insolent, Beatrix wrote to Calyste at his own home; Madame du Guenic received the letter, and gave it to her husband without opening it, but she said to him, in a changed voice and with death in her soul: “My friend, that letter is from the Jockey Club; I recognize both the paper and the perfume.”
Calyste colored, and put the letter into his pocket.
“Why don’t you read it?”
“I know what it is about.”
The young wife sat down. No longer did fever burn her, she wept no more; but madness such as, in feeble beings, gives birth to miracles of crime, madness which lays hands on arsenic for themselves or for their rivals, possessed her. At this moment little Calyste was brought in, and she took him in her arms to dance him. The child, just awakened, sought the breast beneath the gown.
“He remembers,–he, at any rate,” she said in a low voice.
Calyste went to his own room to read his letter. When he was no longer present the poor young woman burst into tears, and wept as women weep when they are all alone.
Pain, as well as pleasure, has its initiation. The first crisis, like that in which poor Sabine nearly succumbed, returns no more than the first fruits of other things return. It is the first wedge struck in the torture of the heart; all others are expected, the shock to the nerves is known, the capital of our forces has been already drawn upon for vigorous resistance. So Sabine, sure of her betrayal, spent three hours with her son in her arms beside the fire in a way that surprised herself, when Gasselin, turned into a footman, came to say:–
“Madame is served.”
“Let monsieur know.”
“Monsieur does not dine at home, Madame la baronne.”
Who knows what torture there is for a young woman of twenty-three in finding herself alone in the great dining-room of an old mansion, served by silent servants, under circumstances like these?
“Order the carriage,” she said suddenly; “I shall go to the Opera.”
She dressed superbly; she wanted to exhibit herself alone and smiling like a happy woman. In the midst of her remorse for the addition she had made to Madame de Rochefide’s letter she had resolved to conquer, to win back Calyste by loving kindness, by the virtues of a wife, by the gentleness of the paschal lamb. She wished, also, to deceive all Paris. She loved,–loved as courtesans and as angels love, with pride, with humility. But the opera chanced to be “Otello.” When Rubini sang /Il mio cor si divide/, she rushed away. Music is sometimes mightier than actor or poet, the two most powerful of all natures, combined. Savinien de Portenduere accompanied Sabine to the peristyle and put her in the carriage without being able to understand this sudden flight.
Madame du Guenic now entered a phase of suffering which is peculiar to the aristocracy. Envious, poor, and miserable beings,–when you see on the arms of such women golden serpents with diamond heads, necklaces clasped around their necks, say to yourselves that those vipers sting, those slender bonds burn to the quick through the delicate flesh. All such luxury is dearly bought. In situations like that of Sabine, women curse the pleasures of wealth; they look no longer at the gilding of their salons; the silk of the divans is jute in their eyes, exotic flowers are nettles, perfumes poison, the choicest cookery scrapes their throat like barley-bread, and life becomes as bitter as the Dead Sea.
Two or three examples may serve to show this reaction of luxury upon happiness; so that all those women who have endured it may behold their own experience.
Fully aware now of this terrible rivalry, Sabine studied her husband when he left the house, that she might divine, if possible, the future of his day. With what restrained fury does a woman fling herself upon the red-hot spikes of that savage martyrdom! What delirious joy if she could think he did not go to the rue de Chartres! Calyste returned, and then the study of his forehead, his hair, his eyes, his countenance, his demeanor, gave a horrible interest to mere nothings, to observations pursued even to matters of toilet, in which a woman loses her self-respect and dignity. These fatal investigations, concealed in the depths of her heart, turn sour and rot the delicate roots from which should spring to bloom the azure flowers of sacred confidence, the golden petals of the One only love, with all the perfumes of memory.
One day Calyste looked about him discontentedly; he had stayed at home! Sabine made herself caressing and humble, gay and sparkling.
“You are vexed with me, Calyste; am I not a good wife? What is there here that displeases you?” she asked.
“These rooms are so cold and bare,” he replied; “you don’t understand arranging things.”
“Tell me what is wanting.”
“Flowers.”
“Ah!” she thought to herself, “Madame de Rochefide likes flowers.”
Two days later, the rooms of the hotel du Guenic had assumed another aspect. No one in Paris could flatter himself to have more exquisite flowers than those that now adorned them.
Some time later Calyste, one evening after dinner, complained of the cold. He twisted about in his chair, declaring there was a draught, and seemed to be looking for something. Sabine could not at first imagine what this new fancy signified, she, whose house possessed a calorifere which heated the staircases, antechambers, and passages. At last, after three days’ meditation, she came to the conclusion that her rival probably sat surrounded by a screen to obtain the half-lights favorable to faded faces; so Sabine had a screen, but hers was of glass and of Israelitish splendor.
“From what quarter will the next storm come?” she said to herself.
These indirect comparisons with his mistress were not yet at an end. When Calyste dined at home he ate his dinner in a way to drive Sabine frantic; he would motion to the servants to take away his plates after pecking at two or three mouthfuls.
“Wasn’t it good?” Sabine would ask, in despair at seeing all the pains she had taken in conference with her cook thrown away.
“I don’t say that, my angel,” replied Calyste, without anger; “I am not hungry, that is all.”
A woman consumed by a legitimate passion, who struggles thus, falls at last into a fury of desire to get the better of her rival, and often goes too far, even in the most secret regions of married life. So cruel, burning, and incessant a combat in the obvious and, as we may call them, exterior matters of a household must needs become more intense and desperate in the things of the heart. Sabine studied her attitudes, her toilets; she took heed about herself in all the infinitely little trifles of love.
The cooking trouble lasted nearly a month. Sabine, assisted by Mariotte and Gasselin, invented various little vaudeville schemes to ascertain the dishes which Madame de Rochefide served to Calyste. Gasselin was substituted for Calyste’s groom, who had fallen conveniently ill. This enabled Gasselin to consort with Madame de Rochefide’s cook, and before long, Sabine gave Calyste the same fare, only better; but still he made difficulties.
“What is wanting now?” she said.
“Oh, nothing,” he answered, looking round the table for something he did not find.
“Ah!” exclaimed Sabine, as she woke the next morning, “Calyste wanted some of those Indian sauces they serve in England in cruets. Madame de Rochefide accustoms him to all sorts of condiments.”
She bought the English cruets and the spiced sauces; but it soon became impossible for her to make such discoveries in all the preparations invented by her rival.
This period lasted some months; which is not surprising when we remember the sort of attraction presented by such a struggle. It is life. And that is preferable, with its wounds and its anguish, to the gloomy darkness of disgust, to the poison of contempt, to the void of abdication, to that death of the heart which is called indifference. But all Sabine’s courage abandoned her one evening when she appeared in a toilet such as women are inspired to wear in the hope of eclipsing a rival, and about which Calyste said, laughing:–
“In spite of all you can do, Sabine, you’ll never be anything but a handsome Andalusian.”
“Alas!” she said, dropping on a sofa, “I may never make myself a blonde, but I know if this continues I shall soon be thirty-five years old.”
She refused to go to the Opera as she intended, and chose to stay at home the whole evening. But once alone she pulled the flowers from her hair and stamped upon them; she tore off the gown and scarf and trampled them underfoot, like a goat caught in the tangle of its tether, which struggles till death comes. Then she went to bed.
XXI
THE WICKEDNESS OF A GOOD WOMAN
Playing for these terrible stakes Sabine grew thin; grief consumed her; but she never for a moment forsook the role she had imposed upon herself. Sustained by a sort of fever, her lips drove back into her throat the bitter words that pain suggested; she repressed the flashing of her glorious dark eyes, and made them soft even to humility. But her failing health soon became noticeable. The duchess, an excellent mother, though her piety was becoming more and more Portuguese, recognized a moral cause in the physically weak condition in which Sabine now took satisfaction. She knew the exact state of the relation between Beatrix and Calyste; and she took great pains to draw her daughter to her own house, partly to soothe the wounds of her heart, but more especially to drag her away from the scene of her martyrdom. Sabine, however, maintained the deepest silence for a long time about her sorrows, fearing lest some one might meddle between herself and Calyste. She declared herself happy! At the height of her misery she recovered her pride, and all her virtues.
But at last, after some months during which her sister Clotilde and her mother had caressed and petted her, she acknowledged her grief, confided her sorrows, cursed life, and declared that she saw death coming with delirious joy. She begged Clotilde, who was resolved to remain unmarried, to be a mother to her little Calyste, the finest child that any royal race could desire for heir presumptive.
One evening, as she sat with her young sister Athenais (whose marriage to the Vicomte de Grandlieu was to take place at the end of Lent), and with Clotilde and the duchess, Sabine gave utterance to the supreme cries of her heart’s anguish, excited by the pangs of a last humiliation.
“Athenais,” she said, when the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu departed at eleven o’clock, “you are going to marry; let my example be a warning to you. Consider it a crime to display your best qualities; resist the pleasure of adorning yourself to please Juste. Be calm, dignified, cold; measure the happiness you give by that which you receive. This is shameful, but it is necessary. Look at me. I perish through my best qualities. All that I /know/ was fine and sacred and grand within me, all my virtues, were rocks on which my happiness is wrecked. I have ceased to please because I am not thirty-six years old. In the eyes of some men youth is thought an inferiority. There is nothing to imagine on an innocent face. I laugh frankly, and that is wrong; to captivate I ought to play off the melancholy half-smile of the fallen angel, who wants to hide her yellowing teeth. A fresh complexion is monotonous; some men prefer their doll’s wax made of rouge and spermaceti and cold cream. I am straightforward; but duplicity is more pleasing. I am loyally passionate, as an honest woman may be, but I ought to be manoeuvring, tricky, hypocritical, and simulate a coldness I have not, –like any provincial actress. I am intoxicated with the happiness of having married one of the most charming men in France; I tell him, naively, how distinguished he is, how graceful his movements are, how handsome I think him; but to please him I ought to turn away my head with pretended horror, to love nothing with real love, and tell him his distinction is mere sickliness. I have the misfortune to admire all beautiful things without setting myself up for a wit by caustic and envious criticism of whatever shines from poesy and beauty. I don’t seek to make Canalis and Nathan say of /me/ in verse and prose that my intellect is superior. I’m only a poor little artless child; I care only for Calyste. Ah! if I had scoured the world like /her/, if I had said as /she/ has said, ‘I love,’ in every language of Europe, I should be consoled, I should be pitied, I should be adored for serving the regal Macedonian with cosmopolitan love! We are thanked for our tenderness if we set it in relief against our vice. And I, a noble woman, must teach myself impurity and all the tricks of prostitutes! And Calyste is the dupe of such grimaces! Oh, mother! oh, my dear Clotilde! I feel that I have got my death-blow. My pride is only a sham buckler; I am without defence against my misery; I love my husband madly, and yet to bring him back to me I must borrow the wisdom of indifference.”
