Cousin Bette E-Book

Honore de Balzac

• Herausgeber: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 782

Beschreibung

Cousin Bette Honore de Balzac - Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris: her beautiful, saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot and their daughter Hortense. Already deeply resentful of their wealth, when Bette learns that the man she is in love with plans to marry Hortense, she becomes consumed by the desire to exact her revenge and dedicates herself to the destruction of the Hulot family, plotting their ruin with patient, silent malice.Cousin Bette is a gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion and treachery, and a brilliant portrayal of the grasping, bourgeois society of 1840's Paris. The culmination of the Comedie humaine, Balzac's epic chronicle of his times, it is one of his greatest triumphs as a novelist.

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Honore de Balzac

Cousin Bette

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Introduction

La Cousine Bette was perhaps the last really great thing that Balzac did — for Le Cousin Pons, which now follows it, was actually written before — and it is beyond all question one of the very greatest of his works. It was written at the highest possible pressure, and (contrary to the author’s more usual system) in parts, without even seeing a proof, for the Constitutionnel in the autumn, winter, and early spring of 1846–47, before his departure from Vierzschovnia, the object being to secure a certain sum of ready money to clear off indebtedness. And it has been sometimes asserted that this labor, coming on the top of many years of scarcely less hard works, was almost the last straw which broke down Balzac’s gigantic strength. Of these things it is never possible to be certain; as to the greatness of La Cousine Bette, there is no uncertainty.

In the first place, it is a very long book for Balzac; it is, I think, putting aside books like Les Illusions Perdues, and Les Celibataires, and Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, which are really groups of work written at different times, the longest of all his novels, if we except the still later and rather doubtful Petits Bourgeois. In the second place, this length is not obtained — as length with him is too often obtained — by digressions, by long retrospective narrations, or even by the insertion of such “padding” as the collection business in Le Cousin Pons. The whole stuff and substance of La Cousine Bette is honestly woven novel-stuff, of one piece and one tenor and texture, with for constant subject the subterranean malignity of the heroine, the erotomania of Hulot and Crevel, the sufferings of Adeline, and the pieuvre operations of Marneffe and his wife — all of which fit in and work together with each other as exactly as the cogs and gear of a harmonious piece of machinery do. Even such much simpler and shorter books as Le Pere Goriot by no means possess this seamless unity of construction, this even march, shoulder to shoulder, of all the personages of the story.

In the second place, this story itself strikes hold on the reader with a force not less irresistible than that of the older and simpler stories just referred to. As compared even with its companion, this force of grasp is remarkable. It is not absolutely criminal or contemptible to feel that Le Cousin Pons sometimes languishes and loses itself; this can never be said of the history of the evil destiny partly personified in Elizabeth Fischer, which hovers over the house of Hulot.

Some, I believe, have felt inclined to question the propriety of the title of the book, and to assign the true heroineship to Valerie Marneffe, whom also the same and other persons are fond of comparing with her contemporary Becky Sharp, not to the advantage of the latter. This is no place for a detailed examination of the comparison, as to which I shall only say that I do not think Thackeray has anything to fear from it. Valerie herself is, beyond all doubt, a powerful study of the “strange woman,” enforcing the Biblical view of that personage with singular force and effectiveness. But her methods are coarser and more commonplace than Becky’s; she never could have long sustained such an ordeal as the tenure of the house in Curzon Street without losing even an equivocal position in decent English society; and it must always be remembered that she was under the orders, so to speak, of Lisbeth, and inspired by her.

Lisbeth herself, on the other hand, is not one of a class; she stands alone as much as Becky herself does. It is, no doubt, an arduous and, some milky-veined critics would say, a doubtfully healthy or praiseworthy task to depict almost pure wickedness; it is excessively hard to render it human; and if the difficulty is not increased, it is certainly not much lessened by the artist’s determination to represent the malefactress as undiscovered and even unsuspected throughout. Balzac, however, has surmounted these difficulties with almost complete success. The only advantage — it is no doubt a considerable one — which he has taken over Shakespeare, when Shakespeare devised Iago, is that of making Mademoiselle Fischer a person of low birth, narrow education, and intellectual faculties narrower still, for all their keenness and intensity. The largeness of brain with which Shakespeare endows his human devil, and the largeness of heart of which he does not seem to wish us to imagine him as in certain circumstances incapable, contrast sharply enough with the peasant meanness of Lisbeth. Indeed, Balzac, whose seldom erring instinct in fixing on the viler parts of human nature may have been somewhat too much dwelt on, but is undeniable, has here and elsewhere hit the fault of the lower class generally very well. It does not appear that the Hulots, though they treated her without much ceremony, gave Bette any real cause of complaint, or that there was anything in their conduct corresponding to that of the Camusots to the luckless Pons. That her cousin Adeline had been prettier than herself in childhood, and was richer and more highly placed in middle life, was enough for Lisbeth — the incarnation of the Radical hatred of superiority in any kind. And so she set to work to ruin and degrade the unhappy family, to set it at variance, and make it miserable, as best she could.

The way of her doing this is wonderfully told, and the various characters, minor as well as major, muster in wonderful strength. I do not know that Balzac has made quite the most of Hector Hulot’s vice — in fact, here, as elsewhere, I think the novelist is not happy in treating this particular deadly sin. The man is a rather disgusting and wholly idiotic old fribble rather than a tragic victim of Libitina. So also his wife is too angelic. But Crevel, the very pattern and model of the vicious bourgeois who had made his fortune; and Wenceslas Steinbock, pattern again and model of the foibles of Polen aus der Polackei; and Hortense, with the better energy of the Hulots in her; and the loathsome reptile Marneffe, and Victoria, and Celestine, and the Brazilian (though he, to be sure, is rather a transpontine rastaqouere), and all the rest are capital, and do their work capitally. But they would not be half so fine as they are if, behind them, there were not the savage Pagan naturalism of Lisbeth Fischer, the “angel of the family”— and a black angel indeed.

