‘So he told me,’ the Baroness interrupted her.
‘Well, so you see, Madame, that I might have been a respectable woman today! I should have had only one lawful husband!’
‘You have excuses, Mademoiselle,’ said the Baroness. ‘God will take them into account. But I am not here to reproach you, far from that; I am anxious to put myself in your debt.’
‘Madame, I have been helping Monsieur le Baron for nearly three years.…’
‘You!’ exclaimed the Baroness, with tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, what can I do for you? I have only my prayers to give you.…’
‘Monsieur le Duc d’Hérouville and I,’ the singer continued, ‘a noble heart, a true aristocrat.…’
And Josépha told the story of how Monsieur Thoul had set up house and ‘married’.
‘So, Mademoiselle,’ said the Baroness, ‘my husband, thanks to you, has wanted for nothing?’
‘We did what we could to help, Madame.’
‘And where is he?’
‘Monsieur le Duc told me, about six months ago, that the Baron, who was known to his lawyer as Monsieur Thoul, had drawn the whole sum of eight thousand francs that he was to have in instalments every three months,’ said Josépha. ‘But neither I nor Monsieur d’Hérouville has had any news of the Baron. People like us lead such a full, such a busy, life that I could not run after old Thoul. And it so happens that in the last six months, Bijou, who does my embroidery, his… what shall I call her?’
‘His mistress,’ said Madame Hulot.
‘His mistress,’ repeated Josépha, ‘has not been here. Mademoiselle Olympe Bijou may very well have got divorced. Divorce is quite common in our district.’
Josépha rose, chose exotic flowers from her flower-stands, and made a charming, sweet-scented bouquet for the Baroness, who, we may as well say, had found her expectations quite disappointed. The Baroness, like those good bourgeois folk who take talented people for some kind of monster, eating and drinking, walking and speaking, quite differently from other human beings, had been hoping to see Josépha the fascinating man-eater, the opera singer, the dazzling and voluptuous courtesan; and she had found a serene and well-poised woman, with the noble dignity given her by her talent, the simplicity of an actress who knows that every evening she is a queen; and, even more unexpectedly, a courtesan who in her looks, her attitude and manner, was paying full and unreserved homage to the virtuous wife, to the Mater dolorosa of the holy hymn, and making an offering of flowers to her sorrows, as in Italy they adorn the Madonna.
‘Madame,’ said the footman, returning after half an hour, ‘old Madame Bijou is on her way; but it is not sure that her daughter Olympe can be counted on to come. Madame’s embroideress has become a respectable woman; she is married.…’
‘A make-believe marriage?’ asked Josépha.
‘No, Madame, really married. She is in charge of a fine business. She has married the owner of a large fancy goods shop that thousands have been spent on, on the boulevard des Italiens, and she has left her embroidering business to her sister and mother. She is Madame Grenouville. The fat shopkeeper…’
‘A man like Crevel!’
‘Yes, Madame,’ said the servant. ‘He has made a marriage settlement of thirty thousand francs on Mademoiselle Bijou. Her elder sister too, they say, is going to marry a rich butcher.’
‘Your affair is not going so well, seemingly,’ the singer said to the Baroness. ‘Monsieur le Baron hasn’t stayed where I settled him.’
Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josépha prudently showed the Baroness into her boudoir and drew the curtains across.
‘You would scare her,’ she told the Baroness. ‘She wouldn’t give anything away if she guessed that you were interested in her confidences. Let me draw her confession from her! If you hide here, you will hear everything. This kind of scene is played just as often in real life as it is in the theatre.
‘Well, Mother Bijou,’ said the singer to an old woman bundled in tartan cloth, who looked like a portress in her Sunday best, ‘so you are all well off? Your daughter has been lucky!’
‘Oh, well off!… My daughter gives us a hundred francs a month, and she goes in her carriage, and she eats off silver; she’s a millionairess, she is!… Olympe could easily have made me comfortable. To have to work at my age!… Do you call that well off?’
‘She is wrong to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to you,’ said Josépha. ‘But why has she not come to see me? It was I who saved her from want by marrying her to my uncle.’
