Оноре де Бальзак
Cousin Betty
“Come to the bottom of your little garden, Father Fischer,” said the important man. “You are hearty?” he went on, sitting down under a vine arbor and scanning the old man from head to foot, as a dealer in human flesh scans a substitute for the conscription.
“Ay, hearty enough for a tontine,” said the lean little old man; his sinews were wiry, and his eye bright.
“Does heat disagree with you?”
“Quite the contrary.”
“What do you say to Africa?”
“A very nice country! – The French went there with the little Corporal” (Napoleon).
“To get us all out of the present scrape, you must go to Algiers,” said the Baron.
“And how about my business?”
“An official in the War Office, who has to retire, and has not enough to live on with his pension, will buy your business.”
“And what am I to do in Algiers?”
“Supply the Commissariat with victuals, corn, and forage; I have your commission ready filled in and signed. You can collect supplies in the country at seventy per cent below the prices at which you can credit us.”
“How shall we get them?”
“Oh, by raids, by taxes in kind, and the Khaliphat. – The country is little known, though we settled there eight years ago; Algeria produces vast quantities of corn and forage. When this produce belongs to Arabs, we take it from them under various pretences; when it belongs to us, the Arabs try to get it back again. There is a great deal of fighting over the corn, and no one ever knows exactly how much each party has stolen from the other. There is not time in the open field to measure the corn as we do in the Paris market, or the hay as it is sold in the Rue d’Enfer. The Arab chiefs, like our Spahis, prefer hard cash, and sell the plunder at a very low price. The Commissariat needs a fixed quantity and must have it. It winks at exorbitant prices calculated on the difficulty of procuring food, and the dangers to which every form of transport is exposed. That is Algiers from the army contractor’s point of view.
“It is a muddle tempered by the ink-bottle, like every incipient government. We shall not see our way through it for another ten years – we who have to do the governing; but private enterprise has sharp eyes. – So I am sending you there to make a fortune; I give you the job, as Napoleon put an impoverished Marshal at the head of a kingdom where smuggling might be secretly encouraged.
“I am ruined, my dear Fischer; I must have a hundred thousand francs within a year.”
“I see no harm in getting it out of the Bedouins,” said the Alsatian calmly. “It was always done under the Empire – ”
“The man who wants to buy your business will be here this morning, and pay you ten thousand francs down,” the Baron went on. “That will be enough, I suppose, to take you to Africa?”
The old man nodded assent.
“As to capital out there, be quite easy. I will draw the remainder of the money due if I find it necessary.”
“All I have is yours – my very blood,” said old Fischer.
“Oh, do not be uneasy,” said Hulot, fancying that his uncle saw more clearly than was the fact. “As to our excise dealings, your character will not be impugned. Everything depends on the authority at your back; now I myself appointed the authorities out there; I am sure of them. This, Uncle Fischer, is a dead secret between us. I know you well, and I have spoken out without concealment or circumlocution.”
“It shall be done,” said the old man. “And it will go on – ?”
“For two years, You will have made a hundred thousand francs of your own to live happy on in the Vosges.”
“I will do as you wish; my honor is yours,” said the little old man quietly.
“That is the sort of man I like. – However, you must not go till you have seen your grand-niece happily married. She is to be a Countess.”
But even taxes and raids and the money paid by the War Office clerk for Fischer’s business could not forthwith provide sixty thousand francs to give Hortense, to say nothing of her trousseau, which was to cost about five thousand, and the forty thousand spent – or to be spent – on Madame Marneffe.
Where, then had the Baron found the thirty thousand francs he had just produced? This was the history.
A few days previously Hulot had insured his life for the sum of a hundred and fifty thousand francs, for three years, in two separate companies. Armed with the policies, of which he paid the premium, he had spoken as follows to the Baron de Nucingen, a peer of the Chamber, in whose carriage he found himself after a sitting, driving home, in fact, to dine with him: —
“Baron, I want seventy thousand francs, and I apply to you. You must find some one to lend his name, to whom I will make over the right to draw my pay for three years; it amounts to twenty-five thousand francs a year – that is, seventy-five thousand francs. – You will say, ‘But you may die’” – the banker signified his assent – “Here, then, is a policy of insurance for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which I will deposit with you till you have drawn up the eighty thousand francs,” said Hulot, producing the document form his pocket.
