The old woman said nothing: she was comparing her own life with her
servant's.
* * * * *
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was born in 1782. She first saw the light in
a mansion on Rue Royale and Mesdames de France were her sponsors in
baptism. Her father was a close friend of the Comte d'Artois, in whose
household he held an important post. He joined in all his
hunting-parties, and was one of the few familiar spirits, in whose
presence, at the mass preceding the hunt, he who was one day to be King
Charles X. used to hurry the officiating priest by saying in an
undertone: "Psit! psit! cure, swallow your _Good Lord_ quickly!"
Monsieur de Varandeuil had made one of those marriages which were
customary enough in his day: he had espoused a sort of actress, a
singer, who, although she had no great talent, had made a success at the
_Concert Spirituel_, beside Madame Todi, Madame Ponteuil and Madame
Saint-Huberty. The little girl born of this marriage in 1782 was sickly
and delicate, ugly of feature, with a nose even then large enough to be
absurd, her father's nose in a face as thin as a man's wrist. She had
nothing of what her parents' vanity would have liked her to have. After
making a fiasco on the piano at the age of five, at a concert given by
her mother in her salon, she was relegated to the society of the
servants. Except for a moment in the morning, she never went near her
mother, who always made her kiss her under the chin, so that she might
not disturb her rouge. When the Revolution arrived, Monsieur de
Varandeuil, thanks to the Comte d'Artois' patronage, was disburser of
pensions. Madame de Varandeuil was traveling in Italy, whither she had
ordered her physician to send her on the pretext of ill health, leaving
her daughter and an infant son in her husband's charge. The absorbing
anxiety of the times, the tempests threatening wealth and the families
that handled wealth--Monsieur de Varandeuil's brother was a
Farmer-General--left that very selfish and unloving father but little
leisure to attend to the wants of his children. Thereupon, he began to
be somewhat embarrassed pecuniarily. He left Rue Royale and took up his
abode at the Hotel du Petit-Charolais, belonging to his mother, who
allowed him to install himself there. Events moved rapidly; one evening,
in the early days of the guillotine, as he was walking along Rue
Saint-Antoine, he heard a hawker in front of him, crying the journal:
_Aux Voleurs! Aux Voleurs!_ According to the usual custom of those
days, he gave a list of the articles contained in the number he had for
sale: Monsieur de Varandeuil heard his own name mingled with oaths and
obscenity. He bought the paper and read therein a revolutionary
denunciation of himself.
Some time after, his brother was arrested and detained at Hotel Talaru
with the other Farmers-General. His mother, in a paroxysm of terror, had
foolishly sold the Hotel du Petit-Charolais, where he was living, for
the value of the mirrors: she was paid in _assignats_, and died of
despair over the constant depreciation of the paper. Luckily Monsieur de
Varandeuil obtained from the purchasers, who could find no tenants,
leave to occupy the rooms formerly used by the stableboys. He took
refuge there, among the outbuildings of the mansion, stripped himself of
his name and posted at the door, as he was ordered to do, his family
name of Roulot, under which he buried the _De Varandeuil_ and the former
courtier of the Comte d'Artois. He lived there alone, buried, forgotten,
hiding his head, never going out, cowering in his hole, without
servants, waited upon by his daughter, to whom he left everything. The
Terror was to them a period of shuddering suspense, the breathless
excitement of impending death. Every evening, the little girl went and
listened at a grated window to the day's crop of condemnations, the
_List of Prize Winners in the Lottery of Saint Guillotine_. She answered
every knock at the door, thinking that they had come to take her father
to the Place de la Revolution, whither her uncle had already been taken.
The moment came when money, the money that was so scarce, no longer
procured bread. It was necessary to go and get it, almost by force, at
the doors of the bakeries; it was necessary to earn it by standing for
hours in the cold, biting night air, in the crushing pressure of crowds
of people; to stand in line from three o'clock in the morning. The
father did not care to venture into that mass of humanity. He was afraid
of being recognized, of compromising himself by one of those outbursts
to which his impetuous nature would have given vent, no matter where he
might be. Then, too, he recoiled from the fatigue and severity of the
task. The little boy was still too small; he would have been crushed; so
the duty of obtaining bread for three mouths each day fell to the
daughter. She obtained it. With her little thin body, fairly lost in her
father's knitted jacket, a cotton cap pulled down over her eyes, her
limbs all huddled together to retain a little warmth, she would wait,
shivering, her eyes aching with cold, amid the pushing and buffeting,
until the baker's wife on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois placed in her hands a
loaf which her little fingers, stiff with cold, could hardly hold. At
last, this poor little creature, who returned day after day, with her
pinched face and her emaciated, trembling body, moved the baker's wife
to pity. With the kindness of heart of a woman of the people, she would
send the coveted loaf to the little one by her boy as soon as she
appeared in the long line. But one day, just as she put out her hand to
take it, a woman, whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and
preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe which kept her
in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil bore the marks of the
blow all her life.
