HOW JEAN OULLIER, COMING TO SEE THE MARQUIS FOR AN HOUR,
WOULD BE THERE STILL IF THEY HAD NOT BOTH BEEN IN THEIR
GRAVE THESE TEN YEARS.
The next morning, before starting for the hunt, it occurred to the
marquis to kiss his children. He therefore went up to their room, and
was not a little astonished to find that the indefatigable Jean
Oullier had preceded him, and was washing and brushing the little
girls with the conscientious determination of a good governess. The
poor fellow, to whom the occupation recalled his own lost young ones,
seemed to be taking deep satisfaction in the work. The marquis changed
his admiration into respect.
For eight days the hunts continued without interruption, each finer
and more fruitful than the last. During those eight days Jean Oullier,
huntsman by day, steward by night, not only revived and restored his
master's wardrobe, but he actually found time to put the house in
order from top to bottom.
The marquis, far from urging his departure, now thought with horror of
parting from so valuable a servitor. From morning till night, and
sometimes from night till morning, he turned over in his mind which of
the Chouan's qualities was most serviceable to him. Jean Oullier had
the scent of a hound to follow game, and the eye of an Indian to
discover its trail by the bend of the reeds or the dew on the grass.
He could even tell, on the dry and stony roads about Machecoul,
Bourgneuf, and Aigrefeuille, the age and sex of a boar, when the trail
was imperceptible to other eyes. No huntsman on horseback had ever
followed up the hounds like Jean Oullier on his long and vigorous
legs. Moreover, on the days when rest was actually necessary for the
little pack of hounds, he was unequalled for discovering the places
where snipe abounded, and taking his master to the spot.
"Damn marriage!" cried the marquis to himself, occasionally, when he
seemed to be thinking of quite other things. "Why do I want to row in
that boat when I have seen so many good fellows come to grief in it?
Heavens and earth! I'm not so young a man--almost forty; I haven't any
illusions; I don't expect to captivate a woman by my personal
attractions. I can't expect to do more than tempt some old dowager
with my three thousand francs a year,--half of which dies with me. I
should probably get a scolding, fussy, nagging wife, who might
interfere with my hunting, which that good Jean manages so well; and I
am sure she will never keep the house in such order as he does.
Still," he added, straightening himself up, and swaying the upper part
of his body, "is this a time to let the old races, the supporters of
monarchy, die out? Wouldn't it be very pleasant to see my son restore
the glory of my house? Besides, what would be thought of me,--who am
known to have had no wife, no legitimate wife,--what will my neighbors
say if I take the two little girls to live with me?"
When these reflections came, which they ordinarily did on rainy days,
when he could not be off on his favorite pastime, they cast the
Marquis de Souday into painful perplexity, from which he wriggled, as
do all undecided temperaments and weak natures,--men, in short, who
never know how to adopt a course,--by making a provisional
arrangement.
At the time when our story opens, in 1831, Mary and Bertha were
seventeen, and the provisional arrangement still lasted; although,
strange as it may seem, the Marquis de Souday had not yet positively
decided to keep his daughters with him.
Jean Oullier, who had hung the key of his house at La Chevrolière to a
nail, had never, in fourteen years, had the least idea of taking it
down. He had waited patiently till his master gave him the order to go
home. But as, ever since his arrival, the château had been neat and
clean; as the marquis had never once missed a button; as the
hunting-boots were always properly greased; as the guns were kept with
all the care of the best armory at Nantes; as Jean Oullier, by means
of certain coercive proceedings, of which he learned the secret from a
former comrade of the "brigand army," had, little by little, brought
the cook not to vent her ill-humor on her master; as the hounds were
always in good condition, shiny of coat, neither fat nor thin, and
able to bear a long chase of eight or ten hours, ending mostly in a
kill; as the chatter and the pretty ways of his children and their
expansive affection varied the monotony of his existence; as his talks
and gossip with Jean Oullier on the stirring incidents of the old war,
now passed into a tradition (it was thirty-six years distant),
enlivened his dull hours and the long evenings and the rainy
days,--the marquis, finding once more the good care, the quiet ease,
the tranquil happiness he had formerly enjoyed with Eva, with the
additional and intoxicating joys of hunting,--the marquis, we say, put
off from day to day, from month to month, from year to year, deciding
on the separation.
