getting on. The Courts and the Chamber, judicial trickery and
political dodges, are making a man of him with a vengeance!--So he
knows I am to be married on Wednesday, and on a Sunday my gentleman
proposes to fix the hour, within three days, when he can prove that my
wife is unworthy of me. That is a good story!--Well, I am going back
to sign the contract. Come with me, Lisbeth--yes, come. They will
never know. I meant to have left Celestine forty thousand francs a
year; but Hulot has just behaved in a way to alienate my affection for
ever."
"Give me ten minutes, Pere Crevel; wait for me in your carriage at the
gate. I will make some excuse for going out."
"Very well--all right."
"My dears," said Lisbeth, who found all the family reassembled in the
drawing-room, "I am going with Crevel: the marriage contract is to be
signed this afternoon, and I shall hear what he has settled. It will
probably be my last visit to that woman. Your father is furious; he
will disinherit you--"
"His vanity will prevent that," said the son-in-law. "He was bent on
owning the estate of Presles, and he will keep it; I know him. Even if
he were to have children, Celestine would still have half of what he
might leave; the law forbids his giving away all his fortune.--Still,
these questions are nothing to me; I am only thinking of our honor.
--Go then, cousin," and he pressed Lisbeth's hand, "and listen
carefully to the contract."
Twenty minutes after, Lisbeth and Crevel reached the house in the Rue
Barbet, where Madame Marneffe was awaiting, in mild impatience, the
result of a step taken by her commands. Valerie had in the end fallen
a prey to the absorbing love which, once in her life, masters a
woman's heart. Wenceslas was its object, and, a failure as an artist,
he became in Madame Marneffe's hands a lover so perfect that he was to
her what she had been to Baron Hulot.
Valerie was holding a slipper in one hand, and Steinbock clasped the
other, while her head rested on his shoulder. The rambling
conversation in which they had been engaged ever since Crevel went out
may be ticketed, like certain lengthy literary efforts of our day,
"_All rights reserved_," for it cannot be reproduced. This masterpiece
of personal poetry naturally brought a regret to the artist's lips,
and he said, not without some bitterness:
"What a pity it is that I married; for if I had but waited, as Lisbeth
told me, I might now have married you."
"Who but a Pole would wish to make a wife of a devoted mistress?"
cried Valerie. "To change love into duty, and pleasure into a bore."
"I know you to be so fickle," replied Steinbock. "Did I not hear you
talking to Lisbeth of that Brazilian, Baron Montes?"
"Do you want to rid me of him?"
"It would be the only way to hinder his seeing you," said the
ex-sculptor.
"Let me tell you, my darling--for I tell you everything," said Valerie
--"I was saving him up for a husband.--The promises I have made to
that man!--Oh, long before I knew you," said she, in reply to a
movement from Wenceslas. "And those promises, of which he avails
himself to plague me, oblige me to get married almost secretly; for if
he should hear that I am marrying Crevel, he is the sort of man that
--that would kill me."
"Oh, as to that!" said Steinbock, with a scornful expression, which
conveyed that such a danger was small indeed for a woman beloved by a
Pole.
And in the matter of valor there is no brag or bravado in a Pole, so
thoroughly and seriously brave are they all.
"And that idiot Crevel," she went on, "who wants to make a great
display and indulge his taste for inexpensive magnificence in honor of
the wedding, places me in difficulties from which I see no escape."
Could Valerie confess to this man, whom she adored, that since the
discomfiture of Baron Hulot, this Baron Henri Montes had inherited the
privilege of calling on her at all hours of the day or night; and
that, notwithstanding her cleverness, she was still puzzled to find a
cause of quarrel in which the Brazilian might seem to be solely in the
wrong? She knew the Baron's almost savage temper--not unlike Lisbeth's
--too well not to quake as she thought of this Othello of Rio de
Janeiro.
As the carriage drove up, Steinbock released Valerie, for his arm was
round her waist, and took up a newspaper, in which he was found
absorbed. Valerie was stitching with elaborate care at the slippers
she was working for Crevel.
"How they slander her!" whispered Lisbeth to Crevel, pointing to this
picture as they opened the door. "Look at her hair--not in the least
tumbled. To hear Victorin, you might have expected to find two
turtle-doves in a nest."