“Silly girl,” whispered Clotilde, “let him think you will avenge yourself–“
“I wish to die irreproachable and without the mere semblance of doing wrong,” replied Sabine. “A woman’s vengeance should be worthy of her love.”
“My child,” said the duchess to her daughter, “a mother must of course see life more coolly than you can see it. Love is not the end, but the means, of the Family. Do not imitate that poor Baronne de Macumer. Excessive passion is unfruitful and deadly. And remember, God sends us afflictions with knowledge of our needs. Now that Athenais’ marriage is arranged, I can give all my thoughts to you. In fact, I have already talked of this delicate crisis in your life with your father and the Duc de Chaulieu, and also with d’Ajuda; we shall certainly find means to bring Calyste back to you.”
“There is always one resource with the Marquise de Rochefide,” remarked Clotilde, smiling, to her sister; “she never keeps her adorers long.”
“D’Ajuda, my darling,” continued the duchess, “was Monsieur de Rochefide’s brother-in-law. If our dear confessor approves of certain little manoeuvres to which we must have recourse to carry out a plan which I have proposed to your father, I can guarantee to you the recovery of Calyste. My conscience is repugnant to the use of such means, and I must first submit them to the judgment of the Abbe Brossette. We shall not wait, my child, till you are /in extremis/ before coming to your relief. Keep a good heart! Your grief to-night is so bitter that my secret escapes me; but it is impossible for me not to give you a little hope.”
“Will it make Calyste unhappy?” asked Sabine, looking anxiously at the duchess.
“Oh, heavens! shall I ever be as silly as that!” cried Athenais, naively.
“Ah, little girl, you know nothing of the precipices down which our virtue flings us when led by love,” replied Sabine, making a sort of moral revelation, so distraught was she by her woe.
The speech was uttered with such incisive bitterness that the duchess, enlightened by the tone and accent and look of her daughter, felt certain there was some hidden trouble.
“My dears, it is midnight; come, go to bed,” she said to Clotilde and Athenais, whose eyes were shining.
“In spite of my thirty-five years I appear to be /de trop/,” said Clotilde, laughing. While Athenais kissed her mother, Clotilde leaned over Sabine and said in her ear: “You will tell what it is? I’ll dine with you to-morrow. If my mother’s conscience won’t let her act, I–I myself will get Calyste out of the hands of the infidels.”
“Well, Sabine,” said the duchess, taking her daughter into her bedroom, “tell me, what new trouble is there, my child?”
“Mamma, I am lost!”
“But how?”
“I wanted to get the better of that horrible woman–I conquered for a time–I am pregnant again–and Calyste loves her so that I foresee a total abandonment. When she hears of it she will be furious. Ah! I suffer such tortures that I cannot endure them long. I know when he is going to her, I know it by his joy; and his peevishness tells me as plainly when he leaves her. He no longer troubles himself to conceal his feelings; I have become intolerable to him. She has an influence over him as unhealthy as she is herself in soul and body. You’ll see! she will exact from him, as the price of forgiveness, my public desertion, a rupture like her own; she will take him away from me to Switzerland or Italy. He is beginning now to say it is ridiculous that he knows nothing of Europe. I can guess what those words mean, flung out in advance. If Calyste is not cured of her in three months I don’t know what he may become; but as for me, I will kill myself.”
“But your soul, my unhappy child? Suicide is a mortal sin.”
“Don’t you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved the child of that woman more than mine–Oh! that’s the end of my patience and all my resignation.”
She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in her heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like that iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay, –it supports, it is a force.
“Come, go home, dear sufferer. In view of such misery the abbe will surely give me absolution for the venial sins which the deceits of the world compel us to commit. Leave me now, my daughter,” she said, going to her /prie-Dieu/. “I must pray to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin for you, with special supplication. Good-bye, my dear Sabine; above all things, do not neglect your religious duties if you wish us to succeed.”
“And if we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste has killed within me the holy fervor of love,–killed it by sickening me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!”
The next day, about two in the afternoon, one of the vicars of the faubourg Saint-Germain appointed to a vacant bishopric in 1840 (an office refused by him for the third time), the Abbe Brossette, one of the most distinguished priests in Paris, crossed the court-yard of the hotel de Grandlieu, with a step which we must needs call the ecclesiastical step, so significant is it of caution, mystery, calmness, gravity, and dignity. He was a thin little man about fifty years of age, with a face as white as that of an old woman, chilled by priestly austerities, and hollowed by all the sufferings which he espoused. Two black eyes, ardent with faith yet softened by an expression more mysterious than mystical, animated that truly apostolical face. He was smiling as he mounted the steps of the portico, so little did he believe in the enormity of the cases about which his penitent sent for him; but as the hand of the duchess was an open palm for charity, she was worth the time which her innocent confessions stole from the more serious miseries of the parish.
When the vicar was announced the duchess rose, and made a few steps toward him in the salon,–a distinction she granted only to cardinals, bishops, simple priests, duchesses older then herself, and persons of royal blood.
“My dear abbe,” she said, pointing to a chair and speaking in a low voice, “I need the authority of your experience before I throw myself into a rather wicked intrigue, although it is one which must result in great good; and I desire to know from you whether I shall make hindrances to my own salvation in the course I propose to follow.”
“Madame la duchesse,” replied the abbe, “do not mix up spiritual things with worldly things; they are usually irreconcilable. In the first place, what is this matter?”
“You know that my daughter Sabine is dying of grief; Monsieur du Guenic has left her for Madame de Rochefide.”
“It is very dreadful, very serious; but you know what our dear Saint Francois de Sales says on that subject. Remember too how Madame Guyon complained of the lack of mysticism in the proofs of conjugal love; she would have been very willing to see her husband with a Madame de Rochefide.”
“Sabine is only too gentle; she is almost too completely a Christian wife; but she has not the slightest taste for mysticism.”
“Poor young woman!” said the abbe, maliciously. “What method will you take to remedy the evil?”
“I have committed the sin, my dear director, of thinking how to launch upon Madame de Rochefide a little man, very self-willed and full of the worst qualities, who will certainly induce her to dismiss my son-in-law.”
“My daughter,” replied the abbe, stroking his chin, “we are not now in the confessional; I am not obliged to make myself your judge. From the world’s point of view, I admit that the result would be decisive–“
“The means seem to me odious,” she said.
“Why? No doubt the duty of a Christian woman is to withdraw a sinning woman from an evil path, rather than push her along it; but when a woman has advanced upon that path as far as Madame de Rochefide, it is not the hand of man, but that of God, which recalls such a sinner; she needs a thunderbolt.”
“Father,” replied the duchess, “I thank you for your indulgence; but the thought has occurred to me that my son-in-law is brave and a Breton. He was heroic at the time of the rash affair of that poor MADAME. Now, if the young fellow who undertook to make Madame de Rochefide love him were to quarrel with Calyste, and a duel should ensue–“
“You have thought wisely, Madame la duchesse; and it only proves that in crooked paths you will always find rocks of stumbling.”
“I have discovered a means, my dear abbe, to do a great good; to withdraw Madame de Rochefide from the fatal path in which she now is; to restore Calyste to his wife, and possibly to save from hell a poor distracted creature.”
“In that case, why consult me?” asked the vicar, smiling.
“Ah!” replied the duchess, “Because I must permit myself some rather nasty actions–“
“You don’t mean to rob anybody?”
“On the contrary, I shall apparently have to spend a great deal of money.”
“You will not calumniate, or–“
“Oh! oh!”
“–injure your neighbor?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Come, tell me your plan,” said the abbe, now becoming curious.
“Suppose, instead of driving out one nail by another,–this is what I thought at my /prie-Dieu/ after imploring the Blessed Virgin to enlighten me,–I were to free Calyste by persuading Monsieur de Rochefide to take back his wife? Instead of lending a hand to evil for the sake of doing good to my daughter, I should do one great good by another almost as great–“
The vicar looked at the Portuguese lady, and was pensive.
“That is evidently an idea that came to you from afar,” he said, “so far that–“
“I have thanked the Virgin for it,” replied the good and humble duchess; “and I have made a vow–not counting a novena–to give twelve hundred francs to some poor family if I succeed. But when I communicated my plan to Monsieur de Grandlieu he began to laugh, and said: ‘Upon my honor, at your time of life I think you women have a devil of your own.'”
“Monsieur le duc made as a husband the same reply I was about to make when you interrupted me,” said the abbe, who could not restrain a smile.
“Ah! Father, if you approve of the idea, will you also approve of the means of execution? It is necessary to do to a certain Madame Schontz (a Beatrix of the quartier Saint-Georges) what I proposed to do to Madame de Rochefide.”
“I am certain that you will not do any real wrong,” said the vicar, cleverly, not wishing to hear any more, having found the result so desirable. “You can consult me later if you find your conscience muttering,” he added. “But why, instead of giving that person in the rue Saint-Georges a fresh occasion for scandal, don’t you give her a husband?”
“Ah! my dear director, now you have rectified the only bad thing I had in my plan. You are worthy of being an archbishop, and I hope I shall not die till I have had the opportunity of calling you Your Eminence.”
“I see only one difficulty in all this,” said the abbe.
“What is that?”
“Suppose Madame de Rochefide chooses to keep your son-in-law after she goes back to her husband?”
“That’s my affair,” replied the duchess; “when one doesn’t often intrigue, one does so–“
“Badly, very badly,” said the abbe. “Habit is necessary for everything. Try to employ some of those scamps who live by intrigue, and don’t show your own hand.”
“Ah! monsieur l’abbe, if I make use of the means of hell, will Heaven help me?”
