pleasures but those of paternity; she died young. Her libertine
husband, fettered at the beginning of his commercial career by the
necessity for working, and held in thrall by want of money, had led
the life of Tantalus. Thrown in--as he phrased it--with the most
elegant women in Paris, he let them out of the shop with servile
homage, while admiring their grace, their way of wearing the fashions,
and all the nameless charms of what is called breeding. To rise to the
level of one of these fairies of the drawing-room was a desire formed
in his youth, but buried in the depths of his heart. Thus to win the
favors of Madame Marneffe was to him not merely the realization of his
chimera, but, as has been shown, a point of pride, of vanity, of
self-satisfaction. His ambition grew with success; his brain was
turned with elation; and when the mind is captivated, the heart feels
more keenly, every gratification is doubled.
Also, it must be said that Madame Marneffe offered to Crevel a
refinement of pleasure of which he had no idea; neither Josepha nor
Heloise had loved him; and Madame Marneffe thought it necessary to
deceive him thoroughly, for this man, she saw, would prove an
inexhaustible till. The deceptions of a venal passion are more
delightful than the real thing. True love is mixed up with birdlike
squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but
a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, a piece of flattery to
the dupe's conceit.
The rare interviews granted to Crevel kept his passion at white heat.
He was constantly blocked by Valerie's virtuous severity; she acted
remorse, and wondered what her father must be thinking of her in the
paradise of the brave. Again and again he had to contend with a sort
of coldness, which the cunning slut made him believe he had overcome
by seeming to surrender to the man's crazy passion; and then, as if
ashamed, she entrenched herself once more in her pride of
respectability and airs of virtue, just like an Englishwoman, neither
more nor less; and she always crushed her Crevel under the weight of
her dignity--for Crevel had, in the first instance, swallowed her
pretensions to virtue.
In short, Valerie had special veins of affections which made her
equally indispensable to Crevel and to the Baron. Before the world she
displayed the attractive combination of modest and pensive innocence,
of irreproachable propriety, with a bright humor enhanced by the
suppleness, the grace and softness of the Creole; but in a
_tete-a-tete_ she would outdo any courtesan; she was audacious, amusing,
and full of original inventiveness. Such a contrast is irresistible to a
man of the Crevel type; he is flattered by believing himself sole
author of the comedy, thinking it is performed for his benefit alone,
and he laughs at the exquisite hypocrisy while admiring the hypocrite.
Valerie had taken entire possession of Baron Hulot; she had persuaded
him to grow old by one of those subtle touches of flattery which
reveal the diabolical wit of women like her. In all evergreen
constitutions a moment arrives when the truth suddenly comes out, as
in a besieged town which puts a good face on affairs as long as
possible. Valerie, foreseeing the approaching collapse of the old beau
of the Empire, determined to forestall it.
"Why give yourself so much bother, my dear old veteran?" said she one
day, six months after their doubly adulterous union. "Do you want to
be flirting? To be unfaithful to me? I assure you, I should like you
better without your make-up. Oblige me by giving up all your
artificial charms. Do you suppose that it is for two sous' worth of
polish on your boots that I love you? For your india-rubber belt, your
strait-waistcoat, and your false hair? And then, the older you look,
the less need I fear seeing my Hulot carried off by a rival."
And Hulot, trusting to Madame Marneffe's heavenly friendship as much
as to her love, intending, too, to end his days with her, had taken
this confidential hint, and ceased to dye his whiskers and hair. After
this touching declaration from his Valerie, handsome Hector made his
appearance one morning perfectly white. Madame Marneffe could assure
him that she had a hundred times detected the white line of the growth
of the hair.
"And white hair suits your face to perfection," said she; "it softens
it. You look a thousand times better, quite charming."
The Baron, once started on this path of reform, gave up his leather
waistcoat and stays; he threw off all his bracing. His stomach fell
and increased in size. The oak became a tower, and the heaviness of
his movements was all the more alarming because the Baron grew
immensely older by playing the part of Louis XII. His eyebrows were
still black, and left a ghostly reminiscence of Handsome Hulot, as
sometimes on the wall of some feudal building a faint trace of
sculpture remains to show what the castle was in the days of its
glory. This discordant detail made his eyes, still bright and
youthful, all the more remarkable in his tanned face, because it had
so long been ruddy with the florid hues of a Rubens; and now a certain
discoloration and the deep tension of the wrinkles betrayed the
efforts of a passion at odds with natural decay. Hulot was now one of
those stalwart ruins in which virile force asserts itself by tufts of
hair in the ears and nostrils and on the fingers, as moss grows on the
almost eternal monuments of the Roman Empire.
