“Victorin saw him, he told me, with that horrible woman not long ago; and he fancied that she maintains him in idleness.—If you only would, dear soul, you might bring your husband back to you yet.”
Hortense shook her head.
“Believe me,” Celestine went on, “the position will ere long be intolerable. In the first instance, rage, despair, indignation, gave you strength. The awful disasters that have come upon us since—two deaths, ruin, and the disappearance of Baron Hulot—have occupied your mind and heart; but now you live in peace and silence, you will find it hard to bear the void in your life; and as you cannot, and will never leave the path of virtue, you will have to be reconciled to Wenceslas. Victorin, who loves you so much, is of that opinion. There is something stronger than one’s feelings even, and that is Nature!”
“But such a mean creature!” cried the proud Hortense. “He cares for that woman because she feeds him.—And has she paid his debts, do you suppose?—Good Heaven! I think of that man’s position day and night! He is the father of my child, and he is degrading himself.”
“But look at your mother, my dear,” said Celestine.
Celestine was one of those women who, when you have given them reasons enough to convince a Breton peasant, still go back for the hundredth time to their original argument. The character of her face, somewhat flat, dull, and common, her light-brown hair in stiff, neat bands, her very complexion spoke of a sensible woman, devoid of charm, but also devoid of weakness.
“The Baroness would willingly go to join her husband in his disgrace, to comfort him and hide him in her heart from every eye,” Celestine went on. “Why, she has a room made ready upstairs for Monsieur Hulot, as if she expected to find him and bring him home from one day to the next.”
“Oh yes, my mother is sublime!” replied Hortense. “She has been so every minute of every day for six-and-twenty years; but I am not like her, it is not my nature.—How can I help it? I am angry with myself sometimes; but you do not know, Celestine, what it would be to make terms with infamy.”
“There is my father!” said Celestine placidly. “He has certainly started on the road that ruined yours. He is ten years younger than the Baron, to be sure, and was only a tradesman; but how can it end? This Madame Marneffe has made a slave of my father; he is her dog; she is mistress of his fortune and his opinions, and nothing can open his eyes. I tremble when I remember that their banns of marriage are already published!—My husband means to make a last attempt; he thinks it a duty to try to avenge society and the family, and bring that woman to account for all her crimes. Alas! my dear Hortense, such lofty souls as Victorin and hearts like ours come too late to a comprehension of the world and its ways!—This is a secret, dear, and I have told you because you are interested in it, but never by a word or a look betray it to Lisbeth, or your mother, or anybody, for—”
“Here is Lisbeth!” said Hortense. “Well, cousin, and how is the Inferno of the Rue Barbet going on?”
“Badly for you, my children.—Your husband, my dear Hortense, is more crazy about that woman than ever, and she, I must own, is madly in love with him.—Your father, dear Celestine, is gloriously blind. That, to be sure, is nothing; I have had occasion to see it once a fortnight; really, I am lucky never to have had anything to do with men, they are besotted creatures.—Five days hence you, dear child, and Victorin will have lost your father’s fortune.”
“Then the banns are cried?” said Celestine.
“Yes,” said Lisbeth, “and I have just been arguing your case. I pointed out to that monster, who is going the way of the other, that if he would only get you out of the difficulties you are in by paying off the mortgage on the house, you would show your gratitude and receive your stepmother—”
Hortense started in horror.
“Victorin will see about that,” said Celestine coldly.
“But do you know what Monsieur le Maire’s answer was?” said Lisbeth. “‘I mean to leave them where they are. Horses can only be broken in by lack of food, sleep, and sugar.’—Why, Baron Hulot was not so bad as Monsieur Crevel.
“So, my poor dears, you may say good-bye to the money. And such a fine fortune! Your father paid three million francs for the Presles estate, and he has thirty thousand francs a year in stocks! Oh!—he has no secrets from me. He talks of buying the Hotel de Navarreins, in the Rue du Bac. Madame Marneffe herself has forty thousand francs a year.—Ah!—here is our guardian angel, here comes your mother!” she exclaimed, hearing the rumble of wheels.
And presently the Baroness came down the garden steps and joined the party. At fifty-five, though crushed by so many troubles, and constantly trembling as if shivering with ague, Adeline, whose face was indeed pale and wrinkled, still had a fine figure, a noble outline, and natural dignity. Those who saw her said, “She must have been beautiful!” Worn with the grief of not knowing her husband’s fate, of being unable to share with him this oasis in the heart of Paris, this peace and seclusion and the better fortune that was dawning on the family, her beauty was the beauty of a ruin. As each gleam of hope died out, each day of search proved vain, Adeline sank into fits of deep melancholy that drove her children to despair.
The Baroness had gone out that morning with fresh hopes, and was anxiously expected. An official, who was under obligations to Hulot, to whom he owed his position and advancement, declared that he had seen the Baron in a box at the Ambigu-Comique theatre with a woman of extraordinary beauty. So Adeline had gone to call on the Baron Verneuil. This important personage, while asserting that he had positively seen his old patron, and that his behaviour to the woman indicated an illicit establishment, told Madame Hulot that to avoid meeting him the Baron had left long before the end of the play.
“He looked like a man at home with the damsel, but his dress betrayed some lack of means,” said he in conclusion.
“Well?” said the three women as the Baroness came towards them.
“Well, Monsieur Hulot is in Paris; and to me,” said Adeline, “it is a gleam of happiness only to know that he is within reach of us.”
“But he does not seem to have mended his ways,” Lisbeth remarked when Adeline had finished her report of her visit to Baron Verneuil. “He has taken up some little work-girl. But where can he get the money from? I could bet that he begs of his former mistresses—Mademoiselle Jenny Cadine or Josepha.”
The Baroness trembled more severely than ever; every nerve quivered; she wiped away the tears that rose to her eyes and looked mournfully up to heaven.
“I cannot think that a Grand Commander of the Legion of Honor will have fallen so low,” said she.
“For his pleasure what would he not do?” said Lisbeth. “He robbed the State, he will rob private persons, commit murder—who knows?”
“Oh, Lisbeth!” cried the Baroness, “keep such thoughts to yourself.”
At this moment Louise came up to the family group, now increased by the arrival of the two Hulot children and little Wenceslas to see if their grandmother’s pockets did not contain some sweetmeats.
“What is it, Louise?” asked one and another.
“A man who wants to see Mademoiselle Fischer.”
“Who is the man?” asked Lisbeth.
