Cousin Bette (54 page)

‘Mademoiselle, I am brought here by despair, which drives one to use any means…'

Josépha's gesture made the Baroness realize that she had wounded the woman of whom she was hoping so much, and she looked at the singer. The supplication of her eyes quenched the flame in Josépha's, and the singer finally smiled. The silent play of glances between the two women was devastatingly eloquent.

‘It is two and a half years since Monsieur Hulot left his family, and I have no idea where he is, although I know that he is living in Paris,' the Baroness went on, in a voice that
shook. ‘It came to me in a dream, perhaps absurdly, that you must have taken an interest in Monsieur Hulot. If you could enable me to see Monsieur Hulot again, oh, Mademoiselle, I would pray to God for you, every day of the days that still remain to me on this earth!'

Two great tears in the singer's eyes showed her responsive feeling.

‘Madame,' she said, in a tone of profound humility, ‘I wronged you before I knew you; but now that I have had the good fortune to behold in you the most perfect image of virtue that exists on earth, believe me I know how great my fault was, and do sincerely repent it, and you may count on my doing my utmost to repair it!…'

She took the Baroness's hand, before the Baroness could prevent her, and kissed it with the utmost respect, even humbling herself by kneeling. Then she rose as proudly as if she were playing Mathilde at the Opera, and rang the bell.

‘Go at once,' she said to her footman, ‘on horseback, and flog the horse if you have to, but at all costs find the girl Bijou, of the rue Saint-Maur-du-Temple, and bring her here. Take a cab for her, and tip the driver to make all the speed he can. Don't lose a moment, if you want to keep your place. Madame,' she said, returning to the Baroness, and speaking with profound respect, ‘I ask you to forgive me. As soon as I had the Duc d'Hérouville for my protector I sent the Baron back to you, when I learned that he was ruining his family for me. What more could I do? In the theatre we all must needs have a protector when we start our career. Our salary doesn't cover even half our expenses, so we take temporary husbands.… It was not that I wanted Baron Hulot, who made me leave a rich man, a vain creature. Old Crevel would certainly have married me.…'

‘So he told me,' the Baroness interrupted her.

‘Well, so you see, Madame, that I might have been a respectable woman today! I should have had only one lawful husband!'

‘You have excuses, Mademoiselle,' said the Baroness. ‘God will take them into account. But I am not here to reproach you, far from that; I am anxious to put myself in your debt.'

‘Madame, I have been helping Monsieur le Baron for nearly three years.…'

‘You!' exclaimed the Baroness, with tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, what can I do for you? I have only my prayers to give you.…'

‘Monsieur le Duc d'Hérouville and I,' the singer continued, ‘a noble heart, a true aristocrat.…'

And Josépha told the story of how Monsieur Thoul had set up house and ‘married'.

‘So, Mademoiselle,' said the Baroness, ‘my husband, thanks to you, has wanted for nothing?'

‘We did what we could to help, Madame.'

‘And where is he?'

‘Monsieur le Duc told me, about six months ago, that the Baron, who was known to his lawyer as Monsieur Thoul, had drawn the whole sum of eight thousand francs that he was to have in instalments every three months,' said Josépha. ‘But neither I nor Monsieur d'Hérouville has had any news of the Baron. People like us lead such a full, such a busy, life that I could not run after old Thoul. And it so happens that in the last six months, Bijou, who does my embroidery, his… what shall I call her?'

‘His mistress,' said Madame Hulot.

‘His mistress,' repeated Josépha, ‘has not been here. Mademoiselle Olympe Bijou may very well have got divorced. Divorce is quite common in our district.'

Josépha rose, chose exotic flowers from her flower-stands, and made a charming, sweet-scented bouquet for the Baroness, who, we may as well say, had found her expectations quite disappointed. The Baroness, like those good bourgeois folk who take talented people for some kind of monster, eating and drinking, walking and speaking, quite differently from other human beings, had been hoping to see Josépha the fascinating man-eater, the opera singer, the dazzling and voluptuous courtesan; and she had found a serene and well-poised woman, with the noble dignity given her by her talent, the simplicity of an actress who knows that every evening she is a queen; and, even more unexpectedly, a courtesan who in her looks, her attitude and manner, was paying full and unreserved homage to the virtuous wife, to the
Mater
dolorosa
of the holy hymn, and making an offering of flowers to her sorrows, as in Italy they adorn the Madonna.