“You are not at confession,” repeated the abbe. “Save your child.”
The worthy duchess, delighted with her vicar, accompanied him to the door of the salon.
XXII
THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLASS GRISETTE
A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a Parisian can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he had been to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very sensibly said to his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so agreeable and satisfactory an existence. This opinion will oblige us to give certain details on the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after his wife had placed him in the position of a /deserted husband/. The reader will then be enabled to understand the enormous difference which our laws and our morals put between the two sexes in the same situation. That which turns to misery for the woman turns to happiness for the man. This contrast may inspire more than one young woman with the determination to remain in her own home, and to struggle there, like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as she may select) the most aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.
Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d’Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage and the /petits journaux/, by his method of repeating them, and applied them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had served in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point that women without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest did not dare to contradict them.
This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously. Thus without any taste of his own, he knew how to be the first to adopt and the first to abandon a new fashion. Accused of nothing worse than spending too much time at his toilet and wearing a corset, he presented the type of those persons who displease no one by adopting incessantly the ideas and the follies of everbody, and who, astride of circumstance, never grow old.
As a husband, he was pitied; people thought Beatrix inexcusable for deserting the best fellow on earth, and social jeers only touched the woman. A member of all clubs, subscriber to all the absurdities generated by patriotism or party spirit ill-understood (a compliance which put him in the front rank /a propos/ of all such matters), this loyal, brave, and very silly nobleman, whom unfortunately so many rich men resemble, would naturally desire to distinguish himself by adopting some fashionable mania. Consequently, he glorified his name principally in being the sultan of a four-footed harem, governed by an old English groom, which cost him monthly from four to five thousand francs. His specialty was /running horses;/ he protected the equine race and supported a magazine devoted to hippic questions; but, for all that, he knew very little of the animals, and from shoes to bridles he depended wholly on his groom,–all of which will sufficiently explain to you that this semi-bachelor had nothing actually of his own, neither mind, taste, position, or absurdity; even his fortune came from his fathers. After having tasted the displeasures of marriage he was so content to find himself once more a bachelor that he said among his friends, “I was born with a caul” (that is, to good luck).
Pleased above all things to be able to live without the costs of making an appearance, to which husbands are constrained, his house, in which since the death of his father nothing had been changed, resembled those of masters who are travelling; he lived there little, never dined, and seldom slept there. Here follows the reason for such indifference.
After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,–of which one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera /galop/, “When one thinks that all /that/ is lodged and clothed and lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!”–this world has already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the historian should proportion the number of such personages to the diverse endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.
Madame Schontz, known at first under the name of La Petite-Aurelie, to distinguish her from one of her rivals far less clever than herself, belongs to the highest class of those women whose social utility cannot be questioned by the prefect of the Seine, nor by those who are interested in the welfare of the city of Paris. Certainly the Rat, accused of demolishing fortunes which frequently never existed, might better be compared to a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of carved free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes where the wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged by the words, /Apartments to let/.
The situation of these dames is determined by that which they take in the apocryphal regions. If the house is near the line traced by the rue de Provence, the woman has an income, her budget prospers; but if she approaches the farther line of the Boulevard Exterieur or rises towards the horrid town of Batignolles, she is without resources. When Monsieur de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on the third floor of the only house that remained in the rue de Berlin; thus she was camping on the border-land between misery and its reverse. This person was not really named, as you may suppose, either Schontz or Aurelie. She concealed the name of her father, an old soldier of the Empire, that perennial colonel who always appears at the dawn of all these feminine existences either as father or seducer. Madame Schontz had received the gratuitous education of Saint-Denis, where young girls are admirably brought up, but where, unfortunately, neither husbands nor openings in life are offered to them when they leave the school,–an admirable creation of the Emperor, which now lacks but one thing, the Emperor himself!
“I shall be there, to provide for the daughters of my faithful legions,” he replied to a remark of one of his ministers, who foresaw the future.
Napoleon had also said, “I shall be there!” for the members of the Institute; to whom they had better give no salary than send them eighty francs each month, a wage that is less than that of certain clerks!
Aurelie was really the daughter of the intrepid Colonel Schiltz, a leader of those bold Alsacian guerillas who came near saving the Emperor in the campaign of France. He died at Metz,–robbed, pillaged, ruined. In 1814 Napoleon put the little Josephine Schiltz, then about nine years old, at Saint-Denis. Having lost both father and mother and being without a home and without resources, the poor child was not dismissed from the institution on the second return of the Bourbons. She was under-mistress of the school till 1827, but then her patience gave way; her beauty seduced her. When she reached her majority Josephine Schiltz, the Empress’s goddaughter, was on the verge of the adventurous life of a courtesan, persuaded to that doubtful future by the fatal example of some of her comrades like herself without resources, who congratulated themselves on their decision. She substituted /on/ for /il/ in her father’s name and placed herself under the patronage of Saint-Aurelie.
Lively, witty, and well-educated, she committed more faults than her duller companions, whose misdemeanors had invariably self-interest for their base. After knowing various writers, poor but dishonest, clever but deeply in debt; after trying certain rich men as calculating as they were foolish; and after sacrificing solid interests to one true love,–thus going through all the schools in which experience is taught,–on a certain day of extreme misery, when, at Valentino’s (the first stage to Musard) she danced in a gown, hat, and mantle that were all borrowed, she attracted the attention of Arthur de Rochefide, who had come there to see the famous /galop/. Her cleverness instantly captivated the man who at that time knew not what passion to devote himself to. So that two years after his desertion by Beatrix, the memory of whom often humiliated him, the marquis was not blamed by any one for marrying, so to speak, in the thirteenth arrondissement, a substitute for his wife.
Let us sketch the four periods of this happiness. It is necessary to show that the theory of marriage in the thirteenth arrondissement affects in like manner all who come within its rule.[*] Marquis in the forties, sexagenary retired shopkeeper, quadruple millionnaire or moderate-income man, great seigneur or bourgeois, the strategy of passion (except for the differences inherent in social zones) never varies. The heart and the money-box are always in the same exact and clearly defined relation. Thus informed, you will be able to estimate the difficulties the duchess was certain to encounter in her charitable enterprise.
[*] Before 1859 there was no 13th arrondissement in Paris, hence the saying.–TR.
Who knows the power in France of witty sayings upon ordinary minds, or what harm the clever men who invent them have done? For instance, no book-keeper could add up the figures of the sums remaining unproductive and lost in the depths of generous hearts and strong-boxes by that ignoble phrase, “/tirer une carotte!/”
The saying has become so popular that it must be allowed to soil this page. Besides, if we penetrate within the 13th arrondissement, we are forced to accept its picturesque patois. /Tirer une carotte/ has a dozen allied meanings, but it suffices to give it here as: /To dupe/. Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being /carotte/. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was, therefore, very /rat/, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The word /rat/, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast who is niggardly.
Madame Schontz had too much sense and she knew men too well not to conceive great hopes from such a beginning. Monsieur de Rochefide allowed her five hundred francs a month, furnished for her, rather shabbily, an apartment costing twelve hundred francs a year on a second floor in the rue Coquenard, and set himself to study Aurelie’s character, while she, perceiving his object, gave him a character to study. Consequently, Rochefide became happy in meeting with a woman of noble nature. But he saw nothing surprising in that; her mother was a Barnheim of Baden, a well-bred woman. Besides, Aurelie was so well brought up herself! Speaking English, German, and Italian, she possessed a thorough knowledge of foreign literatures. She could hold her own against all second-class pianists. And, remark this! she behaved about her talents like a well-bred woman; she never mentioned them. She picked up a brush in a painter’s studio, used it half jestingly, and produced a head which caused general astonishment. For mere amusement during the time she pined as under-mistress at Saint-Denis, she had made some advance in the domain of the sciences, but her subsequent life had covered these good seeds with a coating of salt, and she now gave Arthur the credit of the sprouting of the precious germs, re-cultivated for him.
Thus Aurelie began by showing a disinterestedness equal to her other charms, which allowed this weak corvette to attach its grapnels securely to the larger vessel. Nevertheless, about the end of the first year, she made ignoble noises in the antechamber with her clogs, coming in about the time when the marquis was awaiting her, and hiding, as best she could, the draggled tail of an outrageously muddy gown. In short, she had by this time so perfectly persuaded her /gros papa/ that all her ambition, after so many ups and downs, was to obtain honorably a comfortable little bourgeois existence, that, about ten months after their first meeting, the second phase of happiness declared itself.
Madame Schontz then obtained a fine apartment in the rue Neuve-Saint-Georges. Arthur, who could no longer conceal the amount of his fortune, gave her splendid furniture, a complete service of plate, twelve hundred francs a month, a low carriage with one horse,–this, however, was hired; but he granted a tiger very graciously. Madame Schontz was not the least grateful for this munificence; she knew the motive of her Arthur’s conduct, and recognized the calculations of the male /rat/. Sick of living at a restaurant, where the fare is usually execrable, and where the least little /gourmet/ dinner costs sixty francs for one, and two hundred francs if you invite three friends, Rochefide offered Madame Schontz forty francs a day for his dinner and that of a friend, everything included. Aurelie accepted.
Thus having made him take up all her moral letters of credit, drawn one by one on Monsieur de Rochefide’s comfort, she was listened to with favor when she asked for five hundred francs more a month for her dress, in order not to shame her /gros papa/, whose friends all belonged to the Jockey Club.
“It would be a pretty thing,” she said, “if Rastignac, Maxime de Trailles, d’Esgrignon, La Roche-Hugon, Ronqueroles, Laginski, Lenoncourt, found you with a sort of Madame Everard. Besides, have confidence in me, papa, and you’ll be the gainer.”
In fact, Aurelie contrived to display new virtues in this second phase. She laid out for herself a house-keeping role for which she claimed much credit. She made, so she said, both ends meet at the close of the month on two thousand five hundred francs without a debt, –a thing unheard of in the faubourg Saint-Germain of the 13th arrondissement,–and she served dinners infinitely superior to those of Nucingen, at which exquisite wines were drunk at twelve francs a bottle. Rochefide, amazed, and delighted to be able to invite his friends to the house with economy, declared, as he caught her round the waist,–
“She’s a treasure!”
