Cousin Bette (10 page)

The master's bedroom was more like a student's room, with his single bed and the furniture he had used as a bachelor faded now and shabby like himself; and it was cleaned only once a week. It was a horrible room, in which nothing was put away and old socks dangled from the chairs, stuffed with horse-hair, on whose covers the faded flowers reappeared outlined in dust. It quite clearly proclaimed a man whose home meant nothing to him, who lived outside it: at gaminghouses, cafés, or elsewhere.

The mistress's room was not like the others. There was no sign there of the degrading neglect shamefully evident in the rooms used in common, whose curtains were all discoloured with smoke and dust, in which the child, abandoned apparently to his own devices, left his toys lying everywhere. Situated in the wing of the house facing the street, to one side of the main block on the court of the adjoining property, Valérie's bedroom and dressing-room, with their stylish chintz hangings, rosewood furniture, and velvet pile carpet, were redolent of the pretty woman, one might almost say the kept woman. On the velvet-draped mantelpiece stood the kind of clock that was a fashionable possession at the moment. A well-filled little cabinet for ornaments and richly mounted Chinese porcelain flowerstands caught the eye. The bed, the dressing-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the
tête-à-tête
sofa, the usual toys and trifles lying about – all bore witness to the affectations or whims of fashion.

Although the luxury and elegance were third-rate and everything was three years old, a dandy would have seen nothing to find fault with in the room, except perhaps that its opulence smacked of the middle class. Yet there was no art or distinction in the furnishing, nothing of the effect which good taste achieves by intelligent selection of possessions. A doctor in social science would have deduced the existence of a lover from some of the useless, highly ornamental knick-knacks, which in the home of a married woman could only have come from the demi-god, whose power is invisible but ever present.

The dinner that husband, wife, and child sat down to – the dinner that had been kept since four o'clock – would have revealed this family's financial straits, for the table is the most reliable thermometer of the fortunes of Parisian households. Soup made from potherbs and the water from boiled beans, a piece of veal with potatoes, swamped in brownish water by way of gravy, a dish of beans, and cherries of inferior quality, all served and eaten from chipped plates and dishes, with forks and spoons of nickel's mean unringing metal – was that a menu worthy of such a pretty woman? The Baron would have wept to see it. The dull carafes did nothing to improve the harsh colour of wine bought by the litre from the wine-merchant on the corner. The table-napkins had been in use for a week. Everything, in sum, betrayed a graceless poverty, an indifferent lack of care for the family on the part of both husband and wife. The most unnoticing observer, seeing them, would have said to himself that the dismal moment had come, for these two creatures, when the necessity of eating makes people look about them for some piece of luck which, by fair means or foul, may be induced to come their way.

Valérie's first words to her husband, indeed, will explain the delay in serving dinner, which had been kept back for her, probably by a self-interested devotion on the part of the cook.

‘Samanon will only take your bills of exchange at fifty per cent, and wants part of your salary assigned to him as security.'

Financial distress, which could still be concealed in the household of the Departmental Chief in the Ministry of War, who was cushioned against it by a salary of twenty-four thousand francs plus bonuses, had plainly reached its last stage in the case of the clerk.

‘You have
made
my chief,' said the husband, looking at his wife.

‘I believe I have,' she replied, without blinking at the expression, borrowed from stage-door slang.

‘What are we to do?' Marneffe went on. ‘The landlord is all set to seize our things tomorrow. And your father must needs go and die without making a will! Upon my word, those
Empire fellows all believe that they're immortal like their Emperor.'

‘Poor Father,' she said. ‘I was the only child he had, and he was very fond of me! The Countess must have burned the will. How could he possibly have forgotten me, when he always used to give us two or three thousand-franc notes at a time?'

‘We owe four quarters' rent, fifteen hundred francs! Is our furniture worth that? “That is the question”, as Shakespeare says.'

‘Well, good-bye, my pet,' said Valérie, who had taken only a couple of mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted the juices for a gallant soldier back from Algiers. ‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies!'

‘Valérie, where are you going?' cried Marneffe, moving to stand between his wife and the door.