"My dear Lisbeth," cried Crevel, in his favorite position, "you see
that to turn Lucretia into Aspasia, you have only to inspire a
passion!"
"And have I not always told you," said Lisbeth, "that women like a
burly profligate like you?"
"And she would be most ungrateful, too," said Crevel; "for as to the
money I have spent here, Grindot and I alone can tell!"
And he waved a hand at the staircase.
In decorating this house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot
had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc
d'Herouville had placed Josepha's villa. But Crevel, incapable of
understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a
certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had
found it impossible to embody his architectural dream.
The difference between Josepha's house and that in the Rue Barbet was
just that between the individual stamp on things and commonness. The
objects you admired at Crevel's were to be bought in any shop. These
two types of luxury are divided by the river Million. A mirror, if
unique, is worth six thousand francs; a mirror designed by a
manufacturer who turns them out by the dozen costs five hundred. A
genuine lustre by Boulle will sell at a public auction for three
thousand francs; the same thing reproduced by casting may be made for
a thousand or twelve hundred; one is archaeologically what a picture
by Raphael is in painting, the other is a copy. At what would you
value a copy of a Raphael? Thus Crevel's mansion was a splendid
example of the luxury of idiots, while Josepha's was a perfect model
of an artist's home.
"War is declared," said Crevel, going up to Madame Marneffe.
She rang the bell.
"Go and find Monsieur Berthier," said she to the man-servant, "and do
not return without him. If you had succeeded," said she, embracing
Crevel, "we would have postponed our happiness, my dear Daddy, and
have given a really splendid entertainment; but when a whole family is
set against a match, my dear, decency requires that the wedding shall
be a quiet one, especially when the lady is a widow."
"On the contrary, I intend to make a display of magnificence _a la_
Louis XIV.," said Crevel, who of late had held the eighteenth century
rather cheap. "I have ordered new carriages; there is one for monsieur
and one for madame, two neat coupes; and a chaise, a handsome
traveling carriage with a splendid hammercloth, on springs that
tremble like Madame Hulot."
"Oh, ho! _You intend?_--Then you have ceased to be my lamb?--No, no,
my friend, you will do what _I_ intend. We will sign the contract
quietly--just ourselves--this afternoon. Then, on Wednesday, we will
be regularly married, really married, in mufti, as my poor mother
would have said. We will walk to church, plainly dressed, and have
only a low mass. Our witnesses are Stidmann, Steinbock, Vignon, and
Massol, all wide-awake men, who will be at the mairie by chance, and
who will so far sacrifice themselves as to attend mass.
"Your colleague will perform the civil marriage, for once in a way, as
early as half-past nine. Mass is at ten; we shall be at home to
breakfast by half-past eleven.
"I have promised our guests that we will sit at table till the
evening. There will be Bixiou, your old official chum du Tillet,
Lousteau, Vernisset, Leon de Lora, Vernou, all the wittiest men in
Paris, who will not know that we are married. We will play them a
little trick, we will get just a little tipsy, and Lisbeth must join
us. I want her to study matrimony; Bixiou shall make love to her, and
--and enlighten her darkness."
For two hours Madame Marneffe went on talking nonsense, and Crevel
made this judicious reflection:
"How can so light-hearted a creature be utterly depraved?
Feather-brained, yes! but wicked? Nonsense!"
"Well, and what did the young people say about me?" said Valerie to
Crevel at a moment when he sat down by her on the sofa. "All sorts of
horrors?"
"They will have it that you have a criminal passion for Wenceslas
--you, who are virtue itself."
"I love him!--I should think so, my little Wenceslas!" cried Valerie,
calling the artist to her, taking his face in her hands, and kissing
his forehead. "A poor boy with no fortune, and no one to depend on!
Cast off by a carrotty giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas
is my poet, and I love him as if he were my own child, and make no
secret of it. Bah! your virtuous women see evil everywhere and in
everything. Bless me, could they not sit by a man without doing wrong?
I am a spoilt child who has had all it ever wanted, and bonbons no
longer excite me.--Poor things! I am sorry for them!
"And who slandered me so?"
"Victorin," said Crevel.
"Then why did you not stop his mouth, the odious legal macaw! with the
story of the two hundred thousand francs and his mamma?"