How had Valerie contrived to keep Crevel and Hulot side by side, each
tied to an apron-string, when the vindictive Mayor only longed to
triumph openly over Hulot? Without immediately giving an answer to
this question, which the course of the story will supply, it may be
said that Lisbeth and Valerie had contrived a powerful piece of
machinery which tended to this result. Marneffe, as he saw his wife
improved in beauty by the setting in which she was enthroned, like the
sun at the centre of the sidereal system, appeared, in the eyes of the
world, to have fallen in love with her again himself; he was quite
crazy about her. Now, though his jealousy made him somewhat of a
marplot, it gave enhanced value to Valerie's favors. Marneffe
meanwhile showed a blind confidence in his chief, which degenerated
into ridiculous complaisance. The only person whom he really would not
stand was Crevel.
Marneffe, wrecked by the debauchery of great cities, described by
Roman authors, though modern decency has no name for it, was as
hideous as an anatomical figure in wax. But this disease on feet,
clothed in good broadcloth, encased his lathlike legs in elegant
trousers. The hollow chest was scented with fine linen, and musk
disguised the odors of rotten humanity. This hideous specimen of
decaying vice, trotting in red heels--for Valerie dressed the man as
beseemed his income, his cross, and his appointment--horrified Crevel,
who could not meet the colorless eyes of the Government clerk.
Marneffe was an incubus to the Mayor. And the mean rascal, aware of
the strange power conferred on him by Lisbeth and his wife, was amused
by it; he played on it as on an instrument; and cards being the last
resource of a mind as completely played out as the body, he plucked
Crevel again and again, the Mayor thinking himself bound to
subserviency to the worthy official whom _he was cheating_.
Seeing Crevel a mere child in the hands of that hideous and atrocious
mummy, of whose utter vileness the Mayor knew nothing; and seeing him,
yet more, an object of deep contempt to Valerie, who made game of
Crevel as of some mountebank, the Baron apparently thought him so
impossible as a rival that he constantly invited him to dinner.
Valerie, protected by two lovers on guard, and by a jealous husband,
attracted every eye, and excited every desire in the circle she shone
upon. And thus, while keeping up appearances, she had, in the course
of three years, achieved the most difficult conditions of the success
a courtesan most cares for and most rarely attains, even with the help
of audacity and the glitter of an existence in the light of the sun.
Valerie's beauty, formerly buried in the mud of the Rue du Doyenne,
now, like a well-cut diamond exquisitely set by Chanor, was worth more
than its real value--it could break hearts. Claude Vignon adored
Valerie in secret.
This retrospective explanation, quite necessary after the lapse of
three years, shows Valerie's balance-sheet. Now for that of her
partner, Lisbeth.
Lisbeth Fischer filled the place in the Marneffe household of a
relation who combines the functions of a lady companion and a
housekeeper; but she suffered from none of the humiliations which, for
the most part, weigh upon the women who are so unhappy as to be
obliged to fill these ambiguous situations. Lisbeth and Valerie
offered the touching spectacle of one of those friendships between
women, so cordial and so improbable, that men, always too keen-tongued
in Paris, forthwith slander them. The contrast between Lisbeth's dry
masculine nature and Valerie's creole prettiness encouraged calumny.
And Madame Marneffe had unconsciously given weight to the scandal by
the care she took of her friend, with matrimonial views, which were,
as will be seen, to complete Lisbeth's revenge.
An immense change had taken place in Cousin Betty; and Valerie, who
wanted to smarten her, had turned it to the best account. The strange
woman had submitted to stays, and laced tightly, she used bandoline to
keep her hair smooth, wore her gowns as the dressmaker sent them home,
neat little boots, and gray silk stockings, all of which were included
in Valerie's bills, and paid for by the gentleman in possession. Thus
furbished up, and wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, Lisbeth would
have been unrecognizable by any one who had not seen her for three
years.
