Parisians in the Country
by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #7929 · 471,916 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Parisians in the Country
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Parisians in the Country
Author: Honoré de Balzac
Translator: James Waring
Katharine Prescott Wormeley
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7929]
Most recently updated: November 23, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7929
Credits: Produced by John Bickers, David Widger, and Dagny
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARISIANS IN THE COUNTRY ***
Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
PARISIANS IN THE COUNTRY
THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART,
AND THE MUSE OF THE DEPARTMENT
By Honore De Balzac
INTRODUCTION
I have sometimes wondered whether it was accident or intention which
made Balzac so frequently combine early and late work in the same
volume. The question is certainly insoluble, and perhaps not worth
solving, but it presents itself once more in the present instance.
_L’Illustre Gaudissart_ is a story of 1832, the very heyday of Balzac’s
creative period, when even his pen could hardly keep up with
the abundance of his fancy and the gathered stores of his minute
observation. _La Muse du Departement_ dates ten years and more later,
when, though there was plenty of both left, both sacks had been deeply
dipped into.
_L’Illustre Gaudissart_ is, of course, slight, not merely in bulk, but
in conception. Balzac’s Tourangeau patriotism may have amused itself by
the idea of the villagers “rolling” the great Gaudissart; but the ending
of the tale can hardly be thought to be quite so good as the beginning.
Still, that beginning is altogether excellent. The sketch of the
_commis-voyageur_ generally smacks of that _physiologie_ style of which
Balzac was so fond; but it is good, and Gaudissart himself, as well as
the whole scene with his _epouse libre_, is delightful. The Illustrious
One was evidently a favorite character with his creator. He nowhere
plays a very great part; but it is everywhere a rather favorable
and, except in this little mishap with Margaritis (which, it must
be observed, does not turn entirely to his discomfiture), a rather
successful part. We have him in _Cesar Birotteau_ superintending the
early efforts of Popinot to launch the Huile Cephalique. He was present
at the great ball. He served as intermediary to M. de Bauvan in the
merciful scheme of buying at fancy prices the handiwork of the Count’s
faithful spouse, and so providing her with a livelihood; and later as
a theatrical manager, a little spoilt by his profession, we find him
in _Le Cousin Pons_. But he is always what the French called “a good
devil,” and here he is a very good devil indeed.
Although _La Muse du Departement_ is an important work, it cannot be
spoken of in quite unhesitating terms. It contains, indeed, in the
personage of Lousteau, one of the very most elaborate of Balzac’s
portraits of a particular type of men of letters. The original is said
to have been Jules Janin, who is somewhat disadvantageously contrasted
here and elsewhere with Claude Vignon, said on the same rather vague
authority to be Gustave Planche. Both Janin and Planche are now too much
forgotten, but in both more or less (and in Lousteau very much “more”)
Balzac cannot be said to have dealt mildly with his _bete noire_,
the critical temperament. Lousteau, indeed, though not precisely a
scoundrel, is both a rascal and a cad. Even Balzac seems a little
shocked at his _lettre de faire part_ in reference to his mistress’
child; and it is seldom possible to discern in any of his proceedings
the most remote approximation to the conduct of a gentleman. But then,
as we have seen, and shall see, Balzac’s standard for the conduct of
his actual gentlemen was by no means fantastically exquisite
or discouragingly high, and in the case of his Bohemians it was
accommodating to the utmost degree. He seems to despise Lousteau, but
rather for his insouciance and neglect of his opportunities of making
himself a position than for anything else.
I have often felt disposed to ask those who would assert Balzac’s
absolute infallibility as a gynaecologist to give me a reasoned
criticism of the heroine of this novel. I do not entirely “figure to
myself” Dinah de la Baudraye. It is perfectly possible that she should
have loved a “sweep” like Lousteau, there is certainly nothing extremely
unusual in a woman loving worse sweeps even than he. But would she have
done it, and having done it, have also done what she did afterwards?
These questions may be answered differently; I do not answer them in the
negative myself, but I cannot give them an affirmative answer with the
conviction which I should like to show.
Among the minor characters, the _substitut_ de Clagny has a touch of
nobility which contrasts happily enough with Lousteau’s unworthiness.
Bianchon is as good as usual; Balzac always gives Bianchon a favorable
part. Madame Piedefer is one of the numerous instances in which the
unfortunate class of mothers-in-law atones for what are supposed to
be its crimes against the human race; and old La Baudraye, not so
hopelessly repulsive in a French as he would be in an English novel, is
a shrewd old rascal enough.
But I cannot think the scene of the Parisians _blaguing_ the Sancerrois
is a very happy one. That it is in exceedingly bad taste might not
matter so very much; Balzac would reply, and justly, that he had not
intended to represent it as anything else. That the fun is not very
funny may be a matter of definition and appreciation. But what scarcely
admits of denial or discussion is that it is tyrannously too long. The
citations of _Olympia_ are pushed beyond measure, beyond what is comic,
almost beyond the license of farce; and the comments, which remind one
rather of the heavy jesting on critics in _Un Prince de la Boheme_ and
the short-lived _Revue Parisienne_, are labored to the last degree. The
part of Nathan, too, is difficult to appreciate exactly, and altogether
the book does not seem to me a _reussite_.
The history of _L’Illustre Gaudissart_ is, for a story of Balzac’s,
almost null. It was inserted without any previous newspaper appearance
in the first edition of _Scenes de la Vie de Province_ in 1833, and
entered with the rest of them into the first edition also of the
_Comedie_, when the joint title, which it has kept since and shared with
_La Muse du Departement_, of _Les Parisiens en Province_ was given to
it.
_La Muse du Departement_ has a rather more complicated record than its
companion piece in _Les Parisiens en Province_, _L’Illustre Gaudissart_.
It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the title of _Dinah
Piedefer_, in _Le Messager_ during March and April 1843, and was almost
immediately published as a book, with works of other writers, under the
general title of _Les Mysteres de Province_, and accompanied by some
other work of its own author’s. It had four parts and fifty-two chapters
in _Le Messager_, an arrangement which was but slightly altered in the
volume form. M. de Lovenjoul gives some curious indications of mosaic
work in it, and some fragments which do not now appear in the text.
George Saintsbury
THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.
CHAPTER I
The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period
of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our
century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does
in creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and
being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final expression
of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding
the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those
civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one
direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes from
the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among
the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human pyrotechnic is
a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving
priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he expounds all the better for his
want of faith. Curious being! He has seen everything, known everything,
and is up in all the ways of the world. Soaked in the vices of Paris, he
affects to be the fellow-well-met of the provinces. He is the link which
connects the village with the capital; though essentially he is neither
Parisian nor provincial,--he is a traveller. He sees nothing to the
core: men and places he knows by their names; as for things, he looks
merely at their surface, and he has his own little tape-line with which
to measure them. His glance shoots over all things and penetrates none.
He occupies himself with a great deal, yet nothing occupies him.
Jester and jolly fellow, he keeps on good terms with all political
opinions, and is patriotic to the bottom of his soul. A capital mimic,
he knows how to put on, turn and turn about, the smiles of persuasion,
satisfaction, and good-nature, or drop them for the normal expression of
his natural man. He is compelled to be an observer of a certain sort in
the interests of his trade. He must probe men with a glance and guess
their habits, wants, and above all their solvency. To economize time he
must come to quick decisions as to his chances of success,--a practice
that makes him more or less a man of judgment; on the strength of which
he sets up as a judge of theatres, and discourses about those of Paris
and the provinces.
He knows all the good and bad haunts in France, “de actu et visu.” He
can pilot you, on occasion, to vice or virtue with equal assurance.
Blest with the eloquence of a hot-water spigot turned on at will, he can
check or let run, without floundering, the collection of phrases which
he keeps on tap, and which produce upon his victims the effect of a
moral shower-bath. Loquacious as a cricket, he smokes, drinks, wears a
profusion of trinkets, overawes the common people, passes for a lord
in the villages, and never permits himself to be “stumped,”--a slang
expression all his own. He knows how to slap his pockets at the right
time, and make his money jingle if he thinks the servants of the
second-class houses which he wants to enter (always eminently
suspicious) are likely to take him for a thief. Activity is not the
least surprising quality of this human machine. Not the hawk swooping
upon its prey, not the stag doubling before the huntsman and the hounds,
nor the hounds themselves catching scent of the game, can be compared
with him for the rapidity of his dart when he spies a “commission,” for
the agility with which he trips up a rival and gets ahead of him, for
the keenness of his scent as he noses a customer and discovers the sport
where he can get off his wares.
How many great qualities must such a man possess! You will find in all
countries many such diplomats of low degree; consummate negotiators
arguing in the interests of calico, jewels, frippery, wines; and often
displaying more true diplomacy than ambassadors themselves, who, for
the most part, know only the forms of it. No one in France can doubt the
powers of the commercial traveller; that intrepid soul who dares all,
and boldly brings the genius of civilization and the modern inventions
of Paris into a struggle with the plain commonsense of remote villages,
and the ignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial ways. Can we ever
forget the skilful manoeuvres by which he worms himself into the minds
of the populace, bringing a volume of words to bear upon the refractory,
reminding us of the indefatigable worker in marbles whose file eats
slowly into a block of porphyry? Would you seek to know the utmost power
of language, or the strongest pressure that a phrase can bring to bear
against rebellious lucre, against the miserly proprietor squatting
in the recesses of his country lair?--listen to one of these great
ambassadors of Parisian industry as he revolves and works and sucks like
an intelligent piston of the steam-engine called Speculation.
“Monsieur,” said a wise political economist, the
director-cashier-manager and secretary-general of a celebrated
fire-insurance company, “out of every five hundred thousand francs of
policies to be renewed in the provinces, not more than fifty thousand
are paid up voluntarily. The other four hundred and fifty thousand are
got in by the activity of our agents, who go about among those who are
in arrears and worry them with stories of horrible incendiaries until
they are driven to sign the new policies. Thus you see that eloquence,
the labial flux, is nine tenths of the ways and means of our business.”
To talk, to make people listen to you,--that is seduction in itself.
A nation that has two Chambers, a woman who lends both ears, are soon
lost. Eve and her serpent are the everlasting myth of an hourly fact
which began, and may end, with the world itself.
“A conversation of two hours ought to capture your man,” said a retired
lawyer.
Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and look at him well. Don’t
forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco collar,
nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so original
that we cannot rub it out--how many divers personalities we come across!
In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what a battery,
all in one, is the man himself, his vocation, and his tongue! Intrepid
mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to catch five or six
thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of the red Indians
who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial fish will not rise
to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with seines and nets and
gentlest persuasions. The traveller’s business is to extract the gold
in country caches by a purely intellectual operation, and to extract
it pleasantly and without pain. Can you think without a shudder of the
flood of phrases which, day by day, renewed each dawn, leaps in cascades
the length and breadth of sunny France?
You know the species; let us now take a look at the individual.
There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the
paragon of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the
qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is
vitriol and likewise glue,--glue to catch and entangle his victim and
make him sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve hard heads, close
fists, and closer calculations. His line was once the HAT; but his
talents and the art with which he snared the wariest provincial had
brought him such commercial celebrity that all vendors of the “article
Paris”[*] paid court to him, and humbly begged that he would deign to
take their commissions.
[*] “Article Paris” means anything--especially articles of wearing
apparel--which originates or is made in Paris. The name is
supposed to give to the thing a special value in the provinces.
Thus, when he returned to Paris in the intervals of his triumphant
progress through France, he lived a life of perpetual festivity in
the shape of weddings and suppers. When he was in the provinces, the
correspondents in the smaller towns made much of him; in Paris, the
great houses feted and caressed him. Welcomed, flattered, and fed
wherever he went, it came to pass that to breakfast or to dine alone was
a novelty, an event. He lived the life of a sovereign, or, better still,
of a journalist; in fact, he was the perambulating “feuilleton” of
Parisian commerce.
His name was Gaudissart; and his renown, his vogue, the flatteries
showered upon him, were such as to win for him the surname of
Illustrious. Wherever the fellow went,--behind a counter or before a
bar, into a salon or to the top of a stage-coach, up to a garret or to
dine with a banker,--every one said, the moment they saw him, “Ah! here
comes the illustrious Gaudissart!”[*] No name was ever so in keeping
with the style, the manners, the countenance, the voice, the language,
of any man. All things smiled upon our traveller, and the traveller
smiled back in return. “Similia similibus,”--he believed in homoeopathy.
Puns, horse-laugh, monkish face, skin of a friar, true Rabelaisian
exterior, clothing, body, mind, and features, all pulled together to put
a devil-may-care jollity into every inch of his person. Free-handed and
easy-going, he might be recognized at once as the favorite of grisettes,
the man who jumps lightly to the top of a stage-coach, gives a hand to
the timid lady who fears to step down, jokes with the postillion about
his neckerchief and contrives to sell him a cap, smiles at the maid and
catches her round the waist or by the heart; gurgles at dinner like a
bottle of wine and pretends to draw the cork by sounding a filip on his
distended cheek; plays a tune with his knife on the champagne glasses
without breaking them, and says to the company, “Let me see you do
THAT”; chaffs the timid traveller, contradicts the knowing one, lords it
over a dinner-table and manages to get the titbits for himself. A strong
fellow, nevertheless, he can throw aside all this nonsense and mean
business when he flings away the stump of his cigar and says, with a
glance at some town, “I’ll go and see what those people have got in
their stomachs.”
[*] “Se gaudir,” to enjoy, to make fun. “Gaudriole,” gay discourse,
rather free.--Littre.
When buckled down to his work he became the slyest and cleverest of
diplomats. All things to all men, he knew how to accost a banker like a
capitalist, a magistrate like a functionary, a royalist with pious and
monarchical sentiments, a bourgeois as one of themselves. In short,
wherever he was he was just what he ought to be; he left Gaudissart at
the door when he went in, and picked him up when he came out.
Until 1830 the illustrious Gaudissart was faithful to the article Paris.
In his close relation to the caprices of humanity, the varied paths of
commerce had enabled him to observe the windings of the heart of man. He
had learned the secret of persuasive eloquence, the knack of loosening
the tightest purse-strings, the art of rousing desire in the souls of
husbands, wives, children, and servants; and what is more, he knew
how to satisfy it. No one had greater faculty than he for inveigling
a merchant by the charms of a bargain, and disappearing at the instant
when desire had reached its crisis. Full of gratitude to the hat-making
trade, he always declared that it was his efforts in behalf of the
exterior of the human head which had enabled him to understand its
interior: he had capped and crowned so many people, he was always
flinging himself at their heads, etc. His jokes about hats and heads
were irrepressible, though perhaps not dazzling.
Nevertheless, after August and October, 1830, he abandoned the hat
trade and the article Paris, and tore himself from things mechanical and
visible to mount into the higher spheres of Parisian speculation. “He
forsook,” to use his own words, “matter for mind; manufactured products
for the infinitely purer elaborations of human intelligence.” This
requires some explanation.
The general upset of 1830 brought to birth, as everybody knows, a number
of old ideas which clever speculators tried to pass off in new bodies.
After 1830 ideas became property. A writer, too wise to publish
his writings, once remarked that “more ideas are stolen than
pocket-handkerchiefs.” Perhaps in course of time we may have an Exchange
for thought; in fact, even now ideas, good or bad, have their consols,
are bought up, imported, exported, sold, and quoted like stocks. If
ideas are not on hand ready for sale, speculators try to pass off words
in their stead, and actually live upon them as a bird lives on the seeds
of his millet. Pray do not laugh; a word is worth quite as much as an
idea in a land where the ticket on a sack is of more importance than the
contents. Have we not seen libraries working off the word “picturesque”
when literature would have cut the throat of the word “fantastic”?