One of the last and largest of Balzac’s great works — the very last of them, if we accept La Cousine Bette, to which is pendant and contrast — Le Cousin Pons has always united suffrages from very different classes of admirers. In the first place, it is not “disagreeable,” as the common euphemism has it, and as La Cousine Bette certainly is. In the second, it cannot be accused of being a berquinade, as those who like Balzac best when he is doing moral rag-picking are apt to describe books like Le Medecin de Campagne and Le Lys dans la Vallee, if not even like Eugenie Grandet. It has a considerable variety of interest; its central figure is curiously pathetic and attractive, even though the curse of something like folly, which so often attends Balzac’s good characters, may a little weigh on him. It would be a book of exceptional charm even if it were anonymous, or if we knew no more about the author than we know about Shakespeare.

As it happens, however, Le Cousin Pons has other attractions than this. In the first place, Balzac is always great — perhaps he is at his greatest — in depicting a mania, a passion, whether the subject be pleasure or gold-hunger or parental affection. Pons has two manias, and the one does not interfere with, but rather helps, the other. But this would be nothing if it were not that his chief mania, his ruling passion, is one of Balzac’s own. For, as we have often had occasion to notice, Balzac is not by any means one of the great impersonal artists. He can do many things; but he is never at his best in doing any unless his own personal interests, his likings and hatreds, his sufferings and enjoyments, are concerned. He was a kind of actor-manager in his Comedie Humaine; and perhaps, like other actor-managers, he took rather disproportionate care of the parts which he played himself.

Now, he was even more desperate as a collector and fancier of bibelots than he was as a speculator; and while the one mania was nearly as responsible for his pecuniary troubles and his need to overwork himself as the other, it certainly gave him more constant and more comparatively harmless satisfactions. His connoisseurship would be nothing if he did not question the competence of another, if not of all others. It seems certain that Balzac frequently bought things for what they were not; and probable that his own acquisitions went, in his own eyes, through that succession of stages which Charles Lamb (a sort of Cousin Pons in his way too) described inimitably. His pictures, like John Lamb’s, were apt to begin as Raphaels, and end as Carlo Marattis. Balzac, too, like Pons, was even more addicted to bric-a-brac than to art proper; and after many vicissitudes, he and Madame Hanska seem to have succeeded in getting together a very considerable, if also a very miscellaneous and unequal collection in the house in the Rue du Paradis, the contents of which were dispersed in part (though, I believe, the Rochschild who bought it, bought most of them too) not many years ago. Pons, indeed, was too poor, and probably too queer, to indulge in one fancy which Balzac had, and which, I think, all collectors of the nobler and more poetic class have, though this number may not be large. Balzac liked to have new beautiful things as well as old — to have beautiful things made for him. He was an unwearied customer, though not an uncomplaining one, of the great jeweler Froment Meurice, whose tardiness in carrying out his behests he pathetically upbraids in more than one extant letter.

Therefore, Balzac “did more than sympathize, he felt”— and it has been well put — with Pons in the bric-a-brac matter; and would appear that he did so likewise in that of music, though we have rather less direct evidence. This other sympathy has resulted in the addition to Pons himself of the figure of Schmucke, a minor and more parochial figure, but good in itself, and very much appreciated, I believe, by fellow melomanes.

It is with even more than his usual art that Balzac has surrounded these two originals — these “humorists,” as our own ancestors would have called them — with figures much, very much, more of the ordinary world than themselves. The grasping worldliness of the parvenue family of Camusot in one degree and the greed of the portress, Madame Cibot, in the other, are admirably represented; the latter, in particular, must always hold a very high place among Balzac’s greatest successes. She is, indeed a sort of companion sketch to Cousine Bette herself in a still lower rank of life representing the diabolical in woman; and perhaps we should not wrong the author’s intentions if we suspected that Diane de Maufrigneuse has some claims to make up the trio in a sphere even more above Lisbeth’s than Lisbeth’s is above Madame Cibot’s own.

Different opinions have been held of the actual “bric-a-bracery” of this piece — that is to say, not of Balzac’s competence in the matter but of the artistic value of his introduction of it. Perhaps his enthusiasm does a little run away with him; perhaps he gives us a little too much of it, and avails himself too freely of the license, at least of the temptation, to digress which the introduction of such persons as Elie Magus affords. And it is also open to any one to say that the climax, or what is in effect the climax, is introduced somewhat too soon; that the struggle, first over the body and then over the property of Patroclus–Pons, is inordinately spun out, and that, even granting the author’s mania, he might have utilized it better by giving us more of the harmless and ill-treated cousin’s happy hunts, and less of the disputes over his accumulated quarry. This, however, means simply the old, and generally rather impertinent, suggestion to the artist that he shall do with his art something different from that which he has himself chosen to do. It is, or should be, sufficient that Le Cousin Pons is a very agreeable book, more pathetic if less “grimy,” than its companion, full of its author’s idiosyncracy, and characteristic of his genius. It may not be uninteresting to add that Le Cousin Pons was originally called Le Deux Musiciens, or Le Parasite, and that the change, which is a great improvement, was due to the instances of Madame Hanska.

The bibliography of the two divisions of Les Parents Pauvres is so closely connected, that it is difficult to extricate the separate histories. Originally the author had intended to begin with Le Cousin Pons (which then bore the title of Les Deux Musiciens), and to make it the more important of the two; but La Cousine Bette grew under his hands, and became, in more than one sense, the leader. Both appeared in the Constitutionnel; the first between October 8th and December 3rd, 1846, the second between March 18th and May of the next year. In the winter of 1847–48 the two were published as a book in twelve volumes by Chlendowski and Petion. In the newspaper (where Balzac received — a rarely exact detail — 12,836 francs for the Cousine, and 9,238 for the Cousin) the first-named had thirty-eight headed chapter-divisions, which in book form became a hundred and thirty-two. Le Cousin Pons had two parts in feuilleton, and thirty-one chapters, which in book form became no parts and seventy-eight chapters. All divisions were swept away when, at the end of 1848, the books were added together to the Comedie.