During that month, the whole family would have died of starvation, had
it not been for a supply of rice, which one of their acquaintances, the
Comtesse d'Auteuil, had had the forethought to lay aside, and which she
consented to share with the father and the two children.
Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary Tribunal by
burying himself in obscurity. He escaped it also by reason of the fact
that the accounts of his administration of his office were still
unsettled, as he had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of
the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept suspicion at bay
by his personal animosity toward some great personages at court, and by
the hatred of the queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had
conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of that wretched woman, he
used violent, bitter, insulting words, uttered in such a passionate,
sincere tone that they almost made him appear as an enemy of the royal
family; so that those to whom he was simply Citizen Roulot looked upon
him as a good patriot, and those who knew his former name almost excused
him for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend of a prince
of the blood, and a place holder.
The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic suppers, those repasts
of a whole street in the street; Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her
confused, terrified reminiscences of those days, could still see the
tables on Rue Pavee, with their legs in the streams of the blood of
September flowing from La Force! It was at one of these suppers that
Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived a scheme that completely assured his
immunity. He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted patriots
both, one of whom was on intimate terms with Chaumette, that he was in
great embarrassment because his daughter had been privately baptized
only, so that she had no civil status, and said that he would be very
happy if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of the
municipality and honor her with a name selected by him from the
Republican calendar of Greece or Rome. Chaumette at once arranged a
meeting with this father, _who had reached so high a level_, as they
said in those days. During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was
taken into a closet where she found two women who were instructed to
satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she showed them her breast. They
then escorted her to the great Salle des Declarations, and there, after
a metaphorical allocution, Chaumette baptized her _Sempronie_; a name
which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil and
which she never abandoned.
Somewhat protected and reassured by that episode, the family passed
through the terrible days preceding the fall of Robespierre. At last
came the ninth Thermidor and deliverance. But poverty was none the less
a pressing fact in the Varandeuil household. They had not lived through
the bitter days of the Revolution, they were not to live through the
wretched days of the Directory without unhoped-for succor, money sent by
Providence by the hand of Folly. The father and the two children could
hardly have existed without the income from four shares in the
_Vaudeville_, an investment which Monsieur de Varandeuil was happily
inspired to make in 1791, and which proved to be the best of all
possible investments in those years of death, when people felt the need
of forgetting death every evening--in those days of supreme agony, when
everyone wished to laugh his last laugh at the latest song. Soon these
shares, added to the amount of some outstanding claims that were paid,
provided the family with something more than bread. They thereupon left
the eaves of the Hotel du Petit-Charolais and took a small suite in the
Marais, on Rue du Chaume.
No change took place, however, in the habits of the household. The
daughter continued to wait upon her father and brother. Monsieur de
Varandeuil had gradually become accustomed to see in her only the woman
indicated by her costume and by the work that she did. The father's eyes
did not care to recognize a daughter in that servant's garb and in her
performance of menial occupations. She was no longer a person with his
blood in her veins or who had the honor to belong to him: she was a
servant; and his selfishness confirmed him so fully in that idea and in
his harsh treatment of her, he found that filial, affectionate,
respectful service,--which cost nothing at all, by the way,--so
convenient, that it cost him a bitter pang to give it up later, when a
little more money mended the family fortunes: battles had to be fought
to induce him to take a maid to fill his child's place and to relieve
the girl from the most humiliating domestic labor.
