mischief Madame Marneffes may do in a family, and the means by which
they reach poor virtuous wives apparently so far out of their ken. And
then, if we only transfer, in fancy, such doings to the upper class of
society about a throne, and if we consider what kings' mistresses must
have cost them, we may estimate the debt owed by a nation to a
sovereign who sets the example of a decent and domestic life.
In Paris each ministry is a little town by itself, whence women are
banished; but there is just as much detraction and scandal as though
the feminine population were admitted there. At the end of three
years, Monsieur Marneffe's position was perfectly clear and open to
the day, and in every room one and another asked, "Is Marneffe to be,
or not to be, Coquet's successor?" Exactly as the question might have
been put to the Chamber, "Will the estimates pass or not pass?" The
smallest initiative on the part of the board of Management was
commented on; everything in Baron Hulot's department was carefully
noted. The astute State Councillor had enlisted on his side the victim
of Marneffe's promotion, a hard-working clerk, telling him that if he
could fill Marneffe's place, he would certainly succeed to it; he had
told him that the man was dying. So this clerk was scheming for
Marneffe's advancement.
When Hulot went through his anteroom, full of visitors, he saw
Marneffe's colorless face in a corner, and sent for him before any one
else.
"What do you want of me, my dear fellow?" said the Baron, disguising
his anxiety.
"Monsieur le Directeur, I am the laughing-stock of the office, for it
has become known that the chief of the clerks has left this morning
for a holiday, on the ground of his health. He is to be away a month.
Now, we all know what waiting for a month means. You deliver me over
to the mockery of my enemies, and it is bad enough to be drummed upon
one side; drumming on both at once, monsieur, is apt to burst the
drum."
"My dear Marneffe, it takes long patience to gain an end. You cannot
be made head-clerk in less than two months, if ever. Just when I must,
as far as possible, secure my own position, is not the time to be
applying for your promotion, which would raise a scandal."
"If you are broke, I shall never get it," said Marneffe coolly. "And
if you get me the place, it will make no difference in the end."
"Then I am to sacrifice myself for you?" said the Baron.
"If you do not, I shall be much mistaken in you."
"You are too exclusively Marneffe, Monsieur Marneffe," said Hulot,
rising and showing the clerk the door.
"I have the honor to wish you good-morning, Monsieur le Baron," said
Marneffe humbly.
"What an infamous rascal!" thought the Baron. "This is uncommonly like
a summons to pay within twenty-four hours on pain of distraint."
Two hours later, just when the Baron had been instructing Claude
Vignon, whom he was sending to the Ministry of Justice to obtain
information as to the judicial authorities under whose jurisdiction
Johann Fischer might fall, Reine opened the door of his private room
and gave him a note, saying she would wait for the answer.
"Valerie is mad!" said the Baron to himself. "To send Reine! It is
enough to compromise us all, and it certainly compromises that
dreadful Marneffe's chances of promotion!"
But he dismissed the minister's private secretary, and read as
follows:--
"Oh, my dear friend, what a scene I have had to endure! Though you
have made me happy for three years, I have paid dearly for it! He
came in from the office in a rage that made me quake. I knew he
was ugly; I have seen him a monster! His four real teeth
chattered, and he threatened me with his odious presence without
respite if I should continue to receive you. My poor, dear old
boy, our door is closed against you henceforth. You see my tears;
they are dropping on the paper and soaking it; can you read what I
write, dear Hector? Oh, to think of never seeing you, of giving
you up when I bear in me some of your life, as I flatter myself I
have your heart--it is enough to kill me. Think of our little
Hector!
"Do not forsake me, but do not disgrace yourself for Marneffe's
sake; do not yield to his threats.
"I love you as I have never loved! I remember all the sacrifices
you have made for your Valerie; she is not, and never will be,
ungrateful; you are, and will ever be, my only husband. Think no
more of the twelve hundred francs a year I asked you to settle on
the dear little Hector who is to come some months hence; I will
not cost you anything more. And besides, my money will always be
yours.
"Oh, if you only loved me as I love you, my Hector, you would
retire on your pension; we should both take leave of our family,
our worries, our surroundings, so full of hatred, and we should go
to live with Lisbeth in some pretty country place--in Brittany, or
wherever you like. There we should see nobody, and we should be
happy away from the world. Your pension and the little property I
can call my own would be enough for us. You say you are jealous;
well, you would then have your Valerie entirely devoted to her
Hector, and you would never have to talk in a loud voice, as you
did the other day. I shall have but one child--ours--you may be
sure, my dearly loved old veteran.