George Saintsbury

Dedication

To Don Michele Angelo Cajetani, Prince of Teano.

It is neither to the Roman Prince, nor to the representative of the illustrious house of Cajetani, which has given more than one Pope to the Christian Church, that I dedicate this short portion of a long history; it is to the learned commentator of Dante.

It was you who led me to understand the marvelous framework of ideas on which the great Italian poet built his poem, the only work which the moderns can place by that of Homer. Till I heard you, the Divine Comedy was to me a vast enigma to which none had found the clue—the commentators least of all. Thus, to understand Dante is to be as great as he; but every form of greatness is familiar to you.

A French savant could make a reputation, earn a professor's chair, and a dozen decorations, by publishing in a dogmatic volume the improvised lecture by which you lent enchantment to one of those evenings which are rest after seeing Rome. You do not know, perhaps, that most of our professors live on Germany, on England, on the East, or on the North, as an insect lives on a tree; and, like the insect, become an integral part of it, borrowing their merit from that of what they feed on. Now, Italy hitherto has not yet been worked out in public lectures. No one will ever give me credit for my literary honesty. Merely by plundering you I might have been as learned as three Schlegels in one, whereas I mean to remain a humble Doctor of the Faculty of Social Medicine, a veterinary surgeon for incurable maladies. Were it only to lay a token of gratitude at the feet of my cicerone, I would fain add your illustrious name to those of Porcia, of San-Severino, of Pareto, of di Negro, and of Belgiojoso, who will represent in this "Human Comedy" the close and constant alliance between Italy and France, to which Bandello did honor in the same way in the sixteenth century—Bandello, the bishop and author of some strange tales indeed, who left us the splendid collection of romances whence Shakespeare derived many of his plots and even complete characters, word for word.

The two sketches I dedicate to you are the two eternal aspects of one and the same fact. Homo duplex, said the great Buffon: why not add Res duplex? Everything has two sides, even virtue. Hence Moliere always shows us both sides of every human problem; and Diderot, imitating him, once wrote, "This is not a mere tale"—in what is perhaps Diderot's masterpiece, where he shows us the beautiful picture of Mademoiselle de Lachaux sacrificed by Gardanne, side by side with that of a perfect lover dying for his mistress.

In the same way, these two romances form a pair, like twins of opposite sexes. This is a literary vagary to which a writer may for once give way, especially as part of a work in which I am endeavoring to depict every form that can serve as a garb to mind.

Most human quarrels arise from the fact that both wise men and dunces exist who are so constituted as to be incapable of seeing more than one side of any fact or idea, while each asserts that the side he sees is the only true and right one. Thus it is written in the Holy Book, "God will deliver the world over to divisions." I must confess that this passage of Scripture alone should persuade the Papal See to give you the control of the two Chambers to carry out the text which found its commentary in 1814, in the decree of Louis XVIII.

May your wit and the poetry that is in you extend a protecting hand over these two histories of "The Poor Relations"

Of your affectionate humble servant,

DE BALZAC.

PARIS, August-September, 1846.

Cousin Bette

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, then lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

Among the Paris crowd, who are supposed to be so clever, there are some men who fancy themselves infinitely more attractive in uniform than in their ordinary clothes, and who attribute to women so depraved a taste that they believe they will be favorably impressed by the aspect of a busby and of military accoutrements.

The countenance of this Captain of the Second Company beamed with a self-satisfaction that added splendor to his ruddy and somewhat chubby face. The halo of glory that a fortune made in business gives to a retired tradesman sat on his brow, and stamped him as one of the elect of Paris—at least a retired deputy-mayor of his quarter of the town. And you may be sure that the ribbon of the Legion of Honor was not missing from his breast, gallantly padded a la Prussienne. Proudly seated in one corner of the milord, this splendid person let his gaze wander over the passers-by, who, in Paris, often thus meet an ingratiating smile meant for sweet eyes that are absent.

The vehicle stopped in the part of the street between the Rue de Bellechasse and the Rue de Bourgogne, at the door of a large, newly-build house, standing on part of the court-yard of an ancient mansion that had a garden. The old house remained in its original state, beyond the courtyard curtailed by half its extent.

Only from the way in which the officer accepted the assistance of the coachman to help him out, it was plain that he was past fifty. There are certain movements so undisguisedly heavy that they are as tell-tale as a register of birth. The captain put on his lemon-colored right-hand glove, and, without any question to the gatekeeper, went up the outer steps to the ground of the new house with a look that proclaimed, "She is mine!"

The concierges of Paris have sharp eyes; they do not stop visitors who wear an order, have a blue uniform, and walk ponderously; in short, they know a rich man when they see him.

This ground floor was entirely occupied by Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy, Commissary General under the Republic, retired army contractor, and at the present time at the head of one of the most important departments of the War Office, Councillor of State, officer of the Legion of Honor, and so forth.

This Baron Hulot had taken the name of d'Ervy—the place of his birth—to distinguish him from his brother, the famous General Hulot, Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, created by the Emperor Comte de Forzheim after the campaign of 1809. The Count, the elder brother, being responsible for his junior, had, with paternal care, placed him in the commissariat, where, thanks to the services of the two brothers, the Baron deserved and won Napoleon's good graces. After 1807, Baron Hulot was Commissary General for the army in Spain.

Having rung the bell, the citizen-captain made strenuous efforts to pull his coat into place, for it had rucked up as much at the back as in front, pushed out of shape by the working of a piriform stomach. Being admitted as soon as the servant in livery saw him, the important and imposing personage followed the man, who opened the door of the drawing-room, announcing:

"Monsieur Crevel."