They were without information concerning Madame de Varandeuil, who had
refused to join her husband at Paris during the early years of the
Revolution; at last they learned that she had married again in Germany,
producing, as a certificate of her husband's death, the death
certificate of his guillotined brother, the baptismal name having been
changed. The girl grew up, therefore, abandoned, without affection, with
no mother except a woman dead to her family, whom her father taught her
to despise. Her childhood was passed in constant anxiety, in the
privations that wear life away, in the fatigue resulting from labor that
exhausted the strength of a sickly child, in an expectation of death
that became, at last, an impatient longing to die: there had been hours
when that girl of thirteen was tempted to do as many women did in those
days--to open the door and rush into the street, crying: _Vive le roi!_
in order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation of her childhood
with less tragic motives of weariness. She had to submit to the ill
humor, the exactions, the bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her
father, which had been hitherto somewhat curbed and restrained by the
great tempest of the time. She was still doomed to undergo the fatigues
and humiliations of a servant. She remained alone with her father, kept
down and humbled, shut out from his arms and his kisses, her heart heavy
with grief because she longed to love and had nothing to love. She was
beginning to suffer from the cold void that is formed about a woman by
an unattractive, unfascinating girlhood, by a girlhood devoid of beauty
and sympathetic charm. She could see that she aroused a sort of
compassion with her long nose, her yellow complexion, her angular
figure, her thin body. She felt that she was ugly, and that her ugliness
was made repulsive by her miserable costumes, her dismal, woolen dresses
which she made herself, her father paying for the material only after
much grumbling: she could not induce him to make her a small allowance
for her toilet until she was thirty-five.
How sad and bitter and lonely for her was her life with that morose,
sour old man, who was always scolding and complaining at home, affable
only in society, and who left her every evening to go to the great
houses that were reopened under the Directory and at the beginning of
the Empire! Only at very long intervals did he take her out, and when he
did, it was always to that everlasting _Vaudeville_, where he had boxes.
Even on those rare occasions, his daughter was terrified. She trembled
all the time that she was with him; she was afraid of his violent
disposition, of the tone of the old regime that his outbreaks of wrath
had retained, of the facility with which he would raise his cane at an
insolent remark from the _canaille_. On almost every occasion there were
scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with people in the pit, and
threats of personal violence to which she put an end by lowering the
curtain of the box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even in
the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry them at Monsieur de
Varandeuil's price and would keep them waiting one hour, two hours
without moving; sometimes would unharness his horse in his wrath and
leave him in the vehicle with his daughter who would vainly implore him
to submit and pay the price demanded.
Considering that these diversions should suffice for Sempronie, and
having, moreover, a jealous desire to have her all to himself and always
under his hand, Monsieur de Varandeuil allowed her to form no intimacies
with anybody. He did not take her into society; he did not take her to
the houses of their kinsfolk who returned after the emigration, except
on days of formal receptions or family gatherings. He kept her closely
confined to the house: not until she was forty did he consider that she
was old enough to be allowed to go out alone. Thus, the girl had no
friendship, no connection of any sort to lean upon; indeed, she no
longer had her younger brother with her, as he had gone to the United
States and enlisted in the American navy.
She was forbidden by her father to marry, he did not admit that she
would allow herself even to think of marrying and deserting him; all the
suitors who might have come forward he fought and rejected in advance,
in order not to leave his daughter the courage to speak to him on the
subject, if the occasion should ever arise.
Meanwhile our victories were stripping Italy of her treasures. The
masterpieces of Rome, Florence and Venice were hurrying to Paris.
