score of times to open this chapter, for the Duchess’ debts weighed more
heavily upon his mind than his own; and a score of times his purpose
died away before the attitude of the divine creature beside him. He
could see her by the light of the carriage lamps; she was bewitching in
the love-languor which always seemed to be extorted by the violence of
passion from her madonna’s purity. The Duchess did not fall into the
mistake of talking of her virtue, of her angel’s estate, as provincial
women, her imitators, do. She was far too clever. She made him, for whom
she made such great sacrifices, think these things for himself. At the
end of six months she could make him feel that a harmless kiss on her
hand was a deadly sin; she contrived that every grace should be extorted
from her, and this with such consummate art, that it was impossible not
to feel that she was more an angel than ever when she yielded.
None but Parisian women are clever enough always to give a new charm to
the moon, to romanticize the stars, to roll in the same sack of charcoal
and emerge each time whiter than ever. This is the highest refinement
of intellectual and Parisian civilization. Women beyond the Rhine or the
English Channel believe nonsense of this sort when they utter it; while
your Parisienne makes her lover believe that she is an angel, the better
to add to his bliss by flattering his vanity on both sides--temporal and
spiritual. Certain persons, detractors of the Duchess, maintain that she
was the first dupe of her own white magic. A wicked slander. The Duchess
believed in nothing but herself.
By the end of the year 1823 the Kellers had supplied Victurnien with
two hundred thousand francs, and neither Chesnel nor Mlle. Armande knew
anything about it. He had had, besides, two thousand crowns from Chesnel
at one time and another, the better to hide the sources on which he was
drawing. He wrote lying letters to his poor father and aunt, who lived
on, happy and deceived, like most happy people under the sun. The
insidious current of life in Paris was bringing a dreadful catastrophe
upon the great and noble house; and only one person was in the secret of
it. This was du Croisier. He rubbed his hands gleefully as he went
past in the dark and looked in at the Antiquities. He had good hope of
attaining his ends; and his ends were not, as heretofore, the simple
ruin of the d’Esgrignons, but the dishonor of their house. He felt
instinctively at such times that his revenge was at hand; he scented
it in the wind! He had been sure of it indeed from the day when he
discovered that the young Count’s burden of debt was growing too heavy
for the boy to bear.
Du Croisier’s first step was to rid himself of his most hated enemy, the
venerable Chesnel. The good old man lived in the Rue du Bercail, in a
house with a steep-pitched roof. There was a little paved courtyard in
front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of
the upper story. Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged
borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls. The prim, gray-painted
street door, with its wicket opening and bell attached, announced quite
as plainly as the official scutcheon that “a notary lives here.”
It was half-past five o’clock in the afternoon, at which hour the
old man usually sat digesting his dinner. He had drawn his black
leather-covered armchair before the fire, and put on his armor, a
painted pasteboard contrivance shaped like a top boot, which protected
his stockinged legs from the heat of the fire; for it was one of the
good man’s habits to sit for a while after dinner with his feet on the
dogs and to stir up the glowing coals. He always ate too much; he was
fond of good living. Alas! if it had not been for that little failing,
would he not have been more perfect than it is permitted to mortal man
to be? Chesnel had finished his cup of coffee. His old housekeeper had
just taken away the tray which had been used for the purpose for the
last twenty years. He was waiting for his clerks to go before he himself
went out for his game at cards, and meanwhile he was thinking--no need
to ask of whom or what. A day seldom passed but he asked himself, “Where
is _he_? What is _he_ doing?” He thought that the Count was in Italy
with the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.
When every franc of a man’s fortune has come to him, not by inheritance,
but through his own earning and saving, it is one of his sweetest
pleasures to look back upon the pains that have gone to the making
of it, and then to plan out a future for his crowns. This it is to
conjugate the verb “to enjoy” in every tense. And the old lawyer, whose
affections were all bound up in a single attachment, was thinking that
all the carefully-chosen, well-tilled land which he had pinched and
scraped to buy would one day go to round the d’Esgrignon estates, and
the thought doubled his pleasure. His pride swelled as he sat at his
ease in the old armchair; and the building of glowing coals, which he
raised with the tongs, sometimes seemed to him to be the old noble
house built up again, thanks to his care. He pictured the young Count’s
prosperity, and told himself that he had done well to live for such an
aim. Chesnel was not lacking in intelligence; sheer goodness was not
the sole source of his great devotion; he had a pride of his own; he was
like the nobles who used to rebuild a pillar in a cathedral to inscribe
their name upon it; he meant his name to be remembered by the great
house which he had restored. Future generations of d’Esgrignons should
speak of old Chesnel. Just at this point his old housekeeper came in
with signs of alarm in her countenance.