"You cannot conceive of my fury, for you cannot know how he
treated me, and the foul words he vomited on your Valerie. Such
words would disgrace my paper; a woman such as I am--Montcornet's
daughter--ought never to have heard one of them in her life. I
only wish you had been there, that I might have punished him with
the sight of the mad passion I felt for you. My father would have
killed the wretch; I can only do as women do--love you devotedly!
Indeed, my love, in the state of exasperation in which I am, I
cannot possibly give up seeing you. I must positively see you, in
secret, every day! That is what we are, we women. Your resentment
is mine. If you love me, I implore you, do not let him be
promoted; leave him to die a second-class clerk.
"At this moment I have lost my head; I still seem to hear him
abusing me. Betty, who had meant to leave me, has pity on me, and
will stay for a few days.
"My dear kind love, I do not know yet what is to be done. I see
nothing for it but flight. I always delight in the country
--Brittany, Languedoc, what you will, so long as I am free to love
you. Poor dear, how I pity you! Forced now to go back to your old
Adeline, to that lachrymal urn--for, as he no doubt told you, the
monster means to watch me night and day; he spoke of a detective!
Do not come here, he is capable of anything I know, since he could
make use of me for the basest purposes of speculation. I only wish
I could return you all the things I have received from your
generosity.
"Ah! my kind Hector, I may have flirted, and have seemed to you to
be fickle, but you did not know your Valerie; she liked to tease
you, but she loves you better than any one in the world.
"He cannot prevent your coming to see your cousin; I will arrange
with her that we have speech with each other. My dear old boy,
write me just a line, pray, to comfort me in the absence of your
dear self. (Oh, I would give one of my hands to have you by me on
our sofa!) A letter will work like a charm; write me something
full of your noble soul; I will return your note to you, for I
must be cautious; I should not know where to hide it, he pokes his
nose in everywhere. In short, comfort your Valerie, your little
wife, the mother of your child.--To think of my having to write to
you, when I used to see you every day. As I say to Lisbeth, 'I did
not know how happy I was.' A thousand kisses, dear boy. Be true to
your
"VALERIE."
"And tears!" said Hulot to himself as he finished this letter, "tears
which have blotted out her name.--How is she?" said he to Reine.
"Madame is in bed; she has dreadful spasms," replied Reine. "She had a
fit of hysterics that twisted her like a withy round a faggot. It came
on after writing. It comes of crying so much. She heard monsieur's
voice on the stairs."
The Baron in his distress wrote the following note on office paper
with a printed heading:--
"Be quite easy, my angel, he will die a second-class clerk!--Your
idea is admirable; we will go and live far from Paris, where we
shall be happy with our little Hector; I will retire on my
pension, and I shall be sure to find some good appointment on a
railway.
"Ah, my sweet friend, I feel so much the younger for your letter!
I shall begin life again and make a fortune, you will see, for our
dear little one. As I read your letter, a thousand times more
ardent than those of the _Nouvelle Heloise_, it worked a miracle!
I had not believed it possible that I could love you more. This
evening, at Lisbeth's you will see
"YOUR HECTOR, FOR LIFE."
Reine carried off this reply, the first letter the Baron had written
to his "sweet friend." Such emotions to some extent counterbalanced
the disasters growling in the distance; but the Baron, at this moment
believing he could certainly avert the blows aimed at his uncle,
Johann Fischer, thought only of the deficit.
One of the characteristics of the Bonapartist temperament is a firm
belief in the power of the sword, and confidence in the superiority of
the military over civilians. Hulot laughed to scorn the Public
Prosecutor in Algiers, where the War Office is supreme. Man is always
what he has once been. How can the officers of the Imperial Guard
forget that time was when the mayors of the largest towns in the
Empire and the Emperor's prefects, Emperors themselves on a minute
scale, would come out to meet the Imperial Guard, to pay their
respects on the borders of the Departments through which it passed,
and to do it, in short, the homage due to sovereigns?
At half-past four the baron went straight to Madame Marneffe's; his
heart beat as high as a young man's as he went upstairs, for he was
asking himself this question, "Shall I see her? or shall I not?"
