him more than a hundred thousand francs in these two years. Ah, ha!
you have not seen the end of it!"
"Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake,
forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children
without a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself
respected and loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God
unspotted----"
"Amen!" exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the
face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such an
attempt. "You do not yet know the latter end of poverty--shame,
disgrace.--I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and
your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the
_Prodigal Father_ from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me
deeply," said Crevel, seating himself, "for it is frightful to see the
woman one loves weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do
nothing against your interests or your husband's. Only never send to
me for information. That is all."
"What is to be done?" cried Madame Hulot.
Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which
this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as
a mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son's father-in-law
was insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her
resistance to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he
showed, in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a
humiliated National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the
point of snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in
a state of such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel
at her feet, kissing her hands.
"Good God! what will become of us!" she went on, wiping away her
tears. "Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her
eyes? What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in
her pure life under her mother's care as she is by every gift of
nature? There are days when she wanders round the garden, out of
spirits without knowing why; I find her with tears in her eyes----"
"She is one-and-twenty," said Crevel.
"Must I place her in a convent?" asked the Baroness. "But in such
cases religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously
trained girls lose their head!--Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not
understand that everything is final between us? that I look upon you
with horror? that you have crushed a mother's last hopes----"
"But if I were to restore them," asked he.
Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a frenzied expression that really
touched him. But he drove pity back to the depths of his heart; she
had said, "I look upon you with horror."
Virtue is always a little too rigid; it overlooks the shades and
instincts by help of which we are able to tack when in a false
position.
"So handsome a girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband
nowadays if she is penniless," Crevel remarked, resuming his
starchiest manner. "Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather
alarm intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too
expensive to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out walking
with such a woman on your arm, every one will turn to look at you, and
follow and covet his neighbor's wife. Such success is a source of much
uneasiness to men who do not want to be killing lovers; for, after
all, no man kills more than one. In the position in which you find
yourself there are just three ways of getting your daughter married:
Either by my help--and you will have none of it! That is one.--Or by
finding some old man of sixty, very rich, childless, and anxious to
have children; that is difficult, still such men are to be met with.
Many old men take up with a Josepha, a Jenny Cadine, why should not
one be found who is ready to make a fool of himself under legal
formalities? If it were not for Celestine and our two grandchildren, I
would marry Hortense myself. That is two.--The last way is the
easiest----"
Madame Hulot raised her head, and looked uneasily at the ex-perfumer.
"Paris is a town whither every man of energy--and they sprout like
saplings on French soil--comes to meet his kind; talent swarms here
without hearth or home, and energy equal to anything, even to making a
fortune. Well, these youngsters--your humble servant was such a one in
his time, and how many he has known! What had du Tillet or Popinot
twenty years since? They were both pottering round in Daddy
Birotteau's shop, with not a penny of capital but their determination
to get on, which, in my opinion, is the best capital a man can have.
Money may be eaten through, but you don't eat through your
determination. Why, what had I? The will to get on, and plenty of
pluck. At this day du Tillet is a match for the greatest folks; little
Popinot, the richest druggist of the Rue des Lombards, became a
deputy, now he is in office.--Well, one of these free lances, as we
say on the stock market, of the pen, or of the brush, is the only man
in Paris who would marry a penniless beauty, for they have courage
enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau
without asking for a farthing. Those men are madmen, to be sure! They
trust in love as they trust in good luck and brains!--Find a man of
energy who will fall in love with your daughter, and he will marry
without a thought of money. You must confess that by way of an enemy I
am not ungenerous, for this advice is against my own interests."
"Oh, Monsieur Crevel, if you would indeed be my friend and give up
your ridiculous notions----"
"Ridiculous? Madame, do not run yourself down. Look at yourself--I
love you, and you will come to be mine. The day will come when I shall
say to Hulot, 'You took Josepha, I have taken your wife!'
"It is the old law of tit-for-tat! And I will persevere till I have
attained my end, unless you should become extremely ugly.--I shall
succeed; and I will tell you why," he went on, resuming his attitude,
and looking at Madame Hulot. "You will not meet with such an old man,
or such a young lover," he said after a pause, "because you love your
daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old
libertine, and because you--the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old
Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old
Guard--will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may
find him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of
to-day was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a
factory.
"And then, when you see the girl, urged by her twenty years, capable
of dishonoring you all, you will say to yourself, 'It will be better
that I should fall! If Monsieur Crevel will but keep my secret, I will
earn my daughter's portion--two hundred thousand francs for ten years'
attachment to that old gloveseller--old Crevel!'--I disgust you no
doubt, and what I am saying is horribly immoral, you think? But if you
happened to have been bitten by an overwhelming passion, you would
find a thousand arguments in favor of yielding--as women do when they
are in love.--Yes, and Hortense's interests will suggest to your
feelings such terms of surrendering your conscience----"
"Hortense has still an uncle."
