Cousin Betty Part 25

And then to all her charms Valerie added the highly-prized advantage of being an occult power. Claude Vignon, now secretary to Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg, and dreaming of promotion to the Council of State as a Master of Appeals, was constantly seen in her rooms, to which came also some Deputies--good fellows and gamblers. Madame Marneffe had got her circle together with prudent deliberation; only men whose opinions and habits agreed foregathered there, men whose interest it was to hold together and to proclaim the many merits of the lady of the house.

Scandal is the true Holy Alliance in Paris. Take that as an axiom.

Interests invariably fall asunder in the end; vicious natures can always agree.

Within three months of settling in the Rue Vanneau, Madame Marneffe had entertained Monsieur Crevel, who by that time was Mayor of his _arrondiss.e.m.e.nt_ and Officer of the Legion of Honor. Crevel had hesitated; he would have to give up the famous uniform of the National Guard in which he strutted at the Tuileries, believing himself quite as much a soldier as the Emperor himself; but ambition, urged by Madame Marneffe, had proved stronger than vanity. Then Monsieur le Maire had considered his connection with Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout as quite incompatible with his political position.

Indeed, long before his accession to the civic chair of the Mayoralty, his gallant intimacies had been wrapped in the deepest mystery. But, as the reader may have guessed, Crevel had soon purchased the right of taking his revenge, as often as circ.u.mstances allowed, for having been bereft of Josepha, at the cost of a bond bearing six thousand francs of interest in the name of Valerie Fortin, wife of Sieur Marneffe, for her sole and separate use. Valerie, inheriting perhaps from her mother the special ac.u.men of the kept woman, read the character of her grotesque adorer at a glance. The phrase "I never had a lady for a mistress,"

spoken by Crevel to Lisbeth, and repeated by Lisbeth to her dear Valerie, had been handsomely discounted in the bargain by which she got her six thousand francs a year in five per cents. And since then she had never allowed her prestige to grow less in the eyes of Cesar Birotteau's erewhile bagman.

Crevel himself had married for money the daughter of a miller of la Brie, an only child indeed, whose inheritance const.i.tuted three-quarters of his fortune; for when retail-dealers grow rich, it is generally not so much by trade as through some alliance between the shop and rural thrift. A large proportion of the farmers, corn-factors, dairy-keepers, and market-gardeners in the neighborhood of Paris, dream of the glories of the desk for their daughters, and look upon a shopkeeper, a jeweler, or a money-changer as a son-in-law after their own heart, in preference to a notary or an attorney, whose superior social position is a ground of suspicion; they are afraid of being scorned in the future by these citizen bigwigs.

Madame Crevel, ugly, vulgar, and silly, had given her husband no pleasures but those of paternity; she died young. Her libertine husband, fettered at the beginning of his commercial career by the necessity for working, and held in thrall by want of money, had led the life of Tantalus. Thrown in--as he phrased it--with the most elegant women in Paris, he let them out of the shop with servile homage, while admiring their grace, their way of wearing the fas.h.i.+ons, and all the nameless charms of what is called breeding. To rise to the level of one of these fairies of the drawing-room was a desire formed in his youth, but buried in the depths of his heart. Thus to win the favors of Madame Marneffe was to him not merely the realization of his chimera, but, as has been shown, a point of pride, of vanity, of self-satisfaction. His ambition grew with success; his brain was turned with elation; and when the mind is captivated, the heart feels more keenly, every gratification is doubled.

Also, it must be said that Madame Marneffe offered to Crevel a refinement of pleasure of which he had no idea; neither Josepha nor Heloise had loved him; and Madame Marneffe thought it necessary to deceive him thoroughly, for this man, she saw, would prove an inexhaustible till. The deceptions of a venal pa.s.sion are more delightful than the real thing. True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, a piece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.

The rare interviews granted to Crevel kept his pa.s.sion at white heat.

He was constantly blocked by Valerie's virtuous severity; she acted remorse, and wondered what her father must be thinking of her in the paradise of the brave. Again and again he had to contend with a sort of coldness, which the cunning s.l.u.t made him believe he had overcome by seeming to surrender to the man's crazy pa.s.sion; and then, as if ashamed, she entrenched herself once more in her pride of respectability and airs of virtue, just like an Englishwoman, neither more nor less; and she always crushed her Crevel under the weight of her dignity--for Crevel had, in the first instance, swallowed her pretensions to virtue.