“He is in rags, mademoiselle, and covered with flue like a mattress-picker; his nose is red, and he smells of brandy.—He is one of those men who work half of the week at most.”
This uninviting picture had the effect of making Lisbeth hurry into the courtyard of the house in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, where she found a man smoking a pipe colored in a style that showed him an artist in tobacco.
“Why have you come here, Pere Chardin?” she asked. “It is understood that you go, on the first Saturday in every month, to the gate of the Hotel Marneffe, Rue Barbet-de-Jouy. I have just come back after waiting there for five hours, and you did not come.”
“I did go there, good and charitable lady!” replied the mattress-picker. “But there was a game at pool going on at the Cafe des Savants, Rue du Cerf-Volant, and every man has his fancy. Now, mine is billiards. If it wasn’t for billiards, I might be eating off silver plate. For, I tell you this,” and he fumbled for a scrap of paper in his ragged trousers pocket, “it is billiards that leads on to a dram and plum-brandy.—It is ruinous, like all fine things, in the things it leads to. I know your orders, but the old ‘un is in such a quandary that I came on to forbidden grounds.—If the hair was all hair, we might sleep sound on it; but it is mixed. God is not for all, as the saying goes. He has His favorites—well, He has the right. Now, here is the writing of your estimable relative and my very good friend—his political opinion.”
Chardin attempted to trace some zigzag lines in the air with the forefinger of his right hand.
Lisbeth, not listening to him, read these few words:
day.
“HECTOR.”
“What does he want so much money for?”
“The lan’lord!” said Chardin, still trying to sketch arabesques. “And then my son, you see, has come back from Algiers through Spain and Bayonee, and, and—he has found nothing—against his rule, for a sharp cove is my son, saving your presence. How can he help it, he is in want of food; but he will repay all we lend him, for he is going to get up a company. He has ideas, he has, that will carry him—”
“To the police court,” Lisbeth put in. “He murdered my uncle; I shall not forget that.”
“He—why, he could not bleed a chicken, honorable lady.”
“Here are the three hundred francs,” said Lisbeth, taking fifteen gold pieces out of her purse. “Now, go, and never come here again.”
She saw the father of the Oran storekeeper off the premises, and pointed out the drunken old creature to the porter.
“At any time when that man comes here, if by chance he should come again, do not let him in. If he should ask whether Monsieur Hulot junior or Madame la Baronne Hulot lives here, tell him you know of no such persons.”
“Very good, mademoiselle.”
“Your place depends on it if you make any mistake, even without intending it,” said Lisbeth, in the woman’s ear.—“Cousin,” she went on to Victorin, who just now came in, “a great misfortune is hanging over your head.”
“What is that?” said Victorin.
“Within a few days Madame Marneffe will be your wife’s stepmother.”
“That remains to be seen,” replied Victorin.
For six months past Lisbeth had very regularly paid a little allowance to Baron Hulot, her former protector, whom she now protected; she knew the secret of his dwelling-place, and relished Adeline’s tears, saying to her, as we have seen, when she saw her cheerful and hopeful, “You may expect to find my poor cousin’s name in the papers some day under the heading ‘Police Report.’”
But in this, as on a former occasion, she let her vengeance carry her too far. She had aroused the prudent suspicions of Victorin. He had resolved to be rid of this Damocles’ sword so constantly flourished over them by Lisbeth, and of the female demon to whom his mother and the family owed so many woes. The Prince de Wissembourg, knowing all about Madame Marneffe’s conduct, approved of the young lawyer’s secret project; he had promised him, as a President of the Council can promise, the secret assistance of the police, to enlighten Crevel and rescue a fine fortune from the clutches of the diabolical courtesan, whom he could not forgive either for causing the death of Marshal Hulot or for the Baron’s utter ruin.
The words spoken by Lisbeth, “He begs of his former mistresses,” haunted the Baroness all night. Like sick men given over by the physicians, who have recourse to quacks, like men who have fallen into the lowest Dantesque circle of despair, or drowning creatures who mistake a floating stick for a hawser, she ended by believing in the baseness of which the mere idea had horrified her; and it occurred to her that she might apply for help to one of those terrible women.
Next morning, without consulting her children or saying a word to anybody, she went to see Mademoiselle Josepha Mirah, prima donna of the Royal Academy of Music, to find or to lose the hope that had gleamed before her like a will-o’-the-wisp. At midday, the great singer’s waiting-maid brought her in the card of the Baronne Hulot, saying that this person was waiting at the door, having asked whether Mademoiselle could receive her.
“Are the rooms done?”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“And the flowers fresh?”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“Just tell Jean to look round and see that everything is as it should be before showing the lady in, and treat her with the greatest respect. Go, and come back to dress me—I must look my very best.”
She went to study herself in the long glass.
“Now, to put our best foot foremost!” said she to herself. “Vice under arms to meet virtue!—Poor woman, what can she want of me? I cannot bear to see.
And she sang through the famous aria as the maid came in again.
“Madame,” said the girl, “the lady has a nervous trembling—”
“Offer her some orange-water, some rum, some broth—”
“I did, mademoiselle; but she declines everything, and says it is an infirmity, a nervous complaint—”
“Where is she?”
“In the big drawing-room.”
“Well, make haste, child. Give me my smartest slippers, the dressing-gown embroidered by Bijou, and no end of lace frills. Do my hair in a way to astonish a woman.—This woman plays a part against mine; and tell the lady—for she is a real, great lady, my girl, nay, more, she is what you will never be, a woman whose prayers can rescue souls from your purgatory—tell her I was in bed, as I was playing last night, and that I am just getting up.”
The Baroness, shown into Josepha’s handsome drawing-room, did not note how long she was kept waiting there, though it was a long half hour. This room, entirely redecorated even since Josepha had had the house, was hung with silk in purple and gold color. The luxury which fine gentlemen were wont to lavish on their petites maisons, the scenes of their profligacy, of which the remains still bear witness to the follies from which they were so aptly named, was displayed to perfection, thanks to modern inventiveness, in the four rooms opening into each other, where the warm temperature was maintained by a system of hot-air pipes with invisible openings.
