derived from self-respect. In this absolute intimacy, in which both
lovers put off their masks, the young woman never abdicated her modesty,
her masculine rectitude, and the strength peculiar to ambitious souls,
which formed the basis of her character. Lousteau involuntarily held
her in high esteem. As a Parisian, Dinah was superior to the most
fascinating courtesan; she could be as amusing and as witty as Malaga;
but her extensive information, her habits of mind, her vast reading
enabled her to generalize her wit, while the Florines and the Schontzes
exerted theirs over a very narrow circle.
“There is in Dinah,” said Etienne to Bixiou, “the stuff to make both a
Ninon and a De Stael.”
“A woman who combines an encyclopaedia and a seraglio is very
dangerous,” replied the mocking spirit.
When the expected infant became a visible fact, Madame de la Baudraye
would be seen no more; but before shutting herself up, never to go out
unless into the country, she was bent on being present at the first
performance of a play by Nathan. This literary solemnity occupied the
minds of the two thousand persons who regard themselves as constituting
“all Paris.” Dinah, who had never been at a first night’s performance,
was very full of natural curiosity. She had by this time arrived at such
a pitch of affection for Lousteau that she gloried in her misconduct;
she exerted a sort of savage strength to defy the world; she was
determined to look it in the face without turning her head aside.
She dressed herself to perfection, in a style suited to her delicate
looks and the sickly whiteness of her face. Her pallid complexion gave
her an expression of refinement, and her black hair in smooth bands
enhanced her pallor. Her brilliant gray eyes looked finer than ever,
set in dark rings. But a terribly distressing incident awaited her. By a
very simple chance, the box given to the journalist, on the first tier,
was next to that which Anna Grossetete had taken. The two intimate
friends did not even bow; neither chose to acknowledge the other. At
the end of the first act Lousteau left his seat, abandoning Dinah to the
fire of eyes, the glare of opera-glasses; while the Baronne de Fontaine
and the Comtesse Marie de Vandenesse, who accompanied her, received some
of the most distinguished men of fashion.
Dinah’s solitude was all the more distressing because she had not
the art of putting a good face to the matter by examining the company
through her opera-glass. In vain did she try to assume a dignified and
thoughtful attitude, and fix her eyes on vacancy; she was overpoweringly
conscious of being the object of general attention; she could not
disguise her discomfort, and lapsed a little into provincialism,
displaying her handkerchief and making involuntary movements of which
she had almost cured herself. At last, between the second and third
acts, a man had himself admitted to Dinah’s box! It was Monsieur de
Clagny.
“I am happy to see you, to tell you how much I am pleased by your
promotion,” said she.
“Oh! Madame, for whom should I come to Paris----?”
“What!” said she. “Have I anything to do with your appointment?”
“Everything,” said he. “Since you left Sancerre, it had become
intolerable to me; I was dying--”
“Your sincere friendship does me good,” replied she, holding out her
hand. “I am in a position to make much of my true friends; I now know
their value.--I feared I must have lost your esteem, but the proof you
have given me by this visit touches me more deeply than your ten years’
attachment.”
“You are an object of curiosity to the whole house,” said the lawyer.
“Oh! my dear, is this a part for you to be playing? Could you not be
happy and yet remain honored?--I have just heard that you are Monsieur
Etienne Lousteau’s mistress, that you live together as man and
wife!--You have broken for ever with society; even if you should some
day marry your lover, the time will come when you will feel the want
of the respectability you now despise. Ought you not to be in a home of
your own with your mother, who loves you well enough to protect you with
her aegis?--Appearances at least would be saved.”
“I am in the wrong to have come here,” replied she, “that is all.--I
have bid farewell to all the advantages which the world confers on women
who know how to reconcile happiness and the proprieties. My abnegation
is so complete that I only wish I could clear a vast space about me to
make a desert of my love, full of God, of _him_, and of myself.--We
have made too many sacrifices on both sides not to be united--united by
disgrace if you will, but indissolubly one. I am happy; so happy that I
can love freely, my friend, and confide in you more than of old--for I
need a friend.”
The lawyer was magnanimous, nay, truly great. To this declaration, in
which Dinah’s soul thrilled, he replied in heartrending tones:
“I wanted to go to see you, to be sure that you were loved: I shall now
be easy and no longer alarmed as to your future.--But will your lover
appreciate the magnitude of your sacrifice; is there any gratitude in
his affection?”
“Come to the Rue des Martyrs and you will see!”
“Yes, I will call,” he replied. “I have already passed your door without
daring to inquire for you.--You do not yet know the literary world.
There are glorious exceptions, no doubt; but these men of letters drag
terrible evils in their train; among these I account publicity as one
of the greatest, for it blights everything. A woman may commit herself
with--”
“With a Public Prosecutor?” the Baronne put in with a smile.
“Well!--and then after a rupture there is still something to fall back
on; the world has known nothing. But with a more or less famous man the
public is thoroughly informed. Why look there! What an example you have
close at hand! You are sitting back to back with the Comtesse Marie
Vandenesse, who was within an ace of committing the utmost folly for a
more celebrated man than Lousteau--for Nathan--and now they do not even
recognize each other. After going to the very edge of the precipice, the
Countess was saved, no one knows how; she neither left her husband nor
her house; but as a famous man was scorned, she was the talk of the town
for a whole winter. But her husband’s great fortune, great name,
and high position, but for the admirable management of that true
statesman--whose conduct to his wife, they say, was perfect--she would
have been ruined; in her position no other woman would have remained
respected as she is.”
“And how was Sancerre when you came away?” asked Madame de la Baudraye,
to change the subject.
“Monsieur de la Baudraye announced that your expected confinement after
so many years made it necessary that it should take place in Paris,
and that he had insisted on your going to be attended by the first
physicians,” replied Monsieur de Clagny, guessing what it was that Dinah
most wanted to know. “And so, in spite of the commotion to which your
departure gave rise, you still have your legal status.”
“Why!” she exclaimed, “can Monsieur de la Baudraye still hope----”
“Your husband, madame, did what he always does--made a little
calculation.”
The lawyer left the box when the journalist returned, bowing with
dignity.
“You are a greater hit than the piece,” said Etienne to Dinah.
This brief triumph brought greater happiness to the poor woman than she
had ever known in the whole of her provincial existence; still, as they
left the theatre she was very grave.
“What ails you, my Didine?” asked Lousteau.
“I am wondering how a woman succeeds in conquering the world?”
“There are two ways. One is by being Madame de Stael, the other is by
having two hundred thousand francs a year.”
“Society,” said she, “asserts its hold on us by appealing to our vanity,
our love of appearances.--Pooh! We will be philosophers!”
That evening was the last gleam of the delusive well-being in which
Madame de la Baudraye had lived since coming to Paris. Three days later
she observed a cloud on Lousteau’s brow as he walked round the little
garden-plot smoking a cigar. This woman, who had acquired from her
husband the habit and the pleasure of never owing anybody a sou, was
informed that the household was penniless, with two quarters’ rent
owing, and on the eve, in fact, of an execution.
This reality of Paris life pierced Dinah’s heart like a thorn; she
repented of having tempted Etienne into the extravagances of love. It is
so difficult to pass from pleasure to work, that happiness has wrecked
more poems than sorrows ever helped to flow in sparkling jets.
Dinah, happy in seeing Etienne taking his ease, smoking a cigar after
breakfast, his face beaming as he basked like a lizard in the sunshine,
could not summon up courage enough to make herself the bum-bailiff of a
magazine.
It struck her that through the worthy Migeon, Pamela’s father, she might
pawn the few jewels she possessed, on which her “uncle,” for she was
learning to talk the slang of the town, advanced her nine hundred
francs. She kept three hundred for her baby-clothes and the expenses
of her illness, and joyfully presented the sum due to Lousteau, who was
ploughing, furrow by furrow, or, if you will, line by line, through a
novel for a periodical.
“Dearest heart,” said she, “finish your novel without making any
sacrifice to necessity; polish the style, work up the subject.--I have
played the fine lady too long; I am going to be the housewife and attend
to business.”
For the last four months Etienne had been taking Dinah to the Cafe Riche
to dine every day, a corner being always kept for them. The countrywoman
was in dismay at being told that five hundred francs were owing for the
last fortnight.
“What! we have been drinking wine at six francs a bottle! A sole
_Normande_ costs five francs!--and twenty centimes for a roll?” she
exclaimed, as she looked through the bill Lousteau showed her.
“Well, it makes very little difference to us whether we are robbed at a
restaurant or by a cook,” said Lousteau.
“Henceforth, for the cost of your dinner, you shall live like a prince.”