Italian art was at a premium. Collectors no longer took pride in any
paintings but those of the Italian school. Monsieur de Varandeuil saw an
opening for a fortune in this change of taste. He, also, had fallen a
victim to the artistic dilettantism which was one of the refined
passions of the nobility before the Revolution. He had lived in the
society of artists and collectors; he admired pictures. It occurred to
him to collect a gallery of Italian works and then to sell them. Paris
was still overrun with the objects of art sold and scattered under the
Terror. Monsieur de Varandeuil began to walk back and forth through the
streets--they were the markets for large canvases in those days,--and at
every step he made a discovery; every day he purchased something. Soon
the small apartment was crowded with old, black paintings, so large for
the most part that the walls would not hold them with their frames, with
the result that there was no room for the furniture. These were
christened Raphael, Vinci, or Andrea del Sarto; there were none but
_chefs d'oeuvre_, and the father would keep his daughter standing in
front of them hours at a time, forcing his admiration upon her, wearying
her with his ecstatic flights. He would ascend from epithet to epithet,
would work himself into a state of intoxication, of delirium, and would
end by thinking that he was negotiating with an imaginary purchaser,
would dispute with him over the price of a masterpiece, and would cry
out: "A hundred thousand francs for my Rosso! yes, monsieur, a hundred
thousand francs!" His daughter, dismayed by the large amount of money
that those great, ugly things, in which there were so many nude men,
deducted from the housekeeping supply, ventured upon remonstrance and
tried to check such ruinous extravagance. Monsieur de Varandeuil lost
his temper, waxed wroth like a man who was ashamed to find one of his
blood so deficient in taste, and told her that that was her fortune and
that she would see later if he was an old fool. At last she induced him
to realize. The sale took place; it was a failure, one of the most
complete shipwrecks of illusions that the glazed hall of the Hotel
Bullion has ever seen. Stung to the quick, furious with rage at this
blow, which not only involved pecuniary loss and a serious inroad upon
his little fortune, but was also a direct denial of his claims to
connoisseurship, a slap at his knowledge of art delivered upon the cheek
of his Raphaels, Monsieur de Varandeuil informed his daughter that they
were too poor to remain in Paris and that they must go into the
provinces to live. Having been cradled and reared in an epoch little
adapted to inspire a love of country life in women, Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil tried vainly to combat her father's resolution: she was
obliged to go with him wherever he chose to go, and, by leaving Paris,
to lose the society and friendship of two young kinswomen, to whom, in
their too infrequent interviews, she had partly given her confidence,
and whose hearts she had felt reaching out to her as to an older sister.
Monsieur de Varandeuil hired a small house at L'Isle-Adam. There he was
near familiar scenes, in the atmosphere of what was formerly a little
court, close at hand to two or three chateaux, whose owners he knew, and
which were beginning to throw open their doors once more. Then, too,
since the Revolution a little community of well-to-do bourgeois, rich
shopkeepers, had settled upon this territory which once belonged to the
Contis. The name of Monsieur de Varandeuil sounded very grand in the
ears of all those good people. They bowed very low to him, they
contended for the honor of entertaining him, they listened
respectfully, almost devoutly, to the stories he told of society as it
was. And thus, flattered, caressed, honored as a relic of Versailles, he
had the place of honor and the prestige of a lord among them. When he
dined with Madame Mutel, a former baker, who had forty thousand francs a
year, the hostess left the table, silk dress and all, to go and fry the
oyster plants herself: Monsieur de Varandeuil did not like them except
as she cooked them. But Monsieur de Varandeuil's decision to go into
retirement at L'Isle-Adam was mainly due, not to the pleasant
surroundings there, but to a project that he had formed. He had gone
thither to obtain leisure for a monumental work. That which he had been
unable to do for the honor and glory of Italian art by his collection,
he proposed to do by his pen. He had learned a little Italian with his
wife; he took it into his head to present Vasari's _Lives of the
Painters_ to the French public, to translate it with the assistance of
his daughter, who, when she was very small, had heard her mother's maid
speak Italian and had retained a few words. He plunged the girl into
Vasari, he locked up her time and her thoughts in grammars,
dictionaries, commentaries, all the works of all the scholiasts of
Italian art, kept her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the
_ennui_ and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the darkness
of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden of the book fell upon her;
when he had laid out her task, he would leave her tete-a-tete with the
volumes bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the neighborhood,
paying visits, gambling at some chateau or dining among the bourgeois of
his acquaintance, to whom he would complain pathetically of the
laborious effort that the vast undertaking of his translation entailed
upon him. He would return home, listen to the reading of the translation
made during the day, make comments and critical remarks, and upset a
sentence to give it a different meaning, which his daughter would
eliminate again when he had gone; then he would resume his walks and
jaunts, like a man who has well earned his leisure, walking very erect,
with his hat under his arm and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying
himself, the sky and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature
and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of impatience, common
to children and old men, would overtake him; he would demand a certain
number of pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter to sit
up half the night.
Two or three years passed in this labor, in which Sempronie's eyes were
ruined at last. She lived entombed in her father's Vasari, more entirely
alone than ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance from
the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and their manners _a la Madame
Angot_, and too poorly clad to visit at the chateaux. For her, there was
no pleasure, no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned by
her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He tore up the flowers
that she planted secretly in the garden. He would have nothing there but
vegetables and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand
utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced the Convention
to convert the Tuileries into a potato field. Her only enjoyment was
when her father, at very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of
her two young friends for a week--a week which would have been seven
days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her father embittered its joys,
its diversions, its fetes, with his always threatening outbreaks, his
ill-humor always armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about
trifles--a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked for to place in
her friend's room, a dish for her dinner, or a place to which she wished
to take her.