The Baroness, quite bewildered, examined each work of art with the greatest amazement. Here she found fortunes accounted for that melt in the crucible under which pleasure and vanity feed the devouring flames. This woman, who for twenty-six years had lived among the dead relics of imperial magnificence, whose eyes were accustomed to carpets patterned with faded flowers, rubbed gilding, silks as forlorn as her heart, half understood the powerful fascinations of vice as she studied its results. It was impossible not to wish to possess these beautiful things, these admirable works of art, the creation of the unknown talent which abounds in Paris in our day and produces treasures for all Europe. Each thing had the novel charm of unique perfection. The models being destroyed, every vase, every figure, every piece of sculpture was the original. This is the crowning grace of modern luxury. To own the thing which is not vulgarized by the two thousand wealthy citizens whose notion of luxury is the lavish display of the splendors that shops can supply, is the stamp of true luxury—the luxury of the fine gentlemen of the day, the shooting stars of the Paris firmament.
As she examined the flower-stands, filled with the choicest exotic plants, mounted in chased brass and inlaid in the style of Boulle, the Baroness was scared by the idea of the wealth in this apartment. And this impression naturally shed a glamour over the person round whom all this profusion was heaped. Adeline imagined that Josepha Mirah—whose portrait by Joseph Bridau was the glory of the adjoining boudoir—must be a singer of genius, a Malibran, and she expected to see a real star. She was sorry she had come. But she had been prompted by a strong and so natural a feeling, by such purely disinterested devotion, that she collected all her courage for the interview. Besides, she was about to satisfy her urgent curiosity, to see for herself what was the charm of this kind of women, that they could extract so much gold from the miserly ore of Paris mud.
The Baroness looked at herself to see if she were not a blot on all this splendor; but she was well dressed in her velvet gown, with a little cape trimmed with beautiful lace, and her velvet bonnet of the same shade was becoming. Seeing herself still as imposing as any queen, always a queen even in her fall, she reflected that the dignity of sorrow was a match for the dignity of talent.
At last, after much opening and shutting of doors, she saw Josepha. The singer bore a strong resemblance to Allori’s Judith, which dwells in the memory of all who have ever seen it in the Pitti palace, near the door of one of the great rooms. She had the same haughty mien, the same fine features, black hair simply knotted, and a yellow wrapper with little embroidered flowers, exactly like the brocade worn by the immortal homicide conceived of by Bronzino’s nephew.
“Madame la Baronne, I am quite overwhelmed by the honor you do me in coming here,” said the singer, resolved to play her part as a great lady with a grace.
She pushed forward an easy-chair for the Baroness and seated herself on a stool. She discerned the faded beauty of the woman before her, and was filled with pity as she saw her shaken by the nervous palsy that, on the least excitement, became convulsive. She could read at a glance the saintly life described to her of old by Hulot and Crevel; and she not only ceased to think of a contest with her, she humiliated herself before a superiority she appreciated. The great artist could admire what the courtesan laughed to scorn.
“Mademoiselle, despair brought me here. It reduces us to any means—”
A look in Josepha’s face made the Baroness feel that she had wounded the woman from whom she hoped for so much, and she looked at her. Her beseeching eyes extinguished the flash in Josepha’s; the singer smiled. It was a wordless dialogue of pathetic eloquence.
“It is now two years and a half since Monsieur Hulot left his family, and I do not know where to find him, though I know that he lives in Paris,” said the Baroness with emotion. “A dream suggested to me the idea—an absurd one perhaps—that you may have interested yourself in Monsieur Hulot. If you could enable me to see him—oh! mademoiselle, I would pray Heaven for you every day as long as I live in this world—”
Two large tears in the singer’s eyes told what her reply would be.
“Madame,” said she, “I have done you an injury without knowing you; but, now that I have the happiness of seeing in you the most perfect virtue on earth, believe me I am sensible of the extent of my fault; I repent sincerely, and believe me, I will do all in my power to remedy it!”
She took Madame Hulot’s hand and before the lady could do anything to hinder her, she kissed it respectfully, even humbling herself to bend one knee. Then she rose, as proud as when she stood on the stage in the part of Mathilde, and rang the bell.
“Go on horseback,” said she to the man-servant, “and kill the horse if you must, to find little Bijou, Rue Saint-Maur-du-Temple, and bring her here. Put her into a coach and pay the coachman to come at a gallop. Do not lose a moment—or you lose your place.
“Madame,” she went on, coming back to the Baroness, and speaking to her in respectful tones, “you must forgive me. As soon as the Duc d’Herouville became my protector, I dismissed the Baron, having heard that he was ruining his family for me. What more could I do? In an actress’ career a protector is indispensable from the first day of her appearance on the boards. Our salaries do not pay half our expenses; we must have a temporary husband. I did not value Monsieur Hulot, who took me away from a rich man, a conceited idiot. Old Crevel would undoubtedly have married me—”
“So he told me,” said the Baroness, interrupting her.
“Well, then, you see, madame, I might at this day have been an honest woman, with only one legitimate husband!”
“You have many excuses, mademoiselle,” said Adeline, “and God will take them into account. But, for my part, far from reproaching you, I came, on the contrary, to make myself your debtor in gratitude—”
“Madame, for nearly three years I have provided for Monsieur le Baron’s necessities—”
“You?” interrupted the Baroness, with tears in her eyes. “Oh, what can I do for you? I can only pray—”
“I and Monsieur le Duc d’Herouville,” the singer said, “a noble soul, a true gentleman—” and Josepha related the settling and marriage of Monsieur Thoul.
“And so, thanks to you, mademoiselle, the Baron has wanted nothing?”
“We have done our best to that end, madame.”
“And where is he now?”
“About six months ago, Monsieur le Duc told me that the Baron, known to the notary by the name of Thoul, had drawn all the eight thousand francs that were to have been paid to him in fixed sums once a quarter,” replied Josepha. “We have heard no more of the Baron, neither I nor Monsieur d’Herouville. Our lives are so full, we artists are so busy, that I really have not time to run after old Thoul. As it happens, for the last six months, Bijou, who works for me—his—what shall I say—?”
“His mistress,” said Madame Hulot.
“His mistress,” repeated Josepha, “has not been here. Mademoiselle Olympe Bijou is perhaps divorced. Divorce is common in the thirteenth arrondissement.”
Josepha rose, and foraging among the rare plants in her stands, made a charming bouquet for Madame Hulot, whose expectations, it may be said, were by no means fulfilled. Like those worthy fold, who take men of genius to be a sort of monsters, eating, drinking, walking, and speaking unlike other people, the Baroness had hoped to see Josepha the opera singer, the witch, the amorous and amusing courtesan; she saw a calm and well-mannered woman, with the dignity of talent, the simplicity of an actress who knows herself to be at night a queen, and also, better than all, a woman of the town whose eyes, attitude, and demeanor paid full and ungrudging homage to the virtuous wife, the Mater dolorosa of the sacred hymn, and who was crowning her sorrows with flowers, as the Madonna is crowned in Italy.