Fiscal genius has guessed the proper tax on intellect; it has accurately
estimated the profits of advertising; it has registered a prospectus of
the quantity and exact value of the property, weighing its thought at
the intellectual Stamp Office in the Rue de la Paix.
Having become an article of commerce, intellect and all its products
must naturally obey the laws which bind other manufacturing interests.
Thus it often happens that ideas, conceived in their cups by certain
apparently idle Parisians,--who nevertheless fight many a moral battle
over their champagne and their pheasants,--are handed down at their
birth from the brain to the commercial travellers who are employed to
spread them discreetly, “urbi et orbi,” through Paris and the provinces,
seasoned with the fried pork of advertisement and prospectus, by means
of which they catch in their rat-trap the departmental rodent commonly
called subscriber, sometimes stockholder, occasionally corresponding
member or patron, but invariably fool.
“I am a fool!” many a poor country proprietor has said when, caught by
the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he
has, in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs
into a gulf.
“Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money than
they need for the tour of Europe,” say the speculators.
Consequently there is endless warfare between the recalcitrant public
which refuses to pay the Parisian imposts and the tax-gatherer who,
living by his receipt of custom, lards the public with new ideas, turns
it on the spit of lively projects, roasts it with prospectuses (basting
all the while with flattery), and finally gobbles it up with some
toothsome sauce in which it is caught and intoxicated like a fly with
a black-lead. Moreover, since 1830 what honors and emoluments have been
scattered throughout France to stimulate the zeal and self-love of the
“progressive and intelligent masses”! Titles, medals, diplomas, a sort
of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs, have followed each
other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the manufactured products
of the intellect have developed a spice, a ginger, all their own. From
this have come premiums, forestalled dividends, and that conscription
of noted names which is levied without the knowledge of the unfortunate
writers who bear them, and who thus find themselves actual co-operators
in more enterprises than there are days in the year; for the law, we may
remark, takes no account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all
is the rape of ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the
slave-merchants of Asia, tear from the paternal brain before they are
well matured, and drag half-clothed before the eyes of their blockhead
of a sultan, their Shahabaham, their terrible public, which, if they
don’t amuse it, will cut off their heads by curtailing the ingots and
emptying their pockets.
This madness of our epoch reacted upon the illustrious Gaudissart, and
here follows the history of how it happened. A life-insurance company
having been told of his irresistible eloquence offered him an unheard-of
commission, which he graciously accepted. The bargain concluded and
the treaty signed, our traveller was put in training, or we might say
weaned, by the secretary-general of the enterprise, who freed his mind
of its swaddling-clothes, showed him the dark holes of the business,
taught him its dialect, took the mechanism apart bit by bit, dissected
for his instruction the particular public he was expected to gull,
crammed him with phrases, fed him with impromptu replies, provisioned
him with unanswerable arguments, and, so to speak, sharpened the file of
the tongue which was about to operate upon the life of France.
The puppet amply rewarded the pains bestowed upon him. The heads of the
company boasted of the illustrious Gaudissart, showed him such attention
and proclaimed the great talents of this perambulating prospectus so
loudly in the sphere of exalted banking and commercial diplomacy, that
the financial managers of two newspapers (celebrated at that time
but since defunct) were seized with the idea of employing him to get
subscribers. The proprietors of the “Globe,” an organ of Saint-Simonism,
and the “Movement,” a republican journal, each invited the illustrious
Gaudissart to a conference, and proposed to give him ten francs a head
for every subscriber, provided he brought in a thousand, but only five
francs if he got no more than five hundred. The cause of political
journalism not interfering with the pre-accepted cause of life
insurance, the bargain was struck; although Gaudissart demanded an
indemnity from the Saint-Simonians for the eight days he was forced
to spend in studying the doctrines of their apostle, asserting that a
prodigious effort of memory and intellect was necessary to get to
the bottom of that “article” and to reason upon it suitably. He asked
nothing, however, from the republicans. In the first place, he inclined
in republican ideas,--the only ones, according to guadissardian
philosophy, which could bring about a rational equality. Besides which
he had already dipped into the conspiracies of the French “carbonari”;
he had been arrested, and released for want of proof; and finally, as
he called the newspaper proprietors to observe, he had lately grown a
mustache, and needed only a hat of certain shape and a pair of spurs to
represent, with due propriety, the Republic.
CHAPTER II
For one whole week this commanding genius went every morning to be
Saint-Simonized at the office of the “Globe,” and every afternoon he
betook himself to the life-insurance company, where he learned the
intricacies of financial diplomacy. His aptitude and his memory were
prodigious; so that he was able to start on his peregrinations by the
15th of April, the date at which he usually opened the spring campaign.
Two large commercial houses, alarmed at the decline of business,
implored the ambitious Gaudissart not to desert the article Paris, and
seduced him, it was said, with large offers, to take their commissions
once more. The king of travellers was amenable to the claims of his old
friends, enforced as they were by the enormous premiums offered to him.
* * * * *
“Listen, my little Jenny,” he said in a hackney-coach to a pretty
florist.
All truly great men delight in allowing themselves to be tyrannized over
by a feeble being, and Gaudissart had found his tyrant in Jenny. He was
bringing her home at eleven o’clock from the Gymnase, whither he had
taken her, in full dress, to a proscenium box on the first tier.
“On my return, Jenny, I shall refurnish your room in superior style.
That big Matilda, who pesters you with comparisons and her real India
shawls imported by the suite of the Russian ambassador, and her
silver plate and her Russian prince,--who to my mind is nothing but a
humbug,--won’t have a word to say THEN. I consecrate to the adornment of
your room all the ‘Children’ I shall get in the provinces.”
“Well, that’s a pretty thing to say!” cried the florist. “Monster of
a man! Do you dare to talk to me of your children? Do you suppose I am
going to stand that sort of thing?”
“Oh, what a goose you are, my Jenny! That’s only a figure of speech in
our business.”
“A fine business, then!”
“Well, but listen; if you talk all the time you’ll always be in the
right.”
“I mean to be. Upon my word, you take things easy!”
“You don’t let me finish. I have taken under my protection a superlative
idea,--a journal, a newspaper, written for children. In our profession,
when travellers have caught, let us suppose, ten subscribers to the
‘Children’s Journal,’ they say, ‘I’ve got ten Children,’ just as I say
when I get ten subscriptions to a newspaper called the ‘Movement,’ ‘I’ve
got ten Movements.’ Now don’t you see?”
“That’s all right. Are you going into politics? If you do you’ll get
into Saint-Pelagie, and I shall have to trot down there after you. Oh!
if one only knew what one puts one’s foot into when we love a man, on
my word of honor we would let you alone to take care of yourselves,
you men! However, if you are going away to-morrow we won’t talk of
disagreeable things,--that would be silly.”
The coach stopped before a pretty house, newly built in the Rue
d’Artois, where Gaudissart and Jenny climbed to the fourth story. This
was the abode of Mademoiselle Jenny Courand, commonly reported to be
privately married to the illustrious Gaudissart, a rumor which that
individual did not deny. To maintain her supremacy, Jenny kept him
to the performance of innumerable small attentions, and threatened
continually to turn him off if he omitted the least of them. She now
ordered him to write to her from every town, and render a minute account
of all his proceedings.
“How many ‘Children’ will it take to furnish my chamber?” she asked,
throwing off her shawl and sitting down by a good fire.
“I get five sous for each subscriber.”
“Delightful! And is it with five sous that you expect to make me rich?
Perhaps you are like the Wandering Jew with your pockets full of money.”
“But, Jenny, I shall get a thousand ‘Children.’ Just reflect that
children have never had a newspaper to themselves before. But what a
fool I am to try to explain matters to you,--you can’t understand such
things.”
“Can’t I? Then tell me,--tell me, Gaudissart, if I’m such a goose why do
you love me?”
“Just because you are a goose,--a sublime goose! Listen, Jenny.
See here, I am going to undertake the ‘Globe,’ the ‘Movement,’ the
‘Children,’ the insurance business, and some of my old articles Paris;
instead of earning a miserable eight thousand a year, I’ll bring back
twenty thousand at least from each trip.”
“Unlace me, Gaudissart, and do it right; don’t tighten me.”
“Yes, truly,” said the traveller, complacently; “I shall become a
shareholder in the newspapers, like Finot, one of my friends, the son
of a hatter, who now has thirty thousand francs income, and is going
to make himself a peer of France. When one thinks of that little
Popinot,--ah, mon Dieu! I forgot to tell you that Monsieur Popinot was
named minister of commerce yesterday. Why shouldn’t I be ambitious too?
Ha! ha! I could easily pick up the jargon of those fellows who talk in
the chamber, and bluster with the rest of them. Now, listen to me:--
“Gentlemen,” he said, standing behind a chair, “the Press is neither
a tool nor an article of barter: it is, viewed under its political
aspects, an institution. We are bound, in virtue of our position as
legislators, to consider all things politically, and therefore” (here he
stopped to get breath)--“and therefore we must examine the Press and ask
ourselves if it is useful or noxious, if it should be encouraged or put
down, taxed or free. These are serious questions. I feel that I do
not waste the time, always precious, of this Chamber by examining this
article--the Press--and explaining to you its qualities. We are on the
verge of an abyss. Undoubtedly the laws have not the nap which they
ought to have--Hein?” he said, looking at Jenny. “All orators put France
on the verge of an abyss. They either say that or they talk about the
chariot of state, or convulsions, or political horizons. Don’t I know
their dodges? I’m up to all the tricks of all the trades. Do you know
why? Because I was born with a caul; my mother has got it, but I’ll give
it to you. You’ll see! I shall soon be in the government.”
“You!”
“Why shouldn’t I be the Baron Gaudissart, peer of France? Haven’t they
twice elected Monsieur Popinot as deputy from the fourth arrondissement?
He dines with Louis Phillippe. There’s Finot; he is going to be, they
say, a member of the Council. Suppose they send me as ambassador to
London? I tell you I’d nonplus those English! No man ever got the better
of Gaudissart, the illustrious Gaudissart, and nobody ever will. Yes, I
say it! no one ever outwitted me, and no one can--in any walk of life,
politics or impolitics, here or elsewhere. But, for the time being,
I must give myself wholly to the capitalists; to the ‘Globe,’ the
‘Movement,’ the ‘Children,’ and my article Paris.”
“You will be brought up with a round turn, you and your newspapers. I’ll
bet you won’t get further than Poitiers before the police will nab you.”
“What will you bet?”
“A shawl.”
“Done! If I lose that shawl I’ll go back to the article Paris and
the hat business. But as for getting the better of Gaudissart--never!
never!”
And the illustrious traveller threw himself into position before
Jenny, looked at her proudly, one hand in his waistcoat, his head at
three-quarter profile,--an attitude truly Napoleonic.
“Oh, how funny you are! what have you been eating to-night?”
Gaudissart was thirty-eight years of age, of medium height, stout and
fat like men who roll about continually in stage-coaches, with a face as
round as a pumpkin, ruddy cheeks, and regular features of the type which
sculptors of all lands adopt as a model for statues of Abundance, Law,
Force, Commerce, and the like. His protuberant stomach swelled forth in
the shape of a pear; his legs were small, but active and vigorous. He
caught Jenny up in his arms like a baby and kissed her.
“Hold your tongue, young woman!” he said. “What do you know about
Saint-Simonism, antagonism, Fourierism, criticism, heroic enterprise,
or woman’s freedom? I’ll tell you what they are,--ten francs for each
subscription, Madame Gaudissart.”
“On my word of honor, you are going crazy, Gaudissart.”
“More and more crazy about YOU,” he replied, flinging his hat upon the
sofa.
The next morning Gaudissart, having breakfasted gloriously with Jenny,
departed on horseback to work up the chief towns of the district to
which he was assigned by the various enterprises in whose interests he
was now about to exercise his great talents. After spending forty-five
days in beating up the country between Paris and Blois, he remained two
weeks at the latter place to write up his correspondence and make short
visits to the various market towns of the department. The night before
he left Blois for Tours he indited a letter to Mademoiselle Jenny
Courand. As the conciseness and charm of this epistle cannot be equalled
by any narration of ours, and as, moreover, it proves the legitimacy of
the tie which united these two individuals, we produce it here:--
“My dear Jenny,--You will lose your wager. Like Napoleon,
Gaudissart the illustrious has his star, but NOT his Waterloo. I
triumph everywhere. Life insurance has done well. Between Paris
and Blois I lodged two millions. But as I get to the centre of
France heads become infinitely harder and millions correspondingly
scarce. The article Paris keeps up its own little jog-trot. It is
a ring on the finger. With all my well-known cunning I spit these
shop-keepers like larks. I got off one hundred and sixty-two
Ternaux shawls at Orleans. I am sure I don’t know what they will
do with them, unless they return them to the backs of the sheep.
“As to the article journal--the devil! that’s a horse of another
color. Holy saints! how one has to warble before you can teach
these bumpkins a new tune. I have only made sixty-two ‘Movements’:
exactly a hundred less for the whole trip than the shawls in one
town. Those republican rogues! they won’t subscribe. They talk,
they talk; they share your opinions, and presently you are all
agreed that every existing thing must be overturned. You feel sure
your man is going to subscribe. Not a bit of it! If he owns three
feet of ground, enough to grow ten cabbages, or a few trees to
slice into toothpicks, the fellow begins to talk of consolidated
property, taxes, revenues, indemnities,--a whole lot of stuff, and
I have wasted my time and breath on patriotism. It’s a bad
business! Candidly, the ‘Movement’ does not move. I have written
to the directors and told them so. I am sorry for it--on account
of my political opinions.
“As for the ‘Globe,’ that’s another breed altogether. Just set to
work and talk new doctrines to people you fancy are fools enough
to believe such lies,--why, they think you want to burn their
houses down! It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for
futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood;
for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon
man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great
providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be
found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric,
--in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences. Well, what do
you think? when I open upon them with such ideas these provincials
lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their spoons and beg
me to go away! Are not they fools? geese? The ‘Globe’ is smashed.
I said to the proprietors, ‘You are too advanced, you go ahead too
fast: you ought to get a few results; the provinces like results.’
However, I have made a hundred ‘Globes,’ and I must say,
considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers, it is a
miracle. But to do it I had to make them such a lot of promises
that I am sure I don’t know how the globites, globists, globules,
or whatever they call themselves, will ever get out of them. But
they always tell me they can make the world a great deal better
than it is, so I go ahead and prophesy to the value of ten francs
for each subscription. There was one farmer who thought the paper
was agricultural because of its name. I Globed HIM. Bah! he gave
in at once; he had a projecting forehead; all men with projecting
foreheads are ideologists.
“But the ‘Children’; oh! ah! as to the ‘Children’! I got two
thousand between Paris and Blois. Jolly business! but there is not
much to say. You just show a little vignette to the mother,
pretending to hide it from the child: naturally the child wants to
see, and pulls mamma’s gown and cries for its newspaper, because
‘Papa has DOT his.’ Mamma can’t let her brat tear the gown; the
gown costs thirty francs, the subscription six--economy; result,
subscription. It is an excellent thing, meets an actual want; it
holds a place between dolls and sugar-plums, the two eternal
necessities of childhood.
