Cousin Bette (4 page)

He held it for a moment, like an actor pausing to underline a point.

‘If he had the money, he would give it to the girl who will take Josépha's place!' he said, speaking with increasing urgency and vehemence. ‘On the road he has taken, does a
man stop? He's too fond of women, to begin with! (There's a way of moderation in everything, a
juste milieu
, as our King has said). And then vanity has a hand in it! He's a handsome man! He' ll see you all reduced to beggary for the sake of his pleasure. Indeed you're on the high road to ruin already. Look, since I first set foot in your house, you haven't once been able to do up your drawing-room. The words
HARD UP
shriek from every split in these covers. Show me the son-in-law who will not back out in a fright at sight of such ill-concealed evidence of the cruellest kind of poverty there is, the poverty of families that hold their heads high! I have been a shopkeeper and I know. There's no eye so keen as a Paris shopkeeper's for telling real wealth from wealth that's only a sham.… You haven't got a penny,' he said, lowering his voice. ‘It shows in everything, down to your servant's coat. Would you like me to let you into shocking secrets that have been kept from you?'

‘Monsieur,' said Madame Hulot, who was holding a soaking handkerchief to streaming eyes. ‘That's enough! No more!'

‘Well, my son-in-law gives money to his father. That's what I wanted to tell you at the beginning, when I was talking about how your son lives. But I'm watching over my daughter's interests. Don't you worry.'

‘Oh! if I could only marry my daughter and die!' cried the unhappy woman, her self-control breaking.

‘Well, here's the way to do it!'

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel in sudden hope, with such an instant change of expression that it should have been enough in itself to touch the man, and make him abandon his ridiculous ambition.

‘You will be beautiful for ten years yet,' went on Crevel, his arms folded, his gaze on infinity. ‘Be kind to me, and Mademoiselle Hortense's marriage is arranged. Hulot has given me the right, as I told you, to propose the bargain quite bluntly, and he won't be angry. In the last three years I have been able to make some profitable investments, because my adventures have been restricted. I have three hundred thousand francs to spend, over and above my capital, and the money's yours –'

‘Go, Monsieur,' said Madame Hulot;‘go, and never let me see you again. I had to find out what lay behind your base behaviour in the matter of the marriage planned for Hortense. Yes, base,' she repeated, as Crevel made a gesture. ‘How could you let such private grudges and rancours affect a poor girl, an innocent and lovely creature? If it had not been for the need to know that gave my mother's heart no peace, you would never have spoken to me again, you would never again have crossed my threshold. Thirty-two years of honourable life, of a wife's loyalty, are not to be razed by the assaults of Monsieur Crevel!'

‘Retired perfumer, successor to César Birotteau at the Queen of Roses, rue Saint-Honoré', said Crevel ironically. ‘Former Deputy Mayor, Captain of the National Guard, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, exactly like my predecessor.'

‘Monsieur,' the Baroness continued, ‘Monsieur Hulot, after twenty years of fidelity, may have grown tired of his wife – that concerns me, and only me; but you see, Monsieur, that he has preserved some reticence regarding his infidelity, for I did not know that he had succeeded you in Mademoiselle Josépha's heart.'

‘Oh! at a price, Madame I That song-bird has cost him more than a hundred thousand francs in the last two years. Ah! you haven't reached the end of trouble yet.'

‘We need not prolong this discussion further, Monsieur Crevel. I do not intend to give up, for your sake, the happiness that a mother feels when she is able to embrace her children with a heart uncankered by remorse, and knows that she is respected and loved by her children. I mean to give my soul back to God unstained.'

‘
Amen
!' said Crevel, his face distorted by the diabolical bitterness of aspirants of his kind who have failed after a renewed attempt to gain their ends. ‘You don't know what extreme poverty is like – the shame, the disgrace.… I have tried to open your eyes. I wanted to save you, you and your daughter too! So be it! You shall spell out a modern parable of the prodigal father from the first letter to the last. Your tears and your pride affect my feelings, for to see a woman one
loves cry is dreadful!' Crevel went on, sitting down. ‘All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing to injure you, or your husband; but never send anyone to me to make inquiries. That's all!'