This other diamond--a black diamond, the rarest of all--cut by a
skilled hand, and set as best became her, was appreciated at her full
value by certain ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first
time might have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness
which the clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of
dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick
bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the
rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or
a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness,
the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of
Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian
sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, with life and movement.
Saved from want for the rest of her life, Lisbeth was most amiable;
wherever she dined she brought merriment. And the Baron paid the rent
of her little apartment, furnished, as we know, with the leavings of
her friend Valerie's former boudoir and bedroom.
"I began," she would say, "as a hungry nanny goat, and I am ending as
a _lionne_."
She still worked for Monsieur Rivet at the more elaborate kinds of
gold-trimming, merely, as she said, not to lose her time. At the same
time, she was, as we shall see, very full of business; but it is
inherent in the nature of country-folks never to give up
bread-winning; in this they are like the Jews.
Every morning, very early, Cousin Betty went off to market with the
cook. It was part of Lisbeth's scheme that the house-book, which was
ruining Baron Hulot, was to enrich her dear Valerie--as it did indeed.
Is there a housewife who, since 1838, has not suffered from the evil
effects of Socialist doctrines diffused among the lower classes by
incendiary writers? In every household the plague of servants is
nowadays the worst of financial afflictions. With very few exceptions,
who ought to be rewarded with the Montyon prize, the cook, male or
female, is a domestic robber, a thief taking wages, and perfectly
barefaced, with the Government for a fence, developing the tendency to
dishonesty, which is almost authorized in the cook by the time-honored
jest as to the "handle of the basket." The women who formerly picked
up their forty sous to buy a lottery ticket now take fifty francs to
put into the savings bank. And the smug Puritans who amuse themselves
in France with philanthropic experiments fancy that they are making
the common people moral!
Between the market and the master's table the servants have their
secret toll, and the municipality of Paris is less sharp in collecting
the city-dues than the servants are in taking theirs on every single
thing. To say nothing of fifty per cent charged on every form of food,
they demand large New Year's premiums from the tradesmen. The best
class of dealers tremble before this occult power, and subsidize it
without a word--coachmakers, jewelers, tailors, and all. If any
attempt is made to interfere with them, the servants reply with
impudent retorts, or revenge themselves by the costly blunders of
assumed clumsiness; and in these days they inquire into their master's
character as, formerly, the master inquired into theirs. This mischief
is now really at its height, and the law-courts are beginning to take
cognizance of it; but in vain, for it cannot be remedied but by a law
which shall compel domestic servants, like laborers, to have a
pass-book as a guarantee of conduct. Then the evil will vanish as if
by magic. If every servant were obliged to show his pass-book, and if
masters were required to state in it the cause of his dismissal, this
would certainly prove a powerful check to the evil.
The men who are giving their attentions to the politics of the day
know not to what lengths the depravity of the lower classes has gone.
Statistics are silent as to the startling number of working men of
twenty who marry cooks of between forty and fifty enriched by robbery.
We shudder to think of the result of such unions from the three points
of view of increasing crime, degeneracy of the race, and miserable
households.
As to the mere financial mischief that results from domestic
peculation, that too is immense from a political point of view. Life
being made to cost double, any superfluity becomes impossible in most
households. Now superfluity means half the trade of the world, as it
is half the elegance of life. Books and flowers are to many persons as
necessary as bread.
Lisbeth, well aware of this dreadful scourge of Parisian households,
determined to manage Valerie's, promising her every assistance in the
terrible scene when the two women had sworn to be like sisters. So she
had brought from the depths of the Vosges a humble relation on her
mother's side, a very pious and honest soul, who had been cook to the
Bishop of Nancy. Fearing, however, her inexperience of Paris ways, and
yet more the evil counsel which wrecks such fragile virtue, at first
Lisbeth always went to market with Mathurine, and tried to teach her
what to buy. To know the real prices of things and command the
salesman's respect; to purchase unnecessary delicacies, such as fish,
only when they were cheap; to be well informed as to the price current
of groceries and provisions, so as to buy when prices are low in
anticipation of a rise,--all this housekeeping skill is in Paris
essential to domestic economy. As Mathurine got good wages and many
presents, she liked the house well enough to be glad to drive good
bargains. And by this time Lisbeth had made her quite a match for
herself, sufficiently experienced and trustworthy to be sent to market
alone, unless Valerie was giving a dinner--which, in fact, was not
unfrequently the case. And this was how it came about.