‘Yes, Madame, old Thoul!… But he’s very old, worn out.…’
‘What have you done with him then? Is he with you? She was very silly to leave him, he’s worth millions now.…’
‘Ah, bless my soul!’ said old Madame Bijou. ‘Isn’t that what we told her when she treated him so badly, and him as soft as could be with her, poor old soul! Ah, she fairly kept him on the trot! Olympe has gone to the bad, Madame!’
‘How’s that?’
‘She got to know, saving your presence, Madame, one of those fellows paid to clap at the theatre, the grand-nephew of an old mattress-maker of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. He’s a good-for-nothing, and a banger-on at the theatre, like all those boys with looks. Well, he’s a cock of the side-walk in the boulevard du Temple, where he’s taken on to make a fuss of new plays, and work up the actresses’ entrances, as he calls it. He spends the morning over lunch, and before the show he has dinner to keep himself in good fettle like. Well, he’s been fond of the drinking and the billiards ever since he could walk, as you might say. As I said to Olympe, “It’s not a way to live, that!”’
‘It is, unfortunately, a way that some men live,’ said Josépha.
‘Anyhow, Olympe lost her head over the fellow, who kept bad company, Madame, and a proof of it is that he nearly got himself arrested in a bar thieves use, but Monsieur Braulard, the head of the claque, got him out of it that time. And so he’s one of the lot that wears gold rings in their ears, and earns their living doing nothing, and hangs round the women who go mad about good-looking chaps like him. Well, all the money that Monsieur Thoul gave her went into his games. The business was doing very badly. Whatever came in from embroidery went on billiards. And so this chap here had a pretty sister, about as much use as her brother was, not up to any good, living in the students’ quarter.’
‘A tart from La Chaumière,’ said Josépha.
‘Yes, Madame,’ said Bijou. ‘And so Idamore – that’s what he calls himself for business, for his real name’s Chardin – well, Idamore thought that your uncle must have far more money than he said, and he found a way of sending his sister Élodie – that’s the theatre name he gave her – to us as a work-girl without my daughter thinking anything of it. Well, bless us all! She turned the whole place upside down, she taught all those poor girls bad ways, you couldn’t do a thing with them, quite shameless they got, saving your presence.… And she didn’t rest till she had got old Thoul for herself, and she’s took him away we don’t know where, and that’s put us in a fine fix because of all those bills. And we’re still left from hand to mouth not able to pay them, except that my daughter, whose name is in it, keeps an eye on them.… Well, when Idamore saw that he had hooked the old fellow because of his sister, he left my poor daughter standing there, and he’s now with a young leading lady in the Funambules. And so my daughter got married, as you’ll see.…’
‘But do you know where the mattress-maker lives?’ asked Josépha.
‘Old Papa Chardin? Does that lot live anywhere! He’s drunk from six o’clock in the morning. He makes a mattress about once a month. He spends the whole day in low sort of tap-rooms. He plays pools…’
‘What, pullets? He’s a proud cock!’
‘You don’t understand, Madame; pools at billiards. He wins three or four every day, and he drinks…’
‘Egg flip!’ said Josépha. ‘But if Idamore’s playground is the boulevard, we could find him through my friend B
raulard.’
‘I don’t know, Madame, seeing as all this happened six months ago. Idamore is one of those ones taking the road to gaol, and from there to the central prison at Melun, and from there… save us!…’
‘To the hulks!’ said Josépha.
‘Ah! Madame knows it all,’ said Madame Bijou, with a smile. ‘If my daughter had never have met that fellow, she would have been… But she’s been very lucky, all the same, you’ll tell me; for Monsieur Grenouville got so crazy about her that he’s married her.’
‘And how was that marriage made?’
‘Because Olympe was in such a taking, Madame. She saw herself thrown over for the young leading lady – ah! she didn’t half give her a trouncing, she properly what you call walloped her – and then she had lost old Thoul who adored her, too, and she said she was through with men. And so, Monsieur Grenouville, him who used to come and buy a lot from us, two hundred embroidered Chinese shawls a quarter, he wanted to console her; but believe it or not, she wouldn’t hear a word, it was the Registrar’s Office and the church for her or nothing. “I’m going to be respectable!” that’s what she kept on saying. “I’ll be respectable or I’ll die first!” And she stuck to it. Monsieur Grenouville said he would marry her if she would have nothing more to do with us, and we said we would let her…’
‘If money passed?’ said Josépha shrewdly.
