‘Well, so much the better. Make more!’ replied the unsympathetic old maid, matter-of-fact to the last degree and quite incapable of understanding the joy of triumph or of apprehending beauty in the arts. ‘Don’t go on thinking of what has been sold; make something new to sell. You have spent two hundred silver francs, to say nothing of your labour and time, on that wretched Samson. Your clock will cost you more than two thousand francs to cast and have completed. Come, if you take my advice you’ll finish those two little boys crowning a little girl with cornflowers – that will take the Parisians’ fancy! I shall call on Monsieur Graff, the tailor, on my way to Monsieur Crevel. Now go up to your own room, and let me get dressed.’
Next day the Baron, now quite taken in Madame Marneffe’s toils, went to see Cousin Bette, who was much surprised to find him on the threshold when she opened the door for he had never paid her a visit before. And the thought crossed her mind: ‘Can Hortense be after my sweetheart?’ She had heard the evening before, from Monsieur Crevel, that marriage discussions with the Councillor of the Supreme Court had been broken off.
‘What, Cousin! You here? This is the first time in your life that you have come to see me, so it certainly can’t be for love of my beautiful eyes!’
‘Beautiful indeed! That’s true,’ replied the Baron. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.…’
‘What have you come for? I’m really quite ashamed to receive you in such a miserable place.’
The first of Cousin Bette’s two rooms served as drawing-room, dining-room, kitchen, and workroom. The furniture was that of a prosperous working-class home, with straw-bottomed walnut chairs, a small walnut dining-table, a work-table. There were colour prints framed in dark stained wood, short muslin curtains at the windows, a large walnut cupboard. The floor was well rubbed up, shining with cleanliness and polish, and there was not a speck of dust anywhere in the room. But the whole scene was very cold in general effect: a perfect Terborch picture complete in every detail, even to the grey tone produced by a wallpaper, once bluish, but now faded to the colour of linen. As for the bedroom, no one had ever set foot inside that.
The Baron, glancing about him, took it all in; saw the stamp of indifferent taste and indifferent circumstances on every piece, from the cast-iron stove to the kitchen utensils, and felt a sickened repulsion as he reflected: ‘So this is virtue!’
‘Why have I come?’ he said aloud. ‘You are much too sharp-witted not to guess in the end, so I had better tell you.’ He sat down as he spoke, and, pulling the pleated muslin curtains apart a little way, looked across the court. ‘In this house there is a very pretty woman…’
‘Madame Marneffe! Oh, now I see!’ she said, in complete comprehension. ‘And what about Josépha?’
‘Alas, Cousin, there’s an end of Josépha. I’ve been dismissed like a lackey.’
‘And you want…?’ the cousin asked, regarding the Baron with the dignity of a prude taking offence a quarter of an hour before she need.
‘As Madame Marneffe is a lady, an official’s wife, and you can visit her without compromising yourself, I would like to see you on neighbourly good terms with her. Oh! don’t be afraid; she will have the greatest respect for the Director’s cousin.’
At that moment the rustle of a dress was heard on the stair, and the light pad of a woman’s feet wearing fine soft ankle-boots. The footsteps came to a stop on the landing. There was a double tap on the door, and Madame Marneffe appeared.
‘Forgive me, Mademoiselle, for this intrusion; but I did not find you in yesterday when I came to call on you. We are neighbours, and if I had known that you were the Councillor of State’s cousin, I should long ago have asked you to speak to him on my behalf. I saw Monsieur le Directeur go in, and so I ventured to come; because my husband, Monsieur le Baron, has talked to me about a report on the Ministry personnel that is to be submitted to the Minister tomorrow.’
She appeared to be agitated, fluttering with emotion. She had in fact simply run upstairs.
‘You have no need to ask favours, fair lady,’ the Baron replied. ‘It is for me to ask the favour of an interview with you.’
‘Very well, if Mademoiselle does not mind, please come!’ said Madame Marneffe.
‘Yes, go, Cousin. I’ll see you presently,’ said Cousin Bette discreetly.