At L'Isle-Adam Monsieur de Varandeuil had hired a servant, who almost
immediately became his mistress. A child was born of this connection,
and the father, in his cynical indifference, was shameless enough to
have it brought up under his daughter's eyes. As the years rolled on the
woman acquired a firm foothold in the house. She ended by ruling the
household, father and daughter alike. The day came when Monsieur de
Varandeuil chose to have her sit at his table and be served by
Sempronie. That was too much. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil rebelled under
the insult, and drew herself up to the full height of her indignation.
Secretly, silently, in misery and isolation, harshly treated by the
people and the things about her, the girl had built up a resolute,
straightforward character; tears had tempered instead of softening it.
Beneath filial docility and humility, beneath passive obedience, beneath
apparent gentleness of disposition, she concealed a character of iron, a
man's strength of will, one of those hearts which nothing bends and
which never bend themselves. When her father demanded that she lower
herself to that extent, she reminded him that she was his daughter, she
reviewed her whole life, cast, in a flood of words, the shame and the
reproach of it in his face, and concluded by informing him that if that
woman did not leave the house that very evening, she would leave it, and
that she should have no difficulty in living, thank God! wherever she
might go, with the simple tastes he had forced upon her. The father,
thunderstruck and bewildered by this revolt, yielded and dismissed the
servant; but he retained a dastardly sort of rancor against his daughter
on account of the sacrifice she had extorted from him. His spleen
betrayed itself in sharp, aggressive words, ironical thanks and bitter
smiles. Sempronie's only revenge was to attend to his wants more
thoroughly, more gently, more patiently than ever. Her devotion was
destined to be subjected to one final test; the old man had a stroke of
apoplexy which left him with one whole side of his body stiff and dead,
lame in one leg, and asleep so far as his intelligence was concerned,
although keenly conscious of his misfortune and of his dependence upon
his daughter. Thereupon, all the evil that lay dormant in the depths of
his nature was aroused and let loose. His selfishness amounted to
ferocity. Under the torment of his suffering and his weakness, he became
a sort of malevolent madman. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil devoted her days
and her nights to the invalid, who seemed to hate her for her
attentions, to be humiliated by her care as if it implied generosity and
forgiveness, to suffer torments at seeing always by his side,
indefatigable and kindly, that image of duty. But what a life it was!
She had to contend against the miserable man's incurable _ennui_, to be
always ready to bear him company, to lead him about and support him all
day long. She must play cards with him when he was at home, and not let
him win or lose too much. She must combat his wishes, his gormandizing
tendencies, take dishes away from him, and, in connection with
everything that he wanted, endure complaints, reproaches, insults,
tears, mad despair, and the outbursts of childish anger in which
helpless old men indulge. And this lasted ten years! ten years, during
which Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had no other recreation, no other
consolation than to pour out all the tenderness and warmth of a maternal
affection upon one of her two young friends, recently married,--her
_chick_, as she called her. It was Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's delight
to go and pass a short time every fortnight in that happy household. She
would kiss the pretty child, already in its cradle and asleep for the
night when she arrived; she would dine at racing speed; at dessert she
would send for a carriage and would hasten away like a tardy schoolboy.
But in the last years of her father's life she could not even obtain
permission to dine out: the old man would no longer sanction such a long
absence and kept her almost constantly beside him, repeating again and
again that he was well aware that it was not amusing to take care of an
infirm old man like himself, but that she would soon be rid of him. He
died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no words but these for
her who had been his daughter nearly forty years: "I know that you never
loved me!"
Two years before her father's death, Sempronie's brother had returned
from America. He brought with him a colored woman who had nursed him
through the yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he had
had by the woman before marrying her. Although she was imbued with the
ideas of the old regime as to the blacks, and although she looked upon
that ignorant creature, with her negro jargon, her grin like a wild
beast's and her skin that left grease stains upon her clothing, as no
better than a monkey, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil combated her father's
horror and unwillingness to receive his daughter-in-law; and she it was
who induced him, in the last days of his life, to allow her brother to
present his wife to him. When her father was dead she reflected that
her brother's household was all that remained of the family.
