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Title: Cousin Betty

Author: Honore de Balzac

Release Date: May, 1999 [EBook #1749]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on April 6, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COUSIN BETTY ***




HTM version produced by Walter Debeuf, the original eBook
was prepared by Dagny, [email protected]
and John Bickers, [email protected]

Cousin Betty

by Honore de Balzac

Translated by James Waring

DEDICATION

To Don Michele Angelo Cajetani, Prince of Teano.

It is neither to the Roman Prince, nor to the representative of
the illustrious house of Cajetani, which has given more than one
Pope to the Christian Church, that I dedicate this short portion
of a long history; it is to the learned commentator of Dante.

It was you who led me to understand the marvelous framework of
ideas on which the great Italian poet built his poem, the only
work which the moderns can place by that of Homer. Till I heard
you, the Divine Comedy was to me a vast enigma to which none had
found the clue--the commentators least of all. Thus, to understand
Dante is to be as great as he; but every form of greatness is
familiar to you.

A French savant could make a reputation, earn a professor's chair,
and a dozen decorations, by publishing in a dogmatic volume the
improvised lecture by which you lent enchantment to one of those
evenings which are rest after seeing Rome. You do not know,
perhaps, that most of our professors live on Germany, on England,
on the East, or on the North, as an insect lives on a tree; and,
like the insect, become an integral part of it, borrowing their
merit from that of what they feed on. Now, Italy hitherto has not
yet been worked out in public lectures. No one will ever give me
credit for my literary honesty. Merely by plundering you I might
have been as learned as three Schlegels in one, whereas I mean to
remain a humble Doctor of the Faculty of Social Medicine, a
veterinary surgeon for incurable maladies. Were it only to lay a
token of gratitude at the feet of my cicerone, I would fain add
your illustrious name to those of Porcia, of San-Severino, of
Pareto, of di Negro, and of Belgiojoso, who will represent in this
"Human Comedy" the close and constant alliance between Italy and
France, to which Bandello did honor in the same way in the
sixteenth century--Bandello, the bishop and author of some strange
tales indeed, who left us the splendid collection of romances
whence Shakespeare derived many of his plots and even complete
characters, word for word.

The two sketches I dedicate to you are the two eternal aspects of
one and the same fact. Homo duplex, said the great Buffon: why not
add Res duplex? Everything has two sides, even virtue. Hence
Moliere always shows us both sides of every human problem; and
Diderot, imitating him, once wrote, "This is not a mere tale"--in
what is perhaps Diderot's masterpiece, where he shows us the
beautiful picture of Mademoiselle de Lachaux sacrificed by
Gardanne, side by side with that of a perfect lover dying for his
mistress.

In the same way, these two romances form a pair, like twins of
opposite sexes. This is a literary vagary to which a writer may
for once give way, especially as part of a work in which I am
endeavoring to depict every form that can serve as a garb to mind.

Most human quarrels arise from the fact that both wise men and
dunces exist who are so constituted as to be incapable of seeing
more than one side of any fact or idea, while each asserts that
the side he sees is the only true and right one. Thus it is
written in the Holy Book, "God will deliver the world over to
divisions." I must confess that this passage of Scripture alone
should persuade the Papal See to give you the control of the two
Chambers to carry out the text which found its commentary in 1814,
in the decree of Louis XVIII.

May your wit and the poetry that is in you extend a protecting
hand over these two histories of "The Poor Relations"

Of your affectionate humble servant,

DE BALZAC.
PARIS, August-September, 1846.

COUSIN BETTY

PART I

THE PRODIGAL FATHER

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, then
lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as Milords, was
driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of middle
height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.

Among the Paris crowd, who are supposed to be so clever, there are
some men who fancy themselves infinitely more attractive in uniform
than in their ordinary clothes, and who attribute to women so depraved
a taste that they believe they will be favorably impressed by the
aspect of a busby and of military accoutrements.

The countenance of this Captain of the Second Company beamed with a
self-satisfaction that added splendor to his ruddy and somewhat chubby
face. The halo of glory that a fortune made in business gives to a
retired tradesman sat on his brow, and stamped him as one of the elect
of Paris--at least a retired deputy-mayor of his quarter of the town.
And you may be sure that the ribbon of the Legion of Honor was not
missing from his breast, gallantly padded a la Prussienne. Proudly
seated in one corner of the milord, this splendid person let his
gaze wander over the passers-by, who, in Paris, often thus meet an
ingratiating smile meant for sweet eyes that are absent.

The vehicle stopped in the part of the street between the Rue de
Bellechasse and the Rue de Bourgogne, at the door of a large, newly-
build house, standing on part of the court-yard of an ancient mansion
that had a garden. The old house remained in its original state,
beyond the courtyard curtailed by half its extent.

Only from the way in which the officer accepted the assistance of the
coachman to help him out, it was plain that he was past fifty. There
are certain movements so undisguisedly heavy that they are as tell-
tale as a register of birth. The captain put on his lemon-colored
right-hand glove, and, without any question to the gatekeeper, went up
the outer steps to the ground of the new house with a look that
proclaimed, "She is mine!"

The concierges of Paris have sharp eyes; they do not stop visitors
who wear an order, have a blue uniform, and walk ponderously; in
short, they know a rich man when they see him.

This ground floor was entirely occupied by Monsieur le Baron Hulot
d'Ervy, Commissary General under the Republic, retired army
contractor, and at the present time at the head of one of the most
important departments of the War Office, Councillor of State, officer
of the Legion of Honor, and so forth.

This Baron Hulot had taken the name of d'Ervy--the place of his birth
--to distinguish him from his brother, the famous General Hulot,
Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, created by the
Emperor Comte de Forzheim after the campaign of 1809. The Count, the
elder brother, being responsible for his junior, had, with paternal
care, placed him in the commissariat, where, thanks to the services of
the two brothers, the Baron deserved and won Napoleon's good graces.
After 1807, Baron Hulot was Commissary General for the army in Spain.

Having rung the bell, the citizen-captain made strenuous efforts to
pull his coat into place, for it had rucked up as much at the back as
in front, pushed out of shape by the working of a piriform stomach.
Being admitted as soon as the servant in livery saw him, the important
and imposing personage followed the man, who opened the door of the
drawing-room, announcing:

"Monsieur Crevel."

On hearing the name, singularly appropriate to the figure of the man
who bore it, a tall, fair woman, evidently young-looking for her age,
rose as if she had received an electric shock.

"Hortense, my darling, go into the garden with your Cousin Betty," she
said hastily to her daughter, who was working at some embroidery at
her mother's side.

After curtseying prettily to the captain, Mademoiselle Hortense went
out by a glass door, taking with her a withered-looking spinster, who
looked older than the Baroness, though she was five years younger.

"They are settling your marriage," said Cousin Betty in the girl's
ear, without seeming at all offended at the way in which the Baroness
had dismissed them, counting her almost as zero.

The cousin's dress might, at need, have explained this free-and-easy
demeanor. The old maid wore a merino gown of a dark plum color, of
which the cut and trimming dated from the year of the Restoration; a
little worked collar, worth perhaps three francs; and a common straw
hat with blue satin ribbons edged with straw plait, such as the old-
clothes buyers wear at market. On looking down at her kid shoes, made,
it was evident, by the veriest cobbler, a stranger would have
hesitated to recognize Cousin Betty as a member of the family, for she
looked exactly like a journeywoman sempstress. But she did not leave
the room without bestowing a little friendly nod on Monsieur Crevel,
to which that gentleman responded by a look of mutual understanding.

"You are coming to us to-morrow, I hope, Mademoiselle Fischer?" said
he.

"You have no company?" asked Cousin Betty.

"My children and yourself, no one else," replied the visitor.

"Very well," replied she; "depend on me."

"And here am I, madame, at your orders," said the citizen-captain,
bowing again to Madame Hulot.

He gave such a look at Madame Hulot as Tartuffe casts at Elmire--when
a provincial actor plays the part and thinks it necessary to emphasize
its meaning--at Poitiers, or at Coutances.

"If you will come into this room with me, we shall be more
conveniently placed for talking business than we are in this room,"
said Madame Hulot, going to an adjoining room, which, as the apartment
was arranged, served as a cardroom.

It was divided by a slight partition from a boudoir looking out on the
garden, and Madame Hulot left her visitor to himself for a minute, for
she thought it wise to shut the window and the door of the boudoir, so
that no one should get in and listen. She even took the precaution of
shutting the glass door of the drawing-room, smiling on her daughter
and her cousin, whom she saw seated in an old summer-house at the end
of the garden. As she came back she left the cardroom door open, so as
to hear if any one should open that of the drawing-room to come in.

As she came and went, the Baroness, seen by nobody, allowed her face
to betray all her thoughts, and any one who could have seen her would
have been shocked to see her agitation. But when she finally came back
from the glass door of the drawing-room, as she entered the cardroom,
her face was hidden behind the impenetrable reserve which every woman,
even the most candid, seems to have at her command.

During all these preparations--odd, to say the least--the National
Guardsman studied the furniture of the room in which he found himself.
As he noted the silk curtains, once red, now faded to dull purple by
the sunshine, and frayed in the pleats by long wear; the carpet, from
which the hues had faded; the discolored gilding of the furniture; and
the silk seats, discolored in patches, and wearing into strips--
expressions of scorn, satisfaction, and hope dawned in succession
without disguise on his stupid tradesman's face. He looked at himself
in the glass over an old clock of the Empire, and was contemplating
the general effect, when the rustle of her silk skirt announced the
Baroness. He at once struck at attitude.

After dropping on to a sofa, which had been a very handsome one in the
year 1809, the Baroness, pointing to an armchair with the arms ending
in bronze sphinxes' heads, while the paint was peeling from the wood,
which showed through in many places, signed to Crevel to be seated.

"All the precautions you are taking, madame, would seem full of
promise to a----"

"To a lover," said she, interrupting him.

"The word is too feeble," said he, placing his right hand on his
heart, and rolling his eyes in a way which almost always makes a woman
laugh when she, in cold blood, sees such a look. "A lover! A lover?
Say a man bewitched----"

"Listen, Monsieur Crevel," said the Baroness, too anxious to be able
to laugh, "you are fifty--ten years younger than Monsieur Hulot, I
know; but at my age a woman's follies ought to be justified by beauty,
youth, fame, superior merit--some one of the splendid qualities which
can dazzle us to the point of making us forget all else--even at our
age. Though you may have fifty thousand francs a year, your age
counterbalances your fortune; thus you have nothing whatever of what a
woman looks for----"

"But love!" said the officer, rising and coming forward. "Such love
as----"

"No, monsieur, such obstinacy!" said the Baroness, interrupting him to
put an end to his absurdity.

"Yes, obstinacy," said he, "and love; but something stronger still--a
claim----"

"A claim!" cried Madame Hulot, rising sublime with scorn, defiance,
and indignation. "But," she went on, "this will bring us to no issues;
I did not ask you to come here to discuss the matter which led to your
banishment in spite of the connection between our families----"

"I had fancied so."

"What! still?" cried she. "Do you not see, monsieur, by the entire
ease and freedom with which I can speak of lovers and love, of
everything least creditable to a woman, that I am perfectly secure in
my own virtue? I fear nothing--not even to shut myself in alone with
you. Is that the conduct of a weak woman? You know full well why I
begged you to come."

"No, madame," replied Crevel, with an assumption of great coldness. He
pursed up his lips, and again struck an attitude.

"Well, I will be brief, to shorten our common discomfort," said the
Baroness, looking at Crevel.

Crevel made an ironical bow, in which a man who knew the race would
have recognized the graces of a bagman.

"Our son married your daughter----"

"And if it were to do again----" said Crevel.

"It would not be done at all, I suspect," said the baroness hastily.
"However, you have nothing to complain of. My son is not only one of
the leading pleaders of Paris, but for the last year he has sat as
Deputy, and his maiden speech was brilliant enough to lead us to
suppose that ere long he will be in office. Victorin has twice been
called upon to report on important measures; and he might even now, if
he chose, be made Attorney-General in the Court of Appeal. So, if you
mean to say that your son-in-law has no fortune----"

"Worse than that, madame, a son-in-law whom I am obliged to maintain,"
replied Crevel. "Of the five hundred thousand francs that formed my
daughter's marriage portion, two hundred thousand have vanished--God
knows how!--in paying the young gentleman's debts, in furnishing his
house splendaciously--a house costing five hundred thousand francs,
and bringing in scarcely fifteen thousand, since he occupies the
larger part of it, while he owes two hundred and sixty thousand francs
of the purchase-money. The rent he gets barely pays the interest on
the debt. I have had to give my daughter twenty thousand francs this
year to help her to make both ends meet. And then my son-in-law, who
was making thirty thousand francs a year at the Assizes, I am told, is
going to throw that up for the Chamber----"

"This, again, Monsieur Crevel, is beside the mark; we are wandering
from the point. Still, to dispose of it finally, it may be said that
if my son gets into office, if he has you made an officer of the
Legion of Honor and councillor of the municipality of Paris, you, as a
retired perfumer, will not have much to complain of----"

"Ah! there we are again, madame! Yes, I am a tradesman, a shopkeeper,
a retail dealer in almond-paste, eau-de-Portugal, and hair-oil, and
was only too much honored when my only daughter was married to the son
of Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy--my daughter will be a Baroness!
This is Regency, Louis XV., (Eil-de-boeuf--quite tip-top!--very good.)
I love Celestine as a man loves his only child--so well indeed, that,
to preserve her from having either brother or sister, I resigned
myself to all the privations of a widower--in Paris, and in the prime
of life, madame. But you must understand that, in spite of this
extravagant affection for my daughter, I do not intend to reduce my
fortune for the sake of your son, whose expenses are not wholly
accounted for--in my eyes, as an old man of business."

"Monsieur, you may at this day see in the Ministry of Commerce
Monsieur Popinot, formerly a druggist in the Rue des Lombards----"

"And a friend of mine, madame," said the ex-perfumer. "For I, Celestin
Crevel, foreman once to old Cesar Birotteau, brought up the said Cesar
Birotteau's stock; and he was Popinot's father-in-law. Why, that very
Popinot was no more than a shopman in the establishment, and he is the
first to remind me of it; for he is not proud, to do him justice, to
men in a good position with an income of sixty thousand francs in the
funds."

"Well then, monsieur, the notions you term 'Regency' are quite out of
date at a time when a man is taken at his personal worth; and that is
what you did when you married your daughter to my son."

"But you do not know how the marriage was brought about!" cried
Crevel. "Oh, that cursed bachelor life! But for my misconduct, my
Celestine might at this day be Vicomtesse Popinot!"

"Once more have done with recriminations over accomplished facts,"
said the Baroness anxiously. "Let us rather discuss the complaints I
have found on your strange behavior. My daughter Hortense had a chance
of marrying; the match depended entirely on you; I believed you felt
some sentiments of generosity; I thought you would do justice to a
woman who has never had a thought in her heart for any man but her
husband, that you would have understood how necessary it is for her
not to receive a man who may compromise her, and that for the honor of
the family with which you are allied you would have been eager to
promote Hortense's settlement with Monsieur le Conseiller Lebas.--And
it is you, monsieur, you have hindered the marriage."

"Madame," said the ex-perfumer, "I acted the part of an honest man. I
was asked whether the two hundred thousand francs to be settled on
Mademoiselle Hortense would be forthcoming. I replied exactly in these
words: 'I would not answer for it. My son-in-law, to whom the Hulots
had promised the same sum, was in debt; and I believe that if Monsieur
Hulot d'Ervy were to die to-morrow, his widow would have nothing to
live on.'--There, fair lady."

"And would you have said as much, monsieur," asked Madame Hulot,
looking Crevel steadily in the face, "if I had been false to my duty?"

"I should not be in a position to say it, dearest Adeline," cried this
singular adorer, interrupting the Baroness, "for you would have found
the amount in my pocket-book."

And adding action to word, the fat guardsman knelt down on one knee
and kissed Madame Hulot's hand, seeing that his speech had filled her
with speechless horror, which he took for hesitancy.

"What, buy my daughter's fortune at the cost of----? Rise, monsieur--
or I ring the bell."

Crevel rose with great difficulty. This fact made him so furious that
he again struck his favorite attitude. Most men have some habitual
position by which they fancy that they show to the best advantage the
good points bestowed on them by nature. This attitude in Crevel
consisted in crossing his arms like Napoleon, his head showing three-
quarters face, and his eyes fixed on the horizon, as the painter has
shown the Emperor in his portrait.

"To be faithful," he began, with well-acted indignation, "so faithful
to a liber----"

"To a husband who is worthy of such fidelity," Madame Hulot put in, to
hinder Crevel from saying a word she did not choose to hear.

"Come, madame; you wrote to bid me here, you ask the reasons for my
conduct, you drive me to extremities with your imperial airs, your
scorn, and your contempt! Any one might think I was a Negro. But I
repeat it, and you may believe me, I have a right to--to make love to
you, for---- But no; I love you well enough to hold my tongue."

"You may speak, monsieur. In a few days I shall be eight-and-forty; I
am no prude; I can hear whatever you can say."

"Then will you give me your word of honor as an honest woman--for you
are, alas for me! an honest woman--never to mention my name or to say
that it was I who betrayed the secret?"

"If that is the condition on which you speak, I will swear never to
tell any one from whom I heard the horrors you propose to tell me, not
even my husband."

"I should think not indeed, for only you and he are concerned."

Madame Hulot turned pale.

"Oh, if you still really love Hulot, it will distress you. Shall I say
no more?"

"Speak, monsieur; for by your account you wish to justify in my eyes
the extraordinary declarations you have chosen to make me, and your
persistency in tormenting a woman of my age, whose only wish is to see
her daughter married, and then--to die in peace----"

"You see; you are unhappy."

"I, monsieur?"

"Yes, beautiful, noble creature!" cried Crevel. "You have indeed been
too wretched!"

"Monsieur, be silent and go--or speak to me as you ought."

"Do you know, madame, how Master Hulot and I first made acquaintance?
--At our mistresses', madame."

"Oh, monsieur!"

"Yes, madame, at our mistresses'," Crevel repeated in a melodramatic
tone, and leaving his position to wave his right hand.

"Well, and what then?" said the Baroness coolly, to Crevel's great
amazement.

Such mean seducers cannot understand a great soul.

"I, a widower five years since," Crevel began, in the tone of a man
who has a story to tell, "and not wishing to marry again for the sake
of the daughter I adore, not choosing either to cultivate any such
connection in my own establishment, though I had at the time a very
pretty lady-accountant. I set up, 'on her own account,' as they say, a
little sempstress of fifteen--really a miracle of beauty, with whom I
fell desperately in love. And in fact, madame, I asked an aunt of my
own, my mother's sister, whom I sent for from the country, to live
with the sweet creature and keep an eye on her, that she might behave
as well as might be in this rather--what shall I say--shady?--no,
delicate position.

"The child, whose talent for music was striking, had masters, she was
educated--I had to give her something to do. Besides, I wished to be
at once her father, her benefactor, and--well, out with it--her lover;
to kill two birds with one stone, a good action and a sweetheart. For
five years I was very happy. The girl had one of those voices that
make the fortune of a theatre; I can only describe her by saying that
she is a Duprez in petticoats. It cost me two thousand francs a year
only to cultivate her talent as a singer. She made me music-mad; I
took a box at the opera for her and for my daughter, and went there
alternate evenings with Celestine or Josepha."

"What, the famous singer?"

"Yes, madame," said Crevel with pride, "the famous Josepha owes
everything to me.--At last, in 1834, when the child was twenty,
believing that I had attached her to me for ever, and being very weak
where she was concerned, I thought I would give her a little
amusement, and I introduced her to a pretty little actress, Jenny
Cadine, whose life had been somewhat like her own. This actress also
owed everything to a protector who had brought her up in leading-
strings. That protector was Baron Hulot."

"I know that," said the Baroness, in a calm voice without the least
agitation.

"Bless me!" cried Crevel, more and more astounded. "Well! But do you
know that your monster of a husband took Jenny Cadine in hand at the
age of thirteen?"

"What then?" said the Baroness.

"As Jenny Cadine and Josepha were both aged twenty when they first
met," the ex-tradesman went on, "the Baron had been playing the part
of Louis XV. to Mademoiselle de Romans ever since 1826, and you were
twelve years younger then----"

"I had my reasons, monsieur, for leaving Monsieur Hulot his liberty."

"That falsehood, madame, will surely be enough to wipe out every sin
you have ever committed, and to open to you the gates of Paradise,"
replied Crevel, with a knowing air that brought the color to the
Baroness' cheeks. "Sublime and adored woman, tell that to those who
will believe it, but not to old Crevel, who has, I may tell you,
feasted too often as one of four with your rascally husband not to
know what your high merits are! Many a time has he blamed himself when
half tipsy as he has expatiated on your perfections. Oh, I know you
well!--A libertine might hesitate between you and a girl of twenty. I
do not hesitate----"

"Monsieur!"

"Well, I say no more. But you must know, saintly and noble woman, that
a husband under certain circumstances will tell things about his wife
to his mistress that will mightily amuse her."

Tears of shame hanging to Madame Hulot's long lashes checked the
National Guardsman. He stopped short, and forgot his attitude.

"To proceed," said he. "We became intimate, the Baron and I, through
the two hussies. The Baron, like all bad lots, is very pleasant, a
thoroughly jolly good fellow. Yes, he took my fancy, the old rascal.
He could be so funny!--Well, enough of those reminiscences. We got to
be like brothers. The scoundrel--quite Regency in his notions--tried
indeed to deprave me altogether, preached Saint-Simonism as to women,
and all sorts of lordly ideas; but, you see, I was fond enough of my
girl to have married her, only I was afraid of having children.

"Then between two old daddies, such friends as--as we were, what more
natural than that we should think of our children marrying each other?
--Three months after his son had married my Celestine, Hulot--I don't
know how I can utter the wretch's name! he has cheated us both, madame
--well, the villain did me out of my little Josepha. The scoundrel
knew that he was supplanted in the heart of Jenny Cadine by a young
lawyer and by an artist--only two of them!--for the girl had more and
more of a howling success, and he stole my sweet little girl, a
perfect darling--but you must have seen her at the opera; he got her
an engagement there. Your husband is not so well behaved as I am. I am
ruled as straight as a sheet of music-paper. He had dropped a good
deal of money on Jenny Cadine, who must have cost him near on thirty
thousand francs a year. Well, I can only tell you that he is ruining
himself outright for Josepha.

"Josepha, madame, is a Jewess. Her name is Mirah, the anagram of
Hiram, an Israelite mark that stamps her, for she was a foundling
picked up in Germany, and the inquiries I have made prove that she is
the illegitimate child of a rich Jew banker. The life of the theatre,
and, above all, the teaching of Jenny Cadine, Madame Schontz, Malaga,
and Carabine, as to the way to treat an old man, have developed, in
the child whom I had kept in a respectable and not too expensive way
of life, all the native Hebrew instinct for gold and jewels--for the
golden calf.

"So this famous singer, hungering for plunder, now wants to be rich,
very rich. She tried her 'prentice hand on Baron Hulot, and soon
plucked him bare--plucked him, ay, and singed him to the skin. The
miserable man, after trying to vie with one of the Kellers and with
the Marquis d'Esgrignon, both perfectly mad about Josepha, to say
nothing of unknown worshipers, is about to see her carried off by that
very rich Duke, who is such a patron of the arts. Oh, what is his
name?--a dwarf.--Ah, the Duc d'Herouville. This fine gentleman insists
on having Josepha for his very own, and all that set are talking about
it; the Baron knows nothing of it as yet; for it is the same in the
Thirteenth Arrondissement as in every other: the lover, like the
husband, is last to get the news.

"Now, do you understand my claim? Your husband, dear lady, has robbed
me of my joy in life, the only happiness I have known since I became a
widower. Yes, if I had not been so unlucky as to come across that old
rip, Josepha would still be mine; for I, you know, should never have
placed her on the stage. She would have lived obscure, well conducted,
and mine. Oh! if you could but have seen her eight years ago, slight
and wiry, with the golden skin of an Andalusian, as they say, black
hair as shiny as satin, an eye that flashed lightning under long brown
lashes, the style of a duchess in every movement, the modesty of a
dependent, decent grace, and the pretty ways of a wild fawn. And by
that Hulot's doing all this charm and purity has been degraded to a
man-trap, a money-box for five-franc pieces! The girl is the Queen of
Trollops; and nowadays she humbugs every one--she who knew nothing,
not even that word."

At this stage the retired perfumer wiped his eyes, which were full of
tears. The sincerity of his grief touched Madame Hulot, and roused her
from the meditation into which she had sunk.

"Tell me, madame, is a man of fifty-two likely to find such another
jewel? At my age love costs thirty thousand francs a year. It is
through your husband's experience that I know the price, and I love
Celestine too truly to be her ruin. When I saw you, at the first
evening party you gave in our honor, I wondered how that scoundrel
Hulot could keep a Jenny Cadine--you had the manner of an Empress. You
do not look thirty," he went on. "To me, madame, you look young, and
you are beautiful. On my word of honor, that evening I was struck to
the heart. I said to myself, 'If I had not Josepha, since old Hulot
neglects his wife, she would fit me like a glove.' Forgive me--it is a
reminiscence of my old business. The perfumer will crop up now and
then, and that is what keeps me from standing to be elected deputy.

"And then, when I was so abominably deceived by the Baron, for really
between old rips like us our friend's mistress should be sacred, I
swore I would have his wife. It is but justice. The Baron could say
nothing; we are certain of impunity. You showed me the door like a
mangy dog at the first words I uttered as to the state of my feelings;
you only made my passion--my obstinacy, if you will--twice as strong,
and you shall be mine."

"Indeed; how?"

"I do not know; but it will come to pass. You see, madame, an idiot of
a perfumer--retired from business--who has but one idea in his head,
is stronger than a clever fellow who has a thousand. I am smitten with
you, and you are the means of my revenge; it is like being in love
twice over. I am speaking to you quite frankly, as a man who knows
what he means. I speak coldly to you, just as you do to me, when you
say, 'I never will be yours,' In fact, as they say, I play the game
with the cards on the table. Yes, you shall be mine, sooner or later;
if you were fifty, you should still be my mistress. And it will be;
for I expect anything from your husband!"

Madame Hulot looked at this vulgar intriguer with such a fixed stare
of terror, that he thought she had gone mad, and he stopped.

"You insisted on it, you heaped me with scorn, you defied me--and I
have spoken," said he, feeling that he must justify the ferocity of
his last words.

"Oh, my daughter, my daughter," moaned the Baroness in a voice like a
dying woman's.

"Oh! I have forgotten all else," Crevel went on. "The day when I was
robbed of Josepha I was like a tigress robbed of her cubs; in short,
as you see me now.--Your daughter? Yes, I regard her as the means of
winning you. Yes, I put a spoke in her marriage--and you will not get
her married without my help! Handsome as Mademoiselle Hortense is, she
needs a fortune----"

"Alas! yes," said the Baroness, wiping her eyes.

"Well, just ask your husband for ten thousand francs," said Crevel,
striking his attitude once more. He waited a minute, like an actor who
has made a point.

"If he had the money, he would give it to the woman who will take
Josepha's place," he went on, emphasizing his tones. "Does a man ever
pull up on the road he has taken? In the first place, he is too sweet
on women. There is a happy medium in all things, as our King has told
us. And then his vanity is implicated! He is a handsome man!--He would
bring you all to ruin for his pleasure; in fact, you are already on
the highroad to the workhouse. Why, look, never since I set foot in
your house have you been able to do up your drawing-room furniture.
'Hard up' is the word shouted by every slit in the stuff. Where will
you find a son-in-law who would not turn his back in horror of the
ill-concealed evidence of the most cruel misery there is--that of
people in decent society? I have kept shop, and I know. There is no
eye so quick as that of the Paris tradesman to detect real wealth from
its sham.--You have no money," he said, in a lower voice. "It is
written everywhere, even on your man-servant's coat.

"Would you like me to disclose any more hideous mysteries that are
kept from you?"

"Monsieur," cried Madame Hulot, whose handkerchief was wet through
with her tears, "enough, enough!"

"My son-in-law, I tell you, gives his father money, and this is what I
particularly wanted to come to when I began by speaking of your son's
expenses. But I keep an eye on my daughter's interests, be easy."

"Oh, if I could but see my daughter married, and die!" cried the poor
woman, quite losing her head.

"Well, then, this is the way," said the ex-perfumer.

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a hopeful expression, which so
completely changed her countenance, that this alone ought to have
touched the man's feelings and have led him to abandon his monstrous
schemes.

"You will still be handsome ten years hence," Crevel went on, with his
arms folded; "be kind to me, and Mademoiselle Hulot will marry. Hulot
has given me the right, as I have explained to you, to put the matter
crudely, and he will not be angry. In three years I have saved the
interest on my capital, for my dissipations have been restricted. I
have three hundred thousand francs in the bank over and above my
invested fortune--they are yours----"

"Go," said Madame Hulot. "Go, monsieur, and never let me see you
again. But for the necessity in which you placed me to learn the
secret of your cowardly conduct with regard to the match I had planned
for Hortense--yes, cowardly!" she repeated, in answer to a gesture
from Crevel. "How can you load a poor girl, a pretty, innocent
creature, with such a weight of enmity? But for the necessity that
goaded me as a mother, you would never have spoken to me again, never
again have come within my doors. Thirty-two years of an honorable and
loyal life shall not be swept away by a blow from Monsieur Crevel----"

"The retired perfumer, successor to Cesar Birotteau at the Queen of
the Roses, Rue Saint-Honore," added Crevel, in mocking tones.
"Deputy-mayor, captain in the National Guard, Chevalier of the Legion
of Honor--exactly what my predecessor was!"

"Monsieur," said the Baroness, "if, after twenty years of constancy,
Monsieur Hulot is tired of his wife, that is nobody's concern but
mine. As you see, he has kept his infidelity a mystery, for I did not
know that he had succeeded you in the affections of Mademoiselle
Josepha----"

"Oh, it has cost him a pretty penny, madame. His singing-bird has cost
him more than a hundred thousand francs in these two years. Ah, ha!
you have not seen the end of it!"

"Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake,
forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children
without a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself
respected and loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God
unspotted----"

"Amen!" exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the
face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such an
attempt. "You do not yet know the latter end of poverty--shame,
disgrace.--I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and
your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the
Prodigal Father from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me
deeply," said Crevel, seating himself, "for it is frightful to see the
woman one loves weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do
nothing against your interests or your husband's. Only never send to
me for information. That is all."

"What is to be done?" cried Madame Hulot.

Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which
this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as
a mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son's father-in-law
was insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her
resistance to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he
showed, in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a
humiliated National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the
point of snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in
a state of such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel
at her feet, kissing her hands.

"Good God! what will become of us!" she went on, wiping away her
tears. "Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her
eyes? What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in
her pure life under her mother's care as she is by every gift of
nature? There are days when she wanders round the garden, out of
spirits without knowing why; I find her with tears in her eyes----"

"She is one-and-twenty," said Crevel.

"Must I place her in a convent?" asked the Baroness. "But in such
cases religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously
trained girls lose their head!--Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not
understand that everything is final between us? that I look upon you
with horror? that you have crushed a mother's last hopes----"

"But if I were to restore them," asked he.

Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a frenzied expression that really
touched him. But he drove pity back to the depths of his heart; she
had said, "I look upon you with horror."

Virtue is always a little too rigid; it overlooks the shades and
instincts by help of which we are able to tack when in a false
position.

"So handsome a girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband
nowadays if she is penniless," Crevel remarked, resuming his
starchiest manner. "Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather
alarm intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too
expensive to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out walking
with such a woman on your arm, every one will turn to look at you, and
follow and covet his neighbor's wife. Such success is a source of much
uneasiness to men who do not want to be killing lovers; for, after
all, no man kills more than one. In the position in which you find
yourself there are just three ways of getting your daughter married:
Either by my help--and you will have none of it! That is one.--Or by
finding some old man of sixty, very rich, childless, and anxious to
have children; that is difficult, still such men are to be met with.
Many old men take up with a Josepha, a Jenny Cadine, why should not
one be found who is ready to make a fool of himself under legal
formalities? If it were not for Celestine and our two grandchildren, I
would marry Hortense myself. That is two.--The last way is the
easiest----"

Madame Hulot raised her head, and looked uneasily at the ex-perfumer.

"Paris is a town whither every man of energy--and they sprout like
saplings on French soil--comes to meet his kind; talent swarms here
without hearth or home, and energy equal to anything, even to making a
fortune. Well, these youngsters--your humble servant was such a one in
his time, and how many he has known! What had du Tillet or Popinot
twenty years since? They were both pottering round in Daddy
Birotteau's shop, with not a penny of capital but their determination
to get on, which, in my opinion, is the best capital a man can have.
Money may be eaten through, but you don't eat through your
determination. Why, what had I? The will to get on, and plenty of
pluck. At this day du Tillet is a match for the greatest folks; little
Popinot, the richest druggist of the Rue des Lombards, became a
deputy, now he is in office.--Well, one of these free lances, as we
say on the stock market, of the pen, or of the brush, is the only man
in Paris who would marry a penniless beauty, for they have courage
enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau
without asking for a farthing. Those men are madmen, to be sure! They
trust in love as they trust in good luck and brains!--Find a man of
energy who will fall in love with your daughter, and he will marry
without a thought of money. You must confess that by way of an enemy I
am not ungenerous, for this advice is against my own interests."

"Oh, Monsieur Crevel, if you would indeed be my friend and give up
your ridiculous notions----"

"Ridiculous? Madame, do not run yourself down. Look at yourself--I
love you, and you will come to be mine. The day will come when I shall
say to Hulot, 'You took Josepha, I have taken your wife!'

"It is the old law of tit-for-tat! And I will persevere till I have
attained my end, unless you should become extremely ugly.--I shall
succeed; and I will tell you why," he went on, resuming his attitude,
and looking at Madame Hulot. "You will not meet with such an old man,
or such a young lover," he said after a pause, "because you love your
daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old
libertine, and because you--the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old
Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old
Guard--will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may
find him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of
to-day was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a
factory.

"And then, when you see the girl, urged by her twenty years, capable
of dishonoring you all, you will say to yourself, 'It will be better
that I should fall! If Monsieur Crevel will but keep my secret, I will
earn my daughter's portion--two hundred thousand francs for ten years'
attachment to that old gloveseller--old Crevel!'--I disgust you no
doubt, and what I am saying is horribly immoral, you think? But if you
happened to have been bitten by an overwhelming passion, you would
find a thousand arguments in favor of yielding--as women do when they
are in love.--Yes, and Hortense's interests will suggest to your
feelings such terms of surrendering your conscience----"

"Hortense has still an uncle."

"What! Old Fischer? He is winding up his concerns, and that again is
the Baron's fault; his rake is dragged over every till within his
reach."

"Comte Hulot----"

"Oh, madame, your husband has already made thin air of the old
General's savings. He spent them in furnishing his singer's rooms.--
Now, come; am I to go without a hope?"

"Good-bye, monsieur. A man easily gets over a passion for a woman of
my age, and you will fall back on Christian principles. God takes care
of the wretched----"

The Baroness rose to oblige the captain to retreat, and drove him back
into the drawing-room.

"Ought the beautiful Madame Hulot to be living amid such squalor?"
said he, and he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier bereft of its
gilding, the threadbare carpet, the very rags of wealth which made the
large room, with its red, white, and gold, look like a corpse of
Imperial festivities.

"Monsieur, virtue shines on it all. I have no wish to owe a handsome
abode to having made of the beauty you are pleased to ascribe to me a
man-trap and a money-box for five-franc pieces!"

The captain bit his lips as he recognized the words he had used to
vilify Josepha's avarice.

"And for whom are you so magnanimous?" said he. By this time the
baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door.--"For a
libertine!" said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior
wealth.

"If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is
all."

After bowing to the officer as a woman bows to dismiss an importune
visitor, she turned away too quickly to see him once more fold his
arms. She unlocked the doors she had closed, and did not see the
threatening gesture which was Crevel's parting greeting. She walked
with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her
strength was exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if
she were ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the
tumble-down summer-house, where her daughter was gossiping with Cousin
Betty.

From the first days of her married life to the present time the
Baroness had loved her husband, as Josephine in the end had loved
Napoleon, with an admiring, maternal, and cowardly devotion. Though
ignorant of the details given her by Crevel, she knew that for twenty
years past Baron Hulot been anything rather than a faithful husband;
but she had sealed her eyes with lead, she had wept in silence, and no
word of reproach had ever escaped her. In return for this angelic
sweetness, she had won her husband's veneration and something
approaching to worship from all who were about her.

A wife's affection for her husband and the respect she pays him are
infectious in a family. Hortense believed her father to be a perfect
model of conjugal affection; as to their son, brought up to admire the
Baron, whom everybody regarded as one of the giants who so effectually
backed Napoleon, he knew that he owed his advancement to his father's
name, position, and credit; and besides, the impressions of childhood
exert an enduring influence. He still was afraid of his father; and if
he had suspected the misdeeds revealed by Crevel, as he was too much
overawed by him to find fault, he would have found excuses in the view
every man takes of such matters.

It now will be necessary to give the reasons for the extraordinary
self-devotion of a good and beautiful woman; and this, in a few words,
is her past history.

Three brothers, simple laboring men, named Fischer, and living in a
village situated on the furthest frontier of Lorraine, were compelled
by the Republican conscription to set out with the so-called army of
the Rhine.

In 1799 the second brother, Andre, a widower, and Madame Hulot's
father, left his daughter to the care of his elder brother, Pierre
Fischer, disabled from service by a wound received in 1797, and made a
small private venture in the military transport service, an opening he
owed to the favor of Hulot d'Ervy, who was high in the commissariat.
By a very obvious chance Hulot, coming to Strasbourg, saw the Fischer
family. Adeline's father and his younger brother were at that time
contractors for forage in the province of Alsace.

Adeline, then sixteen years of age, might be compared with the famous
Madame du Barry, like her, a daughter of Lorraine. She was one of
those perfect and striking beauties--a woman like Madame Tallien,
finished with peculiar care by Nature, who bestows on them all her
choicest gifts--distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance,
flesh of a superior texture, and a complexion mingled in the unknown
laboratory where good luck presides. These beautiful creatures all
have something in common: Bianca Capella, whose portrait is one of
Bronzino's masterpieces; Jean Goujon's Venus, painted from the famous
Diane de Poitiers; Signora Olympia, whose picture adorns the Doria
gallery; Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges,
Madame Recamier.--all these women who preserved their beauty in spite
of years, of passion, and of their life of excess and pleasure, have
in figure, frame, and in the character of their beauty certain
striking resemblances, enough to make one believe that there is in the
ocean of generations an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is
born, all daughters of the same salt wave.

Adeline Fischer, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had
the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman
born a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand
of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line
of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as
she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once
seen her, the Commissariat officer made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer
his wife as quickly as the law would permit, to the great astonishment
of the Fischers, who had all been brought up in the fear of their
betters.

The eldest, a soldier of 1792, severely wounded in the attack on the
lines at Wissembourg, adored the Emperor Napoleon and everything that
had to do with the Grande Armee. Andre and Johann spoke with respect
of Commissary Hulot, the Emperor's protege, to whom indeed they owed
their prosperity; for Hulot d'Ervy, finding them intelligent and
honest, had taken them from the army provision wagons to place them in
charge of a government contract needing despatch. The brothers Fischer
had done further service during the campaign of 1804. At the peace
Hulot had secured for them the contract for forage from Alsace, not
knowing that he would presently be sent to Strasbourg to prepare for
the campaign of 1806.

This marriage was like an Assumption to the young peasant girl. The
beautiful Adeline was translated at once from the mire of her village
to the paradise of the Imperial Court; for the contractor, one of the
most conscientious and hard-working of the Commissariat staff, was
made a Baron, obtained a place near the Emperor, and was attached to
the Imperial Guard. The handsome rustic bravely set to work to educate
herself for love of her husband, for she was simply crazy about him;
and, indeed, the Commissariat office was as a man a perfect match for
Adeline as a woman. He was one of the picked corps of fine men. Tall,
well-built, fair, with beautiful blue eyes full of irresistible fire
and life, his elegant appearance made him remarkable by the side of
d'Orsay, Forbin, Ouvrard; in short, in the battalion of fine men that
surrounded the Emperor. A conquering "buck," and holding the ideas of
the Directoire with regard to women, his career of gallantry was
interrupted for some long time by his conjugal affection.

To Adeline the Baron was from the first a sort of god who could do no
wrong. To him she owed everything: fortune--she had a carriage, a fine
house, every luxury of the day; happiness--he was devoted to her in
the face of the world; a title, for she was a Baroness; fame, for she
was spoken of as the beautiful Madame Hulot--and in Paris! Finally,
she had the honor of refusing the Emperor's advances, for Napoleon
made her a present of a diamond necklace, and always remembered her,
asking now and again, "And is the beautiful Madame Hulot still a model
of virtue?" in the tone of a man who might have taken his revenge on
one who should have triumphed where he had failed.

So it needs no great intuition to discern what were the motives in a
simple, guileless, and noble soul for the fanaticism of Madame Hulot's
love. Having fully persuaded herself that her husband could do her no
wrong, she made herself in the depths of her heart the humble, abject,
and blindfold slave of the man who had made her. It must be noted,
too, that she was gifted with great good sense--the good sense of the
people, which made her education sound. In society she spoke little,
and never spoke evil of any one; she did not try to shine; she thought
out many things, listened well, and formed herself on the model of the
best-conducted women of good birth.

In 1815 Hulot followed the lead of the Prince de Wissembourg, his
intimate friend, and became one of the officers who organized the
improvised troops whose rout brought the Napoleonic cycle to a close
at Waterloo. In 1816 the Baron was one of the men best hated by the
Feltre administration, and was not reinstated in the Commissariat till
1823, when he was needed for the Spanish war. In 1830 he took office
as the fourth wheel of the coach, at the time of the levies, a sort of
conscription made by Louis Philippe on the old Napoleonic soldiery.
From the time when the younger branch ascended the throne, having
taken an active part in bringing that about, he was regarded as an
indispensable authority at the War Office. He had already won his
Marshal's baton, and the King could do no more for him unless by
making him minister or a peer of France.

From 1818 till 1823, having no official occupation, Baron Hulot had
gone on active service to womankind. Madame Hulot dated her Hector's
first infidelities from the grand finale of the Empire. Thus, for
twelve years the Baroness had filled the part in her household of
prima donna assoluta, without a rival. She still could boast of the
old-fashioned, inveterate affection which husbands feel for wives who
are resigned to be gentle and virtuous helpmates; she knew that if she
had a rival, that rival would not subsist for two hours under a word
of reproof from herself; but she shut her eyes, she stopped her ears,
she would know nothing of her husband's proceedings outside his home.
In short, she treated her Hector as a mother treats a spoilt child.

Three years before the conversation reported above, Hortense, at the
Theatre des Varietes, had recognized her father in a lower tier stage-
box with Jenny Cadine, and had exclaimed:

"There is papa!"

"You are mistaken, my darling; he is at the Marshal's," the Baroness
replied.

She too had seen Jenny Cadine; but instead of feeling a pang when she
saw how pretty she was, she said to herself, "That rascal Hector must
think himself very lucky."

She suffered nevertheless; she gave herself up in secret to rages of
torment; but as soon as she saw Hector, she always remembered her
twelve years of perfect happiness, and could not find it in her to
utter a word of complaint. She would have been glad if the Baron would
have taken her into his confidence; but she never dared to let him see
that she knew of his kicking over the traces, out of respect for her
husband. Such an excess of delicacy is never met with but in those
grand creatures, daughters of the soil, whose instinct it is to take
blows without ever returning them; the blood of the early martyrs
still lives in their veins. Well-born women, their husbands' equals,
feel the impulse to annoy them, to mark the points of their tolerance,
like points at billiards, by some stinging word, partly in the spirit
of diabolical malice, and to secure the upper hand or the right of
turning the tables.

The Baroness had an ardent admirer in her brother-in-law, Lieutenant-
General Hulot, the venerable Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial
Infantry Guard, who was to have a Marshal's baton in his old age. This
veteran, after having served from 1830 to 1834 as Commandant of the
military division, including the departments of Brittany, the scene of
his exploits in 1799 and 1800, had come to settle in Paris near his
brother, for whom he had a fatherly affection.

This old soldier's heart was in sympathy with his sister-in-law; he
admired her as the noblest and saintliest of her sex. He had never
married, because he hoped to find a second Adeline, though he had
vainly sought for her through twenty campaigns in as many lands. To
maintain her place in the esteem of this blameless and spotless old
republican--of whom Napoleon had said, "That brave old Hulot is the
most obstinate republican, but he will never be false to me"--Adeline
would have endured griefs even greater than those that had just come
upon her. But the old soldier, seventy-two years of age, battered by
thirty campaigns, and wounded for the twenty-seventh time at Waterloo,
was Adeline's admirer, and not a "protector." The poor old Count,
among other infirmities, could only hear through a speaking trumpet.

So long as Baron Hulot d'Ervy was a fine man, his flirtations did not
damage his fortune; but when a man is fifty, the Graces claim payment.
At that age love becomes vice; insensate vanities come into play.
Thus, at about that time, Adeline saw that her husband was incredibly
particular about his dress; he dyed his hair and whiskers, and wore a
belt and stays. He was determined to remain handsome at any cost. This
care of his person, a weakness he had once mercilessly mocked at, was
carried out in the minutest details.

At last Adeline perceived that the Pactolus poured out before the
Baron's mistresses had its source in her pocket. In eight years he had
dissipated a considerable amount of money; and so effectually, that,
on his son's marriage two years previously, the Baron had been
compelled to explain to his wife that his pay constituted their whole
income.

"What shall we come to?" asked Adeline.

"Be quite easy," said the official, "I will leave the whole of my
salary in your hands, and I will make a fortune for Hortense, and some
savings for the future, in business."

The wife's deep belief in her husband's power and superior talents, in
his capabilities and character, had, in fact, for the moment allayed
her anxiety.

