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An Old Maid

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #1352 · 302,952 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: An Old Maid

Author: Honoré de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley


        
Release date: June 1, 1998 [eBook #1352]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1352

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OLD MAID ***

AN OLD MAID


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                             DEDICATION

     To Monsieur Eugene-Auguste-Georges-Louis Midy de la Greneraye
     Surville, Royal Engineer of the Ponts at Chausses.

     As a testimony to the affection of his brother-in-law,

     De Balzac





AN OLD MAID




CHAPTER I. ONE OF MANY CHEVALIERS DE VALOIS


Most persons have encountered, in certain provinces in France, a number
of Chevaliers de Valois. One lived in Normandy, another at Bourges,
a third (with whom we have here to do) flourished in Alencon, and
doubtless the South possesses others. The number of the Valesian
tribe is, however, of no consequence to the present tale. All these
chevaliers, among whom were doubtless some who were Valois as Louis XIV.
was Bourbon, knew so little of one another that it was not advisable
to speak to one about the others. They were all willing to leave the
Bourbons in tranquil possession of the throne of France; for it was too
plainly established that Henri IV. became king for want of a male heir
in the first Orleans branch called the Valois. If there are any Valois,
they descend from Charles de Valois, Duc d’Angouleme, son of Charles
IX. and Marie Touchet, the male line from whom ended, until proof to
the contrary be produced, in the person of the Abbe de Rothelin. The
Valois-Saint-Remy, who descended from Henri II., also came to an end
in the famous Lamothe-Valois implicated in the affair of the Diamond
Necklace.

Each of these many chevaliers, if we may believe reports, was, like
the Chevalier of Alencon, an old gentleman, tall, thin, withered, and
moneyless. He of Bourges had emigrated; he of Touraine hid himself; he
of Alencon fought in La Vendee and “chouanized” somewhat. The youth of
the latter was spend in Paris, where the Revolution overtook him when
thirty years of age in the midst of his conquests and gallantries.

The Chevalier de Valois of Alencon was accepted by the highest
aristocracy of the province as a genuine Valois; and he distinguished
himself, like the rest of his homonyms, by excellent manners, which
proved him a man of society. He dined out every day, and played cards
every evening. He was thought witty, thanks to his foible for relating
a quantity of anecdotes on the reign of Louis XV. and the beginnings
of the Revolution. When these tales were heard for the first time, they
were held to be well narrated. He had, moreover, the great merit of
not repeating his personal bons mots and of never speaking of
his love-affairs, though his smiles and his airs and graces were
delightfully indiscreet. The worthy gentleman used his privilege as a
Voltairean noble to stay away from mass; and great indulgence was shown
to his irreligion because of his devotion to the royal cause. One of his
particular graces was the air and manner (imitated, no doubt, from Mole)
with which he took snuff from a gold box adorned with the portrait of
the Princess Goritza,--a charming Hungarian, celebrated for her beauty
in the last years of the reign of Louis XV. Having been attached during
his youth to that illustrious stranger, he still mentioned her with
emotion. For her sake he had fought a duel with Monsieur de Lauzun.

The chevalier, now fifty-eight years of age, owned to only fifty; and he
might well allow himself that innocent deception, for, among the other
advantages granted to fair thin persons, he managed to preserve
the still youthful figure which saves men as well as women from an
appearance of old age. Yes, remember this: all of life, or rather
all the elegance that expresses life, is in the figure. Among the
chevalier’s other possessions must be counted an enormous nose with
which nature had endowed him. This nose vigorously divided a pale face
into two sections which seemed to have no knowledge of each other, for
one side would redden under the process of digestion, while the
other continued white. This fact is worthy of remark at a period when
physiology is so busy with the human heart. The incandescence, so to
call it, was on the left side. Though his long slim legs, supporting a
lank body, and his pallid skin, were not indicative of health, Monsieur
de Valois ate like an ogre and declared he had a malady called in the
provinces “hot liver,” perhaps to excuse his monstrous appetite. The
circumstance of his singular flush confirmed this declaration; but in a
region where repasts are developed on the line of thirty or forty dishes
and last four hours, the chevalier’s stomach would seem to have been a
blessing bestowed by Providence on the good town of Alencon. According
to certain doctors, heat on the left side denotes a prodigal heart.
The chevalier’s gallantries confirmed this scientific assertion, the
responsibility for which does not rest, fortunately, on the historian.

In spite of these symptoms, Monsieur de Valois’ constitution was
vigorous, consequently long-lived. If his liver “heated,” to use an
old-fashioned word, his heart was not less inflammable. His face was
wrinkled and his hair silvered; but an intelligent observer would have
recognized at once the stigmata of passion and the furrows of pleasure
which appeared in the crow’s-feet and the marches-du-palais, so prized
at the court of Cythera. Everything about this dainty chevalier bespoke
the “ladies’ man.” He was so minute in his ablutions that his cheeks
were a pleasure to look upon; they seemed to have been laved in some
miraculous water. The part of his skull which his hair refused to cover
shone like ivory. His eyebrows, like his hair, affected youth by the
care and regularity with which they were combed. His skin, already
white, seemed to have been extra-whitened by some secret compound.
Without using perfumes, the chevalier exhaled a certain fragrance of
youth, that refreshed the atmosphere. His hands, which were those of
a gentleman, and were cared for like the hands of a pretty woman,
attracted the eye to their rosy, well-shaped nails. In short, had it not
been for his magisterial and stupendous nose, the chevalier might have
been thought a trifle too dainty.

We must here compel ourselves to spoil this portrait by the avowal of a
littleness. The chevalier put cotton in his ears, and wore, appended to
them, two little ear-rings representing negroes’ heads in diamonds, of
admirable workmanship. He clung to these singular appendages, explaining
that since his ears had been bored he had ceased to have headaches (he
had had headaches). We do not present the chevalier as an accomplished
man; but surely we can pardon, in an old celibate whose heart sends
so much blood to his left cheek, these adorable qualities, founded,
perhaps, on some sublime secret history.

Besides, the Chevalier de Valois redeemed those negroes’ heads by so
many other graces that society felt itself sufficiently compensated. He
really took such immense trouble to conceal his age and give pleasure to
his friends. In the first place, we must call attention to the extreme
care he gave to his linen, the only distinction that well-bred men
can nowadays exhibit in their clothes. The linen of the chevalier was
invariably of a fineness and whiteness that were truly aristocratic. As
for his coat, though remarkable for its cleanliness, it was always half
worn-out, but without spots or creases. The preservation of that garment
was something marvellous to those who noticed the chevalier’s high-bred
indifference to its shabbiness. He did not go so far as to scrape the
seams with glass,--a refinement invented by the Prince of Wales; but
he did practice the rudiments of English elegance with a personal
satisfaction little understood by the people of Alencon. The world owes
a great deal to persons who take such pains to please it. In this there
is certainly some accomplishment of that most difficult precept of the
Gospel about rendering good for evil. This freshness of ablution and
all the other little cares harmonized charmingly with the blue eyes, the
ivory teeth, and the blond person of the old chevalier.

The only blemish was that this retired Adonis had nothing manly about
him; he seemed to be employing this toilet varnish to hide the ruins
occasioned by the military service of gallantry only. But we must hasten
to add that his voice produced what might be called an antithesis to his
blond delicacy. Unless you adopted the opinion of certain observers of
the human heart, and thought that the chevalier had the voice of
his nose, his organ of speech would have amazed you by its full and
redundant sound. Without possessing the volume of classical bass voices,
the tone of it was pleasing from a slightly muffled quality like that of
an English bugle, which is firm and sweet, strong but velvety.

The chevalier had repudiated the ridiculous costume still preserved by
certain monarchical old men; he had frankly modernized himself. He
was always seen in a maroon-colored coat with gilt buttons, half-tight
breeches of poult-de-soie with gold buckles, a white waistcoat without
embroidery, and a tight cravat showing no shirt-collar,--a last vestige
of the old French costume which he did not renounce, perhaps, because
it enabled him to show a neck like that of the sleekest abbe. His shoes
were noticeable for their square buckles, a style of which the present
generation has no knowledge; these buckles were fastened to a square of
polished black leather. The chevalier allowed two watch-chains to hang
parallel to each other from each of his waistcoat pockets,--another
vestige of the eighteenth century, which the Incroyables had not
disdained to use under the Directory. This transition costume, uniting
as it did two centuries, was worn by the chevalier with the high-bred
grace of an old French marquis, the secret of which is lost to France
since the day when Fleury, Mole’s last pupil, vanished.

The private life of this old bachelor was apparently open to all eyes,
though in fact it was quite mysterious. He lived in a lodging that was
modest, to say the best of it, in the rue du Cours, on the second floor
of a house belonging to Madame Lardot, the best and busiest washerwoman
in the town. This circumstance will explain the excessive nicety of his
linen. Ill-luck would have it that the day came when Alencon was guilty
of believing that the chevalier had not always comported himself as a
gentleman should, and that in fact he was secretly married in his old
age to a certain Cesarine,--the mother of a child which had had the
impertinence to come into the world without being called for.

“He had given his hand,” as a certain Monsieur du Bousquier remarked,
“to the person who had long had him under irons.”

This horrible calumny embittered the last days of the dainty chevalier
all the more because, as the present Scene will show, he had lost a hope
long cherished to which he had made many sacrifices.

Madame Lardot leased to the chevalier two rooms on the second floor of
her house, for the modest sum of one hundred francs a year. The worthy
gentleman dined out every day, returning only in time to go to bed. His
sole expense therefore was for breakfast, invariably composed of a cup
of chocolate, with bread and butter and fruits in their season. He made
no fire except in the coldest winter, and then only enough to get up
by. Between eleven and four o’clock he walked about, went to read the
papers, and paid visits. From the time of his settling in Alencon he had
nobly admitted his poverty, saying that his whole fortune consisted in
an annuity of six hundred francs a year, the sole remains of his former
opulence,--a property which obliged him to see his man of business (who
held the annuity papers) quarterly. In truth, one of the Alencon bankers
paid him every three months one hundred and fifty francs, sent down
by Monsieur Bordin of Paris, the last of the _procureurs du Chatelet_.
Every one knew these details because the chevalier exacted the utmost
secrecy from the persons to whom he first confided them.

Monsieur de Valois gathered the fruit of his misfortunes. His place at
table was laid in all the most distinguished houses in Alencon, and he
was bidden to all soirees. His talents as a card-player, a narrator, an
amiable man of the highest breeding, were so well known and appreciated
that parties would have seemed a failure if the dainty connoisseur was
absent. Masters of houses and their wives felt the need of his approving
grimace. When a young woman heard the chevalier say at a ball, “You are
delightfully well-dressed!” she was more pleased at such praise than she
would have been at mortifying a rival. Monsieur de Valois was the only
man who could perfectly pronounce certain phrases of the olden time.
The words, “my heart,” “my jewel,” “my little pet,” “my queen,” and the
amorous diminutives of 1770, had a grace that was quite irresistible
when they came from his lips. In short, the chevalier had the privilege
of superlatives. His compliments, of which he was stingy, won the good
graces of all the old women; he made himself agreeable to every one,
even to the officials of the government, from whom he wanted nothing.
His behavior at cards had a lofty distinction which everybody noticed:
he never complained; he praised his adversaries when they lost; he did
not rebuke or teach his partners by showing them how they ought to have
played. When, in the course of a deal, those sickening dissertations
on the game would take place, the chevalier invariably drew out his
snuff-box with a gesture that was worthy of Mole, looked at the Princess
Goritza, raised the cover with dignity, shook, sifted, massed the snuff,
and gathered his pinch, so that by the time the cards were dealt he
had decorated both nostrils and replaced the princess in his waistcoat
pocket,--always on his left side. A gentleman of the “good” century (in
distinction from the “grand” century) could alone have invented that
compromise between contemptuous silence and a sarcasm which might not
have been understood. He accepted poor players and knew how to make
the best of them. His delightful equability of temper made many persons
say,--

“I do admire the Chevalier de Valois!”

His conversation, his manners, seemed bland, like his person. He
endeavored to shock neither man nor woman. Indulgent to defects both
physical and mental, he listened patiently (by the help of the Princess
Goritza) to the many dull people who related to him the petty miseries
of provincial life,--an egg ill-boiled for breakfast, coffee with
feathered cream, burlesque details about health, disturbed sleep,
dreams, visits. The chevalier could call up a languishing look, he could
take on a classic attitude to feign compassion, which made him a most
valuable listener; he could put in an “Ah!” and a “Bah!” and a “What
DID you do?” with charming appropriateness. He died without any one
suspecting him of even an allusion to the tender passages of his romance
with the Princess Goritza. Has any one ever reflected on the service a
dead sentiment can do to society; how love may become both social and
useful? This will serve to explain why, in spite of his constant winning
at play (he never left a salon without carrying off with him about six
francs), the old chevalier remained the spoilt darling of the town. His
losses--which, by the bye, he always proclaimed, were very rare.

All who know him declare that they have never met, not even in the
Egyptian museum at Turin, so agreeable a mummy. In no country in
the world did parasitism ever take on so pleasant a form. Never did
selfishness of a most concentrated kind appear less forth-putting, less
offensive, than in this old gentleman; it stood him in place of devoted
friendship. If some one asked Monsieur de Valois to do him a little
service which might have discommoded him, that some one did not part
from the worthy chevalier without being truly enchanted with him, and
quite convinced that he either could not do the service demanded, or
that he should injure the affair if he meddled in it.

To explain the problematic existence of the chevalier, the historian,
whom Truth, that cruel wanton, grasps by the throat, is compelled to say
that after the “glorious” sad days of July, Alencon discovered that the
chevalier’s nightly winnings amounted to about one hundred and fifty
francs every three months; and that the clever old nobleman had had the
pluck to send to himself his annuity in order not to appear in the eyes
of a community, which loves the main chance, to be entirely without
resources. Many of his friends (he was by that time dead, you will
please remark) have contested mordicus this curious fact, declaring it
to be a fable, and upholding the Chevalier de Valois as a respectable
and worthy gentleman whom the liberals calumniated. Luckily for shrewd
players, there are people to be found among the spectators who will
always sustain them. Ashamed of having to defend a piece of wrong-doing,
they stoutly deny it. Do not accuse them of wilful infatuation; such
men have a sense of their dignity; governments set them the example of a
virtue which consists in burying their dead without chanting the Misere
of their defeats. If the chevalier did allow himself this bit of shrewd
practice,--which, by the bye, would have won him the regard of the
Chevalier de Gramont, a smile from the Baron de Foeneste, a shake of
the hand from the Marquis de Moncade,--was he any the less that amiable
guest, that witty talker, that imperturbable card-player, that famous
teller of anecdotes, in whom all Alencon took delight? Besides, in what
way was this action, which is certainly within the rights of a man’s own
will,--in what way was it contrary to the ethics of a gentleman? When
so many persons are forced to pay annuities to others, what more natural
than to pay one to his own best friend? But Laius is dead--

To return to the period of which we are writing: after about fifteen
years of this way of life the chevalier had amassed ten thousand and
some odd hundred francs. On the return of the Bourbons, one of his old
friends, the Marquis de Pombreton, formerly lieutenant in the Black
mousquetaires, returned to him--so he said--twelve hundred pistoles
which he had lent to the marquis for the purpose of emigrating. This
event made a sensation; it was used later to refute the sarcasms of
the “Constitutionnel,” on the method employed by some emigres in paying
their debts. When this noble act of the Marquis de Pombreton was lauded
before the chevalier, the good man reddened even to his right cheek.
Every one rejoiced frankly at this windfall for Monsieur de Valois,
who went about consulting moneyed people as to the safest manner of
investing this fragment of his past opulence. Confiding in the future of
the Restoration, he finally placed his money on the Grand-Livre at the
moment when the funds were at fifty-six francs and twenty-five centimes.
Messieurs de Lenoncourt, de Navarreins, de Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La
Billardiere, to whom he was known, he said, obtained for him, from the
king’s privy purse, a pension of three hundred francs, and sent him,
moreover, the cross of Saint-Louis. Never was it known positively by
what means the old chevalier obtained these two solemn consecrations of
his title and merits. But one thing is certain; the cross of Saint-Louis
authorized him to take the rank of retired colonel in view of his
service in the Catholic armies of the West.

Besides his fiction of an annuity, about which no one at the present
time knew anything, the chevalier really had, therefore, a bona fide
income of a thousand francs. But in spite of this bettering of his
circumstances, he made no change in his life, manners, or appearance,
except that the red ribbon made a fine effect on his maroon-colored
coat, and completed, so to speak, the physiognomy of a gentleman.
After 1802, the chevalier sealed his letters with a very old seal,
ill-engraved to be sure, by which the Casterans, the d’Esgrignons, the
Troisvilles were enabled to see that he bore: _Party of France, two
cottises gemelled gules, and gules, five mascles or, placed end to end;
on a chief sable, a cross argent_. For crest, a knight’s helmet. For
motto: “Valeo.” Bearing such noble arms, the so-called bastard of the
Valois had the right to get into all the royal carriages of the world.

Many persons envied the quiet existence of this old bachelor, spent
on whist, boston, backgammon, reversi, and piquet, all well played,
on dinners well digested, snuff gracefully inhaled, and tranquil walks
about the town. Nearly all Alencon believed this life to be exempt from
ambitions and serious interests; but no man has a life as simple as
envious neighbors attribute to him. You will find in the most out-of-the
way villages human mollusks, creatures apparently dead, who have
passions for lepidoptera or for conchology, let us say,--beings who will
give themselves infinite pains about moths, butterflies, or the concha
Veneris. Not only did the chevalier have his own particular shells,
but he cherished an ambitious desire which he pursued with a craft
so profound as to be worthy of Sixtus the Fifth: he wanted to marry a
certain rich old maid, with the intention, no doubt, of making her a
stepping-stone by which to reach the more elevated regions of the court.
There, then, lay the secret of his royal bearing and of his residence in
Alencon.




CHAPTER II. SUSANNAH AND THE ELDERS


On a Wednesday morning, early, toward the middle of spring, in the year
16,--such was his mode of reckoning,--at the moment when the chevalier
was putting on his old green-flowered damask dressing-gown, he heard,
despite the cotton in his ears, the light step of a young girl who was
running up the stairway. Presently three taps were discreetly struck
upon the door; then, without waiting for any response, a handsome girl
slipped like an eel into the room occupied by the old bachelor.

“Ah! is it you, Suzanne?” said the Chevalier de Valois, without
discontinuing his occupation, which was that of stropping his razor.
“What have you come for, my dear little jewel of mischief?”

“I have come to tell you something which may perhaps give you as much
pleasure as pain?”

“Is it anything about Cesarine?”

“Cesarine! much I care about your Cesarine!” she said with a saucy air,
half serious, half indifferent.

This charming Suzanne, whose present comical performance was to exercise
a great influence in the principal personages of our history, was a
work-girl at Madame Lardot’s. One word here on the topography of the
house. The wash-rooms occupied the whole of the ground floor. The little
courtyard was used to hang out on wire cords embroidered handkerchiefs,
collarets, capes, cuffs, frilled shirts, cravats, laces, embroidered
dresses,--in short, all the fine linen of the best families of the town.
The chevalier assumed to know from the number of her capes in the wash
how the love-affairs of the wife of the prefect were going on. Though
he guessed much from observations of this kind, the chevalier was
discretion itself; he was never betrayed into an epigram (he had plenty
of wit) which might have closed to him an agreeable salon. You are
therefore to consider Monsieur de Valois as a man of superior manners,
whose talents, like those of many others, were lost in a narrow sphere.
Only--for, after all, he was a man--he permitted himself certain
penetrating glances which could make some women tremble; although they
all loved him heartily as soon as they discovered the depth of his
discretion and the sympathy that he felt for their little weaknesses.

The head woman, Madame Lardot’s factotum, an old maid of forty-six,
hideous to behold, lived on the opposite side of the passage to the
chevalier. Above them were the attics where the linen was dried in
winter. Each apartment had two rooms,--one lighted from the street, the
other from the courtyard. Beneath the chevalier’s room there lived a
paralytic, Madame Lardot’s grandfather, an old buccaneer named Grevin,
who had served under Admiral Simeuse in India, and was now stone-deaf.
As for Madame Lardot, who occupied the other lodging on the first floor,
she had so great a weakness for persons of condition that she may well
have been thought blind to the ways of the chevalier. To her, Monsieur
de Valois was a despotic monarch who did right in all things. Had any of
her workwomen been guilty of a happiness attributed to the chevalier
she would have said, “He is so lovable!” Thus, though the house was of
glass, like all provincial houses, it was discreet as a robber’s cave.

A born confidant to all the little intrigues of the work-rooms, the
chevalier never passed the door, which usually stood open, without
giving something to his little ducks,--chocolate, bonbons, ribbons,
laces, gilt crosses, and such like trifles adored by grisettes;
consequently, the kind old gentleman was adored in return. Women have an
instinct which enables them to divine the men who love them, who like
to be near them, and exact no payment for gallantries. In this respect
women have the instinct of dogs, who in a mixed company will go straight
to the man to whom animals are sacred.