Having induced the landlord to let her have a kitchen and two servants’
rooms, Madame de la Baudraye wrote a few lines to her mother, begging
her to send her some linen and a loan of a thousand francs. She received
two trunks full of linen, some plate, and two thousand francs, sent by
the hand of an honest and pious cook recommended her by her mother.
Ten days after the evening at the theatre when they had met, Monsieur
de Clagny came to call at four o’clock, after coming out of court, and
found Madame de la Baudraye making a little cap. The sight of this proud
and ambitious woman, whose mind was so accomplished, and who had queened
it so well at the Chateau d’Anzy, now condescending to household cares
and sewing for the coming infant, moved the poor lawyer, who had just
left the bench. And as he saw the pricks on one of the taper fingers he
had so often kissed, he understood that Madame de la Baudraye was not
merely playing at this maternal task.
In the course of this first interview the magistrate saw to the depths
of Dinah’s soul. This perspicacity in a man so much in love was a
superhuman effort. He saw that Didine meant to be the journalist’s
guardian spirit and lead him into a nobler road; she had seen that
the difficulties of his practical life were due to some moral defects.
Between two beings united by love--in one so genuine, and in the other
so well feigned--more than one confidence had been exchanged in the
course of four months. Notwithstanding the care with which Etienne
wrapped up his true self, a word now and then had not failed to
enlighten Dinah as to the previous life of a man whose talents were
so hampered by poverty, so perverted by bad examples, so thwarted by
obstacles beyond his courage to surmount. “He will be a greater man if
life is easy to him,” said she to herself. And she strove to make him
happy, to give him the sense of a sheltered home by dint of such economy
and method as are familiar to provincial folks. Thus Dinah became
a housekeeper, as she had become a poet, by the soaring of her soul
towards the heights.
“His happiness will be my absolution.”
These words, wrung from Madame de la Baudraye by her friend the lawyer,
accounted for the existing state of things. The publicity of his
triumph, flaunted by Etienne on the evening of the first performance,
had very plainly shown the lawyer what Lousteau’s purpose was. To
Etienne, Madame de la Baudraye was, to use his own phrase, “a fine
feather in his cap.” Far from preferring the joys of a shy and
mysterious passion, of hiding such exquisite happiness from the eyes of
the world, he found a vulgar satisfaction in displaying the first woman
of respectability who had ever honored him with her affection.
The Judge, however, was for some time deceived by the attentions which
any man would lavish on any woman in Madame de la Baudraye’s situation,
and Lousteau made them doubly charming by the ingratiating ways
characteristic of men whose manners are naturally attractive. There are,
in fact, men who have something of the monkey in them by nature, and to
whom the assumption of the most engaging forms of sentiment is so easy
that the actor is not detected; and Lousteau’s natural gifts had been
fully developed on the stage on which he had hitherto figured.
Between the months of April and July, when Dinah expected her
confinement, she discovered why it was that Lousteau had not triumphed
over poverty; he was idle and had no power of will. The brain, to be
sure, must obey its own laws; it recognizes neither the exigencies of
life nor the voice of honor; a man cannot write a great book because a
woman is dying, or to pay a discreditable debt, or to bring up a family;
at the same time, there is no great talent without a strong will.
These twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast edifice of
personal glory. A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a productive
condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons always ready
for battle. They conquer indolence, they deny themselves enervating
pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their
powers. This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier,
Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega,
Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle--in short, every man who
delighted, governed, or led his contemporaries.
A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his
talent. Though Talent has its germ in a cultivated gift, Will means
the incessant conquest of his instincts, of proclivities subdued and
mortified, and difficulties of every kind heroically defeated. The abuse
of smoking encouraged Lousteau’s indolence. Tobacco, which can lull
grief, inevitably numbs a man’s energy.
Then, while the cigar deteriorated him physically, criticism as a
profession morally stultified a man so easily tempted by pleasure.
Criticism is as fatal to the critic as seeing two sides to a question is
to a pleader. In these professions the judgment is undermined, the mind
loses its lucid rectitude. The writer lives by taking sides. Thus,
we may distinguish two kinds of criticism, as in painting we may
distinguish art from practical dexterity. Criticism, after the pattern
of most contemporary leader-writers, is the expression of judgments
formed at random in a more or less witty way, just as an advocate pleads
in court on the most contradictory briefs. The newspaper critic always
finds a subject to work up in the book he is discussing. Done after this
fashion, the business is well adapted to indolent brains, to men devoid
of the sublime faculty of imagination, or, possessed of it indeed, but
lacking courage to cultivate it. Every play, every book comes to their
pen as a subject, making no demand on their imagination, and of which
they simply write a report, seriously or in irony, according to the
mood of the moment. As to an opinion, whatever it may be, French wit can
always justify it, being admirably ready to defend either side of any
case. And conscience counts for so little, these _bravi_ have so little
value for their own words, that they will loudly praise in the greenroom
the work they tear to tatters in print.
Nay, men have been known to transfer their services from one paper to
another without being at the pains to consider that the opinions of the
new sheet must be diametrically antagonistic to those of the old. Madame
de la Baudraye could smile to see Lousteau with one article on the
Legitimist side and one on the side of the new dynasty, both on the same
occasion. She admired the maxim he preached:
“We are the attorneys of public opinion.”
The other kind of criticism is a science. It necessitates a thorough
comprehension of each work, a lucid insight into the tendencies of the
age, the adoption of a system, and faith in fixed principles--that is to
say, a scheme of jurisprudence, a summing-up, and a verdict. The critic
is then a magistrate of ideas, the censor of his time; he fulfils a
sacred function; while in the former case he is but an acrobat who turns
somersaults for a living so long as he had a leg to stand on. Between
Claude Vignon and Lousteau lay the gulf that divides mere dexterity from
art.
Dinah, whose mind was soon freed from rust, and whose intellect was by
no means narrow, had ere long taken literary measure of her idol. She
saw Lousteau working up to the last minute under the most discreditable
compulsion, and scamping his work, as painters say of a picture from
which sound technique is absent; but she would excuse him by saying, “He
is a poet!” so anxious was she to justify him in her own eyes. When she
thus guessed the secret of many a writer’s existence, she also guessed
that Lousteau’s pen could never be trusted to as a resource.
Then her love for him led her to take a step she would never had thought
of for her own sake. Through her mother she tried to negotiate with her
husband for an allowance, but without Etienne’s knowledge; for, as she
thought, it would be an offence to his delicate feelings, which must be
considered. A few days before the end of July, Dinah crumbled up in her
wrath the letter from her mother containing Monsieur de la Baudraye’s
ultimatum:
“Madame de la Baudraye cannot need an allowance in Paris when she can
live in perfect luxury at her Chateau of Anzy: she may return.”
Lousteau picked up this letter and read it.
“I will avenge you!” said he to Dinah in the ominous tone that delights
a woman when her antipathies are flattered.
Five days after this Bianchon and Duriau, the famous ladies’ doctor,
were engaged at Lousteau’s; for he, ever since little La Baudraye’s
reply, had been making a great display of his joy and importance over
the advent of the infant. Monsieur de Clagny and Madame Piedefer--sent
for in all haste were to be the godparents, for the cautious magistrate
feared lest Lousteau should commit some compromising blunder. Madame de
la Baudraye gave birth to a boy that might have filled a queen with envy
who hoped for an heir-presumptive.
Bianchon and Monsieur de Clagny went off to register the child at the
Mayor’s office as the son of Monsieur and Madame de la Baudraye, unknown
to Etienne, who, on his part, rushed off to a printer’s to have this
circular set up:
_“Madame la Baronne de la Baudraye is happily delivered of a son._
_“Monsieur Etienne Lousteau has the pleasure of informing you of
the fact._
_“The mother and child are doing well.”_
Lousteau had already sent out sixty of these announcements when Monsieur
de Clagny, on coming to make inquiries, happened to see the list of
persons at Sancerre to whom Lousteau proposed to send this amazing
notice, written below the names of the persons in Paris to whom it was
already gone. The lawyer confiscated the list and the remainder of the
circulars, showed them to Madame Piedefer, begging her on no account to
allow Lousteau to carry on this atrocious jest, and jumped into a
cab. The devoted friend then ordered from the same printer another
announcement in the following words:
_“Madame la Baronne de la Baudraye is happily delivered of a son._
_“Monsieur le Baron de la Baudraye has the honor of informing you
of the fact._
_“Mother and child are doing well.”_
After seeing the proofs destroyed, the form of type, everything that
could bear witness to the existence of the former document, Monsieur de
Clagny set to work to intercept those that had been sent; in many cases
he changed them at the porter’s lodge, he got back thirty into his
own hands, and at last, after three days of hard work, only one of the
original notes existed, that, namely sent to Nathan.
