness for physical sufferings, Brigitte took such real care of
her sister-in-law as to satisfy Celeste’s mother when she came to see
her daughter. After Madame Thuillier recovered, however, she called her,
in Celeste’s hearing, “a helpless creature, good for nothing!” which
sent the poor thing crying to her room. When Thuillier found her there,
drying her eyes, he excused her sister, saying:--
“She is an excellent woman, but rather hasty; she loves you in her own
way; she behaves just so with me.”
Celeste, remembering the maternal care of her sister-in-law during her
illness, forgave the wound. Brigitte always treated her brother as the
king of the family; she exalted him to Celeste, and made him out an
autocrat, a Ladislas, an infallible pope. Madame Thuillier having lost
her father and grandfather, and being well-nigh deserted by her mother,
who came to see her on Thursdays only (she herself spending Sundays at
Auteuil in summer), had no one left to love except her husband, and
she did love him,--in the first place, because he was her husband, and
secondly, because he still remained to her “that handsome Thuillier.”
Besides, he sometimes treated her like a wife, and all these reasons
together made her adore him. He seemed to her all the more perfect
because he often took up her defence and scolded his sister, not from
any real interest in his wife, but for pure selfishness, and in order to
have peace in the household during the very few moments that he stayed
there.
In fact, that handsome Thuillier was never at home except at dinner,
after which meal he went out, returning very late at night. He went to
balls and other social festivities by himself, precisely as if he were
still a bachelor. Thus the two women were always alone together. Celeste
insensibly fell into a passive attitude, and became what Brigitte wanted
her,--a helot. The Queen Elizabeth of the household then passed
from despotism to a sort of pity for the poor victim who was always
sacrificed. She ended by softening her haughty ways, her cutting
speech, her contemptuous tones, as soon as she was certain that her
sister-in-law was completely under the yoke. When she saw the wounds it
made on the neck of her victim, she took care of her as a thing of her
own, and Celeste entered upon happier days. Comparing the end with the
beginning, she even felt a sort of love for her torturer. To gain
some power of self-defence, to become something less a cipher in the
household, supported, unknown to herself, by her own means, the poor
helot had but a single chance, and that chance never came to her.
Celeste had no child. This barrenness, which, from month to month,
brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of Brigitte’s
scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit for nothing,
not even to bear children. The old maid, who had longed to love her
brother’s child as if it were her own, was unable, for years, to
reconcile herself to this irremediable sterility.
At the time when our history begins, namely, in 1840, Celeste, then
forty-six years old, had ceased to weep; she now had the certainty of
never being a mother. And here is a strange thing. After twenty-five
years of this life, in which victory had ended by first dulling and then
breaking its own knife, Brigitte loved Celeste as much as Celeste loved
Brigitte. Time, ease, and the perpetual rubbing of domestic life, had
worn off the angles and smoothed the asperities; Celeste’s resignation
and lamb-like gentleness had brought, at last, a serene and peaceful
autumn. The two women were still further united by the one sentiment
that lay within them, namely, their adoration for the lucky and selfish
Thuillier.
Moreover, these two women, both childless, had each, like all women
who have vainly desired children, fallen in love with a child. This
fictitious motherhood, equal in strength to a real motherhood, needs an
explanation which will carry us to the very heart of our drama, and
will show the reason of the new occupation which Mademoiselle Thuillier
provided for her brother.