The poor Chevalier de Valois retained from his former life the need of
bestowing gallant protection, a quality of the seigneurs of other
days. Faithful to the system of the “petite maison,” he liked to enrich
women,--the only beings who know how to receive, because they can
always return. But the poor chevalier could no longer ruin himself for
a mistress. Instead of the choicest bonbons wrapped in bank-bills, he
gallantly presented paper-bags full of toffee. Let us say to the glory
of Alencon that the toffee was accepted with more joy than la Duthe
ever showed at a gilt service or a fine equipage offered by the Comte
d’Artois. All these grisettes fully understood the fallen majesty of the
Chevalier de Valois, and they kept their private familiarities with him
a profound secret for his sake. If they were questioned about him in
certain houses when they carried home the linen, they always spoke
respectfully of the chevalier, and made him out older than he really
was; they talked of him as a most respectable monsieur, whose life was
a flower of sanctity; but once in their own regions they perched on his
shoulders like so many parrots. He liked to be told the secrets which
washerwomen discover in the bosom of households, and day after day these
girls would tell him the cancans which were going the round of Alencon.
He called them his “petticoat gazettes,” his “talking feuilletons.”
 Never did Monsieur de Sartines have spies more intelligent and less
expensive, or minions who showed more honor while displaying their
rascality of mind. So it may be said that in the mornings, while
breakfasting, the chevalier usually amused himself as much as the saints
in heaven.

Suzanne was one of his favorites, a clever, ambitious girl, made of
the stuff of a Sophie Arnold, and handsome withal, as the handsomest
courtesan invited by Titian to pose on black velvet for a model of
Venus; although her face, fine about the eyes and forehead, degenerated,
lower down, into commonness of outline. Hers was a Norman beauty, fresh,
high-colored, redundant, the flesh of Rubens covering the muscles of
the Farnese Hercules, and not the slender articulations of the Venus de’
Medici, Apollo’s graceful consort.

“Well, my child, tell me your great or your little adventure, whatever
it is.”

The particular point about the chevalier which would have made him
noticeable from Paris to Pekin, was the gentle paternity of his manner
to grisettes. They reminded him of the illustrious operatic queens of
his early days, whose celebrity was European during a good third of the
eighteenth century. It is certain that the old gentleman, who had lived
in days gone by with that feminine nation now as much forgotten as many
other great things,--like the Jesuits, the Buccaneers, the Abbes, and
the Farmers-General,--had acquired an irresistible good-humor, a kindly
ease, a laisser-aller devoid of egotism, the self-effacement of
Jupiter with Alcmene, of the king intending to be duped, who casts his
thunderbolts to the devil, wants his Olympus full of follies, little
suppers, feminine profusions--but with Juno out of the way, be it
understood.

In spite of his old green damask dressing-gown and the bareness of the
room in which he sat, where the floor was covered with a shabby tapestry
in place of carpet, and the walls were hung with tavern-paper presenting
the profiles of Louis XVI. and members of his family, traced among the
branches of a weeping willow with other sentimentalities invented by
royalism during the Terror,--in spite of his ruins, the chevalier,
trimming his beard before a shabby old toilet-table, draped with
trumpery lace, exhaled an essence of the eighteenth century. All the
libertine graces of his youth reappeared; he seemed to have the wealth
of three hundred thousand francs of debt, while his vis-a-vis waited
before the door. He was grand,--like Berthier on the retreat from
Moscow, issuing orders to an army that existed no longer.

“Monsieur le chevalier,” replied Suzanne, drolly, “seems to me I needn’t
tell you anything; you’ve only to look.”

And Suzanne presented a side view of herself which gave a sort of
lawyer’s comment to her words. The chevalier, who, you must know, was a
sly old bird, lowered his right eye on the grisette, still holding the
razor at his throat, and pretended to understand.

“Well, well, my little duck, we’ll talk about that presently. But you
are rather previous, it seems to me.”

“Why, Monsieur le chevalier, ought I to wait until my mother beats me
and Madame Lardot turns me off? If I don’t get away soon to Paris, I
shall never be able to marry here, where men are so ridiculous.”

“It can’t be helped, my dear; society is changing; women are just as
much victims to the present state of things as the nobility themselves.
After political overturn comes the overturn of morals. Alas! before long
woman won’t exist” (he took out the cotton-wool to arrange his ears):
“she’ll lose everything by rushing into sentiment; she’ll wring her
nerves; good-bye to all the good little pleasures of our time, desired
without shame, accepted without nonsense.” (He polished up the little
negroes’ heads.) “Women had hysterics in those days to get their ends,
but now” (he began to laugh) “their vapors end in charcoal. In short,
marriage” (here he picked up his pincers to remove a hair) “will become
a thing intolerable; whereas it used to be so gay in my day! The reigns
of Louis XIV. and Louis XV.--remember this, my child--said farewell to
the finest manners and morals ever known to the world.”

“But, Monsieur le chevalier,” said the grisette, “the matter now
concerns the morals and honor of your poor little Suzanne, and I hope
you won’t abandon her.”

“Abandon her!” cried the chevalier, finishing his hair; “I’d sooner
abandon my own name.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Suzanne.

“Now, listen to me, you little mischief,” said the chevalier, sitting
down on a huge sofa, formerly called a duchesse, which Madame Lardot had
been at some pains to find for him.

He drew the magnificent Suzanne before him, holding her legs between his
knees. She let him do as he liked, although in the street she was offish
enough to other men, refusing their familiarities partly from decorum
and partly for contempt for their commonness. She now stood audaciously
in front of the chevalier, who, having fathomed in his day many other
mysteries in minds that were far more wily, took in the situation at a
single glance. He knew very well that no young girl would joke about
a real dishonor; but he took good care not to knock over the pretty
scaffolding of her lie as he touched it.

“We slander ourselves,” he said with inimitable craft; “we are as
virtuous as that beautiful biblical girl whose name we bear; we can
always marry as we please, but we are thirsty for Paris, where charming
creatures--and we are no fool--get rich without trouble. We want to go
and see if the great capital of pleasures hasn’t some young Chevalier de
Valois in store for us, with a carriage, diamonds, an opera-box, and so
forth. Russians, Austrians, Britons, have millions on which we have an
eye. Besides, we are patriotic; we want to help France in getting back
her money from the pockets of those gentry. Hey! hey! my dear little
devil’s duck! it isn’t a bad plan. The world you live in may cry out a
bit, but success justifies all things. The worst thing in this world,
my dear, is to be without money; that’s our disease, yours and mine. Now
inasmuch as we have plenty of wit, we thought it would be a good thing
to parade our dear little honor, or dishonor, to catch an old boy;
but that old boy, my dear heart, knows the Alpha and Omega of female
tricks,--which means that you could easier put salt on a sparrow’s tail
than to make me believe I have anything to do with your little affair.
Go to Paris, my dear; go at the cost of an old celibate, I won’t prevent
it; in fact, I’ll help you, for an old bachelor, Suzanne, is the natural
money-box of a young girl. But don’t drag me into the matter. Listen, my
queen, you who know life pretty well; you would me great harm and give
me much pain,--harm, because you would prevent my marriage in a town
where people cling to morality; pain, because if you are in trouble
(which I deny, you sly puss!) I haven’t a penny to get you out of it.
I’m as poor as a church mouse; you know that, my dear. Ah! if I marry
Mademoiselle Cormon, if I am once more rich, of course I would prefer
you to Cesarine. You’ve always seemed to me as fine as the gold they
gild on lead; you were made to be the love of a great seigneur. I think
you so clever that the trick you are trying to play off on me doesn’t
surprise me one bit; I expected it. You are flinging the scabbard after
the sword, and that’s daring for a girl. It takes nerve and superior
ideas to do it, my angel, and therefore you have won my respectful
esteem.”

“Monsieur le chevalier, I assure you, you are mistaken, and--”

She colored, and did not dare to say more. The chevalier, with a single
glance, had guessed and fathomed her whole plan.

“Yes, yes! I understand: you want me to believe it,” he said. “Well! I
do believe it. But take my advice: go to Monsieur du Bousquier. Haven’t
you taken linen there for the last six or eight months? I’m not asking
what went on between you; but I know the man: he has immense conceit;
he is an old bachelor, and very rich; and he only spends a quarter of
a comfortable income. If you are as clever as I suppose, you can go to
Paris at his expense. There, run along, my little doe; go and twist him
round your finger. Only, mind this: be as supple as silk; at every
word take a double turn round him and make a knot. He is a man to fear
scandal, and if he has given you a chance to put him in the pillory--in
short, understand; threaten him with the ladies of the Maternity
Hospital. Besides, he’s ambitious. A man succeeds through his wife, and
you are handsome and clever enough to make the fortune of a husband.
Hey! the mischief! you could hold your own against all the court
ladies.”

Suzanne, whose mind took in at a flash the chevalier’s last words,
was eager to run off to du Bousquier, but, not wishing to depart too
abruptly, she questioned the chevalier about Paris, all the while
helping him to dress. The chevalier, however, divined her desire to
be off, and favored it by asking her to tell Cesarine to bring up his
chocolate, which Madame Lardot made for him every morning. Suzanne then
slipped away to her new victim, whose biography must here be given.

Born of an old Alencon family, du Bousquier was a cross between the
bourgeois and the country squire. Finding himself without means on the
death of his father, he went, like other ruined provincials, to Paris.
On the breaking out of the Revolution he took part in public affairs.
In spite of revolutionary principles, which made a hobby of republican
honesty, the management of public business in those days was by no
means clean. A political spy, a stock-jobber, a contractor, a man who
confiscated in collusion with the syndic of a commune the property of
emigres in order to sell them and buy them in, a minister, and a general
were all equally engaged in public business. From 1793 to 1799 du
Bousquier was commissary of provisions to the French armies. He lived in
a magnificent hotel and was one of the matadors of finance, did business
with Ouvrard, kept open house, and led the scandalous life of the
period,--the life of a Cincinnatus, on sacks of corn harvested without
trouble, stolen rations, “little houses” full of mistresses, in which
were given splendid fetes to the Directors of the Republic.

The citizen du Bousquier was one of Barras’ familiars; he was on the
best of terms with Fouche, stood very well with Bernadotte, and fully
expected to become a minister by throwing himself into the party which
secretly caballed against Bonaparte until Marengo. If it had not been
for Kellermann’s charge and Desaix’s death, du Bousquier would probably
have become a minister. He was one of the chief assistances of that
secret government whom Napoleon’s luck sent behind the scenes in 1793.
(See “An Historical Mystery.”) The unexpected victory of Marengo was
the defeat of that party who actually had their proclamations printed
to return to the principles of the Montagne in case the First Consul
succumbed.

Convinced of the impossibility of Bonaparte’s triumph, du Bousquier
staked the greater part of his property on a fall in the Funds, and kept
two couriers on the field of battle. The first started for Paris when
Melas’ victory was certain; the second, starting four hours later,
brought the news of the defeat of the Austrians. Du Bousquier cursed
Kellermann and Desaix; he dared not curse Bonaparte, who might owe him
millions. This alternative of millions to be earned and present ruin
staring him in the face, deprived the purveyor of most of his faculties:
he became nearly imbecile for several days; the man had so abused his
health by excesses that when the thunderbolt fell upon him he had no
strength to resist. The payment of his bills against the Exchequer
gave him some hopes for the future, but, in spite of all efforts
to ingratiate himself, Napoleon’s hatred to the contractors who had
speculated on his defeat made itself felt; du Bousquier was left without
a sou. The immorality of his private life, his intimacy with Barras and
Bernadotte, displeased the First Consul even more than his manoeuvres
at the Bourse, and he struck du Bousquier’s name from the list of the
government contractors.

Out of all his past opulence du Bousquier saved only twelve hundred
francs a year from an investment in the Grand Livre, which he had
happened to place there by pure caprice, and which saved him from
penury. A man ruined by the First Consul interested the town of Alencon,
to which he now returned, where royalism was secretly dominant. Du
Bousquier, furious against Bonaparte, relating stories against him of
his meanness, of Josephine’s improprieties, and all the other scandalous
anecdotes of the last ten years, was well received.

About this time, when he was somewhere between forty and fifty, du
Bousquier’s appearance was that of a bachelor of thirty-six, of medium
height, plump as a purveyor, proud of his vigorous calves, with a
strongly marked countenance, a flattened nose, the nostrils garnished
with hair, black eyes with thick lashes, from which darted shrewd
glances like those of Monsieur de Talleyrand, though somewhat dulled.
He still wore republican whiskers and his hair very long; his hands,
adorned with bunches of hair on each knuckle, showed the power of his
muscular system in their prominent blue veins. He had the chest of the
Farnese Hercules, and shoulders fit to carry the stocks. Such shoulders
are seen nowadays only at Tortoni’s. This wealth of masculine vigor
counted for much in du Bousquier’s relations with others. And yet in
him, as in the chevalier, symptoms appeared which contrasted oddly with
the general aspect of their persons. The late purveyor had not the voice
of his muscles. We do not mean that his voice was a mere thread, such
as we sometimes hear issuing from the mouth of these walruses; on the
contrary, it was a strong voice, but stifled, an idea of which can be
given only by comparing it with the noise of a saw cutting into soft and
moistened wood,--the voice of a worn-out speculator.

In spite of the claims which the enmity of the First Consul gave
Monsieur du Bousquier to enter the royalist society of the province,
he was not received in the seven or eight families who composed the
faubourg Saint-Germain of Alencon, among whom the Chevalier de Valois
was welcome. He had offered himself in marriage, through her notary,
to Mademoiselle Armande, sister of the most distinguished noble in the
town; to which offer he received a refusal. He consoled himself as best
he could in the society of a dozen rich families, former manufacturers
of the old point d’Alencon, owners of pastures and cattle, or merchants
doing a wholesale business in linen, among whom, as he hoped, he
might find a wealthy wife. In fact, all his hopes now converged to
the perspective of a fortunate marriage. He was not without a certain
financial ability, which many persons used to their profit. Like a
ruined gambler who advises neophytes, he pointed out enterprises and
speculations, together with the means and chances of conducting them. He
was thought a good administrator, and it was often a question of making
him mayor of Alencon; but the memory of his underhand jobbery still
clung to him, and he was never received at the prefecture. All the
succeeding governments, even that of the Hundred Days, refused to
appoint him mayor of Alencon,--a place he coveted, which, could he have
had it, would, he thought, have won him the hand of a certain old maid
on whom his matrimonial views now turned.

Du Bousquier’s aversion to the Imperial government had thrown him at
first into the royalist circles of Alencon, where he remained in spite
of the rebuffs he received there; but when, after the first return
of the Bourbons, he was still excluded from the prefecture, that
mortification inspired him with a hatred as deep as it was secret
against the royalists. He now returned to his old opinions, and became
the leader of the liberal party in Alencon, the invisible manipulator of
elections, and did immense harm to the Restoration by the cleverness of
his underhand proceedings and the perfidy of his outward behavior. Du
Bousquier, like all those who live by their heads only, carried on his
hatreds with the quiet tranquillity of a rivulet, feeble apparently,
but inexhaustible. His hatred was that of a negro, so peaceful that it
deceived the enemy. His vengeance, brooded over for fifteen years, was
as yet satisfied by no victory, not even that of July, 1830.

It was not without some private intention that the Chevalier de Valois
had turned Suzanne’s designs upon Monsieur du Bousquier. The liberal
and the royalist had mutually divined each other in spite of the wide
dissimulation with which they hid their common hope from the rest of the
town. The two old bachelors were secretly rivals. Each had formed a plan
to marry the Demoiselle Cormon, whom Monsieur de Valois had mentioned to
Suzanne. Both, ensconced in their idea and wearing the armor of apparent
indifference, awaited the moment when some lucky chance might deliver
the old maid over to them. Thus, if the two old bachelors had not been
kept asunder by the two political systems of which they each offered
a living expression, their private rivalry would still have made them
enemies. Epochs put their mark on men. These two individuals proved the
truth of that axiom by the opposing historic tints that were visible
in their faces, in their conversation, in their ideas, and in their
clothes. One, abrupt, energetic, with loud, brusque manners, curt, rude
speech, dark in tone, in hair, in look, terrible apparently, in reality
as impotent as an insurrection, represented the republic admirably. The
other, gentle and polished, elegant and nice, attaining his ends by the
slow and infallible means of diplomacy, faithful to good taste, was the
express image of the old courtier regime.

The two enemies met nearly every evening on the same ground. The war
was courteous and benign on the side of the chevalier; but du Bousquier
showed less ceremony on his, though still preserving the outward
appearances demanded by society, for he did not wish to be driven from
the place. They themselves fully understood each other; but in spite of
the shrewd observation which provincials bestow on the petty interests
of their own little centre, no one in the town suspected the rivalry
of these two men. Monsieur le Chevalier de Valois occupied a
vantage-ground: he had never asked for the hand of Mademoiselle Cormon;
whereas du Bousquier, who entered the lists soon after his rejection by
the most distinguished family in the place, had been refused. But the
chevalier believed that his rival had still such strong chances of
success that he dealt him this coup de Jarnac with a blade (namely,
Suzanne) that was finely tempered for the purpose. The chevalier had
cast his plummet-line into the waters of du Bousquier; and, as we shall
see by the sequel, he was not mistaken in any of his conjectures.

Suzanne tripped with a light foot from the rue du Cours, by the rue de
la Porte de Seez and the rue du Bercail, to the rue du Cygne, where,
about five years earlier, du Bousquier had bought a little house built
of gray Jura stone, which is something between Breton slate and
Norman granite. There he established himself more comfortably than any
householder in town; for he had managed to preserve certain furniture
and decorations from the days of his splendor. But provincial manners
and morals obscured, little by little, the rays of this fallen
Sardanapalus; these vestiges of his former luxury now produced the
effect of a glass chandelier in a barn. Harmony, that bond of all work,
human or divine, was lacking in great things as well as in little ones.
The stairs, up which everybody mounted without wiping their feet, were
never polished; the walls, painted by some wretched artisan of the
neighborhood, were a terror to the eye; the stone mantel-piece,
ill-carved, “swore” with the handsome clock, which was further degraded
by the company of contemptible candlesticks. Like the period which
du Bousquier himself represented, the house was a jumble of dirt and
magnificence. Being considered a man of leisure, du Bousquier led the
same parasite life as the chevalier; and he who does not spend his
income is always rich. His only servant was a sort of Jocrisse, a lad of
the neighborhood, rather a ninny, trained slowly and with difficulty to
du Bousquier’s requirements. His master had taught him, as he might an
orang-outang, to rub the floors, dust the furniture, black his boots,
brush his coats, and bring a lantern to guide him home at night if
the weather were cloudy, and clogs if it rained. Like many other human
beings, this lad hadn’t stuff enough in him for more than one vice; he
was a glutton. Often, when du Bousquier went to a grand dinner, he would
take Rene to wait at table; on such occasions he made him take off his
blue cotton jacket, with its big pockets hanging round his hips, and
always bulging with handkerchiefs, clasp-knives, fruits, or a handful of
nuts, and forced him to put on a regulation coat. Rene would then stuff
his fill with the other servants. This duty, which du Bousquier had
turned into a reward, won him the most absolute discretion from the
Breton servant.

“You here, mademoiselle!” said Rene to Suzanne when she entered;
“‘t’isn’t your day. We haven’t any linen for the wash, tell Madame
Lardot.”

“Old stupid!” said Suzanne, laughing.

The pretty girl went upstairs, leaving Rene to finish his porringer of
buckwheat in boiled milk. Du Bousquier, still in bed, was revolving in
his mind his plans of fortune; for ambition was all that was left
to him, as to other men who have sucked dry the orange of pleasure.
Ambition and play are inexhaustible; in a well-organized man the
passions which proceed from the brain will always survive the passions
of the heart.

“Here am I,” said Suzanne, sitting down on the bed and jangling the
curtain-rings back along the rod with despotic vehemence.

“Quesaco, my charmer?” said the old bachelor, sitting up in bed.

“Monsieur,” said Suzanne, gravely, “you must be astonished to see me
here at this hour; but I find myself in a condition which obliges me not
to care for what people may say about it.”

“What does all that mean?” said du Bousquier, crossing his arms.

“Don’t you understand me?” said Suzanne. “I know,” she continued, making
a pretty little face, “how ridiculous it is in a poor girl to come and
nag at a man for what he thinks a mere nothing. But if you really knew
me, monsieur, if you knew all that I am capable of for a man who would
attach himself to me as much as I’m attached to you, you would never
repent having married me. Of course it isn’t here, in Alencon, that
I should be of service to you; but if we went to Paris, you would see
where I could lead a man with your mind and your capacities; and just
at this time too, when they are remaking the government from top to toe.
So--between ourselves, be it said--_is_ what has happened a misfortune?
Isn’t it rather a piece of luck, which will pay you well? Who and what
are you working for now?”

“For myself, of course!” cried du Bousquier, brutally.

“Monster! you’ll never be a father!” said Suzanne, giving a tone of
prophetic malediction to the words.

