Cousin Bette (16 page)

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 roof. 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.…'

Madame Marneffe broke off this picador's attack, for Cousin Bette frightened her. The peasant-woman's countenance had grown terrible. Her black piercing eyes had the fixed stare of a tiger's. Her face was like the face of a pythoness, as we imagine it. Her teeth were clenched to prevent them from chattering, and her body was shaken convulsively and horribly. She had pushed the rigid half-closed fingers of one hand under her bonnet to grasp handfuls of her hair and support her suddenly heavy head; she was on fire! The smoke of the conflagration that ravaged her seemed to issue from the wrinkles of her face, as if they were fissures opened by volcanic eruption. It was an unearthly spectacle.

‘Well, why do you stop?' she said hollowly. ‘I will be for you all that I was for him. Oh! I would have given my life-blood for him!'

‘You love him, then?'

‘As if he were my child!'

‘Well,' Madame Marneffe went on, breathing more easily, ‘if you only love him like that, you are going to be very well pleased, for you want him to be happy, don't you?'

Lisbeth replied by nodding her head rapidly and repeatedly, like a madwoman.

‘In a month he's going to marry your second cousin.'

‘Hortense!' cried the old maid, striking her forehead and rising to her feet.

‘Well, now! So you are in love with this young man?' asked Madame Marneffe.

‘My dear, we are now sworn friends,' said Mademoiselle Fischer. ‘Yes, if you have attachments, I will regard them as sacred. Your very vices shall be virtues to me, for indeed I have need of your vices!'

‘So you were living with him?' Valérie exclaimed.

‘No, I wanted to be his mother.…'

‘Ah! I can't make head or tail of it,' returned Valérie; ‘for if that's so, then you haven't been deceived or made a fool of, and you ought to be very glad to see him make a good marriage; because now he has got a start in life. Besides, it's all
over for you, in any case. Our artist goes every day to Madame Hulot's, as soon as you have gone out to dinner.'

‘Adeline!' said Lisbeth to herself. ‘Oh, Adeline, you shall atone for this. I will see to it that you grow uglier than I!'

‘Why, you're as pale as death!' exclaimed Valérie.' So there is something behind it? Oh! how silly of me! The mother and daughter must suspect that you might put obstacles in the way of this love-affair, since they are hiding it from you. But if you were not living with the young man,' cried Madame Marneffe, ‘all this, my dear, is harder to get to the bottom of than my husband's heart.…'

‘Oh, but you don't know, how could you know?' returned Lisbeth. ‘You don't know how they've intrigued against me! It's the last blow that kills! And how many blows have bruised my spirit? You don't know how, since I've been old enough to be conscious of it, I have been sacrificed to Adeline! They slapped me, and caressed her. I went dressed like a drudge, and she like a lady. I dug the garden, peeled the vegetables, and she never lifted a finger except to arrange her ribbons! She married the Baron and went to shine at the Emperor's Court, and I stayed until 1809 in my village, waiting for a suitable husband, for four years. They took me away from there, but only to make me a work-woman, and propose working-class matches for me – petty officials, captains who looked like porters! For twenty-six years I have had their leavings.… And now it's like in the Old Testament, the poor man had one lamb that was his only treasure, and the rich man who owned flocks coveted the poor man's lamb and stole it from him… without telling him, without asking him for it. Adeline is robbing me of my happiness I Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in the dust, fallen lower than I am! Hortense, whom I loved, has betrayed me. The Baron – No, it is not possible. See here, tell me again anything in this story that may be true.'

‘Keep calm, my dear.…'

‘Valérie, dear angel, I will keep calm,' this strange woman answered, sitting down. ‘There's only one thing can restore my sanity: give me proof!'

‘Well, your Cousin Hortense owns the Samson group; here
is a lithograph of it published in a review. She paid for it with her own savings; and it's the Baron who is backing him, since he's his future son-in-law, and getting all these commissions.'