In short, Valerie had special veins of affections which made her equally indispensable to Crevel and to the Baron. Before the world she displayed the attractive combination of modest and pensive innocence, of irreproachable propriety, with a bright humor enhanced by the suppleness, the grace and softness of the Creole; but in a _tete-a-tete_ she would outdo any courtesan; she was audacious, amusing, and full of original inventiveness. Such a contrast is irresistible to a man of the Crevel type; he is flattered by believing himself sole author of the comedy, thinking it is performed for his benefit alone, and he laughs at the exquisite hypocrisy while admiring the hypocrite.

Valerie had taken entire possession of Baron Hulot; she had persuaded him to grow old by one of those subtle touches of flattery which reveal the diabolical wit of women like her. In all evergreen const.i.tutions a moment arrives when the truth suddenly comes out, as in a besieged town which puts a good face on affairs as long as possible. Valerie, foreseeing the approaching collapse of the old beau of the Empire, determined to forestall it.

"Why give yourself so much bother, my dear old veteran?" said she one day, six months after their doubly adulterous union. "Do you want to be flirting? To be unfaithful to me? I a.s.sure you, I should like you better without your make-up. Oblige me by giving up all your artificial charms.

Do you suppose that it is for two sous' worth of polish on your boots that I love you? For your india-rubber belt, your strait-waistcoat, and your false hair? And then, the older you look, the less need I fear seeing my Hulot carried off by a rival."

And Hulot, trusting to Madame Marneffe's heavenly friends.h.i.+p as much as to her love, intending, too, to end his days with her, had taken this confidential hint, and ceased to dye his whiskers and hair. After this touching declaration from his Valerie, handsome Hector made his appearance one morning perfectly white. Madame Marneffe could a.s.sure him that she had a hundred times detected the white line of the growth of the hair.

"And white hair suits your face to perfection," said she; "it softens it. You look a thousand times better, quite charming."

The Baron, once started on this path of reform, gave up his leather waistcoat and stays; he threw off all his bracing. His stomach fell and increased in size. The oak became a tower, and the heaviness of his movements was all the more alarming because the Baron grew immensely older by playing the part of Louis XII. His eyebrows were still black, and left a ghostly reminiscence of Handsome Hulot, as sometimes on the wall of some feudal building a faint trace of sculpture remains to show what the castle was in the days of its glory. This discordant detail made his eyes, still bright and youthful, all the more remarkable in his tanned face, because it had so long been ruddy with the florid hues of a Rubens; and now a certain discoloration and the deep tension of the wrinkles betrayed the efforts of a pa.s.sion at odds with natural decay.

Hulot was now one of those stalwart ruins in which virile force a.s.serts itself by tufts of hair in the ears and nostrils and on the fingers, as moss grows on the almost eternal monuments of the Roman Empire.

How had Valerie contrived to keep Crevel and Hulot side by side, each tied to an ap.r.o.n-string, when the vindictive Mayor only longed to triumph openly over Hulot? Without immediately giving an answer to this question, which the course of the story will supply, it may be said that Lisbeth and Valerie had contrived a powerful piece of machinery which tended to this result. Marneffe, as he saw his wife improved in beauty by the setting in which she was enthroned, like the sun at the centre of the sidereal system, appeared, in the eyes of the world, to have fallen in love with her again himself; he was quite crazy about her. Now, though his jealousy made him somewhat of a marplot, it gave enhanced value to Valerie's favors. Marneffe meanwhile showed a blind confidence in his chief, which degenerated into ridiculous complaisance. The only person whom he really would not stand was Crevel.

Marneffe, wrecked by the debauchery of great cities, described by Roman authors, though modern decency has no name for it, was as hideous as an anatomical figure in wax. But this disease on feet, clothed in good broadcloth, encased his lathlike legs in elegant trousers. The hollow chest was scented with fine linen, and musk disguised the odors of rotten humanity. This hideous specimen of decaying vice, trotting in red heels--for Valerie dressed the man as beseemed his income, his cross, and his appointment--horrified Crevel, who could not meet the colorless eyes of the Government clerk. Marneffe was an incubus to the Mayor. And the mean rascal, aware of the strange power conferred on him by Lisbeth and his wife, was amused by it; he played on it as on an instrument; and cards being the last resource of a mind as completely played out as the body, he plucked Crevel again and again, the Mayor thinking himself bound to subserviency to the worthy official whom _he was cheating_.

