"You certainly are asleep," continued Mme. Mauperin in the sharp,
disappointed tone of a woman who is expecting a parry for her attack.
"I told you I wasn't asleep."
"Then you surely don't understand. Oh, these intelligent men--it's
curious. It concerns you though, too; it's your business quite as much
as mine. This is another marriage fallen through--do you understand? A
marriage that was most suitable--money--good family--everything. I know
what these hesitations mean. We may as well give up all idea of it.
Henri was talking to me about it this evening; the young man hadn't said
anything to him; of course, he's too well-bred for that. But Henri is
quite persuaded that he's drawing out of it. One can always tell in
matters of this kind; people have a way of----"
"Well, let him draw out of it then; what do you want me to say?" M.
Mauperin sat straight up and put his two hands on his thighs. "Let him
go. There are plenty of young men like Reverchon; he is not unique, we
can find others; while girls like my daughter----"
"Good heavens! Your daughter--your daughter!"
"You don't do her justice, Thérèse."
"I? Oh, yes, I do; but I see her as she is and not with your eyes. She
has her faults, and great faults, too, which you have encouraged--yes,
you. She is as heedless and full of freaks as a child of ten. If you
imagine that it doesn't worry me--her unreasonableness, her uncertain
moods, and so many other absurdities ever since we have been trying to
get her married! And then her way of criticising every one to whom we
introduce her. She is terrible at interviews of this kind. This makes
about the tenth man she has sent about his business."
At Mme. Mauperin's last words a gleam of paternal vanity lighted up M.
Mauperin's face.
"Yes, yes," he said, smiling at the remembrance, "the fact is she is
diabolically witty. Do you recollect her words about that poor Prefect:
'Oh, he's a regular old cock!' I remember how she said it directly she
saw him."
"It really is very funny, and above all very fit and proper. Jokes of
this kind will help her to get married, take my word for it. Such things
will induce other men to come forward, don't you think so? I am quite
certain that Renée must have a reputation for being a terror. A little
more of her precious wit and you will see what proposals you will get
for your daughter! I married Henriette so easily! Renée is my cross."
M. Mauperin had picked up his snuff-box from the table by the side of
the bed and appeared to be intent on turning it round between his thumb
and first finger.
"Well," continued Mme. Mauperin, "it's her own lookout. When she is
thirty, when she has refused every one, and there is no one left who
wants her, in spite of all her wit, her good qualities and everything
else, she will have time to reflect a little--and you will, too."
There was a pause. Mme. Mauperin gave M. Mauperin time enough to imagine
that she had finished, and then changing her tone she began again:
"I want to speak to you, too, about your son----"
Hereupon M. Mauperin, whose head had been bent while his wife was
talking, looked up, and there was a half smile of mischievous humour on
his face. In the upper as well as the lower middle class there is a
certain maternal love capable of rising to the height of passion and of
sinking to mere idolatry. There are mothers who in their affection and
love will fall down and worship their son. Theirs is not that maternal
love which veils its own weaknesses, which defends its rights, is
jealous of its duties, which is careful about the hierarchy and
discipline of the family, and which commands respect and consideration.
The child, brought near to his mother by all kinds of familiarity,
receives from her attentions which are more like homage, and caresses in
which there is a certain amount of servility. All the mother's dreams
are centred in him, for he is not only the heir but the whole future of
the family. Through him the family will reap the benefits of wealth, of
all the improvements and progressive rise of the _bourgeoisie_ from one
generation to another. The mother revels in the thought of what he is
and what he will be. She loves him and is glorified herself in him. She
dedicates all her ambitions to him and worships him. This son appears to
her a superior being, and she is amazed that he should have been born of
her; she seems to feel the mingled pride and humility of the mother of a
god.
Mme. Mauperin was a typical example of one of these mothers of modern
middle-class life. The merits, the features, the intellect of her son
were for her those of a divinity. His whole person, his accomplishments,
everything he said and everything he did, all was sacred to her. She
would spend her time in contemplation of him; she saw no one else when
he was there. It seemed to her as though the whole world began and ended
in her son. He was in her eyes perfection itself, the most intelligent,
the handsomest, and, above all, the most distinguished of men. He was
short-sighted and wore an eye-glass, but she would not even own that he
was near-sighted.