“I have had a quarrel here at the table d’hote about the
newspapers and my opinions. I was unsuspiciously eating my dinner
next to a man with a gray hat who was reading the ‘Debats.’ I said
to myself, ‘Now for my rostrum eloquence. He is tied to the
dynasty; I’ll cook him; this triumph will be capital practice for
my ministerial talents.’ So I went to work and praised his
‘Debats.’ Hein! if I didn’t lead him along! Thread by thread, I
began to net my man. I launched my four-horse phrases, and the F-
sharp arguments, and all the rest of the cursed stuff. Everybody
listened; and I saw a man who had July as plain as day on his
mustache, just ready to nibble at a ‘Movement.’ Well, I don’t know
how it was, but I unluckily let fall the word ‘blockhead.’
Thunder! you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat
(shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his teeth and was
furiously angry. I put on my grand air--you know--and said to him:
‘Ah, ca! Monsieur, you are remarkably aggressive; if you are not
content, I am ready to give you satisfaction; I fought in July.’
‘Though the father of a family,’ he replied, ‘I am ready--’
‘Father of a family!’ I exclaimed; ‘my dear sir, have you any
children?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Twelve years old?’ ‘Just about.’ ‘Well, then,
the “Children’s Journal” is the very thing for you; six francs a
year, one number a month, double columns, edited by great literary
lights, well got up, good paper, engravings from charming sketches
by our best artists, actual colored drawings of the Indies--will
not fade.’ I fired my broadside ‘feelings of a father, etc.,
etc.,’--in short, a subscription instead of a quarrel. ‘There’s
nobody but Gaudissart who can get out of things like that,’ said
that little cricket Lamard to the big Bulot at the cafe, when he
told him the story.
“I leave to-morrow for Amboise. I shall do up Amboise in two days,
and I will write next from Tours, where I shall measure swords
with the inhabitants of that colorless region; colorless, I mean,
from the intellectual and speculative point of view. But, on the
word of a Gaudissart, they shall be toppled over, toppled down--
floored, I say.
“Adieu, my kitten. Love me always; be faithful; fidelity through
thick and thin is one of the attributes of the Free Woman. Who is
kissing you on the eyelids?
“Thy Felix Forever.”
CHAPTER III
Five days later Gaudissart started from the Hotel des Faisans, at
which he had put up in Tours, and went to Vouvray, a rich and populous
district where the public mind seemed to him susceptible of cultivation.
Mounted upon his horse, he trotted along the embankment thinking no more
of his phrases than an actor thinks of his part which he has played for
a hundred times. It was thus that the illustrious Gaudissart went his
cheerful way, admiring the landscape, and little dreaming that in the
happy valleys of Vouvray his commercial infallibility was about to
perish.
Here a few remarks upon the public mind of Touraine are essential to our
story. The subtle, satirical, epigrammatic tale-telling spirit stamped
on every page of Rabelais is the faithful expression of the Tourangian
mind,--a mind polished and refined as it should be in a land where
the kings of France long held their court; ardent, artistic, poetic,
voluptuous, yet whose first impulses subside quickly. The softness of
the atmosphere, the beauty of the climate, a certain ease of life and
joviality of manners, smother before long the sentiment of art, narrow
the widest heart, and enervate the strongest will. Transplant the
Tourangian, and his fine qualities develop and lead to great results, as
we may see in many spheres of action: look at Rabelais and Semblancay,
Plantin the printer and Descartes, Boucicault, the Napoleon of his day,
and Pinaigrier, who painted most of the colored glass in our cathedrals;
also Verville and Courier. But the Tourangian, distinguished though he
may be in other regions, sits in his own home like an Indian on his mat
or a Turk on his divan. He employs his wit in laughing at his neighbor
and in making merry all his days; and when at last he reaches the end
of his life, he is still a happy man. Touraine is like the Abbaye of
Theleme, so vaunted in the history of Gargantua. There we may find the
complying sisterhoods of that famous tale, and there the good cheer
celebrated by Rabelais reigns in glory.
As to the do-nothingness of that blessed land it is sublime and well
expressed in a certain popular legend: “Tourangian, are you hungry,
do you want some soup?” “Yes.” “Bring your porringer.” “Then I am not
hungry.” Is it to the joys of the vineyard and the harmonious loveliness
of this garden land of France, is it to the peace and tranquillity of a
region where the step of an invader has never trodden, that we owe
the soft compliance of these unconstrained and easy manners? To such
questions no answer. Enter this Turkey of sunny France, and you will
stay there,--lazy, idle, happy. You may be as ambitious as Napoleon, as
poetic as Lord Byron, and yet a power unknown, invisible, will compel
you to bury your poetry within your soul and turn your projects into
dreams.
The illustrious Gaudissart was fated to encounter here in Vouvray one of
those indigenous jesters whose jests are not intolerable solely because
they have reached the perfection of the mocking art. Right or wrong, the
Tourangians are fond of inheriting from their parents. Consequently the
doctrines of Saint-Simon were especially hated and villified among them.
In Touraine hatred and villification take the form of superb disdain
and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of good stories and practical
jokes,--a spirit which, alas! is yielding, day by day, to that other
spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as “English cant.”
For his sins, after getting down at the Soleil d’Or, an inn kept by a
former grenadier of the imperial guard named Mitouflet, married to a
rich widow, the illustrious traveller, after a brief consultation
with the landlord, betook himself to the knave of Vouvray, the jovial
merry-maker, the comic man of the neighborhood, compelled by fame and
nature to supply the town with merriment. This country Figaro was once
a dyer, and now possessed about seven or eight thousand francs a year,
a pretty house on the slope of the hill, a plump little wife, and robust
health. For ten years he had had nothing to do but take care of his wife
and his garden, marry his daughter, play whist in the evenings, keep the
run of all the gossip in the neighborhood, meddle with the elections,
squabble with the large proprietors, and order good dinners; or else
trot along the embankment to find out what was going on in Tours,
torment the cure, and finally, by way of dramatic entertainment, assist
at the sale of lands in the neighborhood of his vineyards. In short, he
led the true Tourangian life,--the life of a little country-townsman. He
was, moreover, an important member of the bourgeoisie,--a leader among
the small proprietors, all of them envious, jealous, delighted to catch
up and retail gossip and calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging
things down to their own level; and at war with all kinds of
superiority, which they deposited with the fine composure of ignorance.
Monsieur Vernier--such was the name of this great little man--was just
finishing his breakfast, with his wife and daughter on either side of
him, when Gaudissart entered the room through a window that looked out
on the Loire and the Cher, and lighted one of the gayest dining-rooms of
that gay land.
“Is this Monsieur Vernier himself?” said the traveller, bending his
vertebral column with such grace that it seemed to be elastic.
“Yes, Monsieur,” said the mischievous ex-dyer, with a scrutinizing look
which took in the style of man he had to deal with.
“I come, Monsieur,” resumed Gaudissart, “to solicit the aid of your
knowledge and insight to guide my efforts in this district, where
Mitouflet tells me you have the greatest influence. Monsieur, I am sent
into the provinces on an enterprise of the utmost importance, undertaken
by bankers who--”
“Who mean to win our tricks,” said Vernier, long used to the ways of
commercial travellers and to their periodical visits.
“Precisely,” replied Gaudissart, with native impudence. “But with your
fine tact, Monsieur, you must be aware that we can’t win tricks from
people unless it is their interest to play at cards. I beg you not to
confound me with the vulgar herd of travellers who succeed by humbug
or importunity. I am no longer a commercial traveller. I was one, and I
glory in it; but to-day my mission is of higher importance, and should
place me, in the minds of superior people, among those who devote
themselves to the enlightenment of their country. The most distinguished
bankers in Paris take part in this affair; not fictitiously, as in some
shameful speculations which I call rat-traps. No, no, nothing of the
kind! I should never condescend--never!--to hawk about such CATCH-FOOLS.
No, Monsieur; the most respectable houses in Paris are concerned in this
enterprise; and their interests guarantee--”
Hereupon Gaudissart drew forth his whole string of phrases, and Monsieur
Vernier let him go the length of his tether, listening with apparent
interest which completely deceived him. But after the word “guarantee”
Vernier paid no further attention to our traveller’s rhetoric, and
turned over in his mind how to play him some malicious trick and deliver
a land, justly considered half-savage by speculators unable to get a
bite of it, from the inroads of these Parisian caterpillars.
At the head of an enchanting valley, called the Valley Coquette because
of its windings and the curves which return upon each other at every
step, and seem more and more lovely as we advance, whether we ascend or
descend them, there lived, in a little house surrounded by vineyards, a
half-insane man named Margaritis. He was of Italian origin, married,
but childless; and his wife took care of him with a courage fully
appreciated by the neighborhood. Madame Margaritis was undoubtedly in
real danger from a man who, among other fancies, persisted in carrying
about with him two long-bladed knives with which he sometimes threatened
her. Who has not seen the wonderful self-devotion shown by provincials
who consecrate their lives to the care of sufferers, possibly because
of the disgrace heaped upon a bourgeoise if she allows her husband or
children to be taken to a public hospital? Moreover, who does not know
the repugnance which these people feel to the payment of the two or
three thousand francs required at Charenton or in the private lunatic
asylums? If any one had spoken to Madame Margaritis of Doctors
Dubuisson, Esquirol, Blanche, and others, she would have preferred, with
noble indignation, to keep her thousands and take care of the “good-man”
at home.
As the incomprehensible whims of this lunatic are connected with the
current of our story, we are compelled to exhibit the most striking
of them. Margaritis went out as soon as it rained, and walked about
bare-headed in his vineyard. At home he made incessant inquiries for
newspapers; to satisfy him his wife and the maid-servant used to give
him an old journal called the “Indre-et-Loire,” and for seven years he
had never yet perceived that he was reading the same number over and
over again. Perhaps a doctor would have observed with interest the
connection that evidently existed between the recurring and spasmodic
demands for the newspaper and the atmospheric variations of the weather.
Usually when his wife had company, which happened nearly every evening,
for the neighbors, pitying her situation, would frequently come to play
at boston in her salon, Margaritis remained silent in a corner and never
stirred. But the moment ten o’clock began to strike on a clock which he
kept shut up in a large oblong closet, he rose at the stroke with the
mechanical precision of the figures which are made to move by springs in
the German toys. He would then advance slowly towards the players, give
them a glance like the automatic gaze of the Greeks and Turks exhibited
on the Boulevard du Temple, and say sternly, “Go away!” There were days
when he had lucid intervals and could give his wife excellent advice
as to the sale of their wines; but at such times he became extremely
annoying, and would ransack her closets and steal her delicacies, which
he devoured in secret. Occasionally, when the usual visitors made their
appearance he would treat them with civility; but as a general thing
his remarks and replies were incoherent. For instance, a lady once asked
him, “How do you feel to-day, Monsieur Margaritis?” “I have grown
a beard,” he replied, “have you?” “Are you better?” asked another.
“Jerusalem! Jerusalem!” was the answer. But the greater part of the time
he gazed stolidly at his guests without uttering a word; and then his
wife would say, “The good-man does not hear anything to-day.”
On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy; he
flourished his knives and shouted, “That joke dishonors me!”
As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men in
sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the same
respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture. Among
his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet discovered the
object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the community had
learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries. He insisted on
keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in the cellar of his
house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on them. But then the
month of June came round he grew uneasy with the restless anxiety of a
madman about the sale of the sack and the puncheons. Madame Margaritis
could nearly always persuade him that the wine had been sold at
an enormous price, which she paid over to him, and which he hid so
cautiously that neither his wife nor the servant who watched him had
ever been able to discover its hiding-place.
The evening before Gaudissart reached Vouvray Madame Margaritis had had
more difficulty than usual in deceiving her husband, whose mind happened
to be uncommonly lucid.
“I really don’t know how I shall get through to-morrow,” she had said to
Madame Vernier. “Would you believe it, the good-man insists on watching
his two casks of wine. He has worried me so this whole day, that I
had to show him two full puncheons. Our neighbor, Pierre Champlain,
fortunately had two which he had not sold. I asked him to kindly let me
have them rolled into our cellar; and oh, dear! now that the good-man
has seen them he insists on bottling them off himself!”
Madame Vernier had related the poor woman’s trouble to her husband just
before the entrance of Gaudissart, and at the first words of the famous
traveller Vernier determined that he should be made to grapple with
Margaritis.
“Monsieur,” said the ex-dyer, as soon as the illustrious Gaudissart
had fired his first broadside, “I will not hide from you the great
difficulties which my native place offers to your enterprise. This part
of the country goes along, as it were, in the rough,--‘suo modo.’ It is
a country where new ideas don’t take hold. We live as our fathers lived,
we amuse ourselves with four meals a day, and we cultivate our vineyards
and sell our wines to the best advantage. Our business principle is to
sell things for more than they cost us; we shall stick in that rut, and
neither God nor the devil can get us out of it. I will, however, give
you some advice, and good advice is an egg in the hand. There is in
this town a retired banker in whose wisdom I have--I, particularly--the
greatest confidence. If you can obtain his support, I will add mine. If
your proposals have real merit, if we are convinced of the advantage of
your enterprise, the approval of Monsieur Margaritis (which carries with
it mine) will open to you at least twenty rich houses in Vouvray who
will be glad to try your specifics.”
When Madame Vernier heard the name of the lunatic she raised her head
and looked at her husband.
“Ah, precisely; my wife intends to call on Madame Margaritis with one
of our neighbors. Wait a moment, and you can accompany these ladies--You
can pick up Madame Fontanieu on your way,” said the wily dyer, winking
at his wife.
To pick out the greatest gossip, the sharpest tongue, the most
inveterate cackler of the neighborhood! It meant that Madame Vernier
was to take a witness to the scene between the traveller and the lunatic
which should keep the town in laughter for a month. Monsieur and Madame
Vernier played their part so well that Gaudissart had no suspicions, and
straightway fell into the trap. He gallantly offered his arm to Madame
Vernier, and believed that he made, as they went along, the conquest
of both ladies, for those benefit he sparkled with wit and humor and
undetected puns.
The house of the pretended banker stood at the entrance to the Valley
Coquette. The place, called La Fuye, had nothing remarkable about it. On
the ground floor was a large wainscoted salon, on either side of which
opened the bedroom of the good-man and that of his wife. The salon
was entered from an ante-chamber, which served as the dining-room and
communicated with the kitchen. This lower door, which was wholly without
the external charm usually seen even in the humblest dwellings in
Touraine, was covered by a mansard story, reached by a stairway built
on the outside of the house against the gable end and protected by
a shed-roof. A little garden, full of marigolds, syringas, and
elder-bushes, separated the house from the fields; and all around the
courtyard were detached buildings which were used in the vintage season
for the various processes of making wine.
CHAPTER IV
Margaritis was seated in an arm-chair covered with yellow Utrecht
velvet, near the window of the salon, and he did not stir as the two
ladies entered with Gaudissart. His thoughts were running on the casks
of wine. He was a spare man, and his bald head, garnished with a few
spare locks at the back of it, was pear-shaped in conformation.
His sunken eyes, overtopped by heavy black brows and surrounded by
discolored circles, his nose, thin and sharp like the blade of a knife,
the strongly marked jawbone, the hollow cheeks, and the oblong tendency
of all these lines, together with his unnaturally long and flat chin,
contributed to give a peculiar expression to his countenance,--something
between that of a retired professor of rhetoric and a rag-picker.
“Monsieur Margaritis,” cried Madame Vernier, addressing him, “come, stir
about! Here is a gentleman whom my husband sends to you, and you must
listen to him with great attention. Put away your mathematics and talk
to him.”
On hearing these words the lunatic rose, looked at Gaudissart, made him
a sign to sit down, and said, “Let us converse, Monsieur.”
The two women went into Madame Margaritis’ bedroom, leaving the
door open so as to hear the conversation, and interpose if it became
necessary. They were hardly installed before Monsieur Vernier crept
softly up through the field and, opening a window, got into the bedroom
without noise.