The Parisienne was banking so heavily on Monsieur le Directeur’s visit and helpful understanding, that she had not only made a toilet suitable for such an interview herself, but had adorned her apartment too. Since early morning, flowers – bought on credit – had decorated it. Marneffe had helped his wife to clean the furniture, polishing up the smallest objects to reflect the light, using soap, brushes, dusters in all directions. Valérie was anxious to be seen in fresh bright surroundings, in order to appear attractive to Monsieur le Directeur, attractive enough to have the right to be cruel, to play hard to get, with all the art of modern tactics; as if she were holding a sweetmeat out of reach to tantalize a child. She had taken Hulot’s measure. Give a hard-pressed Parisian woman twenty-four hours to work, and she can bring down a government.
A man of the Empire, accustomed to Empire manners, could know nothing at all of the conventions of modern love, the new fashionable scruples, the different mode of conversation invented since 1830, in which the poor weak woman succeeds in being accepted as the victim of her lover’s desires, a kind of sister of charity binding up wounds, a self-sacrificing angel. This new art of love uses an enormous number of evangelical phrases in the devil’s work. Passion, for example, is a martyrdom. One aspires towards the ideal, the infinite. Both parties desire to be refined through love. All these fine phrases are a pretext for heaping fuel on the flames, adding more ardour to the act, more frenzy to the fall, than in the past. This hypocrisy, characteristic of our times, has corrupted gallantry. A pair of lovers profess to be two angels, and behave like two demons if they have a chance. Love had no time to analyse itself like this between two campaigns, and in 1809 its victories were achieved as swiftly as the Empire’s victories. During the Restoration, the handsome Hulot, now a ladies’ man again, had begun by consoling some former partners who had fallen, at that time, like extinguished stars from the political firmament; and gone on, as an old man, to let himself be captured by the Jenny Cadines and Joséphas.
Madame Marneffe had placed her guns in position according to what she had learned of the Director’s background, which her husband had filled in for her in detail after making some inquiries at the office. The comedy of modern sentiment might have the charm of novelty for the Baron, so Valérie’s plans were laid, and it may be said at once that the trial of its effectiveness that she made that morning answered all her hopes.
Thanks to these romantic, sentimental, novelettish manoeuvres, Valérie, without having promised anything, obtained for her husband the position of deputy head clerk of his office and the Cross of the Legion of Honour.
This campaign was naturally not conducted without dinners at the Rocher de Cancale, visits to the theatre, numerous presents of mantillas, scarves, dresses, and jewellery. The apartment in the rue du Doyenné was not satisfactory; the Baron meditated a scheme for furnishing one in magnificent style in the rue Vanneau, in a charming modern house.
Monsieur Marneffe obtained a fortnight’s leave of absence, to be taken in a month’s time, in order to attend to some affairs in the country; and a bonus as well. He promised himself a little trip to Switzerland, to study female form there.
Although Baron Hulot was busy in the interests of the lady, he did not forget the young man whose patron he also was. The Minister of Commerce, Count Popinot, was a lover of the arts; he gave two thousand francs for a replica of the Samson group on condition that the mould was broken, so that his Samson and Mademoiselle Hulot’s should be the only two in existence. This group excited the admiration of a Prince. He was shown the model of the clock, ordered it on condition that no replica should be made, and offered thirty thousand francs for it. Th
e artists consulted, among them Stidmann, were satisfied that the man who had designed these two works could undertake a statue. Marshal le Prince de Wis-sembourg, Minister of War and President of the Committee in charge of the fund for Marshal Montcornet’s memorial statue, at once called a meeting, which agreed to entrust the commission for the work to Steinbock. Comte de Rastignac, at that time Under-Secretary of State, wanted an example of the work of the artist, whose fellow-competitors for the commission for the statue acclaimed his success, and who was becoming increasingly celebrated. He bought from Steinbock the delightful group of two little boys crowning a little girl, and promised him a studio at the government marble depot, which is situated, as everyone knows, at Le Gros-Caillou.