“But if you should lose your place?” said the millionaire Baron, laughing.
The other Baron – not a millionaire – looked grave.
“Be quite easy; I only raised the question to show you that I was not devoid of merit in handing you the sum. Are you so short of cash? for the Bank will take your signature.”
“My daughter is to be married,” said Baron Hulot, “and I have no fortune – like every one else who remains in office in these thankless times, when five hundred ordinary men seated on benches will never reward the men who devote themselves to the service as handsomely as the Emperor did.”
“Well, well; but you had Josepha on your hands!” replied Nucingen, “and that accounts for everything. Between ourselves, the Duc d’Herouville has done you a very good turn by removing that leech from sucking your purse dry. ‘I have known what that is, and can pity your case,’” he quoted. “Take a friend’s advice: Shut up shop, or you will be done for.”
This dirty business was carried out in the name of one Vauvinet, a small money-lender; one of those jobbers who stand forward to screen great banking houses, like the little fish that is said to attend the shark. This stock-jobber’s apprentice was so anxious to gain the patronage of Monsieur le Baron Hulot, that he promised the great man to negotiate bills of exchange for thirty thousand francs at eighty days, and pledged himself to renew them four times, and never pass them out of his hands.
Fischer’s successor was to pay forty thousand francs for the house and the business, with the promise that he should supply forage to a department close to Paris.
This was the desperate maze of affairs into which a man who had hitherto been absolutely honest was led by his passions – one of the best administrative officials under Napoleon – peculation to pay the money-lenders, and borrowing of the money-lenders to gratify his passions and provide for his daughter. All the efforts of this elaborate prodigality were directed at making a display before Madame Marneffe, and to playing Jupiter to this middle-class Danae. A man could not expend more activity, intelligence, and presence of mind in the honest acquisition of a fortune than the Baron displayed in shoving his head into a wasp’s nest: He did all the business of his department, he hurried on the upholsterers, he talked to the workmen, he kept a sharp lookout on the smallest details of the house in the Rue Vanneau. Wholly devoted to Madame Marneffe, he nevertheless attended the sittings of the Chambers; he was everywhere at once, and neither his family nor anybody else discovered where his thoughts were.
Adeline, quite amazed to hear that her uncle was rescued, and to see a handsome sum figure in the marriage-contract, was not altogether easy, in spite of her joy at seeing her daughter married under such creditable circumstances. But, on the day before the wedding, fixed by the Baron to coincide with Madame Marneffe’s removal to her new apartment, Hector allayed his wife’s astonishment by this ministerial communication: —
“Now, Adeline, our girl is married; all our anxieties on the subject are at an end. The time is come for us to retire from the world: I shall not remain in office more than three years longer – only the time necessary to secure my pension. Why, henceforth, should we be at any unnecessary expense? Our apartment costs us six thousand francs a year in rent, we have four servants, we eat thirty thousand francs’ worth of food in a year. If you want me to pay off my bills – for I have pledged my salary for the sums I needed to give Hortense her little money, and pay off your uncle – ”
“You did very right!” said she, interrupting her husband, and kissing his hands.
This explanation relieved Adeline of all her fears.
“I shall have to ask some little sacrifices of you,” he went on, disengaging his hands and kissing his wife’s brow. “I have found in the Rue Plumet a very good flat on the first floor, handsome, splendidly paneled, at only fifteen hundred francs a year, where you would only need one woman to wait on you, and I could be quite content with a boy.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“If we keep house in a quiet way, keeping up a proper appearance of course, we should not spend more than six thousand francs a year, excepting my private account, which I will provide for.”
The generous-hearted woman threw her arms round her husband’s neck in her joy.
“How happy I shall be, beginning again to show you how truly I love you!” she exclaimed. “And what a capital manager you are!”
“We will have the children to dine with us once a week. I, as you know, rarely dine at home. You can very well dine twice a week with Victorin and twice a week with Hortense. And, as I believe, I may succeed in making matters up completely between Crevel and us; we can dine once a week with him. These five dinners and our own at home will fill up the week all but one day, supposing that we may occasionally be invited to dine elsewhere.”
“I shall save a great deal for you,” said Adeline.