“Come, don’t talk nonsense, Suzanne,” replied du Bousquier; “I really
think I am still dreaming.”

“How much more reality do you want?” cried Suzanne, standing up.

Du Bousquier rubbed his cotton night-cap to the top of his head with a
rotatory motion, which plainly indicated the tremendous fermentation of
his ideas.

“He actually believes it!” thought Suzanne, “and he’s flattered. Heaven!
how easy it is to gull men!”

“Suzanne, what the devil must I do? It is so extraordinary--I, who
thought--The fact is that--No, no, it can’t be--”

“What? you can’t marry me?”

“Oh! as for that, no; I have engagements.”

“With Mademoiselle Armande or Mademoiselle Cormon, who have both
refused you? Listen to me, Monsieur du Bousquier, my honor doesn’t
need gendarmes to drag you to the mayor’s office. I sha’n’t lack for
husbands, thank goodness! and I don’t want a man who can’t appreciate
what I’m worth. But some day you’ll repent of the way you are behaving;
for I tell you now that nothing on earth, neither gold nor silver, will
induce me to return the good thing that belongs to you, if you refuse to
accept it to-day.”

“But, Suzanne, are you sure?”

“Oh, monsieur!” cried the grisette, wrapping her virtue round her, “what
do you take me for? I don’t remind you of the promises you made me,
which have ruined a poor young girl whose only blame was to have as much
ambition as love.”

Du Bousquier was torn with conflicting sentiments, joy, distrust,
calculation. He had long determined to marry Mademoiselle Cormon;
for the Charter, on which he had just been ruminating, offered to his
ambition, through the half of her property, the political career of a
deputy. Besides, his marriage with the old maid would put him socially
so high in the town that he would have great influence. Consequently,
the storm upraised by that malicious Suzanne drove him into the wildest
embarrassment. Without this secret scheme, he would have married Suzanne
without hesitation. In which case, he could openly assume the leadership
of the liberal party in Alencon. After such a marriage he would, of
course, renounce the best society and take up with the bourgeois class
of tradesmen, rich manufacturers and graziers, who would certainly carry
him in triumph as their candidate. Du Bousquier already foresaw the Left
side.

This solemn deliberation he did not conceal; he rubbed his hands over
his head, displacing the cap which covered its disastrous baldness.
Suzanne, meantime, like all those persons who succeed beyond their
hopes, was silent and amazed. To hide her astonishment, she assumed the
melancholy pose of an injured girl at the mercy of her seducer; inwardly
she was laughing like a grisette at her clever trick.

“My dear child,” said du Bousquier at length, “I’m not to be taken in
with such _bosh_, not I!”

Such was the curt remark which ended du Bousquier’s meditation. He
plumed himself on belonging to the class of cynical philosophers who
could never be “taken in” by women,--putting them, one and all, unto the
same category, as _suspicious_. These strong-minded persons are usually
weak men who have a special catechism in the matter of womenkind. To
them the whole sex, from queens of France to milliners, are essentially
depraved, licentious, intriguing, not a little rascally, fundamentally
deceitful, and incapable of thought about anything but trifles. To them,
women are evil-doing queens, who must be allowed to dance and sing and
laugh as they please; they see nothing sacred or saintly in them, nor
anything grand; to them there is no poetry in the senses, only gross
sensuality. Where such jurisprudence prevails, if a woman is not
perpetually tyrannized over, she reduces the man to the condition of a
slave. Under this aspect du Bousquier was again the antithesis of the
chevalier. When he made his final remark, he flung his night-cap to the
foot of the bed, as Pope Gregory did the taper when he fulminated
an excommunication; Suzanne then learned for the first time that du
Bousquier wore a toupet covering his bald spot.

“Please to remember, Monsieur du Bousquier,” she replied majestically,
“that in coming here to tell you of this matter I have done my duty;
remember that I have offered you my hand, and asked for yours; but
remember also that I behaved with the dignity of a woman who respects
herself. I have not abased myself to weep like a silly fool; I have not
insisted; I have not tormented you. You now know my situation. You must
see that I cannot stay in Alencon: my mother would beat me, and Madame
Lardot rides a hobby of principles; she’ll turn me off. Poor work-girl
that I am, must I go to the hospital? must I beg my bread? No! I’d
rather throw myself into the Brillante or the Sarthe. But isn’t it
better that I should go to Paris? My mother could find an excuse to send
me there,--an uncle who wants me, or a dying aunt, or a lady who sends
for me. But I must have some money for the journey and for--you know
what.”

This extraordinary piece of news was far more startling to du Bousquier
than to the Chevalier de Valois. Suzanne’s fiction introduced such
confusion into the ideas of the old bachelor that he was literally
incapable of sober reflection. Without this agitation and without his
inward delight (for vanity is a swindler which never fails of its dupe),
he would certainly have reflected that, supposing it were true, a
girl like Suzanne, whose heart was not yet spoiled, would have died a
thousand deaths before beginning a discussion of this kind and asking
for money.

“Will you really go to Paris, then?” he said.

A flash of gayety lighted Suzanne’s gray eyes as she heard these words;
but the self-satisfied du Bousquier saw nothing.

“Yes, monsieur,” she said.

Du Bousquier then began bitter lamentations: he had the last payments
to make on his house; the painter, the mason, the upholsterers must
be paid. Suzanne let him run on; she was listening for the figures. Du
Bousquier offered her three hundred francs. Suzanne made what is called
on the stage a false exit; that is, she marched toward the door.

“Stop, stop! where are you going?” said du Bousquier, uneasily. “This
is what comes of a bachelor’s life!” thought he. “The devil take me if
I ever did anything more than rumple her collar, and, lo and behold! she
makes THAT a ground to put her hand in one’s pocket!”

“I’m going, monsieur,” replied Suzanne, “to Madame Granson, the
treasurer of the Maternity Society, who, to my knowledge, has saved many
a poor girl in my condition from suicide.”

“Madame Granson!”

“Yes,” said Suzanne, “a relation of Mademoiselle Cormon, the president
of the Maternity Society. Saving your presence, the ladies of the town
have created an institution to protect poor creatures from destroying
their infants, like that handsome Faustine of Argentan who was executed
for it three years ago.”

“Here, Suzanne,” said du Bousquier, giving her a key, “open that
secretary, and take out the bag you’ll find there: there’s about six
hundred francs in it; it is all I possess.”

“Old cheat!” thought Suzanne, doing as he told her, “I’ll tell about
your false toupet.”

She compared du Bousquier with that charming chevalier, who had given
her nothing, it is true, but who had comprehended her, advised her, and
carried all grisettes in his heart.

“If you deceive me, Suzanne,” cried du Bousquier, as he saw her with her
hand in the drawer, “you--”

“Monsieur,” she said, interrupting him with ineffable impertinence,
“wouldn’t you have given me money if I had asked for it?”

Recalled to a sense of gallantry, du Bousquier had a remembrance of past
happiness and grunted his assent. Suzanne took the bag and departed,
after allowing the old bachelor to kiss her, which he did with an air
that seemed to say, “It is a right which costs me dear; but it is better
than being harried by a lawyer in the court of assizes as the seducer of
a girl accused of infanticide.”

Suzanne hid the sack in a sort of gamebag made of osier which she had on
her arm, all the while cursing du Bousquier for his stinginess; for one
thousand francs was the sum she wanted. Once tempted of the devil to
desire that sum, a girl will go far when she has set foot on the path of
trickery. As she made her way along the rue du Bercail, it came into her
head that the Maternity Society, presided over by Mademoiselle Cormon,
might be induced to complete the sum at which she had reckoned her
journey to Paris, which to a grisette of Alencon seemed considerable.
Besides, she hated du Bousquier. The latter had evidently feared a
revelation of his supposed misconduct to Madame Granson; and Suzanne, at
the risk of not getting a penny from the society, was possessed with
the desire, on leaving Alencon, of entangling the old bachelor in the
inextricable meshes of a provincial slander. In all grisettes there is
something of the malevolent mischief of a monkey. Accordingly, Suzanne
now went to see Madame Granson, composing her face to an expression of
the deepest dejection.




CHAPTER III. ATHANASE


Madame Granson, widow of a lieutenant-colonel of artillery killed at
Jena, possessed, as her whole means of livelihood, a meagre pension of
nine hundred francs a year, and three hundred francs from property of
her own, plus a son whose support and education had eaten up all her
savings. She occupied, in the rue du Bercail, one of those melancholy
ground-floor apartments which a traveller passing along the principal
street of a little provincial town can look through at a glance. The
street door opened at the top of three steep steps; a passage led to an
interior courtyard, at the end of which was the staircase covered by a
wooden gallery. On one side of the passage was the dining-room and the
kitchen; on the other side, a salon put to many uses, and the widow’s
bedchamber.

Athanase Granson, a young man twenty-three years of age, who slept in an
attic room above the second floor of the house, added six hundred francs
to the income of his poor mother, by the salary of a little place which
the influence of his relation, Mademoiselle Cormon, had obtained for him
in the mayor’s office, where he was placed in charge of the archives.

From these indications it is easy to imagine Madame Granson in her
cold salon with its yellow curtains and Utrecht velvet furniture, also
yellow, as she straightened the round straw mats which were placed
before each chair, that visitors might not soil the red-tiled floor
while they sat there; after which she returned to her cushioned
armchair and little work-table placed beneath the portrait of the
lieutenant-colonel of artillery between two windows,--a point from which
her eye could rake the rue du Bercail and see all comers. She was a good
woman, dressed with bourgeois simplicity in keeping with her wan face
furrowed by grief. The rigorous humbleness of poverty made itself felt
in all the accessories of this household, the very air of which was
charged with the stern and upright morals of the provinces. At this
moment the son and mother were together in the dining-room, where
they were breakfasting with a cup of coffee, with bread and butter and
radishes. To make the pleasure which Suzanne’s visit was to give to
Madame Granson intelligible, we must explain certain secret interests of
the mother and son.

Athanase Granson was a thin and pale young man, of medium height, with
a hollow face in which his two black eyes, sparkling with thoughts, gave
the effect of bits of coal. The rather irregular lines of his face, the
curve of his lips, a prominent chin, the fine modelling of his forehead,
his melancholy countenance, caused by a sense of his poverty warring
with the powers that he felt within him, were all indications of
repressed and imprisoned talent. In any other place than the town of
Alencon the mere aspect of his person would have won him the assistance
of superior men, or of women who are able to recognize genius in
obscurity. If his was not genius, it was at any rate the form and aspect
of it; if he had not the actual force of a great heart, the glow of such
a heart was in his glance. Although he was capable of expressing the
highest feeling, a casing of timidity destroyed all the graces of his
youth, just as the ice of poverty kept him from daring to put forth all
his powers. Provincial life, without an opening, without appreciation,
without encouragement, described a circle about him in which languished
and died the power of thought,--a power which as yet had scarcely
reached its dawn. Moreover, Athanase possessed that savage pride which
poverty intensifies in noble minds, exalting them in their struggle with
men and things; although at their start in life it is an obstacle to
their advancement. Genius proceeds in two ways: either it takes its
opportunity--like Napoleon, like Moliere--the moment that it sees it,
or it waits to be sought when it has patiently revealed itself. Young
Granson belonged to that class of men of talent who distrust themselves
and are easily discouraged. His soul was contemplative. He lived more
by thought than by action. Perhaps he might have seemed deficient or
incomplete to those who cannot conceive of genius without the sparkle
of French passion; but he was powerful in the world of mind, and he was
liable to reach, through a series of emotions imperceptible to common
souls, those sudden determinations which make fools say of a man, “He is
mad.”

The contempt which the world pours out on poverty was death to Athanase;
the enervating heat of solitude, without a breath or current of air,
relaxed the bow which ever strove to tighten itself; his soul grew weary
in this painful effort without results. Athanase was a man who might
have taken his place among the glories of France; but, eagle as he was,
cooped in a cage without his proper nourishment, he was about to die of
hunger after contemplating with an ardent eye the fields of air and
the mountain heights where genius soars. His work in the city library
escaped attention, and he buried in his soul his thoughts of fame,
fearing that they might injure him; but deeper than all lay buried
within him the secret of his heart,--a passion which hollowed his
cheeks and yellowed his brow. He loved his distant cousin, this very
Mademoiselle Cormon whom the Chevalier de Valois and du Bousquier,
his hidden rivals, were stalking. This love had had its origin in
calculation. Mademoiselle Cormon was thought to be one of the richest
persons in the town: the poor lad had therefore been led to love her by
desires for material happiness, by the hope, long indulged, of gilding
with comfort his mother’s last years, by eager longing for the ease of
life so needful to men who live by thought; but this most innocent point
of departure degraded his passion in his own eyes. Moreover, he feared
the ridicule the world would cast upon the love of a young man of
twenty-three for an old maid of forty.

And yet his passion was real; whatever may seem false about such a love
elsewhere, it can be realized as a fact in the provinces, where, manners
and morals being without change or chance or movement or mystery,
marriage becomes a necessity of life. No family will accept a young man
of dissolute habits. However natural the liaison of a young man, like
Athanase, with a handsome girl, like Suzanne, for instance, might seem
in a capital, it alarms provincial parents, and destroys the hopes of
marriage of a poor young man when possibly the fortune of a rich one
might cause such an unfortunate antecedent to be overlooked. Between the
depravity of certain liaisons and a sincere love, a man of honor and no
fortune will not hesitate: he prefers the misfortunes of virtue to the
evils of vice. But in the provinces women with whom a young man call
fall in love are rare. A rich young girl he cannot obtain in a region
where all is calculation; a poor young girl he is prevented from loving;
it would be, as provincials say, marrying hunger and thirst. Such
monkish solitude is, however, dangerous to youth.

These reflections explain why provincial life is so firmly based on
marriage. Thus we find that ardent and vigorous genius, forced to rely
on the independence of its own poverty, quits these cold regions where
thought is persecuted by brutal indifference, where no woman is willing
to be a sister of charity to a man of talent, of art, of science.

Who will really understand Athanase Granson’s love for Mademoiselle
Cormon? Certainly neither rich men--those sultans of society who fill
their harems--nor middle-class men, who follow the well-beaten high-road
of prejudices; nor women who, not choosing to understand the passions of
artists, impose the yoke of their virtues upon men of genius, imagining
that the two sexes are governed by the same laws.

Here, perhaps, we should appeal to those young men who suffer from the
repression of their first desires at the moment when all their forces
are developing; to artists sick of their own genius smothering under the
pressure of poverty; to men of talent, persecuted and without influence,
often without friends at the start, who have ended by triumphing over
that double anguish, equally agonizing, of soul and body. Such men
will well understand the lancinating pains of the cancer which was
now consuming Athanase; they have gone through those long and bitter
deliberations made in presence of some grandiose purpose they had not
the means to carry out; they have endured those secret miscarriages in
which the fructifying seed of genius falls on arid soil. Such men know
that the grandeur of desires is in proportion to the height and breadth
of the imagination. The higher they spring, the lower they fall; and how
can it be that ties and bonds should not be broken by such a fall?
Their piercing eye has seen--as did Athanase--the brilliant future which
awaited them, and from which they fancied that only a thin gauze parted
them; but that gauze through which their eyes could see is changed by
Society into a wall of iron. Impelled by a vocation, by a sentiment of
art, they endeavor again and again to live by sentiments which society
as incessantly materializes. Alas! the provinces calculate and arrange
marriage with the one view of material comfort, and a poor artist or man
of science is forbidden to double its purpose and make it the saviour of
his genius by securing to him the means of subsistence!

Moved by such ideas, Athanase Granson first thought of marriage with
Mademoiselle Cormon as a means of obtaining a livelihood which would
be permanent. Thence he could rise to fame, and make his mother happy,
knowing at the same time that he was capable of faithfully loving his
wife. But soon his own will created, although he did not know it, a
genuine passion. He began to study the old maid, and, by dint of the
charm which habit gives, he ended by seeing only her beauties and
ignoring her defects.

In a young man of twenty-three the senses count for much in love; their
fire produces a sort of prism between his eyes and the woman. From
this point of view the clasp with which Beaumarchis’ Cherubin seizes
Marceline is a stroke of genius. But when we reflect that in the utter
isolation to which poverty condemned poor Athanase, Mademoiselle Cormon
was the only figure presented to his gaze, that she attracted his eye
incessantly, that all the light he had was concentrated on her, surely
his love may be considered natural.

This sentiment, so carefully hidden, increased from day to day. Desires,
sufferings, hopes, and meditations swelled in quietness and silence the
lake widening ever in the young man’s breast, as hour by hour added its
drop of water to the volume. And the wider this inward circle, drawn
by the imagination, aided by the senses, grew, the more imposing
Mademoiselle Cormon appeared to Athanase, and the more his own timidity
increased.

The mother had divined the truth. Like all provincial mothers, she
calculated candidly in her own mind the advantages of the match. She
told herself that Mademoiselle Cormon would be very lucky to secure a
husband in a young man of twenty-three, full of talent, who would always
be an honor to his family and the neighborhood; at the same time the
obstacles which her son’s want of fortune and Mademoiselle Cormon’s age
presented to the marriage seemed to her almost insurmountable; she could
think of nothing but patience as being able to vanquish them. Like du
Bousquier, like the Chevalier de Valois, she had a policy of her own;
she was on the watch for circumstances, awaiting the propitious moment
for a move with the shrewdness of maternal instinct. Madame Granson
had no fears at all as to the chevalier, but she did suppose that du
Bousquier, although refused, retained certain hopes. As an able and
underhand enemy to the latter, she did him much secret harm in the
interests of her son; from whom, by the bye, she carefully concealed all
such proceedings.

After this explanation it is easy to understand the importance which
Suzanne’s lie, confided to Madame Granson, was about to acquire. What a
weapon put into the hands of this charitable lady, the treasurer of the
Maternity Society! How she would gently and demurely spread the news
while collecting assistance for the chaste Suzanne!

At the present moment Athanase, leaning pensively on his elbow at
the breakfast table, was twirling his spoon in his empty cup and
contemplating with a preoccupied eye the poor room with its red brick
floor, its straw chairs, its painted wooden buffet, its pink and white
curtains chequered like a backgammon board, which communicated with the
kitchen through a glass door. As his back was to the chimney which his
mother faced, and as the chimney was opposite to the door, his pallid
face, strongly lighted from the window, framed in beautiful black hair,
the eyes gleaming with despair and fiery with morning thoughts, was the
first object which met the eyes of the incoming Suzanne. The grisette,
who belonged to a class which certainly has the instinct of misery and
the sufferings of the heart, suddenly felt that electric spark, darting
from Heaven knows where, which can never be explained, which some strong
minds deny, but the sympathetic stroke of which has been felt by many
men and many women. It is at once a light which lightens the darkness
of the future, a presentiment of the sacred joys of a shared love, the
certainty of mutual comprehension. Above all, it is like the touch of
a firm and able hand on the keyboard of the senses. The eyes are
fascinated by an irresistible attraction; the heart is stirred; the
melodies of happiness echo in the soul and in the ears; a voice cries
out, “It is he!” Often reflection casts a douche of cold water on this
boiling emotion, and all is over.

In a moment, as rapid as the flash of the lightning, Suzanne received
the broadside of this emotion in her heart. The flame of a real love
burned up the evil weeds fostered by a libertine and dissipated life.
She saw how much she was losing of decency and value by accusing herself
falsely. What had seemed to her a joke the night before became to her
eyes a serious charge against herself. She recoiled at her own success.
But the impossibility of any result; the poverty of the young man; a
vague hope of enriching herself, of going to Paris, and returning with
full hands to say, “I love you! here are the means of happiness!”
 or mere fate, if you will have it so, dried up the next moment this
beneficent dew.

The ambitious grisette asked with a timid air for a moment’s interview
with Madame Granson, who took her at once into her bedchamber. When
Suzanne came out she looked again at Athanase; he was still in the same
position, and the tears came into her eyes. As for Madame Granson, she
was radiant with joy. At last she had a weapon, and a terrible one,
against du Bousquier; she could now deal him a mortal blow. She had
of course promised the poor seduced girl the support of all charitable
ladies and that of the members of the Maternity Society in particular;
she foresaw a dozen visits which would occupy her whole day, and brew up
a frightful storm on the head of the guilty du Bousquier. The Chevalier
de Valois, while foreseeing the turn the affair would take, had really
no idea of the scandal which would result from his own action.

“My dear child,” said Madame Granson to her son, “we are to dine,
you know, with Mademoiselle Cormon; do take a little pains with your
appearance. You are wrong to neglect your dress as you do. Put on that
handsome frilled shirt and your green coat of Elbeuf cloth. I have my
reasons,” she added slyly. “Besides, Mademoiselle Cormon is going to
Prebaudet, and many persons will doubtless call to bid her good-bye.
When a young man is marriageable he ought to take every means to make
himself agreeable. If girls would only tell the truth, heavens! my
dear boy, you’d be astonished at what makes them fall in love. Often
it suffices for a man to ride past them at the head of a company of
artillery, or show himself at a ball in tight clothes. Sometimes a mere
turn of the head, a melancholy attitude, makes them suppose a man’s
whole life; they’ll invent a romance to match the hero--who is often
a mere brute, but the marriage is made. Watch the Chevalier de Valois:
study him; copy his manners; see with what ease he presents himself;
he never puts on a stiff air, as you do. Talk a little more; one would
really think you didn’t know anything,--you, who know Hebrew by heart.”