“Is the house on fire, Brigitte?”
“Something of the sort,” said she. “Here is M. du Croisier wanting to
speak to you----”
“M. du Croisier,” repeated the old lawyer. A stab of cold misgiving
gave him so sharp a pang at the heart that he dropped the tongs. “M. du
Croisier here!” thought he, “our chief enemy!”
Du Croisier came in at that moment, like a cat that scents milk in a
dairy. He made a bow, seated himself quietly in the easy-chair which
the lawyer brought forward, and produced a bill for two hundred and
twenty-seven thousand francs, principal and interest, the total amount
of sums advanced to M. Victurnien in bills of exchange drawn upon du
Croisier, and duly honored by him. Of these, he now demanded
immediate payment, with a threat of proceeding to extremities with the
heir-presumptive of the house. Chesnel turned the unlucky letters over
one by one, and asked the enemy to keep the secret. This he engaged to
do if he were paid within forty-eight hours. He was pressed for money
he had obliged various manufacturers; and there followed a series of the
financial fictions by which neither notaries nor borrowers are deceived.
Chesnel’s eyes were dim; he could scarcely keep back the tears. There
was but one way of raising the money; he must mortgage his own lands up
to their full value. But when du Croisier learned the difficulty in
the way of repayment, he forgot that he was hard pressed; he no longer
wanted ready money, and suddenly came out with a proposal to buy the old
lawyer’s property. The sale was completed within two days. Poor Chesnel
could not bear the thought of the son of the house undergoing a five
years’ imprisonment for debt. So in a few days’ time nothing remained
to him but his practice, the sums that were due to him, and the house in
which he lived. Chesnel, stripped of all his lands, paced to and fro in
his private office, paneled with dark oak, his eyes fixed on the beveled
edges of the chestnut cross-beams of the ceiling, or on the trellised
vines in the garden outside. He was not thinking of his farms now, or of
Le Jard, his dear house in the country; not he.
“What will become of him? He ought to come back; they must marry him to
some rich heiress,” he said to himself; and his eyes were dim, his head
heavy.
How to approach Mlle. Armande, and in what words to break the news to
her, he did not know. The man who had just paid the debts of the family
quaked at the thought of confessing these things. He went from the Rue
du Bercail to the Hotel d’Esgrignon with pulses throbbing like some
girl’s heart when she leaves her father’s roof by stealth, not to return
again till she is a mother and her heart is broken.
Mlle. Armande had just received a charming letter, charming in its
hypocrisy. Her nephew was the happiest man under the sun. He had been to
the baths, he had been traveling in Italy with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, and
now sent his journal to his aunt. Every sentence was instinct with
love. There were enchanting descriptions of Venice, and fascinating
appreciations of the great works of Venetian art; there were most
wonderful pages full of the Duomo at Milan, and again of Florence; he
described the Apennines, and how they differed from the Alps, and how in
some village like Chiavari happiness lay all around you, ready made.
The poor aunt was under the spell. She saw the far-off country of love,
she saw, hovering above the land, the angel whose tenderness gave to
all that beauty a burning glow. She was drinking in the letter at long
draughts; how should it have been otherwise? The girl who had put love
from her was now a woman ripened by repressed and pent-up passion, by
all the longings continually and gladly offered up as a sacrifice on the
altar of the hearth. Mlle. Armande was not like the Duchess. She did not
look like an angel. She was rather like the little, straight, slim and
slender, ivory-tinted statues, which those wonderful sculptors, the
builders of cathedrals, placed here and there about the buildings. Wild
plants sometimes find a hold in the damp niches, and weave a crown of
beautiful bluebell flowers about the carved stone. At this moment the
blue buds were unfolding in the fair saint’s eyes. Mlle. Armande loved
the charming couple as if they stood apart from real life; she saw
nothing wrong in a married woman’s love for Victurnien; any other woman
she would have judged harshly; but in this case, not to have loved her
nephew would have been the unpardonable sin. Aunts, mothers, and sisters
have a code of their own for nephews and sons and brothers.