“Monsieur has doubtless been in business--?” began Gaudissart.
“Public business,” answered Margaritis, interrupting him. “I pacificated
Calabria under the reign of King Murat.”
“Bless me! if he hasn’t gone to Calabria!” whispered Monsieur Vernier.
“In that case,” said Gaudissart, “we shall quickly understand each
other.”
“I am listening,” said Margaritis, striking the attitude taken by a man
when he poses to a portrait-painter.
“Monsieur,” said Gaudissart, who chanced to be turning his watch-key
with a rotatory and periodical click which caught the attention of the
lunatic and contributed no doubt to keep him quiet. “Monsieur, if you
were not a man of superior intelligence” (the fool bowed), “I should
content myself with merely laying before you the material advantages of
this enterprise, whose psychological aspects it would be a waste of time
to explain to you. Listen! Of all kinds of social wealth, is not
time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become
wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those
anxieties which I call ‘pot-boiling’?--a vulgar expression, but it puts
the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up more
time than the inability to give proper security to persons from whom you
seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are nevertheless rich
in hope?”
“Money,--yes, that’s right,” said Margaritis.
“Well, Monsieur, I am sent into the departments by a company of bankers
and capitalists, who have apprehended the enormous waste which
rising men of talent are thus making of time, and, consequently,
of intelligence and productive ability. We have seized the idea of
capitalizing for such men their future prospects, and cashing their
talents by discounting--what? TIME; securing the value of it to their
survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the moral
qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur, living
forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three, ten,
twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement onward to
a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of our epoch; a
movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you when we come
to consider the principles involved in the logical co-ordination of
the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by literal examples,
leaving aside all purely abstract reasoning, which I call the
mathematics of thought. Instead of being, as you are, a proprietor
living upon your income, let us suppose that you are painter, a
musician, an artist, or a poet--”
“I am a painter,” said the lunatic.
“Well, so be it. I see you take my metaphor. You are a painter; you have
a glorious future, a rich future before you. But I go still farther--”
At these words the madman looked anxiously at Gaudissart, thinking he
meant to go away; but was reassured when he saw that he kept his seat.
“You may even be nothing at all,” said Gaudissart, going on with his
phrases, “but you are conscious of yourself; you feel yourself--”
“I feel myself,” said the lunatic.
“--you feel yourself a great man; you say to yourself, ‘I will be a
minister of state.’ Well, then, you--painter, artist, man of letters,
statesman of the future--you reckon upon your talents, you estimate
their value, you rate them, let us say, at a hundred thousand crowns--”
“Do you give me a hundred thousand crowns?”
“Yes, Monsieur, as you will see. Either your heirs and assigns will
receive them if you die, for the company contemplates that event, or
you will receive them in the long run through your works of art, your
writings, or your fortunate speculations during your lifetime. But, as
I have already had the honor to tell you, when you have once fixed
upon the value of your intellectual capital,--for it is intellectual
capital,--seize that idea firmly,--intellectual--”
“I understand,” said the fool.
“You sign a policy of insurance with a company which recognizes in you a
value of a hundred thousand crowns; in you, poet--”
“I am a painter,” said the lunatic.
“Yes,” resumed Gaudissart,--“painter, poet, musician, statesman--and
binds itself to pay them over to your family, your heirs, if, by reason
of your death, the hopes foundered on your intellectual capital should
be overthrown for you personally. The payment of the premium is all that
is required to protect--”
“The money-box,” said the lunatic, sharply interrupting him.
“Ah! naturally; yes. I see that Monsieur understands business.”
“Yes,” said the madman. “I established the Territorial Bank in the Rue
des Fosses-Montmartre at Paris in 1798.”
“For,” resumed Gaudissart, going back to his premium, “in order to meet
the payments on the intellectual capital which each man recognizes and
esteems in himself, it is of course necessary that each should pay a
certain premium, three per cent; an annual due of three per cent. Thus,
by the payment of this trifling sum, a mere nothing, you protect your
family from disastrous results at your death--”
“But I live,” said the fool.
“Ah! yes; you mean if you should live long? That is the usual
objection,--a vulgar prejudice. I fully agree that if we had
not foreseen and demolished it we might feel we were unworthy of
being--what? What are we, after all? Book-keepers in the great Bureau of
Intellect. Monsieur, I don’t apply these remarks to you, but I meet on
all sides men who make it a business to teach new ideas and disclose
chains of reasoning to people who turn pale at the first word. On my
word of honor, it is pitiable! But that’s the way of the world, and I
don’t pretend to reform it. Your objection, Monsieur, is really sheer
nonsense.”
“Why?” asked the lunatic.
“Why?--this is why: because, if you live and possess the qualities which
are estimated in your policy against the chances of death,--now, attend
to this--”
“I am attending.”
“Well, then, you have succeeded in life; and you have succeeded because
of the said insurance. You doubled your chances of success by getting
rid of the anxieties you were dragging about with you in the shape of
wife and children who might otherwise be left destitute at your death.
If you attain this certainty, you have touched the value of your
intellectual capital, on which the cost of insurance is but a trifle,--a
mere trifle, a bagatelle.”
“That’s a fine idea!”
“Ah! is it not, Monsieur?” cried Gaudissart. “I call this enterprise the
exchequer of beneficence; a mutual insurance against poverty; or, if
you like it better, the discounting, the cashing, of talent. For talent,
Monsieur, is a bill of exchange which Nature gives to the man of genius,
and which often has a long time to run before it falls due.”
“That is usury!” cried Margaritis.
“The devil! he’s keen, the old fellow! I’ve made a mistake,” thought
Gaudissart, “I must catch him with other chaff. I’ll try humbug No. 1.
Not at all,” he said aloud, “for you who--”
“Will you take a glass of wine?” asked Margaritis.
“With pleasure,” replied Gaudissart.
“Wife, give us a bottle of the wine that is in the puncheons. You are
here at the very head of Vouvray,” he continued, with a gesture of the
hand, “the vineyard of Margaritis.”
The maid-servant brought glasses and a bottle of wine of the vintage of
1819. The good-man filled a glass with circumspection and offered it to
Gaudissart, who drank it up.
“Ah, you are joking, Monsieur!” exclaimed the commercial traveller.
“Surely this is Madeira, true Madeira?”
“So you think,” said the fool. “The trouble with our Vouvray wine is
that it is neither a common wine, nor a wine that can be drunk with the
entremets. It is too generous, too strong. It is often sold in Paris
adulterated with brandy and called Madeira. The wine-merchants buy it
up, when our vintage has not been good enough for the Dutch and Belgian
markets, to mix it with wines grown in the neighborhood of Paris, and
call it Bordeaux. But what you are drinking just now, my good Monsieur,
is a wine for kings, the pure Head of Vouvray,--that’s it’s name. I
have two puncheons, only two puncheons of it left. People who like fine
wines, high-class wines, who furnish their table with qualities that
can’t be bought in the regular trade,--and there are many persons in
Paris who have that vanity,--well, such people send direct to us for
this wine. Do you know any one who--?”
“Let us go on with what we were saying,” interposed Gaudissart.
“We are going on,” said the fool. “My wine is capital; you are capital,
capitalist, intellectual capital, capital wine,--all the same etymology,
don’t you see? hein? Capital, ‘caput,’ head, Head of Vouvray, that’s my
wine,--it’s all one thing.”
“So that you have realized your intellectual capital through your wines?
Ah, I see!” said Gaudissart.
“I have realized,” said the lunatic. “Would you like to buy my
puncheons? you shall have them on good terms.”
“No, I was merely speaking,” said the illustrious Gaudissart, “of the
results of insurance and the employment of intellectual capital. I will
resume my argument.”
The lunatic calmed down, and fell once more into position.
“I remarked, Monsieur, that if you die the capital will be paid to your
family without discussion.”
“Without discussion?”
“Yes, unless there were suicide.”
“That’s quibbling.”
“No, Monsieur; you are aware that suicide is one of those acts which are
easy to prove--”
“In France,” said the fool; “but--”
“But in other countries?” said Gaudissart. “Well, Monsieur, to cut
short discussion on this point, I will say, once for all, that death in
foreign countries or on the field of battle is outside of our--”
“Then what are you insuring? Nothing at all!” cried Margaritis. “My
bank, my Territorial Bank, rested upon--”
“Nothing at all?” exclaimed Gaudissart, interrupting the good-man.
“Nothing at all? What do you call sickness, and afflictions, and
poverty, and passions? Don’t go off on exceptional points.”
“No, no! no points,” said the lunatic.
“Now, what’s the result of all this?” cried Gaudissart. “To you, a
banker, I can sum up the profits in a few words. Listen. A man lives;
he has a future; he appears well; he lives, let us say, by his art; he
wants money; he tries to get it,--he fails. Civilization withholds cash
from this man whose thought could master civilization, and ought to
master it, and will master it some day with a brush, a chisel, with
words, ideas, theories, systems. Civilization is atrocious! It denies
bread to the men who give it luxury. It starves them on sneers and
curses, the beggarly rascal! My words may be strong, but I shall
not retract them. Well, this great but neglected man comes to us; we
recognize his greatness; we salute him with respect; we listen to him.
He says to us: ‘Gentlemen, my life and talents are worth so much; on my
productions I will pay you such or such percentage.’ Very good; what
do we do? Instantly, without reserve or hesitation, we admit him to the
great festivals of civilization as an honored guest--”
“You need wine for that,” interposed the madman.
“--as an honored guest. He signs the insurance policy; he takes our bits
of paper,--scraps, rags, miserable rags!--which, nevertheless, have more
power in the world than his unaided genius. Then, if he wants money,
every one will lend it to him on those rags. At the Bourse, among
bankers, wherever he goes, even at the usurers, he will find money
because he can give security. Well, Monsieur, is not that a great gulf
to bridge over in our social system? But that is only one aspect of our
work. We insure debtors by another scheme of policies and premiums. We
offer annuities at rates graduated according to ages, on a sliding-scale
infinitely more advantageous than what are called tontines, which are
based on tables of mortality that are notoriously false. Our company
deals with large masses of men; consequently the annuitants are
secure from those distressing fears which sadden old age,--too sad
already!--fears which pursue those who receive annuities from private
sources. You see, Monsieur, that we have estimated life under all its
aspects.”
“Sucked it at both ends,” said the lunatic. “Take another glass of wine.
You’ve earned it. You must line your inside with velvet if you are going
to pump at it like that every day. Monsieur, the wine of Vouvray, if
well kept, is downright velvet.”
“Now, what do you think of it all?” said Gaudissart, emptying his glass.
“It is very fine, very new, very useful; but I like the discounts I get
at my Territorial Bank, Rue des Fosses-Montmartre.”
“You are quite right, Monsieur,” answered Gaudissart; “but that sort of
thing is taken and retaken, made and remade, every day. You have also
hypothecating banks which lend upon landed property and redeem it on
a large scale. But that is a narrow idea compared to our system of
consolidating hopes,--consolidating hopes! coagulating, so to speak,
the aspirations born in every soul, and insuring the realization of
our dreams. It needed our epoch, Monsieur, the epoch of
transition--transition and progress--”
“Yes, progress,” muttered the lunatic, with his glass at his lips. “I
like progress. That is what I’ve told them many times--”
“The ‘Times’!” cried Gaudissart, who did not catch the whole sentence.
“The ‘Times’ is a bad newspaper. If you read that, I am sorry for you.”
“The newspaper!” cried Margaritis. “Of course! Wife! wife! where is the
newspaper?” he cried, going towards the next room.
“If you are interested in newspapers,” said Gaudissart, changing his
attack, “we are sure to understand each other.”
“Yes; but before we say anything about that, tell me what you think of
this wine.”
“Delicious!”
“Then let us finish the bottle.” The lunatic poured out a thimbleful
for himself and filled Gaudissart’s glass. “Well, Monsieur, I have two
puncheons left of the same wine; if you find it good we can come to
terms.”
“Exactly,” said Gaudissart. “The fathers of the Saint-Simonian faith
have authorized me to send them all the commodities I--But allow me to
tell you about their noble newspaper. You, who have understood the whole
question of insurance so thoroughly, and who are willing to assist my
work in this district--”
“Yes,” said Margaritis, “if--”
“If I take your wine; I understand perfectly. Your wine is very good,
Monsieur; it puts the stomach in a glow.”
“They make champagne out of it; there is a man from Paris who comes here
and makes it in Tours.”
“I have no doubt of it, Monsieur. The ‘Globe,’ of which we were
speaking--”
“Yes, I’ve gone over it,” said Margaritis.
“I was sure of it!” exclaimed Gaudissart. “Monsieur, you have a fine
frontal development; a pate--excuse the word--which our gentlemen call
‘horse-head.’ There’s a horse element in the head of every great man.
Genius will make itself known; but sometimes it happens that great men,
in spite of their gifts, remain obscure. Such was very nearly the case
with Saint-Simon; also with Monsieur Vico,--a strong man just beginning
to shoot up; I am proud of Vico. Now, here we enter upon the new theory
and formula of humanity. Attention, if you please.”
“Attention!” said the fool, falling into position.
“Man’s spoliation of man--by which I mean bodies of men living upon the
labor of other men--ought to have ceased with the coming of Christ, I
say CHRIST, who was sent to proclaim the equality of man in the sight
of God. But what is the fact? Equality up to our day has been an ‘ignus
fatuus,’ a chimera. Saint-Simon has arisen as the complement of Christ;
as the modern exponent of the doctrine of equality, or rather of its
practice, for theory has served its time--”
“Is he liberated?” asked the lunatic.
“Like liberalism, it has had its day. There is a nobler future before
us: a new faith, free labor, free growth, free production, individual
progress, a social co-ordination in which each man shall receive the
full worth of his individual labor, in which no man shall be preyed upon
by other men who, without capacity of their own, compel ALL to work for
the profit of ONE. From this comes the doctrine of--”
“How about servants?” demanded the lunatic.
“They will remain servants if they have no capacity beyond it.”
“Then what’s the good of your doctrine?”
“To judge of this doctrine, Monsieur, you must consider it from a higher
point of view: you must take a general survey of humanity. Here we come
to the theories of Ballance: do you know his Palingenesis?”
“I am fond of them,” said the fool, who thought he said “ices.”
“Good!” returned Gaudissart. “Well, then, if the palingenistic aspects
of the successive transformations of the spiritualized globe
have struck, stirred, roused you, then, my dear sir, the ‘Globe’
newspaper,--noble name which proclaims its mission,--the ‘Globe’ is an
organ, a guide, who will explain to you with the coming of each day
the conditions under which this vast political and moral change will be
effected. The gentlemen who--”
“Do they drink wine?”
“Yes, Monsieur; their houses are kept up in the highest style; I may
say, in prophetic style. Superb salons, large receptions, the apex of
social life--”
“Well,” remarked the lunatic, “the workmen who pull things down want
wine as much as those who put things up.”
“True,” said the illustrious Gaudissart, “and all the more, Monsieur,
when they pull down with one hand and build up with the other, like the
apostles of the ‘Globe.’”
“They want good wine; Head of Vouvray, two puncheons, three hundred
bottles, only one hundred francs,--a trifle.”
“How much is that a bottle?” said Gaudissart, calculating. “Let me see;
there’s the freight and the duty,--it will come to about seven sous.
Why, it wouldn’t be a bad thing: they give more for worse wines--(Good!
I’ve got him!” thought Gaudissart, “he wants to sell me wine which I
want; I’ll master him)--Well, Monsieur,” he continued, “those who argue
usually come to an agreement. Let us be frank with each other. You have
great influence in this district--”
“I should think so!” said the madman; “I am the Head of Vouvray!”