Athanase listened to his mother with a surprised but submissive air;
then he rose, took his cap, and went off to the mayor’s office, saying
to himself, “Can my mother suspect my secret?”

He passed through the rue du Val-Noble, where Mademoiselle Cormon
lived,--a little pleasure which he gave himself every morning, thinking,
as usual, a variety of fanciful things:--

“How little she knows that a young man is passing before her house who
loves her well, who would be faithful to her, who would never cause
her any grief; who would leave her the entire management of her fortune
without interference. Good God! what fatality! here, side by side, in
the same town, are two persons in our mutual condition, and yet nothing
can bring them together. Suppose I were to speak to her this evening?”

During this time Suzanne had returned to her mother’s house thinking of
Athanase; and, like many other women who have longed to help an adored
man beyond the limit of human powers, she felt herself capable of making
her body a stepping-stone on which he could rise to attain his throne.

It is now necessary to enter the house of this old maid toward whom so
many interests are converging, where the actors in this scene, with
the exception of Suzanne, were all to meet this very evening. As for
Suzanne, that handsome individual bold enough to burn her ships like
Alexander at her start in life, and to begin the battle by a falsehood,
she disappears from the stage, having introduced upon it a violent
element of interest. Her utmost wishes were gratified. She quitted her
native town a few days later, well supplied with money and good clothes,
among which was a fine dress of green reps and a charming green bonnet
lined with pink, the gift of Monsieur de Valois,--a present which she
preferred to all the rest, even the money. If the chevalier had gone
to Paris in the days of her future brilliancy, she would certainly have
left every one for him. Like the chaste Susannah of the Bible, whom the
Elders hardly saw, she established herself joyously and full of hope in
Paris, while all Alencon was deploring her misfortunes, for which the
ladies of two Societies (Charity and Maternity) manifested the liveliest
sympathy. Though Suzanne is a fair specimen of those handsome Norman
women whom a learned physician reckons as comprising one third of her
fallen class whom our monstrous Paris absorbs, it must be stated that
she remained in the upper and more decent regions of gallantry. At an
epoch when, as Monsieur de Valois said, Woman no longer existed, she was
simply “Madame du Val-Noble”; in other days she would have rivalled
the Rhodopes, the Imperias, the Ninons of the past. One of the most
distinguished writers of the Restoration has taken her under his
protection; perhaps he may marry her. He is a journalist, and
consequently above public opinion, inasmuch as he manufactures it afresh
every year or two.




CHAPTER IV. MADEMOISELLE CORMON


In nearly all the second-class prefectures of France there exists
one salon which is the meeting-ground of those considerable and
well-considered persons of the community who are, nevertheless, _not_
the cream of the best society. The master and mistress of such an
establishment are counted among the leading persons of the town; they
are received wherever it may please them to visit; no fete is given, no
formal or diplomatic dinner takes place, to which they are not invited.
But the chateau people, heads of families possessing great estates,
in short, the highest personages in the department, do not go to their
houses; social intercourse between them is carried on by cards from one
to the other, and a dinner or soiree accepted and returned.

This salon, in which the lesser nobility, the clergy, and the magistracy
meet together, exerts a great influence. The judgment and mind of the
region reside in that solid, unostentatious society, where each man
knows the resources of his neighbor, where complete indifference is
shown to luxury and dress,--pleasures which are thought childish in
comparison to that of obtaining ten or twelve acres of pasture land,--a
purchase coveted for years, which has probably given rise to endless
diplomatic combinations. Immovable in its prejudices, good or evil,
this social circle follows a beaten track, looking neither before it nor
behind it. It accepts nothing from Paris without long examination and
trial; it rejects cashmeres as it does investments on the Grand-Livre;
it scoffs at fashions and novelties; reads nothing, prefers ignorance,
whether of science, literature, or industrial inventions. It insists on
the removal of a prefect when that official does not suit it; and if the
administration resists, it isolates him, after the manner of bees who
wall up a snail in wax when it gets into their hive.

In this society gossip is often turned into solemn verdicts. Young women
are seldom seen there; when they come it is to seek approbation of
their conduct,--a consecration of their self-importance. This supremacy
granted to one house is apt to wound the sensibilities of other natives
of the region, who console themselves by adding up the cost it involves,
and by which they profit. If it so happens that there is no fortune
large enough to keep open house in this way, the big-wigs of the place
choose a place of meeting, as they did at Alencon, in the house of some
inoffensive person, whose settled life and character and position offers
no umbrage to the vanities or the interests of any one.

For some years the upper classes of Alencon had met in this way at the
house of an old maid, whose fortune was, unknown to herself, the aim
and object of Madame Granson, her second cousin, and of the two old
bachelors whose secret hopes in that direction we have just unveiled.
This lady lived with her maternal uncle, a former grand-vicar of the
bishopric of Seez, once her guardian, and whose heir she was. The family
of which Rose-Marie-Victoire Cormon was the present representative had
been in earlier days among the most considerable in the province. Though
belonging to the middle classes, she consorted with the nobility, among
whom she was more or less allied, her family having furnished, in past
years, stewards to the Duc d’Alencon, many magistrates to the long robe,
and various bishops to the clergy. Monsieur de Sponde, the maternal
grandfather of Mademoiselle Cormon, was elected by the Nobility to the
States-General, and Monsieur Cormon, her father, by the Tiers-Etat,
though neither accepted the mission. For the last hundred years the
daughters of the family had married nobles belonging to the provinces;
consequently, this family had thrown out so many suckers throughout the
duchy as to appear on nearly all the genealogical trees. No bourgeois
family had ever seemed so like nobility.

The house in which Mademoiselle Cormon lived, build in Henri IV.’s time,
by Pierre Cormon, the steward of the last Duc d’Alencon, had always
belonged to the family; and among the old maid’s visible possessions
this one was particularly stimulating to the covetous desires of the two
old lovers. Yet, far from producing revenue, the house was a cause of
expense. But it is so rare to find in the very centre of a provincial
town a private dwelling without unpleasant surroundings, handsome in
outward structure and convenient within, that Alencon shared the envy of
the lovers.

This old mansion stands exactly in the middle of the rue du Val-Noble.
It is remarkable for the strength of its construction,--a style of
building introduced by Marie de’ Medici. Though built of granite,--a
stone which is hard to work,--its angles, and the casings of the doors
and windows, are decorated with corner blocks cut into diamond facets.
It has only one clear story above the ground-floor; but the roof, rising
steeply, has several projecting windows, with carved spandrels rather
elegantly enclosed in oaken frames, and externally adorned with
balustrades. Between each of these windows is a gargoyle presenting the
fantastic jaws of an animal without a body, vomiting the rain-water upon
large stones pierced with five holes. The two gables are surmounted by
leaden bouquets,--a symbol of the bourgeoisie; for nobles alone had
the privilege in former days of having weather-vanes. To right of
the courtyard are the stables and coach-house; to left, the kitchen,
wood-house, and laundry.

One side of the porte-cochere, being left open, allowed the passers in
the street to see in the midst of the vast courtyard a flower-bed, the
raised earth of which was held in place by a low privet hedge. A few
monthly roses, pinkes, lilies, and Spanish broom filled this bed, around
which in the summer season boxes of paurestinus, pomegranates, and
myrtle were placed. Struck by the scrupulous cleanliness of the
courtyard and its dependencies, a stranger would at once have divined
that the place belonged to an old maid. The eye which presided there
must have been an unoccupied, ferreting eye; minutely careful, less from
nature than for want of something to do. An old maid, forced to employ
her vacant days, could alone see to the grass being hoed from between
the paving stones, the tops of the walls kept clean, the broom
continually going, and the leather curtains of the coach-house always
closed. She alone would have introduced, out of busy idleness, a sort
of Dutch cleanliness into a house on the confines of Bretagne and
Normandie,--a region where they take pride in professing an utter
indifference to comfort.

Never did the Chevalier de Valois, or du Bousquier, mount the steps of
the double stairway leading to the portico of this house without saying
to himself, one, that it was fit for a peer of France, the other, that
the mayor of the town ought to live there.

A glass door gave entrance from this portico into an antechamber, a
species of gallery paved in red tiles and wainscoted, which served as a
hospital for the family portraits,--some having an eye put out, others
suffering from a dislocated shoulder; this one held his hat in a hand
that no longer existed; that one was a case of amputation at the knee.
Here were deposited the cloaks, clogs, overshoes, umbrellas, hoods, and
pelisses of the guests. It was an arsenal where each arrival left his
baggage on arriving, and took it up when departing. Along each wall was
a bench for the servants who arrived with lanterns, and a large stove,
to counteract the north wind, which blew through this hall from the
garden to the courtyard.

The house was divided in two equal parts. On one side, toward the
courtyard, was the well of the staircase, a large dining-room looking to
the garden, and an office or pantry which communicated with the kitchen.
On the other side was the salon, with four windows, beyond which were
two smaller rooms,--one looking on the garden, and used as a boudoir,
the other lighted from the courtyard, and used as a sort of office.

The upper floor contained a complete apartment for a family household,
and a suite of rooms where the venerable Abbe de Sponde had his abode.
The garrets offered fine quarters to the rats and mice, whose nocturnal
performances were related by Mademoiselle Cormon to the Chevalier
de Valois, with many expressions of surprise at the inutility of her
efforts to get rid of them. The garden, about half an acre in size, is
margined by the Brillante, so named from the particles of mica which
sparkle in its bed elsewhere than in the Val-Noble, where its shallow
waters are stained by the dyehouses, and loaded with refuse from
the other industries of the town. The shore opposite to Mademoiselle
Cormon’s garden is crowded with houses where a variety of trades are
carried on; happily for her, the occupants are quiet people,--a baker,
a cleaner, an upholsterer, and several bourgeois. The garden, full of
common flowers, ends in a natural terrace, forming a quay, down which
are several steps leading to the river. Imagine on the balustrade of
this terrace a number of tall vases of blue and white pottery, in which
are gilliflowers; and to right and left, along the neighboring walls,
hedges of linden closely trimmed in, and you will gain an idea of
the landscape, full of tranquil chastity, modest cheerfulness, but
commonplace withal, which surrounded the venerable edifice of the Cormon
family. What peace! what tranquillity! nothing pretentious, but nothing
transitory; all seems eternal there!

The ground-floor is devoted wholly to the reception-rooms. The old,
unchangeable provincial spirit pervades them. The great square salon has
four windows, modestly cased in woodwork painted gray. A single oblong
mirror is placed above the fireplace; the top of its frame represented
the Dawn led by the Hours, and painted in camaieu (two shades of one
color). This style of painting infested the decorative art of the day,
especially above door-frames, where the artist displayed his eternal
Seasons, and made you, in most houses in the centre of France, abhor
the odious Cupids, endlessly employed in skating, gleaning, twirling,
or garlanding one another with flowers. Each window was draped in green
damask curtains, looped up by heavy cords, which made them resemble a
vast dais. The furniture, covered with tapestry, the woodwork, painted
and varnished, and remarkable for the twisted forms so much the fashion
in the last century, bore scenes from the fables of La Fontaine on the
chair-backs; some of this tapestry had been mended. The ceiling was
divided at the centre of the room by a huge beam, from which depended an
old chandelier of rock-crystal swathed in green gauze. On the fireplace
were two vases in Sevres blue, and two old girandoles attached to the
frame of the mirror, and a clock, the subject of which, taken from
the last scene of the “Deserteur,” proved the enormous popularity of
Sedaine’s work. This clock, of bronze-gilt, bore eleven personages
upon it, each about four inches tall. At the back the Deserter was seen
issuing from prison between the soldiers; in the foreground the young
woman lay fainting, and pointing to his pardon. On the walls of this
salon were several of the more recent portraits of the family,--one
or two by Rigaud, and three pastels by Latour. Four card tables, a
backgammon board, and a piquet table occupied the vast room, the only
one in the house, by the bye, which was ceiled.

The dining-room, paved in black and white stone, not ceiled, and its
beams painted, was furnished with one of those enormous sideboards with
marble tops, required by the war waged in the provinces against the
human stomach. The walls, painted in fresco, represented a flowery
trellis. The seats were of varnished cane, and the doors of natural
wood. All things about the place carried out the patriarchal air which
emanated from the inside as well as the outside of the house. The genius
of the provinces preserved everything; nothing was new or old, neither
young nor decrepit. A cold precision made itself felt throughout.

Tourists in Normandy, Brittany, Maine, and Anjou must all have seen in
the capitals of those provinces many houses which resemble more or less
that of the Cormons; for it is, in its way, an archetype of the burgher
houses in that region of France, and it deserves a place in this history
because it serves to explain manners and customs, and represents ideas.
Who does not already feel that life must have been calm and monotonously
regular in this old edifice? It contained a library; but that was placed
below the level of the river. The books were well bound and shelved,
and the dust, far from injuring them, only made them valuable. They were
preserved with the care given in these provinces deprived of vineyards
to other native products, desirable for their antique perfume, and
issued by the presses of Bourgogne, Touraine, Gascogne, and the South.
The cost of transportation was too great to allow any but the best
products to be imported.

The basis of Mademoiselle Cormon’s society consisted of about one
hundred and fifty persons; some went at times to the country; others
were occasionally ill; a few travelled about the department on business;
but certain of the faithful came every night (unless invited elsewhere),
and so did certain others compelled by duties or by habit to live
permanently in the town. All the personages were of ripe age; few
among them had ever travelled; nearly all had spent their lives in the
provinces, and some had taken part in the chouannerie. The latter were
beginning to speak fearlessly of that war, now that rewards were being
showered on the defenders of the good cause. Monsieur de Valois, one of
the movers in the last uprising (during which the Marquis de Montauran,
betrayed by his mistress, perished in spite of the devotion of
Marche-a-Terre, now tranquilly raising cattle for the market near
Mayenne),--Monsieur de Valois had, during the last six months, given the
key to several choice stratagems practised upon an old republican named
Hulot, the commander of a demi-brigade stationed at Alencon from 1798 to
1800, who had left many memories in the place. [See “The Chouans.”]

The women of this society took little pains with their dress, except on
Wednesdays, when Mademoiselle Cormon gave a dinner, on which occasion
the guests invited on the previous Wednesday paid their “visit of
digestion.” Wednesdays were gala days: the assembly was numerous; guests
and visitors appeared in fiocchi; some women brought their sewing,
knitting, or worsted work; the young girls were not ashamed to make
patterns for the Alencon point lace, with the proceeds of which they
paid for their personal expenses. Certain husbands brought their wives
out of policy, for young men were few in that house; not a word could be
whispered in any ear without attracting the attention of all; there was
therefore no danger, either for young girls or wives, of love-making.

Every evening, at six o’clock, the long antechamber received its
furniture. Each habitue brought his cane, his cloak, his lantern. All
these persons knew each other so well, and their habits and ways were
so familiarly patriarchal, that if by chance the old Abbe de Sponde was
lying down, or Mademoiselle Cormon was in her chamber, neither Josette,
the maid, nor Jacquelin, the man-servant, nor Mariette, the cook,
informed them. The first comer received the second; then, when the
company were sufficiently numerous for whist, piquet, or boston,
they began the game without awaiting either the Abbe de Sponde or
mademoiselle. If it was dark, Josette or Jacquelin would hasten to light
the candles as soon as the first bell rang. Seeing the salon lighted up,
the abbe would slowly hurry to come down. Every evening the backgammon
and the piquet tables, the three boston tables, and the whist table were
filled,--which gave occupation to twenty-five or thirty persons; but
as many as forty were usually present. Jacquelin would then light the
candles in the other rooms.

Between eight and nine o’clock the servants began to arrive in the
antechamber to accompany their masters home; and, short of a revolution,
no one remained in the salon at ten o’clock. At that hour the guests
were departing in groups along the street, discoursing on the game, or
continuing conversations on the land they were covetous of buying, on
the terms of some one’s will, on quarrels among heirs, on the haughty
assumption of the aristocratic portion of the community. It was like
Paris when the audience of a theatre disperses.

Certain persons who talk much of poesy and know nothing about it,
declaim against the habits of life in the provinces. But put your
forehead in your left hand, rest one foot on the fender, and your elbow
on your knee; then, if you compass the idea of this quiet and uniform
scene, this house and its interior, this company and its interests,
heightened by the pettiness of its intellect like goldleaf beaten
between sheets of parchment, ask yourself, What is human life? Try to
decide between him who scribbles jokes on Egyptian obelisks, and him who
has “bostoned” for twenty years with Du Bousquier, Monsieur de Valois,
Mademoiselle Cormon, the judge of the court, the king’s attorney, the
Abbe de Sponde, Madame Granson, and tutti quanti. If the daily and
punctual return of the same steps to the same path is not happiness, it
imitates happiness so well that men driven by the storms of an agitated
life to reflect upon the blessings of tranquillity would say that here
was happiness _enough_.

To reckon the importance of Mademoiselle Cormon’s salon at its true
value, it will suffice to say that the born statistician of the
society, du Bousquier, had estimated that the persons who frequented it
controlled one hundred and thirty-one votes in the electoral college,
and mustered among themselves eighteen hundred thousand francs a year
from landed estate in the neighborhood.

The town of Alencon, however, was not entirely represented by this
salon. The higher aristocracy had a salon of their own; moreover, that
of the receiver-general was like an administration inn kept by the
government, where society danced, plotted, fluttered, loved, and supped.
These two salons communicated by means of certain mixed individuals with
the house of Cormon, and vice-versa; but the Cormon establishment sat
severely in judgment on the two other camps. The luxury of their dinners
was criticised; the ices at their balls were pondered; the behavior of
the women, the dresses, and “novelties” there produced were discussed
and disapproved.

Mademoiselle Cormon, a species of firm, as one might say, under whose
name was comprised an imposing coterie, was naturally the aim and object
of two ambitious men as deep and wily as the Chevalier de Valois and
du Bousquier. To the one as well as to the other, she meant election as
deputy, resulting, for the noble, in the peerage, for the purveyor, in
a receiver-generalship. A leading salon is a difficult thing to create,
whether in Paris or the provinces, and here was one already created. To
marry Mademoiselle Cormon was to reign in Alencon. Athanase Granson, the
only one of the three suitors for the hand of the old maid who no longer
calculated profits, now loved her person as well as her fortune.

To employ the jargon of the day, is there not a singular drama in the
situation of these four personages? Surely there is something odd and
fantastic in three rivalries silently encompassing a woman who never
guessed their existence, in spite of an eager and legitimate desire
to be married. And yet, though all these circumstances make the
spinsterhood of this old maid an extraordinary thing, it is not
difficult to explain how and why, in spite of her fortune and her
three lovers, she was still unmarried. In the first place, Mademoiselle
Cormon, following the custom and rule of her house, had always desired
to marry a nobleman; but from 1788 to 1798 public circumstances were
very unfavorable to such pretensions. Though she wanted to be a woman
of condition, as the saying is, she was horribly afraid of the
Revolutionary tribunal. The two sentiments, equal in force, kept her
stationary by a law as true in ethics as it is in statics. This state
of uncertain expectation is pleasing to unmarried women as long as they
feel themselves young, and in a position to choose a husband. France
knows that the political system of Napoleon resulted in making many
widows. Under that regime heiresses were entirely out of proportion
in numbers to the bachelors who wanted to marry. When the Consulate
restored internal order, external difficulties made the marriage of
Mademoiselle Cormon as difficult to arrange as it had been in the past.
If, on the one hand, Rose-Marie-Victoire refused to marry an old man, on
the other, the fear of ridicule forbade her to marry a very young one.

In the provinces, families marry their sons early to escape the
conscription. In addition to all this, she was obstinately determined
not to marry a soldier: she did not intend to take a man and then give
him up to the Emperor; she wanted him for herself alone. With these
views, she found it therefore impossible, from 1804 to 1815, to enter
the lists with young girls who were rivalling each other for suitable
matches.

Besides her predilection for the nobility, Mademoiselle Cormon had
another and very excusable mania: that of being loved for herself.
You could hardly believe the lengths to which this desire led her. She
employed her mind on setting traps for her possible lovers, in order to
test their real sentiments. Her nets were so well laid that the luckless
suitors were all caught, and succumbed to the test she applied to them
without their knowledge. Mademoiselle Cormon did not study them; she
watched them. A single word said heedlessly, a joke (that she often
was unable to understand), sufficed to make her reject an aspirant as
unworthy: this one had neither heart nor delicacy; that one told lies,
and was not religious; a third only wanted to coin money under the cloak
of marriage; another was not of a nature to make a woman happy; here
she suspected hereditary gout; there certain immoral antecedents alarmed
her. Like the Church, she required a noble priest at her altar; she even
wanted to be married for imaginary ugliness and pretended defects, just
as other women wish to be loved for the good qualities they have not,
and for imaginary beauties. Mademoiselle Cormon’s ambition took its
rise in the most delicate and sensitive feminine feeling; she longed to
reward a lover by revealing to him a thousand virtues after marriage, as
other women then betray the imperfections they have hitherto concealed.
But she was ill understood. The noble woman met with none but common
souls in whom the reckoning of actual interests was paramount, and who
knew nothing of the nobler calculations of sentiment.