‘Oh, what shall I do?' cried Madame Hulot.

Until this moment the Baroness had held out bravely under the three-fold torture that the interview's plain speaking inflicted upon her heart, for she was suffering as a woman, a mother, and a wife. As a matter of fact, so long as her son's father-in-law had shown himself overbearing and aggressive, she had found strength in the very opposition of her resistance to the shopkeeper's brutality; but the good nature he evinced in the midst of his exasperation as a rebuffed lover and a handsome Captain of the National Guard turned down released the tension of nerves that had been strained to breaking point. She wrung her hands, dissolved into tears, and was in such a state of dazed exhaustion that she let Crevel, on his knees again, kiss her hands.

‘Oh God! where am I to turn?' she went on, wiping her eyes. ‘Can a mother see her daughter pine before her eyes and look on calmly? What is to become of this being so splendidly endowed, by her own fine character and by its nurture, too, in her pure sheltered upbringing at her mother's side? There are days when she wanders sadly in the garden, not knowing why. I find her with tears in her eyes.'

‘She is twenty-one,' said Crevel.

‘Ought I to send her to a convent?' said the Baroness. ‘At such times of crisis religion is often powerless against nature, and the most piously brought up girls lose their heads! But do get up, Monsieur. Do you not see that everything is finished between us now, that you are hateful to me, that you have struck down a mother's last hope?'

‘And suppose I were to raise it again?' he said.

Madame Hulot stared at Crevel with a frenzied look that touched him; but he crushed the pity in his heart, because of those words ‘you are hateful to me'. Virtue is always a little too much of a piece. It has no knowledge of the shades between black and white, or of the compromises possible between different human temperaments, by means of
which a way may be manoeuvred out of a false position.

‘A girl as beautiful as Mademoiselle Hortense is not married off in these days without a dowry,' Crevel observed, assuming his stiff attitude again. ‘Your daughter's beauty is of the kind that scares husbands off; she's like a thoroughbred horse, which needs too much care and money spent on it to attract many purchasers. Just try walking along with a woman like that on your arm! Everybody will stare at you, and follow you, and covet your wife. That sort of success makes lots of men uncomfortable because they don't want to have to kill lovers; for, after all, one never kills more than one. In the position you're in, you can choose one of only three ways to marry your daughter: with my help – but you won't have it – that's one; by finding an old man of sixty: very rich, childless, and wanting children – difficult, but they do exist. There are so many old men who take Joséphas or Jenny Cadines that surely you might come across one ready to make that sort of fool of himself with the blessing of the law – if I did not have my Célestine, and our two grandchildren, I would marry Hortense myself. That's two! The third way is the easiest…'

Madame Hulot raised her head, and gazed anxiously at the retired perfumer.

‘Paris is a meeting-place, swarming with talent, for all the forceful vigorous young men who spring up like wild seedlings in French soil. They haven't a roof over their heads, but they're equal to anything, and set on making their fortune. Your humble servant was just such a young man in his time, and I have known some others! Twenty years ago du Tillet had nothing, and Popinot not much more. They were plodding along, both of them, in old Birotteau's shop, with their minds made up to get on; and, as I see it, that determination was worth more to them than gold. You can run through money, but you don't reach the bottom of the stuff you're made of i All I had was determination to get on, and spunk.… And now you see du Tillet rubbing shoulders with all the nobs. Little Popinot became the richest druggist in the rue des Lombards, rose to be a Deputy, and there he is, in office, a Minister! Well, one of these
condottieri
, as they call them – freebooters of finance, the pen, or the artist's brush –
is the only hope you have in Paris of marrying a beautiful girl without a sou, because they are game enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau when she hadn't a penny. Young men of that kind are mad: they believe in love, just as they believe in their luck and their own wits I Look for a man of enterprise and vigour to fall in love with your daughter, and he will marry her without worrying about cash. You must admit that I'm pretty generous, for an enemy, giving you advice against my own interest!'

