Cousin Bette (37 page)

‘Oh, Mama, what a lot of harm Papa does us!' Hortense exclaimed.

The Baroness put her finger to her lips, and Hortense regretted her complaint, the first words of blame that she had ever spoken of a father so heroically protected by a sublime silence.

‘Good-bye, my children,' said Madame Hulot. ‘Here is fine weather come now. But don't quarrel with one another again.'

When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room, after seeing the Baroness out, Hortense said:

‘Tell me about your evening!'

And she studied her husband's face as he told his story, which she interrupted with the questions that spring naturally to a wife's lips in such circumstances. His account made Hortense thoughtful. She grasped some idea of the diabolical entertainment that artists must find in such vicious company.

‘Tell me the whole truth, Wenceslas! Stidmann was there, and Claude Vignon, Vernisset, and who else? In fact, you had a good time!'

‘I? Oh, I was only thinking of our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, “My Hortense will be spared anxiety!”'

The Livonian found this questioning desperately tiresome, and in a change of mood he said lightly,

‘And what would you have done, my angel, if your artist had been found guilty?'

‘Oh, I would have taken Stidmann as my lover,' Hortense said, with an air of decision; ‘but without any love for him, of course!'

‘Hortense!' cried Steinbock, with a theatrical gesture, springing to his feet. ‘You should not have had time. I would have killed you first!'

Hortense threw herself into her husband's arms, and clung to him stiflingly, covering him with kisses, and said:

‘Ah! you do love me, Wenceslas! Now I'm not afraid of anything! But no more Marneffe. Don't ever touch such pitch again.'

‘I swear to you, dearest Hortense, that I'll never go back there, except to redeem my note of hand.'

She pouted, but only as loving wives pout when they want to be petted out of their sulky fit. Wenceslas, tired out by such a morning, left his wife to sulk, and went off to his studio to make the clay model for the Samson and Delilah group, the sketch for which was in his pocket. And then Hortense, repenting the sullen temper she had shown, and thinking that Wenceslas was angry, followed him to the studio, which she reached just as her husband was finishing the fashioning of his clay, working on it with the fierce passion of artists under the sway of the creative impulse. When he saw his wife, he hastily threw a damp cloth over the roughly worked out model, and put his arms round Hortense, saying:

‘We're not cross, are we, my puss?'

Hortense had seen the group, and the cloth thrown over it. She said nothing, but before leaving the studio she turned back, pulled away the rag and looked at the model.

‘What's this?' she asked.

‘A group I have an idea for.'

‘And why did you hide it from me?'

‘I didn't want you to see it till it was finished.'

‘The woman is very pretty!' said Hortense. And a thousand suspicions sprang up in her heart, like the jungle vegetation that, in India, springs tall and luxuriant between one day and the next.

*

By the end of about three weeks Madame Marneffe was feeling thoroughly exasperated with Hortense. Women of her kind have their pride. To please them, obeisance must be made to the devil, and they never forgive virtue that does not fear their power, or that fights against them. Now, in that time, Wenceslas had not paid a single visit to the rue Vanneau, not even the visit required by courtesy after a woman's posing as Delilah. Whenever Lisbeth had gone to visit the Steinbocks she had found no one at home. Monsieur and Madame lived at the studio. Lisbeth, tracking the two turtle-doves to their nest at Gros-Caillou, found Wenceslas working with zeal and diligence, and was told by the cook that Madame never left Monsieur. Wenceslas had submitted to the tyranny of love. So Valérie had reasons of her own for embracing Lisbeth's hatred of Hortense. Women will not give up lovers for whose possession they have rivals, just as men prize women desired by several empty-headed adorers. Indeed, reflections made here on the subject of Madame Marneffe apply equally well to men of easy love-affairs, who are a kind of male courtesan.

Valérie's whim became an obsession; she must have her group at all costs, and she was planning to go to the studio one morning to see Wenceslas, when one of those serious occurrences intervened that for women of her kind may be called
fructus belli
– the fortunes of war. This is how Valérie broke the news of this quite personal matter, at breakfast with Lisbeth and Monsieur Marneffe.