What the Baroness' reflections and tears were after Crevel's departure
may now be clearly imagined. The poor woman had for two years past
known that she was at the bottom of a pit, but she had fancied herself
alone in it. How her son's marriage had been finally arranged she had
not known; she had known nothing of Hector's connection with the
grasping Jewess; and, above all, she hoped that no one in the world
knew anything of her troubles. Now, if Crevel went about so ready to
talk of the Baron's excesses, Hector's reputation would suffer. She
could see, under the angry ex-perfumer's coarse harangue, the odious
gossip behind the scenes which led to her son's marriage. Two
reprobate hussies had been the priestesses of this union planned at
some orgy amid the degrading familiarities of two tipsy old sinners.

"And has he forgotten Hortense!" she wondered.

"But he sees her every day; will he try to find her a husband among
his good-for-nothing sluts?"

At this moment it was the mother that spoke rather than the wife, for
she saw Hortense laughing with her Cousin Betty--the reckless laughter
of heedless youth; and she knew that such hysterical laughter was
quite as distressing a symptom as the tearful reverie of solitary
walks in the garden.

Hortense was like her mother, with golden hair that waved naturally,
and was amazingly long and thick. Her skin had the lustre of mother-
of-pearl. She was visibly the offspring of a true marriage, of a pure
and noble love in its prime. There was a passionate vitality in her
countenance, a brilliancy of feature, a full fount of youth, a fresh
vigor and abundance of health, which radiated from her with electric
flashes. Hortense invited the eye.

When her eye, of deep ultramarine blue, liquid with the moisture of
innocent youth, rested on a passer-by, he was involuntarily thrilled.
Nor did a single freckle mar her skin, such as those with which many a
white and golden maid pays toll for her milky whiteness. Tall, round
without being fat, with a slender dignity as noble as her mother's,
she really deserved the name of goddess, of which old authors were so
lavish. In fact, those who saw Hortense in the street could hardly
restrain the exclamation, "What a beautiful girl!"

She was so genuinely innocent, that she could say to her mother:

"What do they mean, mamma, by calling me a beautiful girl when I am
with you? Are not you much handsomer than I am?"

And, in point of fact, at seven-and-forty the Baroness might have been
preferred to her daughter by amateurs of sunset beauty; for she had
not yet lost any of her charms, by one of those phenomena which are
especially rare in Paris, where Ninon was regarded as scandalous,
simply because she thus seemed to enjoy such an unfair advantage over
the plainer women of the seventeenth century.

Thinking of her daughter brought her back to the father; she saw him
sinking by degrees, day after day, down to the social mire, and even
dismissed some day from his appointment. The idea of her idol's fall,
with a vague vision of the disasters prophesied by Crevel, was such a
terror to the poor woman, that she became rapt in the contemplation
like an ecstatic.

Cousin Betty, from time to time, as she chatted with Hortense, looked
round to see when they might return to the drawing-room; but her young
cousin was pelting her with questions, and at the moment when the
Baroness opened the glass door she did not happen to be looking.

Lisbeth Fischer, though the daughter of the eldest of the three
brothers, was five years younger than Madame Hulot; she was far from
being as handsome as her cousin, and had been desperately jealous of
Adeline. Jealousy was the fundamental passion of this character,
marked by eccentricities--a word invented by the English to describe
the craziness not of the asylum, but of respectable households. A
native of the Vosges, a peasant in the fullest sense of the word,
lean, brown, with shining black hair and thick eyebrows joining in a
tuft, with long, strong arms, thick feet, and some moles on her narrow
simian face--such is a brief description of the elderly virgin.

The family, living all under one roof, had sacrificed the common-
looking girl to the beauty, the bitter fruit to the splendid flower.
Lisbeth worked in the fields, while her cousin was indulged; and one
day, when they were alone together, she had tried to destroy Adeline's
nose, a truly Greek nose, which the old mothers admired. Though she
was beaten for this misdeed, she persisted nevertheless in tearing the
favorite's gowns and crumpling her collars.

At the time of Adeline's wonderful marriage, Lisbeth had bowed to
fate, as Napoleon's brothers and sisters bowed before the splendor of
the throne and the force of authority.

Adeline, who was extremely sweet and kind, remembered Lisbeth when she
found herself in Paris, and invited her there in 1809, intending to
rescue her from poverty by finding her a husband. But seeing that it
was impossible to marry the girl out of hand, with her black eyes and
sooty brows, unable, too, to read or write, the Baron began by
apprenticing her to a business; he placed her as a learner with the
embroiderers to the Imperial Court, the well-known Pons Brothers.

Lisbeth, called Betty for short, having learned to embroider in gold
and silver, and possessing all the energy of a mountain race, had
determination enough to learn to read, write, and keep accounts; for
her cousin the Baron had pointed out the necessity for these
accomplishments if she hoped to set up in business as an embroiderer.

She was bent on making a fortune; in two years she was another
creature. In 1811 the peasant woman had become a very presentable,
skilled, and intelligent forewoman.

Her department, that of gold and silver lace-work, as it is called,
included epaulettes, sword-knots, aiguillettes; in short, the immense
mass of glittering ornaments that sparkled on the rich uniforms of the
French army and civil officials. The Emperor, a true Italian in his
love of dress, had overlaid the coats of all his servants with silver
and gold, and the Empire included a hundred and thirty-three
Departments. These ornaments, usually supplied to tailors who were
solvent and wealthy paymasters, were a very secure branch of trade.

Just when Cousin Betty, the best hand in the house of Pons Brothers,
where she was forewoman of the embroidery department, might have set
up in business on her own account, the Empire collapsed. The olive-
branch of peace held out by the Bourbons did not reassure Lisbeth; she
feared a diminution of this branch of trade, since henceforth there
were to be but eighty-six Departments to plunder, instead of a hundred
and thirty-three, to say nothing of the immense reduction of the army.
Utterly scared by the ups and downs of industry, she refused the
Baron's offers of help, and he thought she must be mad. She confirmed
this opinion by quarreling with Monsieur Rivet, who bought the
business of Pons Brothers, and with whom the Baron wished to place her
in partnership; she would be no more than a workwoman. Thus the
Fischer family had relapsed into the precarious mediocrity from which
Baron Hulot had raised it.

The three brothers Fischer, who had been ruined by the abdication at
Fontainebleau, in despair joined the irregular troops in 1815. The
eldest, Lisbeth's father, was killed. Adeline's father, sentenced to
death by court-martial, fled to Germany, and died at Treves in 1820.
Johann, the youngest, came to Paris, a petitioner to the queen of the
family, who was said to dine off gold and silver plate, and never to
be seen at a party but with diamonds in her hair as big as hazel-nuts,
given to her by the Emperor.

Johann Fischer, then aged forty-three, obtained from Baron Hulot a
capital of ten thousand francs with which to start a small business as
forage-dealer at Versailles, under the patronage of the War Office,
through the influence of the friends still in office, of the late
Commissary-General.

These family catastrophes, Baron Hulot's dismissal, and the knowledge
that he was a mere cipher in that immense stir of men and interests
and things which makes Paris at once a paradise and a hell, quite
quelled Lisbeth Fischer. She gave up all idea of rivalry and
comparison with her cousin after feeling her great superiority; but
envy still lurked in her heart, like a plague-germ that may hatch and
devastate a city if the fatal bale of wool is opened in which it is
concealed.

Now and again, indeed, she said to herself:

"Adeline and I are the same flesh and blood, our fathers were brothers
--and she is in a mansion, while I am in a garret."

But every New Year Lisbeth had presents from the Baron and Baroness;
the Baron, who was always good to her, paid for her firewood in the
winter; old General Hulot had her to dinner once a week; and there was
always a cover laid for her at her cousin's table. They laughed at her
no doubt, but they never were ashamed to own her. In short, they had
made her independent in Paris, where she lived as she pleased.

The old maid had, in fact, a terror of any kind of tie. Her cousin had
offered her a room in her own house--Lisbeth suspected the halter of
domestic servitude; several times the Baron had found a solution of
the difficult problem of her marriage; but though tempted in the first
instance, she would presently decline, fearing lest she should be
scorned for her want of education, her general ignorance, and her
poverty; finally, when the Baroness suggested that she should live
with their uncle Johann, and keep house for him, instead of the upper
servant, who must cost him dear, Lisbeth replied that that was the
very last way she should think of marrying.

Lisbeth Fischer had the sort of strangeness in her ideas which is
often noticeable in characters that have developed late, in savages,
who think much and speak little. Her peasant's wit had acquired a good
deal of Parisian asperity from hearing the talk of workshops and
mixing with workmen and workwomen. She, whose character had a marked
resemblance to that of the Corsicans, worked upon without fruition by
the instincts of a strong nature, would have liked to be the
protectress of a weak man; but, as a result of living in the capital,
the capital had altered her superficially. Parisian polish became rust
on this coarsely tempered soul. Gifted with a cunning which had become
unfathomable, as it always does in those whose celibacy is genuine,
with the originality and sharpness with which she clothed her ideas,
in any other position she would have been formidable. Full of spite,
she was capable of bringing discord into the most united family.

In early days, when she indulged in certain secret hopes which she
confided to none, she took to wearing stays, and dressing in the
fashion, and so shone in splendor for a short time, that the Baron
thought her marriageable. Lisbeth at that stage was the piquante
brunette of old-fashioned novels. Her piercing glance, her olive skin,
her reed-like figure, might invite a half-pay major; but she was
satisfied, she would say laughing, with her own admiration.

And, indeed, she found her life pleasant enough when she had freed it
from practical anxieties, for she dined out every evening after
working hard from sunrise. Thus she had only her rent and her midday
meal to provide for; she had most of her clothes given her, and a
variety of very acceptable stores, such as coffee, sugar, wine, and so
forth.

In 1837, after living for twenty-seven years, half maintained by the
Hulots and her Uncle Fischer, Cousin Betty, resigned to being nobody,
allowed herself to be treated so. She herself refused to appear at any
grand dinners, preferring the family party, where she held her own and
was spared all slights to her pride.

Wherever she went--at General Hulot's, at Crevel's, at the house of
the young Hulots, or at Rivet's (Pons' successor, with whom she made
up her quarrel, and who made much of her), and at the Baroness' table
--she was treated as one of the family; in fact, she managed to make
friends of the servants by making them an occasional small present,
and always gossiping with them for a few minutes before going into the
drawing-room. This familiarity, by which she uncompromisingly put
herself on their level, conciliated their servile good-nature, which
is indispensable to a parasite. "She is a good, steady woman," was
everybody's verdict.

Her willingness to oblige, which knew no bounds when it was not
demanded of her, was indeed, like her assumed bluntness, a necessity
of her position. She had at length understood what her life must be,
seeing that she was at everybody's mercy; and needing to please
everybody, she would laugh with young people, who liked her for a sort
of wheedling flattery which always wins them; guessing and taking part
with their fancies, she would make herself their spokeswoman, and they
thought her a delightful confidante, since she had no right to find
fault with them.

Her absolute secrecy also won her the confidence of their seniors;
for, like Ninon, she had certain manly qualities. As a rule, our
confidence is given to those below rather than above us. We employ our
inferiors rather than our betters in secret transactions, and they
thus become the recipients of our inmost thoughts, and look on at our
meditations; Richelieu thought he had achieved success when he was
admitted to the Council. This penniless woman was supposed to be so
dependent on every one about her, that she seemed doomed to perfect
silence. She herself called herself the Family Confessional.

The Baroness only, remembering her ill-usage in childhood by the
cousin who, though younger, was stronger than herself, never wholly
trusted her. Besides, out of sheer modesty, she would never have told
her domestic sorrows to any one but God.

It may here be well to add that the Baron's house preserved all its
magnificence in the eyes of Lisbeth Fischer, who was not struck, as
the parvenu perfumer had been, with the penury stamped on the shabby
chairs, the dirty hangings, and the ripped silk. The furniture we live
with is in some sort like our own person; seeing ourselves every day,
we end, like the Baron, by thinking ourselves but little altered, and
still youthful, when others see that our head is covered with
chinchilla, our forehead scarred with circumflex accents, our stomach
assuming the rotundity of a pumpkin. So these rooms, always blazing in
Betty's eyes with the Bengal fire of Imperial victory, were to her
perennially splendid.

As time went on, Lisbeth had contracted some rather strange old-
maidish habits. For instance, instead of following the fashions, she
expected the fashion to accept her ways and yield to her always out-
of-date notions. When the Baroness gave her a pretty new bonnet, or a
gown in the fashion of the day, Betty remade it completely at home,
and spoilt it by producing a dress of the style of the Empire or of
her old Lorraine costume. A thirty-franc bonnet came out a rag, and
the gown a disgrace. On this point, Lisbeth was as obstinate as a
mule; she would please no one but herself and believed herself
charming; whereas this assimilative process--harmonious, no doubt, in
so far as that it stamped her for an old maid from head to foot--made
her so ridiculous, that, with the best will in the world, no one could
admit her on any smart occasion.

This refractory, capricious, and independent spirit, and the
inexplicable wild shyness of the woman for whom the Baron had four
times found a match--an employe in his office, a retired major, an
army contractor, and a half-pay captain--while she had refused an army
lacemaker, who had since made his fortune, had won her the name of the
Nanny Goat, which the Baron gave her in jest. But this nickname only
met the peculiarities that lay on the surface, the eccentricities
which each of us displays to his neighbors in social life. This woman,
who, if closely studied, would have shown the most savage traits of
the peasant class, was still the girl who had clawed her cousin's
nose, and who, if she had not been trained to reason, would perhaps
have killed her in a fit of jealousy.

It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled
her to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild
men, reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the
difference between natural and civilized man. The savage has only
impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage
the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at
the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the
civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a
thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at
a time. This is the cause of the transient ascendency of a child over
its parents, which ceases as soon as it is satisfied; in the man who
is still one with nature, this contrast is constant. Cousin Betty, a
savage of Lorraine, somewhat treacherous too, was of this class of
natures, which are commoner among the lower orders than is supposed,
accounting for the conduct of the populace during revolutions.

At the time when this Drama opens, if Cousin Betty would have
allowed herself to be dressed like other people; if, like the women of
Paris, she had been accustomed to wear each fashion in its turn, she
would have been presentable and acceptable, but she preserved the
stiffness of a stick. Now a woman devoid of all the graces, in Paris
simply does not exist. The fine but hard eyes, the severe features,
the Calabrian fixity of complexion which made Lisbeth like a figure by
Giotto, and of which a true Parisian would have taken advantage, above
all, her strange way of dressing, gave her such an extraordinary
appearance that she sometimes looked like one of those monkeys in
petticoats taken about by little Savoyards. As she was well known in
the houses connected by family which she frequented, and restricted
her social efforts to that little circle, as she liked her own home,
her singularities no longer astonished anybody; and out of doors they
were lost in the immense stir of Paris street-life, where only pretty
women are ever looked at.

Hortense's laughter was at this moment caused by a victory won over
her Cousin Lisbeth's perversity; she had just wrung from her an avowal
she had been hoping for these three years past. However secretive an
old maid may be, there is one sentiment which will always avail to
make her break her fast from words, and that is her vanity. For the
last three years, Hortense, having become very inquisitive on such
matters, had pestered her cousin with questions, which, however, bore
the stamp of perfect innocence. She wanted to know why her cousin had
never married. Hortense, who knew of the five offers that she had
refused, had constructed her little romance; she supposed that Lisbeth
had had a passionate attachment, and a war of banter was the result.
Hortense would talk of "We young girls!" when speaking of herself and
her cousin.

Cousin Betty had on several occasions answered in the same tone--"And
who says I have not a lover?" So Cousin Betty's lover, real or
fictitious, became a subject of mild jesting. At last, after two years
of this petty warfare, the last time Lisbeth had come to the house
Hortense's first question had been:

"And how is your lover?"

"Pretty well, thank you," was the answer. "He is rather ailing, poor
young man."

"He has delicate health?" asked the Baroness, laughing.

"I should think so! He is fair. A sooty thing like me can love none
but a fair man with a color like the moon."

"But who is he? What does he do?" asked Hortense. "Is he a prince?"

"A prince of artisans, as I am queen of the bobbin. Is a poor woman
like me likely to find a lover in a man with a fine house and money in
the funds, or in a duke of the realm, or some Prince Charming out of a
fairy tale?"

"Oh, I should so much like to see him!" cried Hortense, smiling.

"To see what a man can be like who can love the Nanny Goat?" retorted
Lisbeth.

"He must be some monster of an old clerk, with a goat's beard!"
Hortense said to her mother.

"Well, then, you are quite mistaken, mademoiselle."

"Then you mean that you really have a lover?" Hortense exclaimed in
triumph.

"As sure as you have not!" retorted Lisbeth, nettled.

"But if you have a lover, why don't you marry him, Lisbeth?" said the
Baroness, shaking her head at her daughter. "We have been hearing
rumors about him these three years. You have had time to study him;
and if he has been faithful so long, you should not persist in a delay
which must be hard upon him. After all, it is a matter of conscience;
and if he is young, it is time to take a brevet of dignity."

Cousin Betty had fixed her gaze on Adeline, and seeing that she was
jesting, she replied:

"It would be marrying hunger and thirst; he is a workman, I am a
workwoman. If we had children, they would be workmen.--No, no; we love
each other spiritually; it is less expensive."

"Why do you keep him in hiding?" Hortense asked.

"He wears a round jacket," replied the old maid, laughing.

"You truly love him?" the Baroness inquired.

"I believe you! I love him for his own sake, the dear cherub. For four
years his home has been in my heart."

"Well, then, if you love him for himself," said the Baroness gravely,
"and if he really exists, you are treating him criminally. You do not
know how to love truly."

"We all know that from our birth," said Lisbeth.

"No, there are women who love and yet are selfish, and that is your
case."

Cousin Betty's head fell, and her glance would have made any one
shiver who had seen it; but her eyes were on her reel of thread.

"If you would introduce your so-called lover to us, Hector might find
him employment, or put him in a position to make money."

"That is out of the question," said Cousin Betty.

"And why?"

"He is a sort of Pole--a refugee----"

"A conspirator?" cried Hortense. "What luck for you!--Has he had any
adventures?"

"He has fought for Poland. He was a professor in the school where the
students began the rebellion; and as he had been placed there by the
Grand Duke Constantine, he has no hope of mercy----"

"A professor of what?"

"Of fine arts."

"And he came to Paris when the rebellion was quelled?"

"In 1833. He came through Germany on foot."

"Poor young man! And how old is he?"

"He was just four-and-twenty when the insurrection broke out--he is
twenty-nine now."

"Fifteen years your junior," said the Baroness.

"And what does he live on?" asked Hortense.

"His talent."

"Oh, he gives lessons?"

"No," said Cousin Betty; "he gets them, and hard ones too!"

"And his Christian name--is it a pretty name?"

"Wenceslas."

"What a wonderful imagination you old maids have!" exclaimed the
Baroness. "To hear you talk, Lisbeth, one might really believe you."

"You see, mamma, he is a Pole, and so accustomed to the knout that
Lisbeth reminds him of the joys of his native land."

They all three laughed, and Hortense sang Wenceslas! idole de mon
ame! instead of O Mathilde.

Then for a few minutes there was a truce.

"These children," said Cousin Betty, looking at Hortense as she went
up to her, "fancy that no one but themselves can have lovers."

"Listen," Hortense replied, finding herself alone with her cousin, "if
you prove to me that Wenceslas is not a pure invention, I will give
you my yellow cashmere shawl."

"He is a Count."

"Every Pole is a Count!"

"But he is not a Pole; he comes from Liva--Litha----"

"Lithuania?"

"No."

"Livonia?"

"Yes, that's it!"

"But what is his name?"

"I wonder if you are capable of keeping a secret."

"Cousin Betty, I will be as mute!----"

"As a fish?"

"As a fish."

"By your life eternal?"

"By my life eternal!"

"No, by your happiness in this world?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, his name is Wenceslas Steinbock."

"One of Charles XII.'s Generals was named Steinbock."

"He was his grand-uncle. His own father settled in Livonia after the
death of the King of Sweden; but he lost all his fortune during the
campaign of 1812, and died, leaving the poor boy at the age of eight
without a penny. The Grand Duke Constantine, for the honor of the name
of Steinbock, took him under his protection and sent him to school."

"I will not break my word," Hortense replied; "prove his existence,
and you shall have the yellow shawl. The color is most becoming to
dark skins."

"And you will keep my secret?"

"And tell you mine."

"Well, then, the next time I come you shall have the proof."

"But the proof will be the lover," said Hortense.

Cousin Betty, who, since her first arrival in Paris, had been bitten
by a mania for shawls, was bewitched by the idea of owning the yellow
cashmere given to his wife by the Baron in 1808, and handed down from
mother to daughter after the manner of some families in 1830. The
shawl had been a good deal worn ten years ago; but the costly object,
now always kept in its sandal-wood box, seemed to the old maid ever
new, like the drawing-room furniture. So she brought in her handbag a
present for the Baroness' birthday, by which she proposed to prove the
existence of her romantic lover.

This present was a silver seal formed of three little figures back to
back, wreathed with foliage, and supporting the Globe. They
represented Faith, Hope, and Charity; their feet rested on monsters
rending each other, among them the symbolical serpent. In 1846, now
that such immense strides have been made in the art of which Benvenuto
Cellini was the master, by Mademoiselle de Fauveau, Wagner, Jeanest,
Froment-Meurice, and wood-carvers like Lienard, this little
masterpiece would amaze nobody; but at that time a girl who understood
the silversmith's art stood astonished as she held the seal which
Lisbeth put into her hands, saying:

"There! what do you think of that?"

In design, attitude, and drapery the figures were of the school of
Raphael; but the execution was in the style of the Florentine metal
workers--the school created by Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti,
Benvenuto Cellini, John of Bologna, and others. The French masters of
the Renaissance had never invented more strangely twining monsters
than these that symbolized the evil passions. The palms, ferns, reeds,
and foliage that wreathed the Virtues showed a style, a taste, a
handling that might have driven a practised craftsman to despair; a
scroll floated above the three figures; and on its surface, between
the heads, were a W, a chamois, and the word fecit.

"Who carved this?" asked Hortense.

"Well, just my lover," replied Lisbeth. "There are ten months' work in
it; I could earn more at making sword-knots.--He told me that
Steinbock means a rock goat, a chamois, in German. And he intends to
mark all his work in that way.--Ah, ha! I shall have the shawl."

"What for?"

"Do you suppose I could buy such a thing, or order it? Impossible!
Well, then, it must have been given to me. And who would make me such
a present? A lover!"

Hortense, with an artfulness that would have frightened Lisbeth
Fischer if she had detected it, took care not to express all her
admiration, though she was full of the delight which every soul that
is open to a sense of beauty must feel on seeing a faultless piece of
work--perfect and unexpected.

"On my word," said she, "it is very pretty."

"Yes, it is pretty," said her cousin; "but I like an orange-colored
shawl better.--Well, child, my lover spends his time in doing such
work as that. Since he came to Paris he has turned out three or four
little trifles in that style, and that is the fruit of four years'
study and toil. He has served as apprentice to founders, metal-
casters, and goldsmiths.--There he has paid away thousands and
hundreds of francs. And my gentleman tells me that in a few months now
he will be famous and rich----"

"Then you often see him?"

"Bless me, do you think it is all a fable? I told you truth in jest."

"And he is in love with you?" asked Hortense eagerly.

"He adores me," replied Lisbeth very seriously. "You see, child, he
had never seen any women but the washed out, pale things they all are
in the north, and a slender, brown, youthful thing like me warmed his
heart.--But, mum; you promised, you know!"

"And he will fare like the five others," said the girl ironically, as
she looked at the seal.

"Six others, miss. I left one in Lorraine, who, to this day, would
fetch the moon down for me."

"This one does better than that," said Hortense; "he has brought down
the sun."

"Where can that be turned into money?" asked her cousin. "It takes
wide lands to benefit by the sunshine."

These witticisms, fired in quick retort, and leading to the sort of
giddy play that may be imagined, had given cause for the laughter
which had added to the Baroness' troubles by making her compare her
daughter's future lot with the present, when she was free to indulge
the light-heartedness of youth.

"But to give you a gem which cost him six months of work, he must be
under some great obligations to you?" said Hortense, in whom the
silver seal had suggested very serious reflections.

"Oh, you want to know too much at once!" said her cousin. "But,
listen, I will let you into a little plot."

"Is your lover in it too?"

"Oh, ho! you want so much to see him! But, as you may suppose, an old
maid like Cousin Betty, who had managed to keep a lover for five
years, keeps him well hidden.--Now, just let me alone. You see, I have
neither cat nor canary, neither dog nor a parrot, and the old Nanny
Goat wanted something to pet and tease--so I treated myself to a
Polish Count."

"Has he a moustache?"

"As long as that," said Lisbeth, holding up her shuttle filled with
gold thread. She always took her lace-work with her, and worked till
dinner was served.

"If you ask too many questions, you will be told nothing," she went
on. "You are but two-and-twenty, and you chatter more than I do though
I am forty-two--not to say forty-three."

"I am listening; I am a wooden image," said Hortense.

"My lover has finished a bronze group ten inches high," Lisbeth went
on. "It represents Samson slaying a lion, and he has kept it buried
till it is so rusty that you might believe it to be as old as Samson
himself. This fine piece is shown at the shop of one of the old
curiosity sellers on the Place du Carrousel, near my lodgings. Now,
your father knows Monsieur Popinot, the Minister of Commerce and
Agriculture, and the Comte de Rastignac, and if he would mention the
group to them as a fine antique he had seen by chance! It seems that
such things take the fancy of your grand folks, who don't care so much
about gold lace, and that my man's fortune would be made if one of
them would buy or even look at the wretched piece of metal. The poor
fellow is sure that it might be mistaken for old work, and that the
rubbish is worth a great deal of money. And then, if one of the
ministers should purchase the group, he would go to pay his respects,
and prove that he was the maker, and be almost carried in triumph! Oh!
he believes he has reached the pinnacle; poor young man, and he is as
proud as two newly-made Counts."

"Michael Angelo over again; but, for a lover, he has kept his head on
his shoulders!" said Hortense. "And how much does he want for it?"

"Fifteen hundred francs. The dealer will not let it go for less, since
he must take his commission."

"Papa is in the King's household just now," said Hortense. "He sees
those two ministers every day at the Chamber, and he will do the thing
--I undertake that. You will be a rich woman, Madame la Comtesse de
Steinbock."

"No, the boy is too lazy; for whole weeks he sits twiddling with bits
of red wax, and nothing comes of it. Why, he spends all his days at
the Louvre and the Library, looking at prints and sketching things. He
is an idler!"

The cousins chatted and giggled; Hortense laughing a forced laugh, for
she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through--
the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form, when every thought
is accreted round some form which is suggested by a chance word, as
the efflorescence of hoar-frost gathers about a straw that the wind
has blown against the window-sill.

For the past ten months she had made a reality of her cousin's
imaginary romance, believing, like her mother, that Lisbeth would
never marry; and now, within a week, this visionary being had become
Comte Wenceslas Steinbock, the dream had a certificate of birth, the
wraith had solidified into a young man of thirty. The seal she held in
her hand--a sort of Annunciation in which genius shone like an
immanent light--had the powers of a talisman. Hortense felt such a
surge of happiness, that she almost doubted whether the tale were
true; there was a ferment in her blood, and she laughed wildly to
deceive her cousin.

"But I think the drawing-room door is open," said Lisbeth; "let us go
and see if Monsieur Crevel is gone."

"Mamma has been very much out of spirits these two days. I suppose the
marriage under discussion has come to nothing!"

"Oh, it may come on again. He is--I may tell you so much--a Councillor
of the Supreme Court. How would you like to be Madame la Presidente?
If Monsieur Crevel has a finger in it, he will tell me about it if I
ask him. I shall know by to-morrow if there is any hope."

"Leave the seal with me," said Hortense; "I will not show it--mamma's
birthday is not for a month yet; I will give it to you that morning."

"No, no. Give it back to me; it must have a case."

"But I will let papa see it, that he may know what he is talking about
to the ministers, for men in authority must be careful what they say,"
urged the girl.

"Well, do not show it to your mother--that is all I ask; for if she
believed I had a lover, she would make game of me."

"I promise."

The cousins reached the drawing-room just as the Baroness turned
faint. Her daughter's cry of alarm recalled her to herself. Lisbeth
went off to fetch some salts. When she came back, she found the mother
and daughter in each other's arms, the Baroness soothing her
daughter's fears, and saying:

"It was nothing; a little nervous attack.--There is your father," she
added, recognizing the Baron's way of ringing the bell. "Say not a
word to him."

Adeline rose and went to meet her husband, intending to take him into
the garden and talk to him till dinner should be served of the
difficulties about the proposed match, getting him to come to some
decision as to the future, and trying to hint at some warning advice.

Baron Hector Hulot came in, in a dress at once lawyer-like and
Napoleonic, for Imperial men--men who had been attached to the Emperor
--were easily distinguishable by their military deportment, their blue
coats with gilt buttons, buttoned to the chin, their black silk stock,
and an authoritative demeanor acquired from a habit of command in
circumstances requiring despotic rapidity. There was nothing of the
old man in the Baron, it must be admitted; his sight was still so
good, that he could read without spectacles; his handsome oval face,
framed in whiskers that were indeed too black, showed a brilliant
complexion, ruddy with the veins that characterize a sanguine
temperament; and his stomach, kept in order by a belt, had not
exceeded the limits of "the majestic," as Brillat-Savarin says. A fine
aristocratic air and great affability served to conceal the libertine
with whom Crevel had had such high times. He was one of those men
whose eyes always light up at the sight of a pretty woman, even of
such as merely pass by, never to be seen again.

"Have you been speaking, my dear?" asked Adeline, seeing him with an
anxious brow.

"No," replied Hector, "but I am worn out with hearing others speak for
two hours without coming to a vote. They carry on a war of words, in
which their speeches are like a cavalry charge which has no effect on
the enemy. Talk has taken the place of action, which goes very much
against the grain with men who are accustomed to marching orders, as I
said to the Marshal when I left him. However, I have enough of being
bored on the ministers' bench; here I may play.--How do, la Chevre!--
Good morning, little kid," and he took his daughter round the neck,
kissed her, and made her sit on his knee, resting her head on his
shoulder, that he might feel her soft golden hair against his cheek.

"He is tired and worried," said his wife to herself. "I shall only
worry him more.--I will wait.--Are you going to be at home this
evening?" she asked him.

"No, children. After dinner I must go out. If it had not been the day
when Lisbeth and the children and my brother come to dinner, you would
not have seen me at all."

The Baroness took up the newspaper, looked down the list of theatres,
and laid it down again when she had seen that Robert le Diable was
to be given at the Opera. Josepha, who had left the Italian Opera six
months since for the French Opera, was to take the part of Alice.

This little pantomime did not escape the Baron, who looked hard at his
wife. Adeline cast down her eyes and went out into the garden; her
husband followed her.

"Come, what is it, Adeline?" said he, putting his arm round her waist
and pressing her to his side. "Do not you know that I love you more
than----"

"More than Jenny Cadine or Josepha!" said she, boldly interrupting
him.

"Who put that into your head?" exclaimed the Baron, releasing his
wife, and starting back a step or two.

"I got an anonymous letter, which I burnt at once, in which I was
told, my dear, that the reason Hortense's marriage was broken off was
the poverty of our circumstances. Your wife, my dear Hector, would
never have said a word; she knew of your connection with Jenny Cadine,
and did she ever complain?--But as the mother of Hortense, I am bound
to speak the truth."

Hulot, after a short silence, which was terrible to his wife, whose
heart beat loud enough to be heard, opened his arms, clasped her to
his heart, kissed her forehead, and said with the vehemence of
enthusiasm:

"Adeline, you are an angel, and I am a wretch----"

"No, no," cried the Baroness, hastily laying her hand upon his lips to
hinder him from speaking evil of himself.

"Yes, for I have not at this moment a sou to give to Hortense, and I
am most unhappy. But since you open your heart to me, I may pour into
it the trouble that is crushing me.--Your Uncle Fischer is in
difficulties, and it is I who dragged him there, for he has accepted
bills for me to the amount of twenty-five thousand francs! And all for
a woman who deceives me, who laughs at me behind my back, and calls me
an old dyed Tom. It is frightful! A vice which costs me more than it
would to maintain a family!--And I cannot resist!--I would promise you
here and now never to see that abominable Jewess again; but if she
wrote me two lines, I should go to her, as we marched into fire under
the Emperor."

"Do not be so distressed," cried the poor woman in despair, but
forgetting her daughter as she saw the tears in her husband's eyes.
"There are my diamonds; whatever happens, save my uncle."

"Your diamonds are worth scarcely twenty thousand francs nowadays.
That would not be enough for old Fischer, so keep them for Hortense; I
will see the Marshal to-morrow."

"My poor dear!" said the Baroness, taking her Hector's hands and
kissing them.

This was all the scolding he got. Adeline sacrificed her jewels, the
father made them a present to Hortense, she regarded this as a sublime
action, and she was helpless.

"He is the master; he could take everything, and he leaves me my
diamonds; he is divine!"

This was the current of her thoughts; and indeed the wife had gained
more by her sweetness than another perhaps could have achieved by a
fit of angry jealousy.

The moralist cannot deny that, as a rule, well-bred though very wicked
men are far more attractive and lovable than virtuous men; having
crimes to atone for, they crave indulgence by anticipation, by being
lenient to the shortcomings of those who judge them, and they are
thought most kind. Though there are no doubt some charming people
among the virtuous, Virtue considers itself fair enough, unadorned, to
be at no pains to please; and then all really virtuous persons, for
the hypocrites do not count, have some slight doubts as to their
position; they believe that they are cheated in the bargain of life on
the whole, and they indulge in acid comments after the fashion of
those who think themselves unappreciated.

Hence the Baron, who accused himself of ruining his family, displayed
all his charm of wit and his most seductive graces for the benefit of
his wife, for his children, and his Cousin Lisbeth.

Then, when his son arrived with Celestine, Crevel's daughter, who was
nursing the infant Hulot, he was delightful to his daughter-in-law,
loading her with compliments--a treat to which Celestine's vanity was
little accustomed for no moneyed bride more commonplace or more
utterly insignificant was ever seen. The grandfather took the baby
from her, kissed it, declared it was a beauty and a darling; he spoke
to it in baby language, prophesied that it would grow to be taller
than himself, insinuated compliments for his son's benefit, and
restored the child to the Normandy nurse who had charge of it.
Celestine, on her part, gave the Baroness a look, as much as to say,
"What a delightful man!" and she naturally took her father-in-law's
part against her father.

After thus playing the charming father-in-law and the indulgent
grandpapa, the Baron took his son into the garden, and laid before him
a variety of observations full of good sense as to the attitude to be
taken up by the Chamber on a certain ticklish question which had that
morning come under discussion. The young lawyer was struck with
admiration for the depth of his father's insight, touched by his
cordiality, and especially by the deferential tone which seemed to
place the two men on a footing of equality.

Monsieur Hulot junior was in every respect the young Frenchman, as
he has been moulded by the Revolution of 1830; his mind infatuated
with politics, respectful of his own hopes, and concealing them under
an affectation of gravity, very envious of successful men, making
sententiousness do the duty of witty rejoinders--the gems of the
French language--with a high sense of importance, and mistaking
arrogance for dignity.

Such men are walking coffins, each containing a Frenchman of the past;
now and again the Frenchman wakes up and kicks against his English-
made casing; but ambition stifles him, and he submits to be smothered.
The coffin is always covered with black cloth.

"Ah, here is my brother!" said Baron Hulot, going to meet the Count at
the drawing-room door.

Having greeted the probable successor of the late Marshal Montcornet,
he led him forward by the arm with every show of affection and
respect.

The older man, a member of the Chamber of Peers, but excused from
attendance on account of his deafness, had a handsome head, chilled by
age, but with enough gray hair still to be marked in a circle by the
pressure of his hat. He was short, square, and shrunken, but carried
his hale old age with a free-and-easy air; and as he was full of
excessive activity, which had now no purpose, he divided his time
between reading and taking exercise. In a drawing-room he devoted his
attention to waiting on the wishes of the ladies.

"You are very merry here," said he, seeing that the Baron shed a
spirit of animation on the little family gathering. "And yet Hortense
is not married," he added, noticing a trace of melancholy on his
sister-in-law's countenance.

"That will come all in good time," Lisbeth shouted in his ear in a
formidable voice.

"So there you are, you wretched seedling that could never blossom,"
said he, laughing.

The hero of Forzheim rather liked Cousin Betty, for there were certain
points of resemblance between them. A man of the ranks, without any
education, his courage had been the sole mainspring of his military
promotion, and sound sense had taken the place of brilliancy. Of the
highest honor and clean-handed, he was ending a noble life in full
contentment in the centre of his family, which claimed all his
affections, and without a suspicion of his brother's still
undiscovered misconduct. No one enjoyed more than he the pleasing
sight of this family party, where there never was the smallest
disagreement, for the brothers and sisters were all equally attached,
Celestine having been at once accepted as one of the family. But the
worthy little Count wondered now and then why Monsieur Crevel never
joined the party. "Papa is in the country," Celestine shouted, and it
was explained to him that the ex-perfumer was away from home.

This perfect union of all her family made Madame Hulot say to herself,
"This, after all, is the best kind of happiness, and who can deprive
us of it?"

The General, on seeing his favorite Adeline the object of her
husband's attentions, laughed so much about it that the Baron, fearing
to seem ridiculous, transferred his gallantries to his daughter-in-
law, who at these family dinners was always the object of his flattery
and kind care, for he hoped to win Crevel back through her, and make
him forego his resentment.

Any one seeing this domestic scene would have found it hard to believe
that the father was at his wits' end, the mother in despair, the son
anxious beyond words as to his father's future fate, and the daughter
on the point of robbing her cousin of her lover.

At seven o'clock the Baron, seeing his brother, his son, the Baroness,
and Hortense all engaged at whist, went off to applaud his mistress at
the Opera, taking with him Lisbeth Fischer, who lived in the Rue du
Doyenne, and who always made an excuse of the solitude of that
deserted quarter to take herself off as soon as dinner was over.
Parisians will all admit that the old maid's prudence was but
rational.

The existence of the maze of houses under the wing of the old Louvre
is one of those protests against obvious good sense which Frenchmen
love, that Europe may reassure itself as to the quantum of brains they
are known to have, and not be too much alarmed. Perhaps without
knowing it, this reveals some profound political idea.

It will surely not be a work of supererogation to describe this part
of Paris as it is even now, when we could hardly expect its survival;
and our grandsons, who will no doubt see the Louvre finished, may
refuse to believe that such a relic of barbarism should have survived
for six-and-thirty years in the heart of Paris and in the face of the
palace where three dynasties of kings have received, during those
thirty-six years, the elite of France and of Europe.

Between the little gate leading to the Bridge of the Carrousel and the
Rue du Musee, every one having come to Paris, were it but for a few
days, must have seen a dozen of houses with a decayed frontage where
the dejected owners have attempted no repairs, the remains of an old
block of buildings of which the destruction was begun at the time when
Napoleon determined to complete the Louvre. This street, and the blind
alley known as the Impasse du Doyenne, are the only passages into this
gloomy and forsaken block, inhabited perhaps by ghosts, for there
never is anybody to be seen. The pavement is much below the footway of
the Rue du Musee, on a level with that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Thus,
half sunken by the raising of the soil, these houses are also wrapped
in the perpetual shadow cast by the lofty buildings of the Louvre,
darkened on that side by the northern blast. Darkness, silence, an icy
chill, and the cavernous depth of the soil combine to make these
houses a kind of crypt, tombs of the living. As we drive in a hackney
cab past this dead-alive spot, and chance to look down the little Rue
du Doyenne, a shudder freezes the soul, and we wonder who can lie
there, and what things may be done there at night, at an hour when the
alley is a cut-throat pit, and the vices of Paris run riot there under
the cloak of night. This question, frightful in itself, becomes
appalling when we note that these dwelling-houses are shut in on the
side towards the Rue de Richelieu by marshy ground, by a sea of
tumbled paving-stones between them and the Tuileries, by little
garden-plots and suspicious-looking hovels on the side of the great
galleries, and by a desert of building-stone and old rubbish on the
side towards the old Louvre. Henri III. and his favorites in search of
their trunk-hose, and Marguerite's lovers in search of their heads,
must dance sarabands by moonlight in this wilderness overlooked by the
roof of a chapel still standing there as if to prove that the Catholic
religion--so deeply rooted in France--survives all else.

For forty years now has the Louvre been crying out by every gap in
these damaged walls, by every yawning window, "Rid me of these warts
upon my face!" This cutthroat lane has no doubt been regarded as
useful, and has been thought necessary as symbolizing in the heart of
Paris the intimate connection between poverty and the splendor that is
characteristic of the queen of cities. And indeed these chill ruins,
among which the Legitimist newspaper contracted the disease it is
dying of--the abominable hovels of the Rue du Musee, and the hoarding
appropriated by the shop stalls that flourish there--will perhaps live
longer and more prosperously than three successive dynasties.

In 1823 the low rents in these already condemned houses had tempted
Lisbeth Fischer to settle there, notwithstanding the necessity imposed
upon her by the state of the neighborhood to get home before
nightfall. This necessity, however, was in accordance with the country
habits she retained, of rising and going to bed with the sun, an
arrangement which saves country folk considerable sums in lights and
fuel. She lived in one of the houses which, since the demolition of
the famous Hotel Cambaceres, command a view of the square.

Just as Baron Hulot set his wife's cousin down at the door of this
house, saying, "Good-night, Cousin," an elegant-looking woman, young,
small, slender, pretty, beautifully dressed, and redolent of some
delicate perfume, passed between the wall and the carriage to go in.
This lady, without any premeditation, glanced up at the Baron merely
to see the lodger's cousin, and the libertine at once felt the swift
impression which all Parisians know on meeting a pretty woman,
realizing, as entomologists have it, their desiderata; so he waited
to put on one of his gloves with judicious deliberation before getting
into the carriage again, to give himself an excuse for allowing his
eye to follow the young woman, whose skirts were pleasingly set out by
something else than these odious and delusive crinoline bustles.

"That," said he to himself, "is a nice little person whose happiness I
should like to provide for, as she would certainly secure mine."

When the unknown fair had gone into the hall at the foot of the stairs
going up to the front rooms, she glanced at the gate out of the corner
of her eye without precisely looking round, and she could see the
Baron riveted to the spot in admiration, consumed by curiosity and
desire. This is to every Parisian woman a sort of flower which she
smells at with delight, if she meets it on her way. Nay, certain
women, though faithful to their duties, pretty, and virtuous, come
home much put out if they have failed to cull such a posy in the
course of their walk.

The lady ran upstairs, and in a moment a window on the second floor
was thrown open, and she appeared at it, but accompanied by a man
whose baldhead and somewhat scowling looks announced him as her
husband.

"If they aren't sharp and ingenious, the cunning jades!" thought the
Baron. "She does that to show me where she lives. But this is getting
rather warm, especially for this part of Paris. We must mind what we
are at."

As he got into the milord, he looked up, and the lady and the
husband hastily vanished, as though the Baron's face had affected them
like the mythological head of Medusa.

"It would seem that they know me," thought the Baron. "That would
account for everything."

As the carriage went up the Rue du Musee, he leaned forward to see the
lady again, and in fact she was again at the window. Ashamed of being
caught gazing at the hood under which her admirer was sitting, the
unknown started back at once.

"Nanny shall tell me who it is," said the Baron to himself.

The sight of the Government official had, as will be seen, made a deep
impression on this couple.

"Why, it is Baron Hulot, the chief of the department to which my
office belongs!" exclaimed the husband as he left the window.

"Well, Marneffe, the old maid on the third floor at the back of the
courtyard, who lives with that young man, is his cousin. Is it not odd
that we should never have known that till to-day, and now find it out
by chance?"

"Mademoiselle Fischer living with a young man?" repeated the husband.
"That is porter's gossip; do not speak so lightly of the cousin of a
Councillor of State who can blow hot and cold in the office as he
pleases. Now, come to dinner; I have been waiting for you since four
o'clock."

Pretty--very pretty--Madame Marneffe, the natural daughter of Comte
Montcornet, one of Napoleon's most famous officers, had, on the
strength of a marriage portion of twenty thousand francs, found a
husband in an inferior official at the War Office. Through the
interest of the famous lieutenant-general--made marshal of France six
months before his death--this quill-driver had risen to unhoped-for
dignity as head-clerk of his office; but just as he was to be promoted
to be deputy-chief, the marshal's death had cut off Marneffe's
ambitions and his wife's at the root. The very small salary enjoyed by
Sieur Marneffe had compelled the couple to economize in the matter of
rent; for in his hands Mademoiselle Valerie Fortin's fortune had
already melted away--partly in paying his debts, and partly in the
purchase of necessaries for furnishing a house, but chiefly in
gratifying the requirements of a pretty young wife, accustomed in her
mother's house to luxuries she did not choose to dispense with. The
situation of the Rue du Doyenne, within easy distance of the War
Office, and the gay part of Paris, smiled on Monsieur and Madame
Marneffe, and for the last four years they had dwelt under the same
roof as Lisbeth Fischer.

Monsieur Jean-Paul-Stanislas Marneffe was one of the class of employes
who escape sheer brutishness by the kind of power that comes of
depravity. The small, lean creature, with thin hair and a starved
beard, an unwholesome pasty face, worn rather than wrinkled, with red-
lidded eyes harnessed with spectacles, shuffling in his gait, and yet
meaner in his appearance, realized the type of man that any one would
conceive of as likely to be placed in the dock for an offence against
decency.

The rooms inhabited by this couple had the illusory appearance of sham
luxury seen in many Paris homes, and typical of a certain class of
household. In the drawing-room, the furniture covered with shabby
cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes pretending to be Florentine
bronze, the clumsy cast chandelier merely lacquered, with cheap glass
saucers, the carpet, whose small cost was accounted for in advancing
life by the quality of cotton used in the manufacture, now visible to
the naked eye,--everything, down to the curtains, which plainly showed
that worsted damask has not three years of prime, proclaimed poverty
as loudly as a beggar in rags at a church door.