“Madame,” said the man-servant, reappearing at the end of half an hour, “Madame Bijou is on her way, but you are not to expect little Olympe. Your needle-woman, madame, is settled in life; she is married—”
“More or less?” said Josepha.
“No, madame, really married. She is at the head of a very fine business; she has married the owner of a large and fashionable shop, on which they have spent millions of francs, on the Boulevard des Italiens; and she has left the embroidery business to her sister and mother. She is Madame Grenouville. The fat tradesman—”
“A Crevel?”
“Yes, madame,” said the man. “Well, he has settled thirty thousand francs a year on Mademoiselle Bijou by the marriage articles. And her elder sister, they say, is going to be married to a rich butcher.”
“Your business looks rather hopeless, I am afraid,” said Josepha to the Baroness. “Monsieur le Baron is no longer where I lodged him.”
Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josepha very prudently placed the Baroness in the boudoir, and drew the curtain over the door.
“You would scare her,” said she to Madame Hulot. “She would let nothing out if she suspected that you were interested in the information. Leave me to catechise her. Hide there, and you will hear everything. It is a scene that is played quite as often in real life as on the stage—”
“Well, Mother Bijou,” she said to an old woman dressed in tartan stuff, and who looked like a porter’s wife in her Sunday best, “so you are all very happy? Your daughter is in luck.”
“Oh, happy? As for that!—My daughter gives us a hundred francs a month, while she rides in a carriage and eats off silver plate—she is a millionary, is my daughter! Olympe might have lifted me above labor. To have to work at my age? Is that being good to me?”
“She ought not to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to you,” replied Josepha; “but why did she not come to see me? It was I who placed her in ease by settling her with my uncle.”
“Yes, madame, with old Monsieur Thoul, but he is very old and broken—”
“But what have you done with him? Is he with you? She was very foolish to leave him; he is worth millions now.”
“Heaven above us!” cried the mother. “What did I tell her when she behaved so badly to him, and he as mild as milk, poor old fellow? Oh! didn’t she just give it him hot?—Olympe was perverted, madame?”
“But how?”
“She got to know a claqueur, madame, saving your presence, a man paid to clap, you know, the grand nephew of an old mattress-picker of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This good-for-naught, as all your good-looking fellows are, paid to make a piece go, is the cock of the walk out on the Boulevard du Temple, where he works up the new plays, and takes care that the actresses get a reception, as he calls it. First, he has a good breakfast in the morning; then, before the play, he dines, to be ‘up to the mark,’ as he says; in short, he is a born lover of billiards and drams. ‘But that is not following a trade,’ as I said to Olympe.”
“It is a trade men follow, unfortunately,” said Josepha.
“Well, the rascal turned Olympe’s head, and he, madame, did not keep good company—when I tell you he was very near being nabbed by the police in a tavern where thieves meet. ‘Wever, Monsieur Braulard, the leader of the claque, got him out of that. He wears gold earrings, and he lives by doing nothing, hanging on to women, who are fools about these good-looking scamps. He spent all the money Monsieur Thoul used to give the child.
“Then the business was going to grief; what embroidery brought in went out across the billiard table. ‘Wever, the young fellow had a pretty sister, madame, who, like her brother, lived by hook and by crook, and no better than she should be neither, over in the students’ quarter.”
“One of the sluts at the Chaumiere,” said Josepha.
“So, madame,” said the old woman. “So Idamore, his name is Idamore, leastways that is what he calls himself, for his real name is Chardin—Idamore fancied that your uncle had a deal more money than he owned to, and he managed to send his sister Elodie—and that was a stage name he gave her—to send her to be a workwoman at our place, without my daughter’s knowing who she was; and, gracious goodness! but that girl turned the whole place topsy-turvy; she got all those poor girls into mischief—impossible to whitewash them, saving your presence——
“And she was so sharp, she won over poor old Thoul, and took him away, and we don’t know where, and left us in a pretty fix, with a lot of bills coming in. To this day as ever is we have not been able to settle up; but my daughter, who knows all about such things, keeps an eye on them as they fall due.—Then, when Idamore saw he had got hold of the old man, through his sister, you understand, he threw over my daughter, and now he has got hold of a little actress at the Funambules.—And that was how my daughter came to get married, as you will see—”
“But you must know where the mattress-picker lives?” said Josepha.
“What! old Chardin? As if he lived anywhere at all!—He is drunk by six in the morning; he makes a mattress once a month; he hangs about the wineshops all day; he plays at pools—”
“He plays at pools?” said Josepha.
“You do not understand, madame, pools of billiards, I mean, and he wins three or four a day, and then he drinks.”
“Water out of the pools, I suppose?” said Josepha. “But if Idamore haunts the Boulevard, by inquiring through my friend Vraulard, we could find him.”
“I don’t know, madame; all this was six months ago. Idamore was one of the sort who are bound to find their way into the police courts, and from that to Melun—and the—who knows—?”
“To the prison yard!” said Josepha.
“Well, madame, you know everything,” said the old woman, smiling. “Well, if my girl had never known that scamp, she would now be—Still, she was in luck, all the same, you will say, for Monsieur Grenouville fell so much in love with her that he married her—”
“And what brought that about?”
“Olympe was desperate, madame. When she found herself left in the lurch for that little actress—and she took a rod out of pickle for her, I can tell you; my word, but she gave her a dressing!—and when she had lost poor old Thoul, who worshiped her, she would have nothing more to say to the men. ‘Wever, Monsieur Grenouville, who had been dealing largely with us—to the tune of two hundred embroidered China-crape shawls every quarter—he wanted to console her; but whether or no, she would not listen to anything without the mayor and the priest. ‘I mean to be respectable,’ said she, ‘or perish!’ and she stuck to it. Monsieur Grenouville consented to marry her, on condition of her giving us all up, and we agreed—”
“For a handsome consideration?” said Josepha, with her usual perspicacity.
“Yes, madame, ten thousand francs, and an allowance to my father, who is past work.”
“I begged your daughter to make old Thoul happy, and she has thrown me over. That is not fair. I will take no interest in any one for the future! That is what comes of trying to do good! Benevolence certainly does not answer as a speculation!—Olympe ought, at least, to have given me notice of this jobbing. Now, if you find the old man Thoul within a fortnight, I will give you a thousand francs.”