The Baron had at first observed the strictest decorum; but his passion
for Madame Marneffe had ere long become so vehement, so greedy, that
he would never quit her if he could help it. At first he dined there
four times a week; then he thought it delightful to dine with her
every day. Six months after his daughter's marriage he was paying her
two thousand francs a month for his board. Madame Marneffe invited any
one her dear Baron wished to entertain. The dinner was always arranged
for six; he could bring in three unexpected guests. Lisbeth's economy
enabled her to solve the extraordinary problem of keeping up the table
in the best style for a thousand francs a month, giving the other
thousand to Madame Marneffe. Valerie's dress being chiefly paid for by
Crevel and the Baron, the two women saved another thousand francs a
month on this.
And so this pure and innocent being had already accumulated a hundred
and fifty thousand francs in savings. She had capitalized her income
and monthly bonus, and swelled the amount by enormous interest, due to
Crevel's liberality in allowing his "little Duchess" to invest her
money in partnership with him in his financial operations. Crevel had
taught Valerie the slang and the procedure of the money market, and,
like every Parisian woman, she had soon outstripped her master.
Lisbeth, who never spent a sou of her twelve hundred francs, whose
rent and dress were given to her, and who never put her hand in her
pocket, had likewise a small capital of five or six thousand francs,
of which Crevel took fatherly care.
At the same time, two such lovers were a heavy burthen on Valerie. On
the day when this drama reopens, Valerie, spurred by one of those
incidents which have the effect in life that the ringing of a bell has
in inducing a swarm of bees to settle, went up to Lisbeth's rooms to
give vent to one of those comforting lamentations--a sort of cigarette
blown off from the tongue--by which women alleviate the minor miseries
of life.
"Oh, Lisbeth, my love, two hours of Crevel this morning! It is
crushing! How I wish I could send you in my place!"
"That, unluckily, is impossible," said Lisbeth, smiling. "I shall die
a maid."
"Two old men lovers! Really, I am ashamed sometimes! If my poor mother
could see me."
"You are mistaking me for Crevel!" said Lisbeth.
"Tell me, my little Betty, do you not despise me?"
"Oh! if I had but been pretty, what adventures I would have had!"
cried Lisbeth. "That is your justification."
"But you would have acted only at the dictates of your heart," said
Madame Marneffe, with a sigh.
"Pooh! Marneffe is a dead man they have forgotten to bury," replied
Lisbeth. "The Baron is as good as your husband; Crevel is your adorer;
it seems to me that you are quite in order--like every other married
woman."
"No, it is not that, dear, adorable thing; that is not where the shoe
pinches; you do not choose to understand."
"Yes, I do," said Lisbeth. "The unexpressed factor is part of my
revenge; what can I do? I am working it out."
"I love Wenceslas so that I am positively growing thin, and I can
never see him," said Valerie, throwing up her arms. "Hulot asks him to
dinner, and my artist declines. He does not know that I idolize him,
the wretch! What is his wife after all? Fine flesh! Yes, she is
handsome, but I--I know myself--I am worse!"
"Be quite easy, my child, he will come," said Lisbeth, in the tone of
a nurse to an impatient child. "He shall."
"But when?"
"This week perhaps."
"Give me a kiss."
As may be seen, these two women were but one. Everything Valerie did,
even her most reckless actions, her pleasures, her little sulks, were
decided on after serious deliberation between them.
Lisbeth, strangely excited by this harlot existence, advised Valerie
on every step, and pursued her course of revenge with pitiless logic.
She really adored Valerie; she had taken her to be her child, her
friend, her love; she found her docile, as Creoles are, yielding from
voluptuous indolence; she chattered with her morning after morning
with more pleasure than with Wenceslas; they could laugh together over
the mischief they plotted, and over the folly of men, and count up the
swelling interest on their respective savings.