The dining-room, badly kept by a single servant, had the sickening
aspect of a country inn; everything looked greasy and unclean.

Monsieur's room, very like a schoolboy's, furnished with the bed and
fittings remaining from his bachelor days, as shabby and worn as he
was, dusted perhaps once a week--that horrible room where everything
was in a litter, with old socks hanging over the horsehair-seated
chairs, the pattern outlined in dust, was that of a man to whom home
is a matter of indifference, who lives out of doors, gambling in cafes
or elsewhere.

Madame's room was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that
disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke
and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered
every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were
situated in the part of the house which, on one side of the courtyard,
joined the front half, looking out on the street, to the wing forming
the inner side of the court backing against the adjoining property.
Handsomely hung with chintz, furnished with rosewood, and thickly
carpeted, they proclaimed themselves as belonging to a pretty woman--
and indeed suggested the kept mistress. A clock in the fashionable
style stood on the velvet-covered mantelpiece. There was a nicely
fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled.
The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little
sofa, and all the lady's frippery bore the stamp of fashion or
caprice. Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or
quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a
dandy would have had no fault to find but that the taste of all this
luxury was commonplace. Art, and the distinction that comes of the
choice of things that taste assimilates, was entirely wanting. A
doctor of social science would have detected a lover in two or three
specimens of costly trumpery, which could only have come there through
that demi-god--always absent, but always present if the lady is
married.

The dinner, four hours behind time, to which the husband, wife, and
child sat down, betrayed the financial straits in which the household
found itself, for the table is the surest thermometer for gauging the
income of a Parisian family. Vegetable soup made with the water
haricot beans had been boiled in, a piece of stewed veal and potatoes
sodden with water by way of gravy, a dish of haricot beans, and cheap
cherries, served and eaten in cracked plates and dishes, with the
dull-looking and dull-sounding forks of German silver--was this a
banquet worthy of this pretty young woman? The Baron would have wept
could he have seen it. The dingy decanters could not disguise the vile
hue of wine bought by the pint at the nearest wineshop. The table-
napkins had seen a week's use. In short, everything betrayed
undignified penury, and the equal indifference of the husband and wife
to the decencies of home. The most superficial observer on seeing them
would have said that these two beings had come to the stage when the
necessity of living had prepared them for any kind of dishonor that
might bring luck to them. Valerie's first words to her husband will
explain the delay that had postponed the dinner by the not
disinterested devotion of the cook.

"Samanon will only take your bills at fifty per cent, and insists on a
lien on your salary as security."

So poverty, still unconfessed in the house of the superior official,
and hidden under a stipend of twenty-four thousand francs,
irrespective of presents, had reached its lowest stage in that of the
clerk.

"You have caught on with the chief," said the man, looking at his
wife.

"I rather think so," replied she, understanding the full meaning of
his slang expression.

"What is to become of us?" Marneffe went on. "The landlord will be
down on us to-morrow. And to think of your father dying without making
a will! On my honor, those men of the Empire all think themselves as
immortal as their Emperor."

"Poor father!" said she. "I was his only child, and he was very fond
of me. The Countess probably burned the will. How could he forget me
when he used to give us as much as three or four thousand-franc notes
at once, from time to time?"

"We owe four quarters' rent, fifteen hundred francs. Is the furniture
worth so much? That is the question, as Shakespeare says."

"Now, good-bye, ducky!" said Valerie, who had only eaten a few
mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted all the gravy
for a brave soldier just home from Algiers. "Great evils demand heroic
remedies."

"Valerie, where are you off to?" cried Marneffe, standing between his
wife and the door.

"I am going to see the landlord," she replied, arranging her ringlets
under her smart bonnet. "You had better try to make friends with that
old maid, if she really is your chief's cousin."

The ignorance in which the dwellers under one roof can exist as to the
social position of their fellow-lodgers is a permanent fact which, as
much as any other, shows what the rush of Paris life is. Still, it is
easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his
office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a
woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an
old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house
they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.

Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her
bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she
went to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor
chatted with her neighbors. Here was one of those anonymous,
entomological existences such as are to be met with in many large
tenements where, at the end of four years, you unexpectedly learn that
up on the fourth floor there is an old man lodging who knew Voltaire,
Pilatre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel, Mole, Sophie Arnould, Franklin,
and Robespierre. What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said
concerning Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know, in consequence,
partly, of the loneliness of the neighborhood, and of the alliance, to
which their necessities had led, between them and the doorkeepers,
whose goodwill was too important to them not to have been carefully
encouraged.

Now, the old maid's pride, silence, and reserve had engendered in the
porter and his wife the exaggerated respect and cold civility which
betray the unconfessed annoyance of an inferior. Also, the porter
thought himself in all essentials the equal of any lodger whose rent
was no more than two hundred and fifty francs. Cousin Betty's
confidences to Hortense were true; and it is evident that the porter's
wife might be very likely to slander Mademoiselle Fischer in her
intimate gossip with the Marneffes, while only intending to tell
tales.

When Lisbeth had taken her candle from the hands of worthy Madame
Olivier the portress, she looked up to see whether the windows of the
garret over her own rooms were lighted up. At that hour, even in July,
it was so dark within the courtyard that the old maid could not get to
bed without a light.

"Oh, you may be quite easy, Monsieur Steinbock is in his room. He has
not been out even," said Madame Olivier, with meaning.

Lisbeth made no reply. She was still a peasant, in so far that she was
indifferent to the gossip of persons unconnected with her. Just as a
peasant sees nothing beyond his village, she cared for nobody's
opinion outside the little circle in which she lived. So she boldly
went up, not to her own room, but to the garret; and this is why. At
dessert she had filled her bag with fruit and sweets for her lover,
and she went to give them to him, exactly as an old lady brings home a
biscuit for her dog.

She found the hero of Hortense's dreams working by the light of a
small lamp, of which the light was intensified by the use of a bottle
of water as a lens--a pale young man, seated at a workman's bench
covered with a modeler's tools, wax, chisels, rough-hewn stone, and
bronze castings; he wore a blouse, and had in his hand a little group
in red wax, which he gazed at like a poet absorbed in his labors.

"Here, Wenceslas, see what I have brought you," said she, laying her
handkerchief on a corner of the table; then she carefully took the
sweetmeats and fruit out of her bag.

"You are very kind, mademoiselle," replied the exile in melancholy
tones.

"It will do you good, poor boy. You get feverish by working so hard;
you were not born to such a rough life."

Wenceslas Steinbock looked at her with a bewildered air.

"Eat--come, eat," said she sharply, "instead of looking at me as you
do at one of your images when you are satisfied with it."

On being thus smacked with words, the young man seemed less puzzled,
for this, indeed, was the female Mentor whose tender moods were always
a surprise to him, so much more accustomed was he to be scolded.

Though Steinbock was nine-and-twenty, like many fair men, he looked
five or six years younger; and seeing his youth, though its freshness
had faded under the fatigue and stress of life in exile, by the side
of that dry, hard face, it seemed as though Nature had blundered in
the distribution of sex. He rose and threw himself into a deep chair
of Louis XV. pattern, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, as if to
rest himself. The old maid took a greengage and offered it to him.

"Thank you," said he, taking the plum.

"Are you tired?" said she, giving him another.

"I am not tired with work, but tired of life," said he.

"What absurd notions you have!" she exclaimed with some annoyance.
"Have you not had a good genius to keep an eye on you?" she said,
offering him the sweetmeats, and watching him with pleasure as he ate
them all. "You see, I thought of you when dining with my cousin."

"I know," said he, with a look at Lisbeth that was at once
affectionate and plaintive, "but for you I should long since have
ceased to live. But, my dear lady, artists require relaxation----"

"Ah! there we come to the point!" cried she, interrupting him, her
hands on her hips, and her flashing eyes fixed on him. "You want to go
wasting your health in the vile resorts of Paris, like so many
artisans, who end by dying in the workhouse. No, no, make a fortune,
and then, when you have money in the funds, you may amuse yourself,
child; then you will have enough to pay for the doctor and for your
pleasure, libertine that you are."

Wenceslas Steinbock, on receiving this broadside, with an
accompaniment of looks that pierced him like a magnetic flame, bent
his head. The most malignant slanderer on seeing this scene would at
once have understood that the hints thrown out by the Oliviers were
false. Everything in this couple, their tone, manner, and way of
looking at each other, proved the purity of their private live. The
old maid showed the affection of rough but very genuine maternal
feeling; the young man submitted, as a respectful son yields to the
tyranny of a mother. The strange alliance seemed to be the outcome of
a strong will acting constantly on a weak character, on the fluid
nature peculiar to the Slavs, which, while it does not hinder them
from showing heroic courage in battle, gives them an amazing
incoherency of conduct, a moral softness of which physiologists ought
to try to detect the causes, since physiologists are to political life
what entomologists are to agriculture.

"But if I die before I am rich?" said Wenceslas dolefully.

"Die!" cried she. "Oh, I will not let you die. I have life enough for
both, and I would have my blood injected into your veins if
necessary."

Tears rose to Steinbock's eyes as he heard her vehement and artless
speech.

"Do not be unhappy, my little Wenceslas," said Lisbeth with feeling.
"My cousin Hortense thought your seal quite pretty, I am sure; and I
will manage to sell your bronze group, you will see; you will have
paid me off, you will be able to do as you please, you will soon be
free. Come, smile a little!"

"I can never repay you, mademoiselle," said the exile.

"And why not?" asked the peasant woman, taking the Livonian's part
against herself.

"Because you not only fed me, lodged me, cared for me in my poverty,
but you also gave me strength. You have made me what I am; you have
often been stern, you have made me very unhappy----"

"I?" said the old maid. "Are you going to pour out all your nonsense
once more about poetry and the arts, and to crack your fingers and
stretch your arms while you spout about the ideal, and beauty, and all
your northern madness?--Beauty is not to compare with solid pudding--
and what am I!--You have ideas in your brain? What is the use of them?
I too have ideas. What is the good of all the fine things you may have
in your soul if you can make no use of them? Those who have ideas do
not get so far as those who have none, if they don't know which way to
go.

"Instead of thinking over your ideas you must work.--Now, what have
you done while I was out?"

"What did your pretty cousin say?"

"Who told you she was pretty?" asked Lisbeth sharply, in a tone hollow
with tiger-like jealousy.

"Why, you did."

"That was only to see your face. Do you want to go trotting after
petticoats? You who are so fond of women, well, make them in bronze.
Let us see a cast of your desires, for you will have to do without the
ladies for some little time yet, and certainly without my cousin, my
good fellow. She is not game for your bag; that young lady wants a man
with sixty thousand francs a year--and has found him!

"Why, your bed is not made!" she exclaimed, looking into the adjoining
room. "Poor dear boy, I quite forgot you!"

The sturdy woman pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and
remade the artist's little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This
mixture of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps
accounts for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she
regarded as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based
on its alternations of good and evil?

If the Livonian had happened to meet Madame Marneffe instead of
Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found a protectress whose complaisance
must have led him into some boggy or discreditable path, where he
would have been lost. He would certainly never have worked, nor the
artist have been hatched out. Thus, while he deplored the old maid's
grasping avarice, his reason bid him prefer her iron hand to the life
of idleness and peril led by many of his fellow-countrymen.

This was the incident that had given rise to the coalition of female
energy and masculine feebleness--a contrast in union said not to be
uncommon in Poland.

In 1833 Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes worked into the night when
business was good, at about one o'clock one morning perceived a strong
smell of carbonic acid gas, and heard the groans of a dying man. The
fumes and the gasping came from a garret over the two rooms forming
her dwelling, and she supposed that a young man who had but lately
come to lodge in this attic--which had been vacant for three years--
was committing suicide. She ran upstairs, broke in the door by a push
with her peasant strength, and found the lodger writhing on a camp-bed
in the convulsions of death. She extinguished the brazier; the door
was open, the air rushed in, and the exile was saved. Then, when
Lisbeth had put him to bed like a patient, and he was asleep, she
could detect the motives of his suicide in the destitution of the
rooms, where there was nothing whatever but a wretched table, the
camp-bed, and two chairs.

On the table lay a document, which she read:

"I am Count Wenceslas Steinbock, born at Prelia, in Livonia.

"No one is to be accused of my death; my reasons for killing
myself are, in the words of Kosciusko, Finis Polonioe!

"The grand-nephew of a valiant General under Charles XII. could
not beg. My weakly constitution forbids my taking military
service, and I yesterday saw the last of the hundred thalers which
I had brought with me from Dresden to Paris. I have left twenty-
five francs in the drawer of this table to pay the rent I owe to
the landlord.

"My parents being dead, my death will affect nobody. I desire that
my countrymen will not blame the French Government. I have never
registered myself as a refugee, and I have asked for nothing; I
have met none of my fellow-exiles; no one in Paris knows of my
existence.

"I am dying in Christian beliefs. May God forgive the last of the
Steinbocks!

"WENCESLAS."

Mademoiselle Fischer, deeply touched by the dying man's honesty,
opened the drawer and found the five five-franc pieces to pay his
rent.

"Poor young man!" cried she. "And with no one in the world to care
about him!"

She went downstairs to fetch her work, and sat stitching in the
garret, watching over the Livonian gentleman.

When he awoke his astonishment may be imagined on finding a woman
sitting by his bed; it was like the prolongation of a dream. As she
sat there, covering aiguillettes with gold thread, the old maid had
resolved to take charge of the poor youth whom she admired as he lay
sleeping.

As soon as the young Count was fully awake, Lisbeth talked to give him
courage, and questioned him to find out how he might make a living.
Wenceslas, after telling his story, added that he owed his position to
his acknowledged talent for the fine arts. He had always had a
preference for sculpture; the necessary time for study had, however,
seemed to him too long for a man without money; and at this moment he
was far too weak to do any hard manual labor or undertake an important
work in sculpture. All this was Greek to Lisbeth Fischer. She replied
to the unhappy man that Paris offered so many openings that any man
with will and courage might find a living there. A man of spirit need
never perish if he had a certain stock of endurance.

"I am but a poor girl myself, a peasant, and I have managed to make
myself independent," said she in conclusion. "If you will work in
earnest, I have saved a little money, and I will lend you, month by
month, enough to live upon; but to live frugally, and not to play
ducks and drakes with or squander in the streets. You can dine in
Paris for twenty-five sous a day, and I will get you your breakfast
with mine every day. I will furnish your rooms and pay for such
teaching as you may think necessary. You shall give me formal
acknowledgment for the money I may lay out for you, and when you are
rich you shall repay me all. But if you do not work, I shall not
regard myself as in any way pledged to you, and I shall leave you to
your fate."

"Ah!" cried the poor fellow, still smarting from the bitterness of his
first struggle with death, "exiles from every land may well stretch
out their hands to France, as the souls in Purgatory do to Paradise.
In what other country is such help to be found, and generous hearts
even in such a garret as this? You will be everything to me, my
beloved benefactress; I am your slave! Be my sweetheart," he added,
with one of the caressing gestures familiar to the Poles, for which
they are unjustly accused of servility.

"Oh, no; I am too jealous, I should make you unhappy; but I will
gladly be a sort of comrade," replied Lisbeth.

"Ah, if only you knew how I longed for some fellow-creature, even a
tyrant, who would have something to say to me when I was struggling in
the vast solitude of Paris!" exclaimed Wenceslas. "I regretted
Siberia, whither I should be sent by the Emperor if I went home.--Be
my Providence!--I will work; I will be a better man than I am, though
I am not such a bad fellow!"

"Will you do whatever I bid you?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Well, then, I will adopt you as my child," said she lightly. "Here I
am with a son risen from the grave. Come! we will begin at once. I
will go out and get what I want; you can dress, and come down to
breakfast with me when I knock on the ceiling with the broomstick."

That day, Mademoiselle Fischer made some inquiries, at the houses to
which she carried her work home, as to the business of a sculptor. By
dint of many questions she ended by hearing of the studio kept by
Florent and Chanor, a house that made a special business of casting
and finishing decorative bronzes and handsome silver plate. Thither
she went with Steinbock, recommending him as an apprentice in
sculpture, an idea that was regarded as too eccentric. Their business
was to copy the works of the greatest artists, but they did not teach
the craft. The old maid's persistent obstinacy so far succeeded that
Steinbock was taken on to design ornament. He very soon learned to
model ornament, and invented novelties; he had a gift for it.

Five months after he was out of his apprenticeship as a finisher, he
made acquaintance with Stidmann, the famous head of Florent's studios.
Within twenty months Wenceslas was ahead of his master; but in thirty
months the old maid's savings of sixteen years had melted entirely.
Two thousand five hundred francs in gold!--a sum with which she had
intended to purchase an annuity; and what was there to show for it? A
Pole's receipt! And at this moment Lisbeth was working as hard as in
her young days to supply the needs of her Livonian.

When she found herself the possessor of a piece of paper instead of
her gold louis, she lost her head, and went to consult Monsieur Rivet,
who for fifteen years had been his clever head-worker's friend and
counselor. On hearing her story, Monsieur and Madame Rivet scolded
Lisbeth, told her she was crazy, abused all refugees whose plots for
reconstructing their nation compromised the prosperity of the country
and the maintenance of peace; and they urged Lisbeth to find what in
trade is called security.

"The only hold you have over this fellow is on his liberty," observed
Monsieur Rivet.

Monsieur Achille Rivet was assessor at the Tribunal of Commerce.

"Imprisonment is no joke for a foreigner," said he. "A Frenchman
remains five years in prison and comes out, free of his debts to be
sure, for he is thenceforth bound only by his conscience, and that
never troubles him; but a foreigner never comes out.--Give me your
promissory note; my bookkeeper will take it up; he will get it
protested; you will both be prosecuted and both be condemned to
imprisonment in default of payment; then, when everything is in due
form, you must sign a declaration. By doing this your interest will be
accumulating, and you will have a pistol always primed to fire at your
Pole!"

The old maid allowed these legal steps to be taken, telling her
protege not to be uneasy, as the proceedings were merely to afford a
guarantee to a money-lender who agreed to advance them certain sums.
This subterfuge was due to the inventive genius of Monsieur Rivet. The
guileless artist, blindly trusting to his benefactress, lighted his
pipe with the stamped paper, for he smoked as all men do who have
sorrows or energies that need soothing.

One fine day Monsieur Rivet showed Mademoiselle Fischer a schedule,
and said to her:

"Here you have Wenceslas Steinbock bound hand and foot, and so
effectually, that within twenty-four hours you can have him snug in
Clichy for the rest of his days."

This worthy and honest judge at the Chamber of Commerce experienced
that day the satisfaction that must come of having done a malignant
good action. Beneficence has so many aspects in Paris that this
contradictory expression really represents one of them. The Livonian
being fairly entangled in the toils of commercial procedure, the point
was to obtain payment; for the illustrious tradesman looked on
Wenceslas as a swindler. Feeling, sincerity, poetry, were in his eyes
mere folly in business matters.

So Rivet went off to see, in behalf of that poor Mademoiselle Fischer,
who, as he said, had been "done" by the Pole, the rich manufacturers
for whom Steinbock had worked. It happened that Stidmann--who, with
the help of these distinguished masters of the goldsmiths' art, was
raising French work to the perfection it has now reached, allowing it
to hold its own against Florence and the Renaissance--Stidmann was in
Chanor's private room when the army lace manufacturer called to make
inquiries as to "One Steinbock, a Polish refugee."

"Whom do you call 'One Steinbock'? Do you mean a young Livonian who
was a pupil of mine?" cried Stidmann ironically. "I may tell you,
monsieur, that he is a very great artist. It is said of me that I
believe myself to be the Devil. Well, that poor fellow does not know
that he is capable of becoming a god."

"Indeed," said Rivet, well pleased. And then he added, "Though you
take a rather cavalier tone with a man who has the honor to be an
Assessor on the Tribunal of Commerce of the Department of the Seine."

"Your pardon, Consul!" said Stidmann, with a military salute.

"I am delighted," the Assessor went on, "to hear what you say. The man
may make money then?"

"Certainly," said Chanor; "but he must work. He would have a tidy sum
by now if he had stayed with us. What is to be done? Artists have a
horror of not being free."

"They have a proper sense of their value and dignity," replied
Stidmann. "I do not blame Wenceslas for walking alone, trying to make
a name, and to become a great man; he had a right to do so! But he was
a great loss to me when he left."

"That, you see," exclaimed Rivet, "is what all young students aim at
as soon as they are hatched out of the school-egg. Begin by saving
money, I say, and seek glory afterwards."

"It spoils your touch to be picking up coin," said Stidmann. "It is
Glory's business to bring us wealth."

"And, after all," said Chanor to Rivet, "you cannot tether them."

"They would eat the halter," replied Stidmann.

"All these gentlemen have as much caprice as talent," said Chanor,
looking at Stidmann. "They spend no end of money; they keep their
girls, they throw coin out of window, and then they have no time to
work. They neglect their orders; we have to employ workmen who are
very inferior, but who grow rich; and then they complain of the hard
times, while, if they were but steady, they might have piles of gold."

"You old Lumignon," said Stidmann, "you remind me of the publisher
before the Revolution who said--'If only I could keep Montesquieu,
Voltaire, and Rousseau very poor in my backshed, and lock up their
breeches in a cupboard, what a lot of nice little books they would
write to make my fortune.'--If works of art could be hammered out like
nails, workmen would make them.--Give me a thousand francs, and don't
talk nonsense."

Worthy Monsieur Rivet went home, delighted for poor Mademoiselle
Fischer, who dined with him every Monday, and whom he found waiting
for him.

"If you can only make him work," said he, "you will have more luck
than wisdom; you will be repaid, interest, capital, and costs. This
Pole has talent, he can make a living; but lock up his trousers and
his shoes, do not let him go to the Chaumiere or the parish of
Notre-Dame de Lorette, keep him in leading-strings. If you do not take
such precautions, your artist will take to loafing, and if you only
knew what these artists mean by loafing! Shocking! Why, I have just
heard that they will spend a thousand-franc note in a day!"

This episode had a fatal influence on the home-life of Wenceslas and
Lisbeth. The benefactress flavored the exile's bread with the wormwood
of reproof, now that she saw her money in danger, and often believed
it to be lost. From a kind mother she became a stepmother; she took
the poor boy to task, she nagged him, scolded him for working too
slowly, and blamed him for having chosen so difficult a profession.
She could not believe that those models in red wax--little figures and
sketches for ornamental work--could be of any value. Before long,
vexed with herself for her severity, she would try to efface the tears
by her care and attention.

Then the poor young man, after groaning to think that he was dependent
on this shrew and under the thumb of a peasant of the Vosges, was
bewitched by her coaxing ways and by a maternal affection that
attached itself solely to the physical and material side of life. He
was like a woman who forgives a week of ill-usage for the sake of a
kiss and a brief reconciliation.

Thus Mademoiselle Fischer obtained complete power over his mind. The
love of dominion that lay as a germ in the old maid's heart developed
rapidly. She could now satisfy her pride and her craving for action;
had she not a creature belonging to her, to be schooled, scolded,
flattered, and made happy, without any fear of a rival? Thus the good
and bad sides of her nature alike found play. If she sometimes
victimized the poor artist, she had, on the other hand, delicate
impulses like the grace of wild flowers; it was a joy to her to
provide for all his wants; she would have given her life for him, and
Wenceslas knew it. Like every noble soul, the poor fellow forgot the
bad points, the defects of the woman who had told him the story of her
life as an excuse for her rough ways, and he remembered only the
benefits she had done him.

One day, exasperated with Wenceslas for having gone out walking
instead of sitting at work, she made a great scene.

"You belong to me," said she. "If you were an honest man, you would
try to repay me the money you owe as soon as possible."

The gentleman, in whose veins the blood of the Steinbocks was fired,
turned pale.

"Bless me," she went on, "we soon shall have nothing to live on but
the thirty sous I earn--a poor work-woman!"

The two penniless creatures, worked up by their own war of words, grew
vehement; and for the first time the unhappy artist reproached his
benefactress for having rescued him from death only to make him lead
the life of a galley slave, worse than the bottomless void, where at
least, said he, he would have found rest. And he talked of flight.

"Flight!" cried Lisbeth. "Ah, Monsieur Rivet was right."

And she clearly explained to the Pole that within twenty-four hours he
might be clapped into prison for the rest of his days. It was a
crushing blow. Steinbock sank into deep melancholy and total silence.

In the course of the following night, Lisbeth hearing overhead some
preparations for suicide, went up to her pensioner's room, and gave
him the schedule and a formal release.

"Here, dear child, forgive me," she said with tears in her eyes. "Be
happy; leave me! I am too cruel to you; only tell me that you will
sometimes remember the poor girl who has enabled you to make a living.
--What can I say? You are the cause of my ill-humor. I might die;
where would you be without me? That is the reason of my being
impatient to see you do some salable work. I do not want my money back
for myself, I assure you! I am only frightened at your idleness, which
you call meditation; at your ideas, which take up so many hours when
you sit gazing at the sky; I want you to get into habits of industry."

All this was said with an emphasis, a look, and tears that moved the
high-minded artist; he clasped his benefactress to his heart and
kissed her forehead.

"Keep these pieces," said he with a sort of cheerfulness. "Why should
you send me to Clichy? Am I not a prisoner here out of gratitude?"

This episode of their secret domestic life had occurred six months
previously, and had led to Steinbock's producing three finished works:
the seal in Hortense's possession, the group he had placed with the
curiosity dealer, and a beautiful clock to which he was putting the
last touches, screwing in the last rivets.

This clock represented the twelve Hours, charmingly personified by
twelve female figures whirling round in so mad and swift a dance that
three little Loves perched on a pile of fruit and flowers could not
stop one of them; only the torn skirts of Midnight remained in the
hand of the most daring cherub. The group stood on an admirably
treated base, ornamented with grotesque beasts. The hours were told by
a monstrous mouth that opened to yawn, and each Hour bore some
ingeniously appropriate symbol characteristic of the various
occupations of the day.

It is now easy to understand the extraordinary attachment of
Mademoiselle Fischer for her Livonian; she wanted him to be happy, and
she saw him pining, fading away in his attic. The causes of this
wretched state of affairs may be easily imagined. The peasant woman
watched this son of the North with the affection of a mother, with the
jealousy of a wife, and the spirit of a dragon; hence she managed to
put every kind of folly or dissipation out of his power by leaving him
destitute of money. She longed to keep her victim and companion for
herself alone, well conducted perforce, and she had no conception of
the cruelty of this senseless wish, since she, for her own part, was
accustomed to every privation. She loved Steinbock well enough not to
marry him, and too much to give him up to any other woman; she could
not resign herself to be no more than a mother to him, though she saw
that she was mad to think of playing the other part.

These contradictions, this ferocious jealousy, and the joy of having a
man to herself, all agitated her old maid's heart beyond measure.
Really in love as she had been for four years, she cherished the
foolish hope of prolonging this impossible and aimless way of life in
which her persistence would only be the ruin of the man she thought of
as her child. This contest between her instincts and her reason made
her unjust and tyrannical. She wreaked on the young man her vengeance
for her own lot in being neither young, rich, nor handsome; then,
after each fit of rage, recognizing herself wrong, she stooped to
unlimited humility, infinite tenderness. She never could sacrifice to
her idol till she had asserted her power by blows of the axe. In fact,
it was the converse of Shakespeare's Tempest--Caliban ruling Ariel
and Prospero.

As to the poor youth himself, high-minded, meditative, and inclined to
be lazy, the desert that his protectress made in his soul might be
seen in his eyes, as in those of a caged lion. The penal servitude
forced on him by Lisbeth did not fulfil the cravings of his heart. His
weariness became a physical malady, and he was dying without daring to
ask, or knowing where to procure, the price of some little necessary
dissipation. On some days of special energy, when a feeling of utter
ill-luck added to his exasperation, he would look at Lisbeth as a
thirsty traveler on a sandy shore must look at the bitter sea-water.

These harsh fruits of indigence, and this isolation in the midst of
Paris, Lisbeth relished with delight. And besides, she foresaw that
the first passion would rob her of her slave. Sometimes she even
blamed herself because her own tyranny and reproaches had compelled
the poetic youth to become so great an artist of delicate work, and
she had thus given him the means of casting her off.

On the day after, these three lives, so differently but so utterly
wretched--that of a mother in despair, that of the Marneffe household,
and that of the unhappy exile--were all to be influenced by Hortense's
guileless passion, and by the strange outcome of the Baron's luckless
passion for Josepha.

Just as Hulot was going into the opera-house, he was stopped by the
darkened appearance of the building and of the Rue le Peletier, where
there were no gendarmes, no lights, no theatre-servants, no barrier to
regulate the crowd. He looked up at the announcement-board, and beheld
a strip of white paper, on which was printed the solemn notice:

"CLOSED ON ACCOUNT OF ILLNESS."

He rushed off to Josepha's lodgings in the Rue Chauchat; for, like all
the singers, she lived close at hand.

"Whom do you want, sir?" asked the porter, to the Baron's great
astonishment.

"Have you forgotten me?" said Hulot, much puzzled.

"On the contrary, sir, it is because I have the honor to remember you
that I ask you, Where are you going?"

A mortal chill fell upon the Baron.

"What has happened?" he asked.

"If you go up to Mademoiselle Mirah's rooms, Monsieur le Baron, you
will find Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout there--and Monsieur Bixiou,
Monsieur Leon de Lora, Monsieur Lousteau, Monsieur de Vernisset,
Monsieur Stidmann; and ladies smelling of patchouli--holding a
housewarming."

"Then, where--where is----?"

"Mademoiselle Mirah?--I don't know that I ought to tell you."

The Baron slipped two five-franc pieces into the porter's hand.

"Well, she is now in the Rue de la Ville l'Eveque, in a fine house,
given to her, they say, by the Duc d'Herouville," replied the man in a
whisper.

Having ascertained the number of the house, Monsieur Hulot called a
milord and drove to one of those pretty modern houses with double
doors, where everything, from the gaslight at the entrance, proclaims
luxury.

The Baron, in his blue cloth coat, white neckcloth, nankeen trousers,
patent leather boots, and stiffly starched shirt-frill, was supposed
to be a guest, though a late arrival, by the janitor of this new Eden.
His alacrity of manner and quick step justified this opinion.

The porter rang a bell, and a footman appeared in the hall. This man,
as new as the house, admitted the visitor, who said to him in an
imperious tone, and with a lordly gesture:

"Take in this card to Mademoiselle Josepha."

The victim mechanically looked round the room in which he found
himself--an anteroom full of choice flowers and of furniture that must
have cost twenty thousand francs. The servant, on his return, begged
monsieur to wait in the drawing-room till the company came to their
coffee.

Though the Baron had been familiar with Imperial luxury, which was
undoubtedly prodigious, while its productions, though not durable in
kind, had nevertheless cost enormous sums, he stood dazzled,
dumfounded, in this drawing-room with three windows looking out on a
garden like fairyland, one of those gardens that are created in a
month with a made soil and transplanted shrubs, while the grass seems
as if it must be made to grow by some chemical process. He admired not
only the decoration, the gilding, the carving, in the most expensive
Pompadour style, as it is called, and the magnificent brocades, all of
which any enriched tradesman could have procured for money; but he
also noted such treasures as only princes can select and find, can pay
for and give away; two pictures by Greuze, two by Watteau, two heads
by Vandyck, two landscapes by Ruysdael, and two by le Guaspre, a
Rembrandt, a Holbein, a Murillo, and a Titian, two paintings, by
Teniers, and a pair by Metzu, a Van Huysum, and an Abraham Mignon--in
short, two hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures superbly framed.
The gilding was worth almost as much as the paintings.

"Ah, ha! Now you understand, my good man?" said Josepha.

She had stolen in on tiptoe through a noiseless door, over Persian
carpets, and came upon her adorer, standing lost in amazement--in the
stupid amazement when a man's ears tingle so loudly that he hears
nothing but that fatal knell.

The words "my good man," spoken to an official of such high
importance, so perfectly exemplified the audacity with which these
creatures pour contempt on the loftiest, that the Baron was nailed to
the spot. Josepha, in white and yellow, was so beautifully dressed for
the banquet, that amid all this lavish magnificence she still shone
like a rare jewel.

"Isn't this really fine?" said she. "The Duke has spent all the money
on it that he got out of floating a company, of which the shares all
sold at a premium. He is no fool, is my little Duke. There is nothing
like a man who has been a grandee in his time for turning coals into
gold. Just before dinner the notary brought me the title-deeds to sign
and the bills receipted!--They are all a first-class set in there--
d'Esgrignon, Rastignac, Maxime, Lenoncourt, Verneuil, Laginski,
Rochefide, la Palferine, and from among the bankers Nucingen and du
Tillet, with Antonia, Malaga, Carabine, and la Schontz; and they all
feel for you deeply.--Yes, old boy, and they hope you will join them,
but on condition that you forthwith drink up to two bottles full of
Hungarian wine, Champagne, or Cape, just to bring you up to their
mark.--My dear fellow, we are all so much on here, that it was
necessary to close the Opera. The manager is as drunk as a cornet-a-
piston; he is hiccuping already."

"Oh, Josepha!----" cried the Baron.

"Now, can anything be more absurd than explanations?" she broke in
with a smile. "Look here; can you stand six hundred thousand francs
which this house and furniture cost? Can you give me a bond to the
tune of thirty thousand francs a year, which is what the Duke has just
given me in a packet of common sugared almonds from the grocer's?--a
pretty notion that----"

"What an atrocity!" cried Hulot, who in his fury would have given his
wife's diamonds to stand in the Duc d'Herouville's shoes for twenty-
four hours.

"Atrocity is my trade," said she. "So that is how you take it? Well,
why don't you float a company? Goodness me! my poor dyed Tom, you
ought to be grateful to me; I have thrown you over just when you would
have spent on me your widow's fortune, your daughter's portion.--What,
tears! The Empire is a thing of the past--I hail the coming Empire!"

She struck a tragic attitude, and exclaimed:

"They call you Hulot! Nay, I know you not--"

And she went into the other room.

Through the door, left ajar, there came, like a lightning-flash, a
streak of light with an accompaniment of the crescendo of the orgy and
the fragrance of a banquet of the choicest description.

The singer peeped through the partly open door, and seeing Hulot
transfixed as if he had been a bronze image, she came one step forward
into the room.

"Monsieur," said she, "I have handed over the rubbish in the Rue
Chauchat to Bixiou's little Heloise Brisetout. If you wish to claim
your cotton nightcap, your bootjack, your belt, and your wax dye, I
have stipulated for their return."

This insolent banter made the Baron leave the room as precipitately as
Lot departed from Gomorrah, but he did not look back like Mrs. Lot.

Hulot went home, striding along in a fury, and talking to himself; he
found his family still playing the game of whist at two sous a point,
at which he left them. On seeing her husband return, poor Adeline
imagined something dreadful, some dishonor; she gave her cards to
Hortense, and led Hector away into the very room where, only five
hours since, Crevel had foretold her the utmost disgrace of poverty.

"What is the matter?" she said, terrified.

"Oh, forgive me--but let me tell you all these horrors." And for ten
minutes he poured out his wrath.

"But, my dear," said the unhappy woman, with heroic courage, "these
creatures do not know what love means--such pure and devoted love as
you deserve. How could you, so clear-sighted as you are, dream of
competing with millions?"

"Dearest Adeline!" cried the Baron, clasping her to his heart.

The Baroness' words had shed balm on the bleeding wounds to his
vanity.

"To be sure, take away the Duc d'Herouville's fortune, and she could
not hesitate between us!" said the Baron.

"My dear," said Adeline with a final effort, "if you positively must
have mistresses, why do you not seek them, like Crevel, among women
who are less extravagant, and of a class that can for a time be
content with little? We should all gain by that arrangement.--I
understand your need--but I do not understand that vanity----"

"Oh, what a kind and perfect wife you are!" cried he. "I am an old
lunatic, I do not deserve to have such a wife!"

"I am simply the Josephine of my Napoleon," she replied, with a touch
of melancholy.

"Josephine was not to compare with you!" said he. "Come; I will play a
game of whist with my brother and the children. I must try my hand at
the business of a family man; I must get Hortense a husband, and bury
the libertine."

His frankness so greatly touched poor Adeline, that she said:

"The creature has no taste to prefer any man in the world to my
Hector. Oh, I would not give you up for all the gold on earth. How can
any woman throw you over who is so happy as to be loved by you?"

The look with which the Baron rewarded his wife's fanaticism confirmed
her in her opinion that gentleness and docility were a woman's
strongest weapons.

But in this she was mistaken. The noblest sentiments, carried to an
excess, can produce mischief as great as do the worst vices. Bonaparte
was made Emperor for having fired on the people, at a stone's throw
from the spot where Louis XVI. lost his throne and his head because he
would not allow a certain Monsieur Sauce to be hurt.

On the following morning, Hortense, who had slept with the seal under
her pillow, so as to have it close to her all night, dressed very
early, and sent to beg her father to join her in the garden as soon as
he should be down.

By about half-past nine, the father, acceding to his daughter's
petition, gave her his arm for a walk, and they went along the quays
by the Pont Royal to the Place du Carrousel.

"Let us look into the shop windows, papa," said Hortense, as they went
through the little gate to cross the wide square.

"What--here?" said her father, laughing at her.

"We are supposed to have come to see the pictures, and over there"--
and she pointed to the stalls in front of the houses at a right angle
to the Rue du Doyenne--"look! there are dealers in curiosities and
pictures----"

"Your cousin lives there."

"I know it, but she must not see us."

"And what do you want to do?" said the Baron, who, finding himself
within thirty yards of Madame Marneffe's windows, suddenly remembered
her.

Hortense had dragged her father in front of one of the shops forming
the angle of a block of houses built along the front of the Old
Louvre, and facing the Hotel de Nantes. She went into this shop; her
father stood outside, absorbed in gazing at the windows of the pretty
little lady, who, the evening before, had left her image stamped on
the old beau's heart, as if to alleviate the wound he was so soon to
receive; and he could not help putting his wife's sage advice into
practice.

"I will fall back on a simple little citizen's wife," said he to
himself, recalling Madame Marneffe's adorable graces. "Such a woman as
that will soon make me forget that grasping Josepha."

Now, this was what was happening at the same moment outside and inside
the curiosity shop.

As he fixed his eyes on the windows of his new belle, the Baron saw
the husband, who, while brushing his coat with his own hands, was
apparently on the lookout, expecting to see some one on the square.
Fearing lest he should be seen, and subsequently recognized, the
amorous Baron turned his back on the Rue du Doyenne, or rather stood
at three-quarters' face, as it were, so as to be able to glance round
from time to time. This manoeuvre brought him face to face with Madame
Marneffe, who, coming up from the quay, was doubling the promontory of
houses to go home.

Valerie was evidently startled as she met the Baron's astonished eye,
and she responded with a prudish dropping of her eyelids.

"A pretty woman," exclaimed he, "for whom a man would do many foolish
things."

"Indeed, monsieur?" said she, turning suddenly, like a woman who has
just come to some vehement decision, "you are Monsieur le Baron Hulot,
I believe?"

The Baron, more and more bewildered, bowed assent.

"Then, as chance has twice made our eyes meet, and I am so fortunate
as to have interested or puzzled you, I may tell you that, instead of
doing anything foolish, you ought to do justice.--My husband's fate
rests with you."

"And how may that be?" asked the gallant Baron.

"He is employed in your department in the War Office, under Monsieur
Lebrun, in Monsieur Coquet's room," said she with a smile.

"I am quite disposed, Madame--Madame----?"

"Madame Marneffe."

"Dear little Madame Marneffe, to do injustice for your sake.--I have a
cousin living in your house; I will go to see her one day soon--as
soon as possible; bring your petition to me in her rooms."

"Pardon my boldness, Monsieur le Baron; you must understand that if I
dare to address you thus, it is because I have no friend to protect
me----"

"Ah, ha!"

"Monsieur, you misunderstand me," said she, lowering her eyelids.

Hulot felt as if the sun had disappeared.

"I am at my wits' end, but I am an honest woman!" she went on. "About
six months ago my only protector died, Marshal Montcornet--"

"Ah! You are his daughter?"

"Yes, monsieur; but he never acknowledged me."

"That was that he might leave you part of his fortune."

"He left me nothing; he made no will."

"Indeed! Poor little woman! The Marshal died suddenly of apoplexy.
But, come, madame, hope for the best. The State must do something for
the daughter of one of the Chevalier Bayards of the Empire."

Madame Marneffe bowed gracefully and went off, as proud of her success
as the Baron was of his.

"Where the devil has she been so early?" thought he watching the flow
of her skirts, to which she contrived to impart a somewhat exaggerated
grace. "She looks too tired to have just come from a bath, and her
husband is waiting for her. It is strange, and puzzles me altogether."

Madame Marneffe having vanished within, the Baron wondered what his
daughter was doing in the shop. As he went in, still staring at Madame
Marneffe's windows, he ran against a young man with a pale brow and
sparkling gray eyes, wearing a summer coat of black merino, coarse
drill trousers, and tan shoes, with gaiters, rushing away headlong; he
saw him run to the house in the Rue du Doyenne, into which he went.

Hortense, on going into the shop, had at once recognized the famous
group, conspicuously placed on a table in the middle and in front of
the door. Even without the circumstances to which she owed her
knowledge of this masterpiece, it would probably have struck her by
the peculiar power which we must call the brio--the go--of great
works; and the girl herself might in Italy have been taken as a model
for the personification of Brio.

Not every work by a man of genius has in the same degree that
brilliancy, that glory which is at once patent even to the most
ignoble beholder. Thus, certain pictures by Raphael, such as the
famous Transfiguration, the Madonna di Foligno, and the frescoes
of the Stanze in the Vatican, do not at first captivate our
admiration, as do the Violin-player in the Sciarra Palace, the
portraits of the Doria family, and the Vision of Ezekiel in the
Pitti Gallery, the Christ bearing His Cross in the Borghese
collection, and the Marriage of the Virgin in the Brera at Milan.
The Saint John the Baptist of the Tribuna, and Saint Luke painting
the Virgin's portrait in the Accademia at Rome, have not the charm of
the Portrait of Leo X., and of the Virgin at Dresden.

And yet they are all of equal merit. Nay, more. The Stanze, the
Transfiguration, the panels, and the three easel pictures in the
Vatican are in the highest degree perfect and sublime. But they demand
a stress of attention, even from the most accomplished beholder, and
serious study, to be fully understood; while the Violin-player, the
Marriage of the Virgin, and the Vision of Ezekiel go straight to
the heart through the portal of sight, and make their home there. It
is a pleasure to receive them thus without an effort; if it is not the
highest phase of art, it is the happiest. This fact proves that, in
the begetting of works of art, there is as much chance in the
character of the offspring as there is in a family of children; that
some will be happily graced, born beautiful, and costing their mothers
little suffering, creatures on whom everything smiles, and with whom
everything succeeds; in short, genius, like love, has its fairer
blossoms.

This brio, an Italian word which the French have begun to use, is
characteristic of youthful work. It is the fruit of an impetus and
fire of early talent--an impetus which is met with again later in some
happy hours; but this particular brio no longer comes from the
artist's heart; instead of his flinging it into his work as a volcano
flings up its fires, it comes to him from outside, inspired by
circumstances, by love, or rivalry, often by hatred, and more often
still by the imperious need of glory to be lived up to.

This group by Wenceslas was to his later works what the Marriage of
the Virgin is to the great mass of Raphael's, the first step of a
gifted artist taken with the inimitable grace, the eagerness, and
delightful overflowingness of a child, whose strength is concealed
under the pink-and-white flesh full of dimples which seem to echo to a
mother's laughter. Prince Eugene is said to have paid four hundred
thousand francs for this picture, which would be worth a million to
any nation that owned no picture by Raphael, but no one would give
that sum for the finest of the frescoes, though their value is far
greater as works of art.

Hortense restrained her admiration, for she reflected on the amount of
her girlish savings; she assumed an air of indifference, and said to
the dealer:

"What is the price of that?"

"Fifteen hundred francs," replied the man, sending a glance of
intelligence to a young man seated on a stool in the corner.

The young man himself gazed in a stupefaction at Monsieur Hulot's
living masterpiece. Hortense, forewarned, at once identified him as
the artist, from the color that flushed a face pale with endurance;
she saw the spark lighted up in his gray eyes by her question; she
looked on the thin, drawn features, like those of a monk consumed by
asceticism; she loved the red, well-formed mouth, the delicate chin,
and the Pole's silky chestnut hair.

"If it were twelve hundred," said she, "I would beg you to send it to
me."

"It is antique, mademoiselle," the dealer remarked, thinking, like all
his fraternity, that, having uttered this ne plus ultra of bric-a-
brac, there was no more to be said.

"Excuse me, monsieur," she replied very quietly, "it was made this
year; I came expressly to beg you, if my price is accepted, to send
the artist to see us, as it might be possible to procure him some
important commissions."

"And if he is to have the twelve hundred francs, what am I to
get? I am the dealer," said the man, with candid good-humor.

"To be sure!" replied the girl, with a slight curl of disdain.

"Oh! mademoiselle, take it; I will make terms with the dealer,"
cried the Livonian, beside himself.

Fascinated by Hortense's wonderful beauty and the love of art she
displayed, he added:

"I am the sculptor of the group, and for ten days I have come here
three times a day to see if anybody would recognize its merit and
bargain for it. You are my first admirer--take it!"

"Come, then, monsieur, with the dealer, an hour hence.--Here is my
father's card," replied Hortense.

Then, seeing the shopkeeper go into a back room to wrap the group in a
piece of linen rag, she added in a low voice, to the great
astonishment of the artist, who thought he must be dreaming:

"For the benefit of your future prospects, Monsieur Wenceslas, do not
mention the name of the purchaser to Mademoiselle Fischer, for she is
our cousin."

The word cousin dazzled the artist's mind; he had a glimpse of
Paradise whence this daughter of Eve had come to him. He had dreamed
of the beautiful girl of whom Lisbeth had told him, as Hortense had
dreamed of her cousin's lover; and, as she had entered the shop--

"Ah!" thought he, "if she could but be like this!"