‘Tell me, Marneffe, did you guess that you are about to have another child?'

‘Really? You are going to have a child? Oh, allow me to embrace you!'

He rose and walked round the table. His wife turned her face to him in such a way that his kiss fell on her hair.

‘By this stroke,' he went on, ‘I become head clerk and Officer of the Legion of Honour! But of course, my dear girl, I don't want Stanislas to have his nose put out of joint, poor little man!'

‘Poor little man?' exclaimed Lisbeth. ‘You haven' t set eyes on him for the past seven months. They take me for his mother at the school, because I'm the only one in this house that bothers about him!'

‘A little man we have to pay a hundred crowns for every three months!' said Valérie. ‘Besides, that one's your child, Marneffe. You certainly ought to pay for his schooling out of your salary. The one that's to come won't cost us any bills for his food.… On the contrary, he'll keep us out of the poor-house!'

‘Valérie,' rejoined Marneffe, striking Crevel's pose, ‘I trust that Monsieur le Baron Hulot will take proper care of his son, and not burden a poor civil servant with him. I intend to take a very stern line with Monsieur le Baron. So get hold of your evidence, Madame! Try to have some letters from him, mentioning his felicity, for he's hanging fire a little too long over my promotion.'

And Marneffe left for the Ministry, where, thanks to his Director's invaluable friendship, he did not need to arrive before eleven o'clock. He had little to do there, in any case, in consideration of his notorious incapacity and his aversion to work.

Left alone, Lisbeth and Valérie looked at each other for a moment like a couple of Augurs, then burst simultaneously into a great gust of laughter.

‘Look here, Valérie, is this true?' said Lisbeth. ‘Or are you only playing a farce?'

‘It's a physical fact!' replied Valérie. ‘But Hortense
riles
me! And last night I had the brilliant idea of dropping this baby like a bomb into Wenceslas's household.'

Valérie went back to her bedroom, followed by Lisbeth, and she showed Lisbeth the following letter, already concocted:

Wenceslas dear, I still believe that you love me, although it is nearly three weeks since I saw you. Is that because you despise me? Delilah believes that cannot be true. It seems more likely to be due to some exercise of power on the part of a woman whom you told me you could never love again. Wenceslas, you are too great an artist to let yourself be so tyrannized over. Family life is the tomb of glory.… Ask yourself whether you are the Wenceslas that you were in the rue du Doyenné. In my father's statue you scored a failure; but in you the lover far exceeds the artist – you were more successful with my father's daughter, and you are to be a father, my adored Wenceslas. If you did not come to see me in my present condition, your friends would hold a very low opinion of you; but I love you so madly, I feel in my heart that I should never have the strength to think badly of you. May I call myself, always,

Your
VALÉRIE?

‘What do you think of my plan to send this letter to the studio at a time when our dear Hortense is alone there?' Valérie asked Lisbeth. ‘Stidmann told me, yesterday evening, that Wenceslas is to call for him at eleven to go to Chanor's to discuss some work; so that ninny Hortense will be alone.'

‘After a trick like that,' Lisbeth replied, ‘I cannot still be your friend openly. I'll have to walk out of your house. I must be thought not to visit you any more, or even speak to you.'

‘I suppose so,' said Valérie; ‘but…'

‘Oh, don't worry,' Lisbeth interrupted. ‘We' ll see each other again when I am the Marshal's wife.
They
are all in favour of it now. The Baron is the only one who doesn't know of the plan; but you'll persuade him.'

‘But,' returned Valérie, ‘it is possible that my relations with the Baron may soon be slightly strained.'

‘Madame Olivier is the only person we can trust to let Hortense make her give up the letter,' said Lisbeth. ‘We'll have to send her first to the rue Saint-Dominique, on her way to the studio.'

‘Oh, our pretty little dear will be at home,' replied Madame Marneffe, ringing for Reine, in order to send her for Madame Olivier.

Ten minutes after the despatch of the fateful letter, Baron
Hulot arrived. Madame Marneffe, with a kittenish spring threw herself upon the old man's neck.

