Cousin Bette (2 page)

The rubicund and rather chubby face of this Captain of the Second Company fairly radiated self-satisfaction. He wore the aureole of complacency achieved by wealthy, self-made, retired shopkeepers, that marked him as one of the Paris elect, an ex-Deputy Mayor of his district at least. The ribbon of the Legion of Honour, naturally, was conspicuous upon his chest, which was valorously puffed out in the Prussian manner. Proudly ensconced in a corner of the
milord
, this decorated gentleman allowed his glances to rove among the passers-by, who are often, in Paris, the recipients in this fashion of pleasant smiles intended for bright eyes that are far away.

The
milord
stopped in the part of the street that lies between the rue de Bellechasse and the rue de Bourgogne, at the door of a large house recently built on part of the court of an old mansion set in a garden. The mansion still stood in its original state beyond the court, whose size had been reduced by half.

As the Captain alighted from the
milord
, accepting a helping hand from the driver, it was evident that he was a man in his fifties. Certain movements, by their undisguised heaviness, are as indiscreet as a birth certificate. He replaced his yellow glove on the hand that he had bared, and, making no inquiry of the concierge, walked towards the steps leading to the mansion's ground floor, with an air that declared ‘She is mine!' Paris
porters know how to use their eyes. They never dream of stopping gentlemen with decorations on their chests who are dressed in National Guard blue and walk like men of weight. In other words, they know money when they see it.

This whole ground floor was occupied by Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy, Commissary general under the Republic, lately senior officer controlling the Army Commissariat, and now head of one of the most important departments of the War Ministry, Councillor of State, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, etc., etc.

Baron Hulot had taken the name of Ervy, his birthplace, in order to distinguish himself from his brother, the famous General Hulot, Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, created Comte de Forzheim by the Emperor after the campaign of 1809. The elder brother, the Count, with a fatherly concern for the future of the younger, who had been committed to his charge, had found a place for him in military administration, in which, partly owing to his brother's services but also on his own merits, the Baron had won Napoleon's favour. From the year 1807, Baron Hulot had been Commissary general of the armies in Spain.

When he had rung, the bourgeois Captain exerted himself energetically to smooth down his coat, which had been wrinkled up both in front and behind by his corpulence. Admitted on sight by a servant in livery, this important and imposing visitor followed the man, who announced him as he opened the drawing-room door:

‘Monsieur Crevel!'

When she heard this name, admirably appropriate to the appearance of the man who bore it, a tall, fair, well-preserved woman started, and rose, às if she had received an electric shock.

‘Hortense, my angel, go into the garden with your Cousin Bette,' she said hastily to her daughter, who sat at her embroidery not far away.

With a graceful bow to the Captain, Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot left the room by a french window, taking with her a desiccated spinster who looked older than the Baroness, although she was five years younger.

‘It's about your marriage,' Cousin Bette whispered in her young cousin Hortense's ear, apparently not at all offended by the way in which the Baroness had sent them off, as if she were of little account.

The appearance of this cousin would have afforded sufficient explanation, if explanation were needed, of such lack of ceremony.

The old maid wore a puce merino dress whose cut and narrow ribbon trimmings suggested Restoration fashion, an embroidered collar that had cost perhaps three francs, and a stitched straw hat with blue satin rosettes edged with straw, of the kind seen on the heads of old-clothes women in the market. A stranger, noticing her goatskin slippers, clumsily botched as if by a fifth-rate cobbler, would have hesitated before greeting Cousin Bette as a relation of the family: she looked for all the world like a daily sewing-woman. Before she left the room, however, the spinster gave Monsieur Crevel an intimate little nod, a greeting which that personage answered with a look of friendly understanding.

‘You are coming tomorrow, Mademoiselle Fischer, aren't you?' he said.

‘There won't be company?' Cousin Bette asked.

‘Just my children and you,' replied the visitor.

‘Very well, then, you may count on me.'

‘I am at your service, Madame,' said the bourgeois Captain of Militia, turning to bow again to Baroness Hulot. And he rolled his eyes at Madame Hulot, like Tartuffe casting sheep's eyes at Elmire, when a provincial actor, at Poitiers or Coutances, thinks it necessary to place heavy emphasis on Tartuffe's designs.