The farther she advanced towards that fatal epoch so adroitly called the
“second youth,” the more her distrust increased. She affected to present
herself in the most unfavorable light, and played her part so well that
the last wooers hesitated to link their fate to that of a person whose
virtuous blind-man’s-buff required an amount of penetration that men who
want the virtuous ready-made would not bestow upon it. The constant fear
of being married for her money rendered her suspicious and uneasy beyond
all reason. She turned to the rich men; but the rich are in search
of great marriages; she feared the poor men, in whom she denied the
disinterestedness she sought so eagerly. After each disappointment in
marriage, the poor lady, led to despise mankind, began to see them
all in a false light. Her character acquired, necessarily, a secret
misanthropy, which threw a tinge of bitterness into her conversation,
and some severity into her eyes. Celibacy gave to her manners and habits
a certain increasing rigidity; for she endeavored to sanctify herself
in despair of fate. Noble vengeance! she was cutting for God the rough
diamond rejected by man. Before long public opinion was against her; for
society accepts the verdict an independent woman renders on herself by
not marrying, either through losing suitors or rejecting them. Everybody
supposed that these rejections were founded on secret reasons, always
ill interpreted. One said she was deformed; another suggested some
hidden fault; but the poor girl was really as pure as a saint, as
healthy as an infant, and full of loving kindness; Nature had intended
her for all the pleasures, all the joys, and all the fatigues of
motherhood.

Mademoiselle Cormon did not possess in her person an obliging auxiliary
to her desires. She had no other beauty than that very improperly called
la beaute du diable, which consists of a buxom freshness of youth that
the devil, theologically speaking, could never have,--though perhaps
the expression may be explained by the constant desire that must surely
possess him to cool and refresh himself. The feet of the heiress were
broad and flat. Her leg, which she often exposed to sight by her manner
(be it said without malice) of lifting her gown when it rained, could
never have been taken for the leg of a woman. It was sinewy, with a
thick projecting calf like a sailor’s. A stout waist, the plumpness of a
wet-nurse, strong dimpled arms, red hands, were all in keeping with the
swelling outlines and the fat whiteness of Norman beauty. Projecting
eyes, undecided in color, gave to her face, the rounded outline of which
had no dignity, an air of surprise and sheepish simplicity, which was
suitable perhaps for an old maid. If Rose had not been, as she was,
really innocent, she would have seemed so. An aquiline nose contrasted
curiously with the narrowness of her forehead; for it is rare that that
form of nose does not carry with it a fine brow. In spite of her thick
red lips, a sign of great kindliness, the forehead revealed too great a
lack of ideas to allow of the heart being guided by intellect; she was
evidently benevolent without grace. How severely we reproach Virtue for
its defects, and how full of indulgence we all are for the pleasanter
qualities of Vice!

Chestnut hair of extraordinary length gave to Rose Cormon’s face a
beauty which results from vigor and abundance,--the physical qualities
most apparent in her person. In the days of her chief pretensions,
Rose affected to hold her head at the three-quarter angle, in order to
exhibit a very pretty ear, which detached itself from the blue-veined
whiteness of her throat and temples, set off, as it was, by her wealth
of hair. Seen thus in a ball-dress, she might have seemed handsome. Her
protuberant outlines and her vigorous health did, in fact, draw from the
officers of the Empire the approving exclamation,--

“What a fine slip of a girl!”

But, as years rolled on, this plumpness, encouraged by a tranquil,
wholesome life, had insensibly so ill spread itself over the whole
of Mademoiselle Cormon’s body that her primitive proportions were
destroyed. At the present moment, no corset could restore a pair of hips
to the poor lady, who seemed to have been cast in a single mould. The
youthful harmony of her bosom existed no longer; and its excessive
amplitude made the spectator fear that if she stooped its heavy masses
might topple her over. But nature had provided against this by giving
her a natural counterpoise, which rendered needless the deceitful
adjunct of a bustle; in Rose Cormon everything was genuine. Her chin,
as it doubled, reduced the length of her neck, and hindered the easy
carriage of her head. Rose had no wrinkles, but she had folds of flesh;
and jesters declared that to save chafing she powdered her skin as they
do an infant’s.

This ample person offered to a young man full of ardent desires like
Athanase an attraction to which he had succumbed. Young imaginations,
essentially eager and courageous, like to rove upon these fine living
sheets of flesh. Rose was like a plump partridge attracting the knife
of a gourmet. Many an elegant deep in debt would very willingly have
resigned himself to make the happiness of Mademoiselle Cormon. But,
alas! the poor girl was now forty years old. At this period, after
vainly seeking to put into her life those interests which make the
Woman, and finding herself forced to be still unmarried, she fortified
her virtue by stern religious practices. She had recourse to religion,
the great consoler of oppressed virginity. A confessor had, for the last
three years, directed Mademoiselle Cormon rather stupidly in the path
of maceration; he advised the use of scourging, which, if modern medical
science is to be believed, produces an effect quite the contrary to
that expected by the worthy priest, whose hygienic knowledge was not
extensive.

These absurd practices were beginning to shed a monastic tint over the
face of Rose Cormon, who now saw with something like despair her white
skin assuming the yellow tones which proclaim maturity. A slight down
on her upper lip, about the corners, began to spread and darken like a
trail of smoke; her temples grew shiny; decadence was beginning! It
was authentic in Alencon that Mademoiselle Cormon suffered from rush
of blood to the head. She confided her ills to the Chevalier de Valois,
enumerating her foot-baths, and consulting him as to refrigerants. On
such occasions the shrewd old gentleman would pull out his snuff-box,
gaze at the Princess Goritza, and say, by way of conclusion:--

“The right composing draught, my dear lady, is a good and kind husband.”

“But whom can one trust?” she replied.

The chevalier would then brush away the snuff which had settled in the
folds of his waistcoat or his paduasoy breeches. To the world at large
this gesture would have seemed very natural; but it always gave extreme
uneasiness to the poor woman.

The violence of this hope without an object was so great that Rose was
afraid to look a man in the face lest he should perceive in her eyes the
feelings that filled her soul. By a wilfulness, which was perhaps
only the continuation of her earlier methods, though she felt herself
attracted toward the men who might still suit her, she was so afraid of
being accused of folly that she treated them ungraciously. Most persons
in her society, being incapable of appreciating her motives, which
were always noble, explained her manner towards her co-celibates as the
revenge of a refusal received or expected. When the year 1815 began,
Rose had reached that fatal age which she dared not avow. She was
forty-two years old. Her desire for marriage then acquired an intensity
which bordered on monomania, for she saw plainly that all chance of
progeny was about to escape her; and the thing which in her celestial
ignorance she desired above all things was the possession of children.
Not a person in all Alencon ever attributed to this virtuous woman
a single desire for amorous license. She loved, as it were, in bulk
without the slightest imagination of love. Rose was a Catholic Agnes,
incapable of inventing even one of the wiles of Moliere’s Agnes.

For some months past she had counted on chance. The disbandment of the
Imperial troops and the reorganization of the Royal army caused a change
in the destination of many officers, who returned, some on half-pay,
others with or without a pension, to their native towns,--all having a
desire to counteract their luckless fate, and to end their life in a way
which might to Rose Cormon be a happy beginning of hers. It would surely
be strange if, among those who returned to Alencon or its neighborhood,
no brave, honorable, and, above all, sound and healthy officer of
suitable age could be found, whose character would be a passport among
Bonaparte opinions; or some ci-devant noble who, to regain his lost
position, would join the ranks of the royalists. This hope kept
Mademoiselle Cormon in heart during the early months of that year. But,
alas! all the soldiers who thus returned were either too old or too
young; too aggressively Bonapartist, or too dissipated; in short, their
several situations were out of keeping with the rank, fortune, and
morals of Mademoiselle Cormon, who now grew daily more and more
desperate. The poor woman in vain prayed to God to send her a husband
with whom she could be piously happy: it was doubtless written above
that she should die both virgin and martyr; no man suitable for a
husband presented himself. The conversations in her salon every evening
kept her informed of the arrival of all strangers in Alencon, and of
the facts of their fortunes, rank, and habits. But Alencon is not a
town which attracts visitors; it is not on the road to any capital;
even sailors, travelling from Brest to Paris, never stop there. The
poor woman ended by admitting to herself that she was reduced to the
aborigines. Her eye now began to assume a certain savage expression, to
which the malicious chevalier responded by a shrewd look as he drew out
his snuff-box and gazed at the Princess Goritza. Monsieur de Valois
was well aware that in the feminine ethics of love fidelity to a first
attachment is considered a pledge for the future.

But Mademoiselle Cormon--we must admit it--was wanting in intellect,
and did not understand the snuff-box performance. She redoubled her
vigilance against “the evil spirit”; her rigid devotion and fixed
principles kept her cruel sufferings hidden among the mysteries of
private life. Every evening, after the company had left her, she thought
of her lost youth, her faded bloom, the hopes of thwarted nature; and,
all the while immolating her passions at the feet of the Cross (like
poems condemned to stay in a desk), she resolved firmly that if, by
chance, any suitor presented himself, to subject him to no tests, but to
accept him at once for whatever he might be. She even went so far as to
think of marrying a sub-lieutenant, a man who smoked tobacco, whom she
proposed to render, by dint of care and kindness, one of the best men in
the world, although he was hampered with debts.

But it was only in the silence of night watches that these fantastic
marriages, in which she played the sublime role of guardian angel, took
place. The next day, though Josette found her mistress’ bed in a tossed
and tumbled condition, Mademoiselle Cormon had recovered her dignity,
and could only think of a man of forty, a land-owner, well preserved,
and a quasi-young man.

The Abbe de Sponde was incapable of giving his niece the slightest aid
in her matrimonial manoeuvres. The worthy soul, now seventy years of
age, attributed the disasters of the French Revolution to the design of
Providence, eager to punish a dissolute Church. He had therefore flung
himself into the path, long since abandoned, which anchorites once
followed in order to reach heaven: he led an ascetic life without
proclaiming it, and without external credit. He hid from the world his
works of charity, his continual prayers, his penances; he thought that
all priests should have acted thus during the days of wrath and terror,
and he preached by example. While presenting to the world a calm and
smiling face, he had ended by detaching himself utterly from earthly
interests; his mind turned exclusively to sufferers, to the needs of the
Church, and to his own salvation. He left the management of his property
to his niece, who gave him the income of it, and to whom he paid a
slender board in order to spend the surplus in secret alms and gifts to
the Church.

All the abbe’s affections were concentrated on his niece, who regarded
him as a father, but an abstracted father, unable to conceive the
agitations of the flesh, and thanking God for maintaining his dear
daughter in a state of celibacy; for he had, from his youth up, adopted
the principles of Saint John Chrysostom, who wrote that “the virgin
state is as far above the marriage state as the angel is above
humanity.” Accustomed to reverence her uncle, Mademoiselle Cormon dared
not initiate him into the desires which filled her soul for a change
of state. The worthy man, accustomed, on his side, to the ways of
the house, would scarcely have liked the introduction of a husband.
Preoccupied by the sufferings he soothed, lost in the depths of prayer,
the Abbe de Sponde had periods of abstraction which the habitues of the
house regarded as absent-mindedness. In any case, he talked little; but
his silence was affable and benevolent. He was a man of great height
and spare, with grave and solemn manners, though his face expressed all
gentle sentiments and an inward calm; while his mere presence carried
with it a sacred authority. He was very fond of the Voltairean
chevalier. Those two majestic relics of the nobility and clergy, though
of very different habits and morals, recognized each other by their
generous traits. Besides, the chevalier was as unctuous with the abbe as
he was paternal with the grisettes.

Some persons may fancy that Mademoiselle Cormon used every means to
attain her end; and that among the legitimate lures of womanhood she
devoted herself to dress, wore low-necked gowns, and employed the
negative coquetries of a magnificent display of arms. Not at all! She
was as heroic and immovable in her high-necked chemisette as a sentry in
his box. Her gowns, bonnets, and chiffons were all cut and made by the
dressmaker and the milliner of Alencon, two hump-backed sisters,
who were not without some taste. In spite of the entreaties of these
artists, Mademoiselle Cormon refused to employ the airy deceits of
elegance; she chose to be substantial in all things, flesh and feathers.
But perhaps the heavy fashion of her gowns was best suited to her cast
of countenance. Let those laugh who will at this poor girl; you would
have thought her sublime, O generous souls! who care but little what
form true feeling takes, but admire it where it _is_.

Here some light-minded person may exclaim against the truth of this
statement; they will say that there is not in all France a girl so
silly as to be ignorant of the art of angling for men; that Mademoiselle
Cormon is one of those monstrous exceptions which commonsense should
prevent a writer from using as a type; that the most virtuous and also
the silliest girl who desires to catch her fish knows well how to bait
the hook. But these criticisms fall before the fact that the noble
catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion is still erect in Brittany and
in the ancient duchy of Alencon. Faith and piety admit of no subtleties.
Mademoiselle Cormon trod the path of salvation, preferring the sorrows
of her virginity so cruelly prolonged to the evils of trickery and
the sin of a snare. In a woman armed with a scourge virtue could never
compromise; consequently both love and self-interest were forced to seek
her, and seek her resolutely. And here let us have the courage to make
a cruel observation, in days when religion is nothing more than a
useful means to some, and a poesy to others. Devotion causes a moral
ophthalmia. By some providential grace, it takes from souls on the road
to eternity the sight of many little earthly things. In a word, pious
persons, devotes, are stupid on various points. This stupidity proves
with what force they turn their minds to celestial matters; although the
Voltairean Chevalier de Valois declared that it was difficult to decide
whether stupid people became naturally pious, or whether piety had the
effect of making intelligent young women stupid. But reflect upon this
carefully: the purest catholic virtue, with its loving acceptance of all
cups, with its pious submission to the will of God, with its belief in
the print of the divine finger on the clay of all earthly life, is the
mysterious light which glides into the innermost folds of human history,
setting them in relief and magnifying them in the eyes of those who
still have Faith. Besides, if there be stupidity, why not concern
ourselves with the sorrows of stupidity as well as with the sorrows of
genius? The former is a social element infinitely more abundant than the
latter.

So, then, Mademoiselle Cormon was guilty in the eyes of the world of the
divine ignorance of virgins. She was no observer, and her behavior with
her suitors proved it. At this very moment, a young girl of sixteen, who
had never opened a novel, would have read a hundred chapters of a love
story in the eyes of Athanase Granson, where Mademoiselle Cormon saw
absolutely nothing. Shy herself, she never suspected shyness in others;
she did not recognize in the quavering tones of his speech the force of
a sentiment he could not utter. Capable of inventing those refinements
of sentimental grandeur which hindered her marriage in her early years,
she yet could not recognize them in Athanase. This moral phenomenon will
not seem surprising to persons who know that the qualities of the heart
are as distinct from those of the mind as the faculties of genius are
from the nobility of soul. A perfect, all-rounded man is so rare
that Socrates, one of the noblest pearls of humanity, declared (as a
phrenologist of that day) that he was born to be a scamp, and a very
bad one. A great general may save his country at Zurich, and take
commissions from purveyors. A great musician may conceive the sublimest
music and commit a forgery. A woman of true feeling may be a fool. In
short, a devote may have a sublime soul and yet be unable to recognize
the tones of a noble soul beside her. The caprices produced by physical
infirmities are equally to be met with in the mental and moral regions.

This good creature, who grieved at making her yearly preserves for no
one but her uncle and herself, was becoming almost ridiculous. Those who
felt a sympathy for her on account of her good qualities, and others
on account of her defects, now made fun of her abortive marriages.
More than one conversation was based on what would become of so fine
a property, together with the old maid’s savings and her uncle’s
inheritance. For some time past she had been suspected of being au fond,
in spite of appearances, an “original.” In the provinces it was not
permissible to be original: being original means having ideas that are
not understood by others; the provinces demand equality of mind as well
as equality of manners and customs.

The marriage of Mademoiselle Cormon seemed, after 1804, a thing so
problematical that the saying “married like Mademoiselle Cormon” became
proverbial in Alencon as applied to ridiculous failures. Surely the
sarcastic mood must be an imperative need in France, that so excellent
a woman should excite the laughter of Alencon. Not only did she
receive the whole society of the place at her house, not only was she
charitable, pious, incapable of saying an unkind thing, but she was
fully in accord with the spirit of the place and the habits and customs
of the inhabitants, who liked her as the symbol of their lives; she was
absolutely inlaid into the ways of the provinces; she had never
quitted them; she imbibed all their prejudices; she espoused all their
interests; she adored them.

In spite of her income of eighteen thousand francs from landed property,
a very considerable fortune in the provinces, she lived on a footing
with families who were less rich. When she went to her country-place at
Prebaudet, she drove there in an old wicker carriole, hung on two straps
of white leather, drawn by a wheezy mare, and scarcely protected by two
leather curtains rusty with age. This carriole, known to all the town,
was cared for by Jacquelin as though it were the finest coupe in all
Paris. Mademoiselle valued it; she had used it for twelve years,--a fact
to which she called attention with the triumphant joy of happy avarice.
Most of the inhabitants of the town were grateful to Mademoiselle Cormon
for not humiliating them by the luxury she could have displayed; we may
even believe that had she imported a caleche from Paris they would have
gossiped more about that than about her various matrimonial failures.
The most brilliant equipage would, after all, have only taken her, like
the old carriole, to Prebaudet. Now the provinces, which look solely to
results, care little about the beauty or elegance of the means, provided
they are efficient.




CHAPTER V. AN OLD MAID’S HOUSEHOLD


To complete the picture of the internal habits and ways of this house,
it is necessary to group around Mademoiselle Cormon and the Abbe
de Sponde Jacquelin, Josette, and Mariette, the cook, who employed
themselves in providing for the comfort of uncle and niece.

Jacquelin, a man of forty, short, fat, ruddy, and brown, with a
face like a Breton sailor, had been in the service of the house for
twenty-two years. He waited at table, groomed the mare, gardened,
blacked the abbe’s boots, went on errands, chopped the wood, drove the
carriole, and fetched the oats, straw, and hay from Prebaudet. He sat in
the antechamber during the evening, where he slept like a dormouse. He
was in love with Josette, a girl of thirty, whom Mademoiselle would
have dismissed had she married him. So the poor fond pair laid by their
wages, and loved each other silently, waiting, hoping for mademoiselle’s
own marriage, as the Jews are waiting for the Messiah. Josette, born
between Alencon and Mortagne, was short and plump; her face, which
looked like a dirty apricot, was not wanting in sense and character;
it was said that she ruled her mistress. Josette and Jacquelin, sure of
results, endeavored to hide an inward satisfaction which allows it to be
supposed that, as lovers, they had discounted the future. Mariette, the
cook, who had been fifteen years in the household, knew how to make all
the dishes held in most honor in Alencon.

Perhaps we ought to count for much the fat old Norman brown-bay mare,
which drew Mademoiselle Cormon to her country-seat at Prebaudet; for the
five inhabitants of the house bore to this animal a maniacal affection.
She was called Penelope, and had served the family for eighteen
years; but she was kept so carefully and fed with such regularity that
mademoiselle and Jacquelin both hoped to use her for ten years longer.
This beast was the subject of perpetual talk and occupation; it seemed
as if poor Mademoiselle Cormon, having no children on whom her repressed
motherly feelings could expend themselves, had turned those sentiments
wholly on this most fortunate animal.

The four faithful servants--for Penelope’s intelligence raised her to
the level of the other good servants; while they, on the other hand, had
lowered themselves to the mute, submissive regularity of the beast--went
and came daily in the same occupations with the infallible accuracy of
mechanism. But, as they said in their idiom, they had eaten their white
bread first. Mademoiselle Cormon, like all persons nervously agitated
by a fixed idea, became hard to please, and nagging, less by nature than
from the need of employing her activity. Having no husband or children
to occupy her, she fell back on petty details. She talked for hours
about mere nothings, on a dozen napkins marked “Z,” placed in the closet
before the “O’s.”

“What can Josette be thinking of?” she exclaimed. “Josette is beginning
to neglect things.”

Mademoiselle inquired for eight days running whether Penelope had had
her oats at two o’clock, because on one occasion Jacquelin was a trifle
late. Her narrow imagination spent itself on trifles. A layer of dust
forgotten by the feather-duster, a slice of toast ill-made by Mariette,
Josette’s delay in closing the blinds when the sun came round to fade
the colors of the furniture,--all these great little things gave rise
to serious quarrels in which mademoiselle grew angry. “Everything was
changing,” she would cry; “she did not know her own servants; the fact
was she spoiled them!” On one occasion Josette gave her the “Journee du
Chretien” instead of the “Quinzaine de Paques.” The whole town heard of
this disaster the same evening. Mademoiselle had been forced to leave
the church and return home; and her sudden departure, upsetting
the chairs, made people suppose a catastrophe had happened. She was
therefore obliged to explain the facts to her friends.