This was success, but success of the Parisian kind, which means that it was overwhelming, calculated to crush shoulders and loins not strong enough to bear it – a consequence, be it said, which often follows its achievement. Count Wenceslas Steinbock was spoken of in journals and reviews, without his or Mademoiselle Fischer’s having any idea of it. Every day, as soon as Mademoiselle Fischer had gone out to dinner, Wenceslas went to call on the Baroness and spent an hour or two in the house, except on the day when Bette dined with the Hulots. This state of affairs lasted for some days.
The Baron, reassured about Count Steinbock’s titles and social standing, the Baroness, happy about his character and moral principles, Hortense, proud of her love-affair and the approval given it, and of her suitor’s fame, no longer hesitated to speak of the projected marriage. The artist’s cup, in fact, was full, when an indiscretion on Madame Marneffe’s part imperilled everything. It happened in this way.
Baron Hulot was anxious that Lisbeth should be on friendly terms with Madame Marneffe in order to have a spying eye in her household, and the spinster had already dined with Valérie. Valérie, who on her side wanted to have a listening ear among the Hulot family, made much of the old maid. So the idea naturally occurred to Valérie to invite Mademoiselle Fischer to the house-warming of the new apartment, into which she was shortly moving. The old maid, pleased to find another house to dine in and beguiled by Madame Marneffe, was becoming really fond of her. Of all the persons with whom she was connected, none had ever taken so much trouble on her account. As a matter of fact, Madame Marneffe, full of solicitous little attentions to Mademoiselle Fischer, stood in much the same relation to her as Cousin Bette did to the Baroness, Monsieur Rivet, Crevel – all those persons, indeed, who invited her to dinner. The Marneffes had won Cousin Bette’s particular sympathy by letting her see their distressing poverty, painting it, as is customary, in the most flattering colours: as due to friends who had been helped and had proved ungrateful, illnesses, a mother – Madame Fortin – whose poverty had been kept from her, and who had died believing herself to be still in affluent circumstances, thanks to superhuman sacrifices on Valérie’s part, and so on.
‘That poor young couple!’ as Bette said to her Cousin Hulot. ‘You are certainly doing the right thing in taking an interest in them; they are the most deserving creatures; they are so brave, so good! They can barely exist on the thousand crowns a year a deputy head clerk earns, for they got into debt after Marshal Montcornet’s death. It is barbarous of the Government to expect an official with a wife and family to live, in Paris, on a salary of two thousand four hundred francs a year!’
A young woman who showed her so much friendship, who confided in her about everything, consulted her, flattered her, and apparently wished to be guided by her, quite naturally in a very short time became dearer to the eccentric Cousin Bette than any of her own relations.
The Baron, for his part, admiring a decorum in Madame Marneffe, a standard of education and behaviour that neither Jenny Cadine, nor Josépha, nor any of their friends had possessed, had become infatuated with her in a month, with an old man’s passion, a foolishly unconsidered passion, which seemed to him quite sensible. For, certainly, in her there was no sight of the derision, the debauchery, the wild extravagance, the moral depravity, the contempt for social proprieties, the complete independence, which, in the actress and the singer, had been the cause of all his sufferings. Then, too, he had no reason to apprehend that courtesan rapacity, unquenchable as the desert sand.
Madame Marneffe, now his friend and confidante, made an enormous fuss about accepting the slightest thing from him.
‘Promotion, bonuses, anything you can obtain from the Government for us, are all very well; but don’t begin our friendship by bringing discredit upon the woman you say you love,’ Valérie always said, ‘or I shall not believe you. And I like believing you,’ she would add, with a fetching glance at him, looking rather like St Theresa experiencing a fore-taste of heaven.
To give her a present was like storming a fortress, meant doing violence to a conscience. The poor Baron had to use all kinds of artful devices in order to present her with some trifle, a pretty costly trifle, of course, congratulating himself as he did so on having at last met virtue, on having found the realization of his dreams. In this unsophisticated household (so he said to himself) the Baron was as much a god as in his own home. Monsieur Marneffe appeared to be a thousand leagues from thinking that his Ministry’s Jupiter meditated descending upon his wife in a shower of gold, and adopted the attitude of respectful servant of his august chief.