Five times had the lawyer called on the great man without finding
him. By the time Monsieur de Clagny was admitted, after requesting an
interview, the story of the announcement was known to all Paris. Some
persons regarded it as one of those waggish calumnies, a sort of stab to
which every reputation, even the most ephemeral, is exposed; others
said they had read the paper and returned it to some friend of the
La Baudraye family; a great many declaimed against the immorality of
journalists; in short, this last remaining specimen was regarded as a
curiosity. Florine, with whom Nathan was living, had shown it about,
stamped in the post as paid, and addressed in Etienne’s hand. So, as
soon as the judge spoke of the announcement, Nathan began to smile.
“Give up that monument of recklessness and folly?” cried he. “That
autograph is one of those weapons which an athlete in the circus cannot
afford to lay down. That note proves that Lousteau has no heart, no
taste, no dignity; that he knows nothing of the world nor of public
morality; that he insults himself when he can find no one else to
insult.--None but the son of a provincial citizen imported from Sancerre
to become a poet, but who is only the _bravo_ of some contemptible
magazine, could ever have sent out such a circular letter, as you must
allow, monsieur. This is a document indispensable to the archives of
the age.--To-day Lousteau flatters me, to-morrow he may ask for my
head.--Excuse me, I forgot you were a judge.
“I have gone through a passion for a lady, a great lady, as far superior
to Madame de la Baudraye as your fine feeling, monsieur, is superior to
Lousteau’s vulgar retaliation; but I would have died rather than utter
her name. A few months of her airs and graces cost me a hundred thousand
francs and my prospects for life; but I do not think the price too
high!--And I have never murmured!--If a woman betrays the secret of her
passion, it is the supreme offering of her love, but a man!--He must be
a Lousteau!
“No, I would not give up that paper for a thousand crowns.”
“Monsieur,” said the lawyer at last, after an eloquent battle lasting
half an hour, “I have called on fifteen or sixteen men of letters about
this affair, and can it be that you are the only one immovable by an
appeal of honor? It is not for Etienne Lousteau that I plead, but for
a woman and child, both equally ignorant of the damage done to their
fortune, their prospects, and their honor.--Who knows, monsieur, whether
you might not some day be compelled to plead for some favor of justice
for a friend, for some person whose honor was dearer to you than
your own.--It might be remembered against you that you had been
ruthless.--Can such a man as you are hesitate?” added Monsieur de
Clagny.
“I only wished you to understand the extent of the sacrifice,” replied
Nathan, giving up the letter, as he reflected on the judge’s influence
and accepted this implied bargain.
When the journalist’s stupid jest had been counteracted, Monsieur de
Clagny went to give him a rating in the presence of Madame Piedefer; but
he found Lousteau fuming with irritation.
“What I did monsieur, I did with a purpose!” replied Etienne. “Monsieur
de la Baudraye has sixty thousand francs a year and refuses to make his
wife an allowance; I wished to make him feel that the child is in my
power.”
“Yes, monsieur, I quite suspected it,” replied the lawyer. “For that
reason I readily agreed to be little Polydore’s godfather, and he is
registered as the son of the Baron and Baronne de la Baudraye; if you
have the feelings of a father, you ought to rejoice in knowing that the
child is heir to one of the finest entailed estates in France.”
“And pray, sir, is the mother to die of hunger?”
“Be quite easy,” said the lawyer bitterly, having dragged from Lousteau
the expression of feeling he had so long been expecting. “I will
undertake to transact the matter with Monsieur de la Baudraye.”
Monsieur de Clagny left the house with a chill at his heart.
Dinah, his idol, was loved for her money. Would she not, when too late,
have her eyes opened?
“Poor woman!” said the lawyer, as he walked away. And this justice we
will do him--for to whom should justice be done unless to a Judge?--he
loved Dinah too sincerely to regard her degradation as a means of
triumph one day; he was all pity and devotion; he really loved her.
The care and nursing of the infant, its cries, the quiet needed for the
mother during the first few days, and the ubiquity of Madame Piedefer,
were so entirely adverse to literary labors, that Lousteau moved up
to the three rooms taken on the first floor for the old bigot. The
journalist, obliged to go to the first performances without Dinah, and
living apart from her, found an indescribable charm in the use of his
liberty. More than once he submitted to be taken by the arm and dragged
off to some jollification; more than once he found himself at the house
of a friend’s mistress in the heart of bohemia. He again saw women
brilliantly young and splendidly dressed, in whom economy seemed treason
to their youth and power. Dinah, in spite of her striking beauty, after
nursing her baby for three months, could not stand comparison with these
perishable blossoms, so soon faded, but so showy as long as they live
rooted in opulence.
Home life had, nevertheless, a strong attraction for Etienne. In three
months the mother and daughter, with the help of the cook from
Sancerre and of little Pamela, had given the apartment a quite changed
appearance. The journalist found his breakfast and his dinner served
with a sort of luxury. Dinah, handsome and nicely dressed, was careful
to anticipate her dear Etienne’s wishes, and he felt himself the king
of his home, where everything, even the baby, was subject to his
selfishness. Dinah’s affection was to be seen in every trifle, Lousteau
could not possibly cease the entrancing deceptions of his unreal
passion.
Dinah, meanwhile, was aware of a source of ruin, both to her love and
to the household, in the kind of life into which Lousteau had allowed
himself to drift. At the end of ten months she weaned her baby,
installed her mother in the upstairs rooms, and restored the family
intimacy which indissolubly links a man and woman when the woman is
loving and clever. One of the most striking circumstances in Benjamin
Constant’s novel, one of the explanations of Ellenore’s desertion, is
the want of daily--or, if you will, of nightly--intercourse between
her and Adolphe. Each of the lovers has a separate home; they have both
submitted to the world and saved appearances. Ellenore, repeatedly
left to herself, is compelled to vast labors of affection to expel the
thoughts of release which captivate Adolphe when absent. The constant
exchange of glances and thoughts in domestic life gives a woman such
power that a man needs stronger reasons for desertion than she will ever
give him so long as she loves him.
This was an entirely new phase both to Etienne and to Dinah. Dinah
intended to be indispensable; she wanted to infuse fresh energy into
this man, whose weakness smiled upon her, for she thought it a security.
She found him subjects, sketched the treatment, and at a pinch, would
write whole chapters. She revived the vitality of this dying talent by
transfusing fresh blood into his veins; she supplied him with ideas and
opinions. In short, she produced two books which were a success. More
than once she saved Lousteau’s self-esteem by dictating, correcting, or
finishing his articles when he was in despair at his own lack of ideas.
The secret of this collaboration was strictly preserved; Madame Piedefer
knew nothing of it.
This mental galvanism was rewarded by improved pay, enabling them to
live comfortably till the end of 1838. Lousteau became used to seeing
Dinah do his work, and he paid her--as the French people say in
their vigorous lingo--in “monkey money,” nothing for her pains. This
expenditure in self-sacrifice becomes a treasure which generous souls
prize, and the more she gave the more she loved Lousteau; the time soon
came when Dinah felt that it would be too bitter a grief ever to give
him up.
But then another child was coming, and this year was a terrible trial.
In spite of the precautions of the two women, Etienne contracted debts;
he worked himself to death to pay them off while Dinah was laid up; and,
knowing him as she did, she thought him heroic. But after this effort,
appalled at having two women, two children, and two maids on his hands,
he was incapable of the struggle to maintain a family by his pen when he
had failed to maintain even himself. So he let things take their chance.
Then the ruthless speculator exaggerated the farce of love-making at
home to secure greater liberty abroad.
Dinah proudly endured the burden of life without support. The one idea,
“He loves me!” gave her superhuman strength. She worked as hard as
the most energetic spirits of our time. At the risk of her beauty
and health, Didine was to Lousteau what Mademoiselle Delachaux was to
Gardane in Diderot’s noble and true tale. But while sacrificing herself,
she committed the magnanimous blunder of sacrificing dress. She had her
gowns dyed, and wore nothing but black. She stank of black, as Malaga
said, making fun mercilessly of Lousteau.
By the end of 1839, Etienne, following the example of Louis XV., had,
by dint of gradual capitulations of conscience, come to the point of
establishing a distinction between his own money and the housekeeping
money, just as Louis XV. drew the line between his privy purse and the
public moneys. He deceived Dinah as to his earnings. On discovering
this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of
jealousy. She wanted to live two lives--the life of the world and the
life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-night
performance, and could detect in him many impulses of wounded vanity,
for her black attire rubbed off, as it were, on him, clouding his brow,
and sometimes leading him to be quite brutal. He was really the woman of
the two; and he had all a woman’s exacting perversity; he would reproach
Dinah for the dowdiness of her appearance, even while benefiting by the
sacrifice, which to a mistress is so cruel--exactly like a woman who,
after sending a man through a gutter to save her honor, tells him she
“cannot bear dirt!” when he comes out.