“Well, I see that you thoroughly comprehend the insurance of
intellectual capital--”
“Thoroughly.”
“--and that you have measured the full importance of the ‘Globe’--”
“Twice; on foot.”
Gaudissart was listening to himself and not to the replies of his
hearer.
“Therefore, in view of your circumstances and of your age, I quite
understand that you have no need of insurance for yourself; but,
Monsieur, you might induce others to insure, either because of their
inherent qualities which need development, or for the protection of
their families against a precarious future. Now, if you will subscribe
to the ‘Globe,’ and give me your personal assistance in this district
on behalf of insurance, especially life-annuity,--for the provinces are
much attached to annuities--Well, if you will do this, then we can come
to an understanding about the wine. Will you take the ‘Globe’?”
“I stand on the globe.”
“Will you advance its interests in this district?”
“I advance.”
“And?”
“And--”
“And I--but you do subscribe, don’t you, to the ‘Globe’?”
“The globe, good thing, for life,” said the lunatic.
“For life, Monsieur?--ah, I see! yes, you are right: it is full of
life, vigor, intellect, science,--absolutely crammed with science,--well
printed, clear type, well set up; what I call ‘good nap.’ None of your
botched stuff, cotton and wool, trumpery; flimsy rubbish that rips
if you look at it. It is deep; it states questions on which you can
meditate at your leisure; it is the very thing to make time pass
agreeably in the country.”
“That suits me,” said the lunatic.
“It only costs a trifle,--eighty francs.”
“That won’t suit me,” said the lunatic.
“Monsieur!” cried Gaudissart, “of course you have got grandchildren?
There’s the ‘Children’s Journal’; that only costs seven francs a year.”
“Very good; take my wine, and I will subscribe to the children. That
suits me very well: a fine idea! intellectual product, child. That’s man
living upon man, hein?”
“You’ve hit it, Monsieur,” said Gaudissart.
“I’ve hit it!”
“You consent to push me in the district?”
“In the district.”
“I have your approbation?”
“You have it.”
“Well, then, Monsieur, I take your wine at a hundred francs--”
“No, no! hundred and ten--”
“Monsieur! A hundred and ten for the company, but a hundred to me. I
enable you to make a sale; you owe me a commission.”
“Charge ‘em a hundred and twenty,”--“cent vingt” (“sans vin,” without
wine).
“Capital pun that!”
“No, puncheons. About that wine--”
“Better and better! why, you are a wit.”
“Yes, I’m that,” said the fool. “Come out and see my vineyards.”
“Willingly, the wine is getting into my head,” said the illustrious
Gaudissart, following Monsieur Margaritis, who marched him from row
to row and hillock to hillock among the vines. The three ladies and
Monsieur Vernier, left to themselves, went off into fits of laughter as
they watched the traveller and the lunatic discussing, gesticulating,
stopping short, resuming their walk, and talking vehemently.
“I wish the good-man hadn’t carried him off,” said Vernier.
Finally the pair returned, walking with the eager step of men who were
in haste to finish up a matter of business.
“He has got the better of the Parisian, damn him!” cried Vernier.
And so it was. To the huge delight of the lunatic our illustrious
Gaudissart sat down at a card-table and wrote an order for the delivery
of the two casks of wine. Margaritis, having carefully read it over,
counted out seven francs for his subscription to the “Children’s
Journal” and gave them to the traveller.
“Adieu until to-morrow, Monsieur,” said Gaudissart, twisting his
watch-key. “I shall have the honor to call for you to-morrow. Meantime,
send the wine at once to Paris to the address I have given you, and the
price will be remitted immediately.”
Gaudissart, however, was a Norman, and he had no idea of making any
agreement which was not reciprocal. He therefore required his promised
supporter to sign a bond (which the lunatic carefully read over) to
deliver two puncheons of the wine called “Head of Vouvray,” vineyard of
Margaritis.
This done, the illustrious Gaudissart departed in high feather, humming,
as he skipped along,--
“The King of the South,
He burned his mouth,” etc.
CHAPTER V
The illustrious Gaudissart returned to the Soleil d’Or, where he
naturally conversed with the landlord while waiting for dinner.
Mitouflet was an old soldier, guilelessly crafty, like the peasantry of
the Loire; he never laughed at a jest, but took it with the gravity of
a man accustomed to the roar of cannon and to make his own jokes under
arms.
“You have some very strong-minded people here,” said Gaudissart, leaning
against the door-post and lighting his cigar at Mitouflet’s pipe.
“How do you mean?” asked Mitouflet.
“I mean people who are rough-shod on political and financial ideas.”
“Whom have you seen? if I may ask without indiscretion,” said the
landlord innocently, expectorating after the adroit and periodical
fashion of smokers.
“A fine, energetic fellow named Margaritis.”
Mitouflet cast two glances in succession at his guest which were
expressive of chilling irony.
“May be; the good-man knows a deal. He knows too much for other folks,
who can’t always understand him.”
“I can believe it, for he thoroughly comprehends the abstruse principles
of finance.”
“Yes,” said the innkeeper, “and for my part, I am sorry he is a
lunatic.”
“A lunatic! What do you mean?”
“Well, crazy,--cracked, as people are when they are insane,” answered
Mitouflet. “But he is not dangerous; his wife takes care of him. Have
you been arguing with him?” added the pitiless landlord; “that must have
been funny!”
“Funny!” cried Gaudissart. “Funny! Then your Monsieur Vernier has been
making fun of me!”
“Did he send you there?”
“Yes.”
“Wife! wife! come here and listen. If Monsieur Vernier didn’t take it
into his head to send this gentleman to talk to Margaritis!”
“What in the world did you say to each other, my dear, good Monsieur?”
said the wife. “Why, he’s crazy!”
“He sold me two casks of wine.”
“Did you buy them?”
“Yes.”
“But that is his delusion; he thinks he sells his wine, and he hasn’t
any.”
“Ha!” snorted the traveller, “then I’ll go straight to Monsieur Vernier
and thank him.”
And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer,
whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom
he had already recounted the tale.
“Monsieur,” said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at
his enemy, “you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain
of being thought a turn-key,--a species of being far below a
galley-slave,--you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared
to offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you
hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?”
Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a
tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.
“What!” cried Vernier, delighted at the presence of an audience, “do
you think we have no right to make fun of a man who comes here, bag and
baggage, and demands that we hand over our property because, forsooth,
he is pleased to call us great men, painters, artists, poets,--mixing us
up gratuitously with a set of fools who have neither house nor home, nor
sous nor sense? Why should we put up with a rascal who comes here
and wants us to feather his nest by subscribing to a newspaper which
preaches a new religion whose first doctrine is, if you please, that we
are not to inherit from our fathers and mothers? On my sacred word of
honor, Pere Margaritis said things a great deal more sensible. And now,
what are you complaining about? You and Margaritis seemed to understand
each other. The gentlemen here present can testify that if you had
talked to the whole canton you couldn’t have been as well understood.”
“That’s all very well for you to say; but I have been insulted,
Monsieur, and I demand satisfaction!”
“Very good, Monsieur! consider yourself insulted, if you like. I shall
not give you satisfaction, because there is neither rhyme nor reason nor
satisfaction to be found in the whole business. What an absurd fool he
is, to be sure!”
At these words Gaudissart flew at the dyer to give him a slap on
the face, but the listening crowd rushed between them, so that the
illustrious traveller only contrived to knock off the wig of his enemy,
which fell on the head of Mademoiselle Clara Vernier.
“If you are not satisfied, Monsieur,” he said, “I shall be at the Soleil
d’Or until to-morrow morning, and you will find me ready to show you
what it means to give satisfaction. I fought in July, Monsieur.”
“And you shall fight in Vouvray,” answered the dyer; “and what is more,
you shall stay here longer than you imagine.”
Gaudissart marched off, turning over in his mind this prophetic remark,
which seemed to him full of sinister portent. For the first time in his
life the prince of travellers did not dine jovially. The whole town of
Vouvray was put in a ferment about the “affair” between Monsieur Vernier
and the apostle of Saint-Simonism. Never before had the tragic event of
a duel been so much as heard of in that benign and happy valley.
“Monsieur Mitouflet, I am to fight to-morrow with Monsieur Vernier,”
said Gaudissart to his landlord. “I know no one here: will you be my
second?”
“Willingly,” said the host.
Gaudissart had scarcely finished his dinner before Madame Fontanieu
and the assistant-mayor of Vouvray came to the Soleil d’Or and took
Mitouflet aside. They told him it would be a painful and injurious thing
to the whole canton if a violent death were the result of this affair;
they represented the pitiable distress of Madame Vernier, and conjured
him to find some way to arrange matters and save the credit of the
district.
“I take it all upon myself,” said the sagacious landlord.
In the evening he went up to the traveller’s room carrying pens, ink,
and paper.
“What have you got there?” asked Gaudissart.
“If you are going to fight to-morrow,” answered Mitouflet, “you had
better make some settlement of your affairs; and perhaps you have
letters to write,--we all have beings who are dear to us. Writing
doesn’t kill, you know. Are you a good swordsman? Would you like to get
your hand in? I have some foils.”
“Yes, gladly.”
Mitouflet returned with foils and masks.
“Now, then, let us see what you can do.”
The pair put themselves on guard. Mitouflet, with his former prowess as
grenadier of the guard, made sixty-two passes at Gaudissart, pushed him
about right and left, and finally pinned him up against the wall.
“The deuce! you are strong,” said Gaudissart, out of breath.
“Monsieur Vernier is stronger than I am.”
“The devil! Damn it, I shall fight with pistols.”
“I advise you to do so; because, if you take large holster pistols and
load them up to their muzzles, you can’t risk anything. They are SURE to
fire wide of the mark, and both parties can retire from the field with
honor. Let me manage all that. Hein! ‘sapristi,’ two brave men would be
arrant fools to kill each other for a joke.”
“Are you sure the pistols will carry WIDE ENOUGH? I should be sorry to
kill the man, after all,” said Gaudissart.
“Sleep in peace,” answered Mitouflet, departing.
The next morning the two adversaries, more or less pale, met beside the
bridge of La Cise. The brave Vernier came near shooting a cow which was
peaceably feeding by the roadside.
“Ah, you fired in the air!” cried Gaudissart.
At these words the enemies embraced.
“Monsieur,” said the traveller, “your joke was rather rough, but it was
a good one for all that. I am sorry I apostrophized you: I was excited.
I regard you as a man of honor.”
“Monsieur, we take twenty subscriptions to the ‘Children’s Journal,’”
replied the dyer, still pale.
“That being so,” said Gaudissart, “why shouldn’t we all breakfast
together? Men who fight are always the ones to come to a good
understanding.”
“Monsieur Mitouflet,” said Gaudissart on his return to the inn, “of
course you have got a sheriff’s officer here?”
“What for?”
“I want to send a summons to my good friend Margaritis to deliver the
two casks of wine.”
“But he has not got them,” said Vernier.
“No matter for that; the affair can be arranged by the payment of an
indemnity. I won’t have it said that Vouvray outwitted the illustrious
Gaudissart.”
Madame Margaritis, alarmed at the prospect of a suit in which the
plaintiff would certainly win his case, brought thirty francs to the
placable traveller, who thereupon considered himself quits with the
happiest region of sunny France,--a region which is also, we must add,
the most recalcitrant to new and progressive ideas.
On returning from his trip through the southern departments, the
illustrious Gaudissart occupied the coupe of a diligence, where he met
a young man to whom, as they journeyed between Angouleme and Paris, he
deigned to explain the enigmas of life, taking him, apparently, for an
infant.
As they passed Vouvray the young man exclaimed, “What a fine site!”
“Yes, Monsieur,” said Gaudissart, “but not habitable on account of the
people. You get into duels every day. Why, it is not three months since
I fought one just there,” pointing to the bridge of La Cise, “with a
damned dyer; but I made an end of him,--he bit the dust!”
ADDENDUM
The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
Finot, Andoche
Cesar Birotteau
A Bachelor’s Establishment
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
The Government Clerks
A Start in Life
The Firm of Nucingen
Gaudissart, Felix
Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
Cousin Pons
Cesar Birotteau
Honorine
Popinot, Anselme
Cesar Birotteau
Cousin Pons
Cousin Betty
THE MUSE OF THE DEPARTMENT
Translated by James Waring
DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Comte Ferdinand de Gramont.
MY DEAR FERDINAND,--If the chances of the world of literature--
_habent sua fata libelli_--should allow these lines to be an
enduring record, that will still be but a trifle in return for the
trouble you have taken--you, the Hozier, the Cherin, the King-at-
Arms of these Studies of Life; you, to whom the Navarreins,
Cadignans, Langeais, Blamont-Chauvrys, Chaulieus, Arthez,
Esgrignons, Mortsaufs, Valois--the hundred great names that form
the Aristocracy of the “Human Comedy” owe their lordly mottoes and
ingenious armorial bearings. Indeed, “the Armorial of the Etudes,
devised by Ferdinand de Gramont, gentleman,” is a complete manual
of French Heraldry, in which nothing is forgotten, not even the
arms of the Empire, and I shall preserve it as a monument of
friendship and of Benedictine patience. What profound knowledge of
the old feudal spirit is to be seen in the motto of the
Beauseants, _Pulchre sedens, melius agens_; in that of the
Espards, _Des partem leonis_; in that of the Vandenesses, _Ne se
vend_. And what elegance in the thousand details of the learned
symbolism which will always show how far accuracy has been carried
in my work, to which you, the poet, have contributed.
Your old friend,
DE BALZAC.
On the skirts of Le Berry stands a town which, watered by the Loire,
infallibly attracts the traveler’s eye. Sancerre crowns the topmost
height of a chain of hills, the last of the range that gives variety to
the Nivernais. The Loire floods the flats at the foot of these slopes,
leaving a yellow alluvium that is extremely fertile, excepting in those
places where it has deluged them with sand and destroyed them forever,
by one of those terrible risings which are also incidental to the
Vistula--the Loire of the northern coast.
The hill on which the houses of Sancerre are grouped is so far from the
river that the little river-port of Saint-Thibault thrives on the life
of Sancerre. There wine is shipped and oak staves are landed, with all
the produce brought from the upper and lower Loire. At the period when
this story begins the suspension bridges at Cosne and at Saint-Thibault
were already built. Travelers from Paris to Sancerre by the
southern road were no longer ferried across the river from Cosne to
Saint-Thibault; and this of itself is enough to show that the great
cross-shuffle of 1830 was a thing of the past, for the House of Orleans
has always had a care for substantial improvements, though somewhat
after the fashion of a husband who makes his wife presents out of her
marriage portion.
Excepting that part of Sancerre which occupies the little plateau, the
streets are more or less steep, and the town is surrounded by slopes
known as the Great Ramparts, a name which shows that they are the
highroads of the place.
Outside the ramparts lies a belt of vineyards. Wine forms the chief
industry and the most important trade of the country, which yields
several vintages of high-class wine full of aroma, and so nearly
resembling the wines of Burgundy, that the vulgar palate is deceived. So
Sancerre finds in the wineshops of Paris the quick market indispensable
for liquor that will not keep for more than seven or eight years. Below
the town lie a few villages, Fontenoy and Saint-Satur, almost suburbs,
reminding us by their situation of the smiling vineyards about Neuchatel
in Switzerland.
The town still bears much of its ancient aspect; the streets are narrow
and paved with pebbles carted up from the Loire. Some old houses are to
be seen there. The citadel, a relic of military power and feudal times,
stood one of the most terrible sieges of our religious wars, when French
Calvinists far outdid the ferocious Cameronians of Walter Scott’s tales.