"Oh, the Baroness had fled," said Lisbeth.
"They had better take care, Lisbeth," said Madame Marneffe, with a
frown. "Either they will receive me and do it handsomely, and come to
their stepmother's house--all the party!--or I will see them in lower
depths than the Baron has reached, and you may tell them I said so!
--At last I shall turn nasty. On my honor, I believe that evil is the
scythe with which to cut down the good."
At three o'clock Monsieur Berthier, Cardot's successor, read the
marriage-contract, after a short conference with Crevel, for some of
the articles were made conditional on the action taken by Monsieur and
Madame Victorin Hulot.
Crevel settled on his wife a fortune consisting, in the first place,
of forty thousand francs in dividends on specified securities;
secondly, of the house and all its contents; and thirdly, of three
million francs not invested. He also assigned to his wife every
benefit allowed by law; he left all the property free of duty; and in
the event of their dying without issue, each devised to the survivor
the whole of their property and real estate.
By this arrangement the fortune left to Celestine and her husband was
reduced to two millions of francs in capital. If Crevel and his second
wife should have children, Celestine's share was limited to five
hundred thousand francs, as the life-interest in the rest was to
accrue to Valerie. This would be about the ninth part of his whole
real and personal estate.
Lisbeth returned to dine in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, despair written
on her face. She explained and bewailed the terms of the
marriage-contract, but found Celestine and her husband insensible to
the disastrous news.
"You have provoked your father, my children. Madame Marneffe swears
that you shall receive Monsieur Crevel's wife and go to her house,"
said she.
"Never!" said Victorin.
"Never!" said Celestine.
"Never!" said Hortense.
Lisbeth was possessed by the wish to crush the haughty attitude
assumed by all the Hulots.
"She seems to have arms that she can turn against you," she replied.
"I do not know all about it, but I shall find out. She spoke vaguely
of some history of two hundred thousand francs in which Adeline is
implicated."
The Baroness fell gently backward on the sofa she was sitting on in a
fit of hysterical sobbing.
"Go there, go, my children!" she cried. "Receive the woman! Monsieur
Crevel is an infamous wretch. He deserves the worst punishment
imaginable.--Do as the woman desires you! She is a monster--she knows
all!"
After gasping out these words with tears and sobs, Madame Hulot
collected her strength to go to her room, leaning on her daughter and
Celestine.
"What is the meaning of all this?" cried Lisbeth, left alone with
Victorin.
The lawyer stood rigid, in very natural dismay, and did not hear her.
"What is the matter, my dear Victorin?"
"I am horrified!" said he, and his face scowled darkly. "Woe to
anybody who hurts my mother! I have no scruples then. I would crush
that woman like a viper if I could!--What, does she attack my mother's
life, my mother's honor?"
"She said, but do not repeat it, my dear Victorin--she said you should
all fall lower even than your father. And she scolded Crevel roundly
for not having shut your mouths with this secret that seems to be such
a terror to Adeline."
A doctor was sent for, for the Baroness was evidently worse. He gave
her a draught containing a large dose of opium, and Adeline, having
swallowed it, fell into a deep sleep; but the whole family were
greatly alarmed.
Early next morning Victorin went out, and on his way to the Courts
called at the Prefecture of the Police, where he begged Vautrin, the
head of the detective department, to send him Madame de Saint-Esteve.
"We are forbidden, monsieur, to meddle in your affairs; but Madame de
Saint-Esteve is in business, and will attend to your orders," replied
this famous police officer.
On his return home, the unhappy lawyer was told that his mother's
reason was in danger. Doctor Bianchon, Doctor Larabit, and Professor
Angard had met in consultation, and were prepared to apply heroic
remedies to hinder the rush of blood to the head. At the moment when
Victorin was listening to Doctor Bianchon, who was giving him, at some
length, his reasons for hoping that the crisis might be got over, the
man-servant announced that a client, Madame de Saint-Esteve, was
waiting to see him. Victorin left Bianchon in the middle of a sentence
and flew downstairs like a madman.
"Is there any hereditary lunacy in the family?" said Bianchon,
addressing Larabit.
The doctors departed, leaving a hospital attendant, instructed by
them, to watch Madame Hulot.