“Oh!” he cried, “you are the pearl of women!”
“My kind, divine Hector, I shall bless you with my latest breath,” said she, “for you have done well for my dear Hortense.”
This was the beginning of the end of the beautiful Madame Hulot’s home; and, it may be added, of her being totally neglected, as Hulot had solemnly promised Madame Marneffe.
Crevel, the important and burly, being invited as a matter of course to the party given for the signing of the marriage-contract, behaved as though the scene with which this drama opened had never taken place, as though he had no grievance against the Baron. Celestin Crevel was quite amiable; he was perhaps rather too much the ex-perfumer, but as a Major he was beginning to acquire majestic dignity. He talked of dancing at the wedding.
“Fair lady,” said he politely to the Baroness, “people like us know how to forget. Do not banish me from your home; honor me, pray, by gracing my house with your presence now and then to meet your children. Be quite easy; I will never say anything of what lies buried at the bottom of my heart. I behaved, indeed, like an idiot, for I should lose too much by cutting myself off from seeing you.”
“Monsieur, an honest woman has no ears for such speeches as those you refer to. If you keep your word, you need not doubt that it will give me pleasure to see the end of a coolness which must always be painful in a family.”
“Well, you sulky old fellow,” said Hulot, dragging Crevel out into the garden, “you avoid me everywhere, even in my own house. Are two admirers of the fair sex to quarrel for ever over a petticoat? Come; this is really too plebeian!”
“I, monsieur, am not such a fine man as you are, and my small attractions hinder me from repairing my losses so easily as you can – ”
“Sarcastic!” said the Baron.
“Irony is allowable from the vanquished to the conquerer.”
The conversation, begun in this strain, ended in a complete reconciliation; still Crevel maintained his right to take his revenge.
Madame Marneffe particularly wished to be invited to Mademoiselle Hulot’s wedding. To enable him to receive his future mistress in his drawing-room, the great official was obliged to invite all the clerks of his division down to the deputy head-clerks inclusive. Thus a grand ball was a necessity. The Baroness, as a prudent housewife, calculated that an evening party would cost less than a dinner, and allow of a larger number of invitations; so Hortense’s wedding was much talked about.
Marshal Prince Wissembourg and the Baron de Nucingen signed in behalf of the bride, the Comtes de Rastignac and Popinot in behalf of Steinbock. Then, as the highest nobility among the Polish emigrants had been civil to Count Steinbock since he had become famous, the artist thought himself bound to invite them. The State Council, and the War Office to which the Baron belonged, and the army, anxious to do honor to the Comte de Forzheim, were all represented by their magnates. There were nearly two hundred indispensable invitations. How natural, then, that little Madame Marneffe was bent on figuring in all her glory amid such an assembly. The Baroness had, a month since, sold her diamonds to set up her daughter’s house, while keeping the finest for the trousseau. The sale realized fifteen thousand francs, of which five thousand were sunk in Hortense’s clothes. And what was ten thousand francs for the furniture of the young folks’ apartment, considering the demands of modern luxury? However, young Monsieur and Madame Hulot, old Crevel, and the Comte de Forzheim made very handsome presents, for the old soldier had set aside a sum for the purchase of plate. Thanks to these contributions, even an exacting Parisian would have been pleased with the rooms the young couple had taken in the Rue Saint-Dominique, near the Invalides. Everything seemed in harmony with their love, pure, honest, and sincere.
At last the great day dawned – for it was to be a great day not only for Wenceslas and Hortense, but for old Hulot too. Madame Marneffe was to give a house-warming in her new apartment the day after becoming Hulot’s mistress en titre, and after the marriage of the lovers.
Who but has once in his life been a guest at a wedding-ball? Every reader can refer to his reminiscences, and will probably smile as he calls up the images of all that company in their Sunday-best faces as well as their finest frippery.
If any social event can prove the influence of environment, is it not this? In fact, the Sunday-best mood of some reacts so effectually on the rest that the men who are most accustomed to wearing full dress look just like those to whom the party is a high festival, unique in their life. And think too of the serious old men to whom such things are so completely a matter of indifference, that they are wearing their everyday black coats; the long-married men, whose faces betray their sad experience of the life the young pair are but just entering on; and the lighter elements, present as carbonic-acid gas is in champagne; and the envious girls, the women absorbed in wondering if their dress is a success, the poor relations whose parsimonious “get-up” contrasts with that of the officials in uniform; and the greedy ones, thinking only of the supper; and the gamblers, thinking only of cards.
