five-franc pieces in a thousand francs, and I will try to earn your
money."
"Good-morning, then, Madame Bijou."
On going into the boudoir, the singer found that Madame Hulot had
fainted; but in spite of having lost consciousness, her nervous
trembling kept her still perpetually shaking, as the pieces of a snake
that has been cut up still wriggle and move. Strong salts, cold water,
and all the ordinary remedies were applied to recall the Baroness to
her senses, or rather, to the apprehension of her sorrows.
"Ah! mademoiselle, how far has he fallen!" cried she, recognizing
Josepha, and finding that she was alone with her.
"Take heart, madame," replied the actress, who had seated herself on a
cushion at Adeline's feet, and was kissing her hands. "We shall find
him; and if he is in the mire, well, he must wash himself. Believe me,
with people of good breeding it is a matter of clothes.--Allow me to
make up for you the harm I have done you, for I see how much you are
attached to your husband, in spite of his misconduct--or you should
not have come here.--Well, you see, the poor man is so fond of women.
If you had had a little of our dash, you would have kept him from
running about the world; for you would have been what we can never be
--all the women man wants.
"The State ought to subsidize a school of manners for honest women!
But governments are so prudish! Still, they are guided by men, whom we
privately guide. My word, I pity nations!
"But the matter in question is how you can be helped, and not to laugh
at the world.--Well, madame, be easy, go home again, and do not worry.
I will bring your Hector back to you as he was as a man of thirty."
"Ah, mademoiselle, let us go to see that Madame Grenouville," said the
Baroness. "She surely knows something! Perhaps I may see the Baron
this very day, and be able to snatch him at once from poverty and
disgrace."
"Madame, I will show you the deep gratitude I feel towards you by not
displaying the stage-singer Josepha, the Duc d'Herouville's mistress,
in the company of the noblest, saintliest image of virtue. I respect
you too much to be seen by your side. This is not acted humility; it
is sincere homage. You make me sorry, madame, that I cannot tread in
your footsteps, in spite of the thorns that tear your feet and hands.
--But it cannot be helped! I am one with art, as you are one with
virtue."
"Poor child!" said the Baroness, moved amid her own sorrows by a
strange sense of compassionate sympathy; "I will pray to God for you;
for you are the victim of society, which must have theatres. When you
are old, repent--you will be heard if God vouchsafes to hear the
prayers of a--"
"Of a martyr, madame," Josepha put in, and she respectfully kissed the
Baroness' skirt.
But Adeline took the actress' hand, and drawing her towards her,
kissed her on the forehead. Coloring with pleasure Josepha saw the
Baroness into the hackney coach with the humblest politeness.
"It must be some visiting Lady of Charity," said the man-servant to
the maid, "for she does not do so much for any one, not even for her
dear friend Madame Jenny Cadine."
"Wait a few days," said she, "and you will see him, madame, or I
renounce the God of my fathers--and that from a Jewess, you know, is a
promise of success."
At the very time when Madame Hulot was calling on Josepha, Victorin,
in his study, was receiving an old woman of about seventy-five, who,
to gain admission to the lawyer, had used the terrible name of the
head of the detective force. The man in waiting announced:
"Madame de Saint-Esteve."
"I have assumed one of my business names," said she, taking a seat.
Victorin felt a sort of internal chill at the sight of this dreadful
old woman. Though handsomely dressed, she was terrible to look upon,
for her flat, colorless, strongly-marked face, furrowed with wrinkles,
expressed a sort of cold malignity. Marat, as a woman of that age,
might have been like this creature, a living embodiment of the Reign
of Terror.
This sinister old woman's small, pale eyes twinkled with a tiger's
bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into
oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of
some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low,
cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the
masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's face
would have said that artists had failed in their conceptions of
Mephistopheles.
"My dear sir," she began, with a patronizing air, "I have long since
given up active business of any kind. What I have come to you to do, I
have undertaken, for the sake of my dear nephew, whom I love more than
I could love a son of my own.--Now, the Head of the Police--to whom
the President of the Council said a few words in his ear as regards
yourself, in talking to Monsieur Chapuzot--thinks as the police ought
not to appear in a matter of this description, you understand. They
gave my nephew a free hand, but my nephew will have nothing to say to
it, except as before the Council; he will not be seen in it."