How was he now to remember the scene of the morning when his weeping
children had knelt at his feet? Valerie's note, enshrined for ever in
a thin pocket-book over his heart, proved to him that she loved him
more than the most charming of young men.
Having rung, the unhappy visitor heard within the shuffling slippers
and vexatious scraping cough of the detestable master. Marneffe opened
the door, but only to put himself into an attitude and point to the
stairs, exactly as Hulot had shown him the door of his private room.
"You are too exclusively Hulot, Monsieur Hulot!" said he.
The Baron tried to pass him, Marneffe took a pistol out of his pocket
and cocked it.
"Monsieur le Baron," said he, "when a man is as vile as I am--for you
think me very vile, don't you?--he would be the meanest galley-slave
if he did not get the full benefit of his betrayed honor.--You are for
war; it will be hot work and no quarter. Come here no more, and do not
attempt to get past me. I have given the police notice of my position
with regard to you."
And taking advantage of Hulot's amazement, he pushed him out and shut
the door.
"What a low scoundrel!" said Hulot to himself, as he went upstairs to
Lisbeth. "I understand her letter now. Valerie and I will go away from
Paris. Valerie is wholly mine for the remainder of my days; she will
close my eyes."
Lisbeth was out. Madame Olivier told the Baron that she had gone to
his wife's house, thinking that she would find him there.
"Poor thing! I should never have expected her to be so sharp as she
was this morning," thought Hulot, recalling Lisbeth's behavior as he
made his way from the Rue Vanneau to the Rue Plumet.
As he turned the corner of the Rue Vanneau and the Rue de Babylone, he
looked back at the Eden whence Hymen had expelled him with the sword
of the law. Valerie, at her window, was watching his departure; as he
glanced up, she waved her handkerchief, but the rascally Marneffe hit
his wife's cap and dragged her violently away from the window. A tear
rose to the great official's eye.
"Oh! to be so well loved! To see a woman so ill used, and to be so
nearly seventy years old!" thought he.
Lisbeth had come to give the family the good news. Adeline and
Hortense had already heard that the Baron, not choosing to compromise
himself in the eyes of the whole office by appointing Marneffe to the
first class, would be turned from the door by the Hulot-hating
husband. Adeline, very happy, had ordered a dinner that her Hector was
to like better than any of Valerie's; and Lisbeth, in her devotion,
was helping Mariette to achieve this difficult result. Cousin Betty
was the idol of the hour. Mother and daughter kissed her hands, and
had told her with touching delight that the Marshal consented to have
her as his housekeeper.
"And from that, my dear, there is but one step to becoming his wife!"
said Adeline.
"In fact, he did not say no when Victorin mentioned it," added the
Countess.
The Baron was welcomed home with such charming proofs of affection, so
pathetically overflowing with love, that he was fain to conceal his
troubles.
Marshal Hulot came to dinner. After dinner, Hector did not go out.
Victorin and his wife joined them, and they made up a rubber.
"It is a long time, Hector," said the Marshal gravely, "since you gave
us the treat of such an evening."
This speech from the old soldier, who spoiled his brother though he
thus implicitly blamed him, made a deep impression. It showed how wide
and deep were the wounds in a heart where all the woes he had divined
had found an echo. At eight o'clock the Baron insisted on seeing
Lisbeth home, promising to return.
"Do you know, Lisbeth, he ill-treats her!" said he in the street. "Oh,
I never loved her so well!"
"I never imagined that Valerie loved you so well," replied Lisbeth.
"She is frivolous and a coquette, she loves to have attentions paid
her, and to have the comedy of love-making performed for her, as she
says; but you are her only real attachment."
"What message did she send me?"
"Why, this," said Lisbeth. "She has, as you know, been on intimate
terms with Crevel. You must owe her no grudge, for that, in fact, is
what has raised her above utter poverty for the rest of her life; but
she detests him, and matters are nearly at an end.--Well, she has kept
the key of some rooms--"
"Rue du Dauphin!" cried the thrice-blest Baron. "If it were for that
alone, I would overlook Crevel.--I have been there; I know."
"Here, then, is the key," said Lisbeth. "Have another made from it in
the course of to-morrow--two if you can."
"And then," said Hulot eagerly.
"Well, I will dine at your house again to-morrow; you must give me
back Valerie's key, for old Crevel might ask her to return it to him,
and you can meet her there the day after; then you can decide what
your facts are to be. You will be quite safe, as there are two ways
out. If by chance Crevel, who is _Regence_ in his habits, as he is
fond of saying, should come in by the side street, you could go out
through the shop, or _vice versa_.
