Cousin Bette (63 page)

‘Papa, promise me to allow a priest to come to see you.'

‘Never!' said Crevel. ‘Just think – I have sucked the milk of the Revolution. I may not have Baton d'Holbach's wit, but I have his strength of mind. I was never more Regency, Musketeer, Abbé Dubois, and Maréchal de Richelieu in my life! Upon my soul, my poor wife must be out of her mind – she has just sent a man in a soutane to me, to
me
, Béranger's admirer, Lisette's friend, the child of Voltaire and Rousseau!… The doctor said, in order to sound me, to see whether the illness was getting me down: “Have you seen Monsieur I' Abbé?”… Well, I played the part of the great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor; see here, just like this,' and he turned to show a three-quarter profile, as in his portrait, and extended his hand authoritatively; ‘and I said:

… Ah, that slave came to see,

With his order displayed, but got no change from me.

His order is
a pretty pun, which shows that on the point of death Monsieur le Président de Montesquieu still kept all his graceful wit, for they had sent him a Jesuit!… I like that passage of… you can't say his life, his death rather. Ah! Passage! Another pun! The passage Montesquieu!'

Victorin Hulot sadly contemplated his father-in-law, and wondered whether silliness and vanity had not just as much sustaining power as true greatness of soul. In the soul, like results seem to be produced by very unlike causes. Can it be that a major criminal's fortitude is of the same nature as that of a Champcenetz going proudly to the guillotine?

At the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after extreme suffering, and Crevel followed his wife two days later to the grave. So the provisions of the marriage contract were annulled, and Crevel inherited Valérie's property.

On the day after the funeral, the lawyer saw the old monk appear again, and received him without a word. The monk held out his hand in silence, and in silence Maître Victorin Hulot handed him eighty thousand-franc notes, taken from a sum of money found in Crevel's desk. The younger Madame Hulot inherited the estate at Presles and thirty thousand francs a year. Madame Crevel had bequeathed three hundred thousand francs to Baron Hulot. The scrofulous Stanislas, when
he came of age, was to have Crevel's house and twenty-four thousand francs a year.

*

Among the many philanthropic associations set up by Catholic charity in Paris, there is one, founded by Madame de la Chanterie, which exists to provide a civil and religious marriage for working-class couples who are living together.

Our legislators, with their eyes fixed on the revenue produced by registration, and our dominant middle-class, with a tight grip on notaries' fees, feign ignorance of the fact that three-quarters of the working classes cannot afford to pay fifteen francs for a marriage certificate. The Chamber of Notaries lags far behind the Chamber of Advocates in practical charity. The Paris advocates, a much-maligned body, provide free legal aid for indigent people, while notaries are still unable to make up their minds to drawing up poor people's marriage certificates gratis. As for the tax, the whole machinery of legislation would have to be set in motion to induce the Treasury to relax its grasp. The Registrar's Office is deaf and dumb. The Church, on its side, claims its levy on marriages.

The Church is exceedingly revenue-minded in France. It stoops, in the house of God, to a disgraceful traffic in pew rents and chairs which shocks foreigners, although it cannot have forgotten Christ's anger when he drove the moneychangers from the Temple. But if the Church finds it difficult to forgo its dues, it must be remembered that its fees, stated to be for the maintenance of the fabric of its edifices, constitute nowadays one of its resources, so that responsibility for this questionable practice of the Church lies at the door of the state.

As a result of this combination of circumstances, in times when people are much too busy worrying about the lot of Negroes and the petty criminals of the police courts to trouble about the difficulties of honest citizens, a large number of well-meaning couples live together without marriage, for want of thirty francs, which is the least sum for which the legal profession, the Registrar, the Mayor, and the Church are able to unite two Parisians. Madame de la Chanterie's
organization, founded for the purpose of regularizing such unions according to the laws of Church and state, seeks out couples of this kind, and finds them the more easily because aid is given to persons in distress before their civil status is inquired into.

