to the party given for the signing of the marriage-contract, behaved
as though the scene with which this drama opened had never taken
place, as though he had no grievance against the Baron. Celestin
Crevel was quite amiable; he was perhaps rather too much the
ex-perfumer, but as a Major he was beginning to acquire majestic
dignity. He talked of dancing at the wedding.
"Fair lady," said he politely to the Baroness, "people like us know
how to forget. Do not banish me from your home; honor me, pray, by
gracing my house with your presence now and then to meet your
children. Be quite easy; I will never say anything of what lies buried
at the bottom of my heart. I behaved, indeed, like an idiot, for I
should lose too much by cutting myself off from seeing you."
"Monsieur, an honest woman has no ears for such speeches as those you
refer to. If you keep your word, you need not doubt that it will give
me pleasure to see the end of a coolness which must always be painful
in a family."
"Well, you sulky old fellow," said Hulot, dragging Crevel out into the
garden, "you avoid me everywhere, even in my own house. Are two
admirers of the fair sex to quarrel for ever over a petticoat? Come;
this is really too plebeian!"
"I, monsieur, am not such a fine man as you are, and my small
attractions hinder me from repairing my losses so easily as you
can----"
"Sarcastic!" said the Baron.
"Irony is allowable from the vanquished to the conquerer."
The conversation, begun in this strain, ended in a complete
reconciliation; still Crevel maintained his right to take his revenge.
Madame Marneffe particularly wished to be invited to Mademoiselle
Hulot's wedding. To enable him to receive his future mistress in his
drawing-room, the great official was obliged to invite all the clerks
of his division down to the deputy head-clerks inclusive. Thus a grand
ball was a necessity. The Baroness, as a prudent housewife, calculated
that an evening party would cost less than a dinner, and allow of a
larger number of invitations; so Hortense's wedding was much talked
about.
Marshal Prince Wissembourg and the Baron de Nucingen signed in behalf
of the bride, the Comtes de Rastignac and Popinot in behalf of
Steinbock. Then, as the highest nobility among the Polish emigrants
had been civil to Count Steinbock since he had become famous, the
artist thought himself bound to invite them. The State Council, and
the War Office to which the Baron belonged, and the army, anxious to
do honor to the Comte de Forzheim, were all represented by their
magnates. There were nearly two hundred indispensable invitations. How
natural, then, that little Madame Marneffe was bent on figuring in all
her glory amid such an assembly. The Baroness had, a month since, sold
her diamonds to set up her daughter's house, while keeping the finest
for the trousseau. The sale realized fifteen thousand francs, of which
five thousand were sunk in Hortense's clothes. And what was ten
thousand francs for the furniture of the young folks' apartment,
considering the demands of modern luxury? However, young Monsieur and
Madame Hulot, old Crevel, and the Comte de Forzheim made very handsome
presents, for the old soldier had set aside a sum for the purchase of
plate. Thanks to these contributions, even an exacting Parisian would
have been pleased with the rooms the young couple had taken in the Rue
Saint-Dominique, near the Invalides. Everything seemed in harmony with
their love, pure, honest, and sincere.
At last the great day dawned--for it was to be a great day not only
for Wenceslas and Hortense, but for old Hulot too. Madame Marneffe was
to give a house-warming in her new apartment the day after becoming
Hulot's mistress _en titre_, and after the marriage of the lovers.
Who but has once in his life been a guest at a wedding-ball? Every
reader can refer to his reminiscences, and will probably smile as he
calls up the images of all that company in their Sunday-best faces as
well as their finest frippery.
If any social event can prove the influence of environment, is it not
this? In fact, the Sunday-best mood of some reacts so effectually on
the rest that the men who are most accustomed to wearing full dress
look just like those to whom the party is a high festival, unique in
their life. And think too of the serious old men to whom such things
are so completely a matter of indifference, that they are wearing
their everyday black coats; the long-married men, whose faces betray
their sad experience of the life the young pair are but just entering
on; and the lighter elements, present as carbonic-acid gas is in
champagne; and the envious girls, the women absorbed in wondering if
their dress is a success, the poor relations whose parsimonious
"get-up" contrasts with that of the officials in uniform; and the
greedy ones, thinking only of the supper; and the gamblers, thinking
only of cards.