‘Madame,' said the footman, returning after half an hour, ‘old Madame Bijou is on her way; but it is not sure that her daughter Olympe can be counted on to come. Madame's embroideress has become a respectable woman; she is married.…'

‘A make-believe marriage?' asked Josépha.

‘No, Madame, really married. She is in charge of a fine business. She has married the owner of a large fancy goods shop that thousands have been spent on, on the boulevard des Italiens, and she has left her embroidering business to her sister and mother. She is Madame Grenouville. The fat shopkeeper…'

‘A man like Crevel!'

‘Yes, Madame,' said the servant. ‘He has made a marriage settlement of thirty thousand francs on Mademoiselle Bijou. Her elder sister too, they say, is going to marry a rich butcher.'

‘Your affair is not going so well, seemingly,' the singer said to the Baroness. ‘Monsieur le Baron hasn't stayed where I settled him.'

Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josépha prudently showed the Baroness into her boudoir and drew the curtains across.

‘You would scare her,' she told the Baroness. ‘She wouldn't give anything away if she guessed that you were interested in her confidences. Let me draw her confession from her! If you hide here, you will hear everything. This kind of scene is played just as often in real life as it is in the theatre.

‘Well, Mother Bijou,' said the singer to an old woman bundled in tartan cloth, who looked like a portress in her Sunday best, ‘so you are all well off? Your daughter has been lucky!'

‘Oh, well off!… My daughter gives us a hundred francs a month, and she goes in her carriage, and she eats off silver; she's a millionairess, she is!… Olympe could easily have made me comfortable. To have to work at my age!… Do you call that well off?'

‘She is wrong to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to
you,' said Josépha. ‘But why has she not come to see me? It was I who saved her from want by marrying her to my uncle.'

‘Yes, Madame, old Thoul!… But he's very old, worn out.…'

‘What have you done with him then? Is he with you? She was very silly to leave him, he's worth millions now.…'

‘Ah, bless my soul!' said old Madame Bijou. ‘Isn't that what we told her when she treated him so badly, and him as soft as could be with her, poor old soul! Ah, she fairly kept him on the trot! Olympe has gone to the bad, Madame!'

‘How's that?'

‘She got to know, saving your presence, Madame, one of those fellows paid to clap at the theatre, the grand-nephew of an old mattress-maker of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. He's a
good-for-nothing
, and a
banger-on
at the theatre, like all those boys with looks. Well, he's a cock of the side-walk in the boulevard du Temple, where he's taken on to make a fuss of new plays, and work up the actresses' entrances, as he calls it. He spends the morning over lunch, and before the show he has dinner to keep himself in good fettle like. Well, he's been fond of the drinking and the billiards ever since he could walk, as you might say. As I said to Olympe, “It's not a way to live, that!”'

‘It is, unfortunately, a way that some men live,' said Josépha.

‘Anyhow, Olympe lost her head over the fellow, who kept bad company, Madame, and a proof of it is that he nearly got himself arrested in a bar thieves use, but Monsieur Braulard, the head of the
claque
, got him out of it that time. And so he's one of the lot that wears gold rings in their ears, and earns their living doing nothing, and hangs round the women who go mad about good-looking chaps like him. Well, all the money that Monsieur Thoul gave her went into his games. The business was doing very badly. Whatever came in from embroidery went on billiards. And so this chap here had a pretty sister, about as much use as her brother was, not up to any good, living in the students' quarter.'

‘A tart from La Chaumière,' said Josépha.