Indeed, in this new enterprise and new affection, Lisbeth had found
food for her activity that was far more satisfying than her insane
passion for Wenceslas. The joys of gratified hatred are the fiercest
and strongest the heart can know. Love is the gold, hatred the iron of
the mine of feeling that lies buried in us. And then, Valerie was, to
Lisbeth, Beauty in all its glory--the beauty she worshiped, as we
worship what we have not, beauty far more plastic to her hand than
that of Wenceslas, who had always been cold to her and distant.
At the end of nearly three years, Lisbeth was beginning to perceive
the progress of the underground mine on which she was expending her
life and concentrating her mind. Lisbeth planned, Madame Marneffe
acted. Madame Marneffe was the axe, Lisbeth was the hand the wielded
it, and that hand was rapidly demolishing the family which was every
day more odious to her; for we can hate more and more, just as, when
we love, we love better every day.
Love and hatred are feelings that feed on themselves; but of the two,
hatred has the longer vitality. Love is restricted within limits of
power; it derives its energies from life and from lavishness. Hatred
is like death, like avarice; it is, so to speak, an active
abstraction, above beings and things.
Lisbeth, embarked on the existence that was natural to her, expended
in it all her faculties; governing, like the Jesuits, by occult
influences. The regeneration of her person was equally complete; her
face was radiant. Lisbeth dreamed of becoming Madame la Marechale
Hulot.
This little scene, in which the two friends had bluntly uttered their
ideas without any circumlocution in expressing them, took place
immediately on Lisbeth's return from market, whither she had been to
procure the materials for an elegant dinner. Marneffe, who hoped to
get Coquet's place, was to entertain him and the virtuous Madame
Coquet, and Valerie hoped to persuade Hulot, that very evening, to
consider the head-clerk's resignation.
Lisbeth dressed to go to the Baroness, with whom she was to dine.
"You will come back in time to make tea for us, my Betty?" said
Valerie.
"I hope so."
"You hope so--why? Have you come to sleeping with Adeline to drink her
tears while she is asleep?"
"If only I could!" said Lisbeth, laughing. "I would not refuse. She is
expiating her happiness--and I am glad, for I remember our young days.
It is my turn now. She will be in the mire, and I shall be Comtesse de
Forzheim!"
Lisbeth set out for the Rue Plumet, where she now went as to the
theatre--to indulge her emotions.
The residence Hulot had found for his wife consisted of a large, bare
entrance-room, a drawing-room, and a bed and dressing-room. The
dining-room was next the drawing-room on one side. Two servants' rooms
and a kitchen on the third floor completed the accommodation, which
was not unworthy of a Councillor of State, high up in the War Office.
The house, the court-yard, and the stairs were extremely handsome.
The Baroness, who had to furnish her drawing-room, bed-room, and
dining-room with the relics of her splendor, had brought away the best
of the remains from the house in the Rue de l'Universite. Indeed, the
poor woman was attached to these mute witnesses of her happier life;
to her they had an almost consoling eloquence. In memory she saw her
flowers, as in the carpets she could trace patterns hardly visible now
to other eyes.
On going into the spacious anteroom, where twelve chairs, a barometer,
a large stove, and long, white cotton curtains, bordered with red,
suggested the dreadful waiting-room of a Government office, the
visitor felt oppressed, conscious at once of the isolation in which
the mistress lived. Grief, like pleasure, infects the atmosphere. A
first glance into any home is enough to tell you whether love or
despair reigns there.
Adeline would be found sitting in an immense bedroom with beautiful
furniture by Jacob Desmalters, of mahogany finished in the Empire
style with ormolu, which looks even less inviting than the brass-work
of Louis XVI.! It gave one a shiver to see this lonely woman sitting
on a Roman chair, a work-table with sphinxes before her, colorless,
affecting false cheerfulness, but preserving her imperial air, as she
had preserved the blue velvet gown she always wore in the house. Her
proud spirit sustained her strength and preserved her beauty.
The Baroness, by the end of her first year of banishment to this
apartment, had gauged every depth of misfortune.
"Still, even here my Hector has made my life much handsomer than it
should be for a mere peasant," said she to herself. "He chooses that
it should be so; his will be done! I am Baroness Hulot, the
sister-in-law of a Marshal of France. I have done nothing wrong; my
two children are settled in life; I can wait for death, wrapped in
the spotless veil of an immaculate wife and the crape of departed
happiness."