On hearing the name, singularly appropriate to the figure of the man who bore it, a tall, fair woman, evidently young-looking for her age, rose as if she had received an electric shock.

"Hortense, my darling, go into the garden with your Cousin Betty," she said hastily to her daughter, who was working at some embroidery at her mother's side.

After curtseying prettily to the captain, Mademoiselle Hortense went out by a glass door, taking with her a withered-looking spinster, who looked older than the Baroness, though she was five years younger.

"They are settling your marriage," said Cousin Betty in the girl's ear, without seeming at all offended at the way in which the Baroness had dismissed them, counting her almost as zero.

The cousin's dress might, at need, have explained this free-and-easy demeanor. The old maid wore a merino gown of a dark plum color, of which the cut and trimming dated from the year of the Restoration; a little worked collar, worth perhaps three francs; and a common straw hat with blue satin ribbons edged with straw plait, such as the old-clothes buyers wear at market. On looking down at her kid shoes, made, it was evident, by the veriest cobbler, a stranger would have hesitated to recognize Cousin Betty as a member of the family, for she looked exactly like a journeywoman sempstress. But she did not leave the room without bestowing a little friendly nod on Monsieur Crevel, to which that gentleman responded by a look of mutual understanding.

"You are coming to us to-morrow, I hope, Mademoiselle Fischer?" said he.

"You have no company?" asked Cousin Betty.

"My children and yourself, no one else," replied the visitor.

"Very well," replied she; "depend on me."

"And here am I, madame, at your orders," said the citizen-captain, bowing again to Madame Hulot.

He gave such a look at Madame Hulot as Tartuffe casts at Elmire—when a provincial actor plays the part and thinks it necessary to emphasize its meaning—at Poitiers, or at Coutances.

"If you will come into this room with me, we shall be more conveniently placed for talking business than we are in this room," said Madame Hulot, going to an adjoining room, which, as the apartment was arranged, served as a cardroom.

It was divided by a slight partition from a boudoir looking out on the garden, and Madame Hulot left her visitor to himself for a minute, for she thought it wise to shut the window and the door of the boudoir, so that no one should get in and listen. She even took the precaution of shutting the glass door of the drawing-room, smiling on her daughter and her cousin, whom she saw seated in an old summer-house at the end of the garden. As she came back she left the cardroom door open, so as to hear if any one should open that of the drawing-room to come in.

As she came and went, the Baroness, seen by nobody, allowed her face to betray all her thoughts, and any one who could have seen her would have been shocked to see her agitation. But when she finally came back from the glass door of the drawing-room, as she entered the cardroom, her face was hidden behind the impenetrable reserve which every woman, even the most candid, seems to have at her command.

During all these preparations—odd, to say the least—the National Guardsman studied the furniture of the room in which he found himself. As he noted the silk curtains, once red, now faded to dull purple by the sunshine, and frayed in the pleats by long wear; the carpet, from which the hues had faded; the discolored gilding of the furniture; and the silk seats, discolored in patches, and wearing into strips—expressions of scorn, satisfaction, and hope dawned in succession without disguise on his stupid tradesman's face. He looked at himself in the glass over an old clock of the Empire, and was contemplating the general effect, when the rustle of her silk skirt announced the Baroness. He at once struck at attitude.

After dropping on to a sofa, which had been a very handsome one in the year 1809, the Baroness, pointing to an armchair with the arms ending in bronze sphinxes' heads, while the paint was peeling from the wood, which showed through in many places, signed to Crevel to be seated.

"All the precautions you are taking, madame, would seem full of promise to a——"

"To a lover," said she, interrupting him.

"The word is too feeble," said he, placing his right hand on his heart, and rolling his eyes in a way which almost always makes a woman laugh when she, in cold blood, sees such a look. "A lover! A lover? Say a man bewitched——"

"Listen, Monsieur Crevel," said the Baroness, too anxious to be able to laugh, "you are fifty—ten years younger than Monsieur Hulot, I know; but at my age a woman's follies ought to be justified by beauty, youth, fame, superior merit—some one of the splendid qualities which can dazzle us to the point of making us forget all else—even at our age. Though you may have fifty thousand francs a year, your age counterbalances your fortune; thus you have nothing whatever of what a woman looks for——"

"But love!" said the officer, rising and coming forward. "Such love as——"

"No, monsieur, such obstinacy!" said the Baroness, interrupting him to put an end to his absurdity.

"Yes, obstinacy," said he, "and love; but something stronger still—a claim——"

"A claim!" cried Madame Hulot, rising sublime with scorn, defiance, and indignation. "But," she went on, "this will bring us to no issues; I did not ask you to come here to discuss the matter which led to your banishment in spite of the connection between our families——"

"I had fancied so."

"What! still?" cried she. "Do you not see, monsieur, by the entire ease and freedom with which I can speak of lovers and love, of everything least creditable to a woman, that I am perfectly secure in my own virtue? I fear nothing—not even to shut myself in alone with you. Is that the conduct of a weak woman? You know full well why I begged you to come."

"No, madame," replied Crevel, with an assumption of great coldness. He pursed up his lips, and again struck an attitude.

"Well, I will be brief, to shorten our common discomfort," said the Baroness, looking at Crevel.

Crevel made an ironical bow, in which a man who knew the race would have recognized the graces of a bagman.

"Our son married your daughter——"

"And if it were to do again——" said Crevel.

