Cousin Betty Part 36

Hortense's head fell. What she felt can only be expressed in one word; it was not pain; it was illness.

"But, my dear Hortense, you must learn something of life!" exclaimed Lisbeth, understanding the eloquence of her cousin's looks. "Otherwise, like your mother, you will find yourself abandoned in a deserted room, where you will weep like Calypso on the departure of Ulysses, and at an age when there is no hope of Telemachus--" she added, repeating a jest of Madame Marneffe's. "We have to regard the people in the world as tools which we can make use of or let alone, according as they can serve our turn. Make use of Madame Marneffe now, my dears, and let her alone by and by. Are you afraid lest Wenceslas, who wors.h.i.+ps you, should fall in love with a woman four or five years older than himself, as yellow as a bundle of field peas, and----?"

"I would far rather p.a.w.n my diamonds," said Hortense. "Oh, never go there, Wenceslas!--It is h.e.l.l!"

"Hortense is right," said Steinbock, kissing his wife.

"Thank you, my dearest," said Hortense, delighted. "My husband is an angel, you see, Lisbeth. He does not gamble, he goes nowhere without me; if he only could stick to work--oh, I should be too happy. Why take us on show to my father's mistress, a woman who is ruining him and is the cause of troubles that are killing my heroic mother?"

"My child, that is not where the cause of your father's ruin lies. It was his singer who ruined him, and then your marriage!" replied her cousin. "Bless me! why, Madame Marneffe is of the greatest use to him.

However, I must tell no tales."

"You have a good word for everybody, dear Betty--"

Hortense was called into the garden by hearing the child cry; Lisbeth was left alone with Wenceslas.

"You have an angel for your wife, Wenceslas!" said she. "Love her as you ought; never give her cause for grief."

"Yes, indeed, I love her so well that I do not tell her all," replied Wenceslas; "but to you, Lisbeth, I may confess the truth.--If I took my wife's diamonds to the Monte-de-Piete, we should be no further forward."

"Then borrow of Madame Marneffe," said Lisbeth. "Persuade Hortense, Wenceslas, to let you go there, or else, bless me! go there without telling her."

"That is what I was thinking of," replied Wenceslas, "when I refused for fear of grieving Hortense."

"Listen to me; I care too much for you both not to warn you of your danger. If you go there, hold your heart tight in both hands, for the woman is a witch. All who see her adore her; she is so wicked, so inviting! She fascinates men like a masterpiece. Borrow her money, but do not leave your soul in pledge. I should never be happy again if you were false to Hortense--here she is! not another word! I will settle the matter."

"Kiss Lisbeth, my darling," said Wenceslas to his wife. "She will help us out of our difficulties by lending us her savings."

And he gave Lisbeth a look which she understood.

"Then, I hope you mean to work, my dear treasure," said Hortense.

"Yes, indeed," said the artist. "I will begin to-morrow."

"To-morrow is our ruin!" said his wife, with a smile.

"Now, my dear child! say yourself whether some hindrance has not come in the way every day; some obstacle or business?"

"Yes, very true, my love."

"Here!" cried Steinbock, striking his brow, "here I have swarms of ideas! I mean to astonish all my enemies. I am going to design a service in the German style of the sixteenth century; the romantic style: foliage twined with insects, sleeping children, newly invented monsters, chimeras--real chimeras, such as we dream of!--I see it all! It will be undercut, light, and yet crowded. Chanor was quite amazed.--And I wanted some encouragement, for the last article on Montcornet's monument had been crus.h.i.+ng."

At a moment in the course of the day when Lisbeth and Wenceslas were left together, the artist agreed to go on the morrow to see Madame Marneffe--he either would win his wife's consent, or he would go without telling her.

Valerie, informed the same evening of this success, insisted that Hulot should go to invite Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Steinbock to dinner; for she was beginning to tyrannize over him as women of that type tyrannize over old men, who trot round town, and go to make interest with every one who is necessary to the interests or the vanity of their task-mistress.

Next evening Valerie armed herself for conquest by making such a toilet as a Frenchwoman can devise when she wishes to make the most of herself.