The town of Sancerre, rich in its greater past, but widowed now of its
military importance, is doomed to an even less glorious future, for the
course of trade lies on the right bank of the Loire. The sketch here
given shows that Sancerre will be left more and more lonely in spite of
the two bridges connecting it with Cosne.
Sancerre, the pride of the left bank, numbers three thousand five
hundred inhabitants at most, while at Cosne there are now more than
six thousand. Within half a century the part played by these two
towns standing opposite each other has been reversed. The advantage of
situation, however, remains with the historic town, whence the view on
every side is perfectly enchanting, where the air is deliciously pure,
the vegetation splendid, and the residents, in harmony with nature,
are friendly souls, good fellows, and devoid of Puritanism, though
two-thirds of the population are Calvinists. Under such conditions,
though there are the usual disadvantages of life in a small town, and
each one lives under the officious eye which makes private life almost
a public concern, on the other hand, the spirit of township--a sort
of patriotism, which cannot indeed take the place of a love of
home--flourishes triumphantly.
Thus the town of Sancerre is exceedingly proud of having given birth to
one of the glories of modern medicine, Horace Bianchon, and to an
author of secondary rank, Etienne Lousteau, one of our most successful
journalists. The district included under the municipality of Sancerre,
distressed at finding itself practically ruled by seven or eight large
landowners, the wire-pullers of the elections, tried to shake off the
electoral yoke of a creed which had reduced it to a rotten borough.
This little conspiracy, plotted by a handful of men whose vanity was
provoked, failed through the jealousy which the elevation of one of
them, as the inevitable result, roused in the breasts of the others.
This result showed the radical defect of the scheme, and the remedy then
suggested was to rally round a champion at the next election, in the
person of one of the two men who so gloriously represented Sancerre in
Paris circles.
This idea was extraordinarily advanced for the provinces, for since 1830
the nomination of parochial dignitaries has increased so greatly that
real statesmen are becoming rare indeed in the lower chamber.
In point of fact, this plan, of very doubtful outcome, was hatched in
the brain of the Superior Woman of the borough, _dux femina fasti_, but
with a view to personal interest. This idea was so widely rooted in this
lady’s past life, and so entirely comprehended her future prospects,
that it can scarcely be understood without some sketch of her antecedent
career.
Sancerre at that time could boast of a Superior Woman, long misprized
indeed, but now, about 1836, enjoying a pretty extensive local
reputation. This, too, was the period at which two Sancerrois in Paris
were attaining, each in his own line, to the highest degree of glory
for one, and of fashion for the other. Etienne Lousteau, a writer in
reviews, signed his name to contributions to a paper that had eight
thousand subscribers; and Bianchon, already chief physician to a
hospital, Officer of the Legion of Honor, and member of the Academy of
Sciences, had just been made a professor.
If it were not that the word would to many readers seem to imply a
degree of blame, it might be said that George Sand created _Sandism_, so
true is it that, morally speaking, all good has a reverse of evil. This
leprosy of sentimentality would have been charming. Still, _Sandism_ has
its good side, in that the woman attacked by it bases her assumption of
superiority on feelings scorned; she is a blue-stocking of sentiment;
and she is rather less of a bore, love to some extent neutralizing
literature. The most conspicuous result of George Sand’s celebrity
was to elicit the fact that France has a perfectly enormous number of
superior women, who have, however, till now been so generous as to leave
the field to the Marechal de Saxe’s granddaughter.
The Superior Woman of Sancerre lived at La Baudraye, a town-house
and country-house in one, within ten minutes of the town, and in the
village, or, if you will, the suburb of Saint-Satur. The La Baudrayes of
the present day have, as is frequently the case, thrust themselves in,
and are but a substitute for those La Baudrayes whose name, glorious in
the Crusades, figured in the chief events of the history of Le Berry.
The story must be told.
In the time of Louis XIV. a certain sheriff named Milaud, whose
forefathers had been furious Calvinists, was converted at the time of
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. To encourage this movement in
one of the strong-holds of Calvinism, the King gave said Milaud a good
appointment in the “Waters and Forests,” granted him arms and the title
of Sire (or Lord) de la Baudraye, with the fief of the old and genuine
La Baudrayes. The descendants of the famous Captain la Baudraye fell,
sad to say, into one of the snares laid for heretics by the new decrees,
and were hanged--an unworthy deed of the great King’s.
Under Louis XV. Milaud de la Baudraye, from being a mere squire,
was made Chevalier, and had influence enough to obtain for his son
a cornet’s commission in the Musketeers. This officer perished at
Fontenoy, leaving a child, to whom King Louis XVI. subsequently granted
the privileges, by patent, of a farmer-general, in remembrance of his
father’s death on the field of battle.
This financier, a fashionable wit, great at charades, capping verses,
and posies to Chlora, lived in society, was a hanger-on to the Duc
de Nivernais, and fancied himself obliged to follow the nobility into
exile; but he took care to carry his money with him. Thus the rich
_emigre_ was able to assist more than one family of high rank.
In 1800, tired of hoping, and perhaps tired of lending, he returned
to Sancerre, bought back La Baudraye out of a feeling of vanity and
imaginary pride, quite intelligible in a sheriff’s grandson, though
under the consulate his prospects were but slender; all the more so,
indeed, because the ex-farmer-general had small hopes of his heir’s
perpetuating the new race of La Baudraye.
Jean Athanase Polydore Milaud de la Baudraye, his only son, more than
delicate from his birth, was very evidently the child of a man whose
constitution had early been exhausted by the excesses in which rich men
indulge, who then marry at the first stage of premature old age, and
thus bring degeneracy into the highest circles of society. During the
years of the emigration Madame de la Baudraye, a girl of no fortune,
chosen for her noble birth, had patiently reared this sallow, sickly
boy, for whom she had the devoted love mothers feel for such changeling
creatures. Her death--she was a Casteran de la Tour--contributed to
bring about Monsieur de la Baudraye’s return to France.
This Lucullus of the Milauds, when he died, left his son the fief,
stripped indeed of its fines and dues, but graced with weathercocks
bearing his coat-of-arms, a thousand louis-d’or--in 1802 a considerable
sum of money--and certain receipts for claims on very distinguished
_emigres_ enclosed in a pocketbook full of verses, with this inscription
on the wrapper, _Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas_.
Young La Baudraye did not die, but he owed his life to habits of
monastic strictness; to the economy of action which Fontenelle preached
as the religion of the invalid; and, above all, to the air of Sancerre
and the influence of its fine elevation, whence a panorama over the
valley of the Loire may be seen extending for forty leagues.
From 1802 to 1815 young La Baudraye added several plots to his
vineyards, and devoted himself to the culture of the vine. The
Restoration seemed to him at first so insecure that he dared not go to
Paris to claim his debts; but after Napoleon’s death he tried to
turn his father’s collection of autographs into money, though not
understanding the deep philosophy which had thus mixed up I O U’s and
copies of verses. But the winegrower lost so much time in impressing his
identity on the Duke of Navarreins “and others,” as he phrased it,
that he came back to Sancerre, to his beloved vintage, without having
obtained anything but offers of service.
The Restoration had raised the nobility to such a degree of lustre as
made La Baudraye wish to justify his ambitions by having an heir. This
happy result of matrimony he considered doubtful, or he would not so
long have postponed the step; however, finding himself still above
ground in 1823, at the age of forty-three, a length of years which no
doctor, astrologer, or midwife would have dared to promise him, he hoped
to earn the reward of his sober life. And yet his choice showed such a
lack of prudence in regard to his frail constitution, that the malicious
wit of a country town could not help thinking it must be the result of
some deep calculation.
Just at this time His Eminence, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Bourges,
had converted to the Catholic faith a young person, the daughter of one
of the citizen families, who were the first upholders of Calvinism, and
who, thanks to their obscurity or to some compromise with Heaven, had
escaped from the persecutions under Louis XIV. The Piedefers--a name
that was obviously one of the quaint nicknames assumed by the champions
of the Reformation--had set up as highly respectable cloth merchants.
But in the reign of Louis XVI., Abraham Piedefer fell into difficulties,
and at his death in 1786 left his two children in extreme poverty. One
of them, Tobie Piedefer, went out to the Indies, leaving the pittance
they had inherited to his elder brother. During the Revolution Moise
Piedefer bought up the nationalized land, pulled down abbeys and
churches with all the zeal of his ancestors, oddly enough, and married
a Catholic, the only daughter of a member of the Convention who had
perished on the scaffold. This ambitious Piedefer died in 1819, leaving
a little girl of remarkable beauty. This child, brought up in the
Calvinist faith, was named Dinah, in accordance with the custom in use
among the sect, of taking their Christian names from the Bible, so as to
have nothing in common with the Saints of the Roman Church.
Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer was placed by her mother in one of the best
schools in Bourges, that kept by the Demoiselles Chamarolles, and was
soon as highly distinguished for the qualities of her mind as for her
beauty; but she found herself snubbed by girls of birth and fortune,
destined by-and-by to play a greater part in the world than a mere
plebeian, the daughter of a mother who was dependent on the settlement
of Piedefer’s estate. Dinah, having raised herself for the moment above
her companions, now aimed at remaining on a level with them for the rest
of her life. She determined, therefore, to renounce Calvinism, in the
hope that the Cardinal would extend his favor to his proselyte
and interest himself in her prospects. You may from this judge of
Mademoiselle Dinah’s superiority, since at the age of seventeen she was
a convert solely from ambition.
The Archbishop, possessed with the idea that Dinah Piedefer would adorn
society, was anxious to see her married. But every family to whom the
prelate made advances took fright at a damsel gifted with the looks of
a princess, who was reputed to be the cleverest of Mademoiselle
Chamarolles’ pupils and who, at the somewhat theatrical ceremonial of
prize-giving, always took a leading part. A thousand crowns a year,
which was as much as she could hope for from the estate of La Hautoy
when divided between the mother and daughter, would be a mere trifle in
comparison with the expenses into which a husband would be led by the
personal advantages of so brilliant a creature.
As soon as all these facts came to the ears of little Polydore de la
Baudraye--for they were the talk of every circle in the Department of
the Cher--he went to Bourges just when Madame Piedefer, a devotee at
high services, had almost made up her own mind and her daughter’s to
take the first comer with well-lined pockets--the first _chien coiffe_,
as they say in Le Berry. And if the Cardinal was delighted to receive
Monsieur de la Baudraye, Monsieur de la Baudraye was even better pleased
to receive a wife from the hands of the Cardinal. The little gentleman
only demanded of His Eminence a formal promise to support his claims
with the President of the Council to enable him to recover his debts
from the Duc de Navarreins “and others” by a lien on their indemnities.
This method, however, seemed to the able Minister then occupying the
Pavillon Marsan rather too sharp practice, and he gave the vine-owner to
understand that his business should be attended to all in good time.
It is easy to imagine the excitement produced in the Sancerre district
by the news of Monsieur de la Baudraye’s imprudent marriage.
“It is quite intelligible,” said President Boirouge; “the little man was
very much startled, as I am told, at hearing that handsome young Milaud,
the Attorney-General’s deputy at Nevers, say to Monsieur de Clagny as
they were looking at the turrets of La Baudraye, ‘That will
be mine some day.’--‘But,’ says Clagny, ‘he may marry and have
children.’--‘Impossible!’--So you may imagine how such a changeling as
little La Baudraye must hate that colossal Milaud.”
There was at Nevers a plebeian branch of the Milauds, which had grown so
rich in the cutlery trade that the present representative of that branch
had been brought up to the civil service, in which he had enjoyed the
patronage of Marchangy, now dead.
It will be as well to eliminate from this story, in which moral
developments play the principal part, the baser material interests which
alone occupied Monsieur de la Baudraye, by briefly relating the results
of his negotiations in Paris. This will also throw light on certain
mysterious phenomena of contemporary history, and the underground
difficulties in matters of politics which hampered the Ministry at the
time of the Restoration.
The promises of Ministers were so illusory that Monsieur de la Baudraye
determined on going to Paris at the time when the Cardinal’s presence
was required there by the sitting of the Chambers.
This is how the Duc de Navarreins, the principal debtor threatened by
Monsieur de la Baudraye, got out of the scrape.
The country gentleman, lodging at the Hotel de Mayence, Rue
Saint-Honore, near the Place Vendome, one morning received a visit from
a confidential agent of the Ministry, who was an expert in “winding up”
business. This elegant personage, who stepped out of an elegant cab, and
was dressed in the most elegant style, was requested to walk up to No.
3--that is to say, to the third floor, to a small room where he found
his provincial concocting a cup of coffee over his bedroom fire.
“Is it to Monsieur Milaud de la Baudraye that I have the honor--”
“Yes,” said the little man, draping himself in his dressing-gown.
After examining this garment, the illicit offspring of an old chine
wrapper of Madame Piedefer’s and a gown of the late lamented Madame de
la Baudraye, the emissary considered the man, the dressing-gown, and
the little stove on which the milk was boiling in a tin saucepan, as so
homogeneous and characteristic, that he deemed it needless to beat about
the bush.
“I will lay a wager, monsieur,” said he, audaciously, “that you dine for
forty sous at Hurbain’s in the Palais Royal.”
“Pray, why?”
“Oh, I know you, having seen you there,” replied the Parisian with
perfect gravity. “All the princes’ creditors dine there. You know that
you recover scarcely ten per cent on debts from these fine gentlemen.
I would not give you five per cent on a debt to be recovered from
the estate of the late Duc d’Orleans--nor even,” he added in a low
voice--“from MONSIEUR.”
“So you have come to buy up the bills?” said La Baudraye, thinking
himself very clever.
“Buy them!” said his visitor. “Why, what do you take me for? I am
Monsieur des Lupeaulx, Master of Appeals, Secretary-General to the
Ministry, and I have come to propose an arrangement.”
“What is that?”
“Of course, monsieur, you know the position of your debtor--”
“Of my debtors--”
“Well, monsieur, you understand the position of your debtors; they stand
high in the King’s good graces, but they have no money, and are obliged
to make a good show.--Again, you know the difficulties of the political
situation. The aristocracy has to be rehabilitated in the face of a very
strong force of the third estate. The King’s idea--and France does
him scant justice--is to create a peerage as a national institution
analogous to the English peerage. To realize this grand idea we need
years--and millions.--_Noblesse oblige_. The Duc de Navarreins, who is,
as you know, first gentleman of the Bedchamber to the King, does not
repudiate his debt; but he cannot--Now, be reasonable.--Consider the
state of politics. We are emerging from the pit of the Revolution.--and
you yourself are noble--He simply cannot pay--”
“Monsieur--”
“You are hasty,” said des Lupeaulx. “Listen. He cannot pay in money.
Well, then; you, a clever man, can take payment in favors--Royal or
Ministerial.”
“What! When in 1793 my father put down one hundred thousand--”
“My dear sir, recrimination is useless. Listen to a simple statement in
political arithmetic: The collectorship at Sancerre is vacant; a certain
paymaster-general of the forces has a claim on it, but he has no chance
of getting it; you have the chance--and no claim. You will get the
place. You will hold it for three months, you will then resign, and
Monsieur Gravier will give twenty thousand francs for it. In addition,
the Order of the Legion of Honor will be conferred on you.”
“Well, that is something,” said the wine-grower, tempted by the money
rather than by the red ribbon.
“But then,” said des Lupeaulx, “you must show your gratitude to His
Excellency by restoring to Monseigneur the Duc de Navarreins all your
claims on him.”