Monsieur de Varandeuil, to whom the Comte d'Artois had caused the
arrears of salary of his office to be paid at the return of the
Bourbons, left about ten thousand francs a year to his children. The
brother had, before that inheritance, only a pension of fifteen hundred
francs from the United States. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil considered
that five or six thousand francs a year would hardly suffice for the
comfortable support of that family, in which there were two children,
and it at once occurred to her to add to it her share in the
inheritance. She suggested this contribution in the most natural and
simple way imaginable. Her brother accepted it, and she went with him to
live in a pretty little apartment at the upper end of Rue de Clichy, on
the fourth floor of one of the first houses built in that neighborhood,
then hardly known, where the fresh country air blew briskly through the
framework of the white buildings. She continued there her modest life,
her humble manner of dressing, her economical habits, content with the
least desirable room in the suite, and spending upon herself no more
than eighteen hundred to two thousand francs a year. But, soon, a
brooding jealousy, slowly gathering strength, took possession of the
mulattress. She took offence at the fraternal affection which seemed to
be taking her husband from her arms. She suffered because of the
communion of speech and thought and reminiscences between them; she
suffered because of the conversations in which she could take no part,
because of what she heard in their voices, but could not understand. The
consciousness of her inferiority kindled in her heart the fires of wrath
and hatred that burn fiercely in the tropics. She had recourse to her
children for her revenge; she urged them on, excited them, aroused their
evil passions against her sister-in-law. She encouraged them to laugh at
her, to make sport of her. She applauded the manifestations of the
mischievous intelligence characteristic of children, in whom observation
begins with naughtiness. Once she had let them loose upon their aunt,
she allowed them to laugh at all her absurdities, her figure, her nose,
her dresses, whose meanness, nevertheless, provided their own elegant
attire. Thus incited and upheld, the little ones soon arrived at
insolence. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the quick temper that
accompanies kindness of heart. With her the hand, as well as the heart,
had a part in the first impulse. And then she shared the prevalent
opinion of her time as to the proper way of bringing up children. She
endured two or three impertinent sallies without a word; but at the
fourth she seized the mocking child, took down her skirts, and
administered to her, notwithstanding her twelve years, the soundest
whipping she had ever received. The mulattress made a great outcry and
told her sister-in-law, that she had always detested her children and
that she wanted to kill them. The brother interposed between the two
women and succeeded in reconciling them after a fashion. But new scenes
took place, when the little ones, inflamed against the woman who made
their mother weep, assailed their aunt with the refined tortures of
misbehaved children, mingled with the fiendish cruelty of little
savages. After several patched-up truces it became necessary to part.
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil decided to leave her brother, for she saw how
unhappy he was amid this daily wrenching of his dearest affections. She
left him to his wife and his children. This separation was one of the
great sorrows of her life. She who was so strong against emotion and so
self-contained, and who seemed to take pride in suffering, as it were,
almost broke down when she had to leave the apartment, where she had
dreamed of enjoying a little happiness in her corner, looking on at the
happiness of others: her last tears mounted to her eyes.
She did not go too far away, so that she might be at hand to nurse her
brother if he were ill, and to see him and meet him sometimes. But there
was a great void in her heart and in her life. She had begun to visit
her kinsfolk since her father's death: she drew nearer to them; she
allowed the relatives whom the Restoration had placed in a lofty and
powerful position to come to her, and sought out those whom the new
order of things left in obscurity and poverty. But she returned to her
dear _chick_ first of all, and to another distant cousin, also married,
who had become the _chick's_ sister-in-law. Her relations with her
kinsfolk soon assumed remarkable regularity. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil
never went into society, to an evening party, or to the play. It
required Mademoiselle Rachel's brilliant success to persuade her to step
inside a theatre; she ventured there but twice. She never accepted an
invitation to a large dinner-party. But there were two or three houses
where, as at the _chick's_, she would invite herself to dine,
unexpectedly, when there were no guests. "My love," she would say
without ceremony, "are you and your husband doing nothing this evening?