When he was there she watched him talk, sit down or walk about, and she
would smile at him when his back was turned. She liked the very creases
of his coat. When he was not there she would lean back for a few minutes
in her arm-chair and some reminiscence of infinite sweetness would
gradually brighten and soften her face. It was as though light,
restfulness, and peace had suddenly come to her; her expression was
joyous at such times, her eyes were looking at something in the past,
her heart was living over again some happy moment, and if any one spoke
to her she seemed to wake up out of a dream.
It was in a certain measure hereditary, this intense maternal love. Mme.
Mauperin came of a race which had always loved its sons with a warm,
violent, and almost frenzied love. The mothers in her family had been
mothers with a vengeance. There was a story told of her grandmother in
the Haute-Marne. It was said that she had disfigured a child with a
burning coal who had been considered handsomer than her own boy.
At the time of her son's first ailments Mme. Mauperin had almost lost
her reason; she had hated all children who were well, and had hoped that
God would kill them if her son died. Once when he had been seriously ill
she had been forty-eight nights without going to bed, and her legs had
swelled with fatigue. When he was about again he had been allowed
anything and everything. If any one came to complain to her that he had
been fighting with the village children she would say feelingly: "Poor
little dear!" As the boy grew up his mother's spirit preceded him on
his walk through life, strewing his pathway with hope as he emerged into
manhood. She thought of all the heiresses in the neighbourhood whose age
would be suitable to his. She used to imagine him visiting at all the
country-houses, and she saw him on horseback, riding to the meet in a
red coat. She used to be fairly dazzled by all her dreams of the future.
Then came the time when he went away to college, the time when she had
to separate from him. Mme. Mauperin struggled for three months to keep
her son, to have him educated at home by a tutor, but M. Mauperin was
resolute on this score. All that Mme. Mauperin could obtain from him was
the permission to select the college for her son. She chose one with the
mildest discipline possible, one of those colleges for the children of
wealthy parents, where there is no severity, where the boys are allowed
to eat pastry when they are taking their walks, and where the professors
believe in more theatrical rehearsals than punishments. During the seven
years he was there, Mme. Mauperin never missed a single day going from
Saint-Denis to see him during the recreation hour. Rain, cold, fatigue,
illness, nothing prevented her. In the parlour or in the courtyard the
other mothers pointed her out to each other. The boy would kiss her,
take the cakes she had brought him, and then, telling her he had a
lesson to finish learning, he would hurry back to his games. It was
quite enough for his mother, though, for she had seen him and he was
well. She was always thinking about his health. He was weighed down with
flannel, and in the holidays she fed him well with meat, giving him all
the gravy from underdone beef so that he should grow strong and tall.
She bought him a small mat to sit on at school because the forms were so
hard. There were separate bed-rooms for the pupils, and Mme. Mauperin
furnished her son's like a man's room. At twelve years of age he had a
rosewood dressing-table and chest of drawers of his own. The boy became
a young man, the young man left college, and Mme. Mauperin's passion for
him increased with all that satisfaction which a mother feels in a tall
son when his looks begin to change and his beard makes its first
appearance. Forgetting all about the tradespeople whose bills she had
paid, she was amazed at the style in which her son dressed, at his
boots, and the way in which he did his hair. There was a certain
elegance of taste in everything that he liked, in his luxurious habits,
in his ways, and in his whole life, to which she bowed down in
astonishment and delight, as though she herself were not the mainspring
of it all and his cashier. Her son's valet did not seem to her like an
ordinary domestic; his horse was not merely a horse, it was her son's
horse. When her son went out she gave orders that she should be told so
that she might have the satisfaction of seeing him get into the
carriage and drive away.