The look that passed between the lovers may be imagined; it was a
flame, for virtuous lovers have no hypocrisies.

"Well, what the deuce are you doing here?" her father asked her.

"I have been spending twelve hundred francs that I had saved. Come."
And she took her father's arm.

"Twelve hundred francs?" he repeated.

"To be exact, thirteen hundred; you will lend me the odd hundred?"

"And on what, in such a place, could you spend so much?"

"Ah! that is the question!" replied the happy girl. "If I have got a
husband, he is not dear at the money."

"A husband! In that shop, my child?"

"Listen, dear little father; would you forbid my marrying a great
artist?"

"No, my dear. A great artist in these days is a prince without a title
--he has glory and fortune, the two chief social advantages--next to
virtue," he added, in a smug tone.

"Oh, of course!" said Hortense. "And what do you think of sculpture?"

"It is very poor business," replied Hulot, shaking his head. "It needs
high patronage as well as great talent, for Government is the only
purchaser. It is an art with no demand nowadays, where there are no
princely houses, no great fortunes, no entailed mansions, no
hereditary estates. Only small pictures and small figures can find a
place; the arts are endangered by this need of small things."

"But if a great artist could find a demand?" said Hortense.

"That indeed would solve the problem."

"Or had some one to back him?"

"That would be even better."

"If he were of noble birth?"

"Pooh!"

"A Count."

"And a sculptor?"

"He has no money."

"And so he counts on that of Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot?" said the
Baron ironically, with an inquisitorial look into his daughter's eyes.

"This great artist, a Count and a sculptor, has just seen your
daughter for the first time in his life, and for the space of five
minutes, Monsieur le Baron," Hortense calmly replied. "Yesterday, you
must know, dear little father, while you were at the Chamber, mamma
had a fainting fit. This, which she ascribed to a nervous attack, was
the result of some worry that had to do with the failure of my
marriage, for she told me that to get rid of me---"

"She is too fond of you to have used an expression----"

"So unparliamentary!" Hortense put in with a laugh. "No, she did not
use those words; but I know that a girl old enough to marry and who
does not find a husband is a heavy cross for respectable parents to
bear.--Well, she thinks that if a man of energy and talent could be
found, who would be satisfied with thirty thousand francs for my
marriage portion, we might all be happy. In fact, she thought it
advisable to prepare me for the modesty of my future lot, and to
hinder me from indulging in too fervid dreams.--Which evidently meant
an end to the intended marriage, and no settlements for me!"

"Your mother is a very good woman, noble, admirable!" replied the
father, deeply humiliated, though not sorry to hear this confession.

"She told me yesterday that she had your permission to sell her
diamonds so as to give me something to marry on; but I should like her
to keep her jewels, and to find a husband myself. I think I have found
the man, the possible husband, answering to mamma's prospectus----"

"There?--in the Place du Carrousel?--and in one morning?"

"Oh, papa, the mischief lies deeper!" said she archly.

"Well, come, my child, tell the whole story to your good old father,"
said he persuasively, and concealing his uneasiness.

Under promise of absolute secrecy, Hortense repeated the upshot of her
various conversations with her Cousin Betty. Then, when they got home,
she showed the much-talked-of-seal to her father in evidence of the
sagacity of her views. The father, in the depth of his heart, wondered
at the skill and acumen of girls who act on instinct, discerning the
simplicity of the scheme which her idealized love had suggested in the
course of a single night to his guileless daughter.

"You will see the masterpiece I have just bought; it is to be brought
home, and that dear Wenceslas is to come with the dealer.--The man who
made that group ought to make a fortune; only use your influence to
get him an order for a statue, and rooms at the Institut----"

"How you run on!" cried her father. "Why, if you had your own way, you
would be man and wife within the legal period--in eleven days----"

"Must we wait so long?" said she, laughing. "But I fell in love with
him in five minutes, as you fell in love with mamma at first sight.
And he loves me as if we had known each other for two years. Yes," she
said in reply to her father's look, "I read ten volumes of love in his
eyes. And will not you and mamma accept him as my husband when you see
that he is a man of genius? Sculpture is the greatest of the Arts,"
she cried, clapping her hands and jumping. "I will tell you
everything----"

"What, is there more to come?" asked her father, smiling.

The child's complete and effervescent innocence had restored her
father's peace of mind.

"A confession of the first importance," said she. "I loved him without
knowing him; and, for the last hour, since seeing him, I am crazy
about him."

"A little too crazy!" said the Baron, who was enjoying the sight of
this guileless passion.

"Do not punish me for confiding in you," replied she. "It is so
delightful to say to my father's heart, 'I love him! I am so happy in
loving him!'--You will see my Wenceslas! His brow is so sad. The sun
of genius shines in his gray eyes--and what an air he has! What do you
think of Livonia? Is it a fine country?--The idea of Cousin Betty's
marrying that young fellow! She might be his mother. It would be
murder! I am quite jealous of all she has ever done for him. But I
don't think my marriage will please her."

"See, my darling, we must hide nothing from your mother."

"I should have to show her the seal, and I promised not to betray
Cousin Lisbeth, who is afraid, she says, of mamma's laughing at her,"
said Hortense.

"You have scruples about the seal, and none about robbing your cousin
of her lover."

"I promised about the seal--I made no promise about the sculptor."

This adventure, patriarchal in its simplicity, came admirably a
propos to the unconfessed poverty of the family; the Baron, while
praising his daughter for her candor, explained to her that she must
now leave matters to the discretion of her parents.

"You understand, my child, that it is not your part to ascertain
whether your cousin's lover is a Count, if he has all his papers
properly certified, and if his conduct is a guarantee for his
respectability.--As for your cousin, she refused five offers when she
was twenty years younger; that will prove no obstacle, I undertake to
say."

"Listen to me, papa; if you really wish to see me married, never say a
word to Lisbeth about it till just before the contract is signed. I
have been catechizing her about this business for the last six months!
Well, there is something about her quite inexplicable----"

"What?" said her father, puzzled.

"Well, she looks evil when I say too much, even in joke, about her
lover. Make inquiries, but leave me to row my own boat. My confidence
ought to reassure you."

"The Lord said, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me.' You are one
of those who have come back again," replied the Baron with a touch of
irony.

After breakfast the dealer was announced, and the artist with his
group. The sudden flush that reddened her daughter's face at once made
the Baroness suspicious and then watchful, and the girl's confusion
and the light in her eyes soon betrayed the mystery so badly guarded
in her simple heart.

Count Steinbock, dressed in black, struck the Baron as a very
gentlemanly young man.

"Would you undertake a bronze statue?" he asked, as he held up the
group.

After admiring it on trust, he passed it on to his wife, who knew
nothing about sculpture.

"It is beautiful, isn't it, mamma?" said Hortense in her mother' ear.

"A statue! Monsieur, it is less difficult to execute a statue than to
make a clock like this, which my friend here has been kind enough to
bring," said the artist in reply.

The dealer was placing on the dining-room sideboard the wax model of
the twelve Hours that the Loves were trying to delay.

"Leave the clock with me," said the Baron, astounded at the beauty of
the sketch. "I should like to show it to the Ministers of the Interior
and of Commerce."

"Who is the young man in whom you take so much interest?" the Baroness
asked her daughter.

"An artist who could afford to execute this model could get a hundred
thousand francs for it," said the curiosity-dealer, putting on a
knowing and mysterious look as he saw that the artist and the girl
were interchanging glances. "He would only need to sell twenty copies
at eight thousand francs each--for the materials would cost about a
thousand crowns for each example. But if each copy were numbered and
the mould destroyed, it would certainly be possible to meet with
twenty amateurs only too glad to possess a replica of such a work."

"A hundred thousand francs!" cried Steinbock, looking from the dealer
to Hortense, the Baron, and the Baroness.

"Yes, a hundred thousand francs," repeated the dealer. "If I were rich
enough, I would buy it of you myself for twenty thousand francs; for
by destroying the mould it would become a valuable property. But one
of the princes ought to pay thirty or forty thousand francs for such a
work to ornament his drawing-room. No man has ever succeeded in making
a clock satisfactory alike to the vulgar and to the connoisseur, and
this one, sir, solves the difficulty."

"This is for yourself, monsieur," said Hortense, giving six gold
pieces to the dealer.

"Never breath a word of this visit to any one living," said the artist
to his friend, at the door. "If you should be asked where we sold the
group, mention the Duc d'Herouville, the famous collector in the Rue
de Varenne."

The dealer nodded assent.

"And your name?" said Hulot to the artist when he came back.

"Count Steinbock."

"Have you the papers that prove your identity?"

"Yes, Monsieur le Baron. They are in Russian and in German, but not
legalized."

"Do you feel equal to undertaking a statue nine feet high?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"Well, then, if the persons whom I shall consult are satisfied with
your work, I can secure you the commission for the statue of Marshal
Montcornet, which is to be erected on his monument at Pere-Lachaise.
The Minister of War and the old officers of the Imperial Guard have
subscribed a sum large enough to enable us to select our artist."

"Oh, monsieur, it will make my fortune!" exclaimed Steinbock,
overpowered by so much happiness at once.

"Be easy," replied the Baron graciously. "If the two ministers to whom
I propose to show your group and this sketch in wax are delighted with
these two pieces, your prospects of a fortune are good."

Hortense hugged her father's arm so tightly as to hurt him.

"Bring me your papers, and say nothing of your hopes to anybody, not
even to our old Cousin Betty."

"Lisbeth?" said Madame Hulot, at last understanding the end of all
this, though unable to guess the means.

"I could give proof of my skill by making a bust of the Baroness,"
added Wenceslas.

The artist, struck by Madame Hulot's beauty, was comparing the mother
and daughter.

"Indeed, monsieur, life may smile upon you," said the Baron, quite
charmed by Count Steinbock's refined and elegant manner. "You will
find out that in Paris no man is clever for nothing, and that
persevering toil always finds its reward here."

Hortense, with a blush, held out to the young man a pretty Algerine
purse containing sixty gold pieces. The artist, with something still
of a gentleman's pride, responded with a mounting color easy enough to
interpret.

"This, perhaps, is the first money your works have brought you?" said
Adeline.

"Yes, madame--my works of art. It is not the first-fruits of my labor,
for I have been a workman."

"Well, we must hope my daughter's money will bring you good luck,"
said she.

"And take it without scruple," added the Baron, seeing that Wenceslas
held the purse in his hand instead of pocketing it. "The sum will be
repaid by some rich man, a prince perhaps, who will offer it with
interest to possess so fine a work."

"Oh, I want it too much myself, papa, to give it up to anybody in the
world, even a royal prince!"

"I can make a far prettier thing than that for you, mademoiselle."

"But it would not be this one," replied she; and then, as if ashamed
of having said too much, she ran out into the garden.

"Then I shall break the mould and the model as soon as I go home,"
said Steinbock.

"Fetch me your papers, and you will hear of me before long, if you are
equal to what I expect of you, monsieur."

The artist on this could but take leave. After bowing to Madame Hulot
and Hortense, who came in from the garden on purpose, he went off to
walk in the Tuileries, not bearing--not daring--to return to his
attic, where his tyrant would pelt him with questions and wring his
secret from him.

Hortense's adorer conceived of groups and statues by the hundred; he
felt strong enough to hew the marble himself, like Canova, who was
also a feeble man, and nearly died of it. He was transfigured by
Hortense, who was to him inspiration made visible.

"Now then," said the Baroness to her daughter, "what does all this
mean?"

"Well, dear mamma, you have just seen Cousin Lisbeth's lover, who now,
I hope, is mine. But shut your eyes, know nothing. Good Heavens! I was
to keep it all from you, and I cannot help telling you everything----"

"Good-bye, children!" said the Baron, kissing his wife and daughter;
"I shall perhaps go to call on the Nanny, and from her I shall hear a
great deal about our young man."

"Papa, be cautious!" said Hortense.

"Oh! little girl!" cried the Baroness when Hortense had poured out her
poem, of which the morning's adventure was the last canto, "dear
little girl, Artlessness will always be the artfulest puss on earth!"

Genuine passions have an unerring instinct. Set a greedy man before a
dish of fruit and he will make no mistake, but take the choicest even
without seeing it. In the same way, if you allow a girl who is well
brought up to choose a husband for herself, if she is in a position to
meet the man of her heart, rarely will she blunder. The act of nature
in such cases is known as love at first sight; and in love, first
sight is practically second sight.

The Baroness' satisfaction, though disguised under maternal dignity,
was as great as her daughter's; for, of the three ways of marrying
Hortense of which Crevel had spoken, the best, as she opined, was
about to be realized. And she regarded this little drama as an answer
by Providence to her fervent prayers.

Mademoiselle Fischer's galley slave, obliged at last to go home,
thought he might hide his joy as a lover under his glee as an artist
rejoicing over his first success.

"Victory! my group is sold to the Duc d'Herouville, who is going to
give me some commissions," cried he, throwing the twelve hundred
francs in gold on the table before the old maid.

He had, as may be supposed concealed Hortense's purse; it lay next to
his heart.

"And a very good thing too," said Lisbeth. "I was working myself to
death. You see, child, money comes in slowly in the business you have
taken up, for this is the first you have earned, and you have been
grinding at it for near on five years now. That money barely repays me
for what you have cost me since I took your promissory note; that is
all I have got by my savings. But be sure of one thing," she said,
after counting the gold, "this money will all be spent on you. There
is enough there to keep us going for a year. In a year you may now be
able to pay your debt and have a snug little sum of your own, if you
go on in the same way."

Wenceslas, finding his trick successful, expatiated on the Duc
d'Herouville.

"I will fit you out in a black suit, and get you some new linen," said
Lisbeth, "for you must appear presentably before your patrons; and
then you must have a larger and better apartment than your horrible
garret, and furnish it property.--You look so bright, you are not like
the same creature," she added, gazing at Wenceslas.

"But my work is pronounced a masterpiece."

"Well, so much the better! Do some more," said the arid creature, who
was nothing but practical, and incapable of understanding the joy of
triumph or of beauty in Art. "Trouble your head no further about what
you have sold; make something else to sell. You have spent two hundred
francs in money, to say nothing of your time and your labor, on that
devil of a Samson. Your clock will cost you more than two thousand
francs to execute. I tell you what, if you will listen to me, you will
finish the two little boys crowning the little girl with cornflowers;
that would just suit the Parisians.--I will go round to Monsieur Graff
the tailor before going to Monsieur Crevel.--Go up now and leave me to
dress."

Next day the Baron, perfectly crazy about Madame Marneffe, went to see
Cousin Betty, who was considerably amazed on opening the door to see
who her visitor was, for he had never called on her before. She at
once said to herself, "Can it be that Hortense wants my lover?"--for
she had heard the evening before, at Monsieur Crevel's, that the
marriage with the Councillor of the Supreme Court was broken off.

"What, Cousin! you here? This is the first time you have ever been to
see me, and it is certainly not for love of my fine eyes that you have
come now."

"Fine eyes is the truth," said the Baron; "you have as fine eyes as I
have ever seen----"

"Come, what are you here for? I really am ashamed to receive you in
such a kennel."

The outer room of the two inhabited by Lisbeth served her as sitting-
room, dining-room, kitchen, and workroom. The furniture was such as
beseemed a well-to-do artisan--walnut-wood chairs with straw seats, a
small walnut-wood dining table, a work table, some colored prints in
black wooden frames, short muslin curtains to the windows, the floor
well polished and shining with cleanliness, not a speck of dust
anywhere, but all cold and dingy, like a picture by Terburg in every
particular, even to the gray tone given by a wall paper once blue and
now faded to gray. As to the bedroom, no human being had ever
penetrated its secrets.

The Baron took it all in at a glance, saw the sign-manual of
commonness on every detail, from the cast-iron stove to the household
utensils, and his gorge rose as he said to himself, "And this is
virtue!--What am I here for?" said he aloud. "You are far too cunning
not to guess, and I had better tell you plainly," cried he, sitting
down and looking out across the courtyard through an opening he made
in the puckered curtain. "There is a very pretty woman in the
house----"

"Madame Marneffe! Now I understand!" she exclaimed, seeing it all.
"But Josepha?"

"Alas, Cousin, Josepha is no more. I was turned out of doors like a
discarded footman."

"And you would like . . .?" said Lisbeth, looking at the Baron with
the dignity of a prude on her guard a quarter of an hour too soon.

"As Madame Marneffe is very much the lady, and the wife of an employe,
you can meet her without compromising yourself," the Baron went on,
"and I should like to see you neighborly. Oh! you need not be alarmed;
she will have the greatest consideration for the cousin of her
husband's chief."

At this moment the rustle of a gown was heard on the stairs and the
footstep of a woman wearing the thinnest boots. The sound ceased on
the landing. There was a tap at the door, and Madame Marneffe came in.

"Pray excuse me, mademoiselle, for thus intruding upon you, but I
failed to find you yesterday when I came to call; we are near
neighbors; and if I had known that you were related to Monsieur le
Baron, I should long since have craved your kind interest with him. I
saw him come in, so I took the liberty of coming across; for my
husband, Monsieur le Baron, spoke to me of a report on the office
clerks which is to be laid before the minister to-morrow."

She seemed quite agitated and nervous--but she had only run upstairs.

"You have no need to play the petitioner, fair lady," replied the
Baron. "It is I who should ask the favor of seeing you."

"Very well, if mademoiselle allows it, pray come!" said Madame
Marneffe.

"Yes--go, Cousin, I will join you," said Lisbeth judiciously.

The Parisienne had so confidently counted on the chief's visit and
intelligence, that not only had she dressed herself for so important
an interview--she had dressed her room. Early in the day it had been
furnished with flowers purchased on credit. Marneffe had helped his
wife to polish the furniture, down to the smallest objects, washing,
brushing, and dusting everything. Valerie wished to be found in an
atmosphere of sweetness, to attract the chief and to please him enough
to have a right to be cruel; to tantalize him as a child would, with
all the tricks of fashionable tactics. She had gauged Hulot. Give a
Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a
ministry.

The man of the Empire, accustomed to the ways to the Empire, was no
doubt quite ignorant of the ways of modern love-making, of the
scruples in vogue and the various styles of conversation invented
since 1830, which led to the poor weak woman being regarded as the
victim of her lover's desires--a Sister of Charity salving a wound, an
angel sacrificing herself.

This modern art of love uses a vast amount of evangelical phrases in
the service of the Devil. Passion is martyrdom. Both parties aspire to
the Ideal, to the Infinite; love is to make them so much better. All
these fine words are but a pretext for putting increased ardor into
the practical side of it, more frenzy into a fall than of old. This
hypocrisy, a characteristic of the times, is a gangrene in gallantry.
The lovers are both angels, and they behave, if they can, like two
devils.

Love had no time for such subtle analysis between two campaigns, and
in 1809 its successes were as rapid as those of the Empire. So, under
the Restoration, the handsome Baron, a lady's man once more, had begun
by consoling some old friends now fallen from the political firmament,
like extinguished stars, and then, as he grew old, was captured by
Jenny Cadine and Josepha.

Madame Marneffe had placed her batteries after due study of the
Baron's past life, which her husband had narrated in much detail,
after picking up some information in the offices. The comedy of modern
sentiment might have the charm of novelty to the Baron; Valerie had
made up her mind as to her scheme; and we may say the trial of her
power that she made this morning answered her highest expectations.
Thanks to her manoeuvres, sentimental, high-flown, and romantic,
Valerie, without committing herself to any promises, obtained for her
husband the appointment as deputy head of the office and the Cross of
the Legion of Honor.

The campaign was not carried out without little dinners at the Rocher
de Cancale, parties to the play, and gifts in the form of lace,
scarves, gowns, and jewelry. The apartment in the Rue du Doyenne was
not satisfactory; the Baron proposed to furnish another magnificently
in a charming new house in the Rue Vanneau.

Monsieur Marneffe got a fortnight's leave, to be taken a month hence
for urgent private affairs in the country, and a present in money; he
promised himself that he would spend both in a little town in
Switzerland, studying the fair sex.

While Monsieur Hulot thus devoted himself to the lady he was
"protecting," he did not forget the young artist. Comte Popinot,
Minister of Commerce, was a patron of Art; he paid two thousand francs
for a copy of the Samson on condition that the mould should be
broken, and that there should be no Samson but his and Mademoiselle
Hulot's. The group was admired by a Prince, to whom the model sketch
for the clock was also shown, and who ordered it; but that again was
to be unique, and he offered thirty thousand francs for it.

Artists who were consulted, and among them Stidmann, were of opinion
that the man who had sketched those two models was capable of
achieving a statue. The Marshal Prince de Wissembourg, Minister of
War, and President of the Committee for the subscriptions to the
monument of Marshal Montcornet, called a meeting, at which it was
decided that the execution of the work should be placed in Steinbock's
hands. The Comte de Rastignac, at that time Under-secretary of State,
wished to possess a work by the artist, whose glory was waxing amid
the acclamations of his rivals. Steinbock sold to him the charming
group of two little boys crowning a little girl, and he promised to
secure for the sculptor a studio attached to the Government marble-
quarries, situated, as all the world knows, at Le Gros-Caillou.

This was a success, such success as is won in Paris, that is to say,
stupendous success, that crushes those whose shoulders and loins are
not strong enough to bear it--as, be it said, not unfrequently is the
case. Count Wenceslas Steinbock was written about in all the
newspapers and reviews without his having the least suspicion of it,
any more than had Mademoiselle Fischer. Every day, as soon as Lisbeth
had gone out to dinner, Wenceslas went to the Baroness' and spent an
hour or two there, excepting on the evenings when Lisbeth dined with
the Hulots.

This state of things lasted for several days.

The Baron, assured of Count Steinbock's titles and position; the
Baroness, pleased with his character and habits; Hortense, proud of
her permitted love and of her suitor's fame, none of them hesitated to
speak of the marriage; in short, the artist was in the seventh heaven,
when an indiscretion on Madame Marneffe's part spoilt all.

And this was how.

Lisbeth, whom the Baron wished to see intimate with Madame Marneffe,
that she might keep an eye on the couple, had already dined with
Valerie; and she, on her part, anxious to have an ear in the Hulot
house, made much of the old maid. It occurred to Valerie to invite
Mademoiselle Fischer to a house-warming in the new apartments she was
about to move into. Lisbeth, glad to have found another house to dine
in, and bewitched by Madame Marneffe, had taken a great fancy to
Valerie. Of all the persons she had made acquaintance with, no one had
taken so much pains to please her. In fact, Madame Marneffe, full of
attentions for Mademoiselle Fischer, found herself in the position
towards Lisbeth that Lisbeth held towards the Baroness, Monsieur
Rivet, Crevel, and the others who invited her to dinner.

The Marneffes had excited Lisbeth's compassion by allowing her to see
the extreme poverty of the house, while varnishing it as usual with
the fairest colors; their friends were under obligations to them and
ungrateful; they had had much illness; Madame Fortin, her mother, had
never known of their distress, and had died believing herself wealthy
to the end, thanks to their superhuman efforts--and so forth.

"Poor people!" said she to her Cousin Hulot, "you are right to do what
you can for them; they are so brave and so kind! They can hardly live
on the thousand crowns he gets as deputy-head of the office, for they
have got into debt since Marshal Montcornet's death. It is barbarity
on the part of the Government to suppose that a clerk with a wife and
family can live in Paris on two thousand four hundred francs a year."

And so, within a very short time, a young woman who affected regard
for her, who told her everything, and consulted her, who flattered
her, and seemed ready to yield to her guidance, had become dearer to
the eccentric Cousin Lisbeth than all her relations.

The Baron, on his part, admiring in Madame Marneffe such propriety,
education, and breeding as neither Jenny Cadine nor Josepha, nor any
friend of theirs had to show, had fallen in love with her in a month,
developing a senile passion, a senseless passion, which had an
appearance of reason. In fact, he found here neither the banter, nor
the orgies, nor the reckless expenditure, nor the depravity, nor the
scorn of social decencies, nor the insolent independence which had
brought him to grief alike with the actress and the singer. He was
spared, too, the rapacity of the courtesan, like unto the thirst of
dry sand.

Madame Marneffe, of whom he had made a friend and confidante, made the
greatest difficulties over accepting any gift from him.

"Appointments, official presents, anything you can extract from the
Government; but do not begin by insulting a woman whom you profess to
love," said Valerie. "If you do, I shall cease to believe you--and I
like to believe you," she added, with a glance like Saint Theresa
leering at heaven.

Every time he made her a present there was a fortress to be stormed, a
conscience to be over-persuaded. The hapless Baron laid deep
stratagems to offer her some trifle--costly, nevertheless--proud of
having at last met with virtue and the realization of his dreams. In
this primitive household, as he assured himself, he was the god as
much as in his own. And Monsieur Marneffe seemed at a thousand leagues
from suspecting that the Jupiter of his office intended to descend on
his wife in a shower of gold; he was his august chief's humblest
slave.

Madame Marneffe, twenty-three years of age, a pure and bashful middle-
class wife, a blossom hidden in the Rue du Doyenne, could know nothing
of the depravity and demoralizing harlotry which the Baron could no
longer think of without disgust, for he had never known the charm of
recalcitrant virtue, and the coy Valerie made him enjoy it to the
utmost--all along the line, as the saying goes.

The question having come to this point between Hector and Valerie, it
is not astonishing that Valerie should have heard from Hector the
secret of the intended marriage between the great sculptor Steinbock
and Hortense Hulot. Between a lover on his promotion and a lady who
hesitates long before becoming his mistress, there are contests,
uttered or unexpressed, in which a word often betrays a thought; as,
in fencing, the foils fly as briskly as the swords in duel. Then a
prudent man follows the example of Monsieur de Turenne. Thus the Baron
had hinted at the greater freedom his daughter's marriage would allow
him, in reply to the tender Valerie, who more than once had exclaimed:

"I cannot imagine how a woman can go wrong for a man who is not wholly
hers."

And a thousand times already the Baron had declared that for five-and-
twenty years all had been at an end between Madame Hulot and himself.

"And they say she is so handsome!" replied Madame Marneffe. "I want
proof."

"You shall have it," said the Baron, made happy by this demand, by
which his Valerie committed herself.

Hector had then been compelled to reveal his plans, already being
carried into effect in the Rue Vanneau, to prove to Valerie that he
intended to devote to her that half of his life which belonged to his
lawful wife, supposing that day and night equally divide the existence
of civilized humanity. He spoke of decently deserting his wife,
leaving her to herself as soon as Hortense should be married. The
Baroness would then spend all her time with Hortense or the young
Hulot couple; he was sure of her submission.

"And then, my angel, my true life, my real home will be in the Rue
Vanneau."

"Bless me, how you dispose of me!" said Madame Marneffe. "And my
husband----"

"That rag!"

"To be sure, as compared with you so he is!" said she with a laugh.

Madame Marneffe, having heard Steinbock's history, was frantically
eager to see the young Count; perhaps she wished to have some trifle
of his work while they still lived under the same roof. This curiosity
so seriously annoyed the Baron that Valerie swore to him that she
would never even look at Wenceslas. But though she obtained, as the
reward of her surrender of this wish, a little tea-service of old
Sevres pate tendre, she kept her wish at the bottom of her heart, as
if written on tablets.

So one day when she had begged "my Cousin Betty" to come to take
coffee with her in her room, she opened on the subject of her lover,
to know how she might see him without risk.

"My dear child," said she, for they called each my dear, "why have you
never introduced your lover to me? Do you know that within a short
time he has become famous?"

"He famous?"

"He is the one subject of conversation."

"Pooh!" cried Lisbeth.

"He is going to execute the statue of my father, and I could be of
great use to him and help him to succeed in the work; for Madame
Montcornet cannot lend him, as I can, a miniature by Sain, a beautiful
thing done in 1809, before the Wagram Campaign, and given to my poor
mother--Montcornet when he was young and handsome."

Sain and Augustin between them held the sceptre of miniature painting
under the Empire.

"He is going to make a statue, my dear, did you say?"

"Nine feet high--by the orders of the Minister of War. Why, where have
you dropped from that I should tell you the news? Why, the Government
is going to give Count Steinbock rooms and a studio at Le Gros-
Caillou, the depot for marble; your Pole will be made the Director, I
should not wonder, with two thousand francs a year and a ring on his
finger."

"How do you know all this when I have heard nothing about it?" said
Lisbeth at last, shaking off her amazement.

"Now, my dear little Cousin Betty," said Madame Marneffe, in an
insinuating voice, "are you capable of devoted friendship, put to any
test? Shall we henceforth be sisters? Will you swear to me never to
have a secret from me any more than I from you--to act as my spy, as I
will be yours?--Above all, will you pledge yourself never to betray me
either to my husband or to Monsieur Hulot, and never reveal that it
was I who told you----?"

Madame Marneffe broke off in this spurring harangue; Lisbeth
frightened her. The peasant-woman's face was terrible; her piercing
black eyes had the glare of the tiger's; her face was like that we
ascribe to a pythoness; she set her teeth to keep them from
chattering, and her whole frame quivered convulsively. She had pushed
her clenched fingers under her cap to clutch her hair and support her
head, which felt too heavy; she was on fire. The smoke of the flame
that scorched her seemed to emanate from her wrinkles as from the
crevasses rent by a volcanic eruption. It was a startling spectacle.

"Well, why do you stop?" she asked in a hollow voice. "I will be all
to you that I have been to him.--Oh, I would have given him my life-
blood!"

"You loved him then?"

"Like a child of my own!"

"Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with a breath of relief, "if you
only love him in that way, you will be very happy--for you wish him to
be happy?"

Lisbeth replied by a nod as hasty as a madwoman's.

"He is to marry your Cousin Hortense in a month's time."

"Hortense!" shrieked the old maid, striking her forehead, and starting
to her feet.

"Well, but then you were really in love with this young man?" asked
Valerie.

"My dear, we are bound for life and death, you and I," said
Mademoiselle Fischer. "Yes, if you have any love affairs, to me they
are sacred. Your vices will be virtues in my eyes.--For I shall need
your vices!"

"Then did you live with him?" asked Valerie.

"No; I meant to be a mother to him."

"I give it up. I cannot understand," said Valerie. "In that case you
are neither betrayed nor cheated, and you ought to be very happy to
see him so well married; he is now fairly afloat. And, at any rate,
your day is over. Our artist goes to Madame Hulot's every evening as
soon as you go out to dinner."

"Adeline!" muttered Lisbeth. "Oh, Adeline, you shall pay for this! I
will make you uglier than I am."

"You are as pale as death!" exclaimed Valerie. "There is something
wrong?--Oh, what a fool I am! The mother and daughter must have
suspected that you would raise some obstacles in the way of this
affair since they have kept it from you," said Madame Marneffe. "But
if you did not live with the young man, my dear, all this is a greater
puzzle to me than my husband's feelings----"

"Ah, you don't know," said Lisbeth; "you have no idea of all their
tricks. It is the last blow that kills. And how many such blows have I
had to bruise my soul! You don't know that from the time when I could
first feel, I have been victimized for Adeline. I was beaten, and she
was petted; I was dressed like a scullion, and she had clothes like a
lady's; I dug in the garden and cleaned the vegetables, and she--she
never lifted a finger for anything but to make up some finery!--She
married the Baron, she came to shine at the Emperor's Court, while I
stayed in our village till 1809, waiting for four years for a suitable
match; they brought me away, to be sure, but only to make me a work-
woman, and to offer me clerks or captains like coalheavers for a
husband! I have had their leavings for twenty-six years!--And now like
the story in the Old Testament, the poor relation has one ewe-lamb
which is all her joy, and the rich man who has flocks covets the ewe-
lamb and steals it--without warning, without asking. Adeline has
meanly robbed me of my happiness!--Adeline! Adeline! I will see you in
the mire, and sunk lower than myself!--And Hortense--I loved her, and
she has cheated me. The Baron.--No, it is impossible. Tell me again
what is really true of all this."

"Be calm, my dear child."

"Valerie, my darling, I will be calm," said the strange creature,
sitting down again. "One thing only can restore me to reason; give me
proofs."

"Your Cousin Hortense has the Samson group--here is a lithograph
from it published in a review. She paid for it out of her pocket-
money, and it is the Baron who, to benefit his future son-in-law, is
pushing him, getting everything for him."

"Water!--water!" said Lisbeth, after glancing at the print, below
which she read, "A group belonging to Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy."
"Water! my head is burning, I am going mad!"

Madame Marneffe fetched some water. Lisbeth took off her cap,
unfastened her black hair, and plunged her head into the basin her new
friend held for her. She dipped her forehead into it several times,
and checked the incipient inflammation. After this douche she
completely recovered her self-command.

"Not a word," said she to Madame Marneffe as she wiped her face--"not
a word of all this.--You see, I am quite calm; everything is
forgotten. I am thinking of something very different."

"She will be in Charenton to-morrow, that is very certain," thought
Madame Marneffe, looking at the old maid.

"What is to be done?" Lisbeth went on. "You see, my angel, there is
nothing for it but to hold my tongue, bow my head, and drift to the
grave, as all water runs to the river. What could I try to do? I
should like to grind them all--Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron--
all to dust! But what can a poor relation do against a rich family? It
would be the story of the earthen pot and the iron pot."

"Yes; you are right," said Valerie. "You can only pull as much hay as
you can to your side of the manger. That is all the upshot of life in
Paris."

"Besides," said Lisbeth, "I shall soon die, I can tell you, if I lose
that boy to whom I fancied I could always be a mother, and with whom I
counted on living all my days----"

There were tears in her eyes, and she paused. Such emotion in this
woman made of sulphur and flame, made Valerie shudder.

"Well, at any rate, I have found you," said Lisbeth, taking Valerie's
hand, "that is some consolation in this dreadful trouble.--We shall be
true friends; and why should we ever part? I shall never cross your
track. No one will ever be in love with me!--Those who would have
married me, would only have done it to secure my Cousin Hulot's
interest. With energy enough to scale Paradise, to have to devote it
to procuring bread and water, a few rags, and a garret!--That is
martyrdom, my dear, and I have withered under it."

She broke off suddenly, and shot a black flash into Madame Marneffe's
blue eyes, a glance that pierced the pretty woman's soul, as the point
of a dagger might have pierced her heart.

"And what is the use of talking?" she exclaimed in reproof to herself.
"I never said so much before, believe me! The tables will be turned
yet!" she added after a pause. "As you so wisely say, let us sharpen
our teeth, and pull down all the hay we can get."

"You are very wise," said Madame Marneffe, who had been frightened by
this scene, and had no remembrance of having uttered this maxim. "I am
sure you are right, my dear child. Life is not so long after all, and
we must make the best of it, and make use of others to contribute to
our enjoyment. Even I have learned that, young as I am. I was brought
up a spoilt child, my father married ambitiously, and almost forgot
me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's
daughter! My poor mother, who filled my head with splendid visions,
died of grief at seeing me married to an office clerk with twelve
hundred francs a year, at nine-and-thirty an aged and hardened
libertine, as corrupt as the hulks, looking on me, as others looked on
you, as a means of fortune!--Well, in that wretched man, I have found
the best of husbands. He prefers the squalid sluts he picks up at the
street corners, and leaves me free. Though he keeps all his salary to
himself, he never asks me where I get money to live on----"

And she in her turn stopped short, as a woman does who feels herself
carried away by the torrent of her confessions; struck, too, by
Lisbeth's eager attention, she thought well to make sure of Lisbeth
before revealing her last secrets.

"You see, dear child, how entire is my confidence in you!" she
presently added, to which Lisbeth replied by a most comforting nod.

An oath may be taken by a look and a nod more solemnly than in a court
of justice.

"I keep up every appearance of respectability," Valerie went on,
laying her hand on Lisbeth's as if to accept her pledge. "I am a
married woman, and my own mistress, to such a degree, that in the
morning, when Marneffe sets out for the office, if he takes it into
his head to say good-bye and finds my door locked, he goes off without
a word. He cares less for his boy than I care for one of the marble
children that play at the feet of one of the river-gods in the
Tuileries. If I do not come home to dinner, he dines quite contentedly
with the maid, for the maid is devoted to monsieur; and he goes out
every evening after dinner, and does not come in till twelve or one
o'clock. Unfortunately, for a year past, I have had no ladies' maid,
which is as much as to say that I am a widow!

"I have had one passion, once have been happy--a rich Brazilian--who
went away a year ago--my only lapse!--He went away to sell his
estates, to realize his land, and come back to live in France. What
will he find left of his Valerie? A dunghill. Well! it is his fault
and not mine; why does he delay coming so long? Perhaps he has been
wrecked--like my virtue."

"Good-bye, my dear," said Lisbeth abruptly; "we are friends for ever.
I love you, I esteem you, I am wholly yours! My cousin is tormenting
me to go and live in the house you are moving to, in the Rue Vanneau;
but I would not go, for I saw at once the reasons for this fresh piece
of kindness----"

"Yes; you would have kept an eye on me, I know!" said Madame Marneffe.

"That was, no doubt, the motive of his generosity," replied Lisbeth.
"In Paris, most beneficence is a speculation, as most acts of
ingratitude are revenge! To a poor relation you behave as you do to
rats to whom you offer a bit of bacon. Now, I will accept the Baron's
offer, for this house has grown intolerable to me. You and I have wit
enough to hold our tongues about everything that would damage us, and
tell all that needs telling. So, no blabbing--and we are friends."

"Through thick and thin!" cried Madame Marneffe, delighted to have a
sheep-dog, a confidante, a sort of respectable aunt. "Listen to me;
the Baron is doing a great deal in the Rue Vanneau----"

"I believe you!" interrupted Lisbeth. "He has spent thirty thousand
francs! Where he got the money, I am sure I don't know, for Josepha
the singer bled him dry.--Oh! you are in luck," she went on. "The
Baron would steal for a woman who held his heart in two little white
satin hands like yours!"

"Well, then," said Madame Marneffe, with the liberality of such
creatures, which is mere recklessness, "look here, my dear child; take
away from here everything that may serve your turn in your new
quarters--that chest of drawers, that wardrobe and mirror, the carpet,
the curtains----"

Lisbeth's eyes dilated with excessive joy; she was incredulous of such
a gift.

"You are doing more for me in a breath than my rich relations have
done in thirty years!" she exclaimed. "They have never even asked
themselves whether I had any furniture at all. On his first visit, a
few weeks ago, the Baron made a rich man's face on seeing how poor I
was.--Thank you, my dear; and I will give you your money's worth, you
will see how by and by."

Valerie went out on the landing with her Cousin Betty, and the two
women embraced.

"Pouh! How she stinks of hard work!" said the pretty little woman to
herself when she was alone. "I shall not embrace you often, my dear
cousin! At the same time, I must look sharp. She must be skilfully
managed, for she can be of use, and help me to make my fortune."

Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she
had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when
urged by necessity. To her, life must be all pleasure; and the
pleasure without difficulties. She loved flowers, provided they were
brought to her. She could not imagine going to the play but to a good
box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there. Valerie
inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General
Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for
twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful
and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the
programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon.

The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great
nobles of the last century. Under the Restoration the nobility cannot
forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three
exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in
short, bourgeois and penurious. Since then, 1830 has crowned the work
of 1793. In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no
great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can
hardly foresee. Everything takes the stamp of individuality. The
wisest invest in annuities. Family pride is destroyed.

The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on
the day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had "caught on" with
Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would
make a fortune by means of her good looks. So, for some days, she had
been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place
of a mother--a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must
be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and
think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life.
Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron's
motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself.

Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed,
who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her
detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and
intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy. This
supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the
true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and
meant to attach her to herself. Thus, their conversation was like the
stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth. And
Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination
of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so
little to be feared.

For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that
Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held
it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a
tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather
the green fruit.

To those who study the social world, it must always be a matter of
astonishment to see the fulness, the perfection, and the rapidity with
which an idea develops in a virgin nature.

Virginity, like every other monstrosity, has its special richness, its
absorbing greatness. Life, whose forces are always economized, assumes
in the virgin creature an incalculable power of resistance and
endurance. The brain is reinforced in the sum-total of its reserved
energy. When really chaste natures need to call on the resources of
body or soul, and are required to act or to think, they have muscles
of steel, or intuitive knowledge in their intelligence--diabolical
strength, or the black magic of the Will.

From this point of view the Virgin Mary, even if we regard her only as
a symbol, is supremely great above every other type, whether Hindoo,
Egyptian, or Greek. Virginity, the mother of great things, magna
parens rerum, holds in her fair white hands the keys of the upper
worlds. In short, that grand and terrible exception deserves all the
honors decreed to her by the Catholic Church.

Thus, in one moment, Lisbeth Fischer had become the Mohican whose
snares none can escape, whose dissimulation is inscrutable, whose
swift decisiveness is the outcome of the incredible perfection of
every organ of sense. She was Hatred and Revenge, as implacable as
they are in Italy, Spain, and the East. These two feelings, the
obverse of friendship and love carried to the utmost, are known only
in lands scorched by the sun. But Lisbeth was also a daughter of
Lorraine, bent on deceit.

She accepted this detail of her part against her will; she began by
making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as
children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary
confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and
that superlative is the privilege of the Criminal Bench.

As soon as she left Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to Monsieur
Rivet, and found him in his office.

"Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet," she began, when she had bolted the
door of the room. "You were quite right. Those Poles! They are low
villains--all alike, men who know neither law nor fidelity."

"And who want to set Europe on fire," said the peaceable Rivet, "to
ruin every trade and every trader for the sake of a country that is
all bog-land, they say, and full of horrible Jews, to say nothing of
the Cossacks and the peasants--a sort of wild beasts classed by
mistake with human beings. Your Poles do not understand the times we
live in; we are no longer barbarians. War is coming to an end, my dear
mademoiselle; it went out with the Monarchy. This is the age of
triumph for commerce, and industry, and middle-class prudence, such as
were the making of Holland.

"Yes," he went on with animation, "we live in a period when nations
must obtain all they need by the legal extension of their liberties
and by the pacific action of Constitutional Institutions; that is what
the Poles do not see, and I hope----

"You were saying, my dear?--" he added, interrupting himself when he
saw from his work-woman's face that high politics were beyond her
comprehension.

"Here is the schedule," said Lisbeth. "If I don't want to lose my
three thousand two hundred and ten francs, I must clap this rogue into
prison."

"Didn't I tell you so?" cried the oracle of the Saint-Denis quarter.

The Rivets, successor to Pons Brothers, had kept their shop still in
the Rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the ancient Hotel Langeais, built by
that illustrious family at the time when the nobility still gathered
round the Louvre.

"Yes, and I blessed you on my way here," replied Lisbeth.

"If he suspects nothing, he can be safe in prison by eight o'clock in
the morning," said Rivet, consulting the almanac to ascertain the hour
of sunrise; "but not till the day after to-morrow, for he cannot be
imprisoned till he has had notice that he is to be arrested by writ,
with the option of payment or imprisonment. And so----"

"What an idiotic law!" exclaimed Lisbeth. "Of course the debtor
escapes."

"He has every right to do so," said the Assessor, smiling. "So this is
the way----"

"As to that," said Lisbeth, interrupting him, "I will take the paper
and hand it to him, saying that I have been obliged to raise the
money, and that the lender insists on this formality. I know my
gentleman. He will not even look at the paper; he will light his pipe
with it."

"Not a bad idea, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, make your mind
easy; the job shall be done.--But stop a minute; to put your man in
prison is not the only point to be considered; you only want to
indulge in that legal luxury in order to get your money. Who is to pay
you?"

"Those who give him money."

"To be sure; I forgot that the Minister of War had commissioned him to
erect a monument to one of our late customers. Ah! the house has
supplied many an uniform to General Montcornet; he soon blackened them
with the smoke of cannon. A brave man, he was! and he paid on the
nail."

A marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country; "He
paid on the nail" will always be the highest praise he can have from a
tradesman.

"Very well. And on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet, you shall have the flat
tassels.--By the way, I am moving from the Rue du Doyenne; I am going
to live in the Rue Vanneau."

"You are very right. I could not bear to see you in that hole which,
in spite of my aversion to the Opposition, I must say is a disgrace; I
repeat it, yes! is a disgrace to the Louvre and the Place du
Carrousel. I am devoted to Louis-Philippe, he is my idol; he is the
august and exact representative of the class on whom he founded his
dynasty, and I can never forget what he did for the trimming-makers by
restoring the National Guard----"

"When I hear you speak so, Monsieur Rivet, I cannot help wondering why
you are not made a deputy."

"They are afraid of my attachment to the dynasty," replied Rivet. "My
political enemies are the King's. He has a noble character! They are a
fine family; in short," said he, returning to the charge, "he is our
ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre
is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil
list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of
Paris in a most melancholy state.--It is because I am so strongly in
favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of
Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively
terrifying. You would have been murdered there one fine day.--And so
your Monsieur Crevel has been made Major of his division! He will come
to us, I hope, for his big epaulette."

"I am dining with him to-night, and will send him to you."

Lisbeth believed that she had secured her Livonian to herself by
cutting him off from all communication with the outer world. If he
could no longer work, the artist would be forgotten as completely as a
man buried in a cellar, where she alone would go to see him. Thus she
had two happy days, for she hoped to deal a mortal blow at the
Baroness and her daughter.

To go to Crevel's house, in the Rue des Saussayes, she crossed the
Pont du Carrousel, went along the Quai Voltaire, the Quai d'Orsay, the
Rue Bellechasse, Rue de l'Universite, the Pont de la Concorde, and the
Avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of
passion, always the foe of the legs.

Cousin Betty, as long as she followed the line of the quays, kept
watch on the opposite shore of the Seine, walking very slowly. She had
guessed rightly. She had left Wenceslas dressing; she at once
understood that, as soon as he should be rid of her, the lover would
go off to the Baroness' by the shortest road. And, in fact, as she
wandered along by the parapet of the Quai Voltaire, in fancy
suppressing the river and walking along the opposite bank, she
recognized the artist as he came out of the Tuileries to cross the
Pont Royal. She there came up with the faithless one, and could follow
him unseen, for lovers rarely look behind them. She escorted him as
far as Madame Hulot's house, where he went in like an accustomed
visitor.