Dinah then found herself obliged to gather up the rather loose reins
of power by which a clever woman drives a man devoid of will. But in
so doing she could not fail to lose much of her moral lustre. Such
suspicions as she betrayed drag a woman into quarrels which lead to
disrespect, because she herself comes down from the high level on which
she had at first placed herself. Next she made some concession; Lousteau
was allowed to entertain several of his friends--Nathan, Bixiou,
Blondet, Finot, whose manners, language, and intercourse were depraving.
They tried to convince Madame de la Baudraye that her principles and
aversions were a survival of provincial prudishness; and they preached
the creed of woman’s superiority.
Before long, her jealousy put weapons into Lousteau’s hands. During
the carnival of 1840, she disguised herself to go to the balls at the
Opera-house, and to suppers where she met courtesans, in order to keep
an eye on all Etienne’s amusements.
On the day of Mid-Lent--or rather, at eight on the morning after--Dinah
came home from the ball in her fancy dress to go to bed. She had gone to
spy on Lousteau, who, believing her to be ill, had engaged himself for
that evening to Fanny Beaupre. The journalist, warned by a friend, had
behaved so as to deceive the poor woman, only too ready to be deceived.
As she stepped out of the hired cab, Dinah met Monsieur de la Baudraye,
to whom the porter pointed her out. The little old man took his wife by
the arm, saying, in an icy tone:
“So this is you, madame!”
This sudden advent of conjugal authority, before which she felt herself
so small, and, above all, these words, almost froze the heart of
the unhappy woman caught in the costume of a _debardeur_. To escape
Etienne’s eye the more effectually, she had chosen a dress he was not
likely to detect her in. She took advantage of the mask she still had
on to escape without replying, changed her dress, and went up to her
mother’s rooms, where she found her husband waiting for her. In spite of
her assumed dignity, she blushed in the old man’s presence.
“What do you want of me, monsieur?” she asked. “Are we not separated
forever?”
“Actually, yes,” said Monsieur de la Baudraye. “Legally, no.”
Madame Piedefer was telegraphing signals to her daughter, which Dinah
presently observed and understood.
“Nothing could have brought you here but your own interests,” she said,
in a bitter tone.
“_Our_ interests,” said the little man coldly, “for we have two
children.--Your Uncle Silas Piedefer is dead, at New York, where, after
having made and lost several fortunes in various parts of the world, he
has finally left some seven or eight hundred thousand francs--they say
twelve--but there is stock-in-trade to be sold. I am the chief in our
common interests, and act for you.”
“Oh!” cried Dinah, “in everything that relates to business, I trust no
one but Monsieur de Clagny. He knows the law, come to terms with him;
what he does, will be done right.”
“I have no occasion for Monsieur de Clagny,” answered Monsieur de la
Baudraye, “to take my children from you--”
“Your children!” exclaimed Dinah. “Your children, to whom you have not
sent a sou! _Your_ children!” She burst into a loud shout of laughter;
but Monsieur de la Baudraye’s unmoved coolness threw ice on the
explosion.
“Your mother has just brought them to show me,” he went on. “They are
charming boys. I do not intend to part from them. I shall take them to
our house at Anzy, if it were only to save them from seeing their mother
disguised like a--”
“Silence!” said Madame de la Baudraye imperatively. “What do you want of
me that brought you here?”
“A power of attorney to receive our Uncle Silas’ property.”
Dinah took a pen, wrote two lines to Monsieur de Clagny, and desired her
husband to call again in the afternoon.
At five o’clock, Monsieur de Clagny--who had been promoted to the
post of Attorney-General--enlightened Madame de la Baudraye as to her
position; still, he undertook to arrange everything by a bargain with
the old fellow, whose visit had been prompted by avarice alone. Monsieur
de la Baudraye, to whom his wife’s power of attorney was indispensable
to enable him to deal with the business as he wished, purchased it by
certain concessions. In the first place, he undertook to allow her
ten thousand francs a year so long as she found it convenient--so the
document was worded--to reside in Paris; the children, each on attaining
the age of six, were to be placed in Monsieur de la Baudraye’s keeping.
Finally, the lawyer extracted the payment of the allowance in advance.
Little La Baudraye, who came jauntily enough to say good-bye to his wife
and _his_ children, appeared in a white india-rubber overcoat. He was
so firm on his feet, and so exactly like the La Baudraye of 1836, that
Dinah despaired of ever burying the dreadful little dwarf. From the
garden, where he was smoking a cigar, the journalist could watch
Monsieur de la Baudraye for so long as it took the little reptile to
cross the forecourt, but that was enough for Lousteau; it was plain to
him that the little man had intended to wreck every hope of his dying
that his wife might have conceived.
This short scene made a considerable change in the writer’s secret
scheming. As he smoked a second cigar, he seriously reviewed the
position.
His life with Madame de la Baudraye had hitherto cost him quite as much
as it had cost her. To use the language of business, the two sides
of the account balanced, and they could, if necessary, cry quits.
Considering how small his income was, and how hardly he earned it,
Lousteau regarded himself, morally speaking, as the creditor. It was, no
doubt, a favorable moment for throwing the woman over. Tired at the end
of three years of playing a comedy which never can become a habit,
he was perpetually concealing his weariness; and this fellow, who was
accustomed to disguise none of his feelings, compelled himself to wear
a smile at home like that of a debtor in the presence of his creditor.
This compulsion was every day more intolerable.
Hitherto the immense advantages he foresaw in the future had given him
strength; but when he saw Monsieur de la Baudraye embark for the United
States, as briskly as if it were to go down to Rouen in a steamboat, he
ceased to believe in the future.
He went in from the garden to the pretty drawing-room, where Dinah had
just taken leave of her husband.
“Etienne,” said Madame de la Baudraye, “do you know what my lord and
master has proposed to me? In the event of my wishing to return to live
at Anzy during his absence, he has left his orders, and he hopes that my
mother’s good advice will weigh with me, and that I shall go back there
with my children.”
“It is very good advice,” replied Lousteau drily, knowing the passionate
disclaimer that Dinah expected, and indeed begged for with her eyes.
The tone, the words, the cold look, all hit the hapless woman so hard,
who lived only in her love, that two large tears trickled slowly down
her cheeks, while she did not speak a word, and Lousteau only saw them
when she took out her handkerchief to wipe away these two beads of
anguish.
“What is it, Didine?” he asked, touched to the heart by this excessive
sensibility.
“Just as I was priding myself on having won our freedom,” said she--“at
the cost of my fortune--by selling--what is most precious to a mother’s
heart--selling my children!--for he is to have them from the age of
six--and I cannot see them without going to Sancerre!--and that is
torture!--Ah, dear God! What have I done----?”
Lousteau knelt down by her and kissed her hands with a lavish display of
coaxing and petting.
“You do not understand me,” said he. “I blame myself, for I am not
worth such sacrifices, dear angel. I am, in a literary sense, a quite
second-rate man. If the day comes when I can no longer cut a figure at
the bottom of the newspaper, the editors will let me lie, like an old
shoe flung into the rubbish heap. Remember, we tight-rope dancers have
no retiring pension! The State would have too many clever men on its
hands if it started on such a career of beneficence. I am forty-two, and
I am as idle as a marmot. I feel it--I know it”--and he took her by the
hand--“my love can only be fatal to you.
“As you know, at two-and-twenty I lived on Florine; but what is
excusable in a youth, what then seems smart and charming, is a disgrace
to a man of forty. Hitherto we have shared the burden of existence, and
it has not been lovely for this year and half. Out of devotion to me you
wear nothing but black, and that does me no credit.”--Dinah gave one
of those magnanimous shrugs which are worth all the words ever
spoken.--“Yes,” Etienne went on, “I know you sacrifice everything to my
whims, even your beauty. And I, with a heart worn out in past struggles,
a soul full of dark presentiments as to the future, I cannot repay your
exquisite love with an equal affection. We were very happy--without a
cloud--for a long time.--Well, then, I cannot bear to see so sweet a
poem end badly. Am I wrong?”
Madame de la Baudraye loved Etienne so truly, that this prudence, worthy
of de Clagny, gratified her and stanched her tears.
“He loves me for myself alone!” thought she, looking at him with smiling
eyes.
After four years of intimacy, this woman’s love now combined every shade
of affection which our powers of analysis can discern, and which modern
society has created; one of the most remarkable men of our age, whose
death is a recent loss to the world of letters, Beyle (Stendhal), was
the first to delineate them to perfection.