‘I'm going to see our landlord,' she answered, as she arranged her ringlets under her charming hat. ‘And you had better try to get on the right side of that old maid, if she really is the Director's cousin.'

The ignorance of one another's social position in which tenants of the same house live is something constantly noted, and shows clearly how people are borne along in the swift current of existence in Paris. It is easy to understand, however, that a civil servant who leaves early every morning for his office, returns home for dinner, and goes out every evening, and a wife addicted to the gaieties of Paris, may know nothing of how an old maid lives on the third floor across the court in their block, especially when the old maid has Mademoiselle Fischer's habits.

The first person to stir in the house, Lisbeth would go to bring in her milk, bread, and charcoal without exchanging a word with anyone, and she went to bed with the sun. She never received either letters or visitors, and was not on neighbourly terms with her fellow tenants. Hers was one of those anonymous insect-like existences to be found in certain houses, in which one may discover at the end of four years that there is an old gentleman living on the fourth floor who once knew Voltaire, Pilâtre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel,
Molé, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre. What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said about Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know because the quarter was so isolated and because of the friendly relations with the porters which their financial embarrassment had obliged them to establish, for they were too dependent on the porters' good-will not to have carefully cultivated it. It so happened that the old maid's pride, closed lips, and reserve had provoked in the porters that exaggerated show of respect and cold attitude which spring from an unacknowledged discontent and a sense of being treated as inferior. The porters, moreover, in the case in question, as they say in the law courts, considered themselves just as good as a tenant paying a rent of two hundred and fifty francs. Since Cousin Bette's confidences to her second cousin Hortense were in fact true, one can understand how the portress, gossiping with the Marneffes, might have slandered Mademoiselle Fischer in the belief that she was simply passing on a scandalous piece of news.

When the spinster had taken her candlestick from the hands of the portress, the respectable Madame Olivier, she moved forward to see whether there was a light in the attic windows above her apartment. At that hour, even in July, it was so dark at the end of the court that the old maid could not go to bed without a light.

‘Oh, you needn't worry; Monsieur Steinbock is in. He hasn't even been out,' Madame Olivier said to Mademoiselle Fischer, maliciously.

The spinster made no reply. She had remained a peasant in this respect, that she cared little for what people not close to her might say. Peasants are aware of nothing outside their own village, and to her the opinion of the little circle in the midst of which she lived was still the only one that mattered. She climbed the stairs, then, purposefully, to the attic instead of her own apartment. At dessert, she had put some fruit and sweetmeats into her bag for her sweetheart, and she was going up to present them, for all the world like an old maid bringing home a titbit for her dog.

She found the hero of Hortense's dreams working by the light of a little lamp, whose rays were concentrated by
passing through a globe filled with water – a pale, fair young man, sitting at a kind of work-bench littered with sculptor's tools, red wax, chisels, roughed out bases, bronze copies of models, wearing a workman's blouse, with a little group in modelling wax in his hand, which he was scrutinizing with the concentration of a poet at work.

‘Here, Wenceslas, look what I've brought you,' she said, spreading her handkerchief on a corner of the bench. Then she carefully took the sweets and fruit from her reticule.

‘You are very kind, Mademoiselle,' the poor exile replied, in a melancholy voice.

‘These will refresh you, my poor child. You heat your blood working like this. You weren't born for such hard work.'

Wenceslas Steinbock looked at the old maid in some surprise.

‘Well, eat them,' she said then, roughly, ‘and don't gaze at me as if I were one of your figures that you're feeling pleased with.'

This verbal cuff on the ear put an end to the young man's astonishment; for he recognized the voice of the female mentor to whose bullying he was so inured that tenderness from her always took him by surprise. Although Steinbock was twenty-nine, he appeared, as fair men sometimes do, to be five or six years younger; and anyone seeing his youthful face – although its bloom had vanished in the fatigues and hardships of exile – side by side with Mademoiselle Fischer's lean, hard countenance, might have thought that Nature had made a mistake in assigning their sexes. He got up and flung himself into an old Louis XV easy chair upholstered in yellow Utrecht velvet, apparently ready to take a breather. The old maid then selected a greengage and gently offered it to her friend.