This crowning proof, confirming Madame Marneffe's revelations, put
Lisbeth quite beside herself.

She arrived at the newly promoted Major's door in the state of mental
irritation which prompts men to commit murder, and found Monsieur
Crevel senior in his drawing-room awaiting his children, Monsieur
and Madame Hulot junior.

But Celestin Crevel was so unconscious and so perfect a type of the
Parisian parvenu, that we can scarcely venture so unceremoniously into
the presence of Cesar Birotteau's successor. Celestin Crevel was a
world in himself; and he, even more than Rivet, deserves the honors of
the palette by reason of his importance in this domestic drama.

Have you ever observed how in childhood, or at the early stages of
social life, we create a model for our own imitation, with our own
hands as it were, and often without knowing it? The banker's clerk,
for instance, as he enters his master's drawing-room, dreams of
possessing such another. If he makes a fortune, it will not be the
luxury of the day, twenty years later, that you will find in his
house, but the old-fashioned splendor that fascinated him of yore. It
is impossible to tell how many absurdities are due to this
retrospective jealousy; and in the same way we know nothing of the
follies due to the covert rivalry that urges men to copy the type they
have set themselves, and exhaust their powers in shining with a
reflected light, like the moon.

Crevel was deputy mayor because his predecessor had been; he was Major
because he coveted Cesar Birotteau's epaulettes. In the same way,
struck by the marvels wrought by Grindot the architect, at the time
when Fortune had carried his master to the top of the wheel, Crevel
had "never looked at both sides of a crown-piece," to use his own
language, when he wanted to "do up" his rooms; he had gone with his
purse open and his eyes shut to Grindot, who by this time was quite
forgotten. It is impossible to guess how long an extinct reputation
may survive, supported by such stale admiration.

So Grindot, for the thousandth time had displayed his white-and-gold
drawing-room paneled with crimson damask. The furniture, of rosewood,
clumsily carved, as such work is done for the trade, had in the
country been the source of just pride in Paris workmanship on the
occasion of an industrial exhibition. The candelabra, the fire-dogs,
the fender, the chandelier, the clock, were all in the most unmeaning
style of scroll-work; the round table, a fixture in the middle of the
room, was a mosaic of fragments of Italian and antique marbles,
brought from Rome, where these dissected maps are made of
mineralogical specimens--for all the world like tailors' patterns--an
object of perennial admiration to Crevel's citizen friends. The
portraits of the late lamented Madame Crevel, of Crevel himself, of
his daughter and his son-in-law, hung on the walls, two and two; they
were the work of Pierre Grassou, the favored painter of the
bourgeoisie, to whom Crevel owed his ridiculous Byronic attitude. The
frames, costing a thousand francs each, were quite in harmony with
this coffee-house magnificence, which would have made any true artist
shrug his shoulders.

Money never yet missed the smallest opportunity of being stupid. We
should have in Paris ten Venices if our retired merchants had had the
instinct for fine things characteristic of the Italians. Even in our
own day a Milanese merchant could leave five hundred thousand francs
to the Duomo, to regild the colossal statue of the Virgin that crowns
the edifice. Canova, in his will, desired his brother to build a
church costing four million francs, and that brother adds something on
his own account. Would a citizen of Paris--and they all, like Rivet,
love their Paris in their heart--ever dream of building the spires
that are lacking to the towers of Notre-Dame? And only think of the
sums that revert to the State in property for which no heirs are
found.

All the improvements of Paris might have been completed with the money
spent on stucco castings, gilt mouldings, and sham sculpture during
the last fifteen years by individuals of the Crevel stamp.

Beyond this drawing-room was a splendid boudoir furnished with tables
and cabinets in imitation of Boulle.

The bedroom, smart with chintz, also opened out of the drawing-room.
Mahogany in all its glory infested the dining-room, and Swiss views,
gorgeously framed, graced the panels. Crevel, who hoped to travel in
Switzerland, had set his heart on possessing the scenery in painting
till the time should come when he might see it in reality.

So, as will have been seen, Crevel, the Mayor's deputy, of the Legion
of Honor and of the National Guard, had faithfully reproduced all the
magnificence, even as to furniture, of his luckless predecessor. Under
the Restoration, where one had sunk, this other, quite overlooked, had
come to the top--not by any strange stroke of fortune, but by the
force of circumstance. In revolutions, as in storms at sea, solid
treasure goes to the bottom, and light trifles are floated to the
surface. Cesar Birotteau, a Royalist, in favor and envied, had been
made the mark of bourgeois hostility, while bourgeoisie triumphant
found its incarnation in Crevel.

This apartment, at a rent of a thousand crowns, crammed with all the
vulgar magnificence that money can buy, occupied the first floor of a
fine old house between a courtyard and a garden. Everything was as
spick-and-span as the beetles in an entomological case, for Crevel
lived very little at home.

This gorgeous residence was the ambitious citizen's legal domicile.
His establishment consisted of a woman-cook and a valet; he hired two
extra men, and had a dinner sent in by Chevet, whenever he gave a
banquet to his political friends, to men he wanted to dazzle or to a
family party.

The seat of Crevel's real domesticity, formerly in the Rue Notre-Dame
de Lorette, with Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, had lately been
transferred, as we have seen, to the Rue Chauchat. Every morning the
retired merchant--every ex-tradesman is a retired merchant--spent two
hours in the Rue des Saussayes to attend to business, and gave the
rest of his time to Mademoiselle Zaire, which annoyed Zaire very much.
Orosmanes-Crevel had a fixed bargain with Mademoiselle Heloise; she
owed him five hundred francs worth of enjoyment every month, and no
"bills delivered." He paid separately for his dinner and all extras.
This agreement, with certain bonuses, for he made her a good many
presents, seemed cheap to the ex-attache of the great singer; and he
would say to widowers who were fond of their daughters, that it paid
better to job your horses than to have a stable of your own. At the
same time, if the reader remembers the speech made to the Baron by the
porter at the Rue Chauchat, Crevel did not escape the coachman and the
groom.

Crevel, as may be seen, had turned his passionate affection for his
daughter to the advantage of his self-indulgence. The immoral aspect
of the situation was justified by the highest morality. And then the
ex-perfumer derived from this style of living--it was the inevitable,
a free-and-easy life, Regence, Pompadour, Marechal de Richelieu,
what not--a certain veneer of superiority. Crevel set up for being a
man of broad views, a fine gentleman with an air and grace, a liberal
man with nothing narrow in his ideas--and all for the small sum of
about twelve to fifteen hundred francs a month. This was the result
not of hypocritical policy, but of middle-class vanity, though it came
to the same in the end.

On the Bourse Crevel was regarded as a man superior to his time, and
especially as a man of pleasure, a bon vivant. In this particular
Crevel flattered himself that he had overtopped his worthy friend
Birotteau by a hundred cubits.

"And is it you?" cried Crevel, flying into a rage as he saw Lisbeth
enter the room, "who have plotted this marriage between Mademoiselle
Hulot and your young Count, whom you have been bringing up by hand for
her?"

"You don't seem best pleased at it?" said Lisbeth, fixing a piercing
eye on Crevel. "What interest can you have in hindering my cousin's
marriage? For it was you, I am told, who hindered her marrying
Monsieur Lebas' son."

"You are a good soul and to be trusted," said Crevel. "Well, then, do
you suppose that I will ever forgive Monsieur Hulot for the crime of
having robbed me of Josepha--especially when he turned a decent girl,
whom I should have married in my old age, into a good-for-nothing
slut, a mountebank, an opera singer!--No, no. Never!"

"He is a very good fellow, too, is Monsieur Hulot," said Cousin Betty.

"Amiable, very amiable--too amiable," replied Crevel. "I wish him no
harm; but I do wish to have my revenge, and I will have it. It is my
one idea."

"And is that desire the reason why you no longer visit Madame Hulot?"

"Possibly."

"Ah, ha! then you were courting my fair cousin?" said Lisbeth, with a
smile. "I thought as much."

"And she treated me like a dog!--worse, like a footman; nay, I might
say like a political prisoner.--But I will succeed yet," said he,
striking his brow with his clenched fist.

"Poor man! It would be dreadful to catch his wife deceiving him after
being packed off by his mistress."

"Josepha?" cried Crevel. "Has Josepha thrown him over, packed him off,
turned him out neck and crop? Bravo, Josepha, you have avenged me! I
will send you a pair of pearls to hang in your ears, my ex-sweetheart!
--I knew nothing of it; for after I had seen you, on the day after
that when the fair Adeline had shown me the door, I went back to visit
the Lebas, at Corbeil, and have but just come back. Heloise played the
very devil to get me into the country, and I have found out the
purpose of her game; she wanted me out of the way while she gave a
house-warming in the Rue Chauchat, with some artists, and players, and
writers.--She took me in! But I can forgive her, for Heloise amuses
me. She is a Dejazet under a bushel. What a character the hussy is!
There is the note I found last evening:

" 'DEAR OLD CHAP,--I have pitched my tent in the Rue Chauchat. I
have taken the precaution of getting a few friends to clean up the
paint. All is well. Come when you please, monsieur; Hagar awaits
her Abraham.'

"Heloise will have some news for me, for she has her bohemia at her
fingers' end."

"But Monsieur Hulot took the disaster very calmly," said Lisbeth.

"Impossible!" cried Crevel, stopping in a parade as regular as the
swing of a pendulum.

"Monsieur Hulot is not as young as he was," Lisbeth remarked
significantly.

"I know that," said Crevel, "but in one point we are alike: Hulot
cannot do without an attachment. He is capable of going back to his
wife. It would be a novelty for him, but an end to my vengeance. You
smile, Mademoiselle Fischer--ah! perhaps you know something?"

"I am smiling at your notions," replied Lisbeth. "Yes, my cousin is
still handsome enough to inspire a passion. I should certainly fall in
love with her if I were a man."

"Cut and come again!" exclaimed Crevel. "You are laughing at me.--The
Baron has already found consolation?"

Lisbeth bowed affirmatively.

"He is a lucky man if he can find a second Josepha within twenty-four
hours!" said Crevel. "But I am not altogether surprised, for he told
me one evening at supper that when he was a young man he always had
three mistresses on hand that he might not be left high and dry--the
one he was giving over, the one in possession, and the one he was
courting for a future emergency. He had some smart little work-woman
in reserve, no doubt--in his fish-pond--his Parc-aux-cerfs! He is
very Louis XV., is my gentleman. He is in luck to be so handsome!--
However, he is ageing; his face shows it.--He has taken up with some
little milliner?"

"Dear me, no," replied Lisbeth.

"Oh!" cried Crevel, "what would I not do to hinder him from hanging up
his hat! I could not win back Josepha; women of that kind never come
back to their first love.--Besides, it is truly said, such a return is
not love.--But, Cousin Betty, I would pay down fifty thousand francs--
that is to say, I would spend it--to rob that great good-looking
fellow of his mistress, and to show him that a Major with a portly
stomach and a brain made to become Mayor of Paris, though he is a
grandfather, is not to have his mistress tickled away by a poacher
without turning the tables."

"My position," said Lisbeth, "compels me to hear everything and know
nothing. You may talk to me without fear; I never repeat a word of
what any one may choose to tell me. How can you suppose I should ever
break that rule of conduct? No one would ever trust me again."

"I know," said Crevel; "you are the very jewel of old maids. Still,
come, there are exceptions. Look here, the family have never settled
an allowance on you?"

"But I have my pride," said Lisbeth. "I do not choose to be an expense
to anybody."

"If you will but help me to my revenge," the tradesman went on, "I
will sink ten thousand francs in an annuity for you. Tell me, my fair
cousin, tell me who has stepped into Josepha's shoes, and you will
have money to pay your rent, your little breakfast in the morning, the
good coffee you love so well--you might allow yourself pure Mocha,
heh! And a very good thing is pure Mocha!"

"I do not care so much for the ten thousand francs in an annuity,
which would bring me nearly five hundred francs a year, as for
absolute secrecy," said Lisbeth. "For, you see, my dear Monsieur
Crevel, the Baron is very good to me; he is to pay my rent----"

"Oh yes, long may that last! I advise you to trust him," cried Crevel.
"Where will he find the money?"

"Ah, that I don't know. At the same time, he is spending more than
thirty thousand francs on the rooms he is furnishing for this little
lady."

"A lady! What, a woman in society; the rascal, what luck he has! He is
the only favorite!"

"A married woman, and quite the lady," Lisbeth affirmed.

"Really and truly?" cried Crevel, opening wide eyes flashing with
envy, quite as much as at the magic words quite the lady.

"Yes, really," said Lisbeth. "Clever, a musician, three-and-twenty, a
pretty, innocent face, a dazzling white skin, teeth like a puppy's,
eyes like stars, a beautiful forehead--and tiny feet, I never saw the
like, they are not wider than her stay-busk."

"And ears?" asked Crevel, keenly alive to this catalogue of charms.

"Ears for a model," she replied.

"And small hands?"

"I tell you, in few words, a gem of a woman--and high-minded, and
modest, and refined! A beautiful soul, an angel--and with every
distinction, for her father was a Marshal of France----"

"A Marshal of France!" shrieked Crevel, positively bounding with
excitement. "Good Heavens! by the Holy Piper! By all the joys in
Paradise!--The rascal!--I beg your pardon, Cousin, I am going crazy!--
I think I would give a hundred thousand francs----"

"I dare say you would, and, I tell you, she is a respectable woman--a
woman of virtue. The Baron has forked out handsomely."

"He has not a sou, I tell you."

"There is a husband he has pushed----"

"Where did he push him?" asked Crevel, with a bitter laugh.

"He is promoted to be second in his office--this husband who will
oblige, no doubt;--and his name is down for the Cross of the Legion of
Honor."

"The Government ought to be judicious and respect those who have the
Cross by not flinging it broadcast," said Crevel, with the look of an
aggrieved politician. "But what is there about the man--that old
bulldog of a Baron?" he went on. "It seems to me that I am quite a
match for him," and he struck an attitude as he looked at himself in
the glass. "Heloise has told me many a time, at moments when a woman
speaks the truth, that I was wonderful."

"Oh," said Lisbeth, "women like big men; they are almost always good-
natured; and if I had to decide between you and the Baron, I should
choose you. Monsieur Hulot is amusing, handsome, and has a figure; but
you, you are substantial, and then--you see--you look an even greater
scamp than he does."

"It is incredible how all women, even pious women, take to men who
have that about them!" exclaimed Crevel, putting his arm round
Lisbeth's waist, he was so jubilant.

"The difficulty does not lie there," said Betty. "You must see that a
woman who is getting so many advantages will not be unfaithful to her
patron for nothing; and it would cost you more than a hundred odd
thousand francs, for our little friend can look forward to seeing her
husband at the head of his office within two years' time.--It is
poverty that is dragging the poor little angel into that pit."

Crevel was striding up and down the drawing-room in a state of frenzy.

"He must be uncommonly fond of the woman?" he inquired after a pause,
while his desires, thus goaded by Lisbeth, rose to a sort of madness.

"You may judge for yourself," replied Lisbeth. I don't believe he has
had that of her," said she, snapping her thumbnail against one of
her enormous white teeth, "and he has given her ten thousand francs'
worth of presents already."

"What a good joke it would be!" cried Crevel, "if I got to the winning
post first!"

"Good heavens! It is too bad of me to be telling you all this tittle-
tattle," said Lisbeth, with an air of compunction.

"No.--I mean to put your relations to the blush. To-morrow I shall
invest in your name such a sum in five-per-cents as will give you six
hundred francs a year; but then you must tell me everything--his
Dulcinea's name and residence. To you I will make a clean breast of
it.--I never have had a real lady for a mistress, and it is the height
of my ambition. Mahomet's houris are nothing in comparison with what I
fancy a woman of fashion must be. In short, it is my dream, my mania,
and to such a point, that I declare to you the Baroness Hulot to me
will never be fifty," said he, unconsciously plagiarizing one of the
greatest wits of the last century. "I assure you, my good Lisbeth, I
am prepared to sacrifice a hundred, two hundred--Hush! Here are the
young people, I see them crossing the courtyard. I shall never have
learned anything through you, I give you my word of honor; for I do
not want you to lose the Baron's confidence, quite the contrary. He
must be amazingly fond of this woman--that old boy."

"He is crazy about her," said Lisbeth. "He could not find forty
thousand francs to marry his daughter off, but he has got them somehow
for his new passion."

"And do you think that she loves him?"

"At his age!" said the old maid.

"Oh, what an owl I am!" cried Crevel, "when I myself allowed Heloise
to keep her artist exactly as Henri IX. allowed Gabrielle her
Bellegrade. Alas! old age, old age!--Good-morning, Celestine. How do,
my jewel!--And the brat? Ah! here he comes; on my honor, he is
beginning to be like me!--Good-day, Hulot--quite well? We shall soon
be having another wedding in the family."

Celestine and her husband, as a hint to their father, glanced at the
old maid, who audaciously asked, in reply to Crevel:

"Indeed--whose?"

Crevel put on an air of reserve which was meant to convey that he
would make up for her indiscretions.

"That of Hortense," he replied; "but it is not yet quite settled. I
have just come from the Lebas', and they were talking of Mademoiselle
Popinot as a suitable match for their son, the young councillor, for
he would like to get the presidency of a provincial court.--Now, come
to dinner."

By seven o'clock Lisbeth had returned home in an omnibus, for she was
eager to see Wenceslas, whose dupe she had been for three weeks, and
to whom she was carrying a basket filled with fruit by the hands of
Crevel himself, whose attentions were doubled towards his Cousin
Betty.

She flew up to the attic at a pace that took her breath away, and
found the artist finishing the ornamentation of a box to be presented
to the adored Hortense. The framework of the lid represented
hydrangeas--in French called Hortensias--among which little Loves
were playing. The poor lover, to enable him to pay for the materials
of the box, of which the panels were of malachite, had designed two
candlesticks for Florent and Chanor, and sold them the copyright--two
admirable pieces of work.

"You have been working too hard these last few days, my dear fellow,"
said Lisbeth, wiping the perspiration from his brow, and giving him a
kiss. "Such laborious diligence is really dangerous in the month of
August. Seriously, you may injure your health. Look, here are some
peaches and plums from Monsieur Crevel.--Now, do not worry yourself so
much; I have borrowed two thousand francs, and, short of some
disaster, we can repay them when you sell your clock. At the same
time, the lender seems to me suspicious, for he has just sent in this
document."

She laid the writ under the model sketch of the statue of General
Montcornet.

"For whom are you making this pretty thing?" said she, taking up the
model sprays of hydrangea in red wax which Wenceslas had laid down
while eating the fruit.

"For a jeweler."

"For what jeweler?"

"I do not know. Stidmann asked me to make something out of them, as he
is very busy."

"But these," she said in a deep voice, "are Hortensias. How is it
that you have never made anything in wax for me? Is it so difficult to
design a pin, a little box--what not, as a keepsake?" and she shot a
fearful glance at the artist, whose eyes were happily lowered. "And
yet you say you love me?"

"Can you doubt it, mademoiselle?"

"That is indeed an ardent mademoiselle!--Why, you have been my only
thought since I found you dying--just there. When I saved you, you
vowed you were mine, I mean to hold you to that pledge; but I made a
vow to myself! I said to myself, 'Since the boy says he is mine, I
mean to make him rich and happy!' Well, and I can make your fortune."

"How?" said the hapless artist, at the height of joy, and too artless
to dream of a snare.

"Why, thus," said she.

Lisbeth could not deprive herself of the savage pleasure of gazing at
Wenceslas, who looked up at her with filial affection, the expression
really of his love for Hortense, which deluded the old maid. Seeing in
a man's eyes, for the first time in her life, the blazing torch of
passion, she fancied it was for her that it was lighted.

"Monsieur Crevel will back us to the extent of a hundred thousand
francs to start in business, if, as he says, you will marry me. He has
queer ideas, has the worthy man.--Well, what do you say to it?" she
added.

The artist, as pale as the dead, looked at his benefactress with a
lustreless eye, which plainly spoke his thoughts. He stood stupefied
and open-mouthed.

"I never before was so distinctly told that I am hideous," said she,
with a bitter laugh.

"Mademoiselle," said Steinbock, "my benefactress can never be ugly in
my eyes; I have the greatest affection for you. But I am not yet
thirty, and----"

"I am forty-three," said Lisbeth. "My cousin Adeline is forty-eight,
and men are still madly in love with her; but then she is handsome--
she is!"

"Fifteen years between us, mademoiselle! How could we get on together!
For both our sakes I think we should be wise to think it over. My
gratitude shall be fully equal to your great kindness.--And your money
shall be repaid in a few days."

"My money!" cried she. "You treat me as if I were nothing but an
unfeeling usurer."

"Forgive me," said Wenceslas, "but you remind me of it so often.--
Well, it is you who have made me; do not crush me."

"You mean to be rid of me, I can see," said she, shaking her head.
"Who has endowed you with this strength of ingratitude--you who are a
man of papier-mache? Have you ceased to trust me--your good genius?--
me, when I have spent so many nights working for you--when I have
given you every franc I have saved in my lifetime--when for four years
I have shared my bread with you, the bread of a hard-worked woman, and
given you all I had, to my very courage."

"Mademoiselle--no more, no more!" he cried, kneeling before her with
uplifted hands. "Say not another word! In three days I will tell you,
you shall know all.--Let me, let me be happy," and he kissed her
hands. "I love--and I am loved."

"Well, well, my child, be happy," she said, lifting him up. And she
kissed his forehead and hair with the eagerness that a man condemned
to death must feel as he lives through the last morning.

"Ah! you are of all creatures the noblest and best! You are a match
for the woman I love," said the poor artist.

"I love you well enough to tremble for your future fate," said she
gloomily. "Judas hanged himself--the ungrateful always come to a bad
end! You are deserting me, and you will never again do any good work.
Consider whether, without being married--for I know I am an old maid,
and I do not want to smother the blossom of your youth, your poetry,
as you call it, in my arms, that are like vine-stocks--but whether,
without being married, we could not get on together? Listen; I have
the commercial spirit; I could save you a fortune in the course of ten
years' work, for Economy is my name!--while, with a young wife, who
would be sheer Expenditure, you would squander everything; you would
work only to indulge her. But happiness creates nothing but memories.
Even I, when I am thinking of you, sit for hours with my hands in my
lap----

"Come, Wenceslas, stay with me.--Look here, I understand all about it;
you shall have your mistresses; pretty ones too, like that little
Marneffe woman who wants to see you, and who will give you happiness
you could never find with me. Then, when I have saved you thirty
thousand francs a year in the funds----"

"Mademoiselle, you are an angel, and I shall never forget this hour,"
said Wenceslas, wiping away his tears.

"That is how I like to see you, my child," said she, gazing at him
with rapture.

Vanity is so strong a power in us all that Lisbeth believed in her
triumph. She had conceded so much when offering him Madame Marneffe.
It was the crowning emotion of her life; for the first time she felt
the full tide of joy rising in her heart. To go through such an
experience again she would have sold her soul to the Devil.

"I am engaged to be married," Steinbock replied, "and I love a woman
with whom no other can compete or compare.--But you are, and always
will be, to me the mother I have lost."

The words fell like an avalanche of snow on a burning crater. Lisbeth
sat down. She gazed with despondent eyes on the youth before her, on
his aristocratic beauty--the artist's brow, the splendid hair,
everything that appealed to her suppressed feminine instincts, and
tiny tears moistened her eyes for an instant and immediately dried up.
She looked like one of those meagre statues which the sculptors of the
Middle Ages carved on monuments.

"I cannot curse you," said she, suddenly rising. "You--you are but a
boy. God preserve you!"

She went downstairs and shut herself into her own room.

"She is in love with me, poor creature!" said Wenceslas to himself.
"And how fervently eloquent! She is crazy."

This last effort on the part of an arid and narrow nature to keep hold
on an embodiment of beauty and poetry was, in truth, so violent that
it can only be compared to the frenzied vehemence of a shipwrecked
creature making the last struggle to reach shore.

On the next day but one, at half-past four in the morning, when Count
Steinbock was sunk in the deepest sleep, he heard a knock at the door
of his attic; he rose to open it, and saw two men in shabby clothing,
and a third, whose dress proclaimed him a bailiff down on his luck.

"You are Monsieur Wenceslas, Count Steinbock?" said this man.

"Yes, monsieur."

"My name is Grasset, sir, successor to Louchard, sheriff's
officer----"

"What then?"

"You are under arrest, sir. You must come with us to prison--to
Clichy.--Please to get dressed.--We have done the civil, as you see; I
have brought no police, and there is a hackney cab below."

"You are safely nabbed, you see," said one of the bailiffs; "and we
look to you to be liberal."

Steinbock dressed and went downstairs, a man holding each arm; when he
was in the cab, the driver started without orders, as knowing where he
was to go, and within half an hour the unhappy foreigner found himself
safely under bolt and bar without even a remonstrance, so utterly
amazed was he.

At ten o'clock he was sent for to the prison-office, where he found
Lisbeth, who, in tears, gave him some money to feed himself adequately
and to pay for a room large enough to work in.

"My dear boy," said she, "never say a word of your arrest to anybody,
do not write to a living soul; it would ruin you for life; we must
hide this blot on your character. I will soon have you out. I will
collect the money--be quite easy. Write down what you want for your
work. You shall soon be free, or I will die for it."

"Oh, I shall owe you my life a second time!" cried he, "for I should
lose more than my life if I were thought a bad fellow."

Lisbeth went off in great glee; she hoped, by keeping her artist under
lock and key, to put a stop to his marriage by announcing that he was
a married man, pardoned by the efforts of his wife, and gone off to
Russia.

To carry out this plan, at about three o'clock she went to the
Baroness, though it was not the day when she was due to dine with her;
but she wished to enjoy the anguish which Hortense must endure at the
hour when Wenceslas was in the habit of making his appearance.

"Have you come to dinner?" asked the Baroness, concealing her
disappointment.

"Well, yes."

"That's well," replied Hortense. "I will go and tell them to be
punctual, for you do not like to be kept waiting."

Hortense nodded reassuringly to her mother, for she intended to tell
the man-servant to send away Monsieur Steinbock if he should call; the
man, however, happened to be out, so Hortense was obliged to give her
orders to the maid, and the girl went upstairs to fetch her needlework
and sit in the ante-room.

"And about my lover?" said Cousin Betty to Hortense, when the girl
came back. "You never ask about him now?"

"To be sure, what is he doing?" said Hortense. "He has become famous.
You ought to be very happy," she added in an undertone to Lisbeth.
"Everybody is talking of Monsieur Wenceslas Steinbock."

"A great deal too much," replied she in her clear tones. "Monsieur is
departing.--If it were only a matter of charming him so far as to defy
the attractions of Paris, I know my power; but they say that in order
to secure the services of such an artist, the Emperor Nichols has
pardoned him----"

"Nonsense!" said the Baroness.

"When did you hear that?" asked Hortense, who felt as if her heart had
the cramp.

"Well," said the villainous Lisbeth, "a person to whom he is bound by
the most sacred ties--his wife--wrote yesterday to tell him so. He
wants to be off. Oh, he will be a great fool to give up France to go
to Russia!--"

Hortense looked at her mother, but her head sank on one side; the
Baroness was only just in time to support her daughter, who dropped
fainting, and as white as her lace kerchief.

"Lisbeth! you have killed my child!" cried the Baroness. "You were
born to be our curse!"

"Bless me! what fault of mine is this, Adeline?" replied Lisbeth, as
she rose with a menacing aspect, of which the Baroness, in her alarm,
took no notice.

"I was wrong," said Adeline, supporting the girl. "Ring."

At this instant the door opened, the women both looked round, and saw
Wenceslas Steinbock, who had been admitted by the cook in the maid's
absence.

"Hortense!" cried the artist, with one spring to the group of women.
And he kissed his betrothed before her mother's eyes, on the forehead,
and so reverently, that the Baroness could not be angry. It was a
better restorative than any smelling salts. Hortense opened her eyes,
saw Wenceslas, and her color came back. In a few minutes she had quite
recovered.

"So this was your secret?" said Lisbeth, smiling at Wenceslas, and
affecting to guess the facts from her two cousins' confusion.

"But how did you steal away my lover?" said she, leading Hortense into
the garden.

Hortense artlessly told the romance of her love. Her father and
mother, she said, being convinced that Lisbeth would never marry, had
authorized the Count's visits. Only Hortense, like a full-blown Agnes,
attributed to chance her purchase of the group and the introduction of
the artist, who, by her account, had insisted on knowing the name of
his first purchaser.

Presently Steinbock came out to join the cousins, and thanked the old
maid effusively for his prompt release. Lisbeth replied Jesuitically
that the creditor having given very vague promises, she had not hoped
to be able to get him out before the morrow, and that the person who
had lent her the money, ashamed, perhaps, of such mean conduct, had
been beforehand with her. The old maid appeared to be perfectly
content, and congratulated Wenceslas on his happiness.

"You bad boy!" said she, before Hortense and her mother, "if you had
only told me the evening before last that you loved my cousin
Hortense, and that she loved you, you would have spared me many tears.
I thought that you were deserting your old friend, your governess;
while, on the contrary, you are to become my cousin; henceforth, you
will be connected with me, remotely, it is true, but by ties that
amply justify the feelings I have for you." And she kissed Wenceslas
on the forehead.

Hortense threw herself into Lisbeth's arms and melted into tears.

"I owe my happiness to you," said she, "and I will never forget it."

"Cousin Betty," said the Baroness, embracing Lisbeth in her excitement
at seeing matters so happily settled, "the Baron and I owe you a debt
of gratitude, and we will pay it. Come and talk things over with me,"
she added, leading her away.

So Lisbeth, to all appearances, was playing the part of a good angel
to the whole family; she was adored by Crevel and Hulot, by Adeline
and Hortense.

"We wish you to give up working," said the Baroness. "If you earn
forty sous a day, Sundays excepted, that makes six hundred francs a
year. Well, then, how much have you saved?"

"Four thousand five hundred francs."

"Poor Betty!" said her cousin.

She raised her eyes to heaven, so deeply was she moved at the thought
of all the labor and privation such a sum must represent accumulated
during thirty years.

Lisbeth, misunderstanding the meaning of the exclamation, took it as
the ironical pity of the successful woman, and her hatred was
strengthened by a large infusion of venom at the very moment when her
cousin had cast off her last shred of distrust of the tyrant of her
childhood.

"We will add ten thousand five hundred francs to that sum," said
Adeline, "and put it in trust so that you shall draw the interest for
life with reversion to Hortense. Thus, you will have six hundred
francs a year."

Lisbeth feigned the utmost satisfaction. When she went in, her
handkerchief to her eyes, wiping away tears of joy, Hortense told her
of all the favors being showered on Wenceslas, beloved of the family.

So when the Baron came home, he found his family all present; for the
Baroness had formally accepted Wenceslas by the title of Son, and the
wedding was fixed, if her husband should approve, for a day a
fortnight hence. The moment he came into the drawing-room, Hulot was
rushed at by his wife and daughter, who ran to meet him, Adeline to
speak to him privately, and Hortense to kiss him.

"You have gone too far in pledging me to this, madame," said the Baron
sternly. "You are not married yet," he added with a look at Steinbock,
who turned pale.

"He has heard of my imprisonment," said the luckless artist to
himself.

"Come, children," said he, leading his daughter and the young man into
the garden; they all sat down on the moss-eaten seat in the summer-
house.

"Monsieur le Comte, do you love my daughter as well as I loved her
mother?" he asked.

"More, monsieur," said the sculptor.

"Her mother was a peasant's daughter, and had not a farthing of her
own."

"Only give me Mademoiselle Hortense just as she is, without a
trousseau even----"

"So I should think!" said the Baron, smiling. "Hortense is the
daughter of the Baron Hulot d'Ervy, Councillor of State, high up in
the War Office, Grand Commander of the Legion of Honor, and the
brother to Count Hulot, whose glory is immortal, and who will ere long
be Marshal of France! And--she has a marriage portion.

"It is true," said the impassioned artist. "I must seem very
ambitious. But if my dear Hortense were a laborer's daughter, I would
marry her----"

"That is just what I wanted to know," replied the Baron. "Run away,
Hortense, and leave me to talk business with Monsieur le Comte.--He
really loves you, you see!"

"Oh, papa, I was sure you were only in jest," said the happy girl.

"My dear Steinbock," said the Baron, with elaborate grace of diction
and the most perfect manners, as soon as he and the artist were alone,
"I promised my son a fortune of two hundred thousand francs, of which
the poor boy has never had a sou; and he never will get any of it. My
daughter's fortune will also be two hundred thousand francs, for which
you will give a receipt----"

"Yes, Monsieur le Baron."

"You go too fast," said Hulot. "Have the goodness to hear me out. I
cannot expect from a son-in-law such devotion as I look for from my
son. My son knew exactly all I could and would do for his future
promotion: he will be a Minister, and will easily make good his two
hundred thousand francs. But with you, young man, matters are
different. I shall give you a bond for sixty thousand francs in State
funds at five per cent, in your wife's name. This income will be
diminished by a small charge in the form of an annuity to Lisbeth; but
she will not live long; she is consumptive, I know. Tell no one; it is
a secret; let the poor soul die in peace.--My daughter will have a
trousseau worth twenty thousand francs; her mother will give her six
thousand francs worth of diamonds.

"Monsieur, you overpower me!" said Steinbock, quite bewildered.

"As to the remaining hundred and twenty thousand francs----"

"Say no more, monsieur," said Wenceslas. "I ask only for my beloved
Hortense----"

"Will you listen to me, effervescent youth!--As to the remaining
hundred and twenty thousand francs, I have not got them; but you will
have them--"

"Monsieur?"

"You will get them from the Government, in payment for commissions
which I will secure for you, I pledge you my word of honor. You are to
have a studio, you see, at the Government depot. Exhibit a few fine
statues, and I will get you received at the Institute. The highest
personages have a regard for my brother and for me, and I hope to
succeed in securing for you a commission for sculpture at Versailles
up to a quarter of the whole sum. You will have orders from the City
of Paris and from the Chamber of Peers; in short, my dear fellow, you
will have so many that you will be obliged to get assistants. In that
way I shall pay off my debt to you. You must say whether this way of
giving a portion will suit you; whether you are equal to it."

"I am equal to making a fortune for my wife single-handed if all else
failed!" cried the artist-nobleman.

"That is what I admire!" cried the Baron. "High-minded youth that
fears nothing. Come," he added, clasping hands with the young sculptor
to conclude the bargain, "you have my consent. We will sign the
contract on Sunday next, and the wedding shall be on the following
Saturday, my wife's fete-day."

"It is alright," said the Baroness to her daughter, who stood glued to
the window. "Your suitor and your father are embracing each other."

On going home in the evening, Wenceslas found the solution of the
mystery of his release. The porter handed him a thick sealed packet,
containing the schedule of his debts, with a signed receipt affixed at
the bottom of the writ, and accompanied by this letter:--

"MY DEAR WENCESLAS,--I went to fetch you at ten o'clock this
morning to introduce you to a Royal Highness who wishes to see
you. There I learned that the duns had had you conveyed to a
certain little domain--chief town, Clichy Castle.

"So off I went to Leon de Lora, and told him, for a joke, that you
could not leave your country quarters for lack of four thousand
francs, and that you would spoil your future prospects if you did
not make your bow to your royal patron. Happily, Bridau was there
--a man of genius, who has known what it is to be poor, and has
heard your story. My boy, between them they have found the money,
and I went off to pay the Turk who committed treason against
genius by putting you in quod. As I had to be at the Tuileries at
noon, I could not wait to see you sniffing the outer air. I know
you to be a gentleman, and I answered for you to my two friends--
but look them up to-morrow.

"Leon and Bridau do not want your cash; they will ask you to do
them each a group--and they are right. At least, so thinks the man
who wishes he could sign himself your rival, but is only your
faithful ally,

"STIDMANN.

"P. S.--I told the Prince you were away, and would not return till
to-morrow, so he said, 'Very good--to-morrow.' "

Count Wenceslas went to bed in sheets of purple, without a rose-leaf
to wrinkle them, that Favor can make for us--Favor, the halting
divinity who moves more slowly for men of genius than either Justice
or Fortune, because Jove has not chosen to bandage her eyes. Hence,
lightly deceived by the display of impostors, and attracted by their
frippery and trumpets, she spends the time in seeing them and the
money in paying them which she ought to devote to seeking out men of
merit in the nooks where they hide.

It will now be necessary to explain how Monsieur le Baron Hulot had
contrived to count up his expenditure on Hortense's wedding portion,
and at the same time to defray the frightful cost of the charming
rooms where Madame Marneffe was to make her home. His financial scheme
bore that stamp of talent which leads prodigals and men in love into
the quagmires where so many disasters await them. Nothing can
demonstrate more completely the strange capacity communicated by vice,
to which we owe the strokes of skill which ambitious or voluptuous men
can occasionally achieve--or, in short, any of the Devil's pupils.

On the day before, old Johann Fischer, unable to pay thirty thousand
francs drawn for on him by his nephew, had found himself under the
necessity of stopping payment unless the Baron could remit the sum.

This ancient worthy, with the white hairs of seventy years, had such
blind confidence in Hulot--who, to the old Bonapartist, was an
emanation from the Napoleonic sun--that he was calmly pacing his
anteroom with the bank clerk, in the little ground-floor apartment
that he rented for eight hundred francs a year as the headquarters of
his extensive dealings in corn and forage.

"Marguerite is gone to fetch the money from close by," said he.

The official, in his gray uniform braided with silver, was so
convinced of the old Alsatian's honesty, that he was prepared to leave
the thirty thousand francs' worth of bills in his hands; but the old
man would not let him go, observing that the clock had not yet struck
eight. A cab drew up, the old man rushed into the street, and held out
his hand to the Baron with sublime confidence--Hulot handed him out
thirty thousand-franc notes.

"Go on three doors further, and I will tell you why," said Fischer.

"Here, young man," he said, returning to count out the money to the
bank emissary, whom he then saw to the door.

When the clerk was out of sight, Fischer called back the cab
containing his august nephew, Napoleon's right hand, and said, as he
led him into the house:

"You do not want them to know at the Bank of France that you paid me
the thirty thousand francs, after endorsing the bills?--It was bad
enough to see them signed by such a man as you!--"

"Come to the bottom of your little garden, Father Fischer," said the
important man. "You are hearty?" he went on, sitting down under a vine
arbor and scanning the old man from head to foot, as a dealer in human
flesh scans a substitute for the conscription.

"Ay, hearty enough for a tontine," said the lean little old man; his
sinews were wiry, and his eye bright.

"Does heat disagree with you?"

"Quite the contrary."

"What do you say to Africa?"

"A very nice country!--The French went there with the little Corporal"
(Napoleon).

"To get us all out of the present scrape, you must go to Algiers,"
said the Baron.

"And how about my business?"

"An official in the War Office, who has to retire, and has not enough
to live on with his pension, will buy your business."

"And what am I to do in Algiers?"

"Supply the Commissariat with victuals, corn, and forage; I have your
commission ready filled in and signed. You can collect supplies in the
country at seventy per cent below the prices at which you can credit
us."

"How shall we get them?"

"Oh, by raids, by taxes in kind, and the Khaliphat.--The country is
little known, though we settled there eight years ago; Algeria
produces vast quantities of corn and forage. When this produce belongs
to Arabs, we take it from them under various pretences; when it
belongs to us, the Arabs try to get it back again. There is a great
deal of fighting over the corn, and no one ever knows exactly how much
each party has stolen from the other. There is not time in the open
field to measure the corn as we do in the Paris market, or the hay as
it is sold in the Rue d'Enfer. The Arab chiefs, like our Spahis,
prefer hard cash, and sell the plunder at a very low price. The
Commissariat needs a fixed quantity and must have it. It winks at
exorbitant prices calculated on the difficulty of procuring food, and
the dangers to which every form of transport is exposed. That is
Algiers from the army contractor's point of view.

"It is a muddle tempered by the ink-bottle, like every incipient
government. We shall not see our way through it for another ten years
--we who have to do the governing; but private enterprise has sharp
eyes.--So I am sending you there to make a fortune; I give you the
job, as Napoleon put an impoverished Marshal at the head of a kingdom
where smuggling might be secretly encouraged.

"I am ruined, my dear Fischer; I must have a hundred thousand francs
within a year."

"I see no harm in getting it out of the Bedouins," said the Alsatian
calmly. "It was always done under the Empire----"

"The man who wants to buy your business will be here this morning, and
pay you ten thousand francs down," the Baron went on. "That will be
enough, I suppose, to take you to Africa?"

The old man nodded assent.

"As to capital out there, be quite easy. I will draw the remainder of
the money due if I find it necessary."

"All I have is yours--my very blood," said old Fischer.

"Oh, do not be uneasy," said Hulot, fancying that his uncle saw more
clearly than was the fact. "As to our excise dealings, your character
will not be impugned. Everything depends on the authority at your
back; now I myself appointed the authorities out there; I am sure of
them. This, Uncle Fischer, is a dead secret between us. I know you
well, and I have spoken out without concealment or circumlocution."

"It shall be done," said the old man. "And it will go on----?"

"For two years, You will have made a hundred thousand francs of your
own to live happy on in the Vosges."

"I will do as you wish; my honor is yours," said the little old man
quietly.

"That is the sort of man I like.--However, you must not go till you
have seen your grand-niece happily married. She is to be a Countess."

But even taxes and raids and the money paid by the War Office clerk
for Fischer's business could not forthwith provide sixty thousand
francs to give Hortense, to say nothing of her trousseau, which was to
cost about five thousand, and the forty thousand spent--or to be spent
--on Madame Marneffe.

Where, then had the Baron found the thirty thousand francs he had just
produced? This was the history.

A few days previously Hulot had insured his life for the sum of a
hundred and fifty thousand francs, for three years, in two separate
companies. Armed with the policies, of which he paid the premium, he
had spoken as follows to the Baron de Nucingen, a peer of the Chamber,
in whose carriage he found himself after a sitting, driving home, in
fact, to dine with him:--

"Baron, I want seventy thousand francs, and I apply to you. You must
find some one to lend his name, to whom I will make over the right to
draw my pay for three years; it amounts to twenty-five thousand francs
a year--that is, seventy-five thousand francs.--You will say, 'But you
may die' "--the banker signified his assent--"Here, then, is a policy
of insurance for a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which I will
deposit with you till you have drawn up the eighty thousand francs,"
said Hulot, producing the document form his pocket.

"But if you should lose your place?" said the millionaire Baron,
laughing.

The other Baron--not a millionaire--looked grave.

"Be quite easy; I only raised the question to show you that I was not
devoid of merit in handing you the sum. Are you so short of cash? for
the Bank will take your signature."

"My daughter is to be married," said Baron Hulot, "and I have no
fortune--like every one else who remains in office in these thankless
times, when five hundred ordinary men seated on benches will never
reward the men who devote themselves to the service as handsomely as
the Emperor did."

"Well, well; but you had Josepha on your hands!" replied Nucingen,
"and that accounts for everything. Between ourselves, the Duc
d'Herouville has done you a very good turn by removing that leech from
sucking your purse dry. 'I have known what that is, and can pity your
case,' " he quoted. "Take a friend's advice: Shut up shop, or you will
be done for."

This dirty business was carried out in the name of one Vauvinet, a
small money-lender; one of those jobbers who stand forward to screen
great banking houses, like the little fish that is said to attend the
shark. This stock-jobber's apprentice was so anxious to gain the
patronage of Monsieur le Baron Hulot, that he promised the great man
to negotiate bills of exchange for thirty thousand francs at eighty
days, and pledged himself to renew them four times, and never pass
them out of his hands.

Fischer's successor was to pay forty thousand francs for the house and
the business, with the promise that he should supply forage to a
department close to Paris.

This was the desperate maze of affairs into which a man who had
hitherto been absolutely honest was led by his passions--one of the
best administrative officials under Napoleon--peculation to pay the
money-lenders, and borrowing of the money-lenders to gratify his
passions and provide for his daughter. All the efforts of this
elaborate prodigality were directed at making a display before Madame
Marneffe, and to playing Jupiter to this middle-class Danae. A man
could not expend more activity, intelligence, and presence of mind in
the honest acquisition of a fortune than the Baron displayed in
shoving his head into a wasp's nest: He did all the business of his
department, he hurried on the upholsterers, he talked to the workmen,
he kept a sharp lookout on the smallest details of the house in the
Rue Vanneau. Wholly devoted to Madame Marneffe, he nevertheless
attended the sittings of the Chambers; he was everywhere at once, and
neither his family nor anybody else discovered where his thoughts
were.

Adeline, quite amazed to hear that her uncle was rescued, and to see a
handsome sum figure in the marriage-contract, was not altogether easy,
in spite of her joy at seeing her daughter married under such
creditable circumstances. But, on the day before the wedding, fixed by
the Baron to coincide with Madame Marneffe's removal to her new
apartment, Hector allayed his wife's astonishment by this ministerial
communication:--

"Now, Adeline, our girl is married; all our anxieties on the subject
are at an end. The time is come for us to retire from the world: I
shall not remain in office more than three years longer--only the time
necessary to secure my pension. Why, henceforth, should we be at any
unnecessary expense? Our apartment costs us six thousand francs a year
in rent, we have four servants, we eat thirty thousand francs' worth
of food in a year. If you want me to pay off my bills--for I have
pledged my salary for the sums I needed to give Hortense her little
money, and pay off your uncle----"

"You did very right!" said she, interrupting her husband, and kissing
his hands.

This explanation relieved Adeline of all her fears.

"I shall have to ask some little sacrifices of you," he went on,
disengaging his hands and kissing his wife's brow. "I have found in
the Rue Plumet a very good flat on the first floor, handsome,
splendidly paneled, at only fifteen hundred francs a year, where you
would only need one woman to wait on you, and I could be quite content
with a boy."

"Yes, my dear."

"If we keep house in a quiet way, keeping up a proper appearance of
course, we should not spend more than six thousand francs a year,
excepting my private account, which I will provide for."