"A whole life of virtue!----" was the only sentence the sufferer had
spoken since the attack.
Lisbeth never left Adeline's bedside; she sat up all night, and was
much admired by the two younger women.
"Well, my dear Madame de Saint-Esteve," said Victorin, showing the
dreadful old woman into his study and carefully shutting the doors,
"how are we getting on?"
"Ah, ha! my dear friend," said she, looking at Victorin with cold
irony. "So you have thought things over?"
"Have you done anything?"
"Will you pay fifty thousand francs?"
"Yes," replied Victorin, "for we must get on. Do you know that by one
single phrase that woman has endangered my mother's life and reason?
So, I say, get on."
"We have got on!" replied the old woman.
"Well?" cried Victorin, with a gulp.
"Well, you do not cry off the expenses?"
"On the contrary."
"They run up to twenty-three thousand francs already."
Victorin looked helplessly at the woman.
"Well, could we hoodwink you, you, one of the shining lights of the
law?" said she. "For that sum we have secured a maid's conscience and
a picture by Raphael.--It is not dear."
Hulot, still bewildered, sat with wide open eyes.
"Well, then," his visitor went on, "we have purchased the honesty of
Mademoiselle Reine Tousard, a damsel from whom Madame Marneffe has no
secrets--"
"I understand!"
"But if you shy, say so."
"I will play blindfold," he replied. "My mother has told me that that
couple deserve the worst torments--"
"The rack is out of date," said the old woman.
"You answer for the result?"
"Leave it all to me," said the woman; "your vengeance is simmering."
She looked at the clock; it was six.
"Your avenger is dressing; the fires are lighted at the _Rocher de
Cancale_; the horses are pawing the ground; my irons are getting hot.
--Oh, I know your Madame Marneffe by heart!--Everything is ready. And
there are some boluses in the rat-trap; I will tell you to-morrow
morning if the mouse is poisoned. I believe she will be; good evening,
my son."
"Good-bye, madame."
"Do you know English?"
"Yes."
"Well, my son, thou shalt be King. That is to say, you shall come into
your inheritance," said the dreadful old witch, foreseen by
Shakespeare, and who seemed to know her Shakespeare.
She left Hulot amazed at the door of his study.
"The consultation is for to-morrow!" said she, with the gracious air
of a regular client.
She saw two persons coming, and wished to pass in their eyes a
pinchbeck countess.
"What impudence!" thought Hulot, bowing to his pretended client.
Baron Montes de Montejanos was a _lion_, but a lion not accounted for.
Fashionable Paris, Paris of the turf and of the town, admired the
ineffable waistcoats of this foreign gentleman, his spotless
patent-leather boots, his incomparable sticks, his much-coveted horses,
and the negro servants who rode the horses and who were entirely slaves
and most consumedly thrashed.
His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven
hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but
he was always seen alone. When he went to "first nights," he was in a
stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a
girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any
pretty woman of the world. To pass his time he played whist at the
Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought
funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of
Combabus.
Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise
Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious
Carabine, with a large party of _lions_ and _lionesses_, had invented
this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Massol, as being
on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of
Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote,
preserved in Rollin's _Ancient History_, concerning Combabus, that
voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a King of
Assyria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia, and other geographical
divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage, who continued the work
of d'Anville, the creator of the East of antiquity. This nickname,
which gave Carabine's guests laughter for a quarter of an hour, gave
rise to a series of over-free jests, to which the Academy could not
award the Montyon prize; but among which the name was taken up, to
rest thenceforth on the curly mane of the handsome Baron, called by
Josepha the splendid Brazilian--as one might say a splendid
_Catoxantha_.
Carabine, the loveliest of her tribe, whose delicate beauty and
amusing wit had snatched the sceptre of the Thirteenth Arrondissement
from the hands of Mademoiselle Turquet, better known by the name of
Malaga--Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet (this was her real name) was to
du Tillet the banker what Josepha Mirah was to the Duc d'Herouville.
Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had
prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at
about seven o'clock:
"If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the _Rocher
de Cancale_ and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether
he has a mistress.--I bet that he has, and I should like to win."
"He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call," replied du
Tillet. "We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters--the youngster
Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan."