There are some of every sort, rich and poor, envious and envied,
philosophers and dreamers, all grouped like the plants in a flower-bed
round the rare, choice blossom, the bride. A wedding-ball is an
epitome of the world.
At the liveliest moment of the evening Crevel led the Baron aside, and
said in a whisper, with the most natural manner possible:
"By Jove! that's a pretty woman--the little lady in pink who has
opened a racking fire on you from her eyes."
"Which?"
"The wife of that clerk you are promoting, heaven knows how!--Madame
Marneffe."
"What do you know about it?"
"Listen, Hulot; I will try to forgive you the ill you have done me if
only you will introduce me to her--I will take you to Heloise.
Everybody is asking who is that charming creature. Are you sure that
it will strike no one how and why her husband's appointment got itself
signed?--You happy rascal, she is worth a whole office.--I would serve
in her office only too gladly.--Come, cinna, let us be friends."
"Better friends than ever," said the Baron to the perfumer, "and I
promise you I will be a good fellow. Within a month you shall dine
with that little angel.--For it is an angel this time, old boy. And I
advise you, like me, to have done with the devils."
Cousin Betty, who had moved to the Rue Vanneau, into a nice little
apartment on the third floor, left the ball at ten o'clock, but came
back to see with her own eyes the two bonds bearing twelve hundred
francs interest; one of them was the property of the Countess
Steinbock, the other was in the name of Madame Hulot.
It is thus intelligible that Monsieur Crevel should have spoken to
Hulot about Madame Marneffe, as knowing what was a secret to the rest
of the world; for, as Monsieur Marneffe was away, no one but Lisbeth
Fischer, besides the Baron and Valerie, was initiated into the
mystery.
The Baron had made a blunder in giving Madame Marneffe a dress far too
magnificent for the wife of a subordinate official; other women were
jealous alike of her beauty and of her gown. There was much whispering
behind fans, for the poverty of the Marneffes was known to every one
in the office; the husband had been petitioning for help at the very
moment when the Baron had been so smitten with madame. Also, Hector
could not conceal his exultation at seeing Valerie's success; and she,
severely proper, very lady-like, and greatly envied, was the object of
that strict examination which women so greatly fear when they appear
for the first time in a new circle of society.
After seeing his wife into a carriage with his daughter and his
son-in-law, Hulot managed to escape unperceived, leaving his son and
Celestine to do the honors of the house. He got into Madame Marneffe's
carriage to see her home, but he found her silent and pensive, almost
melancholy.
"My happiness makes you very sad, Valerie," said he, putting his arm
round her and drawing her to him.
"Can you wonder, my dear," said she, "that a hapless woman should be a
little depressed at the thought of her first fall from virtue, even
when her husband's atrocities have set her free? Do you suppose that I
have no soul, no beliefs, no religion? Your glee this evening has been
really too barefaced; you have paraded me odiously. Really, a
schoolboy would have been less of a coxcomb. And the ladies have
dissected me with their side-glances and their satirical remarks.
Every woman has some care for her reputation, and you have wrecked
mine.
"Oh, I am yours and no mistake! And I have not an excuse left but that
of being faithful to you.--Monster that you are!" she added, laughing,
and allowing him to kiss her, "you knew very well what you were doing!
Madame Coquet, our chief clerk's wife, came to sit down by me, and
admired my lace. 'English point!' said she. 'Was it very expensive,
madame?'--'I do not know. This lace was my mother's. I am not rich
enough to buy the like,' said I."
Madame Marneffe, in short, had so bewitched the old beau, that he
really believed she was sinning for the first time for his sake, and
that he had inspired such a passion as had led her to this breach of
duty. She told him that the wretch Marneffe had neglected her after
they had been three days married, and for the most odious reasons.
Since then she had lived as innocently as a girl; marriage had seemed
to her so horrible. This was the cause of her present melancholy.
"If love should prove to be like marriage----" said she in tears.
These insinuating lies, with which almost every woman in Valerie's
predicament is ready, gave the Baron distant visions of the roses of
the seventh heaven. And so Valerie coquetted with her lover, while the
artist and Hortense were impatiently awaiting the moment when the
Baroness should have given the girl her last kiss and blessing.