‘Yes, Madame, ten thousand francs, and a bit every year for my father, who isn’t able to work any more.’
‘I asked your daughter to look after old Thoul and make him happy, and she’s thrown him into the gutter! It really is a shame. I’ll never try to help anyone again! That’s what happens when you try to give a helping hand to someone! You always have reason to regret a kindness. It’s throwing money away – you don’t know how it may turn out. Olympe might at least have let me know what she was up to! If you can find old Thoul again within a fortnight, I’ll give you a thousand francs.…’
‘That’s not an easy job, Madame, though you’re so kind. But there’s a lot of money in a thousand francs, and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Good-bye, Madame Bijou.’
When she went into her boudoir, the singer found Madame Hulot in a dead faint; but even in unconsciousness she was shaken by her nervous trembling, like a snake still twitching with its head cut off. Strong smelling salts, cold water, all the usual remedies, were applied, and the Baroness was recalled to life, or, more precisely, to memory of her sorrows.
‘Ah! Mademoiselle, how low he has fallen!’ she said, recognizing the singer and seeing that she was alone with her.
‘Have courage, Madame,’ answered Josépha, who had seated herself on a cushion at the Baroness’s feet, and was kissing her hands. ‘We’ll find him; and if he is in the mire, well, it’ll wash off. Believe me, for well-bred people, it’s only a matter of clothes.… Let me make amends for the wrong I did you, for I can see how much your husband means to you, in spite of his behaviour, since you came here for him! True enough, poor man, he’s fond of women.… Well, if only you could have had a little of our knack, you know, you would have kept him from running after us. You would have been what we know all about being – every kind of woman to a man. The government ought to start a school for respectable women! But governments are so prudish! And yet it’s the men that run the governments that we lead by the nose – I’m sorry for the nations.… But we must think of what’s to be done for you instead of gibing at them.… Well, don’t worry, Madame; go home, and set your mind at rest. I’ll bring you back your Hector, as good as he was thirty years ago.’
’Oh, Mademoiselle, let us go and see this Madame Grenouville!’ said the Baroness. ‘She is bound to know something. I might see Monsieur Hulot today, and rescue him from poverty and shame at once.…’
‘Madame, I shall prove to you, here and now, the deep gratitude I shall always feel for the honour you have done me. I will not allow the singer Josépha, the Duc d’Hérouville’s mistress, to be seen in the same carriage as the beautiful and saintly image of virtue. I respect you too much to appear in public with you. I am not affecting humility, like an actress: this is homage that I properly pay you. You make me sorry, Madame, that I cannot follow your path, in spite of the thorns in your bleeding hands and feet! But what can one do? I belong to Art, as you belong to Virtue.…’
‘Poor girl!’ said the Baroness, moved, in the midst of her own sorrows, by an unusual sympathy and compassion. ‘I will pray for you. You are the victim of our society, which has to have its entertainment. When old age comes, your penitent voice will be hearkened to… if God deigns to hear the prayers of a…’
‘Of a martyr, Madame,’ said Josépha, reverentially kissing the hem of the Baroness’s dress.
But Adeline took the singer’s hand, drew her to her, and kissed her forehead. Blushing with pleasure, the singer saw Adeline to her cab, with every mark of the deepest respect.
‘It must be some lady of charity,’ said the man-servant to the maid. ‘She doesn’t treat anybody like that, not even her best friend, Madame Jenny Cadine!’
‘Wait a few more days, Madame,’ Josépha said, ‘and you shall see him, or I’ll deny the God of my fathers; and for a Jewess to say that, you know, is to promise success.’
About the time of the Baroness’s arrival at Josépha’s house, Victorin was interviewing an old woman of about seventy-five, who in order to obtain admission to the distinguished lawyer had made use of the awful name of the chief of the Sûreté. The attendant announced:
‘Madame de Saint-Estèvel’
‘That’s just one of the names I use,’ she said, as she sat down.