“It will be a hard task, my good lady; still, there are a good many five-franc pieces in a thousand francs, and I will try to earn your money.”
“Good-morning, then, Madame Bijou.”
On going into the boudoir, the singer found that Madame Hulot had fainted; but in spite of having lost consciousness, her nervous trembling kept her still perpetually shaking, as the pieces of a snake that has been cut up still wriggle and move. Strong salts, cold water, and all the ordinary remedies were applied to recall the Baroness to her senses, or rather, to the apprehension of her sorrows.
“Ah! mademoiselle, how far has he fallen!” cried she, recognizing Josepha, and finding that she was alone with her.
“Take heart, madame,” replied the actress, who had seated herself on a cushion at Adeline’s feet, and was kissing her hands. “We shall find him; and if he is in the mire, well, he must wash himself. Believe me, with people of good breeding it is a matter of clothes.—Allow me to make up for you the harm I have done you, for I see how much you are attached to your husband, in spite of his misconduct—or you should not have come here.—Well, you see, the poor man is so fond of women. If you had had a little of our dash, you would have kept him from running about the world; for you would have been what we can never be—all the women man wants.
“The State ought to subsidize a school of manners for honest women! But governments are so prudish! Still, they are guided by men, whom we privately guide. My word, I pity nations!
“But the matter in question is how you can be helped, and not to laugh at the world.—Well, madame, be easy, go home again, and do not worry. I will bring your Hector back to you as he was as a man of thirty.”
“Ah, mademoiselle, let us go to see that Madame Grenouville,” said the Baroness. “She surely knows something! Perhaps I may see the Baron this very day, and be able to snatch him at once from poverty and disgrace.”
“Madame, I will show you the deep gratitude I feel towards you by not displaying the stage-singer Josepha, the Duc d’Herouville’s mistress, in the company of the noblest, saintliest image of virtue. I respect you too much to be seen by your side. This is not acted humility; it is sincere homage. You make me sorry, madame, that I cannot tread in your footsteps, in spite of the thorns that tear your feet and hands.—But it cannot be helped! I am one with art, as you are one with virtue.”
“Poor child!” said the Baroness, moved amid her own sorrows by a strange sense of compassionate sympathy; “I will pray to God for you; for you are the victim of society, which must have theatres. When you are old, repent—you will be heard if God vouchsafes to hear the prayers of a—”
“Of a martyr, madame,” Josepha put in, and she respectfully kissed the Baroness’ skirt.
But Adeline took the actress’ hand, and drawing her towards her, kissed her on the forehead. Coloring with pleasure Josepha saw the Baroness into the hackney coach with the humblest politeness.
“It must be some visiting Lady of Charity,” said the man-servant to the maid, “for she does not do so much for any one, not even for her dear friend Madame Jenny Cadine.”
“Wait a few days,” said she, “and you will see him, madame, or I renounce the God of my fathers—and that from a Jewess, you know, is a promise of success.”
At the very time when Madame Hulot was calling on Josepha, Victorin, in his study, was receiving an old woman of about seventy-five, who, to gain admission to the lawyer, had used the terrible name of the head of the detective force. The man in waiting announced:
“Madame de Saint-Esteve.”
“I have assumed one of my business names,” said she, taking a seat.
Victorin felt a sort of internal chill at the sight of this dreadful old woman. Though handsomely dressed, she was terrible to look upon, for her flat, colorless, strongly-marked face, furrowed with wrinkles, expressed a sort of cold malignity. Marat, as a woman of that age, might have been like this creature, a living embodiment of the Reign of Terror.
This sinister old woman’s small, pale eyes twinkled with a tiger’s bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman’s face would have said that artists had failed in their conceptions of Mephistopheles.
“My dear sir,” she began, with a patronizing air, “I have long since given up active business of any kind. What I have come to you to do, I have undertaken, for the sake of my dear nephew, whom I love more than I could love a son of my own.—Now, the Head of the Police—to whom the President of the Council said a few words in his ear as regards yourself, in talking to Monsieur Chapuzot—thinks as the police ought not to appear in a matter of this description, you understand. They gave my nephew a free hand, but my nephew will have nothing to say to it, except as before the Council; he will not be seen in it.”
“Then your nephew is—”
“You have hit it, and I am rather proud of him,” said she, interrupting the lawyer, “for he is my pupil, and he soon could teach his teacher.—We have considered this case, and have come to our own conclusions. Will you hand over thirty thousand francs to have the whole thing taken off your hands? I will make a clean sweep of all, and you need not pay till the job is done.”
“Do you know the persons concerned?”
“No, my dear sir; I look for information from you. What we are told is, that a certain old idiot has fallen into the clutches of a widow. This widow, of nine-and-twenty, has played her cards so well, that she has forty thousand francs a year, of which she has robbed two fathers of families. She is now about to swallow down eighty thousand francs a year by marrying an old boy of sixty-one. She will thus ruin a respectable family, and hand over this vast fortune to the child of some lover by getting rid at once of the old husband.—That is the case as stated.”
“Quite correct,” said Victorin. “My father-in-law, Monsieur Crevel—”
“Formerly a perfumer, a mayor—yes, I live in his district under the name of Ma’ame Nourrisson,” said the woman.
“The other person is Madame Marneffe.”
“I do not know,” said Madame de Saint-Esteve. “But within three days I will be in a position to count her shifts.”
“Can you hinder the marriage?” asked Victorin.
“How far have they got?”
“To the second time of asking.”
“We must carry off the woman.—To-day is Sunday—there are but three days, for they will be married on Wednesday, no doubt; it is impossible.—But she may be killed—”
Victorin Hulot started with an honest man’s horror at hearing these five words uttered in cold blood.
“Murder?” said he. “And how could you do it?”
“For forty years, now, monsieur, we have played the part of fate,” replied she, with terrible pride, “and do just what we will in Paris. More than one family—even in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—has told me all its secrets, I can tell you. I have made and spoiled many a match, I have destroyed many a will and saved many a man’s honor. I have in there,” and she tapped her forehead, “a store of secrets which are worth thirty-six thousand francs a year to me; and you—you will be one of my lambs, hoh! Could such a woman as I am be what I am if she revealed her ways and means? I act.
“Whatever I may do, sir, will be the result of an accident; you need feel no remorse. You will be like a man cured by a clairvoyant; by the end of a month, it seems all the work of Nature.”
Victorin broke out in a cold sweat. The sight of an executioner would have shocked him less than this prolix and pretentious Sister of the Hulks. As he looked at her purple-red gown, she seemed to him dyed in blood.
