When the petty shopkeeper who has come to Paris from the provinces
returns to the provinces from Paris he brings with him a few ideas; then
he loses them in the habits and ways of provincial life into which he
plunges, and his reforming notions leave him. From this there do result,
however, certain trifling, slow, successive changes by which Paris
scratches the surface of the provincial towns. This process marks the
transition of the ex-shopkeeper into the substantial bourgeois, but
it acts like an illness upon him. No retail shopkeeper can pass with
impunity from his perpetual chatter into dead silence, from his Parisian
activity to the stillness of provincial life. When these worthy persons
have laid by property they spend a portion of it on some desire
over which they have long brooded and into which they now turn their
remaining impulses, no longer restrained by force of will. Those who
have not been nursing a fixed idea either travel or rush into the
political interests of their municipality. Others take to hunting
or fishing and torment their farmers or tenants; others again become
usurers or stock-jobbers. As for the scheme of the Rogrons, brother and
sister, we know what that was; they had to satisfy an imperious desire
to handle the trowel and remodel their old house into a charming new
one.
This fixed idea produced upon the square of Lower Provins the front
of the building which Brigaut had been examining; also the interior
arrangements of the house and its handsome furniture. The contractor did
not drive a nail without consulting the owners, without requiring them
to sign the plans and specifications, without explaining to them at full
length and in every detail the nature of each article under discussion,
where it was manufactured, and what were its various prices. As to
the choicer things, each, they were told, had been used by Monsieur
Tiphaine, or Madame Julliard, or Monsieur the mayor, the notables of the
place. The idea of having things done as the rich bourgeois of Provins
did them carried the day for the contractor.
“Oh, if Monsieur Garceland has it in his house, put it in,” said
Mademoiselle Rogron. “It must be all right; his taste is good.”
“Sylvie, see, he wants us to have ovolos in the cornice of the
corridor.”
“Do you call those ovolos?”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“What an odd name! I never heard it before.”
“But you have seen the thing?”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand Latin?”
“No.”
“Well, it means eggs--from the Latin _ovum_.”
“What queer fellows you are, you architects!” cried Rogron. “It is
stepping on egg-shells to deal with you.”
“Shall we paint the corridor?” asked the builder.
“Good heavens, no!” cried Sylvie. “That would be five hundred francs
more!”
“Oh, but the salon and the staircase are too pretty not to have the
corridor decorated too,” said the man. “That little Madame Lesourd had
hers painted last year.”
“And now, her husband, as king’s attorney, is obliged to leave Provins.”
“Ah, he’ll be chief justice some of these days,” said the builder.
“How about Monsieur Tiphaine?”
“Monsieur Tiphaine? he’s got a pretty wife and is sure to get on. He’ll
go to Paris. Shall we paint the corridor?”
“Yes, yes,” said Rogron. “The Lesourds must be made to see that we are
as good as they.”
The first year after the Rogrons returned to Provins was entirely taken
up by such discussions, by the pleasure of watching the workmen, by the
surprise occasioned to the townspeople and the replies to questions of
all kinds which resulted therefrom, and also by the attempts made
by Sylvie and her brother to be socially intimate with the principal
families of Provins.
The Rogrons had never gone into any society; they had never left their
shop, knowing absolutely no one in Paris, and now they were athirst for
the pleasures of social life. On their arrival in Provins they found
their former masters in Paris (long since returned to the provinces),
Monsieur and Madame Julliard, lately of the “Chinese Worm,” their
children and grandchildren; the Guepin family, or rather the Guepin
clan, the youngest scion of which now kept the “Three Distaffs”; and
thirdly, Madame Guenee from whom they had purchased the “Family Sister,”
and whose three daughters were married and settled in Provins. These
three races, Julliard, Guepin, and Guenee, had spread through the town
like dog-grass through a lawn. The mayor, Monsieur Garceland, was the
son-in-law of Monsieur Guepin; the curate, Abbe Peroux, was own brother
to Madame Julliard; the judge, Monsieur Tiphaine junior, was brother to
Madame Guenee, who signed herself “_nee_ Tiphaine.”
The queen of the town was the beautiful Madame Tiphaine junior, only
daughter of Madame Roguin, the rich wife of a former notary in Paris,
whose name was never mentioned. Clever, delicate, and pretty, married in
the provinces to please her mother, who for special reasons did not want
her with her, and took her from a convent only a few days before the
wedding, Melanie Tiphaine considered herself an exile in Provins, where
she behaved to admiration. Handsomely dowered, she still had hopes. As
for Monsieur Tiphaine, his old father had made to his eldest daughter
Madame Guenee such advances on her inheritance that an estate worth
eight thousand francs a year, situated within fifteen miles of Provins,
was to come wholly to him. Consequently the Tiphaines would possess,
sooner or later, some forty thousand francs a year, and were not “badly
off,” as they say. The one overwhelming desire of the beautiful Madame
Tiphaine was to get Monsieur Tiphaine elected deputy. As deputy he would
become a judge in Paris; and she was firmly resolved to push him up into
the Royal courts. For these reasons she tickled all vanities and strove
to please all parties; and--what is far more difficult--she succeeded.
Twice a week she received the bourgeoisie of Provins at her house in the
Upper town. This intelligent young woman of twenty had not as yet made
a single blunder or misstep on the slippery path she had taken. She
gratified everybody’s self-love, and petted their hobbies; serious with
the serious, a girl with girls, instinctively a mother with mothers, gay
with young wives and disposed to help them, gracious to all,--in short,
a pearl, a treasure, the pride of Provins. She had never yet said a
word of her intentions and wishes, but all the electors of Provins were
awaiting the time when their dear Monsieur Tiphaine had reached the
required age for nomination. Every man in the place, certain of his
own talents, regarded the future deputy as his particular friend, his
protector. Of course, Monsieur Tiphaine would attain to honors; he would
be Keeper of the Seals, and then, what wouldn’t he do for Provins!