Seeing Crevel a mere child in the hands of that hideous and atrocious mummy, of whose utter vileness the Mayor knew nothing; and seeing him, yet more, an object of deep contempt to Valerie, who made game of Crevel as of some mountebank, the Baron apparently thought him so impossible as a rival that he constantly invited him to dinner.

Valerie, protected by two lovers on guard, and by a jealous husband, attracted every eye, and excited every desire in the circle she shone upon. And thus, while keeping up appearances, she had, in the course of three years, achieved the most difficult conditions of the success a courtesan most cares for and most rarely attains, even with the help of audacity and the glitter of an existence in the light of the sun.

Valerie's beauty, formerly buried in the mud of the Rue du Doyenne, now, like a well-cut diamond exquisitely set by Chanor, was worth more than its real value--it could break hearts. Claude Vignon adored Valerie in secret.

This retrospective explanation, quite necessary after the lapse of three years, shows Valerie's balance-sheet. Now for that of her partner, Lisbeth.

Lisbeth Fischer filled the place in the Marneffe household of a relation who combines the functions of a lady companion and a housekeeper; but she suffered from none of the humiliations which, for the most part, weigh upon the women who are so unhappy as to be obliged to fill these ambiguous situations. Lisbeth and Valerie offered the touching spectacle of one of those friends.h.i.+ps between women, so cordial and so improbable, that men, always too keen-tongued in Paris, forthwith slander them. The contrast between Lisbeth's dry masculine nature and Valerie's creole prettiness encouraged calumny. And Madame Marneffe had unconsciously given weight to the scandal by the care she took of her friend, with matrimonial views, which were, as will be seen, to complete Lisbeth's revenge.

An immense change had taken place in Cousin Betty; and Valerie, who wanted to smarten her, had turned it to the best account. The strange woman had submitted to stays, and laced tightly, she used bandoline to keep her hair smooth, wore her gowns as the dressmaker sent them home, neat little boots, and gray silk stockings, all of which were included in Valerie's bills, and paid for by the gentleman in possession. Thus furbished up, and wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, Lisbeth would have been unrecognizable by any one who had not seen her for three years.

This other diamond--a black diamond, the rarest of all--cut by a skilled hand, and set as best became her, was appreciated at her full value by certain ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first time might have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness which the clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her sister G.o.ddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, with life and movement.

Saved from want for the rest of her life, Lisbeth was most amiable; wherever she dined she brought merriment. And the Baron paid the rent of her little apartment, furnished, as we know, with the leavings of her friend Valerie's former boudoir and bedroom.

"I began," she would say, "as a hungry nanny goat, and I am ending as a _lionne_."

She still worked for Monsieur Rivet at the more elaborate kinds of gold-tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, merely, as she said, not to lose her time. At the same time, she was, as we shall see, very full of business; but it is inherent in the nature of country-folks never to give up bread-winning; in this they are like the Jews.

Every morning, very early, Cousin Betty went off to market with the cook. It was part of Lisbeth's scheme that the house-book, which was ruining Baron Hulot, was to enrich her dear Valerie--as it did indeed.

Is there a housewife who, since 1838, has not suffered from the evil effects of Socialist doctrines diffused among the lower cla.s.ses by incendiary writers? In every household the plague of servants is nowadays the worst of financial afflictions. With very few exceptions, who ought to be rewarded with the Montyon prize, the cook, male or female, is a domestic robber, a thief taking wages, and perfectly barefaced, with the Government for a fence, developing the tendency to dishonesty, which is almost authorized in the cook by the time-honored jest as to the "handle of the basket." The women who formerly picked up their forty sous to buy a lottery ticket now take fifty francs to put into the savings bank. And the smug Puritans who amuse themselves in France with philanthropic experiments fancy that they are making the common people moral!

Between the market and the master's table the servants have their secret toll, and the munic.i.p.ality of Paris is less sharp in collecting the city-dues than the servants are in taking theirs on every single thing.

To say nothing of fifty per cent charged on every form of food, they demand large New Year's premiums from the tradesmen. The best cla.s.s of dealers tremble before this occult power, and subsidize it without a word--coachmakers, jewelers, tailors, and all. If any attempt is made to interfere with them, the servants reply with impudent retorts, or revenge themselves by the costly blunders of a.s.sumed clumsiness; and in these days they inquire into their master's character as, formerly, the master inquired into theirs. This mischief is now really at its height, and the law-courts are beginning to take cognizance of it; but in vain, for it cannot be remedied but by a law which shall compel domestic servants, like laborers, to have a pa.s.s-book as a guarantee of conduct.