“Madame, I do not accept the help of your experience and skill if success is to cost anybody’s life, or the least criminal act is to come of it.”
“You are a great baby, monsieur,” replied the woman; “you wish to remain blameless in your own eyes, while you want your enemy to be overthrown.”
Victorin shook his head in denial.
“Yes,” she went on, “you want this Madame Marneffe to drop the prey she has between her teeth. But how do you expect to make a tiger drop his piece of beef? Can you do it by patting his back and saying, ‘Poor Puss’? You are illogical. You want a battle fought, but you object to blows.—Well, I grant you the innocence you are so careful over. I have always found that there was material for hypocrisy in honesty! One day, three months hence, a poor priest will come to beg of you forty thousand francs for a pious work—a convent to be rebuilt in the Levant—in the desert.—If you are satisfied with your lot, give the good man the money. You will pay more than that into the treasury. It will be a mere trifle in comparison with what you will get, I can tell you.”
She rose, standing on the broad feet that seemed to overflow her satin shoes; she smiled, bowed, and vanished.
“The Devil has a sister,” said Victorin, rising.
He saw the hideous stranger to the door, a creature called up from the dens of the police, as on the stage a monster comes up from the third cellar at the touch of a fairy’s wand in a ballet-extravaganza.
After finishing what he had to do at the Courts, Victorin went to call on Monsieur Chapuzot, the head of one of the most important branches of the Central Police, to make some inquiries about the stranger. Finding Monsieur Chapuzot alone in his office, Victorin thanked him for his help.
“You sent me an old woman who might stand for the incarnation of the criminal side of Paris.”
Monsieur Chapuzot laid his spectacles on his papers and looked at the lawyer with astonishment.
“I should not have taken the liberty of sending anybody to see you without giving you notice beforehand, or a line of introduction,” said he.
“Then it was Monsieur le Prefet—?”
“I think not,” said Chapuzot. “The last time that the Prince de Wissembourg dined with the Minister of the Interior, he spoke to the Prefet of the position in which you find yourself—a deplorable position—and asked him if you could be helped in any friendly way. The Prefet, who was interested by the regrets his Excellency expressed as to this family affair, did me the honor to consult me about it.
“Ever since the present Prefet has held the reins of this department—so useful and so vilified—he has made it a rule that family matters are never to be interfered in. He is right in principle and in morality; but in practice he is wrong. In the forty-five years that I have served in the police, it did, from 1799 till 1815, great services in family concerns. Since 1820 a constitutional government and the press have completely altered the conditions of existence. So my advice, indeed, was not to intervene in such a case, and the Prefet did me the honor to agree with my remarks. The Head of the detective branch has orders, in my presence, to take no steps; so if you have had any one sent to you by him, he will be reprimanded. It might cost him his place. ‘The Police will do this or that,’ is easily said; the Police, the Police! But, my dear sir, the Marshal and the Ministerial Council do not know what the Police is. The Police alone knows the Police; but as for ours, only Fouche, Monsieur Lenoir, and Monsieur de Sartines have had any notion of it.—Everything is changed now; we are reduced and disarmed! I have seen many private disasters develop, which I could have checked with five grains of despotic power.—We shall be regretted by the very men who have crippled us when they, like you, stand face to face with some moral monstrosities, which ought to be swept away as we sweep away mud! In public affairs the Police is expected to foresee everything, or when the safety of the public is involved—but the family?—It is sacred! I would do my utmost to discover and hinder a plot against the King’s life, I would see through the walls of a house; but as to laying a finger on a household, or peeping into private interests—never, so long as I sit in this office. I should be afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of the Press, Monsieur le Depute, of the left centre.”
“What, then, can I do?” said Hulot, after a pause.
“Well, you are the Family,” said the official. “That settles it; you can do what you please. But as to helping you, as to using the Police as an instrument of private feelings, and interests, how is it possible? There lies, you see, the secret of the persecution, necessary, but pronounced illegal, by the Bench, which was brought to bear against the predecessor of our present chief detective. Bibi-Lupin undertook investigations for the benefit of private persons. This might have led to great social dangers. With the means at his command, the man would have been formidable, an underlying fate—”
“But in my place?” said Hulot.
“Why, you ask my advice? You who sell it!” replied Monsieur Chapuzot. “Come, come, my dear sir, you are making fun of me.”
Hulot bowed to the functionary, and went away without seeing that gentleman’s almost imperceptible shrug as he rose to open the door.
“And he wants to be a statesman!” said Chapuzot to himself as he returned to his reports.
Victorin went home, still full of perplexities which he could confide to no one.
At dinner the Baroness joyfully announced to her children that within a month their father might be sharing their comforts, and end his days in peace among his family.
“Oh, I would gladly give my three thousand six hundred francs a year to see the Baron here!” cried Lisbeth. “But, my dear Adeline, do not dream beforehand of such happiness, I entreat you!”
“Lisbeth is right,” said Celestine. “My dear mother, wait till the end.”
The Baroness, all feeling and all hope, related her visit to Josepha, expressed her sense of the misery of such women in the midst of good fortune, and mentioned Chardin the mattress-picker, the father of the Oran storekeeper, thus showing that her hopes were not groundless.
By seven next morning Lisbeth had driven in a hackney coach to the Quai de la Tournelle, and stopped the vehicle at the corner of the Rue de Poissy.
“Go to the Rue des Bernardins,” said she to the driver, “No. 7, a house with an entry and no porter. Go up to the fourth floor, ring at the door to the left, on which you will see ‘Mademoiselle Chardin—Lace and shawls mended.’ She will answer the door. Ask for the Chevalier. She will say he is out. Say in reply, ‘Yes, I know, but find him, for his bonne is out on the quay in a coach, and wants to see him.’”
Twenty minutes later, an old man, who looked about eighty, with perfectly white hair, and a nose reddened by the cold, and a pale, wrinkled face like an old woman’s, came shuffling slowly along in list slippers, a shiny alpaca overcoat hanging on his stooping shoulders, no ribbon at his buttonhole, the sleeves of an under-vest showing below his coat-cuffs, and his shirt-front unpleasantly dingy. He approached timidly, looked at the coach, recognized Lisbeth, and came to the window.
“Why, my dear cousin, what a state you are in!”
“Elodie keeps everything for herself,” said Baron Hulot. “Those Chardins are a blackguard crew.”
“Will you come home to us?”
“Oh, no, no!” cried the old man. “I would rather go to America.”
“Adeline is on the scent.”