Soon after he hired one-third of a box at the Opera for her; next he took her to first representations. Then he began to consult his Aurelie, and recognized the excellence of her advice. She let him take the clever sayings she said about most things for his own, and, these being unknown to others, raised his reputation as an amusing man. He now acquired the certainty of being loved truly, and for himself alone. Aurelie refused to make the happiness of a Russian prince who offered her five thousand francs a month.
“You are a lucky man, my dear marquis,” cried old Prince Galathionne as he finished his game of whist at the club. “Yesterday, after you left us alone, I tried to get Madame Schontz away from you, but she said: ‘Prince, you are not handsomer, but you are a great deal older than Rochefide; you would beat me, but he is like a father to me; can you give me one-tenth of a reason why I should change? I’ve never had the grand passion for Arthur that I once had for little fools in varnished boots and whose debts I paid; but I love him as a wife loves her husband when she is an honest woman.’ And thereupon she showed me the door.”
This speech, which did not seem exaggerated, had the effect of greatly increasing the state of neglect and degradation which reigned in the hotel de Rochefide. Arthur now transported his whole existence and his pleasures to Madame Schontz, and found himself well off; for at the end of three years he had four hundred thousand francs to invest.
The third phase now began. Madame Schontz became the tenderest of mothers to Arthur’s son; she fetched him from school and took him back herself; she overwhelmed with presents and dainties and pocket-money the child who called her his “little mamma,” and who adored her. She took part in the management of Arthur’s property; she made him buy into the Funds when low, just before the famous treaty of London which overturned the ministry of March 1st. Arthur gained two hundred thousand francs by that transaction and Aurelie did not ask for a penny of it. Like the gentleman that he was, Rochefide invested his six hundred thousand francs in stock of the Bank of France and put half of that sum in the name of Josephine Schiltz. A little house was now hired in the rue de La Bruyere and given to Grindot, that great decorative architect, with orders to make it a perfect bonbon-box.
Henceforth, Rochefide no longer managed his affairs. Madame Schontz received the revenues and paid the bills. Become, as it were, practically his wife, his woman of business, she justified the position by making her /gros papa/ more comfortable than ever; she had learned all his fancies, and gratified them as Madame de Pompadour gratified those of Louis XV. In short, Madame Schontz reigned an absolute mistress. She then began to patronize a few young men, artists, men of letters, new-fledged to fame, who rejected both ancients and moderns, and strove to make themselves a great reputation by accomplishing little or nothing.
The conduct of Madame Schontz, a triumph of tactics, ought to reveal to you her superiority. In the first place, these ten or a dozen young fellows amused Arthur; they supplied him with witty sayings and clever opinions on all sorts of topics, and did not put in doubt the fidelity of the mistress; moreover, they proclaimed her a woman who was eminently intelligent. These living advertisements, these perambulating articles, soon set up Madame Schontz as the most agreeable woman to be found in the borderland which separates the thirteenth arrondissement from the twelve others. Her rivals–Suzanne Gaillard, who, in 1838, had won the advantage over her of becoming a wife married in legitimate marriage, Fanny Beaupre, Mariette, Antonia –spread calumnies that were more than droll about the beauty of those young men and the complacent good-nature with which Monsieur de Rochefide welcomed them. Madame Schontz, who could distance, as she said, by three /blagues/ the wit of those ladies, said to them one night at a supper given by Nathan to Florine, after recounting her fortune and her success, “Do as much yourselves!”–a speech which remained in their memory.
It was during this period that Madame Schontz made Arthur sell his race-horses, through a series of considerations which she no doubt derived from the critical mind of Claude Vignon, one of her /habitues/.
“I can conceive,” she said one night, after lashing the horses for some time with her lively wit, “that princes and rich men should set their hearts on horse-flesh, but only for the good of the country, not for the paltry satisfactions of a betting man. If you had a stud farm on your property and could raise a thousand or twelve hundred horses, and if all the horses of France and of Navarre could enter into one great solemn competition, it would be fine; but you buy animals as the managers of theatres trade in artists; you degrade an institution to a gambling game; you make a Bourse of legs, as you make a Bourse of stocks. It is unworthy. Don’t you spend sixty thousand francs sometimes merely to read in the newspapers: ‘Lelia, belonging to Monsieur de Rochefide beat by a length Fleur-de-Genet the property of Monsieur le Duc de Rhetore’? You had much better give that money to poets, who would carry you in prose and verse to immortality, like the late Montyon.”
By dint of being prodded, the marquis was brought to see the hollowness of the turf; he realized that economy of sixty thousand francs; and the next year Madame Schontz remarked to him,–
“I don’t cost you anything now, Arthur.”
Many rich men envied the marquis and endeavored to entice Madame Schontz away from him, but like the Russian prince they wasted their old age.
“Listen to me,” she said to Finot, now become immensely rich. “I am certain that Rochefide would forgive me a little passion if I fell in love with any one, but one doesn’t leave a marquis with a kind heart like that for a /parvenu/ like you. You couldn’t keep me in the position in which Arthur has placed me; he has made me half a wife and a lady, and that’s more than you could do even if you married me.”
This was the last nail which clinched the fetters of that happy galley-slave, for the speech of course reached the ears for which it was intended.
The fourth phase had begun, that of /habit/, the final victory in these plans of campaign, which make the women of this class say of a man, “I hold him!” Rochefide, who had just bought the little hotel in the name of Mademoiselle Josephine Schiltz (a trifle of eighty thousand francs), had reached, at the moment the Duchesse de Grandlieu was forming plans about him, the stage of deriving vanity from his mistress (whom he now called Ninon II.), by vaunting her scrupulous honesty, her excellent manners, her education, and her wit. He had merged his own defects, merits, tastes, and pleasures in Madame Schontz, and he found himself at this period of his life, either from lassitude, indifference, or philosophy, a man unable to change, who clings to wife or mistress.
We may understand the position won in five years by Madame Schontz from the fact that presentation at her house had to be proposed some time before it was granted. She refused to receive dull rich people and smirched people; and only departed from this rule in favor of certain great names of the aristocracy.
“They,” she said, “have a right to be stupid because they are well-bred.”
She possessed ostensibly the three hundred thousand francs which Rochefide had given her, and which a certain good fellow, a broker named Gobenheim (the only man of that class admitted to her house) invested and reinvested for her. But she manipulated for herself secretly a little fortune of two hundred thousand francs, the result of her savings for the last three years and of the constant movement of the three hundred thousand francs,–for she never admitted the possession of more than that known sum.
“The more you make, the less you get rich,” said Gobenheim to her one day.
“Water is so dear,” she answered.
This secret hoard was increased by jewels and diamonds, which Aurelie wore a month and then sold. When any one called her rich, Madame Schontz replied that at the rate of interest in the Funds three hundred thousand francs produced only twelve thousand, and she had spent as much as that in the hardest days of her life.
XXIII
ONE OF THE DISEASES OF THE AGE
Such conduct implied a plan, and Madame Schontz had, as you may well believe, a plan. Jealous for the last two years of Madame du Bruel, she was consumed with the ambition to be married by church and mayor. All social positions have their forbidden fruit, some little thing magnified by desire until it has become the weightiest thing in life. This ambition of course involved a second Arthur; but no espial on the part of those about her had as yet discovered Rochefide’s secret rival. Bixiou fancied he saw the favored one in Leon de Lora; the painter saw him in Bixiou, who had passed his fortieth year and ought to be making himself a fate of some kind. Suspicions were also turned on Victor de Vernisset, a poet of the school of Canalis, whose passion for Madame Schontz was desperate; but the poet accused Stidmann, a young sculptor, of being his fortune rival. This artist, a charming lad, worked for jewellers, for manufacturers in bronze and silver-smiths; he longed to be another Benvenuto Cellini. Claude Vignon, the young Comte de la Palferine, Gobenheim, Vermanton a cynical philosopher, all frequenters of this amusing salon, were severally suspected, and proved innocent. No one had fathomed Madame Schontz, certainly not Rochefide, who thought she had a penchant for the young and witty La Palferine; she was virtuous from self-interest and was wholly bent on making a good marriage.
Only one man of equivocal reputation was ever seen in Madame Schontz’s salon, namely Couture, who had more than once made his brother speculators howl; but Couture had been one of Madame Schontz’s earliest friends, and she alone remained faithful to him. The false alarm of 1840 swept away the last vestige of this stock-gambler’s credit; Aurelie, seeing his run of ill-luck, made Rochefide play, as we have seen, in the other direction. Thankful to find a place for himself at Aurelie’s table, Couture, to whom Finot, the cleverest or, if you choose, the luckiest of all parvenus, occasionally gave a note of a thousand francs, was alone wise and calculating enough to offer his hand and name to madame Schontz, who studied him to see if the bold speculator had sufficient power to make his way in politics and enough gratitude not to desert his wife. Couture, a man about forty-three years of age, half worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant sonority of his name by birth; he said little of the authors of his days.
Madame Schontz was bemoaning to herself the rarity of eligible men, when Couture presented to her a provincial, supplied with the two handles by which women take hold of such pitchers when they wish to keep them. To sketch this person will be to paint a portion of the youth of the day. The digression is history.
In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, son of a chief-justice of the Royal court at Caen (who had lately died), left his native town of Alencon, resigning his judgeship (a position in which his father had compelled him, he said, to waste his time), and came to Paris, with the intention of making a noise there,–a Norman idea, difficult to realize, for he could scarcely scrape together eight thousand francs a year; his mother still being alive and possessing a life-interest in a valuable estate in Alencon. This young man had already, during previous visits to Paris, tried his rope, like an acrobat, and had recognized the great vice of the social replastering of 1830. He meant to turn it to his own profit, following the example of the longest heads of the bourgeoisie. This requires a rapid glance on one of the effects of the new order of things.