There are some of every sort, rich and poor, envious and envied, philosophers and dreamers, all grouped like the plants in a flower-bed round the rare, choice blossom, the bride. A wedding-ball is an epitome of the world.
At the liveliest moment of the evening Crevel led the Baron aside, and said in a whisper, with the most natural manner possible:
“By Jove! that’s a pretty woman – the little lady in pink who has opened a racking fire on you from her eyes.”
“Which?”
“The wife of that clerk you are promoting, heaven knows how! – Madame Marneffe.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Listen, Hulot; I will try to forgive you the ill you have done me if only you will introduce me to her – I will take you to Heloise. Everybody is asking who is that charming creature. Are you sure that it will strike no one how and why her husband’s appointment got itself signed? – You happy rascal, she is worth a whole office. – I would serve in her office only too gladly. – Come, cinna, let us be friends.”
“Better friends than ever,” said the Baron to the perfumer, “and I promise you I will be a good fellow. Within a month you shall dine with that little angel. – For it is an angel this time, old boy. And I advise you, like me, to have done with the devils.”
Cousin Betty, who had moved to the Rue Vanneau, into a nice little apartment on the third floor, left the ball at ten o’clock, but came back to see with her own eyes the two bonds bearing twelve hundred francs interest; one of them was the property of the Countess Steinbock, the other was in the name of Madame Hulot.
It is thus intelligible that Monsieur Crevel should have spoken to Hulot about Madame Marneffe, as knowing what was a secret to the rest of the world; for, as Monsieur Marneffe was away, no one but Lisbeth Fischer, besides the Baron and Valerie, was initiated into the mystery.
The Baron had made a blunder in giving Madame Marneffe a dress far too magnificent for the wife of a subordinate official; other women were jealous alike of her beauty and of her gown. There was much whispering behind fans, for the poverty of the Marneffes was known to every one in the office; the husband had been petitioning for help at the very moment when the Baron had been so smitten with madame. Also, Hector could not conceal his exultation at seeing Valerie’s success; and she, severely proper, very lady-like, and greatly envied, was the object of that strict examination which women so greatly fear when they appear for the first time in a new circle of society.
After seeing his wife into a carriage with his daughter and his son-in-law, Hulot managed to escape unperceived, leaving his son and Celestine to do the honors of the house. He got into Madame Marneffe’s carriage to see her home, but he found her silent and pensive, almost melancholy.
“My happiness makes you very sad, Valerie,” said he, putting his arm round her and drawing her to him.
“Can you wonder, my dear,” said she, “that a hapless woman should be a little depressed at the thought of her first fall from virtue, even when her husband’s atrocities have set her free? Do you suppose that I have no soul, no beliefs, no religion? Your glee this evening has been really too barefaced; you have paraded me odiously. Really, a schoolboy would have been less of a coxcomb. And the ladies have dissected me with their side-glances and their satirical remarks. Every woman has some care for her reputation, and you have wrecked mine.
“Oh, I am yours and no mistake! And I have not an excuse left but that of being faithful to you. – Monster that you are!” she added, laughing, and allowing him to kiss her, “you knew very well what you were doing! Madame Coquet, our chief clerk’s wife, came to sit down by me, and admired my lace. ‘English point!’ said she. ‘Was it very expensive, madame?’ – ‘I do not know. This lace was my mother’s. I am not rich enough to buy the like,’ said I.”
Madame Marneffe, in short, had so bewitched the old beau, that he really believed she was sinning for the first time for his sake, and that he had inspired such a passion as had led her to this breach of duty. She told him that the wretch Marneffe had neglected her after they had been three days married, and for the most odious reasons. Since then she had lived as innocently as a girl; marriage had seemed to her so horrible. This was the cause of her present melancholy.
“If love should prove to be like marriage – ” said she in tears.
These insinuating lies, with which almost every woman in Valerie’s predicament is ready, gave the Baron distant visions of the roses of the seventh heaven. And so Valerie coquetted with her lover, while the artist and Hortense were impatiently awaiting the moment when the Baroness should have given the girl her last kiss and blessing.