“Oh, if only some one would pay my debts!” said the Baron, with a suspicious look, “for Samanon is after me.”
“We have not paid up the arrears yet; your son still owes a hundred thousand francs.”
“Poor boy!”
“And your pension will not be free before seven or eight months.—If you will wait a minute, I have two thousand francs here.”
The Baron held out his hand with fearful avidity.
“Give it me, Lisbeth, and may God reward you! Give it me; I know where to go.”
“But you will tell me, old wretch?”
“Yes, yes. Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be depraved.”
“Do not forget the police-court,” said Lisbeth, who flattered herself that she would some day see Hulot there.
“No.—It is in the Rue de Charonne,” said the Baron, “a part of the town where no fuss is made about anything. No one will ever find me there. I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my back to be shorn any more.”
“No, that has been done,” said Lisbeth, looking at his coat. “Supposing I take you there.”
Baron Hulot got into the coach, deserting Mademoiselle Elodie without taking leave of her, as he might have tossed aside a novel he had finished.
In half an hour, during which Baron Hulot talked to Lisbeth of nothing but little Atala Judici—for he had fallen by degrees to those base passions that ruin old men—she set him down with two thousand francs in his pocket, in the Rue de Charonne, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at the door of a doubtful and sinister-looking house.
“Good-day, cousin; so now you are to be called Thorec, I suppose? Send none but commissionaires if you need me, and always take them from different parts.”
“Trust me! Oh, I am really very lucky!” said the Baron, his face beaming with the prospect of new and future happiness.
“No one can find him there,” said Lisbeth; and she paid the coach at the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and returned to the Rue Louis-le-Grand in the omnibus.
On the following day Crevel was announced at the hour when all the family were together in the drawing-room, just after breakfast. Celestine flew to throw her arms round her father’s neck, and behaved as if she had seen him only the day before, though in fact he had not called there for more than two years.
“Good-morning, father,” said Victorin, offering his hand.
“Good-morning, children,” said the pompous Crevel. “Madame la Baronne, I throw myself at your feet! Good Heavens, how the children grow! they are pushing us off the perch—‘Grand-pa,’ they say, ‘we want our turn in the sunshine.’—Madame la Comtesse, you are as lovely as ever,” he went on, addressing Hortense.—“Ah, ha! and here is the best of good money: Cousin Betty, the Wise Virgin.”
“Why, you are really very comfortable here,” said he, after scattering these greetings with a cackle of loud laughter that hardly moved the rubicund muscles of his broad face.
He looked at his daughter with some contempt.
“My dear Celestine, I will make you a present of all my furniture out of the Rue des Saussayes; it will just do here. Your drawing-room wants furnishing up.—Ha! there is that little rogue Wenceslas. Well, and are we very good children, I wonder? You must have pretty manners, you know.”
“To make up for those who have none,” said Lisbeth.
“That sarcasm, my dear Lisbeth, has lost its sting. I am going, my dear children, to put an end to the false position in which I have so long been placed; I have come, like a good father, to announce my approaching marriage without any circumlocution.”
“You have a perfect right to marry,” said Victorin. “And for my part, I give you back the promise you made me when you gave me the hand of my dear Celestine—”
“What promise?” said Crevel.
“Not to marry,” replied the lawyer. “You will do me the justice to allow that I did not ask you to pledge yourself, that you gave your word quite voluntarily and in spite of my desire, for I pointed out to you at the time that you were unwise to bind yourself.”
“Yes, I do remember, my dear fellow,” said Crevel, ashamed of himself. “But, on my honor, if you will but live with Madame Crevel, my children, you will find no reason to repent.—Your good feeling touches me, Victorin, and you will find that generosity to me is not unrewarded.—Come, by the Poker! welcome your stepmother and come to the wedding.”
“But you have not told us the lady’s name, papa,” said Celestine.
“Why, it is an open secret,” replied Crevel. “Do not let us play at guess who can! Lisbeth must have told you.”
“My dear Monsieur Crevel,” replied Lisbeth, “there are certain names we never utter here—”
“Well, then, it is Madame Marneffe.”
“Monsieur Crevel,” said the lawyer very sternly, “neither my wife nor I can be present at that marriage; not out of interest, for I spoke in all sincerity just now. Yes, I am most happy to think that you may find happiness in this union; but I act on considerations of honor and good feeling which you must understand, and which I cannot speak of here, as they reopen wounds still ready to bleed——”
The Baroness telegraphed a signal to Hortense, who tucked her little one under her arm, saying, “Come Wenceslas, and have your bath!—Good-bye, Monsieur Crevel.”
The Baroness also bowed to Crevel without a word; and Crevel could not help smiling at the child’s astonishment when threatened with this impromptu tubbing.
“You, monsieur,” said Victorin, when he found himself alone with Lisbeth, his wife, and his father-in-law, “are about to marry a woman loaded with the spoils of my father; it was she who, in cold blood, brought him down to such depths; a woman who is the son-in-law’s mistress after ruining the father-in-law; who is the cause of constant grief to my sister!—And you fancy that I shall seem to sanction your madness by my presence? I deeply pity you, dear Monsieur Crevel; you have no family feeling; you do not understand the unity of the honor which binds the members of it together. There is no arguing with passion—as I have too much reason to know. The slaves of their passions are as deaf as they are blind. Your daughter Celestine has too strong a sense of her duty to proffer a word of reproach.”
“That would, indeed, be a pretty thing!” cried Crevel, trying to cut short this harangue.
“Celestine would not be my wife if she made the slightest remonstrance,” the lawyer went on. “But I, at least, may try to stop you before you step over the precipice, especially after giving you ample proof of my disinterestedness. It is not your fortune, it is you that I care about. Nay, to make it quite plain to you, I may add, if it were only to set your mind at ease with regard to your marriage contract, that I am now in a position which leaves me with nothing to wish for—”
“Thanks to me!” exclaimed Crevel, whose face was purple.
“Thanks to Celestine’s fortune,” replied Victorin. “And if you regret having given to your daughter as a present from yourself, a sum which is not half what her mother left her, I can only say that we are prepared to give it back.”
“And do you not know, my respected son-in-law,” said Crevel, striking an attitude, “that under the shelter of my name Madame Marneffe is not called upon to answer for her conduct excepting as my wife—as Madame Crevel?”