Modern equality, unduly developed in our day, has necessarily developed in private life, on a line parallel with political life, the three great divisions of the social /I;/ namely, pride, conceit, and vanity. Fools wish to pass for wits; wits want to be thought men of talent; men of talent wish to be treated as men of genius; as for men of genius, they are more reasonable; they consent to be only demigods. This tendency of the public mind of these days, which, in the Chamber, makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous of the writer, leads fools to disparage wits, wits to disparage men of talent, men of talent to disparage those who outstrip them by an inch or two, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the throne, or whatever does not adore them unconditionally. So soon as a nation has, in a very unstatesmanlike spirit, pulled down all recognized social superiorities, she opens the sluice through which rushes a torrent of secondary ambitions, the meanest of which resolves to lead. She had, so democrats declare, an evil in her aristocracy; but a defined and circumscribed evil; she exchanges it for a dozen armed and contending aristocracies–the worst of all situations. By proclaiming the equality of all, she has promulgated a declaration of the rights of Envy. We inherit to-day the saturnalias of the Revolution transferred to the domain, apparently peaceful, of the mind, of industry, of politics; it now seems that reputations won by toil, by services rendered, by talent, are privileges granted at the expense of the masses. Agrarian law will spread to the field of glory. Never, in any age, have men demanded the affixing of their names on the nation’s posters for reasons more puerile. Distinction is sought at any price, by ridicule, by an affectation of interest in the cause of Poland, in penitentiaries, in the future of liberated galley-slaves, in all the little scoundrels above and below twelve years, and in every other social misery. These diverse manias create fictitious dignities, presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of societies, the number of which is greater than that of the social questions they seek to solve. Society on its grand scale has been demolished to make a million of little ones in the image of the defunct. These parasitic organizations reveal decomposition; are they not the swarming of maggots in the dead body? All these societies are the daughters of one mother, Vanity. It is not thus that Catholic charity or true beneficence proceeds; /they/ study evils in wounds and cure them; they don’t perorate in public meetings upon deadly ills for the pleasure of perorating.
Fabien du Ronceret, without being a superior man, had divined, by the exercise of that greedy common-sense peculiar to a Norman, the gain he could derive from this public vice. Every epoch has its character which clever men make use of. Fabien’s mind, though not clever, was wholly bent on making himself talked about.
“My dear fellow, a man must make himself talked about, if he wants to be anything,” he said, on parting from the king of Alencon, a certain du Bousquier, a friend of his father. “In six months I shall be better known than you are!”
It was thus that Fabien interpreted the spirit of his age; he did not rule it, he obeyed it. He made his debut in Bohemia, a region in the moral topography of Paris where he was known as “The Heir” by reason of certain premeditated prodigalities. Du Ronceret had profited by Couture’s follies for the pretty Madame Cadine, for whom, during his ephemeral opulence, he had arranged a delightful ground-floor apartment with a garden in the rue Blanche. The Norman, who wanted his luxury ready-made, bought Couture’s furniture and all the improvements he was forced to leave behind him,–a kiosk in the garden, where he smoked, a gallery in rustic wood, with India mattings and adorned with potteries, through which to reach the kiosk if it rained. When the Heir was complimented on his apartment, he called it his /den/. The provincial took care not to say that Grindot, the architect, had bestowed his best capacity upon it, as did Stidmann on the carvings, and Leon de Lora on the paintings, for Fabien’s crowning defect was the vanity which condescends to lie for the sake of magnifying the individual self.
The Heir complimented these magnificences by a greenhouse which he built along a wall with a southern exposure,–not that he loved flowers, but he meant to attack through horticulture the public notice he wanted to excite. At the present moment he had all but attained his end. Elected vice-president of some sort of floral society presided over by the Duc de Vissembourg, brother of the Prince de Chiavari, youngest son of the late Marechal Vernon, he adorned his coat with the ribbon of the Legion of honor on the occasion of an exhibition of products, the opening speech at which, delivered by him, and bought of Lousteau for five hundred francs, was boldly pronounced to be his own brew. He also made himself talked about by a flower, given to him by old Blondet of Alencon, father of Emile Blondet, which he presented to the horticultural world as the product of his own greenhouse.
But this success was nothing. The Heir, who wished to be accepted as a wit, had formed a plan of consorting with clever celebrities and so reflecting their fame,–a plan somewhat hard to execute on a basis of an exchequer limited to eight thousand francs a year. With this end in view, Fabien du Ronceret had addressed himself again and again, without success, to Bixiou, Stidmann, and Leon de Lora, asking them to present him to Madame Schontz, and allow him to take part in that menageria of lions of all kinds. Failing in those directions he applied to Couture, for whose dinners he had so often paid that the late speculator felt obliged to prove categorically to Madame Schontz that she ought to acquire such an original, if it was only to make him one of those elegant footmen without wages whom the mistresses of households employ to do errands, when servants are lacking.
In the course of three evenings Madame Schontz read Fabien like a book and said to herself,–
“If Couture does not suit me, I am certain of saddling that one. My future can go on two legs now.”
This queer fellow whom everybody laughed at was really the chosen one, –chosen, however, with an intention which made such preference insulting. The choice escaped all public suspicion by its very improbability. Madame Schontz intoxicated Fabien with smiles given secretly, with little scenes played on the threshold when she bade him good-night, if Monsieur de Rochefide stayed behind. She often made Fabien a third with Arthur in her opera-box and at first representations; this she excused by saying he had done her such or such a service and she did not know how else to repay him. Men have a natural conceit as common to them as to women,–that of being loved exclusively. Now of all flattering passions there is none more prized than that of a Madame Schontz, for the man she makes the object of a love she calls “from the heart,” in distinction from another sort of love. A woman like Madame Schontz, who plays the great lady, and whose intrinsic value is real, was sure to be an object of pride to Fabien, who fell in love with her to the point of never presenting himself before her eyes except in full dress, varnished boots, lemon-kid gloves, embroidered shirt and frill, waistcoat more or less variegated,–in short, with all the external symptoms of profound worship.
A month before the conference of the duchess and her confessor, Madame Schontz had confided the secret of her birth and her real name to Fabien, who did not in the least understand the motive of the confidence. A fortnight later, Madame Schontz, surprised at this want of intelligence, suddenly exclaimed to herself:–
“Heavens! how stupid I am! he expects me to love him for himself.”
Accordingly the next day she took the Heir in her /caleche/ to the Bois, for she now had two little carriages, drawn by two horses. In the course of this public /tete-a-tete/ she opened the question of her future, and declared that she wished to marry.
“I have seven hundred thousand francs,” she said, “and I admit to you that if I could find a man full of ambition, who knew how to understand my character, I would change my position; for do you know what is the dream of my life? To become a true bourgeoise, enter an honorable family, and make my husband and children truly happy.”
The Norman would fain be “distinguished” by Madame Schontz, but as for marrying her, that folly seemed debatable to a bachelor of thirty-eight whom the revolution of July had made a judge. Seeing his hesitation, Madame Schontz made the Heir the butt of her wit, her jests, and her disdain, and turned to Couture. Within a week, the latter, whom she put upon the scent of her fortune, had offered his hand, and heart, and future,–three things of about the same value.
The manoeuvres of Madame Schontz had reached this stage of proceeding, when Madame de Grandlieu began her inquiries into the life and habits of the Beatrix of the Place Saint-Georges.
XXIV
THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL RELATIONS AND POSITION
In accordance with the advice of the Abbe Brossette the Duchesse de Grandlieu asked the Marquis d’Ajuda to bring her that king of political cut-throats, the celebrated Comte Maxime de Trailles, archduke of Bohemia, the youngest of young men, though he was now fully fifty years of age. Monsieur d’Ajuda arranged to dine with Maxime at the club in the rue de Beuane, and proposed to him after dinner to go and play dummy whist with the Duc de Grandlieu, who had an attack of gout and was all alone.
Though the son-in-law of the duke and the cousin of the duchess had every right to present him in a salon where he had never yet set foot, Maxime de Trailles did not deceive himself as to the meaning of an invitation thus given. He felt certain that the duke or the duchess had some need of him. Club life where men play cards with other men whom they do not receive in their own houses is by no means one of the most trifling signs of the present age.
The Duc de Grandlieu did Maxime the honor of appearing to suffer from his gout. After several games of whist he went to bed, leaving his wife /tete-a-tete/ with Maxime and d’Ajuda. The duchess, seconded by the marquis, communicated her project to Monsieur de Trailles, and asked his assistance, while ostensibly asking only for his advice. Maxime listened to the end without committing himself, and waited till the duchess should ask point-blank for his co-operation before replying.
“Madame, I fully understand you,” he then said, casting on her and the marquis one of those shrewd, penetrating, astute, comprehensive glances by which such great scamps compromise their interlocutors. “D’Ajuda will tell you that if any one in Paris can conduct that difficult negotiation, it is I,–of course without mixing you up in it; without its being even known that I have come here this evening. Only, before anything is done, we must settle preliminaries. How much are you willing to sacrifice?”
“All that is necessary.”
“Very well, then, Madame la duchesse. As the price of my efforts you must do me the honor to receive in your house and seriously protect Madame la Comtesse de Trailles.”
“What! are you married?” cried d’Ajuda.
“I shall be married within a fortnight to the heiress of a rich but extremely bourgeois family,–a sacrifice to opinion! I imbibe the very spirit of my government, and start upon a new career. Consequently, Madame la duchesse will understand how important it is to me to have my wife adopted by her and by her family. I am certain of being made deputy by the resignation of my father-in-law, and I am promised a diplomatic post in keeping with my new fortune. I do not see why my wife should not be as well received as Madame de Portenduere in that society of young women which includes Mesdames de la Bastie, Georges de Maufrigneuse, de L’Estorade, du Guenic, d’Ajuda, de Restaud, de Rastignac, de Vandenesse. My wife is pretty, and I will undertake to /un-cotton-night-cap/ her. Will this suit you, Madame la duchesse? You are religious, and if you say yes, your promise, which I know to be sacred, will greatly aid in my change of life. It will be one more good action to your account. Alas! I have long been the king of /mauvais sujets/, and I want to make an end of it. After all, we bear, azure, a wivern or, darting fire, ongle gules, and scaled vert, a chief ermine, from the time of Francois I., who thought proper to ennoble the valet of Louis XI., and we have been counts since Catherine de’ Medici.”
“I will receive and protect your wife,” said the duchess, solemnly, “and my family will not turn its back upon her; I give you my word.”