La Baudraye returned to Sancerre as Collector of Taxes. Six months
later he was superseded by Monsieur Gravier, regarded as one of the most
agreeable financiers who had served under the Empire, and who was of
course presented by Monsieur de la Baudraye to his wife.
As soon as he was released from his functions, Monsieur de la Baudraye
returned to Paris to come to an understanding with some other debtors.
This time he was made a Referendary under the Great Seal, Baron, and
Officer of the Legion of Honor. He sold the appointment as Referendary;
and then the Baron de la Baudraye called on his last remaining debtors,
and reappeared at Sancerre as Master of Appeals, with an appointment
as Royal Commissioner to a commercial association established in the
Nivernais, at a salary of six thousand francs, an absolute sinecure. So
the worthy La Baudraye, who was supposed to have committed a financial
blunder, had, in fact, done very good business in the choice of a wife.
Thanks to sordid economy and an indemnity paid him for the estate
belonging to his father, nationalized and sold in 1793, by the year 1827
the little man could realize the dream of his whole life. By paying
four hundred thousand francs down, and binding himself to further
instalments, which compelled him to live for six years on the air as it
came, to use his own expression, he was able to purchase the estate of
Anzy on the banks of the Loire, about two leagues above Sancerre, and
its magnificent castle built by Philibert de l’Orme, the admiration of
every connoisseur, and for five centuries the property of the Uxelles
family. At last he was one of the great landowners of the province!
It is not absolutely certain that the satisfaction of knowing that an
entail had been created, by letters patent dated back to December 1820,
including the estates of Anzy, of La Baudraye, and of La Hautoy, was
any compensation to Dinah on finding herself reduced to unconfessed
penuriousness till 1835.
This sketch of the financial policy of the first Baron de la Baudraye
explains the man completely. Those who are familiar with the manias of
country folks will recognize in him the _land-hunger_ which becomes such
a consuming passion to the exclusion of every other; a sort of avarice
displayed in the sight of the sun, which often leads to ruin by a want
of balance between the interest on mortgages and the products of the
soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely laughed at the little
man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault and attending to his
business, like a merchant living on his vineyards, found the answer to
the riddle when the ant-lion seized his prey, after waiting for the day
when the extravagance of the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse culminated in the
sale of that splendid property.
Madame Piedefer came to live with her daughter. The combined fortunes of
Monsieur de la Baudraye and his mother-in-law, who had been content to
accept an annuity of twelve hundred francs on the lands of La Hautoy
which she handed over to him, amounted to an acknowledged income of
about fifteen thousand francs.
During the early days of her married life, Dinah had effected some
alterations which had made the house at La Baudraye a very pleasant
residence. She turned a spacious forecourt into a formal garden, pulling
down wine-stores, presses, and shabby outhouses. Behind the manor-house,
which, though small, did not lack style with its turrets and gables,
she laid out a second garden with shrubs, flower-beds, and lawns, and
divided it from the vineyards by a wall hidden under creepers. She
also made everything within doors as comfortable as their narrow
circumstances allowed.
In order not to be ruined by a young lady so very superior as Dinah
seemed to be, Monsieur de la Baudraye was shrewd enough to say nothing
as to the recovery of debts in Paris. This dead secrecy as to his money
matters gave a touch of mystery to his character, and lent him dignity
in his wife’s eyes during the first years of their married life--so
majestic is silence!
The alterations effected at La Baudraye made everybody eager to see the
young mistress, all the more so because Dinah would never show herself,
nor receive any company, before she felt quite settled in her home and
had thoroughly studied the inhabitants, and, above all, her taciturn
husband. When, one spring morning in 1825, pretty Madame de la Baudraye
was first seen walking on the Mall in a blue velvet dress, with her
mother in black velvet, there was quite an excitement in Sancerre. This
dress confirmed the young woman’s reputation for superiority, brought
up, as she had been, in the capital of Le Berry. Every one was afraid
lest in entertaining this phoenix of the Department, the conversation
should not be clever enough; and, of course, everybody was constrained
in the presence of Madame de la Baudraye, who produced a sort of terror
among the woman-folk. As they admired a carpet of Indian shawl-pattern
in the La Baudraye drawing-room, a Pompadour writing-table carved and
gilt, brocade window curtains, and a Japanese bowl full of flowers on
the round table among a selection of the newest books; when they heard
the fair Dinah playing at sight, without making the smallest demur
before seating herself at the piano, the idea they conceived of her
superiority assumed vast proportions. That she might never allow herself
to become careless or the victim of bad taste, Dinah had determined to
keep herself up to the mark as to the fashions and latest developments
of luxury by an active correspondence with Anna Grossetete, her bosom
friend at Mademoiselle Chamarolles’ school.
Anna, thanks to a fine fortune, had married the Comte de Fontaine’s
third son. Thus those ladies who visited at La Baudraye were perpetually
piqued by Dinah’s success in leading the fashion; do what they would,
they were always behind, or, as they say on the turf, distanced.
While all these trifles gave rise to malignant envy in the ladies of
Sancerre, Dinah’s conversation and wit engendered absolute aversion.
In her ambition to keep her mind on the level of Parisian brilliancy,
Madame de la Baudraye allowed no vacuous small talk in her presence, no
old-fashioned compliments, no pointless remarks; she would never endure
the yelping of tittle-tattle, the backstairs slander which forms the
staple of talk in the country. She liked to hear of discoveries in
science or art, or the latest pieces at the theatres, the newest poems,
and by airing the cant words of the day she made a show of uttering
thoughts.
The Abbe Duret, Cure of Sancerre, an old man of a lost type of clergy
in France, a man of the world with a liking for cards, had not dared to
indulge this taste in so liberal a district as Sancerre; he, therefore,
was delighted at Madame de la Baudraye’s coming, and they got on
together to admiration. The _sous-prefet_, one Vicomte de Chargeboeuf,
was delighted to find in Madame de la Baudraye’s drawing-room a sort
of oasis where there was a truce to provincial life. As to Monsieur de
Clagny, the Public Prosecutor, his admiration for the fair Dinah kept
him bound to Sancerre. The enthusiastic lawyer refused all promotion,
and became a quite pious adorer of this angel of grace and beauty. He
was a tall, lean man, with a minatory countenance set off by terrible
eyes in deep black circles, under enormous eyebrows; and his eloquence,
very unlike his love-making, could be incisive.
Monsieur Gravier was a little, round man, who in the days of the Empire
had been a charming ballad-singer; it was this accomplishment that had
won him the high position of Paymaster-General of the forces. Having
mixed himself up in certain important matters in Spain with generals at
that time in opposition, he had made the most of these connections to
the Minister, who, in consideration of the place he had lost, promised
him the Receivership at Sancerre, and then allowed him to pay for the
appointment. The frivolous spirit and light tone of the Empire had
become ponderous in Monsieur Gravier; he did not, or would not,
understand the wide difference between manners under the Restoration
and under the Empire. Still, he conceived of himself as far superior
to Monsieur de Clagny; his style was in better taste; he followed the
fashion, was to be seen in a buff waistcoat, gray trousers, and neat,
tightly-fitting coats; he wore a fashionable silk tie slipped through
a diamond ring, while the lawyer never dressed in anything but
black--coat, trousers, and waistcoat alike, and those often shabby.
These four men were the first to go into ecstasies over Dinah’s
cultivation, good taste, and refinement, and pronounced her a woman of
most superior mind. Then the women said to each other, “Madame de la
Baudraye must laugh at us behind our back.”
This view, which was more or less correct, kept them from visiting at La
Baudraye. Dinah, attainted and convicted of pedantry, because she
spoke grammatically, was nicknamed the Sappho of Saint-Satur. At last
everybody made insolent game of the great qualities of the woman who
had thus roused the enmity of the ladies of Sancerre. And they ended by
denying a superiority--after all, merely comparative!--which emphasized
their ignorance, and did not forgive it. Where the whole population is
hunch-backed, a straight shape is the monstrosity; Dinah was regarded as
monstrous and dangerous, and she found herself in a desert.
Astonished at seeing the women of the neighborhood only at long
intervals, and for visits of a few minutes, Dinah asked Monsieur de
Clagny the reason of this state of things.
“You are too superior a woman to be liked by other women,” said the
lawyer.
Monsieur Gravier, when questioned by the forlorn fair, only, after much
entreaty, replied:
“Well, lady fair, you are not satisfied to be merely charming. You are
clever and well educated, you know every book that comes out, you love
poetry, you are a musician, and you talk delightfully. Women cannot
forgive so much superiority.”
Men said to Monsieur de la Baudraye:
“You who have such a Superior Woman for a wife are very fortunate----”
And at last he himself would say:
“I who have a Superior Woman for a wife, am very fortunate,” etc.
Madame Piedefer, flattered through her daughter, also allowed herself to
say such things--“My daughter, who is a very Superior Woman, was writing
yesterday to Madame de Fontaine such and such a thing.”
Those who know the world--France, Paris--know how true it is that many
celebrities are thus created.
Two years later, by the end of the year 1825, Dinah de la Baudraye was
accused of not choosing to have any visitors but men; then it was said
that she did not care for women--and that was a crime. Not a thing
could she do, not her most trifling action, could escape criticism and
misrepresentation. After making every sacrifice that a well-bred woman
can make, and placing herself entirely in the right, Madame de la
Baudraye was so rash as to say to a false friend who condoled with her
on her isolation:
“I would rather have my bowl empty than with anything in it!”
This speech produced a terrible effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly
retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after
five years of married life, _little_ de la Baudraye became a byword
for laughter. To understand this provincial witticism, readers may be
reminded of the Bailli de Ferrette--some, no doubt, having known him--of
whom it was said that he was the bravest man in Europe for daring to
walk on his legs, and who was accused of putting lead in his shoes to
save himself from being blown away. Monsieur de la Baudraye, a sallow
and almost diaphanous creature, would have been engaged by the Bailli de
Ferrette as first gentleman-in-waiting if that diplomatist had been the
Grand Duke of Baden instead of being merely his envoy.
Monsieur de la Baudraye, whose legs were so thin that, for mere decency,
he wore false calves, whose thighs were like the arms of an average
man, whose body was not unlike that of a cockchafer, would have been an
advantageous foil to the Bailli de Ferrette. As he walked, the little
vine-owner’s leg-pads often twisted round on to his shins, so little did
he make a secret of them, and he would thank any one who warned him of
this little mishap. He wore knee-breeches, black silk stockings, and a
white waistcoat till 1824. After his marriage he adopted blue trousers
and boots with heels, which made Sancerre declare that he had added two
inches to his stature that he might come up to his wife’s chin. For ten
years he was always seen in the same little bottle-green coat with large
white-metal buttons, and a black stock that accentuated his cold stingy
face, lighted up by gray-blue eyes as keen and passionless as a cat’s.
Being very gentle, as men are who act on a fixed plan of conduct, he
seemed to make his wife happy by never contradicting her; he allowed
her to do the talking, and was satisfied to move with the deliberate
tenacity of an insect.
Dinah, adored for her beauty, in which she had no rival, and admired
for her cleverness by the most gentlemanly men of the place, encouraged
their admiration by conversations, for which it was subsequently
asserted, she prepared herself beforehand. Finding herself listened to
with rapture, she soon began to listen to herself, enjoyed haranguing
her audience, and at last regarded her friends as the chorus in a
tragedy, there only to give her her cues. In fact, she had a very
fine collection of phrases and ideas, derived either from books or by
assimilating the opinions of her companions, and thus became a sort of
mechanical instrument, going off on a round of phrases as soon as some
chance remark released the spring. To do her justice, Dinah was choke
full of knowledge, and read everything, even medical books, statistics,
science, and jurisprudence; for she did not know how to spend her
days when she had reviewed her flower-beds and given her orders to the
gardener. Gifted with an excellent memory, and the talent which some
women have for hitting on the right word, she could talk on any subject
with the lucidity of a studied style. And so men came from Cosne, from
la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right bank; from Lere, Vailly,
Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left bank, to be introduced to
Madame de la Baudraye, as they used in Switzerland, to be introduced to
Madame de Stael. Those who only once heard the round of tunes emitted by
this musical snuff-box went away amazed, and told such wonders of Dinah
as made all the women jealous for ten leagues round.
There is an indescribable mental headiness in the admiration we inspire,
or in the effect of playing a part, which fends off criticism from
reaching the idol. An atmosphere, produced perhaps by unceasing nervous
tension, forms a sort of halo, through which the world below is seen.
How otherwise can we account for the perennial good faith which leads
to so many repeated presentments of the same effects, and the constant
ignoring of warnings given by children, such a terror to their parents,
or by husbands, so familiar as they are with the peacock airs of their
wives? Monsieur de la Baudraye had the frankness of a man who opens an
umbrella at the first drop of rain. When his wife was started on the
subject of Negro emancipation or the improvement of convict prisons,
he would take up his little blue cap and vanish without a sound, in the
certainty of being able to get to Saint-Thibault to see off a cargo of
puncheons, and return an hour later to find the discussion approaching a
close. Or, if he had no business to attend to, he would go for a walk on
the Mall, whence he commanded the lovely panorama of the Loire valley,
and take a draught of fresh air while his wife was performing a sonata
in words, or a dialectical duet.
Once fairly established as a Superior Woman, Dinah was eager to prove
her devotion to the most remarkable creations of art. She threw herself
into the propaganda of the romantic school, including, under Art, poetry
and painting, literature and sculpture, furniture and the opera. Thus
she became a mediaevalist. She was also interested in any treasures that
dated from the Renaissance, and employed her allies as so many devoted
commission agents. Soon after she was married, she had become possessed
of the Rougets’ furniture, sold at Issoudun early in 1824. She purchased
some very good things at Nivernais and the Haute-Loire. At the New
Year and on her birthday her friends never failed to give her some
curiosities. These fancies found favor in the eyes of Monsieur de la
Baudraye; they gave him an appearance of sacrificing a few crowns to his
wife’s taste. In point of fact, his land mania allowed him to think of
nothing but the estate of Anzy.
These “antiquities” at that time cost much less than modern furniture.
By the end of five or six years the ante-room, the dining-room, the two
drawing-rooms, and the boudoir which Dinah had arranged on the ground
floor of La Baudraye, every spot even to the staircase, were crammed
with masterpieces collected in the four adjacent departments. These
surroundings, which were called _queer_ by the neighbors, were quite in
harmony with Dinah. All these Marvels, so soon to be the rage, struck
the imagination of the strangers introduced to her; they came expecting
something unusual; and they found their expectations surpassed when,
behind a bower of flowers, they saw these catacombs full of old things,
piled up as Sommerard used to pile them--that “Old Mortality” of
furniture. And then these finds served as so many springs which, turned
on by a question, played off an essay on Jean Goujon, Michel Columb,
Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher, the great native painter
of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood, on Venetian mirrors, on
Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the Michael-Angelo of boxwood
and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of Bernard de Palissy, the enamels
of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht Durer--whom she called Dur;
on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic architecture, early decorated,
flamboyant and pure--enough to turn an old man’s brain and fire a young
man with enthusiasm.
Madame de la Baudraye, possessed with the idea of waking up Sancerre,
tried to form a so-called literary circle. The Presiding Judge, Monsieur
Boirouge, who happened to have a house and garden on his hands, part of
the Popinot-Chandier property, favored the notion of this _coterie_.
The wily Judge talked over the rules of the society with Madame de la
Baudraye; he proposed to figure as one of the founders, and to let the
house for fifteen years to the literary club. By the time it had existed
a year the members were playing dominoes, billiards, and bouillotte, and
drinking mulled wine, punch, and liqueurs. A few elegant little suppers
were then given, and some masked balls during the Carnival. As to
literature--there were the newspapers. Politics and business were
discussed. Monsieur de la Baudraye was constantly there--on his wife’s
account, as she said jestingly.