“That is, no doubt, quite the correct thing,” said the lawyer; “very generous so far as the affections are concerned and the vagaries of passion; but I know of no name, nor law, nor title that can shelter the theft of three hundred thousand francs so meanly wrung from my father!—I tell you plainly, my dear father-in-law, your future wife is unworthy of you, she is false to you, and is madly in love with my brother-in-law, Steinbock, whose debts she had paid.”
“It is I who paid them!”
“Very good,” said Hulot; “I am glad for Count Steinbock’s sake; he may some day repay the money. But he is loved, much loved, and often—”
“Loved!” cried Crevel, whose face showed his utter bewilderment. “It is cowardly, and dirty, and mean, and cheap, to calumniate a woman!—When a man says such things, monsieur, he must bring proof.”
“I will bring proof.”
“I shall expect it.”
“By the day after to-morrow, my dear Monsieur Crevel, I shall be able to tell you the day, the hour, the very minute when I can expose the horrible depravity of your future wife.”
“Very well; I shall be delighted,” said Crevel, who had recovered himself.
“Good-bye, my children, for the present; good-bye, Lisbeth.”
“See him out, Lisbeth,” said Celestine in an undertone.
“And is this the way you take yourself off?” cried Lisbeth to Crevel.
“Ah, ha!” said Crevel, “my son-in-law is too clever by half; he is getting on. The Courts and the Chamber, judicial trickery and political dodges, are making a man of him with a vengeance!—So he knows I am to be married on Wednesday, and on a Sunday my gentleman proposes to fix the hour, within three days, when he can prove that my wife is unworthy of me. That is a good story!—Well, I am going back to sign the contract. Come with me, Lisbeth—yes, come. They will never know. I meant to have left Celestine forty thousand francs a year; but Hulot has just behaved in a way to alienate my affection for ever.”
“Give me ten minutes, Pere Crevel; wait for me in your carriage at the gate. I will make some excuse for going out.”
“Very well—all right.”
“My dears,” said Lisbeth, who found all the family reassembled in the drawing-room, “I am going with Crevel: the marriage contract is to be signed this afternoon, and I shall hear what he has settled. It will probably be my last visit to that woman. Your father is furious; he will disinherit you—”
“His vanity will prevent that,” said the son-in-law. “He was bent on owning the estate of Presles, and he will keep it; I know him. Even if he were to have children, Celestine would still have half of what he might leave; the law forbids his giving away all his fortune.—Still, these questions are nothing to me; I am only thinking of our honor.—Go then, cousin,” and he pressed Lisbeth’s hand, “and listen carefully to the contract.”
Twenty minutes after, Lisbeth and Crevel reached the house in the Rue Barbet, where Madame Marneffe was awaiting, in mild impatience, the result of a step taken by her commands. Valerie had in the end fallen a prey to the absorbing love which, once in her life, masters a woman’s heart. Wenceslas was its object, and, a failure as an artist, he became in Madame Marneffe’s hands a lover so perfect that he was to her what she had been to Baron Hulot.
Valerie was holding a slipper in one hand, and Steinbock clasped the other, while her head rested on his shoulder. The rambling conversation in which they had been engaged ever since Crevel went out may be ticketed, like certain lengthy literary efforts of our day, “All rights reserved,” for it cannot be reproduced. This masterpiece of personal poetry naturally brought a regret to the artist’s lips, and he said, not without some bitterness:
“What a pity it is that I married; for if I had but waited, as Lisbeth told me, I might now have married you.”
“Who but a Pole would wish to make a wife of a devoted mistress?” cried Valerie. “To change love into duty, and pleasure into a bore.”
“I know you to be so fickle,” replied Steinbock. “Did I not hear you talking to Lisbeth of that Brazilian, Baron Montes?”
“Do you want to rid me of him?”
“It would be the only way to hinder his seeing you,” said the ex-sculptor.
“Let me tell you, my darling—for I tell you everything,” said Valerie—“I was saving him up for a husband.—The promises I have made to that man!—Oh, long before I knew you,” said she, in reply to a movement from Wenceslas. “And those promises, of which he avails himself to plague me, oblige me to get married almost secretly; for if he should hear that I am marrying Crevel, he is the sort of man that—that would kill me.”
“Oh, as to that!” said Steinbock, with a scornful expression, which conveyed that such a danger was small indeed for a woman beloved by a Pole.
And in the matter of valor there is no brag or bravado in a Pole, so thoroughly and seriously brave are they all.
“And that idiot Crevel,” she went on, “who wants to make a great display and indulge his taste for inexpensive magnificence in honor of the wedding, places me in difficulties from which I see no escape.”
Could Valerie confess to this man, whom she adored, that since the discomfiture of Baron Hulot, this Baron Henri Montes had inherited the privilege of calling on her at all hours of the day or night; and that, notwithstanding her cleverness, she was still puzzled to find a cause of quarrel in which the Brazilian might seem to be solely in the wrong? She knew the Baron’s almost savage temper—not unlike Lisbeth’s—too well not to quake as she thought of this Othello of Rio de Janeiro.
As the carriage drove up, Steinbock released Valerie, for his arm was round her waist, and took up a newspaper, in which he was found absorbed. Valerie was stitching with elaborate care at the slippers she was working for Crevel.
“How they slander her!” whispered Lisbeth to Crevel, pointing to this picture as they opened the door. “Look at her hair—not in the least tumbled. To hear Victorin, you might have expected to find two turtle-doves in a nest.”
“My dear Lisbeth,” cried Crevel, in his favorite position, “you see that to turn Lucretia into Aspasia, you have only to inspire a passion!”
“And have I not always told you,” said Lisbeth, “that women like a burly profligate like you?”
“And she would be most ungrateful, too,” said Crevel; “for as to the money I have spent here, Grindot and I alone can tell!”
And he waved a hand at the staircase.
In decorating this house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc d’Herouville had placed Josepha’s villa. But Crevel, incapable of understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had found it impossible to embody his architectural dream.
The difference between Josepha’s house and that in the Rue Barbet was just that between the individual stamp on things and commonness. The objects you admired at Crevel’s were to be bought in any shop. These two types of luxury are divided by the river Million. A mirror, if unique, is worth six thousand francs; a mirror designed by a manufacturer who turns them out by the dozen costs five hundred. A genuine lustre by Boulle will sell at a public auction for three thousand francs; the same thing reproduced by casting may be made for a thousand or twelve hundred; one is archaeologically what a picture by Raphael is in painting, the other is a copy. At what would you value a copy of a Raphael? Thus Crevel’s mansion was a splendid example of the luxury of idiots, while Josepha’s was a perfect model of an artist’s home.