"It would not be done at all, I suspect," said the baroness hastily. "However, you have nothing to complain of. My son is not only one of the leading pleaders of Paris, but for the last year he has sat as Deputy, and his maiden speech was brilliant enough to lead us to suppose that ere long he will be in office. Victorin has twice been called upon to report on important measures; and he might even now, if he chose, be made Attorney-General in the Court of Appeal. So, if you mean to say that your son-in-law has no fortune——"

"Worse than that, madame, a son-in-law whom I am obliged to maintain," replied Crevel. "Of the five hundred thousand francs that formed my daughter's marriage portion, two hundred thousand have vanished—God knows how!—in paying the young gentleman's debts, in furnishing his house splendaciously—a house costing five hundred thousand francs, and bringing in scarcely fifteen thousand, since he occupies the larger part of it, while he owes two hundred and sixty thousand francs of the purchase-money. The rent he gets barely pays the interest on the debt. I have had to give my daughter twenty thousand francs this year to help her to make both ends meet. And then my son-in-law, who was making thirty thousand francs a year at the Assizes, I am told, is going to throw that up for the Chamber——"

"This, again, Monsieur Crevel, is beside the mark; we are wandering from the point. Still, to dispose of it finally, it may be said that if my son gets into office, if he has you made an officer of the Legion of Honor and councillor of the municipality of Paris, you, as a retired perfumer, will not have much to complain of——"

"Ah! there we are again, madame! Yes, I am a tradesman, a shopkeeper, a retail dealer in almond-paste, eau-de-Portugal, and hair-oil, and was only too much honored when my only daughter was married to the son of Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy—my daughter will be a Baroness! This is Regency, Louis XV., (Eil-de-boeuf—quite tip-top!—very good.) I love Celestine as a man loves his only child—so well indeed, that, to preserve her from having either brother or sister, I resigned myself to all the privations of a widower—in Paris, and in the prime of life, madame. But you must understand that, in spite of this extravagant affection for my daughter, I do not intend to reduce my fortune for the sake of your son, whose expenses are not wholly accounted for—in my eyes, as an old man of business."

"Monsieur, you may at this day see in the Ministry of Commerce Monsieur Popinot, formerly a druggist in the Rue des Lombards——"

"And a friend of mine, madame," said the ex-perfumer. "For I, Celestin Crevel, foreman once to old Cesar Birotteau, brought up the said Cesar Birotteau's stock; and he was Popinot's father-in-law. Why, that very Popinot was no more than a shopman in the establishment, and he is the first to remind me of it; for he is not proud, to do him justice, to men in a good position with an income of sixty thousand francs in the funds."

"Well then, monsieur, the notions you term 'Regency' are quite out of date at a time when a man is taken at his personal worth; and that is what you did when you married your daughter to my son."

"But you do not know how the marriage was brought about!" cried Crevel. "Oh, that cursed bachelor life! But for my misconduct, my Celestine might at this day be Vicomtesse Popinot!"

"Once more have done with recriminations over accomplished facts," said the Baroness anxiously. "Let us rather discuss the complaints I have found on your strange behavior. My daughter Hortense had a chance of marrying; the match depended entirely on you; I believed you felt some sentiments of generosity; I thought you would do justice to a woman who has never had a thought in her heart for any man but her husband, that you would have understood how necessary it is for her not to receive a man who may compromise her, and that for the honor of the family with which you are allied you would have been eager to promote Hortense's settlement with Monsieur le Conseiller Lebas.—And it is you, monsieur, you have hindered the marriage."

"Madame," said the ex-perfumer, "I acted the part of an honest man. I was asked whether the two hundred thousand francs to be settled on Mademoiselle Hortense would be forthcoming. I replied exactly in these words: 'I would not answer for it. My son-in-law, to whom the Hulots had promised the same sum, was in debt; and I believe that if Monsieur Hulot d'Ervy were to die to-morrow, his widow would have nothing to live on.'—There, fair lady."

"And would you have said as much, monsieur," asked Madame Hulot, looking Crevel steadily in the face, "if I had been false to my duty?"

"I should not be in a position to say it, dearest Adeline," cried this singular adorer, interrupting the Baroness, "for you would have found the amount in my pocket-book."

And adding action to word, the fat guardsman knelt down on one knee and kissed Madame Hulot's hand, seeing that his speech had filled her with speechless horror, which he took for hesitancy.

"What, buy my daughter's fortune at the cost of——? Rise, monsieur—or I ring the bell."

Crevel rose with great difficulty. This fact made him so furious that he again struck his favorite attitude. Most men have some habitual position by which they fancy that they show to the best advantage the good points bestowed on them by nature. This attitude in Crevel consisted in crossing his arms like Napoleon, his head showing three-quarters face, and his eyes fixed on the horizon, as the painter has shown the Emperor in his portrait.

"To be faithful," he began, with well-acted indignation, "so faithful to a liber——"

"To a husband who is worthy of such fidelity," Madame Hulot put in, to hinder Crevel from saying a word she did not choose to hear.

"Come, madame; you wrote to bid me here, you ask the reasons for my conduct, you drive me to extremities with your imperial airs, your scorn, and your contempt! Any one might think I was a Negro. But I repeat it, and you may believe me, I have a right to—to make love to you, for—— But no; I love you well enough to hold my tongue."

"You may speak, monsieur. In a few days I shall be eight-and-forty; I am no prude; I can hear whatever you can say."

"Then will you give me your word of honor as an honest woman—for you are, alas for me! an honest woman—never to mention my name or to say that it was I who betrayed the secret?"

"If that is the condition on which you speak, I will swear never to tell any one from whom I heard the horrors you propose to tell me, not even my husband."

"I should think not indeed, for only you and he are concerned."

Madame Hulot turned pale.

"Oh, if you still really love Hulot, it will distress you. Shall I say no more?"

"Speak, monsieur; for by your account you wish to justify in my eyes the extraordinary declarations you have chosen to make me, and your persistency in tormenting a woman of my age, whose only wish is to see her daughter married, and then—to die in peace——"

"You see; you are unhappy."

"I, monsieur?"

"Yes, beautiful, noble creature!" cried Crevel. "You have indeed been too wretched!"

"Monsieur, be silent and go—or speak to me as you ought."

"Do you know, madame, how Master Hulot and I first made acquaintance?—At our mistresses', madame."

"Oh, monsieur!"