Lousteau could produce in Dinah the acute agitation which may be
compared to magnetism, that upsets every power of the mind and body, and
overcomes every instinct of resistance in a woman. A look from him, or
his hand laid on hers, reduced her to implicit obedience. A kind word or
a smile wreathed the poor woman’s soul with flowers; a fond look elated,
a cold look depressed her. When she walked, taking his arm and keeping
step with him in the street or on the boulevard, she was so entirely
absorbed in him that she lost all sense of herself. Fascinated by this
fellow’s wit, magnetized by his airs, his vices were but trivial defects
in her eyes. She loved the puffs of cigar smoke that the wind brought
into her room from the garden; she went to inhale them, and made no
wry faces, hiding herself to enjoy them. She hated the publisher or
the newspaper editor who refused Lousteau money on the ground of the
enormous advances he had had already. She deluded herself so far as to
believe that her bohemian was writing a novel, for which the payment was
to come, instead of working off a debt long since incurred.
This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the
love of the heart and of the head--passion, caprice, and taste--to
accept Beyle’s definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in certain
moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and constantly
exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to read to the
bottom of Lousteau’s soul, sense was still too much for reason, and
suggested excuses.
“And what am I?” she replied. “A woman who has put herself outside the
pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman’s honor, why should you not
sacrifice to me some of a man’s honor? Do we not live outside the limits
of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan can accept
from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and only death can
part us--you know. My happiness is your honor, Etienne, as my constancy
and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you happy, all is at an
end. If I cause you a pang, condemn me.
“Our debts are paid; we have ten thousand francs a year, and between
us we can certainly make eight thousand francs a year--I will write
theatrical articles.--With fifteen hundred francs a month we shall be as
rich as Rothschild.--Be quite easy. I will have some lovely dresses,
and give you every day some gratified vanity, as on the first night of
Nathan’s play--”
“And what about your mother, who goes to Mass every day, and wants to
bring a priest to the house and make you give up this way of life?”
“Every one has a pet vice. You smoke, she preaches at me, poor woman!
But she takes great care of the children, she takes them out, she is
absolutely devoted, and idolizes me. Would you hinder her from crying?”
“What will be thought of me?”
“But we do not live for the world!” cried she, raising Etienne and
making him sit by her. “Besides, we shall be married some day--we have
the risks of a sea voyage----”
“I never thought of that,” said Lousteau simply; and he added to
himself, “Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back
again.”
From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights,
could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was
so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man
overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.
“Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from
Dinah! But no one ever can!” said he. “She loves me enough to throw
herself out of the window if I told her.”
The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against
Dinah’s jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was
shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing
Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so
rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original
ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her--“You
are betrayed,” and she only replied, “I know it.”
The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.
Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a
word.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
“I would lose my soul for you!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet.
The hapless man’s eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf,
his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he was
so blessed as to be accepted as his idol’s avenger, and this poor joy
filled him with rapture.
“Why are you so startled?” said she, making him sit down again. “That is
how I love him.”
The lawyer understood this argument _ad hominem_. And there were tears
in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!
Lousteau’s satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations,
had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains
of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where
those who love dwell and dream. These grains of sand, which grow to
be pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big
as rocks. Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood
Lousteau’s character.
“He is,” she said to her mother, “a poet, defenceless against disaster,
mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to
pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate. What
would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he has no
prospects. His talent would perish in privations.”
“Oh, my Dinah!” Madame Piedefer had exclaimed, “what a hell you live in!
What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?”
“I will be a mother to him!” she had replied.
There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision
till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor. We accept
compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to play
prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had been
torturing Dinah.
“To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to
preserve her power,” said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had
left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was becoming
a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a pleasure.
The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made
it no easier to play. When he wanted to go out after dinner he would
perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in
words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he had
bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate would
say, “Did I wound you?”
These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for
Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave
way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere
plaything in the man’s hands, and at last she confessed to herself:
“Well, then, I will be his plaything!” finding joy in it--the rapture of
damnation.
When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living in
solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated and
inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the joys,
which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the midst of
remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a _No_ persuaded to
be _Yes_. At every moment she seemed to come across the pool of bitter
water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish than the traveler
would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince’s table.
When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:
“Will he come home, or will he not?” she was not alive again till she
heard the familiar sound of Lousteau’s boots, and his well-known ring at
the bell.
She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would
hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that
agitated heart. How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of
_Le Dernier Jour d’un condamne_, saying to herself, “To-morrow we part.”
And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently artless
feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!
It was terrible. More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced
the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed. In fact, she
had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a
loving woman bears in her heart.
The romance of _Adolphe_ was her Bible, her study, for above all else
she would not be an Ellenore. She allowed herself no tears, she avoided
all the bitterness so cleverly described by the critic to whom we owe
an analysis of this striking work; whose comments indeed seemed to Dinah
almost superior to the book. And she read again and again this fine
essay by the only real critic who has written in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, an article now printed at the beginning of the new edition of
_Adolphe_.
“No,” she would say to herself, as she repeated the author’s fateful
words, “no, I will not ‘give my requests the form of an order,’ I will
not ‘fly to tears as a means of revenge,’ I will not ‘condemn the things
I once approved without reservation,’ I will not ‘dog his footsteps with
a prying eye’; if he plays truant, he shall not on his return ‘see a
scornful lip, whose kiss is an unanswerable command.’ No, ‘my silence
shall not be a reproach nor my first word a quarrel.’--I will not be
like every other woman!” she went on, laying on her table the little
yellow paper volume which had already attracted Lousteau’s remark,
“What! are you studying _Adolphe_?”--“If for one day only he should
recognize my merits and say, ‘That victim never uttered a cry!’--it will
be all I ask. And besides, the others only have him for an hour; I have
him for life!”
Thinking himself justified by his private tribunal in punishing his
wife, Monsieur de la Baudraye robbed her to achieve his cherished
enterprise of reclaiming three thousand acres of moorland, to which he
had devoted himself ever since 1836, living like a mouse. He manipulated
the property left by Monsieur Silas Piedefer so ingeniously, that he
contrived to reduce the proved value to eight hundred thousand francs,
while pocketing twelve hundred thousand. He did not announce his return;
but while his wife was enduring unspeakable woes, he was building farms,
digging trenches, and ploughing rough ground with a courage that ranked
him among the most remarkable agriculturists of the province.
The four hundred thousand francs he had filched from his wife were spent
in three years on this undertaking, and the estate of Anzy was expected
to return seventy-two thousand francs a year of net profits after the
taxes were paid. The eight hundred thousand he invested at four and a
half per cent in the funds, buying at eighty francs, at the time of the
financial crisis brought about by the Ministry of the First of March,
as it was called. By thus securing to his wife an income of forty-eight
thousand francs he considered himself no longer in her debt. Could he
not restore the odd twelve hundred thousand as soon as the four and a
half per cents had risen above a hundred? He was now the greatest man
in Sancerre, with the exception of one--the richest proprietor in
France--whose rival he considered himself. He saw himself with an income
of a hundred and forty thousand francs, of which ninety thousand formed
the revenue from the lands he had entailed. Having calculated that
besides this net income he paid ten thousand francs in taxes, three
thousand in working expenses, ten thousand to his wife, and twelve
hundred to his mother-in-law, he would say in the literary circles of
Sancerre:
“I am reputed miserly, and said to spend nothing; but my outlay amounts
to twenty-six thousand five hundred francs a year. And I have still to
pay for the education of my two children! I daresay it is not a pleasing
fact to the Milauds of Nevers, but the second house of La Baudraye may
yet have as noble a center as the first.--I shall most likely go to
Paris and petition the King of the French to grant me the title of
Count--Monsieur Roy is a Count--and my wife would be pleased to be
Madame la Comtesse.”
And this was said with such splendid coolness that no one would have
dared to laugh at the little man. Only Monsieur Boirouge, the Presiding
Judge, remarked:
“In your place, I should not be happy unless I had a daughter.”
“Well, I shall go to Paris before long----” said the Baron.
In the early part of 1842 Madame de la Baudraye, feeling that she was to
Lousteau no more than a reserve in the background, had again sacrificed
herself absolutely to secure his comfort; she had resumed her black
raiment, but now it was in sign of mourning, for her pleasure was
turning to remorse. She was too often put to shame not to feel the
weight of the chain, and her mother found her sunk in those moods of
meditation into which visions of the future cast unhappy souls in a sort
of torpor.
Madame Piedefer, by the advice of her spiritual director, was on the
watch for the moment of exhaustion, which the priest told her would
inevitably supervene, and then she pleaded in behalf of the children.