At seven in the morning the Baron, perfectly happy – for his Valerie was at once the most guileless of girls and the most consummate of demons – went back to release his son and Celestine from their duties. All the dancers, for the most part strangers, had taken possession of the territory, as they do at every wedding-ball, and were keeping up the endless figures of the cotillions, while the gamblers were still crowding round the bouillotte tables, and old Crevel had won six thousand francs.
The morning papers, carried round the town, contained this paragraph in the Paris article: —
“The marriage was celebrated this morning, at the Church of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, between Monsieur le Comte Steinbock and Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot, daughter of Baron Hulot d’Ervy, Councillor of State, and a Director at the War Office; niece of the famous General Comte de Forzheim. The ceremony attracted a large gathering. There were present some of the most distinguished artists of the day: Leon de Lora, Joseph Bridau, Stidmann, and Bixiou; the magnates of the War Office, of the Council of State, and many members of the two Chambers; also the most distinguished of the Polish exiles living in Paris: Counts Paz, Laginski, and others.
“Monsieur le Comte Wenceslas Steinbock is grandnephew to the famous general who served under Charles XII., King of Sweden. The young Count, having taken part in the Polish rebellion, found a refuge in France, where his well-earned fame as a sculptor has procured him a patent of naturalization.”
And so, in spite of the Baron’s cruel lack of money, nothing was lacking that public opinion could require, not even the trumpeting of the newspapers over his daughter’s marriage, which was solemnized in the same way, in every particular, as his son’s had been to Mademoiselle Crevel. This display moderated the reports current as to the Baron’s financial position, while the fortune assigned to his daughter explained the need for having borrowed money.
Here ends what is, in a way, the introduction to this story. It is to the drama that follows that the premise is to a syllogism, what the prologue is to a classical tragedy.
In Paris, when a woman determines to make a business, a trade, of her beauty, it does not follow that she will make a fortune. Lovely creatures may be found there, and full of wit, who are in wretched circumstances, ending in misery a life begun in pleasure. And this is why. It is not enough merely to accept the shameful life of a courtesan with a view to earning its profits, and at the same time to bear the simple garb of a respectable middle-class wife. Vice does not triumph so easily; it resembles genius in so far that they both need a concurrence of favorable conditions to develop the coalition of fortune and gifts. Eliminate the strange prologue of the Revolution, and the Emperor would never have existed; he would have been no more than a second edition of Fabert. Venal beauty, if it finds no amateurs, no celebrity, no cross of dishonor earned by squandering men’s fortunes, is Correggio in a hay-loft, is genius starving in a garret. Lais, in Paris, must first and foremost find a rich man mad enough to pay her price. She must keep up a very elegant style, for this is her shop-sign; she must be sufficiently well bred to flatter the vanity of her lovers; she must have the brilliant wit of a Sophie Arnould, which diverts the apathy of rich men; finally, she must arouse the passions of libertines by appearing to be mistress to one man only who is envied by the rest.
These conditions, which a woman of that class calls being in luck, are difficult to combine in Paris, although it is a city of millionaires, of idlers, of used-up and capricious men.
Providence has, no doubt, vouchsafed protection to clerks and middle-class citizens, for whom obstacles of this kind are at least double in the sphere in which they move. At the same time, there are enough Madame Marneffes in Paris to allow of our taking Valerie to figure as a type in this picture of manners. Some of these women yield to the double pressure of a genuine passion and of hard necessity, like Madame Colleville, who was for long attached to one of the famous orators of the left, Keller the banker. Others are spurred by vanity, like Madame de la Baudraye, who remained almost respectable in spite of her elopement with Lousteau. Some, again, are led astray by the love of fine clothes, and some by the impossibility of keeping a house going on obviously too narrow means. The stinginess of the State – or of Parliament – leads to many disasters and to much corruption.
At the present moment the laboring classes are the fashionable object of compassion; they are being murdered – it is said – by the manufacturing capitalist; but the Government is a hundred times harder than the meanest tradesman, it carries its economy in the article of salaries to absolute folly. If you work harder, the merchant will pay you more in proportion; but what does the State do for its crowd of obscure and devoted toilers?