"Yes, madame, at our mistresses'," Crevel repeated in a melodramatic tone, and leaving his position to wave his right hand.

"Well, and what then?" said the Baroness coolly, to Crevel's great amazement.

Such mean seducers cannot understand a great soul.

"I, a widower five years since," Crevel began, in the tone of a man who has a story to tell, "and not wishing to marry again for the sake of the daughter I adore, not choosing either to cultivate any such connection in my own establishment, though I had at the time a very pretty lady-accountant. I set up, 'on her own account,' as they say, a little sempstress of fifteen—really a miracle of beauty, with whom I fell desperately in love. And in fact, madame, I asked an aunt of my own, my mother's sister, whom I sent for from the country, to live with the sweet creature and keep an eye on her, that she might behave as well as might be in this rather—what shall I say—shady?—no, delicate position.

"The child, whose talent for music was striking, had masters, she was educated—I had to give her something to do. Besides, I wished to be at once her father, her benefactor, and—well, out with it—her lover; to kill two birds with one stone, a good action and a sweetheart. For five years I was very happy. The girl had one of those voices that make the fortune of a theatre; I can only describe her by saying that she is a Duprez in petticoats. It cost me two thousand francs a year only to cultivate her talent as a singer. She made me music-mad; I took a box at the opera for her and for my daughter, and went there alternate evenings with Celestine or Josepha."

"What, the famous singer?"

"Yes, madame," said Crevel with pride, "the famous Josepha owes everything to me.—At last, in 1834, when the child was twenty, believing that I had attached her to me for ever, and being very weak where she was concerned, I thought I would give her a little amusement, and I introduced her to a pretty little actress, Jenny Cadine, whose life had been somewhat like her own. This actress also owed everything to a protector who had brought her up in leading-strings. That protector was Baron Hulot."

"I know that," said the Baroness, in a calm voice without the least agitation.

"Bless me!" cried Crevel, more and more astounded. "Well! But do you know that your monster of a husband took Jenny Cadine in hand at the age of thirteen?"

"What then?" said the Baroness.

"As Jenny Cadine and Josepha were both aged twenty when they first met," the ex-tradesman went on, "the Baron had been playing the part of Louis XV. to Mademoiselle de Romans ever since 1826, and you were twelve years younger then——"

"I had my reasons, monsieur, for leaving Monsieur Hulot his liberty."

"That falsehood, madame, will surely be enough to wipe out every sin you have ever committed, and to open to you the gates of Paradise," replied Crevel, with a knowing air that brought the color to the Baroness' cheeks. "Sublime and adored woman, tell that to those who will believe it, but not to old Crevel, who has, I may tell you, feasted too often as one of four with your rascally husband not to know what your high merits are! Many a time has he blamed himself when half tipsy as he has expatiated on your perfections. Oh, I know you well!—A libertine might hesitate between you and a girl of twenty. I do not hesitate——"

"Monsieur!"

"Well, I say no more. But you must know, saintly and noble woman, that a husband under certain circumstances will tell things about his wife to his mistress that will mightily amuse her."

Tears of shame hanging to Madame Hulot's long lashes checked the National Guardsman. He stopped short, and forgot his attitude.

"To proceed," said he. "We became intimate, the Baron and I, through the two hussies. The Baron, like all bad lots, is very pleasant, a thoroughly jolly good fellow. Yes, he took my fancy, the old rascal. He could be so funny!—Well, enough of those reminiscences. We got to be like brothers. The scoundrel—quite Regency in his notions—tried indeed to deprave me altogether, preached Saint-Simonism as to women, and all sorts of lordly ideas; but, you see, I was fond enough of my girl to have married her, only I was afraid of having children.

"Then between two old daddies, such friends as—as we were, what more natural than that we should think of our children marrying each other?—Three months after his son had married my Celestine, Hulot—I don't know how I can utter the wretch's name! he has cheated us both, madame—well, the villain did me out of my little Josepha. The scoundrel knew that he was supplanted in the heart of Jenny Cadine by a young lawyer and by an artist—only two of them!—for the girl had more and more of a howling success, and he stole my sweet little girl, a perfect darling—but you must have seen her at the opera; he got her an engagement there. Your husband is not so well behaved as I am. I am ruled as straight as a sheet of music-paper. He had dropped a good deal of money on Jenny Cadine, who must have cost him near on thirty thousand francs a year. Well, I can only tell you that he is ruining himself outright for Josepha.

"Josepha, madame, is a Jewess. Her name is Mirah, the anagram of Hiram, an Israelite mark that stamps her, for she was a foundling picked up in Germany, and the inquiries I have made prove that she is the illegitimate child of a rich Jew banker. The life of the theatre, and, above all, the teaching of Jenny Cadine, Madame Schontz, Malaga, and Carabine, as to the way to treat an old man, have developed, in the child whom I had kept in a respectable and not too expensive way of life, all the native Hebrew instinct for gold and jewels—for the golden calf.

"So this famous singer, hungering for plunder, now wants to be rich, very rich. She tried her 'prentice hand on Baron Hulot, and soon plucked him bare—plucked him, ay, and singed him to the skin. The miserable man, after trying to vie with one of the Kellers and with the Marquis d'Esgrignon, both perfectly mad about Josepha, to say nothing of unknown worshipers, is about to see her carried off by that very rich Duke, who is such a patron of the arts. Oh, what is his name?—a dwarf.—Ah, the Duc d'Herouville. This fine gentleman insists on having Josepha for his very own, and all that set are talking about it; the Baron knows nothing of it as yet; for it is the same in the Thirteenth Arrondissement as in every other: the lover, like the husband, is last to get the news.