She studied her appearance in this great work as a man going out to fight a duel practises his feints and lunges. Not a speck, not a wrinkle was to be seen. Valerie was at her whitest, her softest, her sweetest.

And certain little "patches" attracted the eye.

It is commonly supposed that the patch of the eighteenth century is out of date or out of fas.h.i.+on; that is a mistake. In these days women, more ingenious perhaps than of yore, invite a glance through the opera-gla.s.s by other audacious devices. One is the first to hit on a rosette in her hair with a diamond in the centre, and she attracts every eye for a whole evening; another revives the hair-net, or sticks a dagger through the twist to suggest a garter; this one wears velvet bands round her wrists, that one appears in lace lippets. These valiant efforts, an Austerlitz of vanity or of love, then set the fas.h.i.+on for lower spheres by the time the inventive creatress has originated something new. This evening, which Valerie meant to be a success for her, she had placed three patches. She had washed her hair with some lye, which changed its hue for a few days from a gold color to a duller shade. Madame Steinbock's was almost red, and she would be in every point unlike her.

This new effect gave her a piquant and strange appearance, which puzzled her followers so much, that Montes asked her:

"What have you done to yourself this evening?"--Then she put on a rather wide black velvet neck-ribbon, which showed off the whiteness of her skin. One patch took the place of the _a.s.sa.s.sine_ of our grandmothers.

And Valerie pinned the sweetest rosebud into her bodice, just in the middle above the stay-busk, and in the daintiest little hollow! It was enough to make every man under thirty drop his eyelids.

"I am as sweet as a sugar-plum," said she to herself, going through her att.i.tudes before the gla.s.s, exactly as a dancer practises her curtesies.

Lisbeth had been to market, and the dinner was to be one of those superfine meals which Mathurine had been wont to cook for her Bishop when he entertained the prelate of the adjoining diocese.

Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Count Steinbock arrived almost together, just at six. An ordinary, or, if you will, a natural woman would have hastened at the announcement of a name so eagerly longed for; but Valerie, though ready since five o'clock, remained in her room, leaving her three guests together, certain that she was the subject of their conversation or of their secret thoughts. She herself had arranged the drawing-room, laying out the pretty trifles produced in Paris and nowhere else, which reveal the woman and announce her presence: alb.u.ms bound in enamel or embroidered with beads, saucers full of pretty rings, marvels of Sevres or Dresden mounted exquisitely by Florent and Chanor, statues, books, all the frivolities which cost insane sums, and which pa.s.sion orders of the makers in its first delirium--or to patch up its last quarrel.

Besides, Valerie was in the state of intoxication that comes of triumph.

She had promised to marry Crevel if Marneffe should die; and the amorous Crevel had transferred to the name of Valerie Fortin bonds bearing ten thousand francs a year, the sum-total of what he had made in railway speculations during the past three years, the returns on the capital of a hundred thousand crowns which he had at first offered to the Baronne Hulot. So Valerie now had an income of thirty-two thousand francs.

Crevel had just committed himself to a promise of far greater magnitude than this gift of his surplus. In the paroxysm of rapture which _his d.u.c.h.ess_ had given him from two to four--he gave this fine t.i.tle to Madame _de_ Marneffe to complete the illusion--for Valerie had surpa.s.sed herself in the Rue du Dauphin that afternoon, he had thought well to encourage her in her promised fidelity by giving her the prospect of a certain little mansion, built in the Rue Barbette by an imprudent contractor, who now wanted to sell it. Valerie could already see herself in this delightful residence, with a fore-court and a garden, and keeping a carriage!

"What respectable life can ever procure so much in so short a time, or so easily?" said she to Lisbeth as she finished dressing. Lisbeth was to dine with Valerie that evening, to tell Steinbock those things about the lady which n.o.body can say about herself.

Madame Marneffe, radiant with satisfaction, came into the drawing-room with modest grace, followed by Lisbeth dressed in black and yellow to set her off.

"Good-evening, Claude," said she, giving her hand to the famous old critic.

Claude Vignon, like many another, had become a political personage--a word describing an ambitious man at the first stage of his career. The _political personage_ of 1840 represents, in some degree, the _Abbe_ of the eighteenth century. No drawing-room circle is complete without one.