Every day she was more and more taken up with this son. She had no
diversions, nothing to occupy her imagination; she did not read, and had
grown old living with a husband who had brought her no love and whom she
had always felt to be quite apart from her, engrossed as he had ever
been in his studies, politics, and business. She had no one left with
her but a daughter to whom she had never given her whole heart, and so
she had ended by devoting her life to Henri's interests and putting all
her vanity into his future. And her one thought--the thought which
occupied every hour of her days and nights, her fixed idea--was the
marriage of this adored son. She wanted him to marry well, to make a
match which should be rich enough and brilliant enough to make up to her
and repay her for all the dulness and obscurity of her own existence,
for her life of economy and solitude, for all her own privations as wife
and mother.
"Do you even know your son's age, M. Mauperin?" continued Mme. Mauperin.
"Henri, why, my dear, Henri must be--He was born in 1826, wasn't he?"
"Oh, that's just like a father to ask! Yes, 1826, the 12th of July,
1826."
"Well, then, he is twenty-nine. Fancy that now, he is twenty-nine!"
"And you fold your arms and take things easily! You don't trouble in the
least about his future! You say, 'Fancy that now, he's twenty-nine'--just
like that, quite calmly! Any other man would stir himself and look
round. Henri isn't like his sister, he wants to marry. Have you ever
thought of finding a suitable match for him--a wife? Oh, dear, no, not
any more than for the King of Prussia, of course not! It's just the same
as it was for your elder daughter. I should like to know what you did
towards that marriage? Whether she found any one or not, it appeared to
be all the same to you. How I did have to urge you on to do anything in
the matter! Oh, you can wipe your hands of that marriage; your
daughter's happiness can't weigh much on your conscience, I should
think! If I had not been there you would have found a husband like M.
Davarande, shouldn't you? A model husband, who adores Henriette--and
such a gentleman!"
Mme. Mauperin blew out the candle and got into bed by the side of M.
Mauperin, who had turned over with his face towards the wall.
"Yes," she went on, stretching herself out full length under the sheets,
"a model husband! Do you imagine that there are many sons-in-law who
would be so attentive to us? He would do anything to give us pleasure.
You invite him to dinner and give him meat on fasting-days and he never
says a word. Then, too, he is so obliging. I wanted to match some wools
for my tapestry-work the other day----"
"My dear, what is it we were talking about? I must tell you that I
should like to get a bit of sleep to-night. You began with your
daughter, and now you've started the chapter of M. Davarande's
perfections. I know that chapter--there's enough to last till to-morrow
morning. Come now, you want your son to marry, don't you? That's it,
isn't it? Well, I'm quite willing--let's get him married."
"Just as though I could count on you for getting him married! A lot of
trouble you'll go to about it; you are the right sort of man to
inconvenience yourself for anything."
"Oh, come, come, my dear, that's unjust. It seems to me that about a
fortnight ago I showed you what I was capable of. To go and listen to
the dullest of operas, to eat ices at night, which is a thing I detest,
and to talk about the weather with a provincial man who shouted about
his daughter's dowry on the boulevards. If you don't call that
inconveniencing myself! I suppose you'll say it didn't come to anything?
Was it my fault, though, if the gentleman wanted '_a handsome, manly
husband_,' as he put it, for his daughter? Is it my fault and mine only
if our son has not the frame of a Hercules?"
"M. Mauperin----"
"Oh, yes, it is, of course. I am to blame for everything, according to
you. You would make me pass everywhere for a selfish----"
"Oh, you are like all men!"
"Thank you on behalf of them all."
"No, it's in your character--it's no good blaming you. It's only the
mothers who worry. Ah, if you were only like I am; if at every instant
you were thinking of what might happen to a young man. I know Henri is
sensible; but a young man's fancy is so quickly caught. It might be some
worthless creature--some bad lot--one never knows--such things happen
every day. I should go mad! What do you say to sounding Mme. Rosières?
Shall we?"
There was no reply, and Mme. Mauperin was obliged to resign herself to
silence. She turned over and over, but could not sleep until daylight
appeared.