She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live
apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent
situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly
contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically--in disgust, in the
blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and
very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest
which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common sense, the law
of social proprieties, family interest--all the mixed elements which,
since the Restoration, have been dignified by the mane of Public Morals,
out of sheer aversion to the name of the Catholic religion--where this
is seconded by a sense of insults a little too offensive; when the
fatigue of constant self-sacrifice has almost reached the point of
exhaustion; and when, under these circumstances, a too cruel blow--one
of those mean acts which a man never lets a woman know of unless he
believes himself to be her assured master--puts the crowning touch
to her revulsion and disenchantment, the moment has come for the
intervention of the friend who undertakes the cure. Madame Piedefer had
no great difficulty now in removing the film from her daughter’s eyes.
She sent for Monsieur de Clagny, who completed the work by assuring
Madame de la Baudraye that if she would give up Etienne, her husband
would allow her to keep the children and to live in Paris, and would
restore her to the command of her own fortune.
“And what a life you are leading!” said he. “With care and judgment, and
the support of some pious and charitable persons, you may have a salon
and conquer a position. Paris is not Sancerre.”
Dinah left it to Monsieur de Clagny to negotiate a reconciliation with
the old man.
Monsieur de la Baudraye had sold his wine well, he had sold his wool,
he had felled his timber, and, without telling his wife, he had come
to Paris to invest two hundred thousand francs in the purchase of a
delightful residence in the Rue de l’Arcade, that was being sold in
liquidation of an aristocratic House that was in difficulties. He had
been a member of the Council for the Department since 1826, and now,
paying ten thousand francs in taxes, he was doubly qualified for a
peerage under the conditions of the new legislation.
Some time before the elections of 1842 he had put himself forward as
candidate unless he were meanwhile called to the Upper House as Peer
of France. At the same time, he asked for the title of Count, and for
promotion to the higher grade of the Legion of Honor. In the matter of
the elections, the dynastic nominations; now, in the event of Monsieur
de la Baudraye being won over to the Government, Sancerre would be
more than ever a rotten borough of royalism. Monsieur de Clagny,
whose talents and modesty were more and more highly appreciated by the
authorities, gave Monsieur de la Baudraye his support; he pointed
out that by raising this enterprising agriculturist to the peerage, a
guarantee would be offered to such important undertakings.
Monsieur de la Baudraye, then, a Count, a Peer of France, and Commander
of the Legion of Honor, was vain enough to wish to cut a figure with
a wife and handsomely appointed house.--“He wanted to enjoy life,” he
said.
He therefore addressed a letter to his wife, dictated by Monsieur de
Clagny, begging her to live under his roof and to furnish the house,
giving play to the taste of which the evidences, he said, had charmed
him at the Chateau d’Anzy. The newly made Count pointed out to his wife
that while the interests of their property forbade his leaving Sancerre,
the education of their boys required her presence in Paris. The
accommodating husband desired Monsieur de Clagny to place sixty thousand
francs at the disposal of Madame la Comtesse for the interior decoration
of their mansion, requesting that she would have a marble tablet
inserted over the gateway with the inscription: _Hotel de la Baudraye_.
He then accounted to his wife for the money derived from the estate of
Silas Piedefer, told her of the investment at four and a half per cent
of the eight hundred thousand francs he had brought from New York, and
allowed her that income for her expenses, including the education of the
children. As he would be compelled to stay in Paris during some part of
the session of the House of Peers, he requested his wife to reserve for
him a little suite of rooms in an _entresol_ over the kitchens.
“Bless me! why, he is growing young again--a gentleman!--a
magnifico!--What will he become next? It is quite alarming,” said Madame
de la Baudraye.
“He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty,” replied the
lawyer.
The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was
unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had
turned her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the
Chamarolles’ school.
“I am a countess,” said Dinah to herself. “I shall have the peer’s blue
hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary world in my
drawing-room--and I will look at her!”--And it was this little triumph
that told with all its weight at the moment of her rehabilitation, as
the world’s contempt had of old weighed on her happiness.
One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little
household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of
receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the
Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the
house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:
“I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the
pleasure of your company at the _Rocher de Cancale_.”
She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy manners
assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave of his
least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months past.
“Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night,” said
he--_une premiere_, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.
“Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye,” said Dinah
gravely. “I do not mean to understand such a word as _figged out_.”
“Didine a rebel!” said he, putting his arm round her waist.
“There is no such person as Didine; you have killed her, my dear,” she
replied, releasing herself. “I am taking you to the first performance of
_Madame la Comtesse de la Baudraye_.”
“It is true, then, that our insect is a peer of France?”
“The nomination is to be gazetted in this evening’s _Moniteur_, as I am
told by Monsieur de Clagny, who is promoted to the Court of Appeal.”
“Well, it is quite right,” said the journalist. “The entomology of
society ought to be represented in the Upper House.”
“My friend, we are parting for ever,” said Madame de la Baudraye,
trying to control the trembling of her voice. “I have dismissed the
two servants. When you go in, you will find the house in order, and no
debts. I shall always feel a mother’s affection for you, but in secret.
Let us part calmly, without a fuss, like decent people.
“Have you had a fault to find with my conduct during the past six
years?”
“None, but that you have spoiled my life, and wrecked my prospects,”
said he in a hard tone. “You have read Benjamin Constant’s book very
diligently; you have even studied the last critique on it; but you
have read with a woman’s eyes. Though you have one of those superior
intellects which would make a fortune of a poet, you have never dared to
take the man’s point of view.
“That book, my dear, is of both sexes.--We agreed that books were male
or female, dark or fair. In _Adolphe_ women see nothing but Ellenore;
young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and Adolphe;
political men see the whole of social existence. You did not think it
necessary to read the soul of Adolphe--any more than your critic indeed,
who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my dear, is that
he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never can be what he
might have been--an ambassador, a minister, a chamberlain, a poet--and
rich. He gives up six years of his energy at that stage of his life when
a man is ready to submit to the hardships of any apprenticeship--to
a petticoat, which he outstrips in the career of ingratitude, for the
woman who has thrown over her first lover is certain sooner or later to
desert the second. Adolphe is, in fact, a tow-haired German, who has
not spirit enough to be false to Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare
their Ellenores all ignominious quarreling and reproaches, who say to
themselves, ‘I will not talk of what I have sacrificed; I will not for
ever be showing the stump of my wrist to let that incarnate selfishness
I have made my queen,’ as Ramorny does in _The Fair Maid of Perth_. But
men like that, my dear, get cast aside.
“Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get
back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright, his
blighted position.--You, at this moment, are playing both parts. You
are suffering from the pangs of having lost your position, and think
yourself justified in throwing over a hapless lover whose misfortune
it has been that he fancied you so far superior as to understand that,
though a man’s heart ought to be true, his sex may be allowed to indulge
its caprices.”
“And do you suppose that I shall not make it my business to restore to
you all you have lost by me? Be quite easy,” said Madame de la Baudraye,
astounded by this attack. “Your Ellenore is not dying; and if God
gives her life, if you amend your ways, if you give up courtesans and
actresses, we will find you a better match than a Felicie Cardot.”
The two lovers were sullen. Lousteau affected dejection, he aimed at
appearing hard and cold; while Dinah, really distressed, listened to the
reproaches of her heart.
“Why,” said Lousteau presently, “why not end as we ought to have
begun--hide our love from all eyes, and see each other in secret?”
“Never!” cried the new-made Countess, with an icy look. “Do you not
comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures? Our feelings
seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on earth
they are limited by the strength of our physical being. There are some
feeble, mean natures which may receive an endless number of wounds and
live on; but there are some more highly-tempered souls which snap at
last under repeated blows. You have--”
“Oh! enough!” cried he. “No more copy! Your dissertation is unnecessary,
since you can justify yourself by merely saying--‘I have ceased to
love!’”
“What!” she exclaimed in bewilderment. “Is it I who have ceased to
love?”
“Certainly. You have calculated that I gave you more trouble, more
vexation than pleasure, and you desert your partner--”
“I desert!----” cried she, clasping her hands.
“Have not you yourself just said ‘Never’?”
“Well, then, yes! _Never_,” she repeated vehemently.
This final _Never_, spoken in the fear of falling once more under
Lousteau’s influence, was interpreted by him as the death-warrant of his
power, since Dinah remained insensible to his sarcastic scorn.
The journalist could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and
unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere,
the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could hope
for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of tormenting a
cockchafer he has killed it, Lousteau shed a tear.
Madame de la Baudraye rushed out of the private room where they had been
dining, paid the bill, and fled home to the Rue de l’Arcade, scolding
herself and thinking herself a brute.
Dinah, who had made her house a model of comfort, now metamorphosed
herself. This double metamorphosis cost thirty thousand francs more than
her husband had anticipated.