‘If you will come this way, Monsieur, we can discuss our business more conveniently here than in the drawing-room,' said Madame Hulot, leading the way to an adjoining room that in the lay-out of the suite was designed for a card-room.

Only a thin partition divided this room from the boudoir, whose window opened on the garden, and Madame Hulot left Monsieur Crevel alone for a moment, considering it necessary to shut both the window and the boudoir door so that no one could eavesdrop on that side. She even took the
precaution of closing the french window of the drawing-room, smiling as she did so at her daughter and cousin, whom she saw installed in an old summer-house at the far end of the garden. Returning, she left the door of the card-room ajar, so that she might hear the drawing-room door open if anyone should come in. Moving about the apartment, the Baroness, being unobserved, allowed her face to express what she was thinking, and anyone seeing her would have been quite alarmed by her agitation. But as she crossed the drawing-room to the card-room, she masked her face with that inscrutable reserve that all women, even the most candid, seem able to assume at will.

During these preparations, singular to say the least, the National Guardsman was examining the furnishings of the room in which he found himself. As he remarked the silk curtains, once red, but now faded to violet by the sun and frayed along the folds by long use, a carpet from which the colours had disappeared, chairs with their gilding rubbed off and their silk spotted with stains and worn threadbare in patches, his contemptuous expression was followed by satisfaction, and then by hope, in naïve succession on his successful-shopkeeper's commonplace face. He was surveying himself in a glass above an old Empire clock, taking stock of himself, when the rustle of the Baroness's silk dress warned him of her approach. He at once struck an attitude.

The Baroness sat down on a little sofa that must certainly have been very pretty about the year 1809, and motioned Crevel to an armchair decorated with bronzed sphinx heads, from which the paint was scaling off, leaving the bare wood exposed in places.

‘These precautions of yours, Madame, would be a delightfully promising sign for a…'

‘A lover,' she interrupted him.

‘The word is weak,' he said, placing his right hand on his heart, and rolling his eyes in a fashion that a woman nearly always finds comic when she meets them with no sympathy in her own. ‘A lover! A lover! Say rather – a man bewitched!'

‘Listen, Monsieur Crevel,' the Baroness went on, too much in earnest to feel like laughing. ‘You are fifty – that's ten
years younger than Monsieur Hulot, I know; but if a woman is to commit follies at my age she has to have something to justify her: good looks, youth, celebrity, distinction, brilliant gifts to dazzle her to the point of making her oblivious of everything, even of her age. You may have an income of fifty thousand francs, but your age must be weighed in the balance against your fortune; and you have nothing that a woman needs.'

‘And love?' said the Captain, rising and coming towards her. ‘A love that…'

‘No, Monsieur, infatuation!' said the Baroness, interrupting him to try to put an end to this ridiculous scene.

‘Yes, infatuation and love,' he went on, ‘but something more than that too, a right…'

‘A right!' exclaimed Madame Hulot, suddenly impressive in her scorn, defiance, and indignation. ‘But if you go on in this strain, we shall never have done; and I did not ask you to come here to talk about something that has made you an unwelcome visitor in this house, in spite of the connexion between our two families.'

‘I thought you did.…'

‘What – again?' she exclaimed. ‘Do you not see, Monsieur, by the detached and unconcerned way in which I speak of a lover and love and everything that is most indecorous on a woman's lips, that I am perfectly certain of remaining virtuous? I am not afraid of anything, even of incurring suspicion by shutting myself in this room alone with you. Does a frail woman behave so? You know very well why I asked you to come!'

‘No, Madame,' Crevel replied, with a sudden chill in his manner. He pursed his lips and struck his pose.

‘Well, I'll be brief, and cut short the embarrassment this causes both of us,' said the Baroness, looking him in the face.

Crevel made an ironic bow, in which a man of his trade would have recognized the affected courtesy of a one-time commercial traveller.