“Josette,” she said gently, “such a thing must never happen again.”

Mademoiselle Cormon was, without being aware of it, made happier by such
little quarrels, which served as cathartics to relieve her bitterness.
The soul has its needs, and, like the body, its gymnastics. These
uncertainties of temper were accepted by Josette and Jacquelin as
changes in the weather are accepted by husbandmen. Those worthy souls
remark, “It is fine to-day,” or “It rains,” without arraigning the
heavens. And so when they met in the morning the servants would wonder
in what humor mademoiselle would get up, just as a farmer wonders about
the mists at dawn.

Mademoiselle Cormon had ended, as it was natural she should end, in
contemplating herself only in the infinite pettinesses of her life.
Herself and God, her confessor and the weekly wash, her preserves and
the church services, and her uncle to care for, absorbed her feeble
intellect. To her the atoms of life were magnified by an optic peculiar
to persons who are selfish by nature or self-absorbed by some accident.
Her perfect health gave alarming meaning to the least little derangement
of her digestive organs. She lived under the iron rod of the medical
science of our forefathers, and took yearly four precautionary doses,
strong enough to have killed Penelope, though they seemed to rejuvenate
her mistress. If Josette, when dressing her, chanced to discover a
little pimple on the still satiny shoulders of mademoiselle, it became
the subject of endless inquiries as to the various alimentary articles
of the preceding week. And what a triumph when Josette reminded her
mistress of a certain hare that was rather “high,” and had doubtless
raised that accursed pimple! With what joy they said to each other: “No
doubt, no doubt, it _was_ the hare!”

“Mariette over-seasoned it,” said mademoiselle. “I am always telling
her to do so lightly for my uncle and for me; but Mariette has no more
memory than--”

“The hare,” said Josette.

“Just so,” replied Mademoiselle; “she has no more memory than a hare,--a
very just remark.”

Four times a year, at the beginning of each season, Mademoiselle Cormon
went to pass a certain number of days on her estate of Prebaudet. It
was now the middle of May, the period at which she wished to see how her
apple-trees had “snowed,” a saying of that region which expressed the
effect produced beneath the trees by the falling of their blossoms. When
the circular deposit of these fallen petals resembled a layer of snow
the owner of the trees might hope for an abundant supply of cider.
While she thus gauged her vats, Mademoiselle Cormon also attended to the
repairs which the winter necessitated; she ordered the digging of her
flower-beds and her vegetable garden, from which she supplied her table.
Every season had its own business. Mademoiselle always gave a dinner of
farewell to her intimate friends the day before her departure, although
she was certain to see them again within three weeks. It was always
a piece of news which echoed through Alencon when Mademoiselle Cormon
departed. All her visitors, especially those who had missed a visit,
came to bid her good-bye; the salon was thronged, and every one said
farewell as though she were starting for Calcutta. The next day the
shopkeepers would stand at their doors to see the old carriole pass, and
they seemed to be telling one another some news by repeating from shop
to shop:--

“So Mademoiselle Cormon is going to Prebaudet!”

Some said: “_Her_ bread is baked.”

“Hey! my lad,” replied the next man. “She’s a worthy woman; if money
always came into such hands we shouldn’t see a beggar in the country.”

Another said: “Dear me, I shouldn’t be surprised if the vineyards were
in bloom; here’s Mademoiselle Cormon going to Prebaudet. How happens it
she doesn’t marry?”

“I’d marry her myself,” said a wag; “in fact, the marriage is half-made,
for here’s one consenting party; but the other side won’t. Pooh! the
oven is heating for Monsieur du Bousquier.”

“Monsieur du Bousquier! Why, she has refused him.”

That evening at all the gatherings it was told gravely:--

“Mademoiselle Cormon has gone.”

Or:--

“So you have really let Mademoiselle Cormon go.”

The Wednesday chosen by Suzanne to make known her scandal happened to
be this farewell Wednesday,--a day on which Mademoiselle Cormon drove
Josette distracted on the subject of packing. During the morning,
therefore, things had been said and done in the town which lent the
utmost interest to this farewell meeting. Madame Granson had gone the
round of a dozen houses while the old maid was deliberating on the
things she needed for the journey; and the malicious Chevalier de Valois
was playing piquet with Mademoiselle Armande, sister of a distinguished
old marquis, and the queen of the salon of the aristocrats. If it was
not uninteresting to any one to see what figure the seducer would cut
that evening, it was all important for the chevalier and Madame Granson
to know how Mademoiselle Cormon would take the news in her double
capacity of marriageable woman and president of the Maternity Society.
As for the innocent du Bousquier, he was taking a walk on the promenade,
and beginning to suspect that Suzanne had tricked him; this suspicion
confirmed him in his principles as to women.

On gala days the table was laid at Mademoiselle Cormon’s about half-past
three o’clock. At that period the fashionable people of Alencon dined at
four. Under the Empire they still dined as in former times at half-past
two; but then they supped! One of the pleasures which Mademoiselle
Cormon valued most was (without meaning any malice, although the fact
certainly rests on egotism) the unspeakable satisfaction she derived
from seeing herself dressed as mistress of the house to receive her
guests. When she was thus under arms a ray of hope would glide into
the darkness of her heart; a voice told her that nature had not so
abundantly provided for her in vain, and that some man, brave and
enterprising, would surely present himself. Her desire was refreshed
like her person; she contemplated herself in her heavy stuffs with a
sort of intoxication, and this satisfaction continued when she descended
the stairs to cast her redoubtable eye on the salon, the dinner-table,
and the boudoir. She would then walk about with the naive contentment of
the rich,--who remember at all moments that they are rich and will never
want for anything. She looked at her eternal furniture, her curiosities,
her lacquers, and said to herself that all these fine things wanted was
a master. After admiring the dining-room, and the oblong dinner-table,
on which was spread a snow-white cloth adorned with twenty covers placed
at equal distances; after verifying the squadron of bottles she had
ordered to be brought up, and which all bore honorable labels; after
carefully verifying the names written on little bits of paper in the
trembling handwriting of the abbe (the only duty he assumed in the
household, and one which gave rise to grave discussions on the place
of each guest),--after going through all these preliminary acts
mademoiselle went, in her fine clothes, to her uncle, who was accustomed
at this, the best hour in the day, to take his walk on the terrace which
overlooked the Brillante, where he could listen to the warble of birds
which were resting in the coppice, unafraid of either sportsmen or
children. At such times of waiting she never joined the Abbe de Sponde
without asking him some ridiculous question, in order to draw the old
man into a discussion which might serve to amuse him. And her reason
was this,--which will serve to complete our picture of this excellent
woman’s nature:--

Mademoiselle Cormon regarded it as one of her duties to talk; not that
she was talkative, for she had unfortunately too few ideas, and did
not know enough phrases to converse readily. But she believed she was
accomplishing one of the social duties enjoined by religion, which
orders us to make ourselves agreeable to our neighbor. This obligation
cost her so much that she consulted her director, the Abbe Couturier,
upon the subject of this honest but puerile civility. In spite of the
humble remark of his penitent, confessing the inward labor of her
mind in finding anything to say, the old priest, rigid on the point
of discipline, read her a passage from Saint-Francois de Sales on the
duties of women in society, which dwelt on the decent gayety of
pious Christian women, who were bound to reserve their sternness for
themselves, and to be amiable and pleasing in their homes, and see that
their neighbors enjoyed themselves. Thus, filled with a sense of duty,
and wishing, at all costs, to obey her director, who bade her converse
with amenity, the poor soul perspired in her corset when the talk around
her languished, so much did she suffer from the effort of emitting ideas
in order to revive it. Under such circumstances she would put forth
the silliest statements, such as: “No one can be in two places at
once--unless it is a little bird,” by which she one day roused, and not
without success, a discussion on the ubiquity of the apostles, which
she was unable to comprehend. Such efforts at conversation won her the
appellation of “that good Mademoiselle Cormon,” which, from the lips of
the beaux esprits of society, means that she was as ignorant as a carp,
and rather a poor fool; but many persons of her own calibre took the
remark in its literal sense, and answered:--

“Yes; oh yes! Mademoiselle Cormon is an excellent woman.”

Sometimes she would put such absurd questions (always for the purpose
of fulfilling her duties to society, and making herself agreeable to her
guests) that everybody burst out laughing. She asked, for instance, what
the government did with the taxes they were always receiving; and why
the Bible had not been printed in the days of Jesus Christ, inasmuch
as it was written by Moses. Her mental powers were those of the English
“country gentleman” who, hearing constant mention of “posterity” in
the House of Commons, rose to make the speech that has since become
celebrated: “Gentlemen,” he said, “I hear much talk in this place about
Posterity. I should be glad to know what that power has ever done for
England.”

Under these circumstances the heroic Chevalier de Valois would bring
to the succor of the old maid all the powers of his clever diplomacy,
whenever he saw the pitiless smile of wiser heads. The old gentleman,
who loved to assist women, turned Mademoiselle Cormon’s sayings into wit
by sustaining them paradoxically, and he often covered the retreat so
well that it seemed as if the good woman had said nothing silly. She
asserted very seriously one evening that she did not see any difference
between an ox and a bull. The dear chevalier instantly arrested the
peals of laughter by asserting that there was only the difference
between a sheep and a lamb.

But the Chevalier de Valois served an ungrateful dame, for never did
Mademoiselle Cormon comprehend his chivalrous services. Observing that
the conversation grew lively, she simply thought that she was not so
stupid as she was,--the result being that she settled down into her
ignorance with some complacency; she lost her timidity, and acquired a
self-possession which gave to her “speeches” something of the solemnity
with which the British enunciate their patriotic absurdities,--the
self-conceit of stupidity, as it may be called.

As she approached her uncle, on this occasion, with a majestic step, she
was ruminating over a question that might draw him from a silence, which
always troubled her, for she feared he was dull.

“Uncle,” she said, leaning on his arm and clinging to his side (this
was one of her fictions; for she said to herself “If I had a husband I
should do just so”),--“uncle, if everything here below happens according
to the will of God, there must be a reason for everything.”

“Certainly,” replied the abbe, gravely. The worthy man, who cherished
his niece, always allowed her to tear him from his meditations with
angelic patience.

“Then if I remain unmarried,--supposing that I do,--God wills it?”

“Yes, my child,” replied the abbe.

“And yet, as nothing prevents me from marrying to-morrow if I choose,
His will can be destroyed by mine?”

“That would be true if we knew what was really the will of God,” replied
the former prior of the Sorbonne. “Observe, my daughter, that you put in
an _if_.”

The poor woman, who expected to draw her uncle into a matrimonial
discussion by an argument ad omnipotentem, was stupefied; but persons
of obtuse mind have the terrible logic of children, which consists
in turning from answer to question,--a logic that is frequently
embarrassing.

“But, uncle, God did not make women intending them not to marry;
otherwise they ought all to stay unmarried; if not, they ought all to
marry. There’s great injustice in the distribution of parts.”

“Daughter,” said the worthy abbe, “you are blaming the Church, which
declares celibacy to be the better way to God.”

“But if the Church is right, and all the world were good Catholics,
wouldn’t the human race come to an end, uncle?”

“You have too much mind, Rose; you don’t need so much to be happy.”

That remark brought a smile of satisfaction to the lips of the poor
woman, and confirmed her in the good opinion she was beginning to
acquire about herself. That is how the world, our friends, and our
enemies are the accomplices of our defects!

At this moment the conversation was interrupted by the successive
arrival of the guests. On these ceremonial days, friendly familiarities
were exchanged between the servants of the house and the company.
Mariette remarked to the chief-justice as he passed the kitchen:--

“Ah, Monsieur du Ronceret, I’ve cooked the cauliflowers au gratin
expressly for you, for mademoiselle knows how you like them; and she
said to me: ‘Now don’t forget, Mariette, for Monsieur du Ronceret is
coming.’”

“That good Mademoiselle Cormon!” ejaculated the chief legal authority of
the town. “Mariette, did you steep them in gravy instead of soup-stock?
it is much richer.”

The chief-justice was not above entering the chamber of council where
Mariette held court; he cast the eye of a gastronome around it, and
offered the advice of a past master in cookery.

“Good-day, madame,” said Josette to Madame Granson, who courted the
maid. “Mademoiselle has thought of you, and there’s fish for dinner.”

As for the Chevalier de Valois, he remarked to Mariette, in the easy
tone of a great seigneur who condescends to be familiar:--

“Well, my dear cordon-bleu, to whom I should give the cross of the
Legion of honor, is there some little dainty for which I had better
reserve myself?”

“Yes, yes, Monsieur de Valois,--a hare sent from Prebaudet; weighs
fourteen pounds.”

Du Bousquier was not invited. Mademoiselle Cormon, faithful to the
system which we know of, treated that fifty-year-old suitor extremely
ill, although she felt inexplicable sentiments towards him in the depths
of her heart. She had refused him; yet at times she repented; and a
presentiment that she should yet marry him, together with a terror at
the idea which prevented her from wishing for the marriage, assailed
her. Her mind, stimulated by these feelings, was much occupied by
du Bousquier. Without being aware of it, she was influenced by the
herculean form of the republican. Madame Granson and the Chevalier
de Valois, although they could not explain to themselves Mademoiselle
Cormon’s inconsistencies, had detected her naive glances in that
direction, the meaning of which seemed clear enough to make them both
resolve to ruin the hopes of the already rejected purveyor,--hopes which
it was evident he still indulged.

Two guests, whose functions excused them, kept the dinner waiting. One
was Monsieur du Coudrai, the recorder of mortgages; the other Monsieur
Choisnel, former bailiff to the house of Esgrignon, and now the notary
of the upper aristocracy, by whom he was received with a distinction due
to his virtues; he was also a man of considerable wealth. When the two
belated guests arrived, Jacquelin said to them as he saw them about to
enter the salon:--

“_They_ are all in the garden.”

No doubt the assembled stomachs were impatient; for on the appearance
of the register of mortgages--who had no defect except that of having
married for her money an intolerable old woman, and of perpetrating
endless puns, at which he was the first to laugh--the gentle murmur by
which such late-comers are welcomed arose. While awaiting the official
announcement of dinner, the company were sauntering on the terrace above
the river, and gazing at the water-plants, the mosaic of the currents,
and the various pretty details of the houses clustering across the
river, their old wooden galleries, their mouldering window-frames, their
little gardens where clothes were drying, the cabinet-maker’s shop,--in
short, the many details of a small community to which the vicinity of
a river, a weeping willow, flowers, rose-bushes, added a certain grace,
making the scene quite worthy of a landscape painter.

The chevalier studied all faces, for he knew that his firebrand had been
very successfully introduced into the chief houses of the place. But
no one as yet referred openly to the great news of Suzanne and du
Bousquier. Provincials possess in the highest degree the art of
distilling gossip; the right moment for openly discussing this strange
affair had not arrived; it was first necessary that all present should
put themselves on record. So the whispers went round from ear to ear:--

“You have heard?”

“Yes.”

“Du Bousquier?”

“And that handsome Suzanne.”

“Does Mademoiselle Cormon know of it?”

“No.”

“Ha!”

This was the _piano_ of the scandal; the _rinforzando_ would break
forth as soon as the first course had been removed. Suddenly Monsieur de
Valois’s eyes lighted on Madame Granson, arrayed in her green hat with
bunches of auriculas, and beaming with evident joy. Was it merely the
joy of opening the concert? Though such a piece of news was like a gold
mine to work in the monotonous lives of these personages, the observant
and distrustful chevalier thought he recognized in the worthy woman a
far more extended sentiment; namely, the joy caused by the triumph of
self-interest. Instantly he turned to examine Athanase, and detected him
in the significant silence of deep meditation. Presently, a look cast
by the young man on Mademoiselle Cormon carried to the soul of the
chevalier a sudden gleam. That momentary flash of lightning enabled him
to read the past.

“Ha! the devil!” he said to himself; “what a checkmate I’m exposed to!”

Monsieur de Valois now approached Mademoiselle Cormon, and offered his
arm. The old maid’s feeling to the chevalier was that of respectful
consideration; and certainly his name, together with the position he
occupied among the aristocratic constellations of the department
made him the most brilliant ornament of her salon. In her inmost mind
Mademoiselle Cormon had wished for the last dozen years to become Madame
de Valois. That name was like the branch of a tree, to which the ideas
which _swarmed_ in her mind about rank, nobility, and the external
qualities of a husband had fastened. But, though the Chevalier de Valois
was the man chosen by her heart, and mind, and ambition, that elderly
ruin, combed and curled like a little Saint-John in a procession,
alarmed Mademoiselle Cormon. She saw the gentleman in him, but she could
not see a husband. The indifference which the chevalier affected as to
marriage, above all, the apparent purity of his morals in a house which
abounded in grisettes, did singular harm in her mind to Monsieur
de Valois against his expectations. The worthy man, who showed such
judgment in the matter of his annuity, was at fault here. Without being
herself aware of it, the thoughts of Mademoiselle Cormon on the too
virtuous chevalier might be translated thus:--

“What a pity that he isn’t a trifle dissipated!”

Observers of the human heart have remarked the leaning of pious women
toward scamps; some have expressed surprise at this taste, considering
it opposed to Christian virtue. But, in the first place, what nobler
destiny can you offer to a virtuous woman than to purify, like charcoal,
the muddy waters of vice? How is it some observers fail to see that
these noble creatures, obliged by the sternness of their own principles
never to infringe on conjugal fidelity, must naturally desire a husband
of wider practical experience than their own? The scamps of social life
are great men in love. Thus the poor woman groaned in spirit at finding
her chosen vessel parted into two pieces. God alone could solder
together a Chevalier de Valois and a du Bousquier.

In order to explain the importance of the few words which the chevalier
and Mademoiselle Cormon are about to say to each other, it is necessary
to reveal two serious matters which agitated the town, and about which
opinions were divided; besides, du Bousquier was mysteriously connected
with them.

One concerns the rector of Alencon, who had formerly taken the
constitutional oath, and who was now conquering the repugnance of the
Catholics by a display of the highest virtues. He was Cheverus on a
small scale, and became in time so fully appreciated that when he died
the whole town mourned him. Mademoiselle Cormon and the Abbe de Sponde
belonged to that “little Church,” sublime in its orthodoxy, which was to
the court of Rome what the Ultras were to be to Louis XVIII. The abbe,
more especially, refused to recognize a Church which had compromised
with the constitutionals. The rector was therefore not received in
the Cormon household, whose sympathies were all given to the curate of
Saint-Leonard, the aristocratic parish of Alencon. Du Bousquier, that
fanatic liberal now concealed under the skin of a royalist, knowing how
necessary rallying points are to all discontents (which are really at
the bottom of all oppositions), had drawn the sympathies of the middle
classes around the rector. So much for the first case; the second was
this:--

Under the secret inspiration of du Bousquier the idea of building a
theatre had dawned on Alencon. The henchmen of the purveyor did not know
their Mohammed; and they thought they were ardent in carrying out their
own conception. Athanase Granson was one of the warmest partisans for
the theatre; and of late he had urged at the mayor’s office a cause
which all the other young clerks had eagerly adopted.

The chevalier, as we have said, offered his arm to the old maid for
a turn on the terrace. She accepted it, not without thanking him by
a happy look for this attention, to which the chevalier replied by
motioning toward Athanase with a meaning eye.

“Mademoiselle,” he began, “you have so much sense and judgment in social
proprieties, and also, you are connected with that young man by certain
ties--”

“Distant ones,” she said, interrupting him.

“Ought you not,” he continued, “to use the influence you have over his
mother and over himself by saving him from perdition? He is not very
religious, as you know; indeed he approves of the rector; but that is
not all; there is something far more serious; isn’t he throwing himself
headlong into an opposition without considering what influence his
present conduct may exert upon his future? He is working for the
construction of a theatre. In this affair he is simply the dupe of that
disguised republican du Bousquier--”

“Good gracious! Monsieur de Valois,” she replied; “his mother is always
telling me he has so much mind, and yet he can’t say two words; he
stands planted before me as mum as a post--”

“Which doesn’t think at all!” cried the recorder of mortgages. “I caught
your words on the fly. I present my compliments to Monsieur de Valois,”
 he added, bowing to that gentleman with much emphasis.

The chevalier returned the salutation stiffly, and drew Mademoiselle
Cormon toward some flower-pots at a little distance, in order to show
the interrupter that he did not choose to be spied upon.

“How is it possible,” he continued, lowering his voice, and leaning
towards Mademoiselle Cormon’s ear, “that a young man brought up in those
detestable lyceums should have ideas? Only sound morals and noble habits
will ever produce great ideas and a true love. It is easy to see by a
mere look at him that the poor lad is likely to be imbecile, and come,
perhaps, to some sad end. See how pale and haggard he is!”