"Then your nephew is--"
"You have hit it, and I am rather proud of him," said she,
interrupting the lawyer, "for he is my pupil, and he soon could teach
his teacher.--We have considered this case, and have come to our own
conclusions. Will you hand over thirty thousand francs to have the
whole thing taken off your hands? I will make a clean sweep of all,
and you need not pay till the job is done."
"Do you know the persons concerned?"
"No, my dear sir; I look for information from you. What we are told
is, that a certain old idiot has fallen into the clutches of a widow.
This widow, of nine-and-twenty, has played her cards so well, that she
has forty thousand francs a year, of which she has robbed two fathers
of families. She is now about to swallow down eighty thousand francs a
year by marrying an old boy of sixty-one. She will thus ruin a
respectable family, and hand over this vast fortune to the child of
some lover by getting rid at once of the old husband.--That is the
case as stated."
"Quite correct," said Victorin. "My father-in-law, Monsieur Crevel--"
"Formerly a perfumer, a mayor--yes, I live in his district under the
name of Ma'ame Nourrisson," said the woman.
"The other person is Madame Marneffe."
"I do not know," said Madame de Saint-Esteve. "But within three days I
will be in a position to count her shifts."
"Can you hinder the marriage?" asked Victorin.
"How far have they got?"
"To the second time of asking."
"We must carry off the woman.--To-day is Sunday--there are but three
days, for they will be married on Wednesday, no doubt; it is
impossible.--But she may be killed--"
Victorin Hulot started with an honest man's horror at hearing these
five words uttered in cold blood.
"Murder?" said he. "And how could you do it?"
"For forty years, now, monsieur, we have played the part of fate,"
replied she, with terrible pride, "and do just what we will in Paris.
More than one family--even in the Faubourg Saint-Germain--has told me
all its secrets, I can tell you. I have made and spoiled many a match,
I have destroyed many a will and saved many a man's honor. I have in
there," and she tapped her forehead, "a store of secrets which are
worth thirty-six thousand francs a year to me; and you--you will be
one of my lambs, hoh! Could such a woman as I am be what I am if she
revealed her ways and means? I act.
"Whatever I may do, sir, will be the result of an accident; you need
feel no remorse. You will be like a man cured by a clairvoyant; by the
end of a month, it seems all the work of Nature."
Victorin broke out in a cold sweat. The sight of an executioner would
have shocked him less than this prolix and pretentious Sister of the
Hulks. As he looked at her purple-red gown, she seemed to him dyed in
blood.
"Madame, I do not accept the help of your experience and skill if
success is to cost anybody's life, or the least criminal act is to
come of it."
"You are a great baby, monsieur," replied the woman; "you wish to
remain blameless in your own eyes, while you want your enemy to be
overthrown."
Victorin shook his head in denial.
"Yes," she went on, "you want this Madame Marneffe to drop the prey
she has between her teeth. But how do you expect to make a tiger drop
his piece of beef? Can you do it by patting his back and saying, 'Poor
Puss'? You are illogical. You want a battle fought, but you object to
blows.--Well, I grant you the innocence you are so careful over. I
have always found that there was material for hypocrisy in honesty!
One day, three months hence, a poor priest will come to beg of you
forty thousand francs for a pious work--a convent to be rebuilt in the
Levant--in the desert.--If you are satisfied with your lot, give the
good man the money. You will pay more than that into the treasury. It
will be a mere trifle in comparison with what you will get, I can tell
you."
She rose, standing on the broad feet that seemed to overflow her satin
shoes; she smiled, bowed, and vanished.
"The Devil has a sister," said Victorin, rising.
He saw the hideous stranger to the door, a creature called up from the
dens of the police, as on the stage a monster comes up from the third
cellar at the touch of a fairy's wand in a ballet-extravaganza.
After finishing what he had to do at the Courts, Victorin went to call
on Monsieur Chapuzot, the head of one of the most important branches
of the Central Police, to make some inquiries about the stranger.
Finding Monsieur Chapuzot alone in his office, Victorin thanked him
for his help.
"You sent me an old woman who might stand for the incarnation of the
criminal side of Paris."
Monsieur Chapuzot laid his spectacles on his papers and looked at the
lawyer with astonishment.