When Baroness Hulot had quite recovered her health, she took up her occupation again. It was then that the worthy Madame de la Chanterie asked Adeline to add the regularization of informal marriages to the charitable work she was already doing.

The Baroness made one of her first efforts in this work in the sinister quarter, formerly called Little Poland, that lies between the rue du Rocher, the rue de la Péinière, and the rue de Miroménil, like an offshoot of the faubourg Saint-Marceau. To describe this quarter, it is enough to say that the owners of the various houses, occupied by out-of-work labourers, ugly customers looking for trouble, and men with empty pockets ready to undertake any risky job on the shady side of the law, do not dare to collect their rents, and cannot find bailiffs willing to evict the insolvent tenants. At the present time, it looks as if speculative building, which is changing the face of this corner of Paris and building up the undeveloped ground between the rue d'Amsterdam and the rue du Faubourg-du-Roule, may alter its population for the better, for the builder's trowel is a more effective civilizing influence in Paris than is generally realized. In building fine and elegant houses with a porter's lodge, laying footpaths and putting in shops, speculative builders, by the high rents that they charge, tend to drive away undesirable characters, families without possessions, and every kind of bad tenant. And it is in this way that such districts rid themselves of their disreputable population, and of the kind of dens which the police set foot in only when duty compels them.

In June 1844, the aspect of the place de Laborde and its surrounding streets was still very far from reassuring. The elegant infantryman who might chance to to wander from the rue de la Pépinière into these sinister side-streets would be astonished to find noblemen rubbing shoulders with the dregs of Bohemia. In such districts, where ignorant poverty
and distress in desperate straits proliferate like weeds, there flourish the last public letter-writers, or scriveners, to be seen in Paris. Wherever you see the word
Scrivener
written up in a fair running hand, on a white sheet of paper affixed to the window of some entresol or dirty ground-floor room, you may assume with some certainty that the quarter gives shelter to a large illiterate population, and the vice and crime that result from the circumstances of the unfortunate poor. Lack of education is the mother of all crime. A crime is due, primarily, to an inability to reason.

During the Baroness's illness, this quarter – her charge as a deputy of Providence – had acquired a scrivener who had set up business in Sun Alley, so named by a kind of antithesis familiar to Parisians, for it is overshadowed on both sides. This writer, thought to be a German, was called Vyder, and was living with a young girl of whom he was so jealous that he never let her go out, except to visit a respectable family of stove-fitters living in the rue Saint-Lazare, Italians like all stove-fitters, but settled for years in Paris. These people had been saved from impending bankruptcy and consequent destitution by Baroness Hulot, as Madame de la Chanterie's agent. In the course of some months, prosperity had succeeded poverty, and religion had entered hearts that previously had cursed Providence with the vehemence characteristic of Italian stove-fitters. So it was to this family that the Baroness paid one of her first visits.

She was pleased with the scene that met her eyes at the back of the house where these good people lived, in the rue Saint-Lazare near the rue du Rocher. Above the shops and workshop, now well fitted out and swarming with apprentices and workmen, all Italians from the valley of Domo d'Ossola, the family occupied a little flat to which work had brought plenty. The Baroness was received as if she were the Blessed Virgin in person. After some fifteen minutes spent in inquiry about the family's circumstances, as she was waiting to see the husband in order to learn how the business was going, Adeline set about doing her duty as a benevolent spy by asking whether there were any unfortunate people known to the stove-fitter's family.

‘Ah, you are so kind, my dear lady, you would rescue the damned souls from hell!' said the Italian woman. ‘Yes, indeed. There is a girl quite near here who needs to be saved from perdition.'

‘Do you know her well?' asked the Baroness.

‘She's the grand-daughter of a man my husband once worked for, called Judici, who came to France in 1798, about the time of the Revolution. Old Judici was one of the best stove-fitters in Paris under the Emperor Napoleon. He died in 1819, leaving a fine fortune to his son. But the son squandered it all with loose women, and ended by marrying one of them who was cleverer than the rest, and she gave him this poor little girl, who has just turned fifteen.'