As for Jean Oullier, he had his own reasons for not provoking a
decision. He was not only a brave man, but he was a good one. As we
have said, he at once took a liking to Bertha and Mary; this liking,
in that poor heart deprived of its own children, soon became tender
affection, and the tenderness fanaticism. He did not at first perceive
very clearly the distinction the marquis seemed to make between their
position and that of other children whom he might have by a legitimate
marriage to perpetuate his name. In Poitou, when a man gets a worthy
girl into trouble he knows of no other reparation than to marry her.
Jean Oullier thought it natural, inasmuch as his master could not
legitimatize the connection with the mother, that he should at least
not conceal the paternity which Eva in dying had bequeathed to him.
Therefore, after two months' sojourn at the castle, having made these
reflections, weighed them in his mind, and ratified them in his heart,
the Chouan would have received an order to take the children away with
very ill grace; and his respect for Monsieur de Souday would not have
prevented him from expressing himself bluffly on the subject.
Fortunately, the marquis did not betray to his dependant the
tergiversations of his mind; so that Jean Oullier did really regard
the provisional arrangement as definitive, and he believed that the
marquis considered the presence of his daughters at the castle as
their right and also as his own bounden duty.
At the moment when we issue from these preliminaries, Bertha and Mary
were, as we have said, between seventeen and eighteen years of age.
The purity of race in their paternal ancestors had done marvels when
strengthened with the vigorous Saxon blood of the plebeian mother.
Eva's children were now two splendid young women, with refined and
delicate features, slender and elegant shapes, and with great
distinction and nobility in their air and manner. They were as much
alike as twins are apt to be; only Bertha was dark, like her father,
and Mary was fair, like her mother.
Unfortunately, the education of these beautiful young creatures, while
developing to the utmost their physical advantages, did not
sufficiently concern itself with the needs of their sex. It was
impossible that it should be otherwise, living from day to day beside
their father, with his natural carelessness and his determination to
enjoy the present and let the future take care of itself.
Jean Oullier was the only tutor of Eva's children, as he was formerly
their only nurse. The worthy Chouan taught them all he knew
himself,--namely, to read, write, cipher, and pray with tender and
devout fervor to God and the Virgin; also to roam the woods, scale the
rocks, thread the tangle of holly, reeds, and briers without fatigue,
without fear or weakness of any kind; to hit a bird on the wing, a
squirrel on the leap, and to ride bareback those intractable horses of
Mellerault, almost as wild on their plains and moors as the horses of
the gauchos on the pampas.
The Marquis de Souday had seen all this without attempting to give any
other direction to the education of his daughters, and without having
even the idea of counteracting the taste they were forming for these
manly exercises. The worthy man was only too delighted to have such
valiant comrades in his favorite amusement, uniting, as they did, with
their respectful tenderness toward him a gayety, dash, and ardor for
the chase, which doubled his own pleasure from the time they were old
enough to share it.
And yet, in strict justice, we must say that the marquis added one
ingredient of his own to Jean Oullier's instructions. When Bertha and
Mary were fourteen years old, which was the period when they first
followed their father into the forest, their childish games, which had
hitherto made the old castle so lively in the evenings, began to lose
attraction. So, to fill the void he was beginning to feel, the Marquis
de Souday taught Bertha and Mary how to play whist.
On the other hand, the two children had themselves completed mentally,
as far as they could, the education Jean Oullier had so vigorously
developed physically. Playing hide-and-seek through the castle, they
came upon a room which, in all probability, had not been opened for
thirty years. It was the library. There they found a thousand volumes,
or something near that number.
Each followed her own bent in the choice of books. Mary, the gentle,
sentimental Mary, preferred novels; the turbulent and determined
Bertha, history. Then they mingled their reading in a common fund;
Mary told Paul and Virginia and Amadis to Bertha, and Bertha told
Mèzeray and Velly to Mary. The result of such desultory reading was,
of course, that the two young girls grew up with many false notions
about real life and the habits and requirements of a world they had
never seen, and had, in truth, never heard of.