‘Hector, you are a father!' she whispered in his ear. ‘That's what happens when people quarrel and make it up again.…'

Perceiving a certain surprise which the Baron was not quick enough to dissemble, Valérie looked coldly in a way that reduced the Councillor of State to despair. She allowed him to draw the most convincing proofs from her, one after another. When persuasion, taken sweetly by the hand by vanity, had entered the old man's mind, she told him of Monsieur Marneffe's rage.

‘My own old soldier of the Old Guard,' she said to him, ‘it will be really very difficult for you to avoid having your responsible editor, our managing director if you like, appointed head clerk and Officer of the Legion of Honour, for you have dealt the man a cruel blow. He adores his Stanislas, the little
monstrico
who takes after him, whom I can't endure. Unless you would rather give Stanislas an annuity of twelve hundred francs, with possession of the capital, naturally, and the interest in my name.'

‘But if I bestow annuities, I prefer it to be for the benefit of my own son, not for the
monstrico
!' said the Baron.

That imprudent remark, from which the words ‘my own son' burst like a river in flood, was transformed at the end of an hour's discussion into a formal promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the child that was to come. And after that, the promise, on Valérie's lips and in her rapturous face, was like a drum in a small boy's hands; she had to beat on it without stopping for twenty days.

Baron Hulot left the rue Vanneau, as happy as a man a year married who wants an heir. Meanwhile, Madame Olivier had induced Hortense to demand the letter from her that she was to deliver only into Monsieur le Comte's own hands. The young wife paid twenty francs for this letter. The suicide pays for his opium, his pistol, or his charcoal. When Hortense had read the letter, and re-read it, she could see only the white paper barred with black lines; only the paper existed in the universe, everything else was darkness. The glare of the conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness
lit up the paper, while utter darkness surrounded her. Her little boy's cries as he played came to her ear as if he were in a deep valley and she were high on a mountain. To be so insulted, at twenty-four years of age, in the full splendour of her beauty, adorned with a pure and devoted love: it was not a mere dagger-thrust, it was death. The first attack she had suffered had been nervous – her body had reacted in the grip of jealousy; but certainty of the truth assailed the soul, and the body was unconscious of pain. Hortense remained for about ten minutes in this stunned state; then her mother's image came before her mind, and produced a sudden violent change. She became collected and cold; she recovered her reason. She rang the bell.

‘My dear, get Louise to help you,' she said to the cook. ‘You must pack everything here that belongs to me, as quickly as possible, and all my son's things. I give you an hour. When everything is ready, fetch a cab from the square, and let me know. Make no comment! I'm leaving the house, and I shall take Louise with me. You must stay here with Monsieur. Take good care of him.…'

She went into her room, sat down at her table and wrote the following letter:

Monsieur le Comte,

The enclosed letter will explain why I have taken the course that I have resolved to follow.

When you read these lines, I shall have left your house and returned to my mother, with our child.

Do not imagine that I shall ever change my mind about this decision. Do not think that I am acting on impulse with youthful hotheadedness, with the vehement reaction of outraged young love: you would be quite mistaken.

I have thought very deeply, during the past fortnight, about life, love, our marriage, and our duty to each other. I have heard the whole story of my mother's devotion – she has told me all her sorrows. She bears her sufferings heroically every day, and has done so for twenty-three years; but I do not feel that I have the strength to follow her example, not because I have loved you less than she loves my father, but for reasons deriving from my nature. Our home could easily become a hell, and I might lose my head to the point of dishonouring you, dishonouring myself, and our child. I
have no desire to be a Madame Marneffe, and on that slope a woman of my temperament might perhaps not be able to stop herself. I am, unhappily for me, a Hulot, not a Fischer.

Alone, and away from the sight of your dissipation, I can answer for myself, especially occupied as I shall be with our child, near my strong and sublime mother, whose living example will have its effect on the tumultuous impulses of my heart. There I can be a good mother, bring up our son well, and live. If I stayed with you, the wife would kill the mother, and incessant quarrels would embitter my character.