‘Our son has married your daughter…'

‘And if that were to do again!…'

‘The marriage would not take place,' rejoined the Baroness,
with spirit. ‘I have little doubt of it. All the same, you have no cause for complaint. My son is not only one of the leading lawyers in Paris, but a Deputy since last year, and he has made such a brilliant début in the Chamber that it seems likely that he will be in the Government before long. My son has been consulted twice in the drafting of important Bills, and if he wanted the post he could be Solicitor-General, representing the Government in the Court of Appeal, tomorrow. So that if you mean to imply that you have a son-in-law with no fortune…'

‘A son-in-law whom I am obliged to keep,' returned Crevel; ‘which seems to me worse, Madame. Of the five hundred thousand francs settled on my daughter as her dowry, two hundred thousand have gone heaven knows where! In paying your fine son's debts, in buying high-class furniture for his house, a house worth five hundred thousand francs that brings in barely fifteen thousand because he occupies the best part of it himself, and on which he still owes two hundred and sixty thousand francs – the rent from it barely covers the interest on the debt. This year I have had to give my daughter something like twenty thousand francs to enable her to make ends meet. And my son-in-law who, they say, was making thirty thousand francs in the law-courts is going to throw that up for the Chamber.…'

‘That, Monsieur Crevel, is a side issue, quite beside the point. But, to have done with it, if my son gets into office, if he has you made Officer of the Legion of Honour and Municipal Councillor of Paris, as a retired perfume-seller you will not have much to complain of.'

‘Ah! now we have it, Madame! I am a tradesman, a shopkeeper, a former retailer of almond paste, eau-de-Portugal, cephalic oil for hair troubles. I must consider myself highly honoured to have married my only daughter to the son of Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy. My daughter will be a Baroness. That's Regency, that's Louis XV, that belongs to the Oeil-de-Boeuf ante-room at Versailles! All very fine… I love Célestine as a man cannot help loving his only child. I love her so much that rather than give her brothers and sisters I have put up with all the inconveniences of being a widower
in Paris – and in my prime, Madame! – but you may take it from me that although I may dote on my daughter I do not intend to make a hole in my capital for your son, whose expenses seem to an old businessman like myself to need some explanation.'

‘Monsieur, you see that Monsieur Popinot, who was once a druggist in the rue des Lombards, is Minister of Commerce now, at this very moment.…'

‘A friend of mine, Madame!' said the ex-perfumer. ‘For I, Célestin Crevel, once head salesman to old César Birotteau, bought the business of the said Birotteau, Popinot's father-in-law, Popinot being just an ordinary assistant in the business; and he himself reminds me of the fact, for he is not stuck-up – I'll say that for him – with people in good positions, worth sixty thousand francs a year.'

‘Well, Monsieur, so the ideas that you describe as
Regency
are not in fashion now, in times when people accept a man on his personal merits; which is what you did when you married your daughter to my son.'

‘And you don't know how that marriage came about!' exclaimed Crevel. ‘Ah! confound this bachelor life! If it had not been for my libertine ways my Célestine would be the Vicomtesse Popinot today!'

‘But let me repeat, let's have no recriminations over what is done!' the Baroness said, with emphasis. ‘We have to talk of the reasons I have to protest about your strange conduct. My daughter Hortense had an opportunity to marry. The marriage depended entirely upon you, and I believed I could rely on your generosity. I thought that you would be fair to a woman whose heart has never held any image but her husband's, that you would have realized how necessary it was for her not to receive a man who might compromise her, and that you would have been eager, out of regard for the family with which you have allied your own, to promote Hortense's marriage with Councillor Lebas.… And you, Monsieur, have wrecked the marriage.'

‘Madame,' replied the retired perfume-seller, ‘I acted like an honest man. I was asked whether the two hundred thousand francs of Mademoiselle Hortense's dowry would be paid. I
replied in these words precisely: “I would not answer for it. My son-in-law, on whom the Hulot family settled that sum on his marriage, had debts, and I believe that if Monsieur Hulot d'Ervy were to die tomorrow, his widow would be left to beg her bread.” And that's how it is, my dear lady.'