"What! Old Fischer? He is winding up his concerns, and that again is
the Baron's fault; his rake is dragged over every till within his
reach."
"Comte Hulot----"
"Oh, madame, your husband has already made thin air of the old
General's savings. He spent them in furnishing his singer's rooms.
--Now, come; am I to go without a hope?"
"Good-bye, monsieur. A man easily gets over a passion for a woman of
my age, and you will fall back on Christian principles. God takes care
of the wretched----"
The Baroness rose to oblige the captain to retreat, and drove him back
into the drawing-room.
"Ought the beautiful Madame Hulot to be living amid such squalor?"
said he, and he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier bereft of its
gilding, the threadbare carpet, the very rags of wealth which made the
large room, with its red, white, and gold, look like a corpse of
Imperial festivities.
"Monsieur, virtue shines on it all. I have no wish to owe a handsome
abode to having made of the beauty you are pleased to ascribe to me a
_man-trap_ and _a money-box for five-franc pieces_!"
The captain bit his lips as he recognized the words he had used to
vilify Josepha's avarice.
"And for whom are you so magnanimous?" said he. By this time the
baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door.--"For a
libertine!" said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior
wealth.
"If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is
all."
After bowing to the officer as a woman bows to dismiss an importune
visitor, she turned away too quickly to see him once more fold his
arms. She unlocked the doors she had closed, and did not see the
threatening gesture which was Crevel's parting greeting. She walked
with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her
strength was exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if
she were ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the
tumble-down summer-house, where her daughter was gossiping with Cousin
Betty.
From the first days of her married life to the present time the
Baroness had loved her husband, as Josephine in the end had loved
Napoleon, with an admiring, maternal, and cowardly devotion. Though
ignorant of the details given her by Crevel, she knew that for twenty
years past Baron Hulot been anything rather than a faithful husband;
but she had sealed her eyes with lead, she had wept in silence, and no
word of reproach had ever escaped her. In return for this angelic
sweetness, she had won her husband's veneration and something
approaching to worship from all who were about her.
A wife's affection for her husband and the respect she pays him are
infectious in a family. Hortense believed her father to be a perfect
model of conjugal affection; as to their son, brought up to admire the
Baron, whom everybody regarded as one of the giants who so effectually
backed Napoleon, he knew that he owed his advancement to his father's
name, position, and credit; and besides, the impressions of childhood
exert an enduring influence. He still was afraid of his father; and if
he had suspected the misdeeds revealed by Crevel, as he was too much
overawed by him to find fault, he would have found excuses in the view
every man takes of such matters.
It now will be necessary to give the reasons for the extraordinary
self-devotion of a good and beautiful woman; and this, in a few words,
is her past history.
Three brothers, simple laboring men, named Fischer, and living in a
village situated on the furthest frontier of Lorraine, were compelled
by the Republican conscription to set out with the so-called army of
the Rhine.
In 1799 the second brother, Andre, a widower, and Madame Hulot's
father, left his daughter to the care of his elder brother, Pierre
Fischer, disabled from service by a wound received in 1797, and made a
small private venture in the military transport service, an opening he
owed to the favor of Hulot d'Ervy, who was high in the commissariat.
By a very obvious chance Hulot, coming to Strasbourg, saw the Fischer
family. Adeline's father and his younger brother were at that time
contractors for forage in the province of Alsace.
Adeline, then sixteen years of age, might be compared with the famous
Madame du Barry, like her, a daughter of Lorraine. She was one of
those perfect and striking beauties--a woman like Madame Tallien,
finished with peculiar care by Nature, who bestows on them all her
choicest gifts--distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance,
flesh of a superior texture, and a complexion mingled in the unknown
laboratory where good luck presides. These beautiful creatures all
have something in common: Bianca Capella, whose portrait is one of
Bronzino's masterpieces; Jean Goujon's Venus, painted from the famous
Diane de Poitiers; Signora Olympia, whose picture adorns the Doria
gallery; Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges,
Madame Recamier.--all these women who preserved their beauty in spite
of years, of passion, and of their life of excess and pleasure, have
in figure, frame, and in the character of their beauty certain
striking resemblances, enough to make one believe that there is in the
ocean of generations an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is
born, all daughters of the same salt wave.
Adeline Fischer, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had
the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman
born a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand
of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line
of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as
she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once
seen her, the Commissariat officer made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer
his wife as quickly as the law would permit, to the great astonishment
of the Fischers, who had all been brought up in the fear of their
betters.