Then I will stay and eat some of your ragout." At eight o'clock
regularly she rose to go, and when the husband took his hat to escort
her home, she would knock it out of his hands with a: "Nonsense! an old
nanny-goat like me! Why, I frighten men in the street!" And then ten
days or a fortnight would pass, during which they would not see her. But
if anything went wrong, if there was a death or sickness in the house,
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil always heard of it at once, no one knew how;
she would come, in spite of everything--the weather or the hour--would
give a loud ring at the bell in her own way--they finally called it
_cousin's ring_--and a moment later, relieved of her umbrella, which
never left her, and of her pattens, her hat tossed upon a chair, she was
at the service of those who needed her. She listened, talked, restored
their courage with an indescribable martial accent, with language as
energetic as a soldier might use to console a wounded comrade, and
stimulating as a cordial. If it was a child that was out of sorts, she
would go straight to the bed, laugh at the little one, whose fear
vanished at once, order the father and mother about, run hither and
thither, assume the management of everything, apply the leeches, arrange
the cataplasms, and bring back hope, joy and health at the double quick.
In all branches of the family the old maid appeared thus providentially,
without warning, on days of sorrow, _ennui_ and suffering. She was never
seen except when her hands were needed to heal, her devoted friendship
to console. She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her
great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have
made her only to give her to others. Her everlasting black dress which
she persisted in wearing, her worn, dyed shawl, her absurd hat, her
impoverished appearance, were, in her eyes, the means of being rich
enough to help others with her little fortune; she was extravagant in
almsgiving, and her pockets were always filled with gifts for the poor;
not of money, for she feared the wineshop, but of four-pound loaves
which she bought for them at the baker's. And then, too, by dint of
living in poverty, she was able to give herself what was to her the
greatest of all luxuries: the joy of her friends' children whom she
overwhelmed with New Year's and other gifts, with surprises and
pleasures of all sorts. For instance, suppose that one of them had been
left by his mother, who was absent from Paris, to pass a lovely summer
Sunday at his boarding school, and the little rascal, out of spite, had
misbehaved so that he was not allowed to go out. How surprised he would
be, as the clock struck nine, to see his old cousin appear in the
courtyard, just buttoning the last button of her dress, she had come in
such haste. And what a feeling of desolation at the sight! "Cousin," he
would say piteously, in one of those fits of passion in which at the
same moment you long to cry and to kill your _tyrant_, "I--I am kept in,
and----" "Kept in? Oh! yes, kept in! And do you suppose I've taken all
this trouble----Is your schoolmaster poking fun at me? Where is the
puppy, that I may have a word with him? You go and dress yourself
meanwhile. Off with you!" And the child, not daring to hope that a woman
so shabbily dressed would have the power to raise the embargo, would
suddenly feel a hand upon his arm, and the cousin would carry him off,
toss him into a cab, all bewildered and dumfounded with joy, and take
him to the Bois de Boulogne. She would let him ride a donkey all day
long, urging the beast on with a broken branch, and crying: "Get up!"
And then, after a good dinner at Borne's, she would take him back to
school, and, under the porte-cochere, as she kissed him she would slip a
big hundred-sou piece into his hand.
Strange old maid. The bitter experiences of her whole existence, the
struggle to live, the never-ending physical suffering, the
long-continued bodily and mental torture had, as it were, cut her loose
from life and placed her above it. Her education, the things she had
seen, the spectacle of what seemed the end of everything, the
Revolution, had so formed her character as to lead her to disdain human
suffering. And this old woman, who had nothing left of life save breath,
had risen to a serene philosophy, to a virile, haughty, almost satirical
stoicism. Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow that
seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her tirade, she would
suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word at herself, upon which her face
would at once become calm. She was cheerful with the cheerfulness of a
deep, bubbling spring, the cheerfulness of devoted hearts that have seen
everything, of the old soldier or the old hospital nurse. Kind-hearted
to admiration she was, and yet something was lacking in her kindness of
heart: forgiveness. Hitherto, she had never succeeded in moving or
bending her character. A slight, an unkind action, a trifle, if it
touched her heart, wounded her forever. She forgot nothing. Time, death
itself, did not disarm her memory.
Of religion, she had none. Born at a period when women did without it,
she had grown to womanhood at a time when there were no churches. Mass
did not exist when she was a young maid. There had been nothing to
accustom her to the thought of God or to make her feel the need of Him,
and she had retained a sort of shrinking hatred for priests, which must
have been connected with some family secret of which she never spoke.