"Now, do you understand my claim? Your husband, dear lady, has robbed me of my joy in life, the only happiness I have known since I became a widower. Yes, if I had not been so unlucky as to come across that old rip, Josepha would still be mine; for I, you know, should never have placed her on the stage. She would have lived obscure, well conducted, and mine. Oh! if you could but have seen her eight years ago, slight and wiry, with the golden skin of an Andalusian, as they say, black hair as shiny as satin, an eye that flashed lightning under long brown lashes, the style of a duchess in every movement, the modesty of a dependent, decent grace, and the pretty ways of a wild fawn. And by that Hulot's doing all this charm and purity has been degraded to a man-trap, a money-box for five-franc pieces! The girl is the Queen of Trollops; and nowadays she humbugs every one—she who knew nothing, not even that word."

At this stage the retired perfumer wiped his eyes, which were full of tears. The sincerity of his grief touched Madame Hulot, and roused her from the meditation into which she had sunk.

"Tell me, madame, is a man of fifty-two likely to find such another jewel? At my age love costs thirty thousand francs a year. It is through your husband's experience that I know the price, and I love Celestine too truly to be her ruin. When I saw you, at the first evening party you gave in our honor, I wondered how that scoundrel Hulot could keep a Jenny Cadine—you had the manner of an Empress. You do not look thirty," he went on. "To me, madame, you look young, and you are beautiful. On my word of honor, that evening I was struck to the heart. I said to myself, 'If I had not Josepha, since old Hulot neglects his wife, she would fit me like a glove.' Forgive me—it is a reminiscence of my old business. The perfumer will crop up now and then, and that is what keeps me from standing to be elected deputy.

"And then, when I was so abominably deceived by the Baron, for really between old rips like us our friend's mistress should be sacred, I swore I would have his wife. It is but justice. The Baron could say nothing; we are certain of impunity. You showed me the door like a mangy dog at the first words I uttered as to the state of my feelings; you only made my passion—my obstinacy, if you will—twice as strong, and you shall be mine."

"Indeed; how?"

"I do not know; but it will come to pass. You see, madame, an idiot of a perfumer—retired from business—who has but one idea in his head, is stronger than a clever fellow who has a thousand. I am smitten with you, and you are the means of my revenge; it is like being in love twice over. I am speaking to you quite frankly, as a man who knows what he means. I speak coldly to you, just as you do to me, when you say, 'I never will be yours,' In fact, as they say, I play the game with the cards on the table. Yes, you shall be mine, sooner or later; if you were fifty, you should still be my mistress. And it will be; for I expect anything from your husband!"

Madame Hulot looked at this vulgar intriguer with such a fixed stare of terror, that he thought she had gone mad, and he stopped.

"You insisted on it, you heaped me with scorn, you defied me—and I have spoken," said he, feeling that he must justify the ferocity of his last words.

"Oh, my daughter, my daughter," moaned the Baroness in a voice like a dying woman's.

"Oh! I have forgotten all else," Crevel went on. "The day when I was robbed of Josepha I was like a tigress robbed of her cubs; in short, as you see me now.—Your daughter? Yes, I regard her as the means of winning you. Yes, I put a spoke in her marriage—and you will not get her married without my help! Handsome as Mademoiselle Hortense is, she needs a fortune——"

"Alas! yes," said the Baroness, wiping her eyes.

"Well, just ask your husband for ten thousand francs," said Crevel, striking his attitude once more. He waited a minute, like an actor who has made a point.

"If he had the money, he would give it to the woman who will take Josepha's place," he went on, emphasizing his tones. "Does a man ever pull up on the road he has taken? In the first place, he is too sweet on women. There is a happy medium in all things, as our King has told us. And then his vanity is implicated! He is a handsome man!—He would bring you all to ruin for his pleasure; in fact, you are already on the highroad to the workhouse. Why, look, never since I set foot in your house have you been able to do up your drawing-room furniture. 'Hard up' is the word shouted by every slit in the stuff. Where will you find a son-in-law who would not turn his back in horror of the ill-concealed evidence of the most cruel misery there is—that of people in decent society? I have kept shop, and I know. There is no eye so quick as that of the Paris tradesman to detect real wealth from its sham.—You have no money," he said, in a lower voice. "It is written everywhere, even on your man-servant's coat.

"Would you like me to disclose any more hideous mysteries that are kept from you?"

"Monsieur," cried Madame Hulot, whose handkerchief was wet through with her tears, "enough, enough!"

"My son-in-law, I tell you, gives his father money, and this is what I particularly wanted to come to when I began by speaking of your son's expenses. But I keep an eye on my daughter's interests, be easy."

"Oh, if I could but see my daughter married, and die!" cried the poor woman, quite losing her head.

"Well, then, this is the way," said the ex-perfumer.

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a hopeful expression, which so completely changed her countenance, that this alone ought to have touched the man's feelings and have led him to abandon his monstrous schemes.

"You will still be handsome ten years hence," Crevel went on, with his arms folded; "be kind to me, and Mademoiselle Hulot will marry. Hulot has given me the right, as I have explained to you, to put the matter crudely, and he will not be angry. In three years I have saved the interest on my capital, for my dissipations have been restricted. I have three hundred thousand francs in the bank over and above my invested fortune—they are yours——"

"Go," said Madame Hulot. "Go, monsieur, and never let me see you again. But for the necessity in which you placed me to learn the secret of your cowardly conduct with regard to the match I had planned for Hortense—yes, cowardly!" she repeated, in answer to a gesture from Crevel. "How can you load a poor girl, a pretty, innocent creature, with such a weight of enmity? But for the necessity that goaded me as a mother, you would never have spoken to me again, never again have come within my doors. Thirty-two years of an honorable and loyal life shall not be swept away by a blow from Monsieur Crevel——"

"The retired perfumer, successor to Cesar Birotteau at the Queen of the Roses, Rue Saint-Honore," added Crevel, in mocking tones. "Deputy-mayor, captain in the National Guard, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor—exactly what my predecessor was!"