The fatal accident which in 1842 deprived the House of Orleans of the
heir-presumptive having necessitated a meeting of the Chambers in August
of that year, little La Baudraye came to present his titles to the Upper
House sooner than he had expected, and then saw what his wife had
done. He was so much delighted, that he paid the thirty thousand
francs without a word, just as he had formerly paid eight thousand for
decorating La Baudraye.
On his return from the Luxembourg, where he had been presented according
to custom by two of his peers--the Baron de Nucingen and the Marquis
de Montriveau--the new Count met the old Duc de Chaulieu, a former
creditor, walking along, umbrella in hand, while he himself sat perched
in a low chaise on which his coat-of-arms was resplendent, with the
motto, _Deo sic patet fides et hominibus_. This contrast filled his
heart with a large draught of the balm on which the middle class has
been getting drunk ever since 1840.
Madame de la Baudraye was shocked to see her husband improved and
looking better than on the day of his marriage. The little dwarf, full
of rapturous delight, at sixty-four triumphed in the life which had so
long been denied him; in the family, which his handsome cousin Milaud of
Nevers had declared he would never have; and in his wife--who had asked
Monsieur and Madame de Clagny to dinner to meet the cure of the parish
and his two sponsors to the Chamber of Peers. He petted the children
with fatuous delight.
The handsome display on the table met with his approval.
“These are the fleeces of the Berry sheep,” said he, showing Monsieur de
Nucingen the dish-covers surmounted by his newly-won coronet. “They are
of silver, you see!”
Though consumed by melancholy, which she concealed with the
determination of a really superior woman, Dinah was charming, witty, and
above all, young again in her court mourning.
“You might declare,” cried La Baudraye to Monsieur de Nucingen with a
wave of his hand to his wife, “that the Countess was not yet thirty.”
“Ah, ha! Matame is a voman of dirty!” replied the baron, who was
prone to time-honored remarks, which he took to be the small change of
conversation.
“In every sense of the words,” replied the Countess. “I am, in fact,
five-and-thirty, and mean to set up a little passion--”
“Oh, yes, my wife ruins me in curiosities and china images--”
“She started that mania at an early age,” said the Marquis de Montriveau
with a smile.
“Yes,” said La Baudraye, with a cold stare at the Marquis, whom he had
known at Bourges, “you know that in ‘25, ‘26, and ‘27, she picked a
million francs’ worth of treasures. Anzy is a perfect museum.”
“What a cool hand!” thought Monsieur de Clagny, as he saw this little
country miser quite on the level of his new position.
But misers have savings of all kinds ready for use.
On the day after the vote on the Regency had passed the Chambers, the
little Count went back to Sancerre for the vintage and resumed his old
habits.
In the course of that winter, the Comtesse de la Baudraye, with the
support of the Attorney-General to the Court of Appeals, tried to form a
little circle. Of course, she had an “at home” day, she made a selection
among men of mark, receiving none but those of serious purpose and ripe
years. She tried to amuse herself by going to the Opera, French and
Italian. Twice a week she appeared there with her mother and Madame de
Clagny, who was made by her husband to visit Dinah. Still, in spite of
her cleverness, her charming manners, her fashionable stylishness, she
was never really happy but with her children, on whom she lavished all
her disappointed affection.
Worthy Monsieur de Clagny tried to recruit women for the Countess’
circle, and he succeeded; but he was more successful among the advocates
of piety than the women of fashion.
“And they bore her!” said he to himself with horror, as he saw his idol
matured by grief, pale from remorse, and then, in all the splendor of
recovered beauty, restored by a life of luxury and care for her boys.
This devoted friend, encouraged in his efforts by her mother and by the
cure was full of expedient. Every Wednesday he introduced some celebrity
from Germany, England, Italy, or Prussia to his dear Countess; he
spoke of her as a quite exceptional woman to people to whom she hardly
addressed two words; but she listened to them with such deep attention
that they went away fully convinced of her superiority. In Paris, Dinah
conquered by silence, as at Sancerre she had conquered by loquacity. Now
and then, some smart saying about affairs, or sarcasm on an absurdity,
betrayed a woman accustomed to deal with ideas--the woman who, four
years since, had given new life to Lousteau’s articles.
This phase was to the poor lawyer’s hapless passion like the late season
known as the Indian summer after a sunless year. He affected to be older
than he was, to have the right to befriend Dinah without doing her
an injury, and kept himself at a distance as though he were young,
handsome, and compromising, like a man who has happiness to conceal. He
tried to keep his little attentions a profound secret, and the trifling
gifts which Dinah showed to every one; he endeavored to suggest a
dangerous meaning for his little services.
“He plays at passion,” said the Countess, laughing. She made fun of
Monsieur de Clagny to his face, and the lawyer said, “She notices me.”
“I impress that poor man so deeply,” said she to her mother, laughing,
“that if I would say Yes, I believe he would say No.”
One evening Monsieur de Clagny and his wife were taking his dear
Countess home from the theatre, and she was deeply pensive. They had
been to the first performance of Leon Gozlan’s first play, _La Main
Droite et la Main Gauche_ (The Right Hand and the Left).
“What are you thinking about?” asked the lawyer, alarmed at his idol’s
dejection.
This deep and persistent melancholy, though disguised by the Countess,
was a perilous malady for which Monsieur de Clagny knew no remedy; for
true love is often clumsy, especially when it is not reciprocated. True
love takes its expression from the character. Now, this good man loved
after the fashion of Alceste, when Madame de la Baudraye wanted to be
loved after the manner of Philinte. The meaner side of love can never
get on with the Misanthrope’s loyalty. Thus, Dinah had taken care never
to open her heart to this man. How could she confess to him that she
sometimes regretted the slough she had left?
She felt a void in this fashionable life; she had no one for whom to
dress, or whom to tell of her successes and triumphs. Sometimes the
memory of her wretchedness came to her, mingled with memories of
consuming joys. She would hate Lousteau for not taking any pains to
follow her; she would have liked to get tender or furious letters from
him.
Dinah made no reply, so Monsieur de Clagny repeated the question, taking
the Countess’ hand and pressing it between his own with devout respect.
“Will you have the right hand or the left?” said she, smiling.
“The left,” said he, “for I suppose you mean the truth or a fib.”
“Well, then, I saw him,” she said, speaking into the lawyer’s ear. “And
as I saw him looking so sad, so out of heart, I said to myself, Has he a
cigar? Has he any money?”
“If you wish for the truth, I can tell it you,” said the lawyer. “He is
living as a husband with Fanny Beaupre. You have forced me to tell you
this secret; I should never have told you, for you might have suspected
me perhaps of an ungenerous motive.”
Madame de la Baudraye grasped his hand.
“Your husband,” said she to her chaperon, “is one of the rarest
souls!--Ah! Why----”
She shrank into her corner, looking out of the window, but she did not
finish her sentence, of which the lawyer could guess the end: “Why had
not Lousteau a little of your husband’s generosity of heart?”
This information served, however, to cure Dinah of her melancholy; she
threw herself into the whirl of fashion. She wished for success, and she
achieved it; still, she did not make much way with women, and found it
difficult to get introductions.
In the month of March, Madame Piedefer’s friends the priests and
Monsieur de Clagny made a fine stroke by getting Madame de la Baudraye
appointed receiver of subscriptions for the great charitable work
founded by Madame de Carcado. Then she was commissioned to collect from
the Royal Family their donations for the benefit of the sufferers from
the earthquake at Guadeloupe. The Marquise d’Espard, to whom Monsieur
de Canalis read the list of ladies thus appointed, one evening at the
Opera, said, on hearing that of the Countess:
“I have lived a long time in the world, and I can remember nothing finer
than the manoeuvres undertaken for the rehabilitation of Madame de la
Baudraye.”
In the early spring, which, by some whim of our planets, smiled on Paris
in the first week of March in 1843, making the Champs-Elysees green and
leafy before Longchamp, Fanny Beaupre’s attache had seen Madame de la
Baudraye several times without being seen by her. More than once he
was stung to the heart by one of those promptings of jealousy and envy
familiar to those who are born and bred provincials, when he beheld
his former mistress comfortably ensconced in a handsome carriage, well
dressed, with dreamy eyes, and his two little boys, one at each window.
He accused himself with all the more virulence because he was waging
war with the sharpest poverty of all--poverty unconfessed. Like all
essentially light and frivolous natures, he cherished the singular point
of honor which consists in never derogating in the eyes of one’s own
little public, which makes men on the Bourse commit crimes to escape
expulsion from the temple of the goddess Per-cent, and has given some
criminals courage enough to perform acts of virtue.