“His mother declares he works too hard,” replied the old maid,
innocently. “He sits up late, and for what? reading books and writing!
What business ought to require a young man to write at night?”

“It exhausts him,” replied the chevalier, trying to bring the old maid’s
thoughts back to the ground where he hoped to inspire her with horror
for her youthful lover. “The morals of those Imperial lyceums are really
shocking.”

“Oh, yes!” said the ingenuous creature. “They march the pupils about
with drums at their head. The masters have no more religion than pagans.
And they put the poor lads in uniform, as if they were troops. What
ideas!”

“And behold the product!” said the chevalier, motioning to Athanase. “In
my day, young men were not so shy of looking at a pretty woman. As for
him, he drops his eyes whenever he sees you. That young man frightens me
because I am really interested in him. Tell him not to intrigue with
the Bonapartists, as he is now doing about that theatre. When all these
petty folks cease to ask for it insurrectionally,--which to my mind is
the synonym of constitutionally,--the government will build it. Besides
which, tell his mother to keep an eye on him.”

“Oh, I’m sure she will prevent him from seeing those half-pay,
questionable people. I’ll talk to her,” said Mademoiselle Cormon, “for
he might lose his place in the mayor’s office; and then what would he
and his mother have to live on? It makes me shudder.”

As Monsieur de Talleyrand said of his wife, so the chevalier said to
himself, looking at Mademoiselle Cormon:--

“Find me another as stupid! Good powers! isn’t virtue which drives out
intellect vice? But what an adorable wife for a man of my age! What
principles! what ignorance!”

Remember that this monologue, addressed to the Princess Goritza, was
mentally uttered while he took a pinch of snuff.

Madame Granson had divined that the chevalier was talking about
Athanase. Eager to know the result of the conversation, she followed
Mademoiselle Cormon, who was now approaching the young man with
much dignity. But at this moment Jacquelin appeared to announce that
mademoiselle was served. The old maid gave a glance of appeal to the
chevalier; but the gallant recorder of mortgages, who was beginning to
see in the manners of that gentleman the barrier which the provincial
nobles were setting up about this time between themselves and the
bourgeoisie, made the most of his chance to cut out Monsieur de Valois.
He was close to Mademoiselle Cormon, and promptly offered his arm, which
she found herself compelled to accept. The chevalier then darted, out of
policy, upon Madame Granson.

“Mademoiselle Cormon, my dear lady,” he said to her, walking slowly
after all the other guests, “feels the liveliest interest in your
dear Athanase; but I fear it will vanish through his own fault. He is
irreligious and liberal; he is agitating this matter of the theatre;
he frequents the Bonapartists; he takes the side of that rector. Such
conduct may make him lose his place in the mayor’s office. You know with
what care the government is beginning to weed out such opinions. If your
dear Athanase loses his place, where can he find other employment? I
advise him not to get himself in bad odor with the administration.”

“Monsieur le Chevalier,” said the poor frightened mother, “how grateful
I am to you! You are right: my son is the tool of a bad set of people; I
shall enlighten him.”

The chevalier had long since fathomed the nature of Athanase, and
recognized in it that unyielding element of republican convictions
to which in his youth a young man is willing to sacrifice everything,
carried away by the word “liberty,” so ill-defined and so little
understood, but which to persons disdained by fate is a banner of
revolt; and to such, revolt is vengeance. Athanase would certainly
persist in that faith, for his opinions were woven in with his artistic
sorrows, with his bitter contemplation of the social state. He was
ignorant of the fact that at thirty-six years of age,--the period of
life when a man has judged men and social interests and relations,--the
opinions for which he was ready to sacrifice his future would be
modified in him, as they are in all men of real superiority. To remain
faithful to the Left side of Alencon was to gain the aversion of
Mademoiselle Cormon. There, indeed, the chevalier saw true.

Thus we see that this society, so peaceful in appearance, was internally
as agitated as any diplomatic circle, where craft, ability, and passions
group themselves around the grave questions of an empire. The guests
were now seated at the table laden with the first course, which they ate
as provincials eat, without shame at possessing a good appetite, and
not as in Paris, where it seems as if jaws gnashed under sumptuary laws,
which made it their business to contradict the laws of anatomy. In Paris
people eat with their teeth, and trifle with their pleasure; in the
provinces things are done naturally, and interest is perhaps rather too
much concentrated on the grand and universal means of existence to which
God has condemned his creatures.

It was at the end of the first course that Mademoiselle Cormon made the
most celebrated of her “speeches”; it was talked about for fully two
years, and is still told at the gatherings of the lesser bourgeoisie
whenever the topic of her marriage comes up.

The conversation, becoming lively as the penultimate entree was
reached, had turned naturally on the affair of the theatre and the
constitutionally sworn rector. In the first fervor of royalty, during
the year 1816, those who later were called Jesuits were all for the
expulsion of the Abbe Francois from his parish. Du Bousquier, suspected
by Monsieur de Valois of sustaining the priest and being at the bottom
of the theatre intrigues, and on whose back the adroit chevalier would
in any case have put those sins with his customary cleverness, was in
the dock with no lawyer to defend him. Athanase, the only guest loyal
enough to stand by du Bousquier, had not the nerve to emit his ideas
in the presence of those potentates of Alencon, whom in his heart he
thought stupid. None but provincial youths now retain a respectful
demeanor before men of a certain age, and dare neither to censure
nor contradict them. The talk, diminished under the effect of certain
delicious ducks dressed with olives, was falling flat. Mademoiselle
Cormon, feeling the necessity of maintaining it against her own ducks,
attempted to defend du Bousquier, who was being represented as a
pernicious fomenter of intrigues, capable of any trickery.

“As for me,” she said, “I thought that Monsieur du Bousquier cared
chiefly for childish things.”

Under existing circumstances the remark had enormous success.
Mademoiselle Cormon obtained a great triumph; she brought the nose
of the Princess Goritza flat on the table. The chevalier, who little
expected such an apt remark from his Dulcinea, was so amazed that he
could at first find no words to express his admiration; he applauded
noiselessly, as they do at the Opera, tapping his fingers together to
imitate applause.

“She is adorably witty,” he said to Madame Granson. “I always said that
some day she would unmask her batteries.”

“In private she is always charming,” replied the widow.

“In private, madame, all women have wit,” returned the chevalier.

The Homeric laugh thus raised having subsided, Mademoiselle Cormon asked
the reason of her success. Then began the _forte_ of the gossip. Du
Bousquier was depicted as a species of celibate Pere Gigogne, a monster,
who for the last fifteen years had kept the Foundling Hospital supplied.
His immoral habits were at last revealed! these Parisian saturnalias
were the result of them, etc., etc. Conducted by the Chevalier de
Valois, a most able leader of an orchestra of this kind, the opening of
the _cancan_ was magnificent.

“I really don’t know,” he said, “what should hinder a du Bousquier from
marrying a Mademoiselle Suzanne What’s-her-name. What _is_ her name, do
you know? Suzette! Though I have lodgings at Madame Lardot’s, I know her
girls only by sight. If this Suzette is a tall, fine, saucy girl, with
gray eyes, a slim waist, and a pretty foot, whom I have occasionally
seen, and whose behavior always seemed to me extremely insolent, she
is far superior in manners to du Bousquier. Besides, the girl has the
nobility of beauty; from that point of view the marriage would be a poor
one for her; she might do better. You know how the Emperor Joseph had
the curiosity to see the du Barry at Luciennes. He offered her his arm
to walk about, and the poor thing was so surprised at the honor that she
hesitated to accept it: ‘Beauty is ever a queen,’ said the Emperor. And
he, you know, was an Austrian-German,” added the chevalier. “But I can
tell you that Germany, which is thought here very rustic, is a land
of noble chivalry and fine manners, especially in Poland and Hungary,
where--”

Here the chevalier stopped, fearing to slip into some allusion to his
personal happiness; he took out his snuff-box, and confided the rest
of his remarks to the princess, who had smiled upon him for thirty-six
years and more.

“That speech was rather a delicate one for Louis XV.,” said du Ronceret.

“But it was, I think, the Emperor Joseph who made it, and not Louis
XV.,” remarked Mademoiselle Cormon, in a correcting tone.

“Mademoiselle,” said the chevalier, observing the malicious glance
exchanged between the judge, the notary, and the recorder, “Madame du
Barry was the Suzanne of Louis XV.,--a circumstance well known to scamps
like ourselves, but unsuitable for the knowledge of young ladies. Your
ignorance proves you to be a flawless diamond; historical corruptions do
not enter your mind.”

The Abbe de Sponde looked graciously at the Chevalier de Valois, and
nodded his head in sign of his laudatory approbation.

“Doesn’t mademoiselle know history?” asked the recorder of mortgages.

“If you mix up Louis XV. and this girl Suzanne, how am I to know
history?” replied Mademoiselle Cormon, angelically, glad to see that the
dish of ducks was empty at last, and the conversation so ready to revive
that all present laughed with their mouths full at her last remark.

“Poor girl!” said the Abbe de Sponde. “When a great misfortune happens,
charity, which is divine love, and as blind as pagan love, ought not to
look into the causes of it. Niece, you are president of the Maternity
Society; you must succor that poor girl, who will now find it difficult
to marry.”

“Poor child!” ejaculated Mademoiselle Cormon.

“Do you suppose du Bousquier would marry her?” asked the judge.

“If he is an honorable man he ought to do so,” said Madame Granson; “but
really, to tell the truth, my dog has better morals than he--”

“Azor is, however, a good purveyor,” said the recorder of mortgages,
with the air of saying a witty thing.

At dessert du Bousquier was still the topic of conversation, having
given rise to various little jokes which the wine rendered sparkling.
Following the example of the recorder, each guest capped his neighbor’s
joke with another: Du Bousquier was a father, but not a confessor; he
was father less; he was father LY; he was not a reverend father; nor yet
a conscript-father--

“Nor can he be a foster-father,” said the Abbe de Sponde, with a gravity
which stopped the laughter.

“Nor a noble father,” added the chevalier.

The Church and the nobility descended thus into the arena of puns,
without, however, losing their dignity.

“Hush!” exclaimed the recorder of mortgages. “I hear the creaking of du
Bousquier’s boots.”

It usually happens that a man is ignorant of rumors that are afloat
about him. A whole town may be talking of his affairs; may calumniate
and decry him, but if he has no good friends, he will know nothing about
it. Now the innocent du Bousquier was superb in his ignorance. No one
had told him as yet of Suzanne’s revelations; he therefore appeared very
jaunty and slightly conceited when the company, leaving the dining-room,
returned to the salon for their coffee; several other guests had
meantime assembled for the evening. Mademoiselle Cormon, from a sense of
shamefacedness, dared not look at the terrible seducer. She seized upon
Athanase, and began to lecture him with the queerest platitudes about
royalist politics and religious morality. Not possessing, like the
Chevalier de Valois, a snuff-box adorned with a princess, by the help of
which he could stand this torrent of silliness, the poor poet listened
to the words of her whom he loved with a stupid air, gazing, meanwhile,
at her enormous bust, which held itself before him in that still repose
which is the attribute of all great masses. His love produced in him a
sort of intoxication which changed the shrill voice of the old maid into
a soft murmur, and her flat remarks into witty speeches. Love is a maker
of false coin, continually changing copper pennies into gold-pieces, and
sometimes turning its real gold into copper.

“Well, Athanase, will you promise me?”

This final sentence struck the ear of the absorbed young man like one of
those noises which wake us with a bound.

“What, mademoiselle?”

Mademoiselle Cormon rose hastily, and looked at du Bousquier, who at
that moment resembled the stout god of Fable which the Republic stamped
upon her coins. She walked up to Madame Granson, and said in her ear:--

“My dear friend, you son is an idiot. That lyceum has ruined him,” she
added, remembering the insistence with which the chevalier had spoken of
the evils of education in such schools.

What a catastrophe! Unknown to himself, the luckless Athanase had had
an occasion to fling an ember of his own fire upon the pile of brush
gathered in the heart of the old maid. Had he listened to her, he
might have made her, then and there, perceive his passion; for, in the
agitated state of Mademoiselle Cormon’s mind, a single word would
have sufficed. But that stupid absorption in his own sentiments, which
characterizes young and true love, had ruined him, as a child full of
life sometimes kills itself out of ignorance.

“What have you been saying to Mademoiselle Cormon?” demanded his mother.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing; well, I can explain that,” she thought to herself, putting off
till the next day all further reflection on the matter, and attaching
but little importance to Mademoiselle Cormon’s words; for she fully
believed that du Bousquier was forever lost in the old maid’s esteem
after the revelation of that evening.

Soon the four tables were filled with their sixteen players. Four
persons were playing piquet,--an expensive game, at which the most money
was lost. Monsieur Choisnel, the procureur-du-roi, and two ladies
went into the boudoir for a game at backgammon. The glass lustres were
lighted; and then the flower of Mademoiselle Cormon’s company gathered
before the fireplace, on sofas, and around the tables, and each couple
said to her as they arrived,--

“So you are going to-morrow to Prebaudet?”

“Yes, I really must,” she replied.

On this occasion the mistress of the house appeared preoccupied. Madame
Granson was the first to perceive the quite unnatural state of the old
maid’s mind,--Mademoiselle Cormon was thinking!

“What are you thinking of, cousin?” she said at last, finding her seated
in the boudoir.

“I am thinking,” she replied, “of that poor girl. As the president of
the Maternity Society, I will give you fifty francs for her.”

“Fifty francs!” cried Madame Granson. “But you have never given as much
as that.”

“But, my dear cousin, it is so natural to have children.”

That immoral speech coming from the heart of the old maid staggered the
treasurer of the Maternity Society. Du Bousquier had evidently advanced
in the estimation of Mademoiselle Cormon.

“Upon my word,” said Madame Granson, “du Bousquier is not only a
monster, he is a villain. When a man has done a wrong like that, he
ought to pay the indemnity. Isn’t it his place rather than ours to
look after the girl?--who, to tell you the truth, seems to me rather
questionable; there are plenty of better men in Alencon than that cynic
du Bousquier. A girl must be depraved, indeed, to go after him.”

“Cynic! Your son teaches you to talk Latin, my dear, which is wholly
incomprehensible. Certainly I don’t wish to excuse Monsieur du
Bousquier; but pray explain to me why a woman is depraved because she
prefers one man to another.”

“My dear cousin, suppose you married my son Athanase; nothing could be
more natural. He is young and handsome, full of promise, and he will be
the glory of Alencon; and yet everybody will exclaim against you: evil
tongues will say all sorts of things; jealous women will accuse you
of depravity,--but what will that matter? you will be loved, and loved
truly. If Athanase seemed to you an idiot, my dear, it is that he has
too many ideas; extremes meet. He lives the life of a girl of fifteen;
he has never wallowed in the impurities of Paris, not he! Well, change
the terms, as my poor husband used to say; it is the same thing with du
Bousquier in connection with Suzanne. _You_ would be calumniated; but in
the case of du Bousquier, the charge would be true. Don’t you understand
me?”

“No more than if you were talking Greek,” replied Mademoiselle Cormon,
who opened her eyes wide, and strained all the forces of her intellect.

“Well, cousin, if I must dot all the i’s, it is impossible for Suzanne
to love du Bousquier. And if the heart counts for nothing in this
affair--”

“But, cousin, what do people love with if not their hearts?”

Here Madame Granson said to herself, as the chevalier had previously
thought: “My poor cousin is altogether too innocent; such stupidity
passes all bounds!--Dear child,” she continued aloud, “it seems to me
that children are not conceived by the spirit only.”

“Why, yes, my dear; the Holy Virgin herself--”

“But, my love, du Bousquier isn’t the Holy Ghost!”

“True,” said the old maid; “he is a man!--a man whose personal
appearance makes him dangerous enough for his friends to advise him to
marry.”

“You could yourself bring about that result, cousin.”

“How so?” said the old maid, with the meekness of Christian charity.

“By not receiving him in your house until he marries. You owe it to good
morals and to religion to manifest under such circumstances an exemplary
displeasure.”

“On my return from Prebaudet we will talk further of this, my dear
Madame Granson. I will consult my uncle and the Abbe Couturier,” said
Mademoiselle Cormon, returning to the salon, where the animation was now
at its height.

The lights, the group of women in their best clothes, the solemn tone,
the dignified air of the assembly, made Mademoiselle Cormon not a little
proud of her company. To many persons nothing better could be seen in
Paris in the highest society.

At this moment du Bousquier, who was playing whist with the chevalier
and two old ladies,--Madame du Coudrai and Madame du Ronceret,--was the
object of deep but silent curiosity. A few young women arrived, who,
under pretext of watching the game, gazed fixedly at him in so singular
a manner, though slyly, that the old bachelor began to think that there
must be some deficiency in his toilet.

“Can my false front be crooked?” he asked himself, seized by one of
those anxieties which beset old bachelors.

He took advantage of a lost trick, which ended a seventh rubber, to rise
and leave the table.

“I can’t touch a card without losing,” he said. “I am decidedly too
unlucky.”

“But you are lucky in other ways,” said the chevalier, giving him a sly
look.

That speech naturally made the rounds of the salon, where every one
exclaimed on the exquisite taste of the chevalier, the Prince de
Talleyrand of the province.

“There’s no one like Monsieur de Valois for such wit.”

Du Bousquier went to look at himself in a little oblong mirror, placed
above the “Deserter,” but he saw nothing strange in his appearance.

After innumerable repetitions of the same text, varied in all keys, the
departure of the company took place about ten o’clock, through the long
antechamber, Mademoiselle Cormon conducting certain of her favorite
guests to the portico. There the groups parted; some followed the
Bretagne road towards the chateau; the others went in the direction of
the river Sarthe. Then began the usual conversation, which for twenty
years had echoed at that hour through this particular street of Alencon.
It was invariably:--

“Mademoiselle Cormon looked very well to-night.”

“Mademoiselle Cormon? why, I thought her rather strange.”

“How that poor abbe fails! Did you notice that he slept? He does not
know what cards he holds; he is getting very absent-minded.”

“We shall soon have the grief of losing him.”

“What a fine night! It will be a fine day to-morrow.”

“Good weather for the apple-blossoms.”

“You beat us; but when you play with Monsieur de Valois you never do
otherwise.”

“How much did he win?”

“Well, to-night, three or four francs; he never loses.”

“True; and don’t you know there are three hundred and sixty-five days a
year? At that price his gains are the value of a farm.”

“Ah! what hands we had to-night!”

“Here you are at home, monsieur and madame, how lucky you are, while we
have half the town to cross!”

“I don’t pity you; you could afford a carriage, and dispense with the
fatigue of going on foot.”

“Ah, monsieur! we have a daughter to marry, which takes off one wheel,
and the support of our son in Paris carries off another.”

“You persist in making a magistrate of him?”

“What else can be done with a young man? Besides, there’s no shame in
serving the king.”

Sometimes a discussion on ciders and flax, always couched in the same
terms, and returning at the same time of year, was continued on the
homeward way. If any observer of human customs had lived in this street,
he would have known the months and seasons by simply overhearing the
conversations.

On this occasion it was exclusively jocose; for du Bousquier, who
chanced to march alone in front of the groups, was humming the
well-known air,--little thinking of its appropriateness,--“Tender woman!
hear the warble of the birds,” etc. To some, du Bousquier was a strong
man and a misjudged man. Ever since he had been confirmed in his present
office by a royal decree, Monsieur du Ronceret had been in favor of
du Bousquier. To others the purveyor seemed dangerous,--a man of bad
habits, capable of anything. In the provinces, as in Paris, men before
the public eye are like that statue in the fine allegorical tale of
Addison, for which two knights on arriving near it fought; for one saw
it white, the other saw it black. Then, when they were both off their
horses, they saw it was white one side and black the other. A third
knight coming along declared it red.

When the chevalier went home that night, he made many reflections, as
follows:--

“It is high time now to spread a rumor of my marriage with Mademoiselle
Cormon. It will leak out from the d’Esgrignon salon, and go straight
to the bishop at Seez, and so get round through the grand vicars to the
curate of Saint-Leonard’s, who will be certain to tell it to the Abbe
Couturier; and Mademoiselle Cormon will get the shot in her upper works.
The old Marquis d’Esgrignon shall invite the Abbe de Sponde to dinner,
so as to stop all gossip about Mademoiselle Cormon if I decide against
her, or about me if she refuses me. The abbe shall be well cajoled; and
Mademoiselle Cormon will certainly not hold out against a visit from
Mademoiselle Armande, who will show her the grandeur and future chances
of such an alliance. The abbe’s property is undoubtedly as much as three
hundred thousand; her own savings must amount to more than two hundred
thousand; she has her house and Prebaudet and fifteen thousand francs a
year. A word to my friend the Comte de Fontaine, and I should be
mayor of Alencon to-morrow, and deputy. Then, once seated on the Right
benches, we shall reach the peerage, shouting, ‘Cloture!’ ‘Ordre!’”

As soon as she reached home Madame Granson had a lively argument with
her son, who could not be made to see the connection which existed
between his love and his political opinions. It was the first quarrel
that had ever troubled that poor household.