The eldest, a soldier of 1792, severely wounded in the attack on the
lines at Wissembourg, adored the Emperor Napoleon and everything that
had to do with the _Grande Armee_. Andre and Johann spoke with respect
of Commissary Hulot, the Emperor's protege, to whom indeed they owed
their prosperity; for Hulot d'Ervy, finding them intelligent and
honest, had taken them from the army provision wagons to place them in
charge of a government contract needing despatch. The brothers Fischer
had done further service during the campaign of 1804. At the peace
Hulot had secured for them the contract for forage from Alsace, not
knowing that he would presently be sent to Strasbourg to prepare for
the campaign of 1806.
This marriage was like an Assumption to the young peasant girl. The
beautiful Adeline was translated at once from the mire of her village
to the paradise of the Imperial Court; for the contractor, one of the
most conscientious and hard-working of the Commissariat staff, was
made a Baron, obtained a place near the Emperor, and was attached to
the Imperial Guard. The handsome rustic bravely set to work to educate
herself for love of her husband, for she was simply crazy about him;
and, indeed, the Commissariat office was as a man a perfect match for
Adeline as a woman. He was one of the picked corps of fine men. Tall,
well-built, fair, with beautiful blue eyes full of irresistible fire
and life, his elegant appearance made him remarkable by the side of
d'Orsay, Forbin, Ouvrard; in short, in the battalion of fine men that
surrounded the Emperor. A conquering "buck," and holding the ideas of
the Directoire with regard to women, his career of gallantry was
interrupted for some long time by his conjugal affection.
To Adeline the Baron was from the first a sort of god who could do no
wrong. To him she owed everything: fortune--she had a carriage, a fine
house, every luxury of the day; happiness--he was devoted to her in
the face of the world; a title, for she was a Baroness; fame, for she
was spoken of as the beautiful Madame Hulot--and in Paris! Finally,
she had the honor of refusing the Emperor's advances, for Napoleon
made her a present of a diamond necklace, and always remembered her,
asking now and again, "And is the beautiful Madame Hulot still a model
of virtue?" in the tone of a man who might have taken his revenge on
one who should have triumphed where he had failed.
So it needs no great intuition to discern what were the motives in a
simple, guileless, and noble soul for the fanaticism of Madame Hulot's
love. Having fully persuaded herself that her husband could do her no
wrong, she made herself in the depths of her heart the humble, abject,
and blindfold slave of the man who had made her. It must be noted,
too, that she was gifted with great good sense--the good sense of the
people, which made her education sound. In society she spoke little,
and never spoke evil of any one; she did not try to shine; she thought
out many things, listened well, and formed herself on the model of the
best-conducted women of good birth.
In 1815 Hulot followed the lead of the Prince de Wissembourg, his
intimate friend, and became one of the officers who organized the
improvised troops whose rout brought the Napoleonic cycle to a close
at Waterloo. In 1816 the Baron was one of the men best hated by the
Feltre administration, and was not reinstated in the Commissariat till
1823, when he was needed for the Spanish war. In 1830 he took office
as the fourth wheel of the coach, at the time of the levies, a sort of
conscription made by Louis Philippe on the old Napoleonic soldiery.
From the time when the younger branch ascended the throne, having
taken an active part in bringing that about, he was regarded as an
indispensable authority at the War Office. He had already won his
Marshal's baton, and the King could do no more for him unless by
making him minister or a peer of France.
From 1818 till 1823, having no official occupation, Baron Hulot had
gone on active service to womankind. Madame Hulot dated her Hector's
first infidelities from the grand _finale_ of the Empire. Thus, for
twelve years the Baroness had filled the part in her household of
_prima donna assoluta_, without a rival. She still could boast of the
old-fashioned, inveterate affection which husbands feel for wives who
are resigned to be gentle and virtuous helpmates; she knew that if she
had a rival, that rival would not subsist for two hours under a word
of reproof from herself; but she shut her eyes, she stopped her ears,
she would know nothing of her husband's proceedings outside his home.
In short, she treated her Hector as a mother treats a spoilt child.
Three years before the conversation reported above, Hortense, at the
Theatre des Varietes, had recognized her father in a lower tier
stage-box with Jenny Cadine, and had exclaimed:
"There is papa!"
"You are mistaken, my darling; he is at the Marshal's," the Baroness
replied.
She too had seen Jenny Cadine; but instead of feeling a pang when she
saw how pretty she was, she said to herself, "That rascal Hector must
think himself very lucky."