Victorin felt something like an inner shudder at the sight of that hideous beldame. Her expensive dress did nothing to soften the effect of the cold malignity of her horribly wrinkled, pallid, sinewy face. Marat, if he had been a woman of her age, would have looked like her, a figure of the Terror incarnate. The sharp little eyes of the sinister old hag showed a tiger’s blood-thirsty greed. Her flattened nose, the nostrils elongated to oval holes that seemed to exhale the fires of hell, suggested the purposefully evil beaks of birds of prey. Behind her low cruel forehead manifestly lay an intriguing mind. The long hairs springing haphazard from every crevice of her face seemed to indicate a masculine enterprise and capacity for organization. Anyone seeing this woman would have reflected that none of the painters ever found the right model for Mephistopheles.
‘My dear Monsieur,’ she said patronizingly, ‘it’s a very long time since I took a hand in any business. Anything I do for you I’m doing for the sake of my dear nephew, who means more to me than a son. The President of the Council dropped a couple of words in the ear of the Prefect of Police about you, but he, after conferring with Monsieur Chapuzot, is of the opinion that the police should not appear at all in an affair of this kind. My nephew has been given a free hand, but my nephew will only act in an advisory capacity, he must not be compromised.…’
‘Your nephew is…?’
‘Quite so, and I’m rather proud of the fact,’ she cut the lawyer short; ‘for he’s my pupil, a pupil who soon surpassed his master.… We have considered your business, and we have taken its measure! Will you give thirty thousand francs to be rid of this matter, once for all? I liquidate the business for you, and you pay only when the thing is done.…’
‘You know the persons concerned?’
‘No, my dear Monsieur, you must inform us further. We’ve been told: “There’s a moonstruck old man that a widow’s got her hooks in. The widow, aged twenty-nine, knows how to play her cards, and she has cleaned up forty thousand francs a year from two heads of families. Now she’s on the point of raking in eighty thousand francs a year by marriage with an old fellow of sixty-one. She will ruin an entire respected family, and pass that enormous fortune on to some lover’s child by getting rid of her old husband as soon as may be…”. That is the situation.’
‘That is correct,’ said Victorin. ‘My father-in-la
w, Monsieur Crevel…’
‘A former perfumer, a Mayor. I live in his district, under the name of Ma’am Nourrisson,’ she took him up.
‘The other person is Madame Marneffe.’
‘I don’t know her,’ said Madame de Saint-Estève; ‘but in three days I’ll be in a position to count her shifts.’
‘Could you prevent the marrage?’ asked the lawyer.
‘How far have things gone?’
‘The second reading of the banns.’
‘The woman would have to be kidnapped. Today’s Sunday… there are only three days, for they’ll marry on Wednesday. No, it’s impossible! But we could kill her for you.…’
Victorin Hulot jumped, with any law-abiding citizen’s reaction to hearing those six words spoken in a business-like tone.
‘Murder!…’ he said. ‘And how would you do it?’
‘For the last forty years, Monsieur, we have played the part of fate,’ she answered with a formidable pride, ‘and have done just as we please in Paris. More families than one, and many from the faubourg Saint-Germain, have told me their secrets, believe me! I have made and broken many a marriage, and torn up many a will, and saved many a threatened reputation. I keep a flock of secrets tucked away in their pen in here,’ and she tapped her forehead; ‘and they’re worth thirty-six thousand francs a year to me. And you’ll be one of my lambs, naturally! A woman like me, would she be what I am if she talked about how she did things? I don’t talk, I act! Everything that happens, my dear Monsieur, will be an accident, and you will not feel the slightest remorse. You will be like people cured by hypnotists; at the end of a month they believe that nature did it all.’
A cold sweat broke out on Victorin. Sight of the headsman would have disturbed him less than this sententious and portentous sister of the hulks. Looking at her dress, the colour of wine lees, he fancied her clothed in blood.
‘Madame, I cannot accept the assistance of your experience and energy if success is to cost a life, or if any action in the least criminal is implied.’