Such were the pleasant means by which Madame Tiphaine had come to rule
over the little town. Madame Guenee, Monsieur Tiphaine’s sister, after
having married her eldest daughter to Monsieur Lesourd, prosecuting
attorney, her second to Monsieur Martener, the doctor, and the third to
Monsieur Auffray, the notary, had herself married Monsieur Galardon, the
collector. Mother and daughters all considered Monsieur Tiphaine as the
richest and ablest man in the family. The prosecuting attorney had the
strongest interest in sending his uncle to Paris, expecting to step into
his shoes as judge of the local court of Provins. The four ladies formed
a sort of court round Madame Tiphaine, whose ideas and advice they
followed on all occasions. Monsieur Julliard, the eldest son of the old
merchant, who had married the only daughter of a rich farmer, set up
a sudden, secret, and disinterested passion for Madame Tiphaine, that
angel descended from the Parisian skies. The clever Melanie, too clever
to involve herself with Julliard, but quite capable of keeping him in
the condition of Amadis and making the most of his folly, advised him to
start a journal, intending herself to play the part of Egeria. For the
last two years, therefore, Julliard, possessed by his romantic passion,
had published the said newspaper, called the “Bee-hive,” which contained
articles literary, archaeological, and medical, written in the family.
The advertisements paid expenses. The subscriptions, two hundred in
all, made the profits. Every now and then melancholy verses, totally
incomprehensible in La Brie, appeared, addressed, “TO HER!!!” with three
exclamation marks. The clan Julliard was thus united to the other clans,
and the salon of Madame Tiphaine became, naturally, the first in the
town. The few aristocrats who lived in Provins were, of course, apart,
and formed a single salon in the Upper town, at the house of the old
Comtesse de Breautey.
During the first six months of their transplantation, the Rogrons,
favored by their former acquaintance with several of these people, were
received, first by Madame Julliard the elder, and by the former Madame
Guenee, now Madame Galardon (from whom they had bought their business),
and next, after a good deal of difficulty, by Madame Tiphaine. All
parties wished to study the Rogrons before admitting them. It was
difficult, of course, to keep out merchants of the rue Saint-Denis,
originally from Provins, who had returned to the town to spend their
fortunes. Still, the object of all society is to amalgamate persons
of equal wealth, education, manners, customs, accomplishments, and
character. Now the Guepins, Guenees, and Julliards had a better position
among the bourgeoisie than the Rogrons, whose father had been held in
contempt on account of his private life, and his conduct in the matter
of the Auffray property,--the facts of which were known to the notary
Auffray, Madame Galardon’s son-in-law.
In the social life of these people, to which Madame Tiphaine had given
a certain tone of elegance, all was homogeneous; the component parts
understood each other, knew each other’s characters, and behaved and
conversed in a manner that was agreeable to all. The Rogrons flattered
themselves that being received by Monsieur Garceland, the mayor, they
would soon be on good terms with all the best families in the town.
Sylvie applied herself to learn boston. Rogron, incapable of playing a
game, twirled his thumbs and had nothing to say except to discourse on
his new house. Words seemed to choke him; he would get up, try to speak,
become frightened, and sit down again, with comical distortion of
the lips. Sylvie naively betrayed her natural self at cards. Sharp,
irritable, whining when she lost, insolent when she won, nagging and
quarrelsome, she annoyed her partners as much as her adversaries,
and became the scourge of society. And yet, possessed by a silly,
unconcealed ambition, Rogron and his sister were bent on playing a
part in the society of a little town already in possession of a close
corporation of twelve allied families. Allowing that the restoration of
their house had cost them thirty thousand francs, the brother and sister
possessed between them at least ten thousand francs a year. This they
considered wealth, and with it they endeavored to impress society, which
immediately took the measure of their vulgarity, crass ignorance, and
foolish envy. On the evening when they were presented to the beautiful
Madame Tiphaine, who had already eyed them at Madame Garceland’s and at
Madame Julliard the elder’s, the queen of the town remarked to Julliard
junior, who stayed a few moments after the rest of the company to talk
with her and her husband:--
“You all seem to be taken with those Rogrons.”
“No, no,” said Amadis, “they bore my mother and annoy my wife. When
Mademoiselle Sylvie was apprenticed, thirty years ago, to my father,
none of them could endure her.”
“I have a great mind,” said Madame Tiphaine, putting her pretty foot on
the bar of the fender, “to make it understood that my salon is not an
inn.”
Julliard raised his eyes to the ceiling, as if to say, “Good heavens?
what wit, what intellect!”
“I wish my society to be select; and it certainly will not be if I admit
those Rogrons.”
“They have neither heart, nor mind, nor manners”; said Monsieur
Tiphaine. “If, after selling thread for twenty years, as my sister did
for example--”
“Your sister, my dear,” said his wife in a parenthesis, “cannot be out
of place in any salon.”
“--if,” he continued, “people are stupid enough not to throw off the
shop and polish their manners, if they don’t know any better than to
mistake the Counts of Champagne for the _accounts_ of a wine-shop, as
Rogron did this evening, they had better, in my opinion, stay at home.”
“They are simply impudent,” said Julliard. “To hear them talk you would
suppose there was no other handsome house in Provins but theirs. They
want to crush us; and after all, they have hardly enough to live on.”
“If it was only the brother,” said Madame Tiphaine, “one might put up
with him; he is not so aggressive. Give him a Chinese puzzle and he will
stay in a corner quietly enough; it would take him a whole winter to
find it out. But Mademoiselle Sylvie, with that voice like a hoarse
hyena and those lobster-claws of hands! Don’t repeat all this,
Julliard.”