"I should not have taken the liberty of sending anybody to see you
without giving you notice beforehand, or a line of introduction," said
he.
"Then it was Monsieur le Prefet--?"
"I think not," said Chapuzot. "The last time that the Prince de
Wissembourg dined with the Minister of the Interior, he spoke to the
Prefet of the position in which you find yourself--a deplorable
position--and asked him if you could be helped in any friendly way.
The Prefet, who was interested by the regrets his Excellency expressed
as to this family affair, did me the honor to consult me about it.
"Ever since the present Prefet has held the reins of this department
--so useful and so vilified--he has made it a rule that family matters
are never to be interfered in. He is right in principle and in
morality; but in practice he is wrong. In the forty-five years that I
have served in the police, it did, from 1799 till 1815, great services
in family concerns. Since 1820 a constitutional government and the
press have completely altered the conditions of existence. So my
advice, indeed, was not to intervene in such a case, and the Prefet
did me the honor to agree with my remarks. The Head of the detective
branch has orders, in my presence, to take no steps; so if you have
had any one sent to you by him, he will be reprimanded. It might cost
him his place. 'The Police will do this or that,' is easily said; the
Police, the Police! But, my dear sir, the Marshal and the Ministerial
Council do not know what the Police is. The Police alone knows the
Police; but as for ours, only Fouche, Monsieur Lenoir, and Monsieur de
Sartines have had any notion of it.--Everything is changed now; we are
reduced and disarmed! I have seen many private disasters develop,
which I could have checked with five grains of despotic power.--We
shall be regretted by the very men who have crippled us when they,
like you, stand face to face with some moral monstrosities, which
ought to be swept away as we sweep away mud! In public affairs the
Police is expected to foresee everything, or when the safety of the
public is involved--but the family?--It is sacred! I would do my
utmost to discover and hinder a plot against the King's life, I would
see through the walls of a house; but as to laying a finger on a
household, or peeping into private interests--never, so long as I sit
in this office. I should be afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of the Press, Monsieur le Depute, of the left centre."
"What, then, can I do?" said Hulot, after a pause.
"Well, you are the Family," said the official. "That settles it; you
can do what you please. But as to helping you, as to using the Police
as an instrument of private feelings, and interests, how is it
possible? There lies, you see, the secret of the persecution,
necessary, but pronounced illegal, by the Bench, which was brought
to bear against the predecessor of our present chief detective.
Bibi-Lupin undertook investigations for the benefit of private persons.
This might have led to great social dangers. With the means at his
command, the man would have been formidable, an underlying fate--"
"But in my place?" said Hulot.
"Why, you ask my advice? You who sell it!" replied Monsieur Chapuzot.
"Come, come, my dear sir, you are making fun of me."
Hulot bowed to the functionary, and went away without seeing that
gentleman's almost imperceptible shrug as he rose to open the door.
"And he wants to be a statesman!" said Chapuzot to himself as he
returned to his reports.
Victorin went home, still full of perplexities which he could confide
to no one.
At dinner the Baroness joyfully announced to her children that within
a month their father might be sharing their comforts, and end his days
in peace among his family.
"Oh, I would gladly give my three thousand six hundred francs a year
to see the Baron here!" cried Lisbeth. "But, my dear Adeline, do not
dream beforehand of such happiness, I entreat you!"
"Lisbeth is right," said Celestine. "My dear mother, wait till the
end."
The Baroness, all feeling and all hope, related her visit to Josepha,
expressed her sense of the misery of such women in the midst of good
fortune, and mentioned Chardin the mattress-picker, the father of the
Oran storekeeper, thus showing that her hopes were not groundless.
By seven next morning Lisbeth had driven in a hackney coach to the
Quai de la Tournelle, and stopped the vehicle at the corner of the Rue
de Poissy.
"Go to the Rue des Bernardins," said she to the driver, "No. 7, a
house with an entry and no porter. Go up to the fourth floor, ring at
the door to the left, on which you will see 'Mademoiselle Chardin
--Lace and shawls mended.' She will answer the door. Ask for the
Chevalier. She will say he is out. Say in reply, 'Yes, I know, but
find him, for his _bonne_ is out on the quay in a coach, and wants to
see him.'"