Mlle. Armande was in Venice; she saw the lines of fairy palaces that
stand on either side of the Grand Canal; she was sitting in Victurnien’s
gondola; he was telling her what happiness it had been to feel that the
Duchess’ beautiful hand lay in his own, to know that she loved him as
they floated together on the breast of the amorous Queen of Italian
seas. But even in that moment of bliss, such as angels know, some one
appeared in the garden walk. It was Chesnel! Alas! the sound of his
tread on the gravel might have been the sound of the sands running from
Death’s hour-glass to be trodden under his unshod feet. The sound,
the sight of a dreadful hopelessness in Chesnel’s face, gave her that
painful shock which follows a sudden recall of the senses when the soul
has sent them forth into the world of dreams.
“What is it?” she cried, as if some stab had pierced to her heart.
“All is lost!” said Chesnel. “M. le Comte will bring dishonor upon
the house if we do not set it in order.” He held out the bills, and
described the agony of the last few days in a few simple but vigorous
and touching words.
“He is deceiving us! The miserable boy!” cried Mlle. Armande, her heart
swelling as the blood surged back to it in heavy throbs.
“Let us both say mea culpa, mademoiselle,” the old lawyer said stoutly;
“we have always allowed him to have his own way; he needed stern
guidance; he could not have it from you with your inexperience of life;
nor from me, for he would not listen to me. He has had no mother.”
“Fate sometimes deals terribly with a noble house in decay,” said Mlle.
Armande, with tears in her eyes.
The Marquis came up as she spoke. He had been walking up and down
the garden while he read the letter sent by his son after his return.
Victurnien gave his itinerary from an aristocrat’s point of view;
telling how he had been welcomed by the greatest Italian families of
Genoa, Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples. This flattering
reception he owed to his name, he said, and partly, perhaps, to the
Duchess as well. In short, he had made his appearance magnificently, and
as befitted a d’Esgrignon.
“Have you been at your old tricks, Chesnel?” asked the Marquis.
Mlle. Armande made Chesnel an eager sign, dreadful to see. They
understood each other. The poor father, the flower of feudal honor,
must die with all his illusions. A compact of silence and devotion was
ratified between the two noble hearts by a simple inclination of the
head.
“Ah! Chesnel, it was not exactly in this way that the d’Esgrignons went
into Italy at the end of the fourteenth century, when Marshal Trivulzio,
in the service of the King of France, served under a d’Esgrignon, who
had a Bayard too under his orders. Other times, other pleasures. And,
for that matter, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse is at least the equal of a
Marchesa di Spinola.”
And, on the strength of his genealogical tree, the old man swung himself
off with a coxcomb’s air, as if he himself had once made a conquest of
the Marchesa di Spinola, and still possessed the Duchess of to-day.
The two companions in unhappiness were left together on the garden
bench, with the same thought for a bond of union. They sat for a long
time, saying little save vague, unmeaning words, watching the father
walk away in his happiness, gesticulating as if he were talking to
himself.
“What will become of him now?” Mlle. Armande asked after a while.
“Du Croisier has sent instructions to the MM. Keller; he is not to be
allowed to draw any more without authorization.”
“And there are debts,” continued Mlle. Armande.
“I am afraid so.”
“If he is left without resources, what will he do?”
“I dare not answer that question to myself.”
“But he must be drawn out of that life, he must come back to us, or he
will have nothing left.”
“And nothing else left to him,” Chesnel said gloomily. But Mlle. Armande
as yet did not and could not understand the full force of those words.
“Is there any hope of getting him away from that woman, that Duchess?
Perhaps she leads him on.”
“He would not stick at a crime to be with her,” said Chesnel, trying to
pave the way to an intolerable thought by others less intolerable.