At seven in the morning the Baron, perfectly happy--for his Valerie
was at once the most guileless of girls and the most consummate of
demons--went back to release his son and Celestine from their duties.
All the dancers, for the most part strangers, had taken possession of
the territory, as they do at every wedding-ball, and were keeping up
the endless figures of the cotillions, while the gamblers were still
crowding round the _bouillotte_ tables, and old Crevel had won six
thousand francs.
The morning papers, carried round the town, contained this paragraph
in the Paris article:--
"The marriage was celebrated this morning, at the Church of
Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, between Monsieur le Comte Steinbock and
Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot, daughter of Baron Hulot d'Ervy,
Councillor of State, and a Director at the War Office; niece of
the famous General Comte de Forzheim. The ceremony attracted a
large gathering. There were present some of the most distinguished
artists of the day: Leon de Lora, Joseph Bridau, Stidmann, and
Bixiou; the magnates of the War Office, of the Council of State,
and many members of the two Chambers; also the most distinguished
of the Polish exiles living in Paris: Counts Paz, Laginski, and
others.
"Monsieur le Comte Wenceslas Steinbock is grandnephew to the
famous general who served under Charles XII., King of Sweden. The
young Count, having taken part in the Polish rebellion, found a
refuge in France, where his well-earned fame as a sculptor has
procured him a patent of naturalization."
And so, in spite of the Baron's cruel lack of money, nothing was
lacking that public opinion could require, not even the trumpeting of
the newspapers over his daughter's marriage, which was solemnized in
the same way, in every particular, as his son's had been to
Mademoiselle Crevel. This display moderated the reports current as to
the Baron's financial position, while the fortune assigned to his
daughter explained the need for having borrowed money.
Here ends what is, in a way, the introduction to this story. It is to
the drama that follows that the premise is to a syllogism, what the
prologue is to a classical tragedy.
In Paris, when a woman determines to make a business, a trade, of her
beauty, it does not follow that she will make a fortune. Lovely
creatures may be found there, and full of wit, who are in wretched
circumstances, ending in misery a life begun in pleasure. And this is
why. It is not enough merely to accept the shameful life of a
courtesan with a view to earning its profits, and at the same time to
bear the simple garb of a respectable middle-class wife. Vice does not
triumph so easily; it resembles genius in so far that they both need a
concurrence of favorable conditions to develop the coalition of
fortune and gifts. Eliminate the strange prologue of the Revolution,
and the Emperor would never have existed; he would have been no more
than a second edition of Fabert. Venal beauty, if it finds no
amateurs, no celebrity, no cross of dishonor earned by squandering
men's fortunes, is Correggio in a hay-loft, is genius starving in a
garret. Lais, in Paris, must first and foremost find a rich man mad
enough to pay her price. She must keep up a very elegant style, for
this is her shop-sign; she must be sufficiently well bred to flatter
the vanity of her lovers; she must have the brilliant wit of a Sophie
Arnould, which diverts the apathy of rich men; finally, she must
arouse the passions of libertines by appearing to be mistress to one
man only who is envied by the rest.
These conditions, which a woman of that class calls being in luck, are
difficult to combine in Paris, although it is a city of millionaires,
of idlers, of used-up and capricious men.
Providence has, no doubt, vouchsafed protection to clerks and
middle-class citizens, for whom obstacles of this kind are at least
double in the sphere in which they move. At the same time, there are
enough Madame Marneffes in Paris to allow of our taking Valerie to
figure as a type in this picture of manners. Some of these women yield
to the double pressure of a genuine passion and of hard necessity, like
Madame Colleville, who was for long attached to one of the famous
orators of the left, Keller the banker. Others are spurred by vanity,
like Madame de la Baudraye, who remained almost respectable in spite
of her elopement with Lousteau. Some, again, are led astray by the
love of fine clothes, and some by the impossibility of keeping a house
going on obviously too narrow means. The stinginess of the State--or
of Parliament--leads to many disasters and to much corruption.