How could Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a virtuous and easily alarmed middle-class wife, a flower hidden in the rue du Doyenné, possibly know anything of courtesans’ depravity and corruption, which nowadays filled the Baron’s soul with disgust? He had never before known the delights of a resisting virtue, and the timorous Valérie made him taste them, as the song says, ‘all along the river’.
This being the situation between Hulot and Valérie, no one will be surprised to learn that Valérie had heard through Hulot the secret of Hortense’s approaching marriage with the celebrated artist, Steinbock. Between a lover who has no rights and a woman who does not easily make up her mind to become a mistress, verbal and moral duels take place in which the word often betrays the thought behind it, as a foil in a fencing bout takes on the purpose of a duelling sword. The most cautious of men, in this situation, may behave like Monsieur de Turenne. And so it happened that the Baron dropped a hint of the complete liberty of action that his daughter’s marriage would give him, by way of riposte to the loving Valérie, who had exclaimed on more than one occasion:
‘I cannot understand how any woman could give herself to a man who was not entirely hers!‘
The Baron had already sworn a thousand times that for the past twenty-five years everything had been over between Madame Hulot and himself.
‘They say she is so beautiful!’ Madame Marneffe replied. ‘I must have proofs.’
‘You shall have them,’ said the Baron, delighted that in expressing this desire his Valérie was compromising herself.
‘How can I? You would have to be by my side always,’ Valérie had answered.
Hector had then been forced to reveal his plans and the project he was putting into execution in the rue Vanneau, in order to demonstrate to his Valérie that he was thinking of devoting to her that half of his life which belongs to a legitimate spouse, granted that day and night divide equally the lives of civilized people. He spoke of leaving his wife, with all propriety, to live without him once his daughter was married. The Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense and the young Hulots. He was sure of his wife’s obeying his wishes.
‘From that time, my little angel, my true life – my real home – will be in the rue Vanneau.’
‘Heavens! how you dispose of me!’ said Madame Marneffe then. ‘And what about my husband?’
‘That bag of bones!’
‘I must admit, compared with you, that’s what he is…’ she replied, laughing.
Madame Marneffe ardently wished to see young Count Steinbock, after hearing his story; perhaps she wanted to obtain some piece of jewellery from him while she still lived under the same roo
f. This curiosity was so displeasing to the Baron that Valérie swore never to look at Wenceslas. But, when she had been rewarded for abandoning this fancy with a little tea service of old soft-paste Sèvres, she stored away her wish in the recesses of her heart, written down there as an item on the agenda. And so, one day, when she had asked her Cousin Bette to take coffee with her in her room, she introduced the subject of her sweetheart, in order to find out if she might be able to see him without danger.
‘My dear,’ she said, for they were on my dear terms with each other, ‘why have you not introduced your sweetheart to me yet? You know that he has become famous overnight?’
‘Famous?’
‘Why, everyone’s talking about him!’
‘Ah, bah!’ exclaimed Lisbeth.
‘He’s to make my father’s statue, and I could be very useful to him for the likeness, for Madame Montcornet can’t lend him a miniature by Sain and I can; a beautiful piece of work, painted in 1809 before the Wagram campaign and given to my poor mother, and so it’s a picture of a young, handsome Montcornet.…’
Sain and Augustin were recognized as the supreme miniature painters under the Empire.
‘You say he’s going to make a statue, my dear?’ repeated Lisbeth.
‘Nine feet high, commissioned by the Minister of War. Really! Where have you been, that I can tell you this as a piece of news? The Government is going to give Count Steinbock a studio and rooms at Le Gros-Caillou, at the marble depot. Your Pole will perhaps be in charge there, a post worth two thousand francs a year, a feather in his cap.’
‘How do you come to know all this, when I know nothing about it?’ said Lisbeth at last, emerging from her state of stunned bewilderment.
‘Listen, my dear little Cousin Bette,’ said Madame Marneffe graciously. ‘Are you capable of a devoted friendship, proof against anything? Would you like us to be like two sisters? Will you swear to me to have no secrets from me, if I’ll keep none from you, to be my secret eye if I’ll be yours? Will you swear above all that you’ll never give me away to my husband or Monsieur Hulot, and that you’ll never say that it was I who told you.…’