"You owe all this to me, you old villain; now what will you do for
me?"
"Whatever you want."
"Then you will not oppose my marrying your brother?"
"You! the Marechale Hulot, the Comtesse de Frozheim?" cried Hector,
startled.
"Well, Adeline is a Baroness!" retorted Betty in a vicious and
formidable tone. "Listen to me, you old libertine. You know how
matters stand; your family may find itself starving in the gutter--"
"That is what I dread," said Hulot in dismay.
"And if your brother were to die, who would maintain your wife and
daughter? The widow of a Marshal gets at least six thousand francs
pension, doesn't she? Well, then, I wish to marry to secure bread for
your wife and daughter--old dotard!"
"I had not seen it in that light!" said the Baron. "I will talk to my
brother--for we are sure of you.--Tell my angel that my life is hers."
And the Baron, having seen Lisbeth go into the house in the Rue
Vanneau, went back to his whist and stayed at home. The Baroness was
at the height of happiness; her husband seemed to be returning to
domestic habits; for about a fortnight he went to his office at nine
every morning, he came in to dinner at six, and spent the evening with
his family. He twice took Adeline and Hortense to the play. The mother
and daughter paid for three thanksgiving masses, and prayed to God to
suffer them to keep the husband and father He had restored to them.
One evening Victorin Hulot, seeing his father retire for the night,
said to his mother:
"Well, we are at any rate so far happy that my father has come back to
us. My wife and I shall never regret our capital if only this lasts--"
"Your father is nearly seventy," said the Baroness. "He still thinks
of Madame Marneffe, that I can see; but he will forget her in time. A
passion for women is not like gambling, or speculation, or avarice;
there is an end to it."
But Adeline, still beautiful in spite of her fifty years and her
sorrows, in this was mistaken. Profligates, men whom Nature has gifted
with the precious power of loving beyond the limits ordinarily set to
love, rarely are as old as their age.
During this relapse into virtue Baron Hulot had been three times to
the Rue du Dauphin, and had certainly not been the man of seventy. His
rekindled passion made him young again, and he would have sacrificed
his honor to Valerie, his family, his all, without a regret. But
Valerie, now completely altered, never mentioned money, not even the
twelve hundred francs a year to be settled on their son; on the
contrary, she offered him money, she loved Hulot as a woman of
six-and-thirty loves a handsome law-student--a poor, poetical, ardent
boy. And the hapless wife fancied she had reconquered her dear Hector!
The fourth meeting between this couple had been agreed upon at the end
of the third, exactly as formerly in Italian theatres the play was
announced for the next night. The hour fixed was nine in the morning.
On the next day when the happiness was due for which the amorous old
man had resigned himself to domestic rules, at about eight in the
morning, Reine came and asked to see the Baron. Hulot, fearing some
catastrophe, went out to speak with Reine, who would not come into the
anteroom. The faithful waiting-maid gave him the following note:--
"DEAR OLD MAN,--Do not go to the Rue du Dauphin. Our incubus is
ill, and I must nurse him; but be there this evening at nine.
Crevel is at Corbeil with Monsieur Lebas; so I am sure he will
bring no princess to his little palace. I have made arrangements
here to be free for the night and get back before Marneffe is
awake. Answer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a
wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did. I am told she
is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a
gay dog! Burn this note; I am suspicious of every one."
Hulot wrote this scrap in reply:
"MY LOVE,--As I have told you, my wife has not for five-and-twenty
years interfered with my pleasures. For you I would give up a
hundred Adelines.--I will be in the Crevel sanctum at nine this
evening awaiting my divinity. Oh that your clerk might soon die!
We should part no more. And this is the dearest wish of
"YOUR HECTOR."
That evening the Baron told his wife that he had business with the
Minister at Saint-Cloud, that he would come home at about four or five
in the morning; and he went to the Rue du Dauphin. It was towards the
end of the month of June.
Few men have in the course of their life known really the dreadful
sensation of going to their death; those who have returned from the
foot of the scaffold may be easily counted. But some have had a vivid
experience of it in dreams; they have gone through it all, to the
sensation of the knife at their throat, at the moment when waking and
daylight come to release them.--Well, the sensation to which the
Councillor of State was a victim at five in the morning in Crevel's
handsome and elegant bed, was immeasurably worse than that of feeling
himself bound to the fatal block in the presence of ten thousand
spectators looking at you with twenty thousand sparks of fire.