The generous-hearted woman threw her arms round her husband's neck in
her joy.

"How happy I shall be, beginning again to show you how truly I love
you!" she exclaimed. "And what a capital manager you are!"

"We will have the children to dine with us once a week. I, as you
know, rarely dine at home. You can very well dine twice a week with
Victorin and twice a week with Hortense. And, as I believe, I may
succeed in making matters up completely between Crevel and us; we can
dine once a week with him. These five dinners and our own at home will
fill up the week all but one day, supposing that we may occasionally
be invited to dine elsewhere."

"I shall save a great deal for you," said Adeline.

"Oh!" he cried, "you are the pearl of women!"

"My kind, divine Hector, I shall bless you with my latest breath,"
said she, "for you have done well for my dear Hortense."

This was the beginning of the end of the beautiful Madame Hulot's
home; and, it may be added, of her being totally neglected, as Hulot
had solemnly promised Madame Marneffe.

Crevel, the important and burly, being invited as a matter of course
to the party given for the signing of the marriage-contract, behaved
as though the scene with which this drama opened had never taken
place, as though he had no grievance against the Baron. Celestin
Crevel was quite amiable; he was perhaps rather too much the
ex-perfumer, but as a Major he was beginning to acquire majestic
dignity. He talked of dancing at the wedding.

"Fair lady," said he politely to the Baroness, "people like us know
how to forget. Do not banish me from your home; honor me, pray, by
gracing my house with your presence now and then to meet your
children. Be quite easy; I will never say anything of what lies buried
at the bottom of my heart. I behaved, indeed, like an idiot, for I
should lose too much by cutting myself off from seeing you."

"Monsieur, an honest woman has no ears for such speeches as those you
refer to. If you keep your word, you need not doubt that it will give
me pleasure to see the end of a coolness which must always be painful
in a family."

"Well, you sulky old fellow," said Hulot, dragging Crevel out into the
garden, "you avoid me everywhere, even in my own house. Are two
admirers of the fair sex to quarrel for ever over a petticoat? Come;
this is really too plebeian!"

"I, monsieur, am not such a fine man as you are, and my small
attractions hinder me from repairing my losses so easily as you
can----"

"Sarcastic!" said the Baron.

"Irony is allowable from the vanquished to the conquerer."

The conversation, begun in this strain, ended in a complete
reconciliation; still Crevel maintained his right to take his revenge.

Madame Marneffe particularly wished to be invited to Mademoiselle
Hulot's wedding. To enable him to receive his future mistress in his
drawing-room, the great official was obliged to invite all the clerks
of his division down to the deputy head-clerks inclusive. Thus a grand
ball was a necessity. The Baroness, as a prudent housewife, calculated
that an evening party would cost less than a dinner, and allow of a
larger number of invitations; so Hortense's wedding was much talked
about.

Marshal Prince Wissembourg and the Baron de Nucingen signed in behalf
of the bride, the Comtes de Rastignac and Popinot in behalf of
Steinbock. Then, as the highest nobility among the Polish emigrants
had been civil to Count Steinbock since he had become famous, the
artist thought himself bound to invite them. The State Council, and
the War Office to which the Baron belonged, and the army, anxious to
do honor to the Comte de Forzheim, were all represented by their
magnates. There were nearly two hundred indispensable invitations. How
natural, then, that little Madame Marneffe was bent on figuring in all
her glory amid such an assembly. The Baroness had, a month since, sold
her diamonds to set up her daughter's house, while keeping the finest
for the trousseau. The sale realized fifteen thousand francs, of which
five thousand were sunk in Hortense's clothes. And what was ten
thousand francs for the furniture of the young folks' apartment,
considering the demands of modern luxury? However, young Monsieur and
Madame Hulot, old Crevel, and the Comte de Forzheim made very handsome
presents, for the old soldier had set aside a sum for the purchase of
plate. Thanks to these contributions, even an exacting Parisian would
have been pleased with the rooms the young couple had taken in the Rue
Saint-Dominique, near the Invalides. Everything seemed in harmony with
their love, pure, honest, and sincere.

At last the great day dawned--for it was to be a great day not only
for Wenceslas and Hortense, but for old Hulot too. Madame Marneffe was
to give a house-warming in her new apartment the day after becoming
Hulot's mistress en titre, and after the marriage of the lovers.

Who but has once in his life been a guest at a wedding-ball? Every
reader can refer to his reminiscences, and will probably smile as he
calls up the images of all that company in their Sunday-best faces as
well as their finest frippery.

If any social event can prove the influence of environment, is it not
this? In fact, the Sunday-best mood of some reacts so effectually on
the rest that the men who are most accustomed to wearing full dress
look just like those to whom the party is a high festival, unique in
their life. And think too of the serious old men to whom such things
are so completely a matter of indifference, that they are wearing
their everyday black coats; the long-married men, whose faces betray
their sad experience of the life the young pair are but just entering
on; and the lighter elements, present as carbonic-acid gas is in
champagne; and the envious girls, the women absorbed in wondering if
their dress is a success, the poor relations whose parsimonious "get-
up" contrasts with that of the officials in uniform; and the greedy
ones, thinking only of the supper; and the gamblers, thinking only of
cards.

There are some of every sort, rich and poor, envious and envied,
philosophers and dreamers, all grouped like the plants in a flower-bed
round the rare, choice blossom, the bride. A wedding-ball is an
epitome of the world.

At the liveliest moment of the evening Crevel led the Baron aside, and
said in a whisper, with the most natural manner possible:

"By Jove! that's a pretty woman--the little lady in pink who has
opened a racking fire on you from her eyes."

"Which?"

"The wife of that clerk you are promoting, heaven knows how!--Madame
Marneffe."

"What do you know about it?"

"Listen, Hulot; I will try to forgive you the ill you have done me if
only you will introduce me to her--I will take you to Heloise.
Everybody is asking who is that charming creature. Are you sure that
it will strike no one how and why her husband's appointment got itself
signed?--You happy rascal, she is worth a whole office.--I would serve
in her office only too gladly.--Come, cinna, let us be friends."

"Better friends than ever," said the Baron to the perfumer, "and I
promise you I will be a good fellow. Within a month you shall dine
with that little angel.--For it is an angel this time, old boy. And I
advise you, like me, to have done with the devils."

Cousin Betty, who had moved to the Rue Vanneau, into a nice little
apartment on the third floor, left the ball at ten o'clock, but came
back to see with her own eyes the two bonds bearing twelve hundred
francs interest; one of them was the property of the Countess
Steinbock, the other was in the name of Madame Hulot.

It is thus intelligible that Monsieur Crevel should have spoken to
Hulot about Madame Marneffe, as knowing what was a secret to the rest
of the world; for, as Monsieur Marneffe was away, no one but Lisbeth
Fischer, besides the Baron and Valerie, was initiated into the
mystery.

The Baron had made a blunder in giving Madame Marneffe a dress far too
magnificent for the wife of a subordinate official; other women were
jealous alike of her beauty and of her gown. There was much whispering
behind fans, for the poverty of the Marneffes was known to every one
in the office; the husband had been petitioning for help at the very
moment when the Baron had been so smitten with madame. Also, Hector
could not conceal his exultation at seeing Valerie's success; and she,
severely proper, very lady-like, and greatly envied, was the object of
that strict examination which women so greatly fear when they appear
for the first time in a new circle of society.

After seeing his wife into a carriage with his daughter and his son-
in-law, Hulot managed to escape unperceived, leaving his son and
Celestine to do the honors of the house. He got into Madame Marneffe's
carriage to see her home, but he found her silent and pensive, almost
melancholy.

"My happiness makes you very sad, Valerie," said he, putting his arm
round her and drawing her to him.

"Can you wonder, my dear," said she, "that a hapless woman should be a
little depressed at the thought of her first fall from virtue, even
when her husband's atrocities have set her free? Do you suppose that I
have no soul, no beliefs, no religion? Your glee this evening has been
really too barefaced; you have paraded me odiously. Really, a
schoolboy would have been less of a coxcomb. And the ladies have
dissected me with their side-glances and their satirical remarks.
Every woman has some care for her reputation, and you have wrecked
mine.

"Oh, I am yours and no mistake! And I have not an excuse left but that
of being faithful to you.--Monster that you are!" she added, laughing,
and allowing him to kiss her, "you knew very well what you were doing!
Madame Coquet, our chief clerk's wife, came to sit down by me, and
admired my lace. 'English point!' said she. 'Was it very expensive,
madame?'--'I do not know. This lace was my mother's. I am not rich
enough to buy the like,' said I."

Madame Marneffe, in short, had so bewitched the old beau, that he
really believed she was sinning for the first time for his sake, and
that he had inspired such a passion as had led her to this breach of
duty. She told him that the wretch Marneffe had neglected her after
they had been three days married, and for the most odious reasons.
Since then she had lived as innocently as a girl; marriage had seemed
to her so horrible. This was the cause of her present melancholy.

"If love should prove to be like marriage----" said she in tears.

These insinuating lies, with which almost every woman in Valerie's
predicament is ready, gave the Baron distant visions of the roses of
the seventh heaven. And so Valerie coquetted with her lover, while the
artist and Hortense were impatiently awaiting the moment when the
Baroness should have given the girl her last kiss and blessing.

At seven in the morning the Baron, perfectly happy--for his Valerie
was at once the most guileless of girls and the most consummate of
demons--went back to release his son and Celestine from their duties.
All the dancers, for the most part strangers, had taken possession of
the territory, as they do at every wedding-ball, and were keeping up
the endless figures of the cotillions, while the gamblers were still
crowding round the bouillotte tables, and old Crevel had won six
thousand francs.

The morning papers, carried round the town, contained this paragraph
in the Paris article:--

"The marriage was celebrated this morning, at the Church of Saint-
Thomas d'Aquin, between Monsieur le Comte Steinbock and
Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot, daughter of Baron Hulot d'Ervy,
Councillor of State, and a Director at the War Office; niece of
the famous General Comte de Forzheim. The ceremony attracted a
large gathering. There were present some of the most distinguished
artists of the day: Leon de Lora, Joseph Bridau, Stidmann, and
Bixiou; the magnates of the War Office, of the Council of State,
and many members of the two Chambers; also the most distinguished
of the Polish exiles living in Paris: Counts Paz, Laginski, and
others.

"Monsieur le Comte Wenceslas Steinbock is grandnephew to the
famous general who served under Charles XII., King of Sweden. The
young Count, having taken part in the Polish rebellion, found a
refuge in France, where his well-earned fame as a sculptor has
procured him a patent of naturalization."

And so, in spite of the Baron's cruel lack of money, nothing was
lacking that public opinion could require, not even the trumpeting of
the newspapers over his daughter's marriage, which was solemnized in
the same way, in every particular, as his son's had been to
Mademoiselle Crevel. This display moderated the reports current as to
the Baron's financial position, while the fortune assigned to his
daughter explained the need for having borrowed money.

Here ends what is, in a way, the introduction to this story. It is to
the drama that follows that the premise is to a syllogism, what the
prologue is to a classical tragedy.

In Paris, when a woman determines to make a business, a trade, of her
beauty, it does not follow that she will make a fortune. Lovely
creatures may be found there, and full of wit, who are in wretched
circumstances, ending in misery a life begun in pleasure. And this is
why. It is not enough merely to accept the shameful life of a
courtesan with a view to earning its profits, and at the same time to
bear the simple garb of a respectable middle-class wife. Vice does not
triumph so easily; it resembles genius in so far that they both need a
concurrence of favorable conditions to develop the coalition of
fortune and gifts. Eliminate the strange prologue of the Revolution,
and the Emperor would never have existed; he would have been no more
than a second edition of Fabert. Venal beauty, if it finds no
amateurs, no celebrity, no cross of dishonor earned by squandering
men's fortunes, is Correggio in a hay-loft, is genius starving in a
garret. Lais, in Paris, must first and foremost find a rich man mad
enough to pay her price. She must keep up a very elegant style, for
this is her shop-sign; she must be sufficiently well bred to flatter
the vanity of her lovers; she must have the brilliant wit of a Sophie
Arnould, which diverts the apathy of rich men; finally, she must
arouse the passions of libertines by appearing to be mistress to one
man only who is envied by the rest.

These conditions, which a woman of that class calls being in luck, are
difficult to combine in Paris, although it is a city of millionaires,
of idlers, of used-up and capricious men.

Providence has, no doubt, vouchsafed protection to clerks and middle-
class citizens, for whom obstacles of this kind are at least double in
the sphere in which they move. At the same time, there are enough
Madame Marneffes in Paris to allow of our taking Valerie to figure as
a type in this picture of manners. Some of these women yield to the
double pressure of a genuine passion and of hard necessity, like
Madame Colleville, who was for long attached to one of the famous
orators of the left, Keller the banker. Others are spurred by vanity,
like Madame de la Baudraye, who remained almost respectable in spite
of her elopement with Lousteau. Some, again, are led astray by the
love of fine clothes, and some by the impossibility of keeping a house
going on obviously too narrow means. The stinginess of the State--or
of Parliament--leads to many disasters and to much corruption.

At the present moment the laboring classes are the fashionable object
of compassion; they are being murdered--it is said--by the
manufacturing capitalist; but the Government is a hundred times harder
than the meanest tradesman, it carries its economy in the article of
salaries to absolute folly. If you work harder, the merchant will pay
you more in proportion; but what does the State do for its crowd of
obscure and devoted toilers?

In a married woman it is an inexcusable crime when she wanders from
the path of honor; still, there are degrees even in such a case. Some
women, far from being depraved, conceal their fall and remain to all
appearances quite respectable, like those two just referred to, while
others add to their fault the disgrace of speculation. Thus Madame
Marneffe is, as it were, the type of those ambitious married
courtesans who from the first accept depravity with all its
consequences, and determine to make a fortune while taking their
pleasure, perfectly unscrupulous as to the means. But almost always a
woman like Madame Marneffe has a husband who is her confederate and
accomplice. These Machiavellis in petticoats are the most dangerous of
the sisterhood; of every evil class of Parisian woman, they are the
worst.

A mere courtesan--a Josepha, a Malaga, a Madame Schontz, a Jenny
Cadine--carries in her frank dishonor a warning signal as conspicuous
as the red lamp of a house of ill-fame or the flaring lights of a
gambling hell. A man knows that they light him to his ruin.

But mealy-mouthed propriety, the semblance of virtue, the hypocritical
ways of a married woman who never allows anything to be seen but the
vulgar needs of the household, and affects to refuse every kind of
extravagance, leads to silent ruin, dumb disaster, which is all the
more startling because, though condoned, it remains unaccounted for.
It is the ignoble bill of daily expenses and not gay dissipation that
devours the largest fortune. The father of a family ruins himself
ingloriously, and the great consolation of gratified vanity is wanting
in his misery.

This little sermon will go like a javelin to the heart of many a home.
Madame Marneffes are to be seen in every sphere of social life, even
at Court; for Valerie is a melancholy fact, modeled from the life in
the smallest details. And, alas! the portrait will not cure any man of
the folly of loving these sweetly-smiling angels, with pensive looks
and candid faces, whose heart is a cash-box.

About three years after Hortense's marriage, in 1841, Baron Hulot
d'Ervy was supposed to have sown his wild oats, to have "put up his
horses," to quote the expression used by Louis XV.'s head surgeon, and
yet Madame Marneffe was costing him twice as much as Josepha had ever
cost him. Still, Valerie, though always nicely dressed, affected the
simplicity of a subordinate official's wife; she kept her luxury for
her dressing-gowns, her home wear. She thus sacrificed her Parisian
vanity to her dear Hector. At the theatre, however, she always
appeared in a pretty bonnet and a dress of extreme elegance; and the
Baron took her in a carriage to a private box.

Her rooms, the whole of the second floor of a modern house in the Rue
Vanneau, between a fore-court and a garden, was redolent of
respectability. All its luxury was in good chintz hangings and
handsome convenient furniture.

Her bedroom, indeed, was the exception, and rich with such profusion
as Jenny Cadine or Madame Schontz might have displayed. There were
lace curtains, cashmere hangings, brocade portieres, a set of chimney
ornaments modeled by Stidmann, a glass cabinet filled with dainty
nicknacks. Hulot could not bear to see his Valerie in a bower of
inferior magnificence to the dunghill of gold and pearls owned by a
Josepha. The drawing-room was furnished with red damask, and the
dining-room had carved oak panels. But the Baron, carried away by his
wish to have everything in keeping, had at the end of six months,
added solid luxury to mere fashion, and had given her handsome
portable property, as, for instance, a service of plate that was to
cost more than twenty-four thousand francs.

Madame Marneffe's house had in a couple of years achieved a reputation
for being a very pleasant one. Gambling went on there. Valerie herself
was soon spoken of as an agreeable and witty woman. To account for her
change of style, a rumor was set going of an immense legacy bequeathed
to her by her "natural father," Marshal Montcornet, and left in trust.

With an eye to the future, Valerie had added religious to social
hypocrisy. Punctual at the Sunday services, she enjoyed all the honors
due to the pious. She carried the bag for the offertory, she was a
member of a charitable association, presented bread for the sacrament,
and did some good among the poor, all at Hector's expense. Thus
everything about the house was extremely seemly. And a great many
persons maintained that her friendship with the Baron was entirely
innocent, supporting the view by the gentleman's mature age, and
ascribing to him a Platonic liking for Madame Marneffe's pleasant wit,
charming manners, and conversation--such a liking as that of the late
lamented Louis XVIII. for a well-turned note.

The Baron always withdrew with the other company at about midnight,
and came back a quarter of an hour later.

The secret of this secrecy was as follows. The lodge-keepers of the
house were a Monsieur and Madame Olivier, who, under the Baron's
patronage, had been promoted from their humble and not very lucrative
post in the Rue du Doyenne to the highly-paid and handsome one in the
Rue Vanneau. Now, Madame Olivier, formerly a needlewoman in the
household of Charles X., who had fallen in the world with the
legitimate branch, had three children. The eldest, an under-clerk in a
notary's office, was object of his parents' adoration. This Benjamin,
for six years in danger of being drawn for the army, was on the point
of being interrupted in his legal career, when Madame Marneffe
contrived to have him declared exempt for one of those little
malformations which the Examining Board can always discern when
requested in a whisper by some power in the ministry. So Olivier,
formerly a huntsman to the King, and his wife would have crucified the
Lord again for the Baron or for Madame Marneffe.

What could the world have to say? It knew nothing of the former
episode of the Brazilian, Monsieur Montes de Montejanos--it could say
nothing. Besides, the world is very indulgent to the mistress of a
house where amusement is to be found.

And then to all her charms Valerie added the highly-prized advantage
of being an occult power. Claude Vignon, now secretary to Marshal the
Prince de Wissembourg, and dreaming of promotion to the Council of
State as a Master of Appeals, was constantly seen in her rooms, to
which came also some Deputies--good fellows and gamblers. Madame
Marneffe had got her circle together with prudent deliberation; only
men whose opinions and habits agreed foregathered there, men whose
interest it was to hold together and to proclaim the many merits of
the lady of the house. Scandal is the true Holy Alliance in Paris.
Take that as an axiom. Interests invariably fall asunder in the end;
vicious natures can always agree.

Within three months of settling in the Rue Vanneau, Madame Marneffe
had entertained Monsieur Crevel, who by that time was Mayor of his
arrondissement and Officer of the Legion of Honor. Crevel had
hesitated; he would have to give up the famous uniform of the National
Guard in which he strutted at the Tuileries, believing himself quite
as much a soldier as the Emperor himself; but ambition, urged by
Madame Marneffe, had proved stronger than vanity. Then Monsieur le
Maire had considered his connection with Mademoiselle Heloise
Brisetout as quite incompatible with his political position.

Indeed, long before his accession to the civic chair of the Mayoralty,
his gallant intimacies had been wrapped in the deepest mystery. But,
as the reader may have guessed, Crevel had soon purchased the right of
taking his revenge, as often as circumstances allowed, for having been
bereft of Josepha, at the cost of a bond bearing six thousand francs
of interest in the name of Valerie Fortin, wife of Sieur Marneffe, for
her sole and separate use. Valerie, inheriting perhaps from her mother
the special acumen of the kept woman, read the character of her
grotesque adorer at a glance. The phrase "I never had a lady for a
mistress," spoken by Crevel to Lisbeth, and repeated by Lisbeth to her
dear Valerie, had been handsomely discounted in the bargain by which
she got her six thousand francs a year in five per cents. And since
then she had never allowed her prestige to grow less in the eyes of
Cesar Birotteau's erewhile bagman.

Crevel himself had married for money the daughter of a miller of la
Brie, an only child indeed, whose inheritance constituted three-
quarters of his fortune; for when retail-dealers grow rich, it is
generally not so much by trade as through some alliance between the
shop and rural thrift. A large proportion of the farmers, corn-
factors, dairy-keepers, and market-gardeners in the neighborhood of
Paris, dream of the glories of the desk for their daughters, and look
upon a shopkeeper, a jeweler, or a money-changer as a son-in-law after
their own heart, in preference to a notary or an attorney, whose
superior social position is a ground of suspicion; they are afraid of
being scorned in the future by these citizen bigwigs.

Madame Crevel, ugly, vulgar, and silly, had given her husband no
pleasures but those of paternity; she died young. Her libertine
husband, fettered at the beginning of his commercial career by the
necessity for working, and held in thrall by want of money, had led
the life of Tantalus. Thrown in--as he phrased it--with the most
elegant women in Paris, he let them out of the shop with servile
homage, while admiring their grace, their way of wearing the fashions,
and all the nameless charms of what is called breeding. To rise to the
level of one of these fairies of the drawing-room was a desire formed
in his youth, but buried in the depths of his heart. Thus to win the
favors of Madame Marneffe was to him not merely the realization of his
chimera, but, as has been shown, a point of pride, of vanity, of self-
satisfaction. His ambition grew with success; his brain was turned
with elation; and when the mind is captivated, the heart feels more
keenly, every gratification is doubled.

Also, it must be said that Madame Marneffe offered to Crevel a
refinement of pleasure of which he had no idea; neither Josepha nor
Heloise had loved him; and Madame Marneffe thought it necessary to
deceive him thoroughly, for this man, she saw, would prove an
inexhaustible till. The deceptions of a venal passion are more
delightful than the real thing. True love is mixed up with birdlike
squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but
a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, a piece of flattery to
the dupe's conceit.

The rare interviews granted to Crevel kept his passion at white heat.
He was constantly blocked by Valerie's virtuous severity; she acted
remorse, and wondered what her father must be thinking of her in the
paradise of the brave. Again and again he had to contend with a sort
of coldness, which the cunning slut made him believe he had overcome
by seeming to surrender to the man's crazy passion; and then, as if
ashamed, she entrenched herself once more in her pride of
respectability and airs of virtue, just like an Englishwoman, neither
more nor less; and she always crushed her Crevel under the weight of
her dignity--for Crevel had, in the first instance, swallowed her
pretensions to virtue.

In short, Valerie had special veins of affections which made her
equally indispensable to Crevel and to the Baron. Before the world she
displayed the attractive combination of modest and pensive innocence,
of irreproachable propriety, with a bright humor enhanced by the
suppleness, the grace and softness of the Creole; but in a tete-a-
tete she would outdo any courtesan; she was audacious, amusing, and
full of original inventiveness. Such a contrast is irresistible to a
man of the Crevel type; he is flattered by believing himself sole
author of the comedy, thinking it is performed for his benefit alone,
and he laughs at the exquisite hypocrisy while admiring the hypocrite.

Valerie had taken entire possession of Baron Hulot; she had persuaded
him to grow old by one of those subtle touches of flattery which
reveal the diabolical wit of women like her. In all evergreen
constitutions a moment arrives when the truth suddenly comes out, as
in a besieged town which puts a good face on affairs as long as
possible. Valerie, foreseeing the approaching collapse of the old beau
of the Empire, determined to forestall it.

"Why give yourself so much bother, my dear old veteran?" said she one
day, six months after their doubly adulterous union. "Do you want to
be flirting? To be unfaithful to me? I assure you, I should like you
better without your make-up. Oblige me by giving up all your
artificial charms. Do you suppose that it is for two sous' worth of
polish on your boots that I love you? For your india-rubber belt, your
strait-waistcoat, and your false hair? And then, the older you look,
the less need I fear seeing my Hulot carried off by a rival."

And Hulot, trusting to Madame Marneffe's heavenly friendship as much
as to her love, intending, too, to end his days with her, had taken
this confidential hint, and ceased to dye his whiskers and hair. After
this touching declaration from his Valerie, handsome Hector made his
appearance one morning perfectly white. Madame Marneffe could assure
him that she had a hundred times detected the white line of the growth
of the hair.

"And white hair suits your face to perfection," said she; "it softens
it. You look a thousand times better, quite charming."

The Baron, once started on this path of reform, gave up his leather
waistcoat and stays; he threw off all his bracing. His stomach fell
and increased in size. The oak became a tower, and the heaviness of
his movements was all the more alarming because the Baron grew
immensely older by playing the part of Louis XII. His eyebrows were
still black, and left a ghostly reminiscence of Handsome Hulot, as
sometimes on the wall of some feudal building a faint trace of
sculpture remains to show what the castle was in the days of its
glory. This discordant detail made his eyes, still bright and
youthful, all the more remarkable in his tanned face, because it had
so long been ruddy with the florid hues of a Rubens; and now a certain
discoloration and the deep tension of the wrinkles betrayed the
efforts of a passion at odds with natural decay. Hulot was now one of
those stalwart ruins in which virile force asserts itself by tufts of
hair in the ears and nostrils and on the fingers, as moss grows on the
almost eternal monuments of the Roman Empire.

How had Valerie contrived to keep Crevel and Hulot side by side, each
tied to an apron-string, when the vindictive Mayor only longed to
triumph openly over Hulot? Without immediately giving an answer to
this question, which the course of the story will supply, it may be
said that Lisbeth and Valerie had contrived a powerful piece of
machinery which tended to this result. Marneffe, as he saw his wife
improved in beauty by the setting in which she was enthroned, like the
sun at the centre of the sidereal system, appeared, in the eyes of the
world, to have fallen in love with her again himself; he was quite
crazy about her. Now, though his jealousy made him somewhat of a
marplot, it gave enhanced value to Valerie's favors. Marneffe
meanwhile showed a blind confidence in his chief, which degenerated
into ridiculous complaisance. The only person whom he really would not
stand was Crevel.

Marneffe, wrecked by the debauchery of great cities, described by
Roman authors, though modern decency has no name for it, was as
hideous as an anatomical figure in wax. But this disease on feet,
clothed in good broadcloth, encased his lathlike legs in elegant
trousers. The hollow chest was scented with fine linen, and musk
disguised the odors of rotten humanity. This hideous specimen of
decaying vice, trotting in red heels--for Valerie dressed the man as
beseemed his income, his cross, and his appointment--horrified Crevel,
who could not meet the colorless eyes of the Government clerk.
Marneffe was an incubus to the Mayor. And the mean rascal, aware of
the strange power conferred on him by Lisbeth and his wife, was amused
by it; he played on it as on an instrument; and cards being the last
resource of a mind as completely played out as the body, he plucked
Crevel again and again, the Mayor thinking himself bound to
subserviency to the worthy official whom he was cheating.

Seeing Crevel a mere child in the hands of that hideous and atrocious
mummy, of whose utter vileness the Mayor knew nothing; and seeing him,
yet more, an object of deep contempt to Valerie, who made game of
Crevel as of some mountebank, the Baron apparently thought him so
impossible as a rival that he constantly invited him to dinner.

Valerie, protected by two lovers on guard, and by a jealous husband,
attracted every eye, and excited every desire in the circle she shone
upon. And thus, while keeping up appearances, she had, in the course
of three years, achieved the most difficult conditions of the success
a courtesan most cares for and most rarely attains, even with the help
of audacity and the glitter of an existence in the light of the sun.
Valerie's beauty, formerly buried in the mud of the Rue du Doyenne,
now, like a well-cut diamond exquisitely set by Chanor, was worth more
than its real value--it could break hearts. Claude Vignon adored
Valerie in secret.

This retrospective explanation, quite necessary after the lapse of
three years, shows Valerie's balance-sheet. Now for that of her
partner, Lisbeth.

Lisbeth Fischer filled the place in the Marneffe household of a
relation who combines the functions of a lady companion and a
housekeeper; but she suffered from none of the humiliations which, for
the most part, weigh upon the women who are so unhappy as to be
obliged to fill these ambiguous situations. Lisbeth and Valerie
offered the touching spectacle of one of those friendships between
women, so cordial and so improbable, that men, always too keen-tongued
in Paris, forthwith slander them. The contrast between Lisbeth's dry
masculine nature and Valerie's creole prettiness encouraged calumny.
And Madame Marneffe had unconsciously given weight to the scandal by
the care she took of her friend, with matrimonial views, which were,
as will be seen, to complete Lisbeth's revenge.

An immense change had taken place in Cousin Betty; and Valerie, who
wanted to smarten her, had turned it to the best account. The strange
woman had submitted to stays, and laced tightly, she used bandoline to
keep her hair smooth, wore her gowns as the dressmaker sent them home,
neat little boots, and gray silk stockings, all of which were included
in Valerie's bills, and paid for by the gentleman in possession. Thus
furbished up, and wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, Lisbeth would
have been unrecognizable by any one who had not seen her for three
years.

This other diamond--a black diamond, the rarest of all--cut by a
skilled hand, and set as best became her, was appreciated at her full
value by certain ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first
time might have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness
which the clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of
dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick
bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the
rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or
a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness,
the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of
Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian
sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, with life and movement.

Saved from want for the rest of her life, Lisbeth was most amiable;
wherever she dined she brought merriment. And the Baron paid the rent
of her little apartment, furnished, as we know, with the leavings of
her friend Valerie's former boudoir and bedroom.

"I began," she would say, "as a hungry nanny goat, and I am ending as
a lionne."

She still worked for Monsieur Rivet at the more elaborate kinds of
gold-trimming, merely, as she said, not to lose her time. At the same
time, she was, as we shall see, very full of business; but it is
inherent in the nature of country-folks never to give up bread-
winning; in this they are like the Jews.

Every morning, very early, Cousin Betty went off to market with the
cook. It was part of Lisbeth's scheme that the house-book, which was
ruining Baron Hulot, was to enrich her dear Valerie--as it did indeed.

Is there a housewife who, since 1838, has not suffered from the evil
effects of Socialist doctrines diffused among the lower classes by
incendiary writers? In every household the plague of servants is
nowadays the worst of financial afflictions. With very few exceptions,
who ought to be rewarded with the Montyon prize, the cook, male or
female, is a domestic robber, a thief taking wages, and perfectly
barefaced, with the Government for a fence, developing the tendency to
dishonesty, which is almost authorized in the cook by the time-honored
jest as to the "handle of the basket." The women who formerly picked
up their forty sous to buy a lottery ticket now take fifty francs to
put into the savings bank. And the smug Puritans who amuse themselves
in France with philanthropic experiments fancy that they are making
the common people moral!

Between the market and the master's table the servants have their
secret toll, and the municipality of Paris is less sharp in collecting
the city-dues than the servants are in taking theirs on every single
thing. To say nothing of fifty per cent charged on every form of food,
they demand large New Year's premiums from the tradesmen. The best
class of dealers tremble before this occult power, and subsidize it
without a word--coachmakers, jewelers, tailors, and all. If any
attempt is made to interfere with them, the servants reply with
impudent retorts, or revenge themselves by the costly blunders of
assumed clumsiness; and in these days they inquire into their master's
character as, formerly, the master inquired into theirs. This mischief
is now really at its height, and the law-courts are beginning to take
cognizance of it; but in vain, for it cannot be remedied but by a law
which shall compel domestic servants, like laborers, to have a pass-
book as a guarantee of conduct. Then the evil will vanish as if by
magic. If every servant were obliged to show his pass-book, and if
masters were required to state in it the cause of his dismissal, this
would certainly prove a powerful check to the evil.

The men who are giving their attentions to the politics of the day
know not to what lengths the depravity of the lower classes has gone.
Statistics are silent as to the startling number of working men of
twenty who marry cooks of between forty and fifty enriched by robbery.
We shudder to think of the result of such unions from the three points
of view of increasing crime, degeneracy of the race, and miserable
households.

As to the mere financial mischief that results from domestic
peculation, that too is immense from a political point of view. Life
being made to cost double, any superfluity becomes impossible in most
households. Now superfluity means half the trade of the world, as it
is half the elegance of life. Books and flowers are to many persons as
necessary as bread.

Lisbeth, well aware of this dreadful scourge of Parisian households,
determined to manage Valerie's, promising her every assistance in the
terrible scene when the two women had sworn to be like sisters. So she
had brought from the depths of the Vosges a humble relation on her
mother's side, a very pious and honest soul, who had been cook to the
Bishop of Nancy. Fearing, however, her inexperience of Paris ways, and
yet more the evil counsel which wrecks such fragile virtue, at first
Lisbeth always went to market with Mathurine, and tried to teach her
what to buy. To know the real prices of things and command the
salesman's respect; to purchase unnecessary delicacies, such as fish,
only when they were cheap; to be well informed as to the price current
of groceries and provisions, so as to buy when prices are low in
anticipation of a rise,--all this housekeeping skill is in Paris
essential to domestic economy. As Mathurine got good wages and many
presents, she liked the house well enough to be glad to drive good
bargains. And by this time Lisbeth had made her quite a match for
herself, sufficiently experienced and trustworthy to be sent to market
alone, unless Valerie was giving a dinner--which, in fact, was not
unfrequently the case. And this was how it came about.

The Baron had at first observed the strictest decorum; but his passion
for Madame Marneffe had ere long become so vehement, so greedy, that
he would never quit her if he could help it. At first he dined there
four times a week; then he thought it delightful to dine with her
every day. Six months after his daughter's marriage he was paying her
two thousand francs a month for his board. Madame Marneffe invited any
one her dear Baron wished to entertain. The dinner was always arranged
for six; he could bring in three unexpected guests. Lisbeth's economy
enabled her to solve the extraordinary problem of keeping up the table
in the best style for a thousand francs a month, giving the other
thousand to Madame Marneffe. Valerie's dress being chiefly paid for by
Crevel and the Baron, the two women saved another thousand francs a
month on this.

And so this pure and innocent being had already accumulated a hundred
and fifty thousand francs in savings. She had capitalized her income
and monthly bonus, and swelled the amount by enormous interest, due to
Crevel's liberality in allowing his "little Duchess" to invest her
money in partnership with him in his financial operations. Crevel had
taught Valerie the slang and the procedure of the money market, and,
like every Parisian woman, she had soon outstripped her master.
Lisbeth, who never spent a sou of her twelve hundred francs, whose
rent and dress were given to her, and who never put her hand in her
pocket, had likewise a small capital of five or six thousand francs,
of which Crevel took fatherly care.

At the same time, two such lovers were a heavy burthen on Valerie. On
the day when this drama reopens, Valerie, spurred by one of those
incidents which have the effect in life that the ringing of a bell has
in inducing a swarm of bees to settle, went up to Lisbeth's rooms to
give vent to one of those comforting lamentations--a sort of cigarette
blown off from the tongue--by which women alleviate the minor miseries
of life.

"Oh, Lisbeth, my love, two hours of Crevel this morning! It is
crushing! How I wish I could send you in my place!"

"That, unluckily, is impossible," said Lisbeth, smiling. "I shall die
a maid."

"Two old men lovers! Really, I am ashamed sometimes! If my poor mother
could see me."

"You are mistaking me for Crevel!" said Lisbeth.

"Tell me, my little Betty, do you not despise me?"

"Oh! if I had but been pretty, what adventures I would have had!"
cried Lisbeth. "That is your justification."

"But you would have acted only at the dictates of your heart," said
Madame Marneffe, with a sigh.

"Pooh! Marneffe is a dead man they have forgotten to bury," replied
Lisbeth. "The Baron is as good as your husband; Crevel is your adorer;
it seems to me that you are quite in order--like every other married
woman."

"No, it is not that, dear, adorable thing; that is not where the shoe
pinches; you do not choose to understand."

"Yes, I do," said Lisbeth. "The unexpressed factor is part of my
revenge; what can I do? I am working it out."

"I love Wenceslas so that I am positively growing thin, and I can
never see him," said Valerie, throwing up her arms. "Hulot asks him to
dinner, and my artist declines. He does not know that I idolize him,
the wretch! What is his wife after all? Fine flesh! Yes, she is
handsome, but I--I know myself--I am worse!"

"Be quite easy, my child, he will come," said Lisbeth, in the tone of
a nurse to an impatient child. "He shall."

"But when?"

"This week perhaps."

"Give me a kiss."

As may be seen, these two women were but one. Everything Valerie did,
even her most reckless actions, her pleasures, her little sulks, were
decided on after serious deliberation between them.

Lisbeth, strangely excited by this harlot existence, advised Valerie
on every step, and pursued her course of revenge with pitiless logic.
She really adored Valerie; she had taken her to be her child, her
friend, her love; she found her docile, as Creoles are, yielding from
voluptuous indolence; she chattered with her morning after morning
with more pleasure than with Wenceslas; they could laugh together over
the mischief they plotted, and over the folly of men, and count up the
swelling interest on their respective savings.

Indeed in this new enterprise and new affection, Lisbeth had found
food for her activity that was far more satisfying than her insane
passion for Wenceslas. The joys of gratified hatred are the fiercest
and strongest the heart can know. Love is the gold, hatred the iron of
the mine of feeling that lies buried in us. And then, Valerie was, to
Lisbeth, Beauty in all its glory--the beauty she worshiped, as we
worship what we have not, beauty far more plastic to her hand than
that of Wenceslas, who had always been cold to her and distant.

At the end of nearly three years, Lisbeth was beginning to perceive
the progress of the underground mine on which she was expending her
life and concentrating her mind. Lisbeth planned, Madame Marneffe
acted. Madame Marneffe was the axe, Lisbeth was the hand the wielded
it, and that hand was rapidly demolishing the family which was every
day more odious to her; for we can hate more and more, just as, when
we love, we love better every day.

Love and hatred are feelings that feed on themselves; but of the two,
hatred has the longer vitality. Love is restricted within limits of
power; it derives its energies from life and from lavishness. Hatred
is like death, like avarice; it is, so to speak, an active
abstraction, above beings and things.

Lisbeth, embarked on the existence that was natural to her, expended
in it all her faculties; governing, like the Jesuits, by occult
influences. The regeneration of her person was equally complete; her
face was radiant. Lisbeth dreamed of becoming Madame la Marechale
Hulot.

This little scene, in which the two friends had bluntly uttered their
ideas without any circumlocution in expressing them, took place
immediately on Lisbeth's return from market, whither she had been to
procure the materials for an elegant dinner. Marneffe, who hoped to
get Coquet's place, was to entertain him and the virtuous Madame
Coquet, and Valerie hoped to persuade Hulot, that very evening, to
consider the head-clerk's resignation.

Lisbeth dressed to go to the Baroness, with whom she was to dine.

"You will come back in time to make tea for us, my Betty?" said
Valerie.

"I hope so."

"You hope so--why? Have you come to sleeping with Adeline to drink her
tears while she is asleep?"

"If only I could!" said Lisbeth, laughing. "I would not refuse. She is
expiating her happiness--and I am glad, for I remember our young days.
It is my turn now. She will be in the mire, and I shall be Comtesse de
Forzheim!"

Lisbeth set out for the Rue Plumet, where she now went as to the
theatre--to indulge her emotions.

The residence Hulot had found for his wife consisted of a large, bare
entrance-room, a drawing-room, and a bed and dressing-room. The
dining-room was next the drawing-room on one side. Two servants' rooms
and a kitchen on the third floor completed the accommodation, which
was not unworthy of a Councillor of State, high up in the War Office.
The house, the court-yard, and the stairs were extremely handsome.

The Baroness, who had to furnish her drawing-room, bed-room, and
dining-room with the relics of her splendor, had brought away the best
of the remains from the house in the Rue de l'Universite. Indeed, the
poor woman was attached to these mute witnesses of her happier life;
to her they had an almost consoling eloquence. In memory she saw her
flowers, as in the carpets she could trace patterns hardly visible now
to other eyes.

On going into the spacious anteroom, where twelve chairs, a barometer,
a large stove, and long, white cotton curtains, bordered with red,
suggested the dreadful waiting-room of a Government office, the
visitor felt oppressed, conscious at once of the isolation in which
the mistress lived. Grief, like pleasure, infects the atmosphere. A
first glance into any home is enough to tell you whether love or
despair reigns there.

Adeline would be found sitting in an immense bedroom with beautiful
furniture by Jacob Desmalters, of mahogany finished in the Empire
style with ormolu, which looks even less inviting than the brass-work
of Louis XVI.! It gave one a shiver to see this lonely woman sitting
on a Roman chair, a work-table with sphinxes before her, colorless,
affecting false cheerfulness, but preserving her imperial air, as she
had preserved the blue velvet gown she always wore in the house. Her
proud spirit sustained her strength and preserved her beauty.

The Baroness, by the end of her first year of banishment to this
apartment, had gauged every depth of misfortune.

"Still, even here my Hector has made my life much handsomer than it
should be for a mere peasant," said she to herself. "He chooses that
it should be so; his will be done! I am Baroness Hulot, the sister-in-
law of a Marshal of France. I have done nothing wrong; my two children
are settled in life; I can wait for death, wrapped in the spotless
veil of an immaculate wife and the crape of departed happiness."

A portrait of Hulot, in the uniform of a Commissary General of the
Imperial Guard, painted in 1810 by Robert Lefebvre, hung above the
work-table, and when visitors were announced, Adeline threw into a
drawer an Imitation of Jesus Christ, her habitual study. This
blameless Magdalen thus heard the Voice of the Spirit in her desert.

"Mariette, my child," said Lisbeth to the woman who opened the door,
"how is my dear Adeline to-day?"

"Oh, she looks pretty well, mademoiselle; but between you and me, if
she goes on in this way, she will kill herself," said Mariette in a
whisper. "You really ought to persuade her to live better. Now,
yesterday madame told me to give her two sous' worth of milk and a
roll for one sou; to get her a herring for dinner and a bit of cold
veal; she had a pound cooked to last her the week--of course, for the
days when she dines at home and alone. She will not spend more than
ten sous a day for her food. It is unreasonable. If I were to say
anything about it to Monsieur le Marechal, he might quarrel with
Monsieur le Baron and leave him nothing, whereas you, who are so kind
and clever, can manage things----"

"But why do you not apply to my cousin the Baron?" said Lisbeth.

"Oh, dear mademoiselle, he has not been here for three weeks or more;
in fact, not since we last had the pleasure of seeing you! Besides,
madame has forbidden me, under threat of dismissal, ever to ask the
master for money. But as for grief!--oh, poor lady, she has been very
unhappy. It is the first time that monsieur has neglected her for so
long. Every time the bell rang she rushed to the window--but for the
last five days she has sat still in her chair. She reads. Whenever she
goes out to see Madame la Comtesse, she says, 'Mariette, if monsieur
comes in,' says she, 'tell him I am at home, and send the porter to
fetch me; he shall be well paid for his trouble.' "

"Poor soul!" said Lisbeth; "it goes to my heart. I speak of her to the
Baron every day. What can I do? 'Yes,' says he, 'Betty, you are right;
I am a wretch. My wife is an angel, and I am a monster! I will go
to-morrow----' And he stays with Madame Marneffe. That woman is
ruining him, and he worships her; he lives only in her sight.--I do
what I can; if I were not there, and if I had not Mathurine to depend
upon, he would spend twice as much as he does; and as he has hardly
any money in the world, he would have blown his brains out by this
time. And, I tell you, Mariette, Adeline would die of her husband's
death, I am perfectly certain. At any rate, I pull to make both ends
meet, and prevent my cousin from throwing too much money into the
fire."

"Yes, that is what madame says, poor soul! She knows how much she owes
you," replied Mariette. "She said she had judged you unjustly for many
years----"

"Indeed!" said Lisbeth. "And did she say anything else?"

"No, mademoiselle. If you wish to please her, talk to her about
Monsieur le Baron; she envies you your happiness in seeing him every
day."

"Is she alone?"

"I beg pardon, no; the Marshal is with her. He comes every day, and
she always tells him she saw monsieur in the morning, but that he
comes in very late at night."

"And is there a good dinner to-day?"

Mariette hesitated; she could not meet Lisbeth's eye. The drawing-room
door opened, and Marshal Hulot rushed out in such haste that he bowed
to Lisbeth without looking at her, and dropped a paper. Lisbeth picked
it up and ran after him downstairs, for it was vain to hail a deaf
man; but she managed not to overtake the Marshal, and as she came up
again she furtively read the following lines written in pencil:--

"MY DEAR BROTHER,--My husband has given me the money for my
quarter's expenses; but my daughter Hortense was in such need of
it, that I lent her the whole sum, which was scarcely enough to
set her straight. Could you lend me a few hundred francs? For I
cannot ask Hector for more; if he were to blame me, I could not
bear it."

"My word!" thought Lisbeth, "she must be in extremities to bend her
pride to such a degree!"

Lisbeth went in. She saw tears in Adeline's eyes, and threw her arms
round her neck.

"Adeline, my dearest, I know all," cried Cousin Betty. "Here, the
Marshal dropped this paper--he was in such a state of mind, and
running like a greyhound.--Has that dreadful Hector given you no money
since----?"

"He gives it me quite regularly," replied the Baroness, "but Hortense
needed it, and--"

"And you had not enough to pay for dinner to-night," said Lisbeth,
interrupting her. "Now I understand why Mariette looked so confused
when I said something about the soup. You really are childish,
Adeline; come, take my savings."

"Thank you, my kind cousin," said Adeline, wiping away a tear. "This
little difficulty is only temporary, and I have provided for the
future. My expenses henceforth will be no more than two thousand four
hundred francs a year, rent inclusive, and I shall have the money.--
Above all, Betty, not a word to Hector. Is he well?"

"As strong as the Pont Neuf, and as gay as a lark; he thinks of
nothing but his charmer Valerie."