Then the evil will vanish as if by magic. If every servant were obliged to show his pa.s.s-book, and if masters were required to state in it the cause of his dismissal, this would certainly prove a powerful check to the evil.

The men who are giving their attentions to the politics of the day know not to what lengths the depravity of the lower cla.s.ses has gone.

Statistics are silent as to the startling number of working men of twenty who marry cooks of between forty and fifty enriched by robbery.

We shudder to think of the result of such unions from the three points of view of increasing crime, degeneracy of the race, and miserable households.

As to the mere financial mischief that results from domestic peculation, that too is immense from a political point of view. Life being made to cost double, any superfluity becomes impossible in most households.

Now superfluity means half the trade of the world, as it is half the elegance of life. Books and flowers are to many persons as necessary as bread.

Lisbeth, well aware of this dreadful scourge of Parisian households, determined to manage Valerie's, promising her every a.s.sistance in the terrible scene when the two women had sworn to be like sisters. So she had brought from the depths of the Vosges a humble relation on her mother's side, a very pious and honest soul, who had been cook to the Bishop of Nancy. Fearing, however, her inexperience of Paris ways, and yet more the evil counsel which wrecks such fragile virtue, at first Lisbeth always went to market with Mathurine, and tried to teach her what to buy. To know the real prices of things and command the salesman's respect; to purchase unnecessary delicacies, such as fish, only when they were cheap; to be well informed as to the price current of groceries and provisions, so as to buy when prices are low in antic.i.p.ation of a rise,--all this housekeeping skill is in Paris essential to domestic economy. As Mathurine got good wages and many presents, she liked the house well enough to be glad to drive good bargains. And by this time Lisbeth had made her quite a match for herself, sufficiently experienced and trustworthy to be sent to market alone, unless Valerie was giving a dinner--which, in fact, was not unfrequently the case. And this was how it came about.

The Baron had at first observed the strictest decorum; but his pa.s.sion for Madame Marneffe had ere long become so vehement, so greedy, that he would never quit her if he could help it. At first he dined there four times a week; then he thought it delightful to dine with her every day.

Six months after his daughter's marriage he was paying her two thousand francs a month for his board. Madame Marneffe invited any one her dear Baron wished to entertain. The dinner was always arranged for six; he could bring in three unexpected guests. Lisbeth's economy enabled her to solve the extraordinary problem of keeping up the table in the best style for a thousand francs a month, giving the other thousand to Madame Marneffe. Valerie's dress being chiefly paid for by Crevel and the Baron, the two women saved another thousand francs a month on this.

And so this pure and innocent being had already acc.u.mulated a hundred and fifty thousand francs in savings. She had capitalized her income and monthly bonus, and swelled the amount by enormous interest, due to Crevel's liberality in allowing his "little d.u.c.h.ess" to invest her money in partners.h.i.+p with him in his financial operations. Crevel had taught Valerie the slang and the procedure of the money market, and, like every Parisian woman, she had soon outstripped her master. Lisbeth, who never spent a sou of her twelve hundred francs, whose rent and dress were given to her, and who never put her hand in her pocket, had likewise a small capital of five or six thousand francs, of which Crevel took fatherly care.

At the same time, two such lovers were a heavy burthen on Valerie.

On the day when this drama reopens, Valerie, spurred by one of those incidents which have the effect in life that the ringing of a bell has in inducing a swarm of bees to settle, went up to Lisbeth's rooms to give vent to one of those comforting lamentations--a sort of cigarette blown off from the tongue--by which women alleviate the minor miseries of life.

"Oh, Lisbeth, my love, two hours of Crevel this morning! It is crus.h.i.+ng!

How I wish I could send you in my place!"

"That, unluckily, is impossible," said Lisbeth, smiling. "I shall die a maid."

"Two old men lovers! Really, I am ashamed sometimes! If my poor mother could see me."

"You are mistaking me for Crevel!" said Lisbeth.

"Tell me, my little Betty, do you not despise me?"

"Oh! if I had but been pretty, what adventures I would have had!" cried Lisbeth. "That is your justification."

"But you would have acted only at the dictates of your heart," said Madame Marneffe, with a sigh.

"Pooh! Marneffe is a dead man they have forgotten to bury," replied Lisbeth. "The Baron is as good as your husband; Crevel is your adorer; it seems to me that you are quite in order--like every other married woman."

"No, it is not that, dear, adorable thing; that is not where the shoe pinches; you do not choose to understand."