Twenty minutes later, an old man, who looked about eighty, with
perfectly white hair, and a nose reddened by the cold, and a pale,
wrinkled face like an old woman's, came shuffling slowly along in list
slippers, a shiny alpaca overcoat hanging on his stooping shoulders,
no ribbon at his buttonhole, the sleeves of an under-vest showing
below his coat-cuffs, and his shirt-front unpleasantly dingy. He
approached timidly, looked at the coach, recognized Lisbeth, and came
to the window.
"Why, my dear cousin, what a state you are in!"
"Elodie keeps everything for herself," said Baron Hulot. "Those
Chardins are a blackguard crew."
"Will you come home to us?"
"Oh, no, no!" cried the old man. "I would rather go to America."
"Adeline is on the scent."
"Oh, if only some one would pay my debts!" said the Baron, with a
suspicious look, "for Samanon is after me."
"We have not paid up the arrears yet; your son still owes a hundred
thousand francs."
"Poor boy!"
"And your pension will not be free before seven or eight months.--If
you will wait a minute, I have two thousand francs here."
The Baron held out his hand with fearful avidity.
"Give it me, Lisbeth, and may God reward you! Give it me; I know where
to go."
"But you will tell me, old wretch?"
"Yes, yes. Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a
little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be
depraved."
"Do not forget the police-court," said Lisbeth, who flattered herself
that she would some day see Hulot there.
"No.--It is in the Rue de Charonne," said the Baron, "a part of the
town where no fuss is made about anything. No one will ever find me
there. I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a
retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my
back to be shorn any more."
"No, that has been done," said Lisbeth, looking at his coat.
"Supposing I take you there."
Baron Hulot got into the coach, deserting Mademoiselle Elodie without
taking leave of her, as he might have tossed aside a novel he had
finished.
In half an hour, during which Baron Hulot talked to Lisbeth of nothing
but little Atala Judici--for he had fallen by degrees to those base
passions that ruin old men--she set him down with two thousand francs
in his pocket, in the Rue de Charonne, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at the
door of a doubtful and sinister-looking house.
"Good-day, cousin; so now you are to be called Thorec, I suppose? Send
none but commissionaires if you need me, and always take them from
different parts."
"Trust me! Oh, I am really very lucky!" said the Baron, his face
beaming with the prospect of new and future happiness.
"No one can find him there," said Lisbeth; and she paid the coach at
the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and returned to the Rue Louis-le-Grand in
the omnibus.
On the following day Crevel was announced at the hour when all the
family were together in the drawing-room, just after breakfast.
Celestine flew to throw her arms round her father's neck, and behaved
as if she had seen him only the day before, though in fact he had not
called there for more than two years.
"Good-morning, father," said Victorin, offering his hand.
"Good-morning, children," said the pompous Crevel. "Madame la Baronne,
I throw myself at your feet! Good Heavens, how the children grow! they
are pushing us off the perch--'Grand-pa,' they say, 'we want our turn
in the sunshine.'--Madame la Comtesse, you are as lovely as ever," he
went on, addressing Hortense.--"Ah, ha! and here is the best of good
money: Cousin Betty, the Wise Virgin."
"Why, you are really very comfortable here," said he, after scattering
these greetings with a cackle of loud laughter that hardly moved the
rubicund muscles of his broad face.
He looked at his daughter with some contempt.
"My dear Celestine, I will make you a present of all my furniture out
of the Rue des Saussayes; it will just do here. Your drawing-room
wants furnishing up.--Ha! there is that little rogue Wenceslas. Well,
and are we very good children, I wonder? You must have pretty manners,
you know."
"To make up for those who have none," said Lisbeth.
"That sarcasm, my dear Lisbeth, has lost its sting. I am going, my
dear children, to put an end to the false position in which I have so
long been placed; I have come, like a good father, to announce my
approaching marriage without any circumlocution."
"You have a perfect right to marry," said Victorin. "And for my part,
I give you back the promise you made me when you gave me the hand of
my dear Celestine--"
"What promise?" said Crevel.
"Not to marry," replied the lawyer. "You will do me the justice to
allow that I did not ask you to pledge yourself, that you gave your
word quite voluntarily and in spite of my desire, for I pointed out to
you at the time that you were unwise to bind yourself."