Madame Hulot looked out at a tall silver-fir in front of the window,
and Lisbeth could not see her cousin's eyes to read their expression.

"Did you mention that it was the day when we all dine together here?"

"Yes. But, dear me! Madame Marneffe is giving a grand dinner; she
hopes to get Monsieur Coquet to resign, and that is of the first
importance.--Now, Adeline, listen to me. You know that I am fiercely
proud as to my independence. Your husband, my dear, will certainly
bring you to ruin. I fancied I could be of use to you all by living
near this woman, but she is a creature of unfathomable depravity, and
she will make your husband promise things which will bring you all to
disgrace." Adeline writhed like a person stabbed to the heart. "My
dear Adeline, I am sure of what I say. I feel it is my duty to
enlighten you.--Well, let us think of the future. The Marshal is an
old man, but he will last a long time yet--he draws good pay; when he
dies his widow would have a pension of six thousand francs. On such an
income I would undertake to maintain you all. Use your influence over
the good man to get him to marry me. It is not for the sake of being
Madame la Marechale; I value such nonsense at no more than I value
Madame Marneffe's conscience; but you will all have bread. I see that
Hortense must be wanting it, since you give her yours."

The Marshal now came in; he had made such haste, that he was mopping
his forehead with his bandana.

"I have given Mariette two thousand francs," he whispered to his
sister-in-law.

Adeline colored to the roots of her hair. Two tears hung on the
fringes of the still long lashes, and she silently pressed the old
man's hand; his beaming face expressed the glee of a favored lover.

"I intended to spend the money in a present for you, Adeline," said
he. "Instead of repaying me, you must choose for yourself the thing
you would like best."

He took Lisbeth's hand, which she held out to him, and so bewildered
was he by his satisfaction, that he kissed it.

"That looks promising," said Adeline to Lisbeth, smiling so far as she
was able to smile.

The younger Hulot and his wife now came in.

"Is my brother coming to dinner?" asked the Marshal sharply.

Adeline took up a pencil and wrote these words on a scrap of paper:

"I expect him; he promised this morning that he would be here; but if
he should not come, it would be because the Marshal kept him. He is
overwhelmed with business."

And she handed him the paper. She had invented this way of conversing
with Marshal Hulot, and kept a little collection of paper scraps and a
pencil at hand on the work-table.

"I know," said the Marshal, "he is worked very hard over the business
in Algiers."

At this moment, Hortense and Wenceslas arrived, and the Baroness, as
she saw all her family about her, gave the Marshal a significant
glance understood by none but Lisbeth.

Happiness had greatly improved the artist, who was adored by his wife
and flattered by the world. His face had become almost round, and his
graceful figure did justice to the advantages which blood gives to men
of birth. His early fame, his important position, the delusive
eulogies that the world sheds on artists as lightly as we say, "How
d'ye do?" or discuss the weather, gave him that high sense of merit
which degenerates into sheer fatuity when talent wanes. The Cross of
the Legion of Honor was the crowning stamp of the great man he
believed himself to be.

After three years of married life, Hortense was to her husband what a
dog is to its master; she watched his every movement with a look that
seemed a constant inquiry, her eyes were always on him, like those of
a miser on his treasure; her admiring abnegation was quite pathetic.
In her might be seen her mother's spirit and teaching. Her beauty, as
great as ever, was poetically touched by the gentle shadow of
concealed melancholy.

On seeing Hortense come in, it struck Lisbeth that some long-
suppressed complaint was about to break through the thin veil of
reticence. Lisbeth, from the first days of the honeymoon, had been
sure that this couple had too small an income for so great a passion.

Hortense, as she embraced her mother, exchanged with her a few
whispered phrases, heart to heart, of which the mystery was betrayed
to Lisbeth by certain shakes of the head.

"Adeline, like me, must work for her living," thought Cousin Betty.
"She shall be made to tell me what she will do! Those pretty fingers
will know at last, like mine, what it is to work because they must."

At six o'clock the family party went in to dinner. A place was laid
for Hector.

"Leave it so," said the Baroness to Mariette, "monsieur sometimes
comes in late."

"Oh, my father will certainly come," said Victorin to his mother. "He
promised me he would when we parted at the Chamber."

Lisbeth, like a spider in the middle of its net, gloated over all
these countenances. Having known Victorin and Hortense from their
birth, their faces were to her like panes of glass, through which she
could read their young souls. Now, from certain stolen looks directed
by Victorin on his mother, she saw that some disaster was hanging over
Adeline which Victorin hesitated to reveal. The famous young lawyer
had some covert anxiety. His deep reverence for his mother was evident
in the regret with which he gazed at her.

Hortense was evidently absorbed in her own woes; for a fortnight past,
as Lisbeth knew, she had been suffering the first uneasiness which
want of money brings to honest souls, and to young wives on whom life
has hitherto smiled, and who conceal their alarms. Also Lisbeth had
immediately guessed that her mother had given her no money. Adeline's
delicacy had brought her so low as to use the fallacious excuses that
necessity suggests to borrowers.

Hortense's absence of mind, with her brother's and the Baroness' deep
dejection, made the dinner a melancholy meal, especially with the
added chill of the Marshal's utter deafness. Three persons gave a
little life to the scene: Lisbeth, Celestine, and Wenceslas.
Hortense's affection had developed the artist's natural liveliness as
a Pole, the somewhat swaggering vivacity and noisy high spirits that
characterize these Frenchmen of the North. His frame of mind and the
expression of his face showed plainly that he believed in himself, and
that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother's training, kept all
domestic difficulties to herself.

"You must be content, at any rate," said Lisbeth to her young cousin,
as they rose from table, "since your mother has helped you with her
money."

"Mamma!" replied Hortense in astonishment. "Oh, poor mamma! It is for
me that she would like to make money. You do not know, Lisbeth, but I
have a horrible suspicion that she works for it in secret."

They were crossing the large, dark drawing-room where there were no
candles, all following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp into
Adeline's bedroom. At this instant Victorin just touched Lisbeth and
Hortense on the arm. The two women, understanding the hint, left
Wenceslas, Celestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness to go on together,
and remained standing in a window-bay.

"What is it, Victorin?" said Lisbeth. "Some disaster caused by your
father, I dare wager."

"Yes, alas!" replied Victorin. "A money-lender named Vauvinet has
bills of my father's to the amount of sixty thousand francs, and wants
to prosecute. I tried to speak of the matter to my father at the
Chamber, but he would not understand me; he almost avoided me. Had we
better tell my mother?"

"No, no," said Lisbeth, "she has too many troubles; it would be a
death-blow; you must spare her. You have no idea how low she has
fallen. But for your uncle, you would have found no dinner here this
evening."

"Dear Heaven! Victorin, what wretches we are!" said Hortense to her
brother. "We ought to have guessed what Lisbeth has told us. My dinner
is choking me!"

Hortense could say no more; she covered her mouth with her
handkerchief to smother a sob, and melted into tears.

"I told the fellow Vauvinet to call on me to-morrow," replied
Victorin, "but will he be satisfied by my guarantee on a mortgage? I
doubt it. Those men insist on ready money to sweat others on usurious
terms."

"Let us sell out of the funds!" said Lisbeth to Hortense.

"What good would that do?" replied Victorin. "It would bring fifteen
or sixteen thousand francs, and we want sixty thousand."

"Dear cousin!" cried Hortense, embracing Lisbeth with the enthusiasm
of guilelessness.

"No, Lisbeth, keep your little fortune," said Victorin, pressing the
old maid's hand. "I shall see to-morrow what this man would be up to.
With my wife's consent, I can at least hinder or postpone the
prosecution--for it would really be frightful to see my father's honor
impugned. What would the War Minister say? My father's salary, which
he pledged for three years, will not be released before the month of
December, so we cannot offer that as a guarantee. This Vauvinet has
renewed the bills eleven times; so you may imagine what my father must
pay in interest. We must close this pit."

"If only Madame Marneffe would throw him over!" said Hortense
bitterly.

"Heaven forbid!" exclaimed Victorin. "He would take up some one else;
and with her, at any rate, the worst outlay is over."

What a change in children formerly so respectful, and kept so long by
their mother in blind worship of their father! They knew him now for
what he was.

"But for me," said Lisbeth, "your father's ruin would be more complete
than it is."

"Come in to mamma," said Hortense; "she is very sharp, and will
suspect something; as our kind Lisbeth says, let us keep everything
from her--let us be cheerful."

"Victorin," said Lisbeth, "you have no notion of what your father will
be brought to by his passion for women. Try to secure some future
resource by getting the Marshal to marry me. Say something about it
this evening; I will leave early on purpose."

Victorin went into the bedroom.

"And you, poor little thing!" said Lisbeth in an undertone to
Hortense, "what can you do?"

"Come to dinner with us to-morrow, and we will talk it over," answered
Hortense. "I do not know which way to turn; you know how hard life is,
and you will advise me."

While the whole family with one consent tried to persuade the Marshal
to marry, and while Lisbeth was making her way home to the Rue
Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which, in such women as
Madame Marneffe, are a stimulus to vice by compelling them to exert
their energy and every resource of depravity. One fact, at any rate,
must however be acknowledged: life in Paris is too full for vicious
persons to do wrong instinctively and unprovoked; vice is only a
weapon of defence against aggressors--that is all.

Madame Marneffe's drawing-room was full of her faithful admirers, and
she had just started the whist-tables, when the footman, a pensioned
soldier recruited by the Baron, announced:

"Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos."

Valerie's heart jumped, but she hurried to the door, exclaiming:

"My cousin!" and as she met the Brazilian, she whispered:

"You are my relation--or all is at an end between us!--And so you were
not wrecked, Henri?" she went on audibly, as she led him to the fire.
"I heard you were lost, and have mourned for you these three years."

"How are you, my good fellow?" said Marneffe, offering his hand to the
stranger, whose get-up was indeed that of a Brazilian and a
millionaire.

Monsieur le Baron Henri Montes de Montejanos, to whom the climate of
the equator had given the color and stature we expect to see in
Othello on the stage, had an alarming look of gloom, but it was a
merely pictorial illusion; for, sweet and affectionate by nature, he
was predestined to be the victim that a strong man often is to a weak
woman. The scorn expressed in his countenance, the muscular strength
of his stalwart frame, all his physical powers were shown only to his
fellow-men; a form of flattery which women appreciate, nay, which so
intoxicates them, that every man with his mistress on his arm assumes
a matador swagger that provokes a smile. Very well set up, in a
closely fitting blue coat with solid gold buttons, in black trousers,
spotless patent evening boots, and gloves of a fashionable hue, the
only Brazilian touch in the Baron's costume was a large diamond, worth
about a hundred thousand francs, which blazed like a star on a
handsome blue silk cravat, tucked into a white waistcoat in such a way
as to show corners of a fabulously fine shirt front.

His brow, bossy like that of a satyr, a sign of tenacity in his
passions, was crowned by thick jet-black hair like a virgin forest,
and under it flashed a pair of hazel eyes, so wild looking as to
suggest that before his birth his mother must have been scared by a
jaguar.

This fine specimen of the Portuguese race in Brazil took his stand
with his back to the fire, in an attitude that showed familiarity with
Paris manners; holding his hat in one hand, his elbow resting on the
velvet-covered shelf, he bent over Madame Marneffe, talking to her in
an undertone, and troubling himself very little about the dreadful
people who, in his opinion, were so very much in the way.

This fashion of taking the stage, with the Brazilian's attitude and
expression, gave, alike to Crevel and to the baron, an identical shock
of curiosity and anxiety. Both were struck by the same impression and
the same surmise. And the manoeuvre suggested in each by their very
genuine passion was so comical in its simultaneous results, that it
made everybody smile who was sharp enough to read its meaning. Crevel,
a tradesman and shopkeeper to the backbone, though a mayor of Paris,
unluckily, was a little slower to move than his rival partner, and
this enabled the Baron to read at a glance Crevel's involuntary self-
betrayal. This was a fresh arrow to rankle in the very amorous old
man's heart, and he resolved to have an explanation from Valerie.

"This evening," said Crevel to himself too, as he sorted his hand, "I
must know where I stand."

"You have a heart!" cried Marneffe. "You have just revoked."

"I beg your pardon," said Crevel, trying to withdraw his card.--"This
Baron seems to me very much in the way," he went on, thinking to
himself. "If Valerie carries on with my Baron, well and good--it is a
means to my revenge, and I can get rid of him if I choose; but as for
this cousin!--He is one Baron too many; I do not mean to be made a
fool of. I will know how they are related."

That evening, by one of those strokes of luck which come to pretty
women, Valerie was charmingly dressed. Her white bosom gleamed under a
lace tucker of rusty white, which showed off the satin texture of her
beautiful shoulders--for Parisian women, Heaven knows how, have some
way of preserving their fine flesh and remaining slender. She wore a
black velvet gown that looked as if it might at any moment slip off
her shoulders, and her hair was dressed with lace and drooping
flowers. Her arms, not fat but dimpled, were graced by deep ruffles to
her sleeves. She was like a luscious fruit coquettishly served in a
handsome dish, and making the knife-blade long to be cutting it.

"Valerie," the Brazilian was saying in her ear, "I have come back
faithful to you. My uncle is dead; I am twice as rich as I was when I
went away. I mean to live and die in Paris, for you and with you."

"Lower, Henri, I implore you----"

"Pooh! I mean to speak to you this evening, even if I should have to
pitch all these creatures out of window, especially as I have lost two
days in looking for you. I shall stay till the last.--I can, I
suppose?"

Valerie smiled at her adopted cousin, and said:

"Remember that you are the son of my mother's sister, who married your
father during Junot's campaign in Portugal."

"What, I, Montes de Montejanos, great grandson of a conquerer of
Brazil! Tell a lie?"

"Hush, lower, or we shall never meet again."

"Pray, why?"

"Marneffe, like all dying wretches, who always take up some last whim,
has a revived passion for me----"

"That cur?" said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe; "I will settle
him!"

"What violence!"

"And where did you get all this splendor?" the Brazilian went on, just
struck by the magnificence of the apartment.

She began to laugh.

"Henri! what bad taste!" said she.

She had felt two burning flashes of jealousy which had moved her so
far as to make her look at the two souls in purgatory. Crevel, playing
against Baron Hulot and Monsieur Coquet, had Marneffe for his partner.
The game was even, because Crevel and the Baron were equally absent-
minded, and made blunder after blunder. Thus, in one instant, the old
men both confessed the passion which Valerie had persuaded them to
keep secret for the past three years; but she too had failed to hide
the joy in her eyes at seeing the man who had first taught her heart
to beat, the object of her first love. The rights of such happy
mortals survive as long as the woman lives over whom they have
acquired them.

With these three passions at her side--one supported by the insolence
of wealth, the second by the claims of possession, and the third by
youth, strength, fortune, and priority--Madame Marneffe preserved her
coolness and presence of mind, like General Bonaparte when, at the
siege of Mantua, he had to fight two armies, and at the same time
maintain the blockade.

Jealousy, distorting Hulot's face, made him look as terrible as the
late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian
square. Being such a handsome man, he had never known any ground for
jealousy, any more than Murat knew what it was to be afraid. He had
always felt sure that he should triumph. His rebuff by Josepha, the
first he had ever met, he ascribed to her love of money; "he was
conquered by millions, and not by a changeling," he would say when
speaking of the Duc d'Herouville. And now, in one instant, the poison
and delirium that the mad passion sheds in a flood had rushed to his
heart. He kept turning from the whist-table towards the fireplace with
an action a la Mirabeau; and as he laid down his cards to cast a
challenging glance at the Brazilian and Valerie, the rest of the
company felt the sort of alarm mingled with curiosity that is caused
by evident violence ready to break out at any moment. The sham cousin
stared at Hulot as he might have looked at some big China mandarin.

This state of things could not last; it was bound to end in some
tremendous outbreak. Marneffe was as much afraid of Hulot as Crevel
was of Marneffe, for he was anxious not to die a mere clerk. Men
marked for death believe in life as galley-slaves believe in liberty;
this man was bent on being a first-class clerk at any cost. Thoroughly
frightened by the pantomime of the Baron and Crevel, he rose, said a
few words in his wife's ear, and then, to the surprise of all, Valerie
went into the adjoining bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband.

"Did Madame Marneffe ever speak to you of this cousin of hers?" said
Crevel to Hulot.

"Never!" replied the Baron, getting up. "That is enough for this
evening," said he. "I have lost two louis--there they are."

He threw the two gold pieces on the table, and seated himself on the
sofa with a look which everybody else took as a hint to go. Monsieur
and Madame Coquet, after exchanging a few words, left the room, and
Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two
departures were a hint to less intelligent persons, who now found that
they were not wanted. The Baron and Crevel were left together, and
spoke never a word. Hulot, at last, ignoring Crevel, went on tiptoe to
listen at the bedroom door; but he bounded back with a prodigious
jump, for Marneffe opened the door and appeared with a calm face,
astonished to find only the two men.

"And the tea?" said he.

"Where is Valerie?" replied the Baron in a rage.

"My wife," said Marneffe. "She is gone upstairs to speak to
mademoiselle your cousin. She will come down directly."

"And why has she deserted us for that stupid creature?"

"Well," said Marneffe, "Mademoiselle Lisbeth came back from dining
with the Baroness with an attack of indigestion and Mathurine asked
Valerie for some tea for her, so my wife went up to see what was the
matter."

"And her cousin?"

"He is gone."

"Do you really believe that?" said the Baron.

"I have seen him to his carriage," replied Marneffe, with a hideous
smirk.

The wheels of a departing carriage were audible in the street. The
Baron, counting Marneffe for nothing, went upstairs to Lisbeth. An
idea flashed through him such as the heart sends to the brain when it
is on fire with jealousy. Marneffe's baseness was so well known to
him, that he could imagine the most degrading connivance between
husband and wife.

"What has become of all the ladies and gentlemen?" said Marneffe,
finding himself alone with Crevel.

"When the sun goes to bed, the cocks and hens follow suit," said
Crevel. "Madame Marneffe disappeared, and her adorers departed. Will
you play a game of piquet?" added Crevel, who meant to remain.

He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house.

Monsieur Marneffe agreed. The Mayor was a match for the Baron. Simply
by playing cards with the husband he could stay on indefinitely; and
Marneffe, since the suppression of the public tables, was quite
satisfied with the more limited opportunities of private play.

Baron Hulot went quickly up to Lisbeth's apartment, but the door was
locked, and the usual inquiries through the door took up time enough
to enable the two light-handed and cunning women to arrange the scene
of an attack of indigestion with the accessories of tea. Lisbeth was
in such pain that Valerie was very much alarmed, and consequently
hardly paid any heed to the Baron's furious entrance. Indisposition is
one of the screens most often placed by women to ward off a quarrel.
Hulot peeped about, here and there, but could see no spot in Cousin
Betty's room where a Brazilian might lie hidden.

"Your indigestion does honor to my wife's dinner, Lisbeth," said he,
scrutinizing her, for Lisbeth was perfectly well, trying to imitate
the hiccough of spasmodic indigestion as she drank her tea.

"How lucky it is that dear Betty should be living under my roof!" said
Madame Marneffe. "But for me, the poor thing would have died."

"You look as if you only half believed it," added Lisbeth, turning to
the Baron, "and that would be a shame----"

"Why?" asked the Baron. "Do you know the purpose of my visit?"

And he leered at the door of a dressing-closet from which the key had
been withdrawn.

"Are you talking Greek?" said Madame Marneffe, with an appealing look
of misprized tenderness and devotedness.

"But it is all through you, my dear cousin; yes, it is your doing that
I am in such a state," said Lisbeth vehemently.

This speech diverted the Baron's attention; he looked at the old maid
with the greatest astonishment.

"You know that I am devoted to you," said Lisbeth. "I am here, that
says everything. I am wearing out the last shreds of my strength in
watching over your interests, since they are one with our dear
Valerie's. Her house costs one-tenth of what any other does that is
kept on the same scale. But for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand
francs a month, you would be obliged to spend three or four thousand."

"I know all that," replied the Baron out of patience; "you are our
protectress in many ways," he added, turning to Madame Marneffe and
putting his arm round her neck.--"Is not she, my pretty sweet?"

"On my honor," exclaimed Valerie, "I believe you are gone mad!"

"Well, you cannot doubt my attachment," said Lisbeth. "But I am also
very fond of my cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She has not
seen you for a month. Now that is really too bad; you leave my poor
Adeline without a sou. Your daughter Hortense almost died of it when
she was told that it is thanks to your brother that we had any dinner
at all. There was not even bread in your house this day.

"Adeline is heroically resolved to keep her sufferings to herself. She
said to me, 'I will do as you have done!' The speech went to my heart;
and after dinner, as I thought of what my cousin had been in 1811, and
of what she is in 1841--thirty years after--I had a violent
indigestion.--I fancied I should get over it; but when I got home, I
thought I was dying--"

"You see, Valerie, to what my adoration of you has brought me! To
crime--domestic crime!"

"Oh! I was wise never to marry!" cried Lisbeth, with savage joy. "You
are a kind, good man; Adeline is a perfect angel;--and this is the
reward of her blind devotion."

"An elderly angel!" said Madame Marneffe softly, as she looked half
tenderly, half mockingly, at her Hector, who was gazing at her as an
examining judge gazes at the accused.

"My poor wife!" said Hulot. "For more than nine months I have given
her no money, though I find it for you, Valerie; but at what a cost!
No one else will ever love you so, and what torments you inflict on me
in return!"

"Torments?" she echoed. "Then what do you call happiness?"

"I do not yet know on what terms you have been with this so-called
cousin whom you never mentioned to me," said the Baron, paying no heed
to Valerie's interjection. "But when he came in I felt as if a
penknife had been stuck into my heart. Blinded I may be, but I am not
blind. I could read his eyes, and yours. In short, from under that
ape's eyelids there flashed sparks that he flung at you--and your
eyes!--Oh! you have never looked at me so, never! As to this mystery,
Valerie, it shall all be cleared up. You are the only woman who ever
made me know the meaning of jealousy, so you need not be surprised by
what I say.--But another mystery which has rent its cloud, and it
seems to me infamous----"

"Go on, go on," said Valerie.

"It is that Crevel, that square lump of flesh and stupidity, is in
love with you, and that you accept his attentions with so good a grace
that the idiot flaunts his passion before everybody."

"Only three! Can you discover no more?" asked Madame Marneffe.

"There may be more!" retorted the Baron.

"If Monsieur Crevel is in love with me, he is in his rights as a man
after all; if I favored his passion, that would indeed be the act of a
coquette, or of a woman who would leave much to be desired on your
part.--Well, love me as you find me, or let me alone. If you restore
me to freedom, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel will ever enter my
doors again. But I will take up with my cousin, just to keep my hand
in, in those charming habits you suppose me to indulge.--Good-bye,
Monsieur le Baron Hulot."

She rose, but the Baron took her by the arm and made her sit down
again. The old man could not do without Valerie. She had become more
imperatively indispensable to him than the necessaries of life; he
preferred remaining in uncertainty to having any proof of Valerie's
infidelity.

"My dearest Valerie," said he, "do you not see how miserable I am? I
only ask you to justify yourself. Give me sufficient reasons--"

"Well, go downstairs and wait for me; for I suppose you do not wish to
look on at the various ceremonies required by your cousin's state."

Hulot slowly turned away

"You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how
your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any
rate, will take her my savings to-morrow."

"You owe your wife white bread to eat at least," said Madame Marneffe,
smiling.

The Baron, without taking offence at Lisbeth's tone, as despotic as
Josepha's, got out of the room, only too glad to escape so importunate
a question.

The door bolted once more, the Brazilian came out of the dressing-
closet, where he had been waiting, and he appeared with his eyes full
of tears, in a really pitiable condition. Montes had heard everything.

"Henri, you must have ceased to love me, I know it!" said Madame
Marneffe, hiding her face in her handkerchief and bursting into tears.

It was the outcry of real affection. The cry of a woman's despair is
so convincing that it wins the forgiveness that lurks at the bottom of
every lover's heart--when she is young and pretty, and wears a gown so
low that she could slip out at the top and stand in the garb of Eve.

"But why, if you love me, do you not leave everything for my sake?"
asked the Brazilian.

This South American born, being logical, as men are who have lived the
life of nature, at once resumed the conversation at the point where it
had been broken off, putting his arm round Valerie's waist.

"Why?" she repeated, gazing up at Henri, whom she subjugated at once
by a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we
are in Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of
America.--My dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That
husband of mine, a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a
head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being
ambitious? Now for the very reason that made him leave us our liberty
--nearly four years ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now
abandons me to Monsieur Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful
official, who snorts like a grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who
is sixty-three years old, and who had grown ten years older by dint of
trying to be young; who is so odious to me that the very day when
Marneffe is promoted, and gets his Cross of the Legion of Honor----"

"How much more will your husband get then?"

"A thousand crowns."

"I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will
leave Paris and go----"

"Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman
makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we
can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die
out in a tete-a-tete in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the
only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in
your tiger's brain."

For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that
he is a lion with a will of iron.

"Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he
is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the
twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in
flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and
may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another
man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined
at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is
poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow.
Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty
thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as
I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as
Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the
only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name
I will ever bear. And I am ready to give any pledge of my love that
you may require."

"Well, then, to-night----"

"But you, son of the South, my splendid jaguar, come expressly for me
from the virgin forest of Brazil," said she, taking his hand and
kissing and fondling it, "I have some consideration for the poor
creature you mean to make your wife.--Shall I be your wife, Henri?"

"Yes," said the Brazilian, overpowered by this unbridled volubility of
passion. And he knelt at her feet.

"Well, then, Henri," said Valerie, taking his two hands and looking
straight into his eyes, "swear to me now, in the presence of Lisbeth,
my best and only friend, my sister--that you will make me your wife at
the end of my year's widowhood."

"I swear it."

"That is not enough. Swear by your mother's ashes and eternal
salvation, swear by the Virgin Mary and by all your hopes as a
Catholic!"

Valerie knew that the Brazilian would keep that oath even if she
should have fallen into the foulest social slough.

The Baron solemnly swore it, his nose almost touching Valerie's white
bosom, and his eyes spellbound. He was drunk, drunk as a man is when
he sees the woman he loves once more, after a sea voyage of a hundred
and twenty days.

"Good. Now be quite easy. And in Madame Marneffe respect the future
Baroness de Montejanos. You are not to spend a sou upon me; I forbid
it.--Stay here in the outer room; sleep on the sofa. I myself will
come and tell you when you may move.--We will breakfast to-morrow
morning, and you can be leaving at about one o'clock as if you had
come to call at noon. There is nothing to fear; the gate-keepers love
me as much as if they were my father and mother.--Now I must go down
and make tea."

She beckoned to Lisbeth, who followed her out on to the landing. There
Valerie whispered in the old maid's ear:

"My darkie has come back too soon. I shall die if I cannot avenge you
on Hortense!"

"Make your mind easy, my pretty little devil!" said Lisbeth, kissing
her forehead. "Love and Revenge on the same track will never lose the
game. Hortense expects me to-morrow; she is in beggary. For a thousand
francs you may have a thousand kisses from Wenceslas."

On leaving Valerie, Hulot had gone down to the porter's lodge and made
a sudden invasion there.

"Madame Olivier?"

On hearing the imperious tone of this address, and seeing the action
by which the Baron emphasized it, Madame Olivier came out into the
courtyard as far as the Baron led her.

"You know that if any one can help your son to a connection by and by,
it is I; it is owing to me that he is already third clerk in a
notary's office, and is finishing his studies."

"Yes, Monsieur le Baron; and indeed, sir, you may depend on our
gratitude. Not a day passes that I do not pray to God for Monsieur le
Baron's happiness."

"Not so many words, my good woman," said Hulot, "but deeds----"

"What can I do, sir?" asked Madame Olivier.

"A man came here to-night in a carriage. Do you know him?"

Madame Olivier had recognized Montes well enough. How could she have
forgotten him? In the Rue du Doyenne the Brazilian had always slipped
a five-franc piece into her hand as he went out in the morning, rather
too early. If the Baron had applied to Monsieur Olivier, he would
perhaps have learned all he wanted to know. But Olivier was in bed. In
the lower orders the woman is not merely the superior of the man--she
almost always has the upper hand. Madame Olivier had long since made
up her mind as to which side to take in case of a collision between
her two benefactors; she regarded Madame Marneffe as the stronger
power.

"Do I know him?" she repeated. "No, indeed, no. I never saw him
before!"

"What! Did Madame Marneffe's cousin never go to see her when she was
living in the Rue du Doyenne?"

"Oh! Was it her cousin?" cried Madame Olivier. "I dare say he did
come, but I did not know him again. Next time, sir, I will look at
him----"

"He will be coming out," said Hulot, hastily interrupting Madame
Olivier.

"He has left," said Madame Olivier, understanding the situation. "The
carriage is gone."

"Did you see him go?"

"As plainly as I see you. He told his servant to drive to the
Embassy."

This audacious statement wrung a sigh of relief from the Baron; he
took Madame Olivier's hand and squeezed it.

"Thank you, my good Madame Olivier. But that is not all.--Monsieur
Crevel?"

"Monsieur Crevel? What can you mean, sir? I do not understand," said
Madame Olivier.

"Listen to me. He is Madame Marneffe's lover----"

"Impossible, Monsieur le Baron; impossible," said she, clasping her
hands.

"He is Madame Marneffe's lover," the Baron repeated very positively.
"How do they manage it? I don't know; but I mean to know, and you are
to find out. If you can put me on the tracks of this intrigue, your
son is a notary."

"Don't you fret yourself so, Monsieur le Baron," said Madame Olivier.
"Madame cares for you, and for no one but you; her maid knows that for
true, and we say, between her and me, that you are the luckiest man in
this world--for you know what madame is.--Just perfection!

"She gets up at ten every morning; then she breakfasts. Well and good.
After that she takes an hour or so to dress; that carries her on till
two; then she goes for a walk in the Tuileries in the sight of all
men, and she is always in by four to be ready for you. She lives like
clockwork. She keeps no secrets from her maid, and Reine keeps nothing
from me, you may be sure. Reine can't if she would--along of my son,
for she is very sweet upon him. So, you see, if madame had any
intimacy with Monsieur Crevel, we should be bound to know it."

The Baron went upstairs again with a beaming countenance, convinced
that he was the only man in the world to that shameless slut, as
treacherous, but as lovely and as engaging as a siren.

Crevel and Marneffe had begun a second rubber at piquet. Crevel was
losing, as a man must who is not giving his thoughts to his game.
Marneffe, who knew the cause of the Mayor's absence of mind, took
unscrupulous advantage of it; he looked at the cards in reverse, and
discarded accordingly; thus, knowing his adversary's hand, he played
to beat him. The stake being a franc a point, he had already robbed
the Mayor of thirty francs when Hulot came in.

"Hey day!" said he, amazed to find no company. "Are you alone? Where
is everybody gone?"

"Your pleasant temper put them all to flight," said Crevel.

"No, it was my wife's cousin," replied Marneffe. "The ladies and
gentlemen supposed that Valerie and Henri might have something to say
to each other after three years' separation, and they very discreetly
retired.--If I had been in the room, I would have kept them; but then,
as it happens, it would have been a mistake, for Lisbeth, who always
comes down to make tea at half-past ten, was taken ill, and that upset
everything--"

"Then is Lisbeth really unwell?" asked Crevel in a fury.

"So I was told," replied Marneffe, with the heartless indifference of
a man to whom women have ceased to exist.

The Mayor looked at the clock; and, calculating the time, the Baron
seemed to have spent forty minutes in Lisbeth's rooms. Hector's
jubilant expression seriously incriminated Valerie, Lisbeth, and
himself.

"I have just seen her; she is in great pain, poor soul!" said the
Baron.

"Then the sufferings of others must afford you much joy, my friend,"
retorted Crevel with acrimony, "for you have come down with a face
that is positively beaming. Is Lisbeth likely to die? For your
daughter, they say, is her heiress. You are not like the same man. You
left this room looking like the Moor of Venice, and you come back with
the air of Saint-Preux!--I wish I could see Madame Marneffe's face at
this minute----"

"And pray, what do you mean by that?" said Marneffe to Crevel, packing
his cards and laying them down in front of him.

A light kindled in the eyes of this man, decrepit at the age of forty-
seven; a faint color flushed his flaccid cold cheeks, his ill-
furnished mouth was half open, and on his blackened lips a sort of
foam gathered, thick, and as white as chalk. This fury in such a
helpless wretch, whose life hung on a thread, and who in a duel would
risk nothing while Crevel had everything to lose, frightened the
Mayor.

"I said," repeated Crevel, "that I should like to see Madame
Marneffe's face. And with all the more reason since yours, at this
moment, is most unpleasant. On my honor, you are horribly ugly, my
dear Marneffe----"

"Do you know that you are very uncivil?"

"A man who has won thirty francs of me in forty-five minutes cannot
look handsome in my eyes."

"Ah, if you had but seen me seventeen years ago!" replied the clerk.

"You were so good-looking?" asked Crevel.

"That was my ruin; now, if I had been like you--I might be a mayor and
a peer."

"Yes," said Crevel, with a smile, "you have been too much in the wars;
and of the two forms of metal that may be earned by worshiping the god
of trade, you have taken the worse--the dross!" [This dialogue is
garnished with puns for which it is difficult to find any English
equivalent.] And Crevel roared with laughter. Though Marneffe could
take offence if his honor were in peril, he always took these rough
pleasantries in good part; they were the small coin of conversation
between him and Crevel.

"The daughters of Eve cost me dear, no doubt; but, by the powers!
'Short and sweet' is my motto."

" 'Long and happy' is more to my mind," returned Crevel.

Madame Marneffe now came in; she saw that her husband was at cards
with Crevel, and only the Baron in the room besides; a mere glance at
the municipal dignitary showed her the frame of mind he was in, and
her line of conduct was at once decided on.

"Marneffe, my dear boy," said she, leaning on her husband's shoulder,
and passing her pretty fingers through his dingy gray hair, but
without succeeding in covering his bald head with it, "it is very late
for you; you ought to be in bed. To-morrow, you know, you must dose
yourself by the doctor's orders. Reine will give you your herb tea at
seven. If you wish to live, give up your game."

"We will pay it out up to five points," said Marneffe to Crevel.

"Very good--I have scored two," replied the Mayor.

"How long will it take you?"

"Ten minutes," said Marneffe.

"It is eleven o'clock," replied Valerie. "Really, Monsieur Crevel, one
might fancy you meant to kill my husband. Make haste, at any rate."

This double-barreled speech made Crevel and Hulot smile, and even
Marneffe himself. Valerie sat down to talk to Hector.

"You must leave, my dearest," said she in Hulot's ear. "Walk up and
down the Rue Vanneau, and come in again when you see Crevel go out."

"I would rather leave this room and go into your room through the
dressing-room door. You could tell Reine to let me in."

"Reine is upstairs attending to Lisbeth."

"Well, suppose then I go up to Lisbeth's rooms?"

Danger hemmed in Valerie on every side; she foresaw a discussion with
Crevel, and could not allow Hulot to be in her room, where he could
hear all that went on.--And the Brazilian was upstairs with Lisbeth.

"Really, you men, when you have a notion in your head, you would burn
a house down to get into it!" exclaimed she. "Lisbeth is not in a fit
state to admit you.--Are you afraid of catching cold in the street? Be
off there--or good-night."

"Good evening, gentlemen," said the Baron to the other two.

Hulot, when piqued in his old man's vanity, was bent on proving that
he could play the young man by waiting for the happy hour in the open
air, and he went away.

Marneffe bid his wife good-night, taking her hands with a semblance of
devotion. Valerie pressed her husband's hand with a significant
glance, conveying:

"Get rid of Crevel."

"Good-night, Crevel," said Marneffe. "I hope you will not stay long
with Valerie. Yes! I am jealous--a little late in the day, but it has
me hard and fast. I shall come back to see if you are gone."

"We have a little business to discuss, but I shall not stay long,"
said Crevel.

"Speak low.--What is it?" said Valerie, raising her voice, and looking
at him with a mingled expression of haughtiness and scorn.

Crevel, as he met this arrogant stare, though he was doing Valerie
important services, and had hoped to plume himself on the fact, was at
once reduced to submission.

"That Brazilian----" he began, but, overpowered by Valerie's fixed
look of contempt, he broke off.

"What of him?" said she.

"That cousin--"

"Is no cousin of mine," said she. "He is my cousin to the world and to
Monsieur Marneffe. And if he were my lover, it would be no concern of
yours. A tradesman who pays a woman to be revenged on another man, is,
in my opinion, beneath the man who pays her for love of her. You did
not care for me; all you saw in me was Monsieur Hulot's mistress. You
bought me as a man buys a pistol to kill his adversary. I wanted
bread--I accepted the bargain."

"But you have not carried it out," said Crevel, the tradesman once
more.

"You want Baron Hulot to be told that you have robbed him of his
mistress, to pay him out for having robbed you of Josepha? Nothing can
more clearly prove your baseness. You say you love a woman, you treat
her like a duchess, and then you want to degrade her? Well, my good
fellow, and you are right. This woman is no match for Josepha. That
young person has the courage of her disgrace, while I--I am a
hypocrite, and deserve to be publicly whipped.--Alas! Josepha is
protected by her cleverness and her wealth. I have nothing to shelter
me but my reputation; I am still the worthy and blameless wife of a
plain citizen; if you create a scandal, what is to become of me? If I
were rich, then indeed; but my income is fifteen thousand francs a
year at most, I suppose."

"Much more than that," said Crevel. "I have doubled your savings in
these last two months by investing in Orleans."

"Well, a position in Paris begins with fifty thousand. And you
certainly will not make up to me for the position I should surrender.
--What was my aim? I want to see Marneffe a first-class clerk; he will
then draw a salary of six thousand francs. He has been twenty-seven
years in his office; within three years I shall have a right to a
pension of fifteen hundred francs when he dies. You, to whom I have
been entirely kind, to whom I have given your fill of happiness--you
cannot wait!--And that is what men call love!" she exclaimed.

"Though I began with an ulterior purpose," said Crevel, "I have become
your poodle. You trample on my heart, you crush me, you stultify me,
and I love you as I have never loved in my life. Valerie, I love you
as much as I love my Celestine. I am capable of anything for your
sake.--Listen, instead of coming twice a week to the Rue du Dauphin,
come three times."

"Is that all! You are quite young again, my dear boy!"

"Only let me pack off Hulot, humiliate him, rid you of him," said
Crevel, not heeding her impertinence! "Have nothing to say to the
Brazilian, be mine alone; you shall not repent of it. To begin with, I
will give you eight thousand francs a year, secured by bond, but only
as an annuity; I will not give you the capital till the end of five
years' constancy--"

"Always a bargain! A tradesman can never learn to give. You want to
stop for refreshments on the road of love--in the form of Government
bonds! Bah! Shopman, pomatum seller! you put a price on everything!--
Hector told me that the Duc d'Herouville gave Josepha a bond for
thirty thousand francs a year in a packet of sugar almonds! And I am
worth six of Josepha.

"Oh! to be loved!" she went on, twisting her ringlets round her
fingers, and looking at herself in the glass. "Henri loves me. He
would smash you like a fly if I winked at him! Hulot loves me; he
leaves his wife in beggary! As for you, go my good man, be the worthy
father of a family. You have three hundred thousand francs over and
above your fortune, only to amuse yourself, a hoard, in fact, and you
think of nothing but increasing it--"

"For you, Valerie, since I offer you half," said he, falling on his
knees.

"What, still here!" cried Marneffe, hideous in his dressing-gown.
"What are you about?"

"He is begging my pardon, my dear, for an insulting proposal he has
dared to make me. Unable to obtain my consent, my gentleman proposed
to pay me----"

Crevel only longed to vanish into the cellar, through a trap, as is
done on the stage.

"Get up, Crevel," said Marneffe, laughing, "you are ridiculous. I can
see by Valerie's manner that my honor is in no danger."

"Go to bed and sleep in peace," said Madame Marneffe.

"Isn't she clever?" thought Crevel. "She has saved me. She is
adorable!"

As Marneffe disappeared, the Mayor took Valerie's hands and kissed
them, leaving on them the traces of tears.

"It shall all stand in your name," he said.

"That is true love," she whispered in his ear. "Well, love for love.
Hulot is below, in the street. The poor old thing is waiting to return
when I place a candle in one of the windows of my bedroom. I give you
leave to tell him that you are the man I love; he will refuse to
believe you; take him to the Rue du Dauphin, give him every proof,
crush him; I allow it--I order it! I am tired of that old seal; he
bores me to death. Keep your man all night in the Rue du Dauphin,
grill him over a slow fire, be revenged for the loss of Josepha. Hulot
may die of it perhaps, but we shall save his wife and children from
utter ruin. Madame Hulot is working for her bread--"

"Oh! poor woman! On my word, it is quite shocking!" exclaimed Crevel,
his natural feeling coming to the top.

"If you love me, Celestin," said she in Crevel's ear, which she
touched with her lips, "keep him there, or I am done for. Marneffe is
suspicious. Hector has a key of the outer gate, and will certainly
come back."

Crevel clasped Madame Marneffe to his heart, and went away in the
seventh heaven of delight. Valerie fondly escorted him to the landing,
and then followed him, like a woman magnetized, down the stairs to the
very bottom.

"My Valerie, go back, do not compromise yourself before the porters.--
Go back; my life, my treasure, all is yours.--Go in, my duchess!"

"Madame Olivier," Valerie called gently when the gate was closed.

"Why, madame! You here?" said the woman in bewilderment.

"Bolt the gates at top and bottom, and let no one in."

"Very good, madame."

Having barred the gate, Madame Olivier told of the bribe that the War
Office chief had tried to offer her.

"You behaved like an angel, my dear Olivier; we shall talk of that
to-morrow."

Valerie flew like an arrow to the third floor, tapped three times at
Lisbeth's door, and then went down to her room, where she gave
instructions to Mademoiselle Reine, for a woman must make the most of
the opportunity when a Montes arrives from Brazil.

"By Heaven! only a woman of the world is capable of such love," said
Crevel to himself. "How she came down those stairs, lighting them up
with her eyes, following me! Never did Josepha--Josepha! she is cag-
mag!" cried the ex-bagman. "What have I said? Cag-mag--why, I might
have let the word slip out at the Tuileries! I can never do any good
unless Valerie educates me--and I was so bent on being a gentleman.--
What a woman she is! She upsets me like a fit of the colic when she
looks at me coldly. What grace! What wit! Never did Josepha move me
so. And what perfection when you come to know her!--Ha, there is my
man!"

He perceived in the gloom of the Rue de Babylone the tall, somewhat
stooping figure of Hulot, stealing along close to a boarding, and he
went straight up to him.

"Good-morning, Baron, for it is past midnight, my dear fellow. What
the devil are your doing here? You are airing yourself under a
pleasant drizzle. That is not wholesome at our time of life. Will you
let me give you a little piece of advice? Let each of us go home; for,
between you and me, you will not see the candle in the window."

The last words made the Baron suddenly aware that he was sixty-three,
and that his cloak was wet.

"Who on earth told you--?" he began.

"Valerie, of course, our Valerie, who means henceforth to be my
Valerie. We are even now, Baron; we will play off the tie when you
please. You have nothing to complain of; you know, I always stipulated
for the right of taking my revenge; it took you three months to rob me
of Josepha; I took Valerie from you in--We will say no more about
that. Now I mean to have her all to myself. But we can be very good
friends, all the same."

"Crevel, no jesting," said Hulot, in a voice choked by rage. "It is a
matter of life and death."

"Bless me, is that how you take it!--Baron, do you not remember what
you said to me the day of Hortense's marriage: 'Can two old gaffers
like us quarrel over a petticoat? It is too low, too common. We are
Regence, we agreed, Pompadour, eighteenth century, quite the
Marechal Richelieu, Louis XV., nay, and I may say, Liaisons
dangereuses!"

Crevel might have gone on with his string of literary allusions; the
Baron heard him as a deaf man listens when he is but half deaf. But,
seeing in the gaslight the ghastly pallor of his face, the triumphant
Mayor stopped short. This was, indeed, a thunderbolt after Madame
Olivier's asservations and Valerie's parting glance.

"Good God! And there are so many other women in Paris!" he said at
last.

"That is what I said to you when you took Josepha," said Crevel.

"Look here, Crevel, it is impossible. Give me some proof.--Have you a
key, as I have, to let yourself in?"

And having reached the house, the Baron put the key into the lock; but
the gate was immovable; he tried in vain to open it.

"Do not make a noise in the streets at night," said Crevel coolly. "I
tell you, Baron, I have far better proof than you can show."

"Proofs! give me proof!" cried the Baron, almost crazy with
exasperation.

"Come, and you shall have them," said Crevel.

And in obedience to Valerie's instructions, he led the Baron away
towards the quay, down the Rue Hillerin-Bertin. The unhappy Baron
walked on, as a merchant walks on the day before he stops payment; he
was lost in conjectures as to the reasons of the depravity buried in
the depths of Valerie's heart, and still believed himself the victim
of some practical joke. As they crossed the Pont Royal, life seemed to
him so blank, so utterly a void, and so out of joint from his
financial difficulties, that he was within an ace of yielding to the
evil prompting that bid him fling Crevel into the river and throw
himself in after.

On reaching the Rue du Dauphin, which had not yet been widened, Crevel
stopped before a door in a wall. It opened into a long corridor paved
with black-and-white marble, and serving as an entrance-hall, at the
end of which there was a flight of stairs and a doorkeeper's lodge,
lighted from an inner courtyard, as is often the case in Paris. This
courtyard, which was shared with another house, was oddly divided into
two unequal portions. Crevel's little house, for he owned it, had
additional rooms with a glass skylight, built out on to the adjoining
plot, under conditions that it should have no story added above the
ground floor, so that the structure was entirely hidden by the lodge
and the projecting mass of the staircase.