Valerie was asleep in a graceful attitude. She was lovely, as a woman
is who is lovely enough to look so even in sleep. It is art invading
nature; in short, a living picture.
In his horizontal position the Baron's eyes were but three feet above
the floor. His gaze, wandering idly, as that of a man who is just
awake and collecting his ideas, fell on a door painted with flowers by
Jan, an artist disdainful of fame. The Baron did not indeed see twenty
thousand flaming eyes, like the man condemned to death; he saw but
one, of which the shaft was really more piercing than the thousands on
the Public Square.
Now this sensation, far rarer in the midst of enjoyment even than that
of a man condemned to death, was one for which many a splenetic
Englishman would certainly pay a high price. The Baron lay there,
horizontal still, and literally bathed in cold sweat. He tried to
doubt the fact; but this murderous eye had a voice. A sound of
whispering was heard through the door.
"So long as it is nobody but Crevel playing a trick on me!" said the
Baron to himself, only too certain of an intruder in the temple.
The door was opened. The Majesty of the French Law, which in all
documents follows next to the King, became visible in the person of a
worthy little police-officer supported by a tall Justice of the Peace,
both shown in by Monsieur Marneffe. The police functionary, rooted in
shoes of which the straps were tied together with flapping bows, ended
at top in a yellow skull almost bare of hair, and a face betraying him
as a wide-awake, cheerful, and cunning dog, from whom Paris life had
no secrets. His eyes, though garnished with spectacles, pierced the
glasses with a keen mocking glance. The Justice of the Peace, a
retired attorney, and an old admirer of the fair sex, envied the
delinquent.
"Pray excuse the strong measures required by our office, Monsieur le
Baron!" said the constable; "we are acting for the plaintiff. The
Justice of the Peace is here to authorize the visitation of the
premises.--I know who you are, and who the lady is who is accused."
Valerie opened her astonished eyes, gave such a shriek as actresses
use to depict madness on the stage, writhed in convulsions on the bed,
like a witch of the Middle Ages in her sulphur-colored frock on a bed
of faggots.
"Death, and I am ready! my dear Hector--but a police court?--Oh!
never."
With one bound she passed the three spectators and crouched under the
little writing-table, hiding her face in her hands.
"Ruin! Death!" she cried.
"Monsieur," said Marneffe to Hulot, "if Madame Marneffe goes mad, you
are worse than a profligate; you will be a murderer."
What can a man do, what can he say, when he is discovered in a bed
which is not his, even on the score of hiring, with a woman who is no
more his than the bed is?--Well, this:
"Monsieur the Justice of the Peace, Monsieur the Police Officer," said
the Baron with some dignity, "be good enough to take proper care of
that unhappy woman, whose reason seems to me to be in danger.--You can
harangue me afterwards. The doors are locked, no doubt; you need not
fear that she will get away, or I either, seeing the costume we wear."
The two functionaries bowed to the magnate's injunctions.
"You, come here, miserable cur!" said Hulot in a low voice to
Marneffe, taking him by the arm and drawing him closer. "It is not I,
but you, who will be the murderer! You want to be head-clerk of your
room and officer of the Legion of Honor?"
"That in the first place, Chief!" replied Marneffe, with a bow.
"You shall be all that, only soothe your wife and dismiss these
fellows."
"Nay, nay!" said Marneffe knowingly. "These gentlemen must draw up
their report as eyewitnesses to the fact; without that, the chief
evidence in my case, where should I be? The higher official ranks are
chokeful of rascalities. You have done me out of my wife, and you have
not promoted me, Monsieur le Baron; I give you only two days to get
out of the scrape. Here are some letters--"
"Some letters!" interrupted Hulot.
"Yes; letters which prove that you are the father of the child my wife
expects to give birth to.--You understand? And you ought to settle on
my son a sum equal to what he will lose through this bastard. But I
will be reasonable; this does not distress me, I have no mania for
paternity myself. A hundred louis a year will satisfy me. By to-morrow
I must be Monsieur Coquet's successor and see my name on the list for
promotion in the Legion of Honor at the July fetes, or else--the
documentary evidence and my charge against you will be laid before the
Bench. I am not so hard to deal with after all, you see."