“Ah! Madame la duchesse,” cried Maxime, visibly touched, “if Monsieur le duc would also deign to treat me with some kindness, I promise you to make your plan succeed without its costing you very much. But,” he continued after a pause, “you must take upon yourself to follow my instructions. This is the last intrigue of my bachelor life; it must be all the better managed because it concerns a good action,” he added, smiling.
“Follow your instructions!” said the duchess. “Then I must appear in all this.”
“Ah! madame, I will not compromise you,” cried Maxime. “I esteem you too much to demand guarantees. I merely mean that you must follow my advice. For example, it will be necessary that du Guenic be taken away by his wife for at least two years; she must show him Switzerland, Italy, Germany,–in short, all possible countries.”
“Ah! you confirm a fear of my director,” said the duchess, naively, remembering the judicious objection of the Abbe Brossette.
Maxime and d’Ajuda could not refrain from smiling at the idea of this agreement between heaven and hell.
“To prevent Madame de Rochefide from ever seeing Calyste again,” she continued, “we will all travel, Juste and his wife, Calyste, Sabine, and I. I will leave Clotilde with her father–“
“It is too soon to sing victory, madame,” said Maxime. “I foresee enormous difficulties; though I shall no doubt vanquish them. Your esteem and your protection are rewards which would make me commit the vilest actions, but these will be–“
“The vilest actions!” cried the duchess, interrupting this modern condottiere, and showing on her countenance as much disgust as amazement.
“And you would share them, madame, inasmuch as I am only your agent. But are you ignorant of the degree of blindness to which Madame de Rochefide has brought your son-in-law? I know it from Canalis and Nathan, between whom she was hesitating when Calyste threw himself into the lioness’s jaws. Beatrix has contrived to persuade that serious Breton that she has never loved any one but him; that she is virtuous; that Conti was merely a sentimental head-love in which neither the heart nor the rest of it had any part,–a musical love, in short! As for Rochefide, that was duty. So, you understand, she is virgin!–a fact she proves by forgetting her son, whom for more than a year she has not made the slightest attempt to see. The truth is, the little count will soon be twelve years old, and he finds in Madame Schontz a mother who is all the more a mother because maternity is, as you know, a passion with women of that sort. Du Guenic would let himself be cut in pieces, and would chop up his wife for Beatrix; and you think it is an easy matter to drag a man from the depths of such credulity! Ah! madame, Shakespeare’s Iago would lose all his handkerchiefs. People think that Othello, or his younger brother, Orosmanes, or Saint-Preux, Rene, Werther, and other lovers now in possession of fame, represented love! Never did their frosty-hearted fathers know what absolute love is; Moliere alone conceived it. Love, Madame la duchesse, is not loving a noble woman, a Clarissa–a great effort, faith! Love is to say to one’s self: ‘She whom I love is infamous; she deceives me, she will deceive me; she is an abandoned creature, she smells of the frying of hell-fire;’ but we rush to her, we find there the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise. That is how Moliere loved, and how we, scamps that we are! how we love. As for me, I weep at the great scene of Arnolphe. Now, that is how your son-in-law loves Beatrix. I shall have trouble separating Rochefide from Madame Schontz; but Madame Schontz will no doubt lend herself to the plot; I shall study her interior. But as for Calyste and Beatrix, they will need the blows of an axe, far deeper treachery, and so base an infamy that your virtuous imagination could never descend to it –unless indeed your director gave you a hand. You have asked the impossible, you shall be obeyed. But in spite of my settled intention to war with fire and sword, I cannot absolutely promise you success. I have known lovers who did not recoil before the most awful disillusions. You are too virtuous to know the full power of women who are not virtuous.”
“Do not enter upon those infamous actions until I have consulted the Abbe Brossette to know how far I may be your accomplice,” cried the duchess, with a naivete which disclosed what selfishness there is in piety.
“You shall be ignorant of everything, my dear mother,” interposed d’Ajuda.
On the portico, while the carriage of the marquis was drawing up, d’Ajuda said to Maxime:–
“You frightened that good duchess.”
“But she has no idea of the difficulty of what she asks. Let us go to the Jockey Club; Rochefide must invite me to dine with Madame Schontz to-morrow, for to-night my plan will be made, and I shall have chosen the pawns on my chess-board to carry it out. In the days of her splendor Beatrix refused to receive me; I intend to pay off that score, and I will avenge your sister-in-law so cruelly that perhaps she will find herself too well revenged.”
The next day Rochefide told Madame Schontz that Maxime de Trailles was coming to dinner. That meant notifying her to display all her luxury, and prepare the choicest food for this connoisseur emeritus, whom all the women of the Madame Schontz type were in awe of. Madame Schontz herself thought as much of her toilet as of putting her house in a state to receive this personage.
In Paris there are as many royalties as there are varieties of art, mental and moral specialties, sciences, professions; the strongest and most capable of the men who practise them has a majesty which is all his own; he is appreciated, respected by his peers, who know the difficulties of his art or profession, and whose admiration is given to the man who surmounts them. Maxime was, in the eyes of /rats/ and courtesans, an extremely powerful and capable man, who had known how to make himself excessively loved. He was also admired by men who knew how difficult it is to live in Paris on good terms with creditors; in short, he had never had any other rival in elegance, deportment, and wit than the illustrious de Marsay, who frequently employed him on political missions. All this will suffice to explain his interview with the duchess, his prestige with Madame Schontz, and the authority of his words in a conference which he intended to have on the boulevard des Italiens with a young man already well-known, though lately arrived, in the Bohemia of Paris.
XXV
A PRINCE OF BOHEMIA
The next day, when Maxime de Trailles rose, Finot (whom he had summoned the night before) was announced. Maxime requested his visitor to arrange, as if by accident, a breakfast at the cafe Anglais, where Finot, Couture, and Lousteau should gossip beside him. Finot, whose position toward the Comte de Trailles was that of a sub-lieutenant before a marshall of France, could refuse him nothing; it was altogether too dangerous to annoy that lion. Consequently, when Maxime came to the breakfast, he found Finot and his two friends at table and the conversation already started on Madame Schontz, about whom Couture, well manoeuvred by Finot and Lousteau (Lousteau being, though not aware of it, Finot’s tool), revealed to the Comte de Trailles all that he wanted to know about her.
About one o’clock, Maxime was chewing a toothpick and talking with du Tillet on Tortoni’s portico, where speculation held a little Bourse, a sort of prelude to the great one. He seemed to be engaged in business, but he was really awaiting the Comte de la Palferine, who, within a given time, was certain to pass that way. The boulevard des Italiens is to-day what the Pont Neuf was in 1650; all persons known to fame pass along it once, at least, in the course of the day. Accordingly, at the end of about ten minutes, Maxime dropped du Tillet’s arm, and nodding to the young Prince of Bohemia said, smiling:–
“One word with you, count.”
The two rivals in their own principality, the one orb on its decline, the other like the rising sun, sat down upon four chairs before the Cafe de Paris. Maxime took care to place a certain distance between himself and some old fellows who habitually sunned themselves like wall-fruit at that hour in the afternoon, to dry out their rheumatic affections. He had excellent reasons for distrusting old men.
“Have you debts?” said Maxime, to the young count.
“If I had none, should I be worthy of being your successor?” replied La Palferine.
“In putting that question to you I don’t place the matter in doubt; I only want to know if the total is reasonable; if it goes to the five or the six?”
“Six what?”
“Figures; whether you owe fifty or one hundred thousand? I have owed, myself, as much as six hundred thousand.”
La Palferine raised his hat with an air as respectful as it was humorous.
“If I had sufficient credit to borrow a hundred thousand francs,” he replied, “I should forget my creditors and go and pass my life in Venice, amid masterpieces of painting and pretty women and–“
“And at my age what would you be?” asked Maxime.
“I should never reach it,” replied the young count.
Maxime returned the civility of his rival, and touched his hat lightly with an air of laughable gravity.
“That’s one way of looking at life,” he replied in the tone of one connoisseur to another. “You owe–?”
“Oh! a mere trifle, unworthy of being confessed to an uncle; he would disinherit me for such a paltry sum,–six thousand.”
“One is often more hampered by six thousand than by a hundred thousand,” said Maxime, sententiously. “La Palferine, you’ve a bold spirit, and you have even more spirit than boldness; you can go far, and make yourself a position. Let me tell you that of all those who have rushed into the career at the close of which I now am, and who have tried to oppose me, you are the only one who has ever pleased me.”
La Palferine colored, so flattered was he by this avowal made with gracious good-humor by the leader of Parisian adventurers. This action of his own vanity was however a recognition of inferiority which wounded him; but Maxime divined that unpleasant reaction, easy to foresee in so clever a mind, and he applied a balm instantly by putting himself at the discretion of the young man.
“Will you do something for me that will facilitate my retreat from the Olympic circus by a fine marriage? I will do as much for you.”
“You make me very proud; it realizes the fable of the Rat and the Lion,” said La Palferine.
“I shall begin by lending you twenty thousand francs,” continued Maxime.
“Twenty thousand francs! I knew very well that by dint of walking up and down this boulevard–” said La Palferine, in the style of a parenthesis.
“My dear fellow, you must put yourself on a certain footing,” said Maxime, laughing. “Don’t go on your own two feet, have six; do as I do, I never get out of my tilbury.”
“But you must be going to ask me for something beyond my powers.”
“No, it is only to make a woman love you within a fortnight.”
“Is it a lorette?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s impossible; but if it concerns a woman, and a well-bred one who is also clever–“
“She is a very illustrious marquise.”
“You want her letters?” said the young count.
“Ah! you are after my own heart!” cried Maxime. “No, that’s not it.”
“Then you want me to love her?”
“Yes, in the real sense–“
“If I am to abandon the aesthetic, it is utterly impossible,” said La Palferine. “I have, don’t you see, as to women a certain honor; we may play the fool with them, but not–“
“Ah! I was not mistaken!” cried Maxime. “Do you think I’m a man to propose mere twopenny infamies to you? No, you must go, and dazzle, and conquer. My good mate, I give you twenty thousand francs, and ten days in which to triumph. Meet me to-night at Madame Schontz’.”
“I dine there.”
“Very good,” returned Maxime. “Later, when you have need of me, Monsieur le comte, you will find me,” he added in the tone of a king who binds himself, but promises nothing.