Lousteau dined and breakfasted and smoked as if he were a rich man. Not
for an inheritance would he have bought any but the dearest cigars, for
himself as well as for the playwright or author with whom he went into
the shop. The journalist took his walks abroad in patent leather boots;
but he was constantly afraid of an execution on goods which, to use the
bailiff’s slang, had already received the last sacrament. Fanny Beaupre
had nothing left to pawn, and her salary was pledged to pay her
debts. After exhausting every possible advance of pay from newspapers,
magazines, and publishers, Etienne knew not of what ink he could churn
gold. Gambling-houses, so ruthlessly suppressed, could no longer, as of
old, cash I O U’s drawn over the green table by beggary in despair. In
short, the journalist was reduced to such extremity that he had just
borrowed a hundred francs of the poorest of his friends, Bixiou, from
whom he had never yet asked for a franc. What distressed Lousteau was
not the fact of owing five thousand francs, but seeing himself bereft
of his elegance, and of the furniture purchased at the cost of so many
privations, and added to by Madame de la Baudraye.
On April the 3rd, a yellow poster, torn down by the porter after
being displayed on the wall, announced the sale of a handsome suite of
furniture on the following Saturday, the day fixed for sales under
legal authority. Lousteau was taking a walk, smoking cigars, and seeking
ideas--for, in Paris, ideas are in the air, they smile on you from a
street corner, they splash up with a spurt of mud from under the wheels
of a cab! Thus loafing, he had been seeking ideas for articles, and
subjects for novels for a month past, and had found nothing but friends
who carried him off to dinner or to the play, and who intoxicated his
woes, telling him that champagne would inspire him.
“Beware,” said the virulent Bixiou one night, the man who would at the
same moment give a comrade a hundred francs and stab him to the heart
with a sarcasm; “if you go to sleep drunk every night, one day you will
wake up mad.”
On the day before, the Friday, the unhappy wretch, although he was
accustomed to poverty, felt like a man condemned to death. Of old he
would have said:
“Well, the furniture is very old! I will buy new.”
But he was incapable now of literary legerdemain. Publishers, undermined
by piracy, paid badly; the newspapers made close bargains with
hard-driven writers, as the Opera managers did with tenors that sang
flat.
He walked on, his eye on the crowd, though seeing nothing, a cigar
in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets, every feature of his face
twitching, and an affected smile on his lips. Then he saw Madame de la
Baudraye go by in a carriage; she was going to the Boulevard by the Rue
de la Chaussee d’Antin to drive in the Bois.
“There is nothing else left!” said he to himself, and he went home to
smarten himself up.
That evening, at seven, he arrived in a hackney cab at Madame de
la Baudraye’s door, and begged the porter to send a note up to the
Countess--a few lines, as follows:
“Would Madame la Comtesse do Monsieur Lousteau the favor of receiving
him for a moment, and at once?”
This note was sealed with a seal which as lovers they had both used.
Madame de la Baudraye had had the word _Parce que_ engraved on a
genuine Oriental carnelian--a potent word--a woman’s word--the word that
accounts for everything, even for the Creation.
The Countess had just finished dressing to go to the Opera; Friday was
her night in turn for her box. At the sight of this seal she turned
pale.
“I will come,” she said, tucking the note into her dress.
She was firm enough to conceal her agitation, and begged her mother to
see the children put to bed. She then sent for Lousteau, and received
him in a boudoir, next to the great drawing-room, with open doors. She
was going to a ball after the Opera, and was wearing a beautiful dress
of brocade in stripes alternately plain and flowered with pale blue. Her
gloves, trimmed with tassels, showed off her beautiful white arms. She
was shimmering with lace and all the dainty trifles required by fashion.
Her hair, dressed _a la Sevigne_, gave her a look of elegance; a
necklace of pearls lay on her bosom like bubbles on snow.
“What is the matter, monsieur?” said the Countess, putting out her
foot from below her skirt to rest it on a velvet cushion. “I thought, I
hoped, I was quite forgotten.”
“If I should reply _Never_, you would refuse to believe me,” said
Lousteau, who remained standing, or walked about the room, chewing the
flowers he plucked from the flower-stands full of plants that scented
the room.
For a moment silence reigned. Madame de la Baudraye, studying Lousteau,
saw that he was dressed as the most fastidious dandy might have been.
“You are the only person in the world who can help me, or hold out a
plank to me--for I am drowning, and have already swallowed more than one
mouthful----” said he, standing still in front of Dinah, and seeming to
yield to an overpowering impulse. “Since you see me here, it is because
my affairs are going to the devil.”
“That is enough,” said she; “I understand.”
There was another pause, during which Lousteau turned away, took out his
handkerchief, and seemed to wipe away a tear.
“How much do you want, Etienne,” she went on in motherly tones. “We are
at this moment old comrades; speak to me as you would to--to Bixiou.”
“To save my furniture from vanishing into thin air to-morrow morning at
the auction mart, eighteen hundred francs! To repay my friends, as much
again! Three quarters’ rent to the landlord--whom you know.--My ‘uncle’
wants five hundred francs--”
“And you!--to live on?”
“Oh! I have my pen----”
“It is heavier to lift than any one could believe who reads your
articles,” said she, with a subtle smile.--“I have not such a sum as
you need, but come to-morrow at eight; the bailiff will surely wait till
nine, especially if you bring him away to pay him.”
She must, she felt, dismiss Lousteau, who affected to be unable to look
at her; she herself felt such pity as might cut every social Gordian
knot.
“Thank you,” she added, rising and offering her hand to Lousteau. “Your
confidence has done me good! It is long indeed since my heart has known
such joy----”
Lousteau took her hand and pressed it tenderly to his heart.
“A drop of water in the desert--and sent by the hand of an angel! God
always does things handsomely!”
He spoke half in jest and half pathetically; but, believe me, as a piece
of acting it was as fine as Talma’s in his famous part of _Leicester_,
which was played throughout with touches of this kind. Dinah felt his
heart beating through his coat; it was throbbing with satisfaction, for
the journalist had had a narrow escape from the hulks of justice; but
it also beat with a very natural fire at seeing Dinah rejuvenescent and
restored by wealth.
Madame de la Baudraye, stealing an examining glance at Etienne, saw that
his expression was in harmony with the flowers of love, which, as she
thought, had blossomed again in that throbbing heart; she tried to look
once into the eyes of the man she had loved so well, but the seething
blood rushed through her veins and mounted to her brain. Their eyes met
with the same fiery glow as had encouraged Lousteau on the Quay by the
Loire to crumple Dinah’s muslin gown. The Bohemian put his arm round her
waist, she yielded, and their cheeks were touching.
“Here comes my mother, hide!” cried Dinah in alarm. And she hurried
forward to intercept Madame Piedefer.
“Mamma,” said she--this word was to the stern old lady a coaxing
expression which never failed of its effect--“will you do me a great
favor? Take the carriage and go yourself to my banker, Monsieur
Mongenod, with a note I will give you, and bring back six thousand
francs. Come, come--it is an act of charity; come into my room.”
And she dragged away her mother, who seemed very anxious to see who it
was that her daughter had been talking with in the boudoir.
Two days afterwards, Madame Piedefer held a conference with the cure of
the parish. After listening to the lamentations of the old mother, who
was in despair, the priest said very gravely:
“Any moral regeneration which is not based on a strong religious
sentiment, and carried out in the bosom of the Church, is built on
sand.--The many means of grace enjoined by the Catholic religion, small
as they are, and not understood, are so many dams necessary to restrain
the violence of evil promptings. Persuade your daughter to perform all
her religious duties, and we shall save her yet.”
Within ten days of this meeting the Hotel de la Baudraye was shut
up. The Countess, the children, and her mother, in short, the whole
household, including a tutor, had gone away to Sancerre, where Dinah
intended to spend the summer. She was everything that was nice to the
Count, people said.
And so the Muse of Sancerre had simply come back to family and married
life; but certain evil tongues declared that she had been compelled
to come back, for that the little peer’s wishes would no doubt be
fulfilled--he hoped for a little girl.
Gatien and Monsieur Gravier lavished every care, every servile attention
on the handsome Countess. Gatien, who during Madame de la Baudraye’s
long absence had been to Paris to learn the art of _lionnerie_ or
dandyism, was supposed to have a good chance of finding favor in the
eyes of the disenchanted “Superior Woman.” Others bet on the tutor;
Madame Piedefer urged the claims of religion.
In 1844, about the middle of June, as the Comte de la Baudraye was
taking a walk on the Mall at Sancerre with the two fine little boys,
he met Monsieur Milaud, the Public Prosecutor, who was at Sancerre on
business, and said to him:
“These are my children, cousin.”
“Ah, ha! so these are our children!” replied the lawyer, with a
mischievous twinkle.
PARIS, June 1843-August 1844.