"Monsieur," said the Baroness, "if, after twenty years of constancy, Monsieur Hulot is tired of his wife, that is nobody's concern but mine. As you see, he has kept his infidelity a mystery, for I did not know that he had succeeded you in the affections of Mademoiselle Josepha——"

"Oh, it has cost him a pretty penny, madame. His singing-bird has cost him more than a hundred thousand francs in these two years. Ah, ha! you have not seen the end of it!"

"Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake, forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children without a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself respected and loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God unspotted——"

"Amen!" exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such an attempt. "You do not yet know the latter end of poverty—shame, disgrace.—I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the Prodigal Father from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me deeply," said Crevel, seating himself, "for it is frightful to see the woman one loves weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing against your interests or your husband's. Only never send to me for information. That is all."

"What is to be done?" cried Madame Hulot.

Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as a mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son's father-in-law was insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her resistance to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he showed, in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a humiliated National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the point of snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in a state of such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel at her feet, kissing her hands.

"Good God! what will become of us!" she went on, wiping away her tears. "Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her eyes? What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in her pure life under her mother's care as she is by every gift of nature? There are days when she wanders round the garden, out of spirits without knowing why; I find her with tears in her eyes——"

"She is one-and-twenty," said Crevel.

"Must I place her in a convent?" asked the Baroness. "But in such cases religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously trained girls lose their head!—Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not understand that everything is final between us? that I look upon you with horror? that you have crushed a mother's last hopes——"

"But if I were to restore them," asked he.

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a frenzied expression that really touched him. But he drove pity back to the depths of his heart; she had said, "I look upon you with horror."

Virtue is always a little too rigid; it overlooks the shades and instincts by help of which we are able to tack when in a false position.

"So handsome a girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband nowadays if she is penniless," Crevel remarked, resuming his starchiest manner. "Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather alarm intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too expensive to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out walking with such a woman on your arm, every one will turn to look at you, and follow and covet his neighbor's wife. Such success is a source of much uneasiness to men who do not want to be killing lovers; for, after all, no man kills more than one. In the position in which you find yourself there are just three ways of getting your daughter married: Either by my help—and you will have none of it! That is one.—Or by finding some old man of sixty, very rich, childless, and anxious to have children; that is difficult, still such men are to be met with. Many old men take up with a Josepha, a Jenny Cadine, why should not one be found who is ready to make a fool of himself under legal formalities? If it were not for Celestine and our two grandchildren, I would marry Hortense myself. That is two.—The last way is the easiest——"

Madame Hulot raised her head, and looked uneasily at the ex-perfumer.

"Paris is a town whither every man of energy—and they sprout like saplings on French soil—comes to meet his kind; talent swarms here without hearth or home, and energy equal to anything, even to making a fortune. Well, these youngsters—your humble servant was such a one in his time, and how many he has known! What had du Tillet or Popinot twenty years since? They were both pottering round in Daddy Birotteau's shop, with not a penny of capital but their determination to get on, which, in my opinion, is the best capital a man can have. Money may be eaten through, but you don't eat through your determination. Why, what had I? The will to get on, and plenty of pluck. At this day du Tillet is a match for the greatest folks; little Popinot, the richest druggist of the Rue des Lombards, became a deputy, now he is in office.—Well, one of these free lances, as we say on the stock market, of the pen, or of the brush, is the only man in Paris who would marry a penniless beauty, for they have courage enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau without asking for a farthing. Those men are madmen, to be sure! They trust in love as they trust in good luck and brains!—Find a man of energy who will fall in love with your daughter, and he will marry without a thought of money. You must confess that by way of an enemy I am not ungenerous, for this advice is against my own interests."

"Oh, Monsieur Crevel, if you would indeed be my friend and give up your ridiculous notions——"

"Ridiculous? Madame, do not run yourself down. Look at yourself—I love you, and you will come to be mine. The day will come when I shall say to Hulot, 'You took Josepha, I have taken your wife!'

"It is the old law of tit-for-tat! And I will persevere till I have attained my end, unless you should become extremely ugly.—I shall succeed; and I will tell you why," he went on, resuming his attitude, and looking at Madame Hulot. "You will not meet with such an old man, or such a young lover," he said after a pause, "because you love your daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old libertine, and because you—the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old Guard—will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may find him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of to-day was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a factory.

"And then, when you see the girl, urged by her twenty years, capable of dishonoring you all, you will say to yourself, 'It will be better that I should fall! If Monsieur Crevel will but keep my secret, I will earn my daughter's portion—two hundred thousand francs for ten years' attachment to that old gloveseller—old Crevel!'—I disgust you no doubt, and what I am saying is horribly immoral, you think? But if you happened to have been bitten by an overwhelming passion, you would find a thousand arguments in favor of yielding—as women do when they are in love.—Yes, and Hortense's interests will suggest to your feelings such terms of surrendering your conscience——"

"Hortense has still an uncle."

"What! Old Fischer? He is winding up his concerns, and that again is the Baron's fault; his rake is dragged over every till within his reach."

"Comte Hulot——"

"Oh, madame, your husband has already made thin air of the old General's savings. He spent them in furnishing his singer's rooms.—Now, come; am I to go without a hope?"

"Good-bye, monsieur. A man easily gets over a passion for a woman of my age, and you will fall back on Christian principles. God takes care of the wretched——"

The Baroness rose to oblige the captain to retreat, and drove him back into the drawing-room.

"Ought the beautiful Madame Hulot to be living amid such squalor?" said he, and he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier bereft of its gilding, the threadbare carpet, the very rags of wealth which made the large room, with its red, white, and gold, look like a corpse of Imperial festivities.

"Monsieur, virtue shines on it all. I have no wish to owe a handsome abode to having made of the beauty you are pleased to ascribe to me a man-trap and a money-box for five-franc pieces!"

The captain bit his lips as he recognized the words he had used to vilify Josepha's avarice.

"And for whom are you so magnanimous?" said he. By this time the baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door.—"For a libertine!" said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior wealth.

"If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is all."