“Crime,” repeated Mlle. Armande. “Oh, Chesnel, no one but you would
think of such a thing!” she added, with a withering look; before such
a look from a woman’s eyes no mortal can stand. “There is but one crime
that a noble can commit--the crime of high treason; and when he is
beheaded, the block is covered with a black cloth, as it is for kings.”
“The times have changed very much,” said Chesnel, shaking his head.
Victurnien had thinned his last thin, white hairs. “Our Martyr-King did
not die like the English King Charles.”
That thought soothed Mlle. Armande’s splendid indignation; a shudder ran
through her; but still she did not realize what Chesnel meant.
“To-morrow we will decide what we must do,” she said; “it needs thought.
At the worst, we have our lands.”
“Yes,” said Chesnel. “You and M. le Marquis own the estate conjointly;
but the larger part of it is yours. You can raise money upon it without
saying a word to him.”
The players at whist, reversis, boston, and backgammon noticed that
evening that Mlle. Armande’s features, usually so serene and pure,
showed signs of agitation.
“That poor heroic child!” said the old Marquise de Casteran, “she must
be suffering still. A woman never knows what her sacrifices to her
family may cost her.”
Next day it was arranged with Chesnel that Mlle. Armande should go to
Paris to snatch her nephew from perdition. If any one could carry off
Victurnien, was it not the woman whose motherly heart yearned over him?
Mlle. Armande made up her mind that she would go to the Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse and tell her all. Still, some sort of pretext was necessary
to explain the journey to the Marquis and the whole town. At some cost
to her maidenly delicacy, Mlle. Armande allowed it to be thought that
she was suffering from a complaint which called for a consultation
of skilled and celebrated physicians. Goodness knows whether the town
talked of this or no! But Mlle. Armande saw that something far more than
her own reputation was at stake. She set out. Chesnel brought her his
last bag of louis; she took it, without paying any attention to it, as
she took her white capuchine and thread mittens.
“Generous girl! What grace!” he said, as he put her into the carriage
with her maid, a woman who looked like a gray sister.
Du Croisier had thought out his revenge, as provincials think out
everything. For studying out a question in all its bearings, there are
no folk in this world like savages, peasants, and provincials; and
this is how, when they proceed from thought to action, you find every
contingency provided for from beginning to end. Diplomatists are
children compared with these classes of mammals; they have time before
them, an element which is lacking to those people who are obliged to
think about a great many things, to superintend the progress of all
kinds of schemes, to look forward for all sorts of contingencies in
the wider interests of human affairs. Had de Croisier sounded poor
Victurnien’s nature so well, that he foresaw how easily the young Count
would lend himself to his schemes of revenge? Or was he merely profiting
by an opportunity for which he had been on the watch for years? One
circumstance there was, to be sure, in his manner of preparing his
stroke, which shows a certain skill. Who was it that gave du Croisier
warning of the moment? Was it the Kellers? Or could it have been
President du Ronceret’s son, then finishing his law studies in Paris?
Du Croisier wrote to Victurnien, telling him that the Kellers had been
instructed to advance no more money; and that letter was timed to arrive
just as the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was in the utmost perplexity, and
the Comte d’Esgrignon consumed by the sense of poverty as dreadful as
it was cunningly hidden. The wretched young man was exerting all his
ingenuity to seem as if he were wealthy!
Now in the letter which informed the victim that in future the Kellers
would make no further advances without security, there was a tolerably
wide space left between the forms of an exaggerated respect and the
signature. It was quite easy to tear off the best part of the letter
and convert it into a bill of exchange for any amount. The diabolical
missive had been enclosed in an envelope, so that the other side of the
sheet was blank. When it arrived, Victurnien was writhing in the lowest
depths of despair. After two years of the most prosperous, sensual,
thoughtless, and luxurious life, he found himself face to face with the
most inexorable poverty; it was an absolute impossibility to procure
money. There had been some throes of crisis before the journey came to
an end. With the Duchess’ help he had managed to extort various sums
from bankers; but it had been with the greatest difficulty, and,
moreover, those very amounts were about to start up again before him as
overdue bills of exchange in all their rigor, with a stern summons to
pay from the Bank of France and the commercial court. All through the
enjoyments of those last weeks the unhappy boy had felt the point of the
Commander’s sword; at every supper-party he heard, like Don Juan,
the heavy tread of the statue outside upon the stairs. He felt an
unaccountable creeping of the flesh, a warning that the sirocco of debt
is nigh at hand. He reckoned on chance. For five years he had never
turned up a blank in the lottery, his purse had always been replenished.