CHAPTER VI. FINAL DISAPPOINTMENT AND ITS FIRST RESULT


The next day, Mademoiselle Cormon, packed into the old carriole with
Josette, and looking like a pyramid on a vast sea of parcels, drove up
the rue Saint-Blaise on her way to Prebaudet, where she was overtaken by
an event which hurried on her marriage,--an event entirely unlooked
for by either Madame Granson, du Bousquier, Monsieur de Valois, or
Mademoiselle Cormon himself. Chance is the greatest of all artificers.

The day after her arrival at Prebaudet, she was innocently employed,
about eight o’clock in the morning, in listening, as she breakfasted, to
the various reports of her keeper and her gardener, when Jacquelin made
a violent irruption into the dining-room.

“Mademoiselle,” he cried, out of breath, “Monsieur l’abbe sends you an
express, the son of Mere Grosmort, with a letter. The lad left Alencon
before daylight, and he has just arrived; he ran like Penelope! Can’t I
give him a glass of wine?”

“What can have happened, Josette? Do you think my uncle can be--”

“He couldn’t write if he were,” said Josette, guessing her mistress’s
fears.

“Quick! quick!” cried Mademoiselle Cormon, as soon as she had read the
first lines. “Tell Jacquelin to harness Penelope--Get ready, Josette;
pack up everything in half an hour. We must go back to town--”

“Jacquelin!” called Josette, excited by the sentiment she saw on her
mistress’s face.

Jacquelin, informed by Josette, came in to say,--

“But, mademoiselle, Penelope is eating her oats.”

“What does that signify? I must start at once.”

“But, mademoiselle, it is going to rain.”

“Then we shall get wet.”

“The house is on fire!” muttered Josette, piqued at the silence her
mistress kept as to the contents of the letter, which she read and
reread.

“Finish your coffee, at any rate, mademoiselle; don’t excite your blood;
just see how red you are.”

“Am I red, Josette?” she said, going to a mirror, from which the
quicksilver was peeling, and which presented her features to her upside
down.

“Good heavens!” thought Mademoiselle Cormon, “suppose I should look
ugly! Come, Josette; come, my dear, dress me at once; I want to be ready
before Jacquelin has harnessed Penelope. If you can’t pack my things in
time, I will leave them here rather than lose a single minute.”

If you have thoroughly comprehended the positive monomania to which the
desire of marriage had brought Mademoiselle Cormon, you will share her
emotion. The worthy uncle announced in this sudden missive that Monsieur
de Troisville, of the Russian army during the Emigration, grandson of
one of his best friends, was desirous of retiring to Alencon, and asked
his, the abbe’s hospitality, on the ground of his friendship for his
grandfather, the Vicomte de Troisville. The old abbe, alarmed at the
responsibility, entreated his niece to return instantly and help him to
receive this guest, and do the honors of the house; for the viscount’s
letter had been delayed, and he might descend upon his shoulders that
very night.

After reading this missive could there be a question of the demands
of Prebaudet? The keeper and the gardener, witnesses to Mademoiselle
Cormon’s excitement, stood aside and awaited her orders. But when,
as she was about to leave the room, they stopped her to ask for
instructions, for the first time in her life the despotic old maid,
who saw to everything at Prebaudet with her own eyes, said, to their
stupefaction, “Do what you like.” This from a mistress who carried her
administration to the point of counting her fruits, and marking them so
as to order their consumption according to the number and condition of
each!

“I believe I’m dreaming,” thought Josette, as she saw her mistress
flying down the staircase like an elephant to which God has given wings.

Presently, in spite of a driving rain, Mademoiselle Cormon drove away
from Prebaudet, leaving her factotums with the reins on their necks.
Jacquelin dared not take upon himself to hasten the usual little trot
of the peaceable Penelope, who, like the beautiful queen whose name she
bore, had an appearance of making as many steps backward as she made
forward. Impatient with the pace, mademoiselle ordered Jacquelin in a
sharp voice to drive at a gallop, with the whip, if necessary, to the
great astonishment of the poor beast, so afraid was she of not having
time to arrange the house suitably to receive Monsieur de Troisville.
She calculated that the grandson of her uncle’s friend was probably
about forty years of age; a soldier just from service was undoubtedly
a bachelor; and she resolved, her uncle aiding, not to let Monsieur
de Troisville quit their house in the condition he entered it. Though
Penelope galloped, Mademoiselle Cormon, absorbed in thoughts of her
trousseau and the wedding-day, declared again and again that Jacquelin
made no way at all. She twisted about in the carriole without replying
to Josette’s questions, and talked to herself like a person who is
mentally revolving important designs.

The carriole at last arrived in the main street of Alencon, called the
rue Saint-Blaise at the end toward Montagne, but near the hotel du More
it takes the name of the rue de la Porte-de-Seez, and becomes the rue
du Bercail as it enters the road to Brittany. If the departure of
Mademoiselle Cormon made a great noise in Alencon, it is easy to imagine
the uproar caused by her sudden return on the following day, in a
pouring rain which beat her face without her apparently minding it.
Penelope at a full gallop was observed by every one, and Jacquelin’s
grin, the early hour, the parcels stuffed into the carriole topsy-turvy,
and the evident impatience of Mademoiselle Cormon were all noted.

The property of the house of Troisville lay between Alencon and
Mortagne. Josette knew the various branches of the family. A word
dropped by mademoiselle as they entered Alencon had put Josette on the
scent of the affair; and a discussion having started between them, it
was settled that the expected de Troisville must be between forty
and forty-two years of age, a bachelor, and neither rich nor poor.
Mademoiselle Cormon beheld herself speedily Vicomtesse de Troisville.

“And to think that my uncle told me nothing! thinks of nothing! inquires
nothing! That’s my uncle all over. He’d forget his own nose if it wasn’t
fastened to his face.”

Have you never remarked that, under circumstances such as these,
old maids become, like Richard III., keen-witted, fierce, bold,
promissory,--if one may so use the word,--and, like inebriate clerks, no
longer in awe of anything?

Immediately the town of Alencon, speedily informed from the farther
end of the rue de Saint-Blaise to the gate of Seez of this precipitate
return, accompanied by singular circumstances, was perturbed throughout
its viscera, both public and domestic. Cooks, shopkeepers, street
passengers, told the news from door to door; thence it rose to the upper
regions. Soon the words: “Mademoiselle Cormon has returned!” burst like
a bombshell into all households. At that moment Jacquelin was descending
from his wooden seat (polished by a process unknown to cabinet-makers),
on which he perched in front of the carriole. He opened the great green
gate, round at the top, and closed in sign of mourning; for during
Mademoiselle Cormon’s absence the evening assemblies did not take place.
The faithful invited the Abbe de Sponde to their several houses; and
Monsieur de Valois paid his debt by inviting him to dine at the Marquis
d’Esgrignon’s. Jacquelin, having opened the gate, called familiarly to
Penelope, whom he had left in the middle of the street. That animal,
accustomed to this proceeding, turned in of herself, and circled round
the courtyard in a manner to avoid injuring the flower-bed. Jacquelin
then took her bridle, and led the carriage to the portico.

“Mariette!” cried Mademoiselle Cormon.

“Mademoiselle!” exclaimed Mariette, who was occupied in closing the
gate.

“Has the gentleman arrived?”

“No, mademoiselle.”

“Where’s my uncle?”

“He is at church, mademoiselle.”

Jacquelin and Josette were by this time on the first step of the
portico, holding out their hands to manoeuvre the exit of their mistress
from the carriole as she pulled herself up by the sides of the vehicle
and clung to the curtains. Mademoiselle then threw herself into their
arms; because for the last two years she dared not risk her weight
on the iron step, affixed to the frame of the carriage by a horrible
mechanism of clumsy bolts.

When Mademoiselle Cormon reached the level of the portico she looked
about her courtyard with an air of satisfaction.

“Come, come, Mariette, leave that gate alone; I want you.”

“There’s something in the wind,” whispered Jacquelin, as Mariette passed
the carriole.

“Mariette, what provisions have you in the house?” asked Mademoiselle
Cormon, sitting down on the bench in the long antechamber like a person
overcome with fatigue.

“I haven’t anything,” replied Mariette, with her hands on her hips.
“Mademoiselle knows very well that during her absence Monsieur l’abbe
dines out every day. Yesterday I went to fetch him from Mademoiselle
Armande’s.”

“Where is he now?”

“Monsieur l’abbe? Why, at church; he won’t be in before three o’clock.”

“He thinks of nothing! he ought to have told you to go to market.
Mariette, go at once; and without wasting money, don’t spare it; get all
there is that is good and delicate. Go to the diligence office and see
if you can send for pates; and I want shrimps from the Brillante. What
o’clock is it?”

“A quarter to nine.”

“Good heavens! Mariette, don’t stop to chatter. The person my uncle
expects may arrive at any moment. If we had to give him breakfast, where
should we be with nothing in the house?”

Mariette turned back to Penelope in a lather, and looked at Jacquelin
as if she would say, “Mademoiselle has put her hand on a husband _this_
time.”

“Now, Josette,” continued the old maid, “let us see where we had better
put Monsieur de Troisville to sleep.”

With what joy she said the words, “Put Monsieur de Troisville”
 (pronounced Treville) “to sleep.” How many ideas in those few words! The
old maid was bathed in hope.

“Will you put him in the green chamber?”

“The bishop’s room? No; that’s too near mine,” said Mademoiselle Cormon.
“All very well for monseigneur; he’s a saintly man.”

“Give him your uncle’s room.”

“Oh, that’s so bare; it is actually indecent.”

“Well, then, mademoiselle, why not arrange a bed in your boudoir? It is
easily done; and there’s a fire-place. Moreau can certainly find in his
warerooms a bed to match the hangings.”

“You are right, Josette. Go yourself to Moreau; consult with him what
to do; I authorize you to get what is wanted. If the bed could be put up
to-night without Monsieur de Troisville observing it (in case Monsieur
de Troisville arrives while Moreau is here), I should like it. If Moreau
won’t engage to do this, then I must put Monsieur de Troisville in the
green room, although Monsieur de Troisville would be so very near to
me.”

Josette was departing when her mistress recalled her.

“Stop! explain the matter to Jacquelin,” she cried, in a loud nervous
tone. “Tell _him_ to go to Moreau; I must be dressed! Fancy if Monsieur
de Troisville surprised me as I am now! and my uncle not here to receive
him! Oh, uncle, uncle! Come, Josette; come and dress me at once.”

“But Penelope?” said Josette, imprudently.

“Always Penelope! Penelope this, Penelope that! Is Penelope the mistress
of this house?”

“But she is all of a lather, and she hasn’t had time to eat her oats.”

“Then let her starve!” cried Mademoiselle Cormon; “provided I marry,”
 she thought to herself.

Hearing these words, which seemed to her like homicide, Josette stood
still for a moment, speechless. Then, at a gesture from her mistress,
she ran headlong down the steps of the portico.

“The devil is in her, Jacquelin,” were the first words she uttered.

Thus all things conspired on this fateful day to produce the great
scenic effect which decided the future life of Mademoiselle Cormon.
The town was already topsy-turvy in mind, as a consequence of the five
extraordinary circumstances which accompanied Mademoiselle Cormon’s
return; to wit, the pouring rain; Penelope at a gallop, in a lather, and
blown; the early hour; the parcels half-packed; and the singular air of
the excited old maid. But when Mariette made an invasion of the market,
and bought all the best things; when Jacquelin went to the principal
upholsterer in Alencon, two doors from the church, in search of a
bed,--there was matter for the gravest conjectures. These extraordinary
events were discussed on all sides; they occupied the minds of every
one, even Mademoiselle Armande herself, with whom was Monsieur de
Valois. Within two days the town of Alencon had been agitated by such
startling events that certain good women were heard to remark that the
world was coming to an end. This last news, however, resolved itself
into a single question, “What is happening at the Cormons?”

The Abbe de Sponde, adroitly questioned when he left Saint-Leonard’s
to take his daily walk with the Abbe Couturier, replied with his usual
kindliness that he expected the Vicomte de Troisville, a nobleman in the
service of Russia during the Emigration, who was returning to Alencon
to settle there. From two to five o’clock a species of labial telegraphy
went on throughout the town; and all the inhabitants learned that
Mademoiselle Cormon had at last found a husband by letter, and was about
to marry the Vicomte de Troisville. Some said, “Moreau has sold them a
bed.” The bed was six feet wide in that quarter; it was four feet wide
at Madame Granson’s, in the rue du Bercail; but it was reduced to a
simple couch at Monsieur du Ronceret’s, where du Bousquier was dining.
The lesser bourgeoisie declared that the cost was eleven hundred francs.
But generally it was thought that, as to this, rumor was counting the
chickens before they were hatched. In other quarters it was said that
Mariette had made such a raid on the market that the price of carp had
risen. At the end of the rue Saint-Blaise, Penelope had dropped dead.
This decease was doubted in the house of the receiver-general; but at
the Prefecture it was authenticated that the poor beast had expired as
she turned into the courtyard of the hotel Cormon, with such velocity
had the old maid flown to meet her husband. The harness-maker, who lived
at the corner of the rue de Seez, was bold enough to call at the house
and ask if anything had happened to Mademoiselle Cormon’s carriage, in
order to discover whether Penelope was really dead. From the end of
the rue Saint-Blaise to the end of the rue du Bercail, it was then made
known that, thanks to Jacquelin’s devotion, Penelope, that silent victim
of her mistress’s impetuosity, still lived, though she seemed to be
suffering.

Along the road to Brittany the Vicomte de Troisville was stated to be a
younger son without a penny, for the estates in Perche belonged to the
Marquis de Troisville, peer of France, who had children; the marriage
would be, therefore, an enormous piece of luck for a poor emigre. The
aristocracy along that road approved of the marriage; Mademoiselle
Cormon could not do better with her money. But among the Bourgeoisie,
the Vicomte de Troisville was a Russian general who had fought against
France, and was now returning with a great fortune made at the court of
Saint-Petersburg; he was a _foreigner_; one of those _allies_ so hated
by the liberals; the Abbe de Sponde had slyly negotiated this marriage.
All the persons who had a right to call upon Mademoiselle Cormon
determined to do so that very evening.

During this transurban excitement, which made that of Suzanne almost
a forgotten affair, Mademoiselle was not less agitated; she was filled
with a variety of novel emotions. Looking about her salon, dining-room,
and boudoir, cruel apprehensions took possession of her. A species of
demon showed her with a sneer her old-fashioned luxury. The handsome
things she had admired from her youth up she suddenly suspected of age
and absurdity. In short, she felt that fear which takes possession of
nearly all authors when they read over a work they have hitherto thought
proof against every exacting or blase critic: new situations seem
timeworn; the best-turned and most highly polished phrases limp and
squint; metaphors and images grin or contradict each other; whatsoever
is false strikes the eye. In like manner this poor woman trembled lest
she should see on the lips of Monsieur de Troisville a smile of contempt
for this episcopal salon; she dreaded the cold look he might cast over
that ancient dining-room; in short, she feared the frame might injure
and age the portrait. Suppose these antiquities should cast a reflected
light of old age upon herself? This question made her flesh creep. She
would gladly, at that moment, spend half her savings on refitting her
house if some fairy wand could do it in a moment. Where is the general
who has not trembled on the eve of a battle? The poor woman was now
between her Austerlitz and her Waterloo.

“Madame la Vicomtesse de Troisville,” she said to herself; “a noble
name! Our property will go to a good family, at any rate.”

She fell a prey to an irritation which made every fibre of her nerves
quiver to all their papillae, long sunk in flesh. Her blood, lashed
by this new hope, was in motion. She felt the strength to converse, if
necessary, with Monsieur de Troisville.

It is useless to relate the activity with which Josette, Jacquelin,
Mariette, Moreau, and his agents went about their functions. It was like
the busyness of ants about their eggs. All that daily care had already
rendered neat and clean was again gone over and brushed and rubbed and
scrubbed. The china of ceremony saw the light; the damask linen marked
“A, B, C” was drawn from depths where it lay under a triple guard of
wrappings, still further defended by formidable lines of pins. Above
all, Mademoiselle Cormon sacrificed on the altar of her hopes three
bottles of the famous liqueurs of Madame Amphoux, the most illustrious
of all the distillers of the tropics,--a name very dear to gourmets.
Thanks to the devotion of her lieutenants, mademoiselle was soon ready
for the conflict. The different weapons--furniture, cookery, provisions,
in short, all the various munitions of war, together with a body of
reserve forces--were ready along the whole line. Jacquelin, Mariette,
and Josette received orders to appear in full dress. The garden was
raked. The old maid regretted that she couldn’t come to an understanding
with the nightingales nesting in the trees, in order to obtain their
finest trilling.

At last, about four o’clock, at the very moment when the Abbe de Sponde
returned home, and just as mademoiselle began to think she had set the
table with the best plate and linen and prepared the choicest dishes to
no purpose, the click-clack of a postilion was heard in the Val-Noble.

“‘Tis he!” she said to herself, the snap of the whip echoing in her
heart.

True enough; heralded by all this gossip, a post-chaise, in which was
a single gentleman, made so great a sensation coming down the rue
Saint-Blaise and turning into the rue du Cours that several little
gamains and some grown persons followed it, and stood in groups about
the gate of the hotel Cormon to see it enter. Jacquelin, who foresaw his
own marriage in that of his mistress, had also heard the click-clack in
the rue Saint-Blaise, and had opened wide the gates into the courtyard.
The postilion, a friend of his, took pride in making a fine turn-in, and
drew up sharply before the portico. The abbe came forward to greet his
guest, whose carriage was emptied with a speed that highwaymen might put
into the operation; the chaise itself was rolled into the coach-house,
the gates closed, and in a few moments all signs of Monsieur de
Troisville’s arrival had disappeared. Never did two chemicals blend
into each other with greater rapidity than the hotel Cormon displayed in
absorbing the Vicomte de Troisville.

Mademoiselle, whose heart was beating like a lizard caught by a
herdsman, sat heroically still on her sofa, beside the fire in the
salon. Josette opened the door; and the Vicomte de Troisville, followed
by the Abbe de Sponde, presented himself to the eyes of the spinster.

“Niece, this is Monsieur le Vicomte de Troisville, the grandson of one
of my old schoolmates; Monsieur de Troisville, my niece, Mademoiselle
Cormon.”

“Ah! that good uncle; how well he does it!” thought Rose-Marie-Victoire.

The Vicomte de Troisville was, to paint him in two words, du Bousquier
ennobled. Between the two men there was precisely the difference which
separates the vulgar style from the noble style. If they had both been
present, the most fanatic liberal would not have denied the existence
of aristocracy. The viscount’s strength had all the distinction of
elegance; his figure had preserved its magnificent dignity. He had blue
eyes, black hair, an olive skin, and looked to be about forty-six years
of age. You might have thought him a handsome Spaniard preserved in
the ice of Russia. His manner, carriage, and attitude, all denoted
a diplomat who had seen Europe. His dress was that of a well-bred
traveller. As he seemed fatigued, the abbe offered to show him to his
room, and was much amazed when his niece threw open the door of the
boudoir, transformed into a bedroom.

Mademoiselle Cormon and her uncle then left the noble stranger to attend
to his own affairs, aided by Jacquelin, who brought up his luggage, and
went themselves to walk beside the river until their guest had made
his toilet. Although the Abbe de Sponde chanced to be even more
absent-minded than usual, Mademoiselle Cormon was not less preoccupied.
They both walked on in silence. The old maid had never before met any
man as seductive as this Olympean viscount. She might have said to
herself, as the Germans do, “This is my ideal!” instead of which she
felt herself bound from head to foot, and could only say, “Here’s my
affair!” Then she flew to Mariette to know if the dinner could be put
back a while without loss of excellence.

“Uncle, your Monsieur de Troisville is very amiable,” she said, on
returning.

“Why, niece, he hasn’t as yet said a word.”

“But you can see it in his ways, his manners, his face. Is he a
bachelor?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied the abbe, who was thinking of a
discussion on mercy, lately begun between the Abbe Couturier and
himself. “Monsieur de Troisville wrote me that he wanted to buy a house
here. If he was married, he wouldn’t come alone on such an errand,”
 added the abbe, carelessly, not conceiving the idea that his niece could
be thinking of marriage.

“Is he rich?”

“He is a younger son of the younger branch,” replied her uncle. “His
grandfather commanded a squadron, but the father of this young man made
a bad marriage.”

“Young man!” exclaimed the old maid. “It seems to me, uncle, that he
must be at least forty-five.” She felt the strongest desire to put their
years on a par.

“Yes,” said the abbe; “but to a poor priest of seventy, Rose, a man of
forty seems a youth.”

All Alencon knew by this time that Monsieur de Troisville had arrived at
the Cormons. The traveller soon rejoined his hosts, and began to admire
the Brillante, the garden, and the house.

“Monsieur l’abbe,” he said, “my whole ambition is to have a house like
this.” The old maid fancied a declaration lurked in that speech, and she
lowered her eyes. “You must enjoy it very much, mademoiselle,” 

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