She suffered nevertheless; she gave herself up in secret to rages of
torment; but as soon as she saw Hector, she always remembered her
twelve years of perfect happiness, and could not find it in her to
utter a word of complaint. She would have been glad if the Baron would
have taken her into his confidence; but she never dared to let him see
that she knew of his kicking over the traces, out of respect for her
husband. Such an excess of delicacy is never met with but in those
grand creatures, daughters of the soil, whose instinct it is to take
blows without ever returning them; the blood of the early martyrs
still lives in their veins. Well-born women, their husbands' equals,
feel the impulse to annoy them, to mark the points of their tolerance,
like points at billiards, by some stinging word, partly in the spirit
of diabolical malice, and to secure the upper hand or the right of
turning the tables.
The Baroness had an ardent admirer in her brother-in-law,
Lieutenant-General Hulot, the venerable Colonel of the Grenadiers of
the Imperial Infantry Guard, who was to have a Marshal's baton in his
old age. This veteran, after having served from 1830 to 1834 as
Commandant of the military division, including the departments of
Brittany, the scene of his exploits in 1799 and 1800, had come to
settle in Paris near his brother, for whom he had a fatherly affection.
This old soldier's heart was in sympathy with his sister-in-law; he
admired her as the noblest and saintliest of her sex. He had never
married, because he hoped to find a second Adeline, though he had
vainly sought for her through twenty campaigns in as many lands. To
maintain her place in the esteem of this blameless and spotless old
republican--of whom Napoleon had said, "That brave old Hulot is the
most obstinate republican, but he will never be false to me"--Adeline
would have endured griefs even greater than those that had just come
upon her. But the old soldier, seventy-two years of age, battered by
thirty campaigns, and wounded for the twenty-seventh time at Waterloo,
was Adeline's admirer, and not a "protector." The poor old Count,
among other infirmities, could only hear through a speaking trumpet.
So long as Baron Hulot d'Ervy was a fine man, his flirtations did not
damage his fortune; but when a man is fifty, the Graces claim payment.
At that age love becomes vice; insensate vanities come into play.
Thus, at about that time, Adeline saw that her husband was incredibly
particular about his dress; he dyed his hair and whiskers, and wore a
belt and stays. He was determined to remain handsome at any cost. This
care of his person, a weakness he had once mercilessly mocked at, was
carried out in the minutest details.
At last Adeline perceived that the Pactolus poured out before the
Baron's mistresses had its source in her pocket. In eight years he had
dissipated a considerable amount of money; and so effectually, that,
on his son's marriage two years previously, the Baron had been
compelled to explain to his wife that his pay constituted their whole
income.
"What shall we come to?" asked Adeline.
"Be quite easy," said the official, "I will leave the whole of my
salary in your hands, and I will make a fortune for Hortense, and some
savings for the future, in business."
The wife's deep belief in her husband's power and superior talents, in
his capabilities and character, had, in fact, for the moment allayed
her anxiety.
What the Baroness' reflections and tears were after Crevel's departure
may now be clearly imagined. The poor woman had for two years past
known that she was at the bottom of a pit, but she had fancied herself
alone in it. How her son's marriage had been finally arranged she had
not known; she had known nothing of Hector's connection with the
grasping Jewess; and, above all, she hoped that no one in the world
knew anything of her troubles. Now, if Crevel went about so ready to
talk of the Baron's excesses, Hector's reputation would suffer. She
could see, under the angry ex-perfumer's coarse harangue, the odious
gossip behind the scenes which led to her son's marriage. Two
reprobate hussies had been the priestesses of this union planned at
some orgy amid the degrading familiarities of two tipsy old sinners.
"And has he forgotten Hortense!" she wondered.
"But he sees her every day; will he try to find her a husband among
his good-for-nothing sluts?"
At this moment it was the mother that spoke rather than the wife, for
she saw Hortense laughing with her Cousin Betty--the reckless laughter
of heedless youth; and she knew that such hysterical laughter was
quite as distressing a symptom as the tearful reverie of solitary
walks in the garden.
Hortense was like her mother, with golden hair that waved naturally,
and was amazingly long and thick. Her skin had the lustre of
mother-of-pearl. She was visibly the offspring of a true marriage, of
a pure and noble love in its prime. There was a passionate vitality in
her countenance, a brilliancy of feature, a full fount of youth, a
fresh vigor and abundance of health, which radiated from her with
electric flashes. Hortense invited the eye.
When her eye, of deep ultramarine blue, liquid with the moisture of
innocent youth, rested on a passer-by, he was involuntarily thrilled.
Nor did a single freckle mar her skin, such as those with which many a
white and golden maid pays toll for her milky whiteness. Tall, round
without being fat, with a slender dignity as noble as her mother's,
she really deserved the name of goddess, of which old authors were so
lavish. In fact, those who saw Hortense in the street could hardly
restrain the exclamation, "What a beautiful girl!"
She was so genuinely innocent, that she could say to her mother:
"What do they mean, mamma, by calling me a beautiful girl when I am
with you? Are not you much handsomer than I am?"