‘Yes, Madame,' said Bijou. ‘And so Idamore – that's what
he calls himself for business, for his real name's Chardin – well, Idamore thought that your uncle must have far more money than he said, and he found a way of sending his sister Élodie – that's the theatre name he gave her – to us as a work-girl without my daughter thinking anything of it. Well, bless us all! She turned the whole place upside down, she taught all those poor girls bad ways, you couldn't do a thing with them, quite shameless they got, saving your presence.… And she didn't rest till she had got old Thoul for herself, and she's took him away we don't know where, and that's put us in a fine fix because of all those bills. And we're still left from hand to mouth not able to pay them, except that my daughter, whose name is in it, keeps an eye on them.… Well, when Idamore saw that he had hooked the old fellow because of his sister, he left my poor daughter standing there, and he's now with a young leading lady in the Funambules. And so my daughter got married, as you'll see.…'

‘But do you know where the mattress-maker lives?' asked Josépha.

‘Old Papa Chardin? Does that lot live anywhere! He's drunk from six o'clock in the morning. He makes a mattress about once a month. He spends the whole day in low sort of tap-rooms. He plays pools…'

‘What, pullets? He's a proud cock!'

‘You don't understand, Madame; pools at billiards. He wins three or four every day, and he drinks…'

‘Egg flip!' said Josépha. ‘But if Idamore's playground is the boulevard, we could find him through my friend Braulard.'

‘I don't know, Madame, seeing as all this happened six months ago. Idamore is one of those ones taking the road to gaol, and from there to the central prison at Melun, and from there… save us!…'

‘To the hulks!' said Josépha.

‘Ah! Madame knows it all,' said Madame Bijou, with a smile. ‘If my daughter had never have met that fellow, she would have been… But she's been very lucky, all the same, you'll tell me; for Monsieur Grenouville got so crazy about her that he's married her.'

‘And how was that marriage made?'

‘Because Olympe was in such a taking, Madame. She saw herself thrown over for the young leading lady – ah! she didn't half give her a trouncing, she properly what you call walloped her – and then she had lost old Thoul who adored her, too, and she said she was through with men. And so, Monsieur Grenouville, him who used to come and buy a lot from us, two hundred embroidered Chinese shawls a quarter, he wanted to console her; but believe it or not, she wouldn't hear a word, it was the Registrar's Office and the church for her or nothing. “I'm going to be respectable!” that's what she kept on saying. “I'll be respectable or I'll die first!” And she stuck to it. Monsieur Grenouville said he would marry her if she would have nothing more to do with us, and we said we would let her…'

‘If money passed?' said Josépha shrewdly.

‘Yes, Madame, ten thousand francs, and a bit every year for my father, who isn't able to work any more.'

‘I asked your daughter to look after old Thoul and make him happy, and she's thrown him into the gutter! It really is a shame. I'll never try to help anyone again! That's what happens when you try to give a helping hand to someone! You always have reason to regret a kindness. It's throwing money away – you don't know how it may turn out. Olympe might at least have let me know what she was up to! If you can find old Thoul again within a fortnight, I'll give you a thousand francs.…'

‘That's not an easy job, Madame, though you're so kind. But there's a lot of money in a thousand francs, and I'll see what I can do.'

‘Good-bye, Madame Bijou.'

When she went into her boudoir, the singer found Madame Hulot in a dead faint; but even in unconsciousness she was shaken by her nervous trembling, like a snake still twitching with its head cut off. Strong smelling salts, cold water, all the usual remedies, were applied, and the Baroness was recalled to life, or, more precisely, to memory of her sorrows.

‘Ah! Mademoiselle, how low he has fallen!' she said,
recognizing the singer and seeing that she was alone with her.

‘Have courage, Madame,' answered Josépha, who had seated herself on a cushion at the Baroness's feet, and was kissing her hands. ‘We'll find him; and if he is in the mire, well, it'll wash off. Believe me, for well-bred people, it's only a matter of clothes.… Let me make amends for the wrong I did you, for I can see how much your husband means to you, in spite of his behaviour, since you came here for him! True enough, poor man, he's fond of women.… Well, if only you could have had a little of our knack, you know, you would have kept him from running after us. You would have been what we know all about being –
every kind of woman
to a man. The government ought to start a school for respectable women! But governments are so prudish! And yet it's the men that run the governments that we lead by the nose – I'm sorry for the nations.… But we must think of what's to be done for you instead of gibing at them.… Well, don't worry, Madame; go home, and set your mind at rest. I'll bring you back your Hector, as good as he was thirty years ago.'