"My dear, this is my cousin, Count Steinbock," said Lisbeth, introducing Wenceslas, whom Valerie seemed to have overlooked.

"Oh yes, I recognized Monsieur le Comte," replied Valerie with a gracious bow to the artist. "I often saw you in the Rue du Doyenne, and I had the pleasure of being present at your wedding.--It would be difficult, my dear," said she to Lisbeth, "to forget your adopted son after once seeing him.--It is most kind of you, Monsieur Stidmann,"

she went on, "to have accepted my invitation at such short notice; but necessity knows no law. I knew you to be the friend of both these gentlemen. Nothing is more dreary, more sulky, than a dinner where all the guests are strangers, so it was for their sake that I hailed you in--but you will come another time for mine, I hope?--Say that you will."

And for a few minutes she moved about the room with Stidmann, wholly occupied with him.

Crevel and Hulot were announced separately, and then a deputy named Beauvisage.

This individual, a provincial Crevel, one of the men created to make up the crowd in the world, voted under the banner of Giraud, a State Councillor, and Victorin Hulot. These two politicians were trying to form a nucleus of progressives in the loose array of the Conservative Party. Giraud himself occasionally spent the evening at Madame Marneffe's, and she flattered herself that she should also capture Victorin Hulot; but the puritanical lawyer had hitherto found excuses for refusing to accompany his father and father-in-law. It seemed to him criminal to be seen in the house of the woman who cost his mother so many tears. Victorin Hulot was to the puritans of political life what a pious woman is among bigots.

Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to _pick up the Paris style_. This man, one of the outer stones of the Chamber, was forming himself under the auspices of this delicious and fascinating Madame Marneffe. Introduced here by Crevel, he had accepted him, at her instigation, as his model and master. He consulted him on every point, took the address of his tailor, imitated him, and tried to strike the same att.i.tudes. In short, Crevel was his Great Man.

Valerie, surrounded by these bigwigs and the three artists, and supported by Lisbeth, struck Wenceslas as a really superior woman, all the more so because Claude Vignon spoke of her like a man in love.

"She is Madame de Maintenon in Ninon's petticoats!" said the veteran critic. "You may please her in an evening if you have the wit; but as for making her love you--that would be a triumph to crown a man's ambition and fill up his life."

Valerie, while seeming cold and heedless of her former neighbor, piqued his vanity, quite unconsciously indeed, for she knew nothing of the Polish character. There is in the Slav a childish element, as there is in all these primitively wild nations which have overflowed into civilization rather than that they have become civilized. The race has spread like an inundation, and has covered a large portion of the globe.

It inhabits deserts whose extent is so vast that it expands at its ease; there is no jostling there, as there is in Europe, and civilization is impossible without the constant friction of minds and interests. The Ukraine, Russia, the plains by the Danube, in short, the Slav nations, are a connecting link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism. Thus the Pole, the wealthiest member of the Slav family, has in his character all the childishness and inconsistency of a beardless race. He has courage, spirit, and strength; but, cursed with instability, that courage, strength, and energy have neither method nor guidance; for the Pole displays a variability resembling that of the winds which blow across that vast plain broken with swamps; and though he has the impetuosity of the snow squalls that wrench and sweep away buildings, like those aerial avalanches he is lost in the first pool and melts into water. Man always a.s.similates something from the surroundings in which he lives. Perpetually at strife with the Turk, the Pole has imbibed a taste for Oriental splendor; he often sacrifices what is needful for the sake of display. The men dress themselves out like women, yet the climate has given them the tough const.i.tution of Arabs.

The Pole, sublime in suffering, has tired his oppressors' arms by sheer endurance of beating; and, in the nineteenth century, has reproduced the spectacle presented by the early Christians. Infuse only ten per cent of English cautiousness into the frank and open Polish nature, and the magnanimous white eagle would at this day be supreme wherever the two-headed eagle has sneaked in. A little Machiavelism would have hindered Poland from helping to save Austria, who has taken a share of it; from borrowing from Prussia, the usurer who had undermined it; and from breaking up as soon as a division was first made.