At the present moment the laboring classes are the fashionable object
of compassion; they are being murdered--it is said--by the
manufacturing capitalist; but the Government is a hundred times harder
than the meanest tradesman, it carries its economy in the article of
salaries to absolute folly. If you work harder, the merchant will pay
you more in proportion; but what does the State do for its crowd of
obscure and devoted toilers?
In a married woman it is an inexcusable crime when she wanders from
the path of honor; still, there are degrees even in such a case. Some
women, far from being depraved, conceal their fall and remain to all
appearances quite respectable, like those two just referred to, while
others add to their fault the disgrace of speculation. Thus Madame
Marneffe is, as it were, the type of those ambitious married
courtesans who from the first accept depravity with all its
consequences, and determine to make a fortune while taking their
pleasure, perfectly unscrupulous as to the means. But almost always a
woman like Madame Marneffe has a husband who is her confederate and
accomplice. These Machiavellis in petticoats are the most dangerous of
the sisterhood; of every evil class of Parisian woman, they are the
worst.
A mere courtesan--a Josepha, a Malaga, a Madame Schontz, a Jenny
Cadine--carries in her frank dishonor a warning signal as conspicuous
as the red lamp of a house of ill-fame or the flaring lights of a
gambling hell. A man knows that they light him to his ruin.
But mealy-mouthed propriety, the semblance of virtue, the hypocritical
ways of a married woman who never allows anything to be seen but the
vulgar needs of the household, and affects to refuse every kind of
extravagance, leads to silent ruin, dumb disaster, which is all the
more startling because, though condoned, it remains unaccounted for.
It is the ignoble bill of daily expenses and not gay dissipation that
devours the largest fortune. The father of a family ruins himself
ingloriously, and the great consolation of gratified vanity is wanting
in his misery.
This little sermon will go like a javelin to the heart of many a home.
Madame Marneffes are to be seen in every sphere of social life, even
at Court; for Valerie is a melancholy fact, modeled from the life in
the smallest details. And, alas! the portrait will not cure any man of
the folly of loving these sweetly-smiling angels, with pensive looks
and candid faces, whose heart is a cash-box.
About three years after Hortense's marriage, in 1841, Baron Hulot
d'Ervy was supposed to have sown his wild oats, to have "put up his
horses," to quote the expression used by Louis XV.'s head surgeon, and
yet Madame Marneffe was costing him twice as much as Josepha had ever
cost him. Still, Valerie, though always nicely dressed, affected the
simplicity of a subordinate official's wife; she kept her luxury for
her dressing-gowns, her home wear. She thus sacrificed her Parisian
vanity to her dear Hector. At the theatre, however, she always
appeared in a pretty bonnet and a dress of extreme elegance; and the
Baron took her in a carriage to a private box.
Her rooms, the whole of the second floor of a modern house in the Rue
Vanneau, between a fore-court and a garden, was redolent of
respectability. All its luxury was in good chintz hangings and
handsome convenient furniture.
Her bedroom, indeed, was the exception, and rich with such profusion
as Jenny Cadine or Madame Schontz might have displayed. There were
lace curtains, cashmere hangings, brocade portieres, a set of chimney
ornaments modeled by Stidmann, a glass cabinet filled with dainty
nicknacks. Hulot could not bear to see his Valerie in a bower of
inferior magnificence to the dunghill of gold and pearls owned by a
Josepha. The drawing-room was furnished with red damask, and the
dining-room had carved oak panels. But the Baron, carried away by his
wish to have everything in keeping, had at the end of six months,
added solid luxury to mere fashion, and had given her handsome
portable property, as, for instance, a service of plate that was to
cost more than twenty-four thousand francs.
Madame Marneffe's house had in a couple of years achieved a reputation
for being a very pleasant one. Gambling went on there. Valerie herself
was soon spoken of as an agreeable and witty woman. To account for her
change of style, a rumor was set going of an immense legacy bequeathed
to her by her "natural father," Marshal Montcornet, and left in trust.