This back building had long served as a store-room, backshop, and
kitchen to one of the shops facing the street. Crevel had cut off
these three rooms from the rest of the ground floor, and Grindot had
transformed them into an inexpensive private residence. There were two
ways in--from the front, through the shop of a furniture-dealer, to
whom Crevel let it at a low price, and only from month to month, so as
to be able to get rid of him in case of his telling tales, and also
through a door in the wall of the passage, so ingeniously hidden as to
be almost invisible. The little apartment, comprising a dining-room,
drawing-room, and bedroom, all lighted from above, and standing partly
on Crevel's ground and partly on his neighbor's, was very difficult to
find. With the exception of the second-hand furniture-dealer, the
tenants knew nothing of the existence of this little paradise.

The doorkeeper, paid to keep Crevel's secrets, was a capital cook. So
Monsieur le Maire could go in and out of his inexpensive retreat at
any hour of the night without any fear of being spied upon. By day, a
lady, dressed as Paris women dress to go shopping, and having a key,
ran no risk in coming to Crevel's lodgings; she would stop to look at
the cheapened goods, ask the price, go into the shop, and come out
again, without exciting the smallest suspicion if any one should
happen to meet her.

As soon as Crevel had lighted the candles in the sitting-room, the
Baron was surprised at the elegance and refinement it displayed. The
perfumer had given the architect a free hand, and Grindot had done
himself credit by fittings in the Pompadour style, which had in fact
cost sixty thousand francs.

"What I want," said Crevel to Grindot, "is that a duchess, if I
brought one there, should be surprised at it."

He wanted to have a perfect Parisian Eden for his Eve, his "real
lady," his Valerie, his duchess.

"There are two beds," said Crevel to Hulot, showing him a sofa that
could be made wide enough by pulling out a drawer. "This is one, the
other is in the bedroom. We can both spend the night here."

"Proof!" was all the Baron could say.

Crevel took a flat candlestick and led Hulot into the adjoining room,
where he saw, on a sofa, a superb dressing-gown belonging to Valerie,
which he had seen her wear in the Rue Vanneau, to display it before
wearing it in Crevel's little apartment. The Mayor pressed the spring
of a little writing-table of inlaid work, known as a bonheur-du-
jour, and took out of it a letter that he handed to the Baron.

"Read that," said he.

The Councillor read these words written in pencil:

"I have waited in vain, you old wretch! A woman of my quality does
not expect to be kept waiting by a retired perfumer. There was no
dinner ordered--no cigarettes. I will make you pay for this!"

"Well, is that her writing?"

"Good God!" gasped Hulot, sitting down in dismay. "I see all the
things she uses--her caps, her slippers. Why, how long since--?"

Crevel nodded that he understood, and took a packet of bills out of
the little inlaid cabinet.

"You can see, old man. I paid the decorators in December, 1838. In
October, two months before, this charming little place was first
used."

Hulot bent his head.

"How the devil do you manage it? I know how she spends every hour of
her day."

"How about her walk in the Tuileries?" said Crevel, rubbing his hands
in triumph.

"What then?" said Hulot, mystified.

"Your lady love comes to the Tuileries, she is supposed to be airing
herself from one till four. But, hop, skip, and jump, and she is here.
You know your Moliere? Well, Baron, there is nothing imaginary in your
title."

Hulot, left without a shred of doubt, sat sunk in ominous silence.
Catastrophes lead intelligent and strong-minded men to be
philosophical. The Baron, morally, was at this moment like a man
trying to find his way by night through a forest. This gloomy
taciturnity and the change in that dejected countenance made Crevel
very uneasy, for he did not wish the death of his colleague.

"As I said, old fellow, we are now even; let us play for the odd. Will
you play off the tie by hook and by crook? Come!"

"Why," said Hulot, talking to himself--"why is it that out of ten
pretty women at least seven are false?"

But the Baron was too much upset to answer his own question. Beauty is
the greatest of human gifts for power. Every power that has no
counterpoise, no autocratic control, leads to abuses and folly.
Despotism is the madness of power; in women the despot is caprice.

"You have nothing to complain of, my good friend; you have a beautiful
wife, and she is virtuous."

"I deserve my fate," said Hulot. "I have undervalued my wife and made
her miserable, and she is an angel! Oh, my poor Adeline! you are
avenged! She suffers in solitude and silence, and she is worthy of my
love; I ought--for she is still charming, fair and girlish even--But
was there ever a woman known more base, more ignoble, more villainous
than this Valerie?"

"She is a good-for-nothing slut," said Crevel, "a hussy that deserves
whipping on the Place du Chatelet. But, my dear Canillac, though we
are such blades, so Marechal de Richelieu, Louis XV., Pompadour,
Madame du Barry, gay dogs, and everything that is most eighteenth
century, there is no longer a lieutenant of police."

"How can we make them love us?" Hulot wondered to himself without
heeding Crevel.

"It is sheer folly in us to expect to be loved, my dear fellow," said
Crevel. "We can only be endured; for Madame Marneffe is a hundred
times more profligate than Josepha."

"And avaricious! she costs me a hundred and ninety-two thousand francs
a year!" cried Hulot.

"And how many centimes!" sneered Crevel, with the insolence of a
financier who scorns so small a sum.

"You do not love her, that is very evident," said the Baron dolefully.

"I have had enough of her," replied Crevel, "for she has had more than
three hundred thousand francs of mine!"

"Where is it? Where does it all go?" said the Baron, clasping his head
in his hands.

"If we had come to an agreement, like the simple young men who combine
to maintain a twopenny baggage, she would have cost us less."

"That is an idea"! replied the Baron. "But she would still be cheating
us; for, my burly friend, what do you say to this Brazilian?"

"Ay, old sly fox, you are right, we are swindled like--like
shareholders!" said Crevel. "All such women are an unlimited
liability, and we the sleeping partners."

"Then it was she who told you about the candle in the window?"

"My good man," replied Crevel, striking an attitude, "she has fooled
us both. Valerie is a--She told me to keep you here.--Now I see it
all. She has got her Brazilian!--Oh, I have done with her, for if you
hold her hands, she would find a way to cheat you with her feet!
There! she is a minx, a jade!"

"She is lower than a prostitute," said the Baron. "Josepha and Jenny
Cadine were in their rights when they were false to us; they make a
trade of their charms."

"But she, who affects the saint--the prude!" said Crevel. "I tell you
what, Hulot, do you go back to your wife; your money matters are not
looking well; I have heard talk of certain notes of hand given to a
low usurer whose special line of business is lending to these sluts, a
man named Vauvinet. For my part, I am cured of your 'real ladies.'
And, after all, at our time of life what do we want of these swindling
hussies, who, to be honest, cannot help playing us false? You have
white hair and false teeth; I am of the shape of Silenus. I shall go
in for saving. Money never deceives one. Though the Treasury is indeed
open to all the world twice a year, it pays you interest, and this
woman swallows it. With you, my worthy friend, as Gubetta, as my
partner in the concern, I might have resigned myself to a shady
bargain--no, a philosophical calm. But with a Brazilian who has
possibly smuggled in some doubtful colonial produce----"

"Woman is an inexplicable creature!" said Hulot.

"I can explain her," said Crevel. "We are old; the Brazilian is young
and handsome."

"Yes; that, I own, is true," said Hulot; "we are older than we were.
But, my dear fellow, how is one to do without these pretty creatures--
seeing them undress, twist up their hair, smile cunningly through
their fingers as they screw up their curl-papers, put on all their
airs and graces, tell all their lies, declare that we don't love them
when we are worried with business; and they cheer us in spite of
everything."

"Yes, by the Power! It is the only pleasure in life!" cried Crevel.
"When a saucy little mug smiles at you and says, 'My old dear, you
don't know how nice you are! I am not like other women, I suppose, who
go crazy over mere boys with goats' beards, smelling of smoke, and as
coarse as serving-men! For in their youth they are so insolent!--They
come in and they bid you good-morning, and out they go.--I, whom you
think such a flirt, I prefer a man of fifty to these brats. A man who
will stick by me, who is devoted, who knows a woman is not to be
picked up every day, and appreciates us.--That is what I love you for,
you old monster!'--and they fill up these avowals with little pettings
and prettinesses and--Faugh! they are as false as the bills on the
Hotel de Ville."

"A lie is sometimes better than the truth," said Hulot, remembering
sundry bewitching scenes called up by Crevel, who mimicked Valerie.
"They are obliged to act upon their lies, to sew spangles on their
stage frocks--"

"And they are ours, after all, the lying jades!" said Crevel coarsely.

"Valerie is a witch," said the Baron. "She can turn an old man into a
young one."

"Oh, yes!" said Crevel, "she is an eel that wriggles through your
hands; but the prettiest eel, as white and sweet as sugar, as amusing
as Arnal--and ingenious!"

"Yes, she is full of fun," said Hulot, who had now quite forgotten his
wife.

The colleagues went to bed the best friends in the world, reminding
each other of Valerie's perfections, the tones of her voice, her
kittenish way, her movements, her fun, her sallies of wit, and of
affections; for she was an artist in love, and had charming impulses,
as tenors may sing a scena better one day than another. And they fell
asleep, cradled in tempting and diabolical visions lighted by the
fires of hell.

At nine o'clock next morning Hulot went off to the War Office, Crevel
had business out of town; they left the house together, and Crevel
held out his hand to the Baron, saying:

"To show that there is no ill-feeling. For we, neither of us, will
have anything more to say to Madame Marneffe?"

"Oh, this is the end of everything," replied Hulot with a sort of
horror.

By half-past ten Crevel was mounting the stairs, four at a time, up to
Madame Marneffe's apartment. He found the infamous wretch, the
adorable enchantress, in the most becoming morning wrapper, enjoying
an elegant little breakfast in the society of the Baron Montes de
Montejanos and Lisbeth. Though the sight of the Brazilian gave him a
shock, Crevel begged Madame Marneffe to grant him two minutes' speech
with her. Valerie led Crevel into the drawing-room.

"Valerie, my angel," said the amorous Mayor, "Monsieur Marneffe cannot
have long to live. If you will be faithful to me, when he dies we will
be married. Think it over. I have rid you of Hulot.--So just consider
whether this Brazilian is to compare with a Mayor of Paris, a man who,
for your sake, will make his way to the highest dignities, and who can
already offer you eighty-odd thousand francs a year."

"I will think it over," said she. "You will see me in the Rue du
Dauphin at two o'clock, and we can discuss the matter. But be a good
boy--and do not forget the bond you promised to transfer to me."

She returned to the dining-room, followed by Crevel, who flattered
himself that he had hit on a plan for keeping Valerie to himself; but
there he found Baron Hulot, who, during this short colloquy, had also
arrived with the same end in view. He, like Crevel, begged for a brief
interview. Madame Marneffe again rose to go to the drawing-room, with
a smile at the Brazilian that seemed to say, "What fools they are!
Cannot they see you?"

"Valerie," said the official, "my child, that cousin of yours is an
American cousin--"

"Oh, that is enough!" she cried, interrupting the Baron. "Marneffe
never has been, and never will be, never can be my husband! The first,
the only man I ever loved, has come back quite unexpectedly. It is no
fault of mine! But look at Henri and look at yourself. Then ask
yourself whether a woman, and a woman in love, can hesitate for a
moment. My dear fellow, I am not a kept mistress. From this day forth
I refuse to play the part of Susannah between the two Elders. If you
really care for me, you and Crevel, you will be our friends; but all
else is at an end, for I am six-and-twenty, and henceforth I mean to
be a saint, an admirable and worthy wife--as yours is."

"Is that what you have to say?" answered Hulot. "Is this the way you
receive me when I come like a Pope with my hands full of Indulgences?
--Well, your husband will never be a first-class clerk, nor be
promoted in the Legion of Honor."

"That remains to be seen," said Madame Marneffe, with a meaning look
at Hulot.

"Well, well, no temper," said Hulot in despair. "I will call this
evening, and we will come to an understanding."

"In Lisbeth's rooms then."

"Very good--at Lisbeth's," said the old dotard.

Hulot and Crevel went downstairs together without speaking a word till
they were in the street; but outside on the sidewalk they looked at
each other with a dreary laugh.

"We are a couple of old fools," said Crevel.

"I have got rid of them," said Madame Marneffe to Lisbeth, as she sat
down once more. "I never loved and I never shall love any man but my
Jaguar," she added, smiling at Henri Montes. "Lisbeth, my dear, you
don't know. Henri has forgiven me the infamy to which I was reduced by
poverty."

"It was my own fault," said the Brazilian. "I ought to have sent you a
hundred thousand francs."

"Poor boy!" said Valerie; "I might have worked for my living, but my
fingers were not made for that--ask Lisbeth."

The Brazilian went away the happiest man in Paris.

At noon Valerie and Lisbeth were chatting in the splendid bedroom
where this dangerous woman was giving to her dress those finishing
touches which a lady alone can give. The doors were bolted, the
curtains drawn over them, and Valerie related in every detail all the
events of the evening, the night, the morning.

"What do you think of it all, my darling?" she said to Lisbeth in
conclusion. "Which shall I be when the time comes--Madame Crevel, or
Madame Montes?"

"Crevel will not last more than ten years, such a profligate as he
is," replied Lisbeth. "Montes is young. Crevel will leave you about
thirty thousand francs a year. Let Montes wait; he will be happy
enough as Benjamin. And so, by the time you are three-and-thirty, if
you take care of your looks, you may marry your Brazilian and make a
fine show with sixty thousand francs a year of your own--especially
under the wing of a Marechale."

"Yes, but Montes is a Brazilian; he will never make his mark,"
observed Valerie.

"We live in the day of railways," said Lisbeth, "when foreigners rise
to high positions in France."

"We shall see," replied Valerie, "when Marneffe is dead. He has not
much longer to suffer."

"These attacks that return so often are a sort of physical remorse,"
said Lisbeth. "Well, I am off to see Hortense."

"Yes--go, my angel!" replied Valerie. "And bring me my artist.--Three
years, and I have not gained an inch of ground! It is a disgrace to
both of us!--Wenceslas and Henri--these are my two passions--one for
love, the other for fancy."

"You are lovely this morning," said Lisbeth, putting her arm round
Valerie's waist and kissing her forehead. "I enjoy all your pleasures,
your good fortune, your dresses--I never really lived till the day
when we became sisters."

"Wait a moment, my tiger-cat!" cried Valerie, laughing; "your shawl is
crooked. You cannot put a shawl on yet in spite of my lessons for
three years--and you want to be Madame la Marechale Hulot!"

Shod in prunella boots, over gray silk stockings, in a gown of
handsome corded silk, her hair in smooth bands under a very pretty
black velvet bonnet, lined with yellow satin, Lisbeth made her way to
the Rue Saint-Dominique by the Boulevard des Invalides, wondering
whether sheer dejection would at last break down Hortense's brave
spirit, and whether Sarmatian instability, taken at a moment when,
with such a character, everything is possible, would be too much for
Steinbock's constancy.

Hortense and Wenceslas had the ground floor of a house situated at the
corner of the Rue Saint-Dominique and the Esplanade des Invalides.
These rooms, once in harmony with the honeymoon, now had that half-
new, half-faded look that may be called the autumnal aspect of
furniture. Newly married folks are as lavish and wasteful, without
knowing it or intending it, of everything about them as they are of
their affection. Thinking only of themselves, they reck little of the
future, which, at a later time, weighs on the mother of a family.

Lisbeth found Hortense just as she had finished dressing a baby
Wenceslas, who had been carried into the garden.

"Good-morning, Betty," said Hortense, opening the door herself to her
cousin. The cook was gone out, and the house-servant, who was also the
nurse, was doing some washing.

"Good-morning, dear child," replied Lisbeth, kissing her. "Is
Wenceslas in the studio?" she added in a whisper.

"No; he is in the drawing-room talking to Stidmann and Chanor."

"Can we be alone?" asked Lisbeth.

"Come into my room."

In this room, the hangings of pink-flowered chintz with green leaves
on a white ground, constantly exposed to the sun, were much faded, as
was the carpet. The muslin curtains had not been washed for many a
day. The smell of tobacco hung about the room; for Wenceslas, now an
artist of repute, and born a fine gentleman, left his cigar-ash on the
arms of the chairs and the prettiest pieces of furniture, as a man
does to whom love allows everything--a man rich enough to scorn vulgar
carefulness.

"Now, then, let us talk over your affairs," said Lisbeth, seeing her
pretty cousin silent in the armchair into which she had dropped. "But
what ails you? You look rather pale, my dear."

"Two articles have just come out in which my poor Wenceslas is pulled
to pieces; I have read them, but I have hidden them from him, for they
would completely depress him. The marble statue of Marshal Montcornet
is pronounced utterly bad. The bas-reliefs are allowed to pass muster,
simply to allow of the most perfidious praise of his talent as a
decorative artist, and to give the greater emphasis to the statement
that serious art is quite out of his reach! Stidmann, whom I besought
to tell me the truth, broke my heart by confessing that his own
opinion agreed with that of every other artist, of the critics, and
the public. He said to me in the garden before breakfast, 'If
Wenceslas cannot exhibit a masterpiece next season, he must give up
heroic sculpture and be content to execute idyllic subjects, small
figures, pieces of jewelry, and high-class goldsmiths' work!' This
verdict is dreadful to me, for Wenceslas, I know, will never accept
it; he feels he has so many fine ideas."

"Ideas will not pay the tradesman's bills," remarked Lisbeth. "I was
always telling him so--nothing but money. Money is only to be had for
work done--things that ordinary folks like well enough to buy them.
When an artist has to live and keep a family, he had far better have a
design for a candlestick on his counter, or for a fender or a table,
than for groups or statues. Everybody must have such things, while he
may wait months for the admirer of the group--and for his money---"

"You are right, my good Lisbeth. Tell him all that; I have not the
courage.--Besides, as he was saying to Stidmann, if he goes back to
ornamental work and small sculpture, he must give up all hope of the
Institute and grand works of art, and we should not get the three
hundred thousand francs' worth of work promised at Versailles and by
the City of Paris and the Ministers. That is what we are robbed of by
those dreadful articles, written by rivals who want to step into our
shoes."

"And that is not what you dreamed of, poor little puss!" said Lisbeth,
kissing Hortense on the brow. "You expected to find a gentleman, a
leader of Art, the chief of all living sculptors.--But that is poetry,
you see, a dream requiring fifty thousand francs a year, and you have
only two thousand four hundred--so long as I live. After my death
three thousand."

A few tears rose to Hortense's eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her
eyes as a cat laps milk.

This is the story of their honeymoon--the tale will perhaps not be
lost on some artists.

Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one
of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory in
Art--for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind--is
courage above all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have
no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.

Driven by the dreadful stress of poverty, goaded by Lisbeth, and kept
by her in blinders, as a horse is, to hinder it from seeing to the
right and left of its road, lashed on by that hard woman, the
personification of Necessity, a sort of deputy Fate, Wenceslas, a born
poet and dreamer, had gone on from conception to execution, and
overleaped, without sounding it, the gulf that divides these two
hemispheres of Art. To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a
delightful occupation. It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the
life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy. The work then floats in
all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the
fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juices of a fruit
enjoyed in anticipation.

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as
a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But
gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting
it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every
morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking
it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be
instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of
this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected which in
sculpture speaks to every eye, in literature to every intellect, in
painting to every memory, in music to every heart!--This is the task
of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward
and obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at
command than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which
makes a mother--that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly
understood--the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so
difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the
opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor's edge,
she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a
crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is
a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the
sportsman's despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike
dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are
often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of
this overwhelming labor, "I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it
with regret." Be it known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does
not throw himself into his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf, as a
soldier leads a forlorn hope without a moment's thought, and if when
he is in the crater he does not dig on as a miner does when the earth
has fallen in on him; if he contemplates the difficulties before him
instead of conquering them one by one, like the lovers in fairy tales,
who to win their princesses overcome ever new enchantments, the work
remains incomplete; it perishes in the studio where creativeness
becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own
talent.

Rossini, a brother genius to Raphael, is a striking instance in his
poverty-stricken youth, compared with his latter years of opulence.
This is the reason why the same prize, the same triumph, the same bays
are awarded to great poets and to great generals.

Wenceslas, by nature a dreamer, had expended so much energy in
production, in study, and in work under Lisbeth's despotic rule, that
love and happiness resulted in reaction. His real character
reappeared, the weakness, recklessness, and indolence of the Sarmatian
returned to nestle in the comfortable corners of his soul, whence the
schoolmaster's rod had routed them.

For the first few months the artist adored his wife. Hortense and
Wenceslas abandoned themselves to the happy childishness of a
legitimate and unbounded passion. Hortense was the first to release
her husband from his labors, proud to triumph over her rival, his Art.
And, indeed, a woman's caresses scare away the Muse, and break down
the sturdy, brutal resolution of the worker.

Six or seven months slipped by, and the artist's fingers had forgotten
the use of the modeling tool. When the need for work began to be felt,
when the Prince de Wissembourg, president of the committee of
subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas spoke the inevitable
byword of the idler, "I am just going to work on it," and he lulled
his dear Hortense with fallacious promises and the magnificent schemes
of the artist as he smokes. Hortense loved her poet more than ever;
she dreamed of a sublime statue of Marshal Montcornet. Montcornet
would be the embodied ideal of bravery, the type of the cavalry
officer, of courage a la Murat. Yes, yes; at the mere sight of that
statue all the Emperor's victories were to seem a foregone conclusion.
And then such workmanship! The pencil was accommodating and answered
to the word.

By way of a statue the result was a delightful little Wenceslas.

When the progress of affairs required that he should go to the studio
at le Gros-Caillou to mould the clay and set up the life-size model,
Steinbock found one day that the Prince's clock required his presence
in the workshop of Florent and Chanor, where the figures were being
finished; or, again, the light was gray and dull; to-day he had
business to do, to-morrow they had a family dinner, to say nothing of
indispositions of mind and body, and the days when he stayed at home
to toy with his adored wife.

Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg was obliged to be angry to get the
clay model finished; he declared that he must put the work into other
hands. It was only by dint of endless complaints and much strong
language that the committee of subscribers succeeded in seeing the
plaster-cast. Day after day Steinbock came home, evidently tired,
complaining of this "hodman's work" and his own physical weakness.
During that first year the household felt no pinch; the Countess
Steinbock, desperately in love with her husband cursed the War
Minister. She went to see him; she told him that great works of art
were not to be manufactured like cannon; and that the State--like
Louis XIV., Francis I., and Leo X.--ought to be at the beck and call
of genius. Poor Hortense, believing she held a Phidias in her embrace,
had the sort of motherly cowardice for her Wenceslas that is in every
wife who carries her love to the pitch of idolatry.

"Do not be hurried," said she to her husband, "our whole future life
is bound up with that statue. Take your time and produce a
masterpiece."

She would go to the studio, and then the enraptured Steinbock wasted
five hours out of seven in describing the statue instead of working at
it. He thus spent eighteen months in finishing the design, which to
him was all-important.

When the plaster was cast and the model complete, poor Hortense, who
had looked on at her husband's toil, seeing his health really suffer
from the exertions which exhaust a sculptor's frame and arms and hands
--Hortense thought the result admirable. Her father, who knew nothing
of sculpture, and her mother, no less ignorant, lauded it as a
triumph; the War Minister came with them to see it, and, overruled by
them, expressed approval of the figure, standing as it did alone, in a
favorable light, thrown up against a green baize background.

Alas! at the exhibition of 1841, the disapprobation of the public soon
took the form of abuse and mockery in the mouths of those who were
indignant with the idol too hastily set up for worship. Stidmann tried
to advise his friend, but was accused of jealousy. Every article in a
newspaper was to Hortense an outcry of envy. Stidmann, the best of
good fellows, got articles written, in which adverse criticism was
contravened, and it was pointed out that sculptors altered their works
in translating the plaster into marble, and that the marble would be
the test.

"In reproducing the plaster sketch in marble," wrote Claude Vignon, "a
masterpiece may be ruined, or a bad design made beautiful. The plaster
is the manuscript, the marble is the book."

So in two years and a half Wenceslas had produced a statue and a son.
The child was a picture of beauty; the statue was execrable.

The clock for the Prince and the price of the statue paid off the
young couple's debts. Steinbock had acquired fashionable habits; he
went to the play, to the opera; he talked admirably about art; and in
the eyes of the world he maintained his reputation as a great artist
by his powers of conversation and criticism. There are many clever men
in Paris who spend their lives in talking themselves out, and are
content with a sort of drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating
these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard
work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its
difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his
will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew
swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover.

Sculpture--like dramatic art--is at once the most difficult and the
easiest of all arts. You have but to copy a model, and the task is
done; but to give it a soul, to make it typical by creating a man or a
woman--this is the sin of Prometheus. Such triumphs in the annals of
sculpture may be counted, as we may count the few poets among men.
Michael Angelo, Michel Columb, Jean Goujon, Phidias, Praxiteles,
Polycletes, Puget, Canova, Albert Durer, are the brothers of Milton,
Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso, Homer, and Moliere. And such an
achievement is so stupendous that a single statue is enough to make a
man immortal, as Figaro, Lovelace, and Manon Lescaut have immortalized
Beaumarchais, Richardson, and the Abbe Prevost.

Superficial thinkers--and there are many in the artist world--have
asserted that sculpture lives only by the nude, that it died with the
Greeks, and that modern vesture makes it impossible. But, in the first
place, the Ancients have left sublime statues entirely clothed--the
Polyhymnia, the Julia, and others, and we have not found one-tenth
of all their works; and then, let any lover of art go to Florence and
see Michael Angelo's Penseroso, or to the Cathedral of Mainz, and
behold the Virgin by Albert Durer, who has created a living woman
out of ebony, under her threefold drapery, with the most flowing, the
softest hair that ever a waiting-maid combed through; let all the
ignorant flock thither, and they will acknowledge that genius can give
mind to drapery, to armor, to a robe, and fill it with a body, just as
a man leaves the stamp of his individuality and habits of life on the
clothes he wears.

Sculpture is the perpetual realization of the fact which once, and
never again, was, in painting called Raphael!

The solution of this hard problem is to be found only in constant
persevering toil; for, merely to overcome the material difficulties to
such an extent, the hand must be so practised, so dexterous and
obedient, that the sculptor may be free to struggle soul to soul with
the elusive moral element that he has to transfigure as he embodies
it. If Paganini, who uttered his soul through the strings of his
violin, spent three days without practising, he lost what he called
the stops of his instrument, meaning the sympathy between the wooden
frame, the strings, the bow, and himself; if he had lost this
alliance, he would have been no more than an ordinary player.

Perpetual work is the law of art, as it is the law of life, for art is
idealized creation. Hence great artists and perfect poets wait neither
for commission nor for purchasers. They are constantly creating--
to-day, to-morrow, always. The result is the habit of work, the
unfailing apprehension of the difficulties which keep them in close
intercourse with the Muse and her productive forces. Canova lived in
his studio, as Voltaire lived in his study; and so must Homer and
Phidias have lived.

While Lisbeth kept Wenceslas Steinbock in thraldom in his garret, he
was on the thorny road trodden by all these great men, which leads to
the Alpine heights of glory. Then happiness, in the person of
Hortense, had reduced the poet to idleness--the normal condition of
all artists, since to them idleness is fully occupied. Their joy is
such as that of the pasha of a seraglio; they revel with ideas, they
get drunk at the founts of intellect. Great artists, such as
Steinbock, wrapped in reverie, are rightly spoken of as dreamers.
They, like opium-eaters, all sink into poverty, whereas if they had
been kept up to the mark by the stern demands of life, they might have
been great men.

At the same time, these half-artists are delightful; men like them and
cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists,
who are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of
society. This is why: Great men are the slaves of their work. Their
indifference to outer things, their devotion to their work, make
simpletons regard them as egotists, and they are expected to wear the
same garb as the dandy who fulfils the trivial evolutions called
social duties. These men want the lions of the Atlas to be combed and
scented like a lady's poodle.

These artists, who are too rarely matched to meet their fellows, fall
into habits of solitary exclusiveness; they are inexplicable to the
majority, which, as we know, consists mostly of fools--of the envious,
the ignorant, and the superficial.

Now you may imagine what part a wife should play in the life of these
glorious and exceptional beings. She ought to be what, for five years,
Lisbeth had been, but with the added offering of love, humble and
patient love, always ready and always smiling.

Hortense, enlightened by her anxieties as a mother, and driven by dire
necessity, had discovered too late the mistakes she had been
involuntarily led into by her excessive love. Still, the worthy
daughter of her mother, her heart ached at the thought of worrying
Wenceslas; she loved her dear poet too much to become his torturer;
and she could foresee the hour when beggary awaited her, her child,
and her husband.

"Come, come, my child," said Lisbeth, seeing the tears in her cousin's
lovely eyes, "you must not despair. A glassful of tears will not buy a
plate of soup. How much do you want?"

"Well, five or six thousand francs."

"I have but three thousand at the most," said Lisbeth. "And what is
Wenceslas doing now?"

"He has had an offer to work in partnership with Stidmann at a table
service for the Duc d'Herouville for six thousand francs. Then
Monsieur Chanor will advance four thousand to repay Monsieur de Lora
and Bridau--a debt of honor."

"What, you have had the money for the statue and the bas-reliefs for
Marshal Montcornet's monument, and you have not paid them yet?"

"For the last three years," said Hortense, "we have spent twelve
thousand francs a year, and I have but a hundred louis a year of my
own. The Marshal's monument, when all the expenses were paid, brought
us no more than sixteen thousand francs. Really and truly, if
Wenceslas gets no work, I do not know what is to become of us. Oh, if
only I could learn to make statues, I would handle the clay!" she
cried, holding up her fine arms.

The woman, it was plain, fulfilled the promise of the girl; there was
a flash in her eye; impetuous blood, strong with iron, flowed in her
veins; she felt that she was wasting her energy in carrying her
infant.

"Ah, my poor little thing! a sensible girl should not marry an artist
till his fortune is made--not while it is still to make."

At this moment they heard voices; Stidmann and Wenceslas were seeing
Chanor to the door; then Wenceslas and Stidmann came in again.

Stidmann, an artist in vogue in the world of journalists, famous
actresses, and courtesans of the better class, was a young man of
fashion whom Valerie much wished to see in her rooms; indeed, he had
already been introduced to her by Claude Vignon. Stidmann had lately
broken off an intimacy with Madame Schontz, who had married some
months since and gone to live in the country. Valerie and Lisbeth,
hearing of this upheaval from Claude Vignon, thought it well to get
Steinbock's friend to visit in the Rue Vanneau.

Stidmann, out of good feeling, went rarely to the Steinbocks'; and as
it happened that Lisbeth was not present when he was introduced by
Claude Vignon, she now saw him for the first time. As she watched this
noted artist, she caught certain glances from his eyes at Hortense,
which suggested to her the possibility of offering him to the Countess
Steinbock as a consolation if Wenceslas should be false to her. In
point of fact, Stidmann was reflecting that if Steinbock were not his
friend, Hortense, the young and superbly beautiful countess, would be
an adorable mistress; it was this very notion, controlled by honor,
that kept him away from the house. Lisbeth was quick to mark the
significant awkwardness that troubles a man in the presence of a woman
with whom he will not allow himself to flirt.

"Very good-looking--that young man," said she in a whisper to
Hortense.

"Oh, do you think so?" she replied. "I never noticed him."

"Stidmann, my good fellow," said Wenceslas, in an undertone to his
friend, "we are on no ceremony, you and I--we have some business to
settle with this old girl."

Stidmann bowed to the ladies and went away.

"It is settled," said Wenceslas, when he came in from taking leave of
Stidmann. "But there are six months' work to be done, and we must live
meanwhile."

"There are my diamonds," cried the young Countess, with the impetuous
heroism of a loving woman.

A tear rose in Wenceslas' eye.

"Oh, I am going to work," said he, sitting down by his wife and
drawing her on to his knee. "I will do odd jobs--a wedding chest,
bronze groups----"

"But, my children," said Lisbeth; "for, as you know, you will be my
heirs, and I shall leave you a very comfortable sum, believe me,
especially if you help me to marry the Marshal; nay, if we succeed in
that quickly, I will take you all to board with me--you and Adeline.
We should live very happily together.--But for the moment, listen to
the voice of my long experience. Do not fly to the Mont-de-Piete; it
is the ruin of the borrower. I have always found that when the
interest was due, those who had pledged their things had nothing
wherewith to pay up, and then all is lost. I can get you a loan at
five per cent on your note of hand."

"Oh, we are saved!" said Hortense.

"Well, then, child, Wenceslas had better come with me to see the
lender, who will oblige him at my request. It is Madame Marneffe. If
you flatter her a little--for she is as vain as a parvenue--she will
get you out of the scrape in the most obliging way. Come yourself and
see her, my dear Hortense."

Hortense looked at her husband with the expression a man condemned to
death must wear on his way to the scaffold.

"Claude Vignon took Stidmann there," said Wenceslas. "He says it is a
very pleasant house."

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 worships 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 pawn my diamonds," said Hortense. "Oh, never go
there, Wenceslas!--It is hell!"

"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 crushing."

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 fashion; that is a mistake. In these days women,
more ingenious perhaps than of yore, invite a glance through the
opera-glass 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
fashion 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 assassine 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 attitudes before the glass, 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: albums 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 passion 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 Duchess had given him from two to four--he gave this fine
title to Madame de Marneffe to complete the illusion--for Valerie
had surpassed 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 nobody 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 attitudes. 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 assimilates 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 constitution 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.

At the christening of Poland, no doubt, the Fairy Carabosse,
overlooked by the genii who endowed that attractive people with the
most brilliant gifts, came in to say:

"Keep all the gifts that my sisters have bestowed on you; but you
shall never know what you wish for!"

If, in its heroic duel with Russia, Poland had won the day, the Poles
would now be fighting among themselves, as they formerly fought in
their Diets to hinder each other from being chosen King. When that
nation, composed entirely of hot-headed dare-devils, has good sense
enough to seek a Louis XI. among her own offspring, to accept his
despotism and a dynasty, she will be saved.

What Poland has been politically, almost every Pole is in private
life, especially under the stress of disaster. Thus Wenceslas
Steinbock, after worshiping his wife for three years and knowing that
he was a god to her, was so much nettled at finding himself barely
noticed by Madame Marneffe, that he made it a point of honor to
attract her attention. He compared Valerie with his wife and gave her
the palm. Hortense was beautiful flesh, as Valerie had said to
Lisbeth; but Madame Marneffe had spirit in her very shape, and the
savor of vice.

Such devotion as Hortense's is a feeling which a husband takes as his
due; the sense of the immense preciousness of such perfect love soon
wears off, as a debtor, in the course of time, begins to fancy that
the borrowed money is his own. This noble loyalty becomes the daily
bread of the soul, and an infidelity is as tempting as a dainty. The
woman who is scornful, and yet more the woman who is reputed
dangerous, excites curiosity, as spices add flavor to good food.
Indeed, the disdain so cleverly acted by Valerie was a novelty to
Wenceslas, after three years of too easy enjoyment. Hortense was a
wife; Valerie a mistress.

Many men desire to have two editions of the same work, though it is in
fact a proof of inferiority when a man cannot make his mistress of his
wife. Variety in this particular is a sign of weakness. Constancy will
always be the real genius of love, the evidence of immense power--the
power that makes the poet! A man ought to find every woman in his
wife, as the squalid poets of the seventeenth century made their
Manons figure as Iris and Chloe.

"Well," said Lisbeth to the Pole, as she beheld him fascinated, "what
do you think of Valerie?"

"She is too charming," replied Wenceslas.

"You would not listen to me," said Betty. "Oh! my little Wenceslas, if
you and I had never parted, you would have been that siren's lover;
you might have married her when she was a widow, and you would have
had her forty thousand francs a year----"

"Really?"

"Certainly," replied Lisbeth. "Now, take care of yourself; I warned
you of the danger; do not singe your wings in the candle!--Come, give
me your arm, dinner is served."

No language could be so thoroughly demoralizing as this; for if you
show a Pole a precipice, he is bound to leap it. As a nation they have
the very spirit of cavalry; they fancy they can ride down every
obstacle and come out victorious. The spur applied by Lisbeth to
Steinbock's vanity was intensified by the appearance of the dining-
room, bright with handsome silver plate; the dinner was served with
every refinement and extravagance of Parisian luxury.

"I should have done better to take Celimene," thought he to himself.

All through the dinner Hulot was charming; pleased to see his son-in-
law at that table, and yet more happy in the prospect of a
reconciliation with Valerie, whose fidelity he proposed to secure by
the promise of Coquet's head-clerkship. Stidmann responded to the
Baron's amiability by shafts of Parisian banter and an artist's high
spirits. Steinbock would not allow himself to be eclipsed by his
friend; he too was witty, said amusing things, made his mark, and was
pleased with himself; Madame Marneffe smiled at him several times to
show that she quite understood him.

The good meal and heady wines completed the work; Wenceslas was deep
in what must be called the slough of dissipation. Excited by just a
glass too much, he stretched himself on a settee after dinner, sunk in
physical and mental ecstasy, which Madame Marneffe wrought to the
highest pitch by coming to sit down by him--airy, scented, pretty
enough to damn an angel. She bent over Wenceslas and almost touched
his ear as she whispered to him:

"We cannot talk over business matters this evening, unless you will
remain till the last. Between us--you, Lisbeth, and me--we can settle
everything to suit you."

"Ah, Madame, you are an angel!" replied Wenceslas, also in a murmur.
"I was a pretty fool not to listen to Lisbeth--"

"What did she say?"

"She declared, in the Rue du Doyenne, that you loved me!"

Madame Marneffe looked at him, seemed covered with confusion, and
hastily left her seat. A young and pretty woman never rouses the hope
of immediate success with impunity. This retreat, the impulse of a
virtuous woman who is crushing a passion in the depths of her heart,
was a thousand times more effective than the most reckless avowal.
Desire was so thoroughly aroused in Wenceslas that he doubled his
attentions to Valerie. A woman seen by all is a woman wished for.
Hence the terrible power of actresses. Madame Marneffe, knowing that
she was watched, behaved like an admired actress. She was quite
charming, and her success was immense.

"I no longer wonder at my father-in-law's follies," said Steinbock to
Lisbeth.

"If you say such things, Wenceslas, I shall to my dying day repent of
having got you the loan of these ten thousand francs. Are you, like
all these men," and she indicated the guests, "madly in love with that
creature? Remember, you would be your father-in-law's rival. And think
of the misery you would bring on Hortense."

"That is true," said Wenceslas. "Hortense is an angel; I should be a
wretch."

"And one is enough in the family!" said Lisbeth.

"Artists ought never to marry!" exclaimed Steinbock.

"Ah! that is what I always told you in the Rue du Doyenne. Your
groups, your statues, your great works, ought to be your children."

"What are you talking about?" Valerie asked, joining Lisbeth.--"Give
us tea, Cousin."

Steinbock, with Polish vainglory, wanted to appear familiar with this
drawing-room fairy. After defying Stidmann, Vignon, and Crevel with a
look, he took Valerie's hand and forced her to sit down by him on the
settee.

"You are rather too lordly, Count Steinbock," said she, resisting a
little. But she laughed as she dropped on to the seat, not without
arranging the rosebud pinned into her bodice.

"Alas! if I were really lordly," said he, "I should not be here to
borrow money."

"Poor boy! I remember how you worked all night in the Rue du Doyenne.
You really were rather a spooney; you married as a starving man
snatches a loaf. You knew nothing of Paris, and you see where you are
landed. But you turned a deaf ear to Lisbeth's devotion, as you did to
the love of a woman who knows her Paris by heart."

"Say no more!" cried Steinbock; "I am done for!"

"You shall have your ten thousand francs, my dear Wenceslas; but on
one condition," she went on, playing with his handsome curls.

"What is that?"

"I will take no interest----"

"Madame!"

"Oh, you need not be indignant; you shall make it good by giving me a
bronze group. You began the story of Samson; finish it.--Do a Delilah
cutting off the Jewish Hercules' hair. And you, who, if you will
listen to me, will be a great artist, must enter into the subject.
What you have to show is the power of woman. Samson is a secondary
consideration. He is the corpse of dead strength. It is Delilah--
passion--that ruins everything. How far more beautiful is that
replica--That is what you call it, I think--" She skilfully
interpolated, as Claude Vignon and Stidmann came up to them on hearing
her talk of sculpture--"how far more beautiful than the Greek myth is
that replica of Hercules at Omphale's feet.--Did Greece copy Judaea,
or did Judaea borrow the symbolism from Greece?"

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of
the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza--
most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical
proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and
all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and
he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence.
And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue."

"I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this
interruption to her tete-a-tete.

"Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon.

"Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand
with the timidity of a girl in love.

"You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if
madame asks a favor of you!"

"What is it?" asked Claude Vignon.

"A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off
Samson's hair."

"It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----"

"On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling.

"Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann.

"You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen
glance at Valerie.

"Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on
waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot.
The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it,
covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the
ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at
Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like
Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As
I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors,
but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah
is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again.
She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for
she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and
one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off
your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs,
gentlemen!"

And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in
concert with the critic.

"It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann.

"Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met,"
said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so
rare."

"And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin
can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to
think?"

"If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count,"
said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who
had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for
an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a
thousand crowns!"

"Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon.

"Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to
Crevel. "Ask her--"

At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This
was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete
language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but
women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study
their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they
perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question,
"Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly
asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring
it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table,
cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it
submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of
intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of
feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's
declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to
the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental
servility.

And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she
crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in
her hand.

"I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the
artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with
his, "to have them given to me thus!"

"What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that
this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her
heart.

"Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group."

"He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?"

"Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock.

"He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would
be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather
un-dressy."

Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a
victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win
admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time
looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her
gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by
glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was
not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to
return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette,
whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated
Steinbock.

"Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper.
"Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she
robbed you of Wenceslas."

"Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful,"
replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This
morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots
have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and
to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at
five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on
their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they
can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully
distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of
refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-
sacrifice."

"The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at
Hulot.

"I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in
September."

"And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is
high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this
evening."

"My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are
quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is
enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not
tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense
is sitting up for you."

"Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little
business with you and her," replied Wenceslas.

"No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for
her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow
at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin
Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her
to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of
it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at
Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is
lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense."

Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually
interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient.

Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected
him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had
listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before
had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor.
She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a
needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten
till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering:

"Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent?
He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He
took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the
best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!"

But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past.

From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms;
the quarter where they lived was now deserted.

"If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought
she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to
see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped
by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for
six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no
one but me."

Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on
account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime
regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to
the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the
magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the
mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has
seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman
to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight
of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let
herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie
to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves
a special form of worship.

In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a
safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not
worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to
such manifestations?

By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish,
that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the
bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother.

"At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My
dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the
torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone,
with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I
should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me!--
Bad boy!"

"What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh
caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to
whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the
Montcornet statue. There were--"

"Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired.

"Worthy Madame Florent--"

"You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?"

"Yes, at their house; I made a mistake."

"You did not take a coach to come home?"

"No."

"And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?"

"Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as
the Madeleine, talking all the way."

"It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the
Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at
her husband's patent leather boots.

It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-
Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled.

"Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to
lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination.

He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for
Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth
of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman
and his workmen.

"Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am
going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to
get up early, by your leave, my pet."

The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was
miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of
her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street
prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted
for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her.

Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite
reassured.

"Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to
dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we
cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto
Cellini!"

Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she
was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of
onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the
cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann.

"I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?"

"He is at the studio."

"I came to talk over the work with him."

"I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair.

Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain
Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann
bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang;
the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master
from the studio.

"You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did
not come in till past one in the morning."

"Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to
fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is
interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great
flirt."

"And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to
keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me."

"I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think
her a very dangerous woman."

Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth.

"So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with
Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----"

Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had
blundered.

The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The
artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her
mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with
violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary
indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to
his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an
effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that
the slightest contradiction was mischievous.

The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that
her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish,
Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again.

"Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!"

"If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!"
exclaimed Stidmann in despair.

"He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed
to go to his work!"

Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this
conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion.

At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to
ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran
quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame
Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I
shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!"

Reine appeared in answer to his ring.

"Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is
dying--"

Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise.

"But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----"

"I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is
very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your
mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel.

"He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself.

And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau,
he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After
telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique,
Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the
secret of yesterday's dinner.

"I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally
forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not
telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say?
That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is
well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I
am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse
myself?"

"I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves
you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that
you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any
rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye."

Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up
at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish
artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few
words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had
no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward
place in his conjugal affairs.

At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst
into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the
hysterical attack.

"Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his
word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with
her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the
morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion,
not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I
was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was
easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my
weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's
blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such
discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging
myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I
might even kill him first and myself after--and so on.

"And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking
all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their
all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for
that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been
arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content
with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas?
--I will go to see her and stab her!"

Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was
unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic
efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's
head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses.

"Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot
be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear
Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I
have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny
Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!-- Did you know that?"

"You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----"

She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts.

"Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind,
and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say,
'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying
breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you,
what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered,
perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been
withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is,
would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown
the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a
scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the
destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have
married.

"I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last
connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My
serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened
Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking
him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the
veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held
that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it--
motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion
--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----"

Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and
of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the
tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial
affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her
knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as
pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr.

"Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my
daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for
no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl,
whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing
ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my
woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish
that I spoke.--God will forgive me!

"Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the
world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with
the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and
twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--"

"But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said
the self-absorbed girl.

"Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes."

"Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not
go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle."

"For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most
infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem.
We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were
ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer
doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense,
swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me,
never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as
your mother has been."

Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step.

"So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has
been here while I went to see him."

"Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who
uses words to stab.

"Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met."

"And yesterday?"

"Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother
shall judge between us."

This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the
truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched;
they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to.

There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to
their Czar.

"Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my
sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our
poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such
troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a
woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong?--
She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand
more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth
will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than
our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered
us her savings."

"Poor soul!" said Hortense.

"Poor soul!" said the Baroness.

"But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her,
nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame
Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of
honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to
the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs,
but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had
free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none
the wiser; I will go and get them.'

"Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me
to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have
the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on
the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all.

"What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous,
and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her
since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled
creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to
convince his wife by the vehemence that women like.