At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the
restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was
spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill
in bank-notes. A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims;
waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for
their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.
Five guests had arrived, and were waiting for nine more. These were
first and foremost Bixiou, still flourishing in 1843, the salt of
every intellectual dish, always supplied with fresh wit--a phenomenon
as rare in Paris as virtue is; Leon de Lora, the greatest living
painter of landscape and the sea who has this great advantage over all
his rivals, that he has never fallen below his first successes. The
courtesans could never dispense with these two kings of ready wit. No
supper, no dinner, was possible without them.
Seraphine Sinet, _dite_ Carabine, as the mistress _en titre_ of the
Amphitryon, was one of the first to arrive; and the brilliant lighting
showed off her shoulders, unrivaled in Paris, her throat, as round as
if turned in a lathe, without a crease, her saucy face, and dress of
satin brocade in two shades of blue, trimmed with Honiton lace enough
to have fed a whole village for a month.
Pretty Jenny Cadine, not acting that evening, came in a dress of
incredible splendor; her portrait is too well known to need any
description. A party is always a Longchamps of evening dress for these
ladies, each anxious to win the prize for her millionaire by thus
announcing to her rivals:
"This is the price I am worth!"
A third woman, evidently at the initial stage of her career, gazed,
almost shamefaced, at the luxury of her two established and wealthy
companions. Simply dressed in white cashmere trimmed with blue, her
head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the
old-fashioned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given
the charm of ineptitude to her fair hair. Still unaccustomed to any
finery, she showed the timidity--to use a hackneyed phrase
--inseparable from a first appearance. She had come from Valognes to
find in Paris some use for her distracting youthfulness, her innocence
that might have stirred the senses of a dying man, and her beauty,
worthy to hold its own with any that Normandy has ever supplied to the
theatres of the capital. The lines of that unblemished face were the
ideal of angelic purity. Her milk-white skin reflected the light like
a mirror. The delicate pink in her cheeks might have been laid on with
a brush. She was called Cydalise, and, as will be seen, she was an
important pawn in the game played by Ma'ame Nourrisson to defeat
Madame Marneffe.
"Your arm is not a match for your name, my child," said Jenny Cadine,
to whom Carabine had introduced this masterpiece of sixteen, having
brought her with her.
And, in fact, Cydalise displayed to public admiration a fine pair of
arms, smooth and satiny, but red with healthy young blood.
"What do you want for her?" said Jenny Cadine, in an undertone to
Carabine.
"A fortune."
"What are you going to do with her?"
"Well--Madame Combabus!"
"And what are you to get for such a job?"
"Guess."
"A service of plate?"
"I have three."
"Diamonds?"
"I am selling them."
"A green monkey?"
"No. A picture by Raphael."
"What maggot is that in your brain?"
"Josepha makes me sick with her pictures," said Carabine. "I want some
better than hers."
Du Tillet came with the Brazilian, the hero of the feast; the Duc
d'Herouville followed with Josepha. The singer wore a plain velvet
gown, but she had on a necklace worth a hundred and twenty thousand
francs, pearls hardly distinguishable from her skin like white
camellia petals. She had stuck one scarlet camellia in her black hair
--a patch--the effect was dazzling, and she had amused herself by
putting eleven rows of pearls on each arm. As she shook hands with
Jenny Cadine, the actress said, "Lend me your mittens!"
Josepha unclasped them one by one and handed them to her friend on a
plate.
"There's style!" said Carabine. "Quite the Duchess! You have robbed
the ocean to dress the nymph, Monsieur le Duc," she added turning to
the little Duc d'Herouville.
The actress took two of the bracelets; she clasped the other twenty on
the singer's beautiful arms, which she kissed.
Lousteau, the literary cadger, la Palferine and Malaga, Massol,
Vauvinet, and Theodore Gaillard, a proprietor of one of the most
important political newspapers, completed the party. The Duc
d'Herouville, polite to everybody, as a fine gentleman knows how to
be, greeted the Comte de la Palferine with the particular nod which,
while it does not imply either esteem or intimacy, conveys to all the
world, "We are of the same race, the same blood--equals!"--And this
greeting, the shibboleth of the aristocracy, was invented to be the
despair of the upper citizen class.