After Chesnel had come du Croisier (he told himself), after du Croisier
surely another gold mine would pour out its wealth. And besides, he
was winning great sums at play; his luck at play had saved him several
unpleasant steps already; and often a wild hope sent him to the Salon
des Etrangers only to lose his winnings afterwards at whist at the club.
His life for the past two months had been like the immortal finale of
Mozart’s Don Giovanni; and of a truth, if a young man has come to such
a plight as Victurnien’s, that finale is enough to make him shudder.
Can anything better prove the enormous power of music than that sublime
rendering of the disorder and confusion arising out of a life wholly
give up to sensual indulgence? that fearful picture of a deliberate
effort to shut out the thought of debts and duels, deceit and evil
luck? In that music Mozart disputes the palm with Moliere. The terrific
finale, with its glow, its power, its despair and laughter, its grisly
spectres and elfish women, centres about the prodigal’s last effort made
in the after-supper heat of wine, the frantic struggle which ends the
drama. Victurnien was living through this infernal poem, and alone.
He saw visions of himself--a friendless, solitary outcast, reading the
words carved on the stone, the last words on the last page of the book
that had held him spellbound--THE END!
Yes; for him all would be at an end, and that soon. Already he saw the
cold, ironical eyes which his associates would turn upon him, and their
amusement over his downfall. Some of them he knew were playing high on
that gambling-table kept open all day long at the Bourse, or in private
houses at the clubs, and anywhere and everywhere in Paris; but not one
of these men could spare a banknote to save an intimate. There was no
help for it--Chesnel must be ruined. He had devoured Chesnel’s living.
He sat with the Duchess in their box at the Italiens, the whole house
envying them their happiness, and while he smiled at her, all the Furies
were tearing at his heart. Indeed, to give some idea of the depths of
doubt, despair, and incredulity in which the boy was groveling; he who
so clung to life--the life which the angel had made so fair--who so
loved it, that he would have stooped to baseness merely to live; he, the
pleasure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d’Esgrignon, had even taken
out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide. He who would
never have brooked the appearance of an insult was abusing himself in
language which no man is likely to hear except from himself.
He left du Croisier’s letter lying open on the bed. Josephin had brought
it in at nine o’clock. Victurnien’s furniture had been seized, but
he slept none the less. After he came back from the Opera, he and the
Duchess had gone to a voluptuous retreat, where they often spent a few
hours together after the most brilliant court balls and evening parties
and gaieties. Appearances were very cleverly saved. Their love-nest
was a garret like any other to all appearance; Mme. de Maufrigneuse was
obliged to bow her head with its court feathers or wreath of flowers to
enter in at the door; but within all the peris of the East had made the
chamber fair. And now that the Count was on the brink of ruin, he had
longed to bid farewell to the dainty nest, which he had built to realize
a day-dream worthy of his angel. Presently adversity would break the
enchanted eggs; there would be no brood of white doves, no brilliant
tropical birds, no more of the thousand bright-winged fancies which
hover above our heads even to the last days of our lives. Alas! alas! in
three days he must be gone; his bills had fallen into the hands of the
money-lenders, the law proceedings had reached the last stage.
An evil thought crossed his brain. He would fly with the Duchess; they
would live in some undiscovered nook in the wilds of North or South
America; but--he would fly with a fortune, and leave his creditors to
confront their bills. To carry out the plan, he had only to cut off the
lower portion of that letter with du Croisier’s signature, and to fill
in the figures to turn it into a bill, and present it to the Kellers.
There was a dreadful struggle with temptation; tears shed, but the honor
of the family triumphed, subject to one condition. Victurnien wanted to
be sure of his beautiful Diane; he would do nothing unless she should
consent to their flight. So he went to the Duchess in the Rue Faubourg
Saint-Honore, and found her in coquettish morning dress, which cost as
much in thought as in money, a fit dress in which to begin to play the
part of Angel at eleven o’clock in the morning.