Her faith, her strength, her piety, all consisted in the pride of her
conscience; she considered that if she retained her own esteem, she
could be sure of acting rightly and of never failing in her duty. She
was thus singularly constituted by the two epochs in which she had
lived, a compound of the two, dipped in the opposing currents of the old
regime and the Revolution. After Louis XVI. failed to take horse on the
Tenth of August, she lost her regard for kings; but she detested the
mob. She desired equality and she held parvenus in horror. She was a
republican and an aristocrat, combined scepticism with prejudice, the
horrors of '93, which she saw, with the vague and noble theories of
humanity which surrounded her cradle.
Her external qualities were altogether masculine. She had the sharp
voice, the freedom of speech, the unruly tongue of the old woman of the
eighteenth century, heightened by an accent suggestive of the common
people, a mannish, highly colored style of elocution peculiar to
herself, rising above modesty in the choice of words and fearless in
calling things baldly by their plain names.
Meanwhile, the years rolled on, sweeping away the Restoration and the
monarchy of Louis-Philippe. She saw all those whom she had loved go
from her one by one, all her family take the road to the cemetery. She
was left quite alone, and she marveled and was grieved that death should
forget her, who would have offered so little resistance, for she was
already leaning over the grave and was obliged to force her heart down
to the level of the little children brought to her by the sons and
daughters of the friends whom she had lost. Her brother was dead. Her
dear _chick_ was no more. The _chick's_ sister-in-law alone was left to
her. But hers was a life that hung trembling in the balance, ready to
fly away. Crushed by the death of a child for whom she had waited for
years, the poor woman was dying of consumption. Mademoiselle de
Varandeuil was in her bedroom every day, from noon until six o'clock,
for four years. She lived by her side all that time, in the close
atmosphere and the odor of constant fumigations. She did not allow
herself to be kept away for one hour by her own gout and rheumatism, but
gave her time and her life to the peaceful last hours of that dying
woman, whose eyes were fixed upon heaven, where her dead children
awaited her. And when, in the cemetery, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had
turned aside the shroud to kiss the dead face for the last time, it
seemed to her as if there were no one near to her, as if she were all
alone upon the earth.
Thenceforth, yielding to the infirmities which she had no further reason
to shake off, she began to live the narrow, confined life of old people
who wear out their carpet in one spot only--never leaving her room,
reading but little because it tired her eyes, and passing most of her
time buried in her easy-chair, reviewing the past and living it over
again. She would sit in the same position for days, her eyes wide open
and dreaming, her thoughts far from herself, far from the room in which
she sat, journeying whither her memories led her, to distant faces,
dearly loved, pallid faces, to vanished regions--lost in a profound
lethargy which Germinie was careful not to disturb, saying to herself:
"Madame is in her meditations----"
One day in every week, however, she went abroad. Indeed it was with that
weekly excursion in view, in order to be nearer the spot to which she
wished to go on that one day, that she left her apartments on Rue
Taitbout and took up her abode on Rue de Laval. One day in every week,
deterred by nothing, not even by illness, she repaired to the Montmartre
Cemetery, where her father and her brother rested, and the women whose
loss she regretted, all those whose sufferings had come to an end before
hers. For the dead and for Death she displayed a veneration almost equal
to that of the ancients. To her, the grave was sacred, and a dear
friend. She loved to visit the land of hope and deliverance where her
dear ones were sleeping, there to await death and to be ready with her
body. On that day, she would start early in the morning, leaning on the
arm of her maid, who carried a folding-stool. As she drew near the
cemetery, she would enter the shop of a dealer in wreaths, who had known
her for many years, and who, in winter, loaned her a foot-warmer. There
she would rest a few moments; then, loading Germinie down with wreaths
of immortelles, she would pass through the cemetery gate, take the path
to the left of the cedar at the entrance, and make her pilgrimage slowly
from tomb to tomb. She would throw away the withered flowers, sweep up
the dead leaves, tie the wreaths together, and, sitting down upon her
folding-chair, would gaze and dream, and absent-mindedly remove a bit of
moss from the flat stone with the end of her umbrella. Then she would
rise, turn as if to say _au revoir_ to the tomb she was leaving, walk
away, stop once more, and talk in an undertone, as she had done before,
with that part of her that was sleeping under the stone; and having thus
paid a visit to all the dead who lived in her affections, she would
return home slowly and reverentially, enveloping herself in silence as
if she were afraid to speak.