‘What has become of him?' asked the Baroness, struck by a resemblance to her husband in the character of this Judici.

‘Well, now, Madame, the little girl, whose name is Atala, has left her father and mother, and come to live near here, with an old German, who is eighty if he's a day, called Vyder, who does all their business for people who can't read or write. If the old libertine who bought the little girl from her mother for fifteen hundred francs, so they say, would even marry her – because he can't have long to live, and they do say that he's worth some thousands of francs a year – well then the poor child, who's a little angel, would be saved from harm, and want of money in particular, which is bound to make her go to the bad.'

‘Thank you for letting me know of this good work to be done,' said Adeline; ‘but I must be careful how I go about it. What is this old man like?'

‘Oh, he's a very decent fellow, Madame. He makes the child happy, and he has a certain amount of common sense; for you see what he's done? He's left the neighbourhood the Judicis live in, I believe in order to save the child from her mother's clutches. The mother is jealous of her daughter, and perhaps her notion was to turn the child's beauty to some use, to make her a young madam!… Atala thought of us, she told her Monsieur he ought to set her up near our house; and as the old fellow saw what kind we are, he lets her come here. But get them married, Madame, and you will be doing
something worthy of you.… Once she's married, the child will be free, and she'll be able to escape her mother, who would like to make some money by her, see her in the theatre, or getting on in the shocking career she's started her in.'

‘Why has this old man not married her?…'

‘He didn't need to,' said the Italian; ‘and besides, although old Vyder is not really ill-natured, I think he knows what's best for himself well enough to want to keep the child under his thumb; and if he married her, well, poor old fellow, he's afraid he might find himself getting what comes to all old husbands in the end.…'

‘Can you send for the girl?' said the Baroness. ‘If I saw her here, I should know if there is anything I can do.'

The stove-fitter's wife made a sign to her eldest daughter, who left the room. Ten minutes later the young person came in again, hand in hand with a girl of fifteen and a half, of wholly Italian beauty.

From her father's race Mademoiselle Judici had inherited the kind of skin that seems olive by daylight, but whose pallor in the evening by artificial light takes on a dazzling quality, eyes of an almost Eastern size, shape, and brilliance, thick curling eyelashes like little black feathers, ebon-black hair, and the native dignity of carriage of Lombardy, which makes the foreigner think, as he walks through the streets on a Sunday in Milan, that the porters' daughters are all queens.

Atala, told by the stove-fitter's daughter that the great lady of whom she had heard was at the house, had hastily put on a pretty silk dress, low-cut boots, and an elegant little cape. A bonnet with cherry ribbons strikingly set off her beautiful head. The child's attitude was one of naive curiosity, and she stood examining the Baroness, whose nervous tremor much surprised her, out of the corners of her eyes.

The Baroness sighed deeply when she saw this perfect creation of feminine loveliness that had been set in the mire of prostitution, and she inwardly vowed that she would bring the girl back to the paths of virtue.

‘What is your name, child?'

‘Atala, Madame.'

‘Can you read and write?'

‘No, Madame; but it doesn't matter, because Monsieur can.…'

‘Did your parents ever take you to church? Have you made your first communion? Do you know your catechism?'

‘Papa wanted me to do things like what you say, Madame, but Mama wouldn't let me.…'

‘Your mother wouldn't let you?' exclaimed the Baroness. ‘Your mother is very unkind to you, then, is she?'

‘She always used to beat me! I don't know why, but my father and mother were for ever quarrelling about me.…'

‘Then no one has ever spoken to you about God?' asked the Baroness.

The child opened wide eyes.

‘Oh, Mama and Papa often used to say “my God” and “for God's sake” and “God damn and blast”,' she answered, with a charming simplicity.

‘Have you never been inside a church? Did you never think of going in?'

‘Churches?… Ah! Notre-Dame, the Panthéon. I have seen them in the distance when Papa took me into Paris, but that didn't happen very often. There are no churches like that in the Faubourg.'

‘In which faubourg did you live?'