In a married woman it is an inexcusable crime when she wanders from the path of honor; still, there are degrees even in such a case. Some women, far from being depraved, conceal their fall and remain to all appearances quite respectable, like those two just referred to, while others add to their fault the disgrace of speculation. Thus Madame Marneffe is, as it were, the type of those ambitious married courtesans who from the first accept depravity with all its consequences, and determine to make a fortune while taking their pleasure, perfectly unscrupulous as to the means. But almost always a woman like Madame Marneffe has a husband who is her confederate and accomplice. These Machiavellis in petticoats are the most dangerous of the sisterhood; of every evil class of Parisian woman, they are the worst.
A mere courtesan – a Josepha, a Malaga, a Madame Schontz, a Jenny Cadine – carries in her frank dishonor a warning signal as conspicuous as the red lamp of a house of ill-fame or the flaring lights of a gambling hell. A man knows that they light him to his ruin.
But mealy-mouthed propriety, the semblance of virtue, the hypocritical ways of a married woman who never allows anything to be seen but the vulgar needs of the household, and affects to refuse every kind of extravagance, leads to silent ruin, dumb disaster, which is all the more startling because, though condoned, it remains unaccounted for. It is the ignoble bill of daily expenses and not gay dissipation that devours the largest fortune. The father of a family ruins himself ingloriously, and the great consolation of gratified vanity is wanting in his misery.
This little sermon will go like a javelin to the heart of many a home. Madame Marneffes are to be seen in every sphere of social life, even at Court; for Valerie is a melancholy fact, modeled from the life in the smallest details. And, alas! the portrait will not cure any man of the folly of loving these sweetly-smiling angels, with pensive looks and candid faces, whose heart is a cash-box.
About three years after Hortense’s marriage, in 1841, Baron Hulot d’Ervy was supposed to have sown his wild oats, to have “put up his horses,” to quote the expression used by Louis XV.‘s head surgeon, and yet Madame Marneffe was costing him twice as much as Josepha had ever cost him. Still, Valerie, though always nicely dressed, affected the simplicity of a subordinate official’s wife; she kept her luxury for her dressing-gowns, her home wear. She thus sacrificed her Parisian vanity to her dear Hector. At the theatre, however, she always appeared in a pretty bonnet and a dress of extreme elegance; and the Baron took her in a carriage to a private box.
Her rooms, the whole of the second floor of a modern house in the Rue Vanneau, between a fore-court and a garden, was redolent of respectability. All its luxury was in good chintz hangings and handsome convenient furniture.
Her bedroom, indeed, was the exception, and rich with such profusion as Jenny Cadine or Madame Schontz might have displayed. There were lace curtains, cashmere hangings, brocade portieres, a set of chimney ornaments modeled by Stidmann, a glass cabinet filled with dainty nicknacks. Hulot could not bear to see his Valerie in a bower of inferior magnificence to the dunghill of gold and pearls owned by a Josepha. The drawing-room was furnished with red damask, and the dining-room had carved oak panels. But the Baron, carried away by his wish to have everything in keeping, had at the end of six months, added solid luxury to mere fashion, and had given her handsome portable property, as, for instance, a service of plate that was to cost more than twenty-four thousand francs.
Madame Marneffe’s house had in a couple of years achieved a reputation for being a very pleasant one. Gambling went on there. Valerie herself was soon spoken of as an agreeable and witty woman. To account for her change of style, a rumor was set going of an immense legacy bequeathed to her by her “natural father,” Marshal Montcornet, and left in trust.
With an eye to the future, Valerie had added religious to social hypocrisy. Punctual at the Sunday services, she enjoyed all the honors due to the pious. She carried the bag for the offertory, she was a member of a charitable association, presented bread for the sacrament, and did some good among the poor, all at Hector’s expense. Thus everything about the house was extremely seemly. And a great many persons maintained that her friendship with the Baron was entirely innocent, supporting the view by the gentleman’s mature age, and ascribing to him a Platonic liking for Madame Marneffe’s pleasant wit, charming manners, and conversation – such a liking as that of the late lamented Louis XVIII. for a well-turned note.
The Baron always withdrew with the other company at about midnight, and came back a quarter of an hour later.