With an eye to the future, Valerie had added religious to social
hypocrisy. Punctual at the Sunday services, she enjoyed all the honors
due to the pious. She carried the bag for the offertory, she was a
member of a charitable association, presented bread for the sacrament,
and did some good among the poor, all at Hector's expense. Thus
everything about the house was extremely seemly. And a great many
persons maintained that her friendship with the Baron was entirely
innocent, supporting the view by the gentleman's mature age, and
ascribing to him a Platonic liking for Madame Marneffe's pleasant wit,
charming manners, and conversation--such a liking as that of the late
lamented Louis XVIII. for a well-turned note.
The Baron always withdrew with the other company at about midnight,
and came back a quarter of an hour later.
The secret of this secrecy was as follows. The lodge-keepers of the
house were a Monsieur and Madame Olivier, who, under the Baron's
patronage, had been promoted from their humble and not very lucrative
post in the Rue du Doyenne to the highly-paid and handsome one in the
Rue Vanneau. Now, Madame Olivier, formerly a needlewoman in the
household of Charles X., who had fallen in the world with the
legitimate branch, had three children. The eldest, an under-clerk in a
notary's office, was object of his parents' adoration. This Benjamin,
for six years in danger of being drawn for the army, was on the point
of being interrupted in his legal career, when Madame Marneffe
contrived to have him declared exempt for one of those little
malformations which the Examining Board can always discern when
requested in a whisper by some power in the ministry. So Olivier,
formerly a huntsman to the King, and his wife would have crucified the
Lord again for the Baron or for Madame Marneffe.
What could the world have to say? It knew nothing of the former
episode of the Brazilian, Monsieur Montes de Montejanos--it could say
nothing. Besides, the world is very indulgent to the mistress of a
house where amusement is to be found.
And then to all her charms Valerie added the highly-prized advantage
of being an occult power. Claude Vignon, now secretary to Marshal the
Prince de Wissembourg, and dreaming of promotion to the Council of
State as a Master of Appeals, was constantly seen in her rooms, to
which came also some Deputies--good fellows and gamblers. Madame
Marneffe had got her circle together with prudent deliberation; only
men whose opinions and habits agreed foregathered there, men whose
interest it was to hold together and to proclaim the many merits of
the lady of the house. Scandal is the true Holy Alliance in Paris.
Take that as an axiom. Interests invariably fall asunder in the end;
vicious natures can always agree.
Within three months of settling in the Rue Vanneau, Madame Marneffe
had entertained Monsieur Crevel, who by that time was Mayor of his
_arrondissement_ and Officer of the Legion of Honor. Crevel had
hesitated; he would have to give up the famous uniform of the National
Guard in which he strutted at the Tuileries, believing himself quite
as much a soldier as the Emperor himself; but ambition, urged by
Madame Marneffe, had proved stronger than vanity. Then Monsieur le
Maire had considered his connection with Mademoiselle Heloise
Brisetout as quite incompatible with his political position.
Indeed, long before his accession to the civic chair of the Mayoralty,
his gallant intimacies had been wrapped in the deepest mystery. But,
as the reader may have guessed, Crevel had soon purchased the right of
taking his revenge, as often as circumstances allowed, for having been
bereft of Josepha, at the cost of a bond bearing six thousand francs
of interest in the name of Valerie Fortin, wife of Sieur Marneffe, for
her sole and separate use. Valerie, inheriting perhaps from her mother
the special acumen of the kept woman, read the character of her
grotesque adorer at a glance. The phrase "I never had a lady for a
mistress," spoken by Crevel to Lisbeth, and repeated by Lisbeth to her
dear Valerie, had been handsomely discounted in the bargain by which
she got her six thousand francs a year in five per cents. And since
then she had never allowed her prestige to grow less in the eyes of
Cesar Birotteau's erewhile bagman.
Crevel himself had married for money the daughter of a miller of la
Brie, an only child indeed, whose inheritance constituted
three-quarters of his fortune; for when retail-dealers grow rich, it
is generally not so much by trade as through some alliance between
the shop and rural thrift. A large proportion of the farmers,
corn-factors, dairy-keepers, and market-gardeners in the neighborhood
of Paris, dream of the glories of the desk for their daughters, and
look upon a shopkeeper, a jeweler, or a money-changer as a son-in-law
after their own heart, in preference to a notary or an attorney, whose
superior social position is a ground of suspicion; they are afraid of
being scorned in the future by these citizen bigwigs.