“This poor woman must have done you some deadly harm,” said La Palferine.
“Don’t try to throw a plummet-line into my waters, my boy; and let me tell you that in case of success you will obtain such powerful influence that you will be able, like me, to retire upon a fine marriage when you are bored with your bohemian life.”
“Comes there a time when it is a bore to amuse one’s self,” said La Palferine, “to be nothing, to live like the birds, to hunt the fields of Paris like a savage, and laugh at everything?”
“All things weary, even hell,” said de Trailles, laughing. “Well, this evening.”
The two /roues/, the old and the young, rose. As Maxime got into his one-horse equipage, he thought to himself: “Madame d’Espard can’t endure Beatrix; she will help me. Hotel de Grandlieu,” he called out to the coachman, observing that Rastignac was just passing him.
Find a great man without some weakness!
The duchess, Madame du Guenic, and Clotilde were evidently weeping.
“What is the matter?” he asked the duchess.
“Calyste did not come home; this is the first time; my poor daughter is in despair.”
“Madame la duchesse,” said Maxime, drawing the pious lady into the embrasure of a window, “for Heaven’s sake keep the utmost secrecy as to my efforts, and ask d’Ajuda to do the same; for if Calyste ever hears of our plot there will be a duel between him and me to the death. When I told you that the affair would not cost much, I meant that you would not be obliged to spend enormous sums; but I do want twenty thousand francs; the rest is my affair; there may be important places to be given, a receiver-generalship possibly.”
The duchess and Maxime left the room. When Madame de Grandlieu returned to her daughter, she again listened to Sabine’s dithyrambics inlaid with family facts even more cruel than those which had already crushed the young wife’s happiness.
“Don’t be so troubled, my darling,” said the duchess. “Beatrix will pay dear for your tears and sufferings; the hand of Satan is upon her; she will meet with ten humiliations for every one she has inflicted upon you.”
Madame Schontz had invited Claude Vignon, who, on several occasions, had expressed a wish to know Maxime de Trailles personally. She also invited Couture, Fabien, Bixiou, Leon de Lora, La Palferine, and Nathan. The latter was asked by Rochefide on account of Maxime. Aurelie thus expected nine guests, all men of the first ability, with the exception of du Ronceret; but the Norman vanity and the brutal ambition of the Heir were fully on a par with Claude Vignon’s literary power, Nathan’s poetic gift, La Palferine’s /finesse/, Couture’s financial eye, Bixiou’s wit, Finot’s shrewdness, Maxime’s profound diplomacy, and Leon de Lora’s genius.
Madame Schontz, anxious to appear both young and beautiful, armed herself with a toilet which that sort of woman has the art of making. She wore a guipure pelerine of spidery texture, a gown of blue velvet, the graceful corsage of which was buttoned with opals, and her hair in bands as smooth and shining as ebony. Madame Schontz owed her celebrity as a pretty woman to the brilliancy and freshness of a complexion as white and warm as that of Creoles, to a face full of spirited details, the features of which were clearly and firmly drawn, –a type long presented in perennial youth by the Comtesse Merlin, and which is perhaps peculiar to Southern races. Unhappily, little Madame Schontz had tended towards ebonpoint ever since her life had become so happy and calm. Her neck, of exquisite roundness, was beginning to take on flesh about the shoulders; but in France the heads of women are principally treasured; so that fine heads will often keep an ill-formed body unobserved.
“My dear child,” said Maxime, coming in and kissing Madame Schontz on the forehead, “Rochefide wanted me to see your establishment; why, it is almost in keeping with his four hundred thousand francs a year. Well, well, he would never have had them if he hadn’t known you. In less than five years you have made him save what others–Antonia, Malaga, Cadine, or Florentine–would have made him lose.”
“I am not a lorette, I am an artist,” said Madame Schontz, with a sort of dignity, “I hope to end, as they say on the stage, as the progenitrix of honest men.”
“It is dreadful, but we are all marrying,” returned Maxime, throwing himself into an arm-chair beside the fire. “Here am I, on the point of making a Comtesse Maxime.”
“Oh, how I should like to see her!” exclaimed Madame Schontz. “But permit me to present to you Monsieur Claude Vignon–Monsieur Claude Vignon, Monsieur de Trailles.”
“Ah, so you are the man who allowed Camille Maupin, the innkeeper of literature, to go into a convent?” cried Maxime. “After you, God. I never received such an honor. Mademoiselle des Touches treated you, monsieur, as though you were Louis XIV.”
“That is how history is written!” replied Claude Vignon. “Don’t you know that her fortune was used to free the Baron du Guenic’s estates? Ah! if she only knew that Calyste now belongs to her ex-friend,” (Maxime pushed the critic’s foot, motioning to Rochefide), “she would issue from her convent, I do believe, to tear him from her.”
“Upon my word, Rochefide, if I were you,” said Maxime, finding that his warning did not stop Vignon, “I should give back my wife’s fortune, so that the world couldn’t say she attached herself to Calyste from necessity.”
“Maxime is right,” remarked Madame Schontz, looking at Arthur, who colored high. “If I have helped you to gain several thousand francs a year, you couldn’t better employ them. I shall have made the happiness of husband /and/ wife; what a feather in my cap!”
“I never thought of it,” replied the marquis; “but a man should be a gentleman before he’s a husband.”
“Let me tell you when is the time to be generous,” said Maxime.
“Arthur,” said Aurelie, “Maxime is right. Don’t you see, old fellow, that generous actions are like Couture’s investments?–you should make them in the nick of time.”
At that moment Couture, followed by Finot, came in; and, soon after, all the guests were assembled in the beautiful blue and gold salon of the hotel Schontz, a title which the various artists had given to their inn after Rochefide purchased it for his Ninon II. When Maxime saw La Palferine, the last to arrive, enter, he walked up to his lieutenant, and taking him aside into the recess of a window, gave him notes for twenty thousand francs.
“Remember, my boy, you needn’t economize them,” he said, with the particular grace of a true scamp.
“There’s none but you who can double the value of what you seem to give,” replied La Palferine.
“Have you decided?”
“Surely, inasmuch as I take the money,” said the count, with a mixture of haughtiness and jest.
“Well, then, Nathan, who is here to-night, will present you two days hence at the house of Madame la Marquise de Rochefide.”
La Palferine started when he heard the name.
“You are to be madly in love with her, and, not to rouse suspicion, drink heavily, wines, liqueurs! I’ll tell Aurelie to place you beside Nathan at dinner. One thing more, my boy: you and I must meet every night, on the boulevard de la Madeleine at one in the morning,–you to give me an account of progress, I to give you instructions.”
“I shall be there, my master,” said the young count, bowing.
“Why do you make us dine with that queer fellow dressed like the head-waiter of a restaurant?” whispered Maxime to Madame Schontz, with a sign toward Fabien du Ronceret.
“Have you never met the Heir? Du Ronceret of Alencon.”
“Monsieur,” said Maxime to Fabien, “I think you must know my friend d’Esgrignon?”
“Victurnien has ceased to know me for some time,” replied Fabien, “but we used to be very intimate in our youth.”
The dinner was one of those which are given nowhere but in Paris by these great female spendthrifts, for the choiceness of their preparations often surprise the most fastidious of guests. It was at just such a supper, at the house of a courtesan as handsome and rich as Madame Schontz, that Paganini declared he had never eaten such fare at the table of any sovereign, nor drunk such wines with any prince, nor heard such witty conversation, nor seen the glitter of such coquettish luxury.
Maxime and Madame Schontz were the first to re-enter the salon, about ten o’clock, leaving the other guests, who had ceased to tell anecdotes and were now boasting of their various good qualities, with their viscous lips glued to the glasses which they could not drain.
“Well, my dear,” said Maxime, “you are not mistaken; yes, I have come for your /beaux yeux/ and for help in a great affair. You must leave Arthur; but I pledge myself to make him give you two hundred thousand francs.”
“Why should I leave the poor fellow?”
“To marry that idiot, who seems to have been sent from Alencon expressly for the purpose. He has been a judge, and I’ll have him made chief-justice in place of Emile Blondet’s father, who is getting to be eighty years old. Now, if you know how to sail your boat, your husband can be elected deputy. You will both be personages, and you can then look down on Madame la Comtesse du Bruel.”
“Never!” said Madame Schontz; “she’s a countess.”
“Hasn’t he condition enough to be made a count?”
“By the bye, he bears arms,” cried Aurelie, hunting for a letter in an elegant bag hanging at the corner of the fireplace, and giving it to Maxime. “What do they mean? Here are combs.”
“He bears: per fesse argent and azure; on the first, three combs gules, two and one, crossed by three bunches grapes purpure, leaved vert, one and two; on the second, four feathers or, placed fretwise, with /Servir/ for motto, and a squire’s helmet. It is not much; it seems they were ennobled under Louis XIV.; some mercer was doubtless their grandfather, and the maternal line must have made its money in wines; the du Ronceret whom the king ennobled was probably an usher. But if you get rid of Arthur and marry du Ronceret, I promise you he shall be a baron at the very least. But you see, my dear, you’ll have to soak yourself for five or six years in the provinces if you want to bury La Schontz in a baroness. That queer creature has been casting looks at you, the meaning of which is perfectly clear. You’ve got him.”
“No,” replied Aurelie, “when my hand was offered to him he remained, like the brandies I read of to-day in the market reports, /dull/.”
“I will undertake to decide him–if he is drunk. Go and see where they all are.”
“It is not worth while to go; I hear no one but Bixiou, who is making jokes to which nobody listens. But I know my Arthur; he feels bound to be polite, and he is probably looking at Bixiou with his eyes shut.”
“Let us go back, then.”
“/Ah ca!/” said Madame Schontz, suddenly stopping short, “in whose interest shall I be working?”
“In that of Madame de Rochefide,” replied Maxime, promptly. “It is impossible to reconcile her with Rochefide as long as you hold him. Her object is to recover her place as head of his household and the enjoyment of four hundred thousand francs a year.”
“And she offers me only two hundred thousand! I want three hundred thousand, since the affair concerns her. What! haven’t I taken care of her brat and her husband? I have filled her place in every way–and does she think to bargain with me? With that, my dear Maxime, I shall have a million; and if you’ll promise me the chief-justiceship at Alencon, I can hold my own as Madame du Ronceret.”