At the time they made their first communion the vicar of Machecoul,
who loved them for their piety and the goodness of their heart, did
risk a few remarks to their father on the peculiar existence such a
bringing-up must produce; but his friendly remarks made no impression
on the selfish indifference of the Marquis de Souday. The education we
have described was continued, and such habits and ways were the result
that, thanks to their already false position, poor Bertha and her
sister acquired a very bad reputation throughout the neighborhood.
The fact was, the Marquis de Souday was surrounded by little newly
made nobles, who envied him his truly illustrious name, and asked
nothing better than to fling back upon him the contempt with which his
ancestors had probably treated theirs. So when they saw him keep in
his own house, and call his daughters, the children of an illegitimate
union, they began to trumpet forth the evils of his life in London;
they exaggerated his wrong-doing and made poor Eva (saved by a miracle
from a life of degradation) a common woman of the town. Consequently,
little by little, the country squires of Beauvoir, Saint-Leger,
Bourgneuf, Saint-Philbert, and Grand-Lieu, avoided the marquis, under
pretence that he degraded the nobility,--a matter about which, taking
into account the mushroom character of their own rank, they were very
good to concern themselves.
But soon it was not the men only who disapproved of the Marquis de
Souday's conduct. The beauty of the twin sisters roused the enmity of
the mothers and daughters in a circuit of thirty miles, and that was
infinitely more alarming. If Bertha and Mary had been ugly the hearts
of these charitable ladies and young ladies, naturally inclined to
Christian mercy, would perhaps have forgiven the poor devil of a
father for his improper paternity; but it was impossible not to be
shocked at the sight of two such spurious creatures, crushing by their
distinction, their nobility, and their personal charm, the well-born
young ladies of the neighborhood. Such insolent superiority deserved
neither mercy nor compassion.
The indignation against the poor girls was so general that even if
they had never given any cause for gossip or calumny, gossip and
calumny would have swept their wings over them. Imagine, therefore,
what was likely to happen, and did actually happen, when the masculine
and eccentric habits of the sisters were fully known! One universal
hue-and-cry of reprobation arose from the department of the
Loire-Inférieure and echoed through those of La Vendée and the
Maine-et-Loire; and if it had not been for the sea, which bounds the
coast of the Loire-Inférieure, that reprobation would, undoubtedly,
have spread as far to the west as it did to the south and east. All
classes, bourgeois and nobles, city-folk and country-folk, had their
say about it. Young men, who had hardly seen Mary and Bertha, and did
not know them, spoke of the daughters of the Marquis de Souday with
meaning smiles, expressive of hopes, if not of memories. Dowagers
crossed themselves on pronouncing their names, and nurses threatened
little children when they were naughty with goblin tales of them.
The most indulgent confined themselves to attributing to the twins the
three virtues of Harlequin, usually regarded as the attributes of the
disciples of Saint-Hubert,--namely, love, gambling, and wine. Others,
however, declared that the little castle of Souday was every night the
scene of orgies such as chronicles of the regency alone could show. A
few imaginative persons went further, and declared that one of
its ruined towers--abandoned to the innocent loves of a flock of
pigeons--was a repetition of the famous Tour de Nesle, of licentious
and homicidal memory.
In short, so much was said about Bertha and Mary that, no matter what
had been and then was the purity of their lives and the innocence of
their actions, they became an object of horror to the society of the
whole region. Through the servants of private houses, through the
workmen employed by the bourgeoisie, this hatred and horror of society
filtered down among the peasantry, so that the whole population in
smocks and wooden shoes (if we except a few old blind men and helpless
women to whom the twins had been kind) echoed far and wide the absurd
stories invented by the big-wigs. There was not a woodman, not a
laborer in Machecoul, not a farmer in Saint-Philbert and Aigrefeuille
that did not feel himself degraded in raising his hat to them.
The peasantry at last gave Bertha and Mary a nickname; and this
nickname, starting from the lower classes, was adopted by acclamation
among the upper, as a just characterization of the lawless habits
and appetites attributed to the young girls. They were called the
she-wolves (a term, as we all know, equivalent to _sluts_),--the
she-wolves of Machecoul.