‘Thank you,' he said, taking the fruit.

‘Are you tired?' she asked, giving him another.

‘I am not tired with work, but tired of life,' he replied.

‘What nonsense you talk!' she said, somewhat tartly. ‘Haven't you got a guardian angel to watch over you?' she went on, offering him the sweetmeats and watching with
pleasure as he ate them all. ‘You see, while I was at dinner at my cousin's I was thinking of you.'

‘I know,' he said, turning a look at once caressing and plaintive on Lisbeth. ‘Without you I should have died long ago. But you know, my dear lady, artists need some distraction.…'

‘Ah, so that's what's in your mind!' she interrupted him, sharply, setting her hands on her hips and fixing him with kindling eyes. ‘You want to ruin your health in the stews of Paris, and end up like so many artists, dying in the workhouse! No, no, make a fortune for yourself first, and when you have money stacked away you can take your fun then, my child. You will have the wherewithal then, you libertine, to pay for the doctors as well as the pleasures!'

Wenceslas Steinbock took this broadside, delivered with looks that searched him with their magnetic flame, and bowed his head. The most bitter-tongued of Mademoiselle Fischer's detractors, watching even the beginning of this scene, would have acknowledged that the scandalous suggestions of the Olivier pair must be false. Everything in the tone, the gestures, and the looks of these two beings declared the purity of their life together. The old maid evinced the tender feeling of a dictatorial but sincere maternal affection. The young man submitted like a respectful son to a mother's tyranny. This strange relationship appeared to be the result of a powerful will constantly acting upon a malleable nature, upon that inconsistency of the Slav temperament which allows Slavs to display heroic courage upon the battlefield and yet show an incredible lack of resolution in their conduct of ordinary life, a kind of flabbiness of the moral fibre whose causes might well be investigated by physiologists, for physiologists are to politics what entomologists are to agriculture.

‘And what if I die before I get rich?' Wenceslas asked gloomily.

‘Die?' exclaimed the spinster. ‘Oh, I won't let you die! I have life enough for two, and I would give you my life-blood if it came to that.'

As he listened to that frank, vehement declaration, tears rose to Steinbock's eyes.

‘Don't he sad, my little Wenceslas,' Lisbeth, touched in her turn, went on. ‘Do you know, I think my cousin Hortense thought your seal very nice. Now I'm going to set about getting your bronze group sold; you'll be able to pay off your debt to me, and do what you like; you'll be free! Come now, smile!'

‘I shall never be able to pay off my debt to you, Mademoiselle,' the poor exile replied.

‘And why not?' demanded the Vosges peasant, ready to take up the cudgels for the Livonian against herself.

‘Because you have not only fed, housed, and cared for me in my need, you have given me strength! You have made me what I am. You have often been harsh, you have made me suffer.…'

‘I?' said the old maid. ‘Are you going to start on your usual nonsense about poetry and the arts, and crack your fingers and wave your arms, talking about ideal beauty and all your northern moonshine? Beauty is nothing compared with solid practical common sense, and I represent common sense. You have ideas in your mind, have you? That's all very fine! I have my ideas too.… Of what use is what's in the head if you don't turn it to practical account? People with ideas don't get on so well as those who have none, but know how to bestir themselves. Instead of thinking of your dreams, you need to work. What have you done while I was out?'

‘What did your pretty cousin say?'

‘Who told you she was pretty?' Lisbeth instantly took him up, in a tone behind which could be heard the roar of a tigerish jealousy.

‘You did, of course.'

‘That was to see the face you would put on. You want to go chasing after petticoats, do you? You like women: well, model them, express your desires in bronze; for you'll have to do without your little love-affairs for some time yet, and especially love-affairs with my cousin, my dear boy. She's not game for your game-bag. That girl has to find a husband worth sixty thousand francs a year… and he's been found.… Goodness, the bed is not made!' she said, looking across into the other room. ‘Oh, poor dear, I've been neglecting you.'