“That’s settled,” said Maxime.
“Oh! won’t it be dull to live in that little town!” cried Aurelie, philosophically. “I have heard so much of that province from d’Esgrignon and the Val-Noble that I seem to have lived there already.”
“Suppose I promise you the support of the nobility?”
“Ah! Maxime, you don’t mean that?–but the pigeon won’t fly.”
“And he is very ugly with his purple skin and bristles for whiskers; he looks like a wild boar with the eyes of a bird of prey. But he’ll make the finest chief-justice of a provincial court. Now don’t be uneasy! in ten minutes he shall be singing to you Isabelle’s air in the fourth act of Robert le Diable: ‘At thy feet I kneel’–you promise, don’t you? to send Arthur back to Beatrix?”
“It will be difficult; but perseverance wins.”
About half-past ten o’clock the guests returned to the salon for coffee. Under the circumstances in which Madame Schontz, Couture, and du Ronceret were placed, it is easy to imagine the effect produced upon the Heir by the following conversation which Maxime held with Couture in a corner and in a low voice, but so placed that Fabien could listen to them.
“My dear Couture, if you want to lead a steady life you had better accept a receiver-generalship which Madame de Rochefide will obtain for you. Aurelie’s million will furnish the security, and you’ll share the property in marrying her. You can be made deputy, if you know how to trim your sails; and the premium I want for thus saving you is your vote in the chamber.”
“I shall always be proud to be a follower of yours.”
“Ah! my dear fellow, you have had quite an escape. Just imagine! Aurelie took a fancy for that Norman from Alencon; she asked to have him made a baron, and chief-justice in his native town, and officer of the Legion of honor! The fool never guessed her value, and you will owe your fortune to her disappointment. You had better not leave that clever creature time for reflection. As for me, I am already putting the irons in the fire.”
And Maxime left Couture at the summit of happiness, saying to La Palferine, “Shall I drive you home, my boy?”
By eleven o’clock Aurelie was alone with Couture, Fabien, and Rochefide. Arthur was asleep on a sofa. Couture and Fabien each tried to outstay the other, without success; and Madame Schontz finally terminated the struggle by saying to Couture,–
“Good-night, I shall see you to-morrow.”
A dismissal which he took in good part.
“Mademoiselle,” said Fabien, in a low voice, “because you saw me thoughtful at the offer which you indirectly made to me, do not think there was the slightest hesitation on my part. But you do not know my mother; she would never consent to my happiness.”
“You have reached an age for respectful summons,” retorted Aurelie, insolently. “But if you are afraid of mamma you won’t do for me.”
“Josephine!” said the Heir, tenderly, passing his arm audaciously round Madame Schontz’ waist, “I thought you loved me!”
“Well?”
“Perhaps I could appease my mother, and obtain her consent.”
“How?”
“If you would employ your influence–“
“To have you made baron, officer of the Legion of honor, and chief-justice at Alencon,–is that it, my friend? Listen to me: I have done so many things in my life that I am capable of virtue. I can be an honest woman and a loyal wife; and I can push my husband very high. But I wish to be loved by him without one look or one thought being turned away from me. Does that suit you? Don’t bind yourself imprudently; it concerns your whole life, my little man.”
“With a woman like you I can do it blind,” cried Fabien, intoxicated by the glance she gave him as much as by the liqueurs des Iles.
“You shall never repent that word, my dear; you shall be peer of France. As for that poor old fellow,” she continued, looking at Rochefide, who was sound asleep, “after to-day I have d-o-n-e with him.”
Fabien caught Madame Schontz around the waist and kissed her with an impulse of fury and joy, in which the double intoxication of wine and love was secondary to ambition.
“Remember, my dear child,” she said, “the respect you ought to show to your wife; don’t play the lover; leave me free to retire from my mud-hole in a proper manner. Poor Couture, who thought himself sure of wealth and a receiver-generalship!”
“I have a horror of that man,” said Fabien; “I wish I might never see him again.”
“I will not receive him any more,” replied Madame Schontz, with a prudish little air. “Now that we have come to an understanding, my Fabien, you must go; it is one o’clock.”
This little scene gave birth in the household of Arthur and Aurelie (so completely happy until now) to a phase of domestic warfare produced in the bosom of all homes by some secret and alien interest in one of the partners. The next day when Arthur awoke he found Madame Schontz as frigid as that class of woman knows how to make herself.
“What happened last night?” he said, as he breakfasted, looking at Aurelie.
“What often happens in Paris,” she replied, “one goes to bed in damp weather and the next morning the pavements are dry and frozen so hard that they are dusty. Do you want a brush?”
“What’s the matter with you, dearest?”
“Go and find your great scarecrow of a wife!”
“My wife!” exclaimed the poor marquis.
“Don’t I know why you brought Maxime here? You mean to make up with Madame de Rochefide, who wants you perhaps for some indiscreet brat. And I, whom you call so clever, I advised you to give back her fortune! Oh! I see your scheme. At the end of five years Monsieur is tired of me. I’m getting fat, Beatrix is all bones–it will be a change for you! You are not the first I’ve known to like skeletons. Your Beatrix knows how to dress herself, that’s true; and you are man who likes figure-heads. Besides, you want to send Monsieur du Guenic to the right-about. It will be a triumph! You’ll cut quite an appearance in the world! How people will talk of it! Why! you’ll be a hero!”
Madame Schontz did not make an end of her sarcasms for two hours after mid-day, in spite of Arthur’s protestations. She then said she was invited out to dinner, and advised her “faithless one” to go without her to the Opera, for she herself was going to the Ambigu-Comique to meet Madame de la Baudraye, a charming woman, a friend of Lousteau. Arthur proposed, as proof of his eternal attachment to his little Aurelie and his detestation of his wife, to start the next day for Italy, and live as a married couple in Rome, Naples, Florence,–in short, wherever she liked, offering her a gift of sixty thousand francs.
“All that is nonsense,” she said. “It won’t prevent you from making up with your wife, and you’ll do a wise thing.”
Arthur and Aurelie parted on this formidable dialogue, he to play cards and dine at the club, she to dress and spend the evening /tete-a-tete/ with Fabien.
Monsieur de Rochefide found Maxime at the club, and complained to him like a man who feels that his happiness is being torn from his heart by the roots, every fibre of which clung to it. Maxime listened to his moans, as persons of social politeness are accustomed to listen, while thinking of other things.
“I’m a man of good counsel in such matters, my dear fellow,” he answered. “Well, let me tell you, you are on the wrong road in letting Aurelie see how dear she is to you. Allow me to present you to Madame Antonia. There’s a heart to let. You’ll soon see La Schontz with other eyes. She is thirty-seven years old, that Schontz of yours, and Madame Antonia is only twenty-six! And what a woman! I may say she is my pupil. If Madame Schontz persists in keeping on the hind heels of her pride, don’t you know what that means?”
“Faith, no!”
“That she wants to marry, and if that’s the case, nothing can hinder her from leaving you. After a lease of six years a woman has a right to do so. Now, if you will only listen to me, you can do a better thing for yourself. Your wife is to-day worth more than all the Schontzes and Antonias of the quartier Saint-Georges. I admit the conquest is difficult, but it is not impossible; and after all that has happened she will make you as happy as an Orgon. In any case, you mustn’t look like a fool; come and sup to-night with Antonia.”
“No, I love Aurelie too well; I won’t give her any reason to complain of me.”
“Ah! my dear fellow, what a future you are preparing for yourself!” cried Maxime.
“It is eleven o’clock; she must have returned from the Ambigu,” said Rochefide, leaving the club.
And he called out his coachman to drive at top speed to the rue de la Bruyere.
Madame Schontz had given precise directions; monsieur could enter as master with the fullest understanding of madame; but, warned by the noise of monsieur’s arrival, madame had so arranged that the sound of her dressing-door closing as women’s doors do close when they are surprised, was to reach monsieur’s ears. Then, at a corner of the piano, Fabien’s hat, forgotten intentionally, was removed very awkwardly by a maid the moment after monsieur had entered the room.
“Did you go to the Ambigu, my little girl?”
“No, I changed my mind, and stayed at home to play music.”
“Who came to see you?” asked the marquis, good-humoredly, seeing the hat carried off by the maid.
“No one.”
At that audacious falsehood Arthur bowed his head; he passed beneath the Caudine forks of submission. A real love descends at times to these sublime meannesses. Arthur behaved with Madame Schontz as Sabine with Calyste, and Calyste with Beatrix.
Within a week the transition from larva to butterfly took place in the young, handsome, and clever Charles-Edouard, Comte Rusticoli de la Palferine. Until this moment of his life he had lived miserably, covering his deficits with an audacity equal to that of Danton. But he now paid his debts; he now, by advice of Maxime, had a little carriage; he was admitted to the Jockey Club and to the club of the rue de Gramont; he became supremely elegant, and he published in the “Journal des Debats” a novelette which won him in a few days a reputation which authors by profession obtain after years of toil and successes only; for there is nothing so usurping in Paris as that which ought to be ephemeral. Nathan, very certain that the count would never publish anything else, lauded the graceful and presuming young man so highly to Beatrix that she, spurred by the praise of the poet, expressed a strong desire to see this king of the vagabonds of good society.
“He will be all the more delighted to come here,” replied Nathan, “because, as I happen to know, he has fallen in love with you to the point of committing all sorts of follies.”
“But I am told he has already committed them.”
“No, not all; he has not yet committed that of falling in love with a virtuous woman.”
Some ten days after the scheme plotted on the boulevard between Maxime and his henchman, the seductive Charles-Edouard, the latter, to whom Nature had given, no doubt sarcastically, a face of charming melancholy, made his first irruption into the nest of the dove of the rue de Chartres, who took for his reception an evening when Calyste was obliged to go to a party with his wife.
If you should ever meet La Palferine you will understand perfectly the success obtained in a single evening by that sparkling mind, that animated fancy, especially if you take into consideration the admirable adroitness of the showman who consented to superintend this debut. Nathan was a good comrade, and he made the young count shine, as a jeweller showing off an ornament in hopes to sell it, makes the