‘Ah, Monsieur Crevel, if only you would be my friend and give up your absurd ideas!'

‘Absurd? Madame, don't rush on your own destruction. Consider your position… I love you, and you'll be mine! I want to say, one day, to Hulot: “You took Josépha from me. Now I have your wife!” It's the old law of an eye for an eye, and I'll stick to my plan – unless, of course, you should become much too ugly. I'll get my way, and I'll tell you why.' He struck his attitude, staring at Madame Hulot.

‘You will never find an old man or a young lover either,' he resumed, after a pause, ‘because you love your daughter too much to expose her to the little games of an old rake, and because you, Baroness Hulot, sister-in-law of the old Lieuten-ant-General who commanded the veteran grenadiers of the Old Guard, will never resign yourself to looking for the young man of force and energy where he is to be found, because he might be an ordinary working man, like many a millionaire nowadays who was an ordinary mechanic ten years ago, or a simple works overseer, or an ordinary foreman in a factory. And then, watching your daughter, twenty years old, driven by the urges of youth, capable of disgracing you, you will say to yourself: “Better that I should dishonour myself than that she should; and if Monsieur Crevel is willing to keep my secret, I'll go and earn my daughter's dowry – two hundred thousand francs for ten years' attachment to that old shopkeeper who knows how to get on… old Crevel!” I am vexing you, and what I say is shockingly immoral, isn't it? But if you had been seized by an irresistible passion, you would be arguing with yourself, trying to think up reasons for yielding to me, such as women always do find when they're in
love. Well, Hortense's plight will suggest these reasons to your heart, ways of settling things with your conscience!'

‘Hortense still has her uncle.'

‘Who? Old Fischer?… He's winding up his business, and that's the Baron's fault too – he uses his rake on all the cash-boxes within reach.'

‘Count Hulot…'

‘Oh, your husband, Madame, has already squandered the old Lieutenant-General's savings; he furnished his opera-singer's house with them. Come now, are you going to let me go without some reason for hoping?'

‘Good-bye, Monsieur. A passion for a woman of my age is soon cured, and you will come to see things in a Christian light. God protects the unfortunate.'

The Baroness rose, in order to oblige the Captain to retreat, and drove him before her into the drawing-room.

‘Should the beautiful Madame Hulot have to live among worn-out trash like this?' he said. And he pointed to an old lamp, the flaking gilt of a chandelier, the threadbare carpet: the tatters of opulence that made the great white, red, and gold room seem like the corpse of Empire gaiety.

‘Virtue, Monsieur, casts its own radiance over everything here. I have no desire to buy magnificent furnishings by using the beauty you attribute to me as “bird-lime, a trap to catch five-franc pieces”!'

The Captain bit his lip as he recognized the expressions that he had used to stigmatize Josépha's greed.

‘And all this unswerving fidelity is for whose sake?' he said.

By this time the Baroness had conducted the retired perfumer as far as the door.

‘For a libertine's!' he wound up, pursing his lips smugly, like a virtuous man and a millionaire.

‘If you were right, Monsieur, there would be some merit in my constancy, that's all.'

She left the Captain, after bowing to him as one bows to some importunate bore to get rid of him, and turned away too quickly to see him for the last time striking his pose. She went to reopen the doors that she had closed, and did not observe the menacing gesture with which Crevel took his
leave. She walked proudly, her head held high, as martyrs walked in the Colosseum. All the same, she had exhausted her strength, and she let herself sink on the divan in her blue boudoir as if she were on the point of fainting, and lay there with her eyes fixed on the little ruined summer-house where her daughter was chattering to Cousin Bette.

From the first days of her marriage until that moment, the Baroness had loved her husband, as Josephine had come in the end to love Napoleon: with an admiring love, a maternal love, with abject devotion. If she had not known the details which Crevel had just given her, she knew very well that for the past twenty years Baron Hulot had been habitually unfaithful to her; but she had sealed her eyes with lead; she had wept in secret, and no word of reproach had ever escaped her lips. To reward her for this angelic kindness, she had gained her husband's veneration, and was worshipped by him as a kind of divinity.