"Yes, I do remember, my dear fellow," said Crevel, ashamed of himself.
"But, on my honor, if you will but live with Madame Crevel, my
children, you will find no reason to repent.--Your good feeling
touches me, Victorin, and you will find that generosity to me is not
unrewarded.--Come, by the Poker! welcome your stepmother and come to
the wedding."
"But you have not told us the lady's name, papa," said Celestine.
"Why, it is an open secret," replied Crevel. "Do not let us play at
guess who can! Lisbeth must have told you."
"My dear Monsieur Crevel," replied Lisbeth, "there are certain names
we never utter here--"
"Well, then, it is Madame Marneffe."
"Monsieur Crevel," said the lawyer very sternly, "neither my wife nor
I can be present at that marriage; not out of interest, for I spoke in
all sincerity just now. Yes, I am most happy to think that you may
find happiness in this union; but I act on considerations of honor and
good feeling which you must understand, and which I cannot speak of
here, as they reopen wounds still ready to bleed----"
The Baroness telegraphed a signal to Hortense, who tucked her little
one under her arm, saying, "Come Wenceslas, and have your bath!
--Good-bye, Monsieur Crevel."
The Baroness also bowed to Crevel without a word; and Crevel could not
help smiling at the child's astonishment when threatened with this
impromptu tubbing.
"You, monsieur," said Victorin, when he found himself alone with
Lisbeth, his wife, and his father-in-law, "are about to marry a woman
loaded with the spoils of my father; it was she who, in cold blood,
brought him down to such depths; a woman who is the son-in-law's
mistress after ruining the father-in-law; who is the cause of constant
grief to my sister!--And you fancy that I shall seem to sanction your
madness by my presence? I deeply pity you, dear Monsieur Crevel; you
have no family feeling; you do not understand the unity of the honor
which binds the members of it together. There is no arguing with
passion--as I have too much reason to know. The slaves of their
passions are as deaf as they are blind. Your daughter Celestine has
too strong a sense of her duty to proffer a word of reproach."
"That would, indeed, be a pretty thing!" cried Crevel, trying to cut
short this harangue.
"Celestine would not be my wife if she made the slightest
remonstrance," the lawyer went on. "But I, at least, may try to stop
you before you step over the precipice, especially after giving you
ample proof of my disinterestedness. It is not your fortune, it is you
that I care about. Nay, to make it quite plain to you, I may add, if
it were only to set your mind at ease with regard to your marriage
contract, that I am now in a position which leaves me with nothing to
wish for--"
"Thanks to me!" exclaimed Crevel, whose face was purple.
"Thanks to Celestine's fortune," replied Victorin. "And if you regret
having given to your daughter as a present from yourself, a sum which
is not half what her mother left her, I can only say that we are
prepared to give it back."
"And do you not know, my respected son-in-law," said Crevel, striking
an attitude, "that under the shelter of my name Madame Marneffe is not
called upon to answer for her conduct excepting as my wife--as Madame
Crevel?"
"That is, no doubt, quite the correct thing," said the lawyer; "very
generous so far as the affections are concerned and the vagaries of
passion; but I know of no name, nor law, nor title that can shelter
the theft of three hundred thousand francs so meanly wrung from my
father!--I tell you plainly, my dear father-in-law, your future wife
is unworthy of you, she is false to you, and is madly in love with my
brother-in-law, Steinbock, whose debts she had paid."
"It is I who paid them!"
"Very good," said Hulot; "I am glad for Count Steinbock's sake; he may
some day repay the money. But he is loved, much loved, and often--"
"Loved!" cried Crevel, whose face showed his utter bewilderment. "It
is cowardly, and dirty, and mean, and cheap, to calumniate a woman!
--When a man says such things, monsieur, he must bring proof."
"I will bring proof."
"I shall expect it."
"By the day after to-morrow, my dear Monsieur Crevel, I shall be able
to tell you the day, the hour, the very minute when I can expose the
horrible depravity of your future wife."
"Very well; I shall be delighted," said Crevel, who had recovered
himself.
"Good-bye, my children, for the present; good-bye, Lisbeth."
"See him out, Lisbeth," said Celestine in an undertone.
"And is this the way you take yourself off?" cried Lisbeth to Crevel.