This result deeply grieved the Superior Woman, who despaired of
Sancerre, and collected the wit of the neighborhood in her own
drawing-room. Nevertheless, and in spite of the efforts of Messieurs de
Chargeboeuf, Gravier, and de Clagny, of the Abbe Duret and the two chief
magistrates, of a young doctor, and a young Assistant Judge--all blind
admirers of Dinah’s--there were occasions when, weary of discussion,
they allowed themselves an excursion into the domain of agreeable
frivolity which constitutes the common basis of worldly conversation.
Monsieur Gravier called this “from grave to gay.” The Abbe Duret’s
rubber made another pleasing variety on the monologues of the oracle.
The three rivals, tired of keeping their minds up to the level of the
“high range of discussion”--as they called their conversation--but not
daring to confess it, would sometimes turn with ingratiating hints to
the old priest.
“Monsieur le Cure is dying for his game,” they would say.
The wily priest lent himself very readily to the little trick. He
protested.
“We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired hostess!”
and so he would incite Dinah’s magnanimity to take pity at last on her
dear Abbe.
This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet’s, was repeated with
so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the
prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her one
of the younger functionaries to harry.
One young landowner, and the dandy of Sancerre, fell away from Dinah’s
good graces in consequence of some rash demonstrations. After soliciting
the honor of admission to this little circle, where he flattered himself
he could snatch the blossom from the constituted authorities who guarded
it, he was so unfortunate as to yawn in the middle of an explanation
Dinah was favoring him with--for the fourth time, it is true--of the
philosophy of Kant. Monsieur de la Thaumassiere, the grandson of the
historian of Le Berry, was thenceforth regarded as a man entirely bereft
of soul and brains.
The three devotees _en titre_ each submitted to these exorbitant demands
on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph, when at last
Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so bold as to imagine
that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife till she should have
lost all her illusions. In 1826, when she was surrounded by adorers,
Dinah completed her twentieth year, and the Abbe Duret kept her in
a sort of fervid Catholicism; so her worshipers had to be content to
overwhelm her with little attentions and small services, only too happy
to be taken for the carpet-knights of this sovereign lady, by strangers
admitted to spend an evening or two at La Baudraye.
“Madame de la Baudraye is a fruit that must be left to ripen.” This was
the opinion of Monsieur Gravier, who was waiting.
As to the lawyer, he wrote letters four pages long, to which Dinah
replied in soothing speech as she walked, leaning on his arm, round and
round the lawn after dinner.
Madame de la Baudraye, thus guarded by three passions, and always under
the eye of her pious mother, escaped the malignity of slander. It was so
evident to all Sancerre that no two of these three men would ever leave
the third alone with Madame de la Baudraye, that their jealousy was a
comedy to the lookers-on.
To reach Saint-Thibault from Caesar’s Gate there is a way much shorter
than that by the ramparts, down what is known in mountainous districts
as a _coursiere_, called at Sancerre _le Casse-cou_, or Break-neck
Alley. The name is significant as applied to a path down the steepest
part of the hillside, thickly strewn with stones, and shut in by the
high banks of the vineyards on each side. By way of the Break-neck the
distance from Sancerre to La Baudraye is much abridged. The ladies of
the place, jealous of the Sappho of Saint-Satur, were wont to walk on
the Mall, looking down this Longchamp of the bigwigs, whom they would
stop and engage in conversation--sometimes the Sous-prefet and
sometimes the Public Prosecutor--and who would listen with every sign of
impatience or uncivil absence of mind. As the turrets of La Baudraye are
visible from the Mall, many a younger man came to contemplate the abode
of Dinah while envying the ten or twelve privileged persons who might
spend their afternoons with the Queen of the neighborhood.
Monsieur de la Baudraye was not slow to discover the advantage he, as
Dinah’s husband, held over his wife’s adorers, and he made use of them
without any disguise, obtaining a remission of taxes, and gaining two
lawsuits. In every litigation he used the Public Prosecutor’s name with
such good effect that the matter was carried no further, and, like all
undersized men, he was contentious and litigious in business, though in
the gentlest manner.
At the same time, the more certainly guiltless she was, the less
conceivable did Madame de la Baudraye’s position seem to the prying eyes
of these women. Frequently, at the house of the Presidente de Boirouge,
the ladies of a certain age would spend a whole evening discussing
the La Baudraye household, among themselves of course. They all had
suspicions of a mystery, a secret such as always interests women who
have had some experience of life. And, in fact, at La Baudraye one of
those slow and monotonous conjugal tragedies was being played out which
would have remained for ever unknown if the merciless scalpel of the
nineteenth century, guided by the insistent demand for novelty, had not
dissected the darkest corners of the heart, or at any rate those which
the decency of past centuries left unopened. And that domestic drama
sufficiently accounts for Dinah’s immaculate virtue during her early
married life.
A young lady, whose triumphs at school had been the outcome of her
pride, and whose first scheme in life had been rewarded by a victory,
was not likely to pause in such a brilliant career. Frail as Monsieur
de la Baudraye might seem, he was really an unhoped-for good match for
Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer. But what was the hidden motive of this
country landowner when, at forty-four, he married a girl of seventeen;
and what could his wife make out of the bargain? This was the text of
Dinah’s first meditations.
The little man never behaved quite as his wife expected. To begin with,
he allowed her to take the five precious acres now wasted in pleasure
grounds round La Baudraye, and paid, almost with generosity, the seven
or eight thousand francs required by Dinah for improvements in the
house, enabling her to buy the furniture at the Rougets’ sale at
Issoudun, and to redecorate her rooms in various styles--Mediaeval,
Louis XIV., and Pompadour. The young wife found it difficult to believe
that Monsieur de la Baudraye was so miserly as he was reputed, or else
she must have great influence with him. The illusion lasted a year and a
half.
After Monsieur de la Baudraye’s second journey to Paris, Dinah
discovered in him the Artic coldness of a provincial miser whenever
money was in question. The first time she asked for supplies she played
the sweetest of the comedies of which Eve invented the secret; but
the little man put it plainly to his wife that he gave her two hundred
francs a month for her personal expenses, and paid Madame Piedefer
twelve hundred francs a year as a charge on the lands of La Hautoy, and
that this was two hundred francs a year more than was agreed to under
the marriage settlement.
“I say nothing of the cost of housekeeping,” he said in conclusion. “You
may give your friends cake and tea in the evening, for you must have
some amusement. But I, who spent but fifteen hundred francs a year as a
bachelor, now spend six thousand, including rates and repairs, and
this is rather too much in relation to the nature of our property. A
winegrower is never sure of what his expenses may be--the making, the
duty, the casks--while the returns depend on a scorching day or a sudden
frost. Small owners, like us, whose income is far from being fixed, must
base their estimates on their minimum, for they have no means of making
up a deficit or a loss. What would become of us if a wine merchant
became bankrupt? In my opinion, promissory notes are so many
cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to have
a year’s income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of our
returns.”
Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it; Dinah
flung herself against a will of iron padded round with gentleness. She
tried to fill the little man’s soul with jealousy and alarms, but it
was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah, when he went to
Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique’s fidelity. When
she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by the scorn a
courtesan sometimes shows to her “protector,” and which acts on him with
the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur de la Baudraye gazed
at his wife with fixed eyes, like those of a cat which, in the midst of
domestic broils, waits till a blow is threatened before stirring from
its place. The strange, speechless uneasiness that was perceptible under
his mute indifference almost terrified the young wife of twenty; she
could not at first understand the selfish quiescence of this man, who
might be compared to a cracked pot, and who, in order to live, regulated
his existence with the unchangeable regularity which a clockmaker
requires of a clock. So the little man always evaded his wife, while she
always hit out, as it were, ten feet above his head.
Dinah’s fits of fury when she saw herself condemned never to escape from
La Baudraye and Sancerre are more easily imagined than described--she
who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf whom she,
the giant, had at first humored in order to command. In the hope of some
day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris, she accepted
the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view to seeing
Monsieur de la Baudraye’s name drawn from the electoral urn; for she
supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice from Paris,
each time a step higher on the social ladder. But when she struck on the
man’s heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble! The man who had
been Receiver-General and Referendary, who was now Master of Appeals,
Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Royal Commissioner, was but a mole
throwing up its little hills round and round a vineyard! Then some
lamentations were poured into the heart of the Public Prosecutor, of the
Sous-prefet, even of Monsieur Gravier, and they all increased in
their devotion to this sublime victim; for, like all women, she never
mentioned her speculative schemes, and--again like all women--finding
such speculation vain, she ceased to speculate.
Dinah, tossed by mental storms, was still undecided when, in the autumn
of 1827, the news was told of the purchase by the Baron de la Baudraye
of the estate of Anzy. Then the little old man showed an impulsion of
pride and glee which for a few months changed the current of his wife’s
ideas; she fancied there was a hidden vein of greatness in the man when
she found him applying for a patent of entail. In his triumph the Baron
exclaimed:
“Dinah, you shall be a countess yet!”
There was then a patched-up reunion between the husband and wife, such
as can never endure, and which only humiliated and fatigued a woman
whose apparent superiority was unreal, while her unseen superiority was
genuine. This whimsical medley is commoner than people think. Dinah, who
was ridiculous from the perversity of her cleverness, had really great
qualities of soul, but circumstances did not bring these rarer powers to
light, while a provincial life debased the small change of her wit from
day to day. Monsieur de la Baudraye, on the contrary, devoid of soul, of
strength, and of wit, was fated to figure as a man of character, simply
by pursuing a plan of conduct which he was too feeble to change.
There was in their lives a first phase, lasting six years, during which
Dinah, alas! became utterly provincial. In Paris there are several kinds
of women: the duchess and the financier’s wife, the ambassadress and the
consul’s wife, the wife of the minister who is a minister, and of him
who is no longer a minister; then there is the lady--quite the lady--of
the right bank of the Seine and of the left. But in the country there is
but one kind of woman, and she, poor thing, is the provincial woman.
This remark points to one of the sores of modern society. It must be
clearly understood: France in the nineteenth century is divided into two
broad zones--Paris, and the provinces. The provinces jealous of Paris;
Paris never thinking of the provinces but to demand money. Of old, Paris
was the Capital of the provinces, and the court ruled the Capital; now,
all Paris is the Court, and all the country is the town.
However lofty, beautiful, and clever a girl born in any department of
France may be on entering life, if, like Dinah Piedefer, she marries
in the country and remains there, she inevitably becomes the provincial
woman. In spite of every determination, the commonplace of second-rate
ideas, indifference to dress, the culture of vulgar people, swamp the
sublimer essence hidden in the youthful plant; all is over, it falls
into decay. How should it be otherwise? From their earliest years
girls bred in the country see none but provincials; they cannot imagine
anything superior, their choice lies among mediocrities; provincial
fathers marry their daughters to provincial sons; crossing the races is
never thought of, and the brain inevitably degenerates, so that in many
country towns intellect is as rare as the breed is hideous. Mankind
becomes dwarfed in mind and body, for the fatal principle of conformity
of fortune governs every matrimonial alliance. Men of talent, artists,
superior brains--every bird of brilliant plumage flies to Paris. The
provincial woman, inferior in herself, is also inferior through
her husband. How is she to live happy under this crushing twofold
consciousness?
But there is a third and terrible element besides her congenital and
conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and
gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the
most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of
being something in the existence of a superior man, chosen by herself,
wittingly, as if to have some revenge on marriage, wherein her tastes
were so little consulted? But if in the country the husbands are
inferior beings, the bachelors are no less so. When a provincial wife
commits her “little sin,” she falls in love with some so-called handsome
native, some indigenous dandy, a youth who wears gloves and is supposed
to ride well; but she knows at the bottom of her soul that her fancy
is in pursuit of the commonplace, more or less well dressed. Dinah was
preserved from this danger by the idea impressed upon her of her own
superiority. Even if she had not been as carefully guarded in her early
married life as she was by her mother, whose presence never weighed upon
her till the day when she wanted to be rid of it, her pride, and her
high sense of her own destinies, would have protected her. Flattered as
she was to find herself surrounded by admirers, she saw no lover
among them. No man here realized the poetical ideal which she and Anna
Grossetete had been wont to sketch. When, stirred by the involuntary
temptations suggested by the homage she received, she asked herself, “If
I had to make a choice, who should it be?” she owned to a preference for
Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, a gentleman of good family, whose appearance
and manners she liked, but whose cold nature, selfishness, and narrow
ambition, never rising above a prefecture and a good marriage, repelled
her. At a word from his family, who were alarmed lest he should be
killed for an intrigue, the Vicomte had already deserted a woman he had
loved in the town where he previously had been Sous-prefet.
Monsieur de Clagny, on the other hand, the only man whose mind appealed
to hers, whose ambition was founded on love, and who knew what love
means, Dinah thought perfectly odious. When Dinah saw herself condemned
to six years’ residence at Sancerre she was on the point of accepting
the devotion of Monsieur le Vicomte de Chargeboeuf; but he was appointed
to a prefecture and left the district. To Monsieur de Clagny’s great
satisfaction, the new Sous-prefet was a married man whose wife made
friends with Dinah. The lawyer had now no rival to fear but Monsieur
Gravier. Now Monsieur Gravier was the typical man of forty of whom women
make use while they laugh at him, whose hopes they intentionally and
remorselessly encourage, as we are kind to a beast of burden. In six
years, among all the men who were introduced to her from twenty leagues
round, there was not one in whose presence Dinah was conscious of the
excitement caused by personal beauty, by a belief in promised happiness,
by the impact of a superior soul, or the anticipation of a love affair,
even an unhappy one.
Thus none of Dinah’s choicest faculties had a chance of developing;
she swallowed many insults to her pride, which was constantly suffering
under the husband who so calmly walked the stage as supernumerary in the
drama of her life. Compelled to bury her wealth of love, she showed only
the surface to the world. Now and then she would try to rouse herself,
try to form some manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings
by the need for money. And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious
protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent
the provincial metamorphosis here described. Each day took with it a
fragment of her spirited determination. She had laid down a rule for the
care of her person, which she gradually departed from. Though at first
she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life,
she was obliged to limit her purchases by the amount of her allowance.
Instead of six hats, caps, or gowns, she resigned herself to one gown
each season. She was so much admired in a certain bonnet that she made
it do duty for two seasons. So it was in everything.
Not unfrequently her artistic sense led her to sacrifice the
requirements of her person to secure some bit of Gothic furniture. By
the seventh year she had come so low as to think it convenient to
have her morning dresses made at home by the best needlewoman in the
neighborhood; and her mother, her husband, and her friends pronounced
her charming in these inexpensive costumes which did credit to her
taste. Her ideas were imitated! As she had no standard of comparison,
Dinah fell into the snares that surround the provincial woman. If a
Parisian woman’s hips are too narrow or too full, her inventive wit and
the desire to please help to find some heroic remedy; if she has some
defect, some ugly spot, or small disfigurement, she is capable of making
it an adornment; this is often seen; but the provincial woman--never! If
her waist is too short and her figure ill balanced, well, she makes up
her mind to the worst, and her adorers--or they do not adore her--must
take her as she is, while the Parisian always insists on being taken for
what she is not. Hence the preposterous bustles, the audacious flatness,
the ridiculous fulness, the hideous outlines ingeniously displayed, to
which a whole town will become accustomed, but which are so astounding
when a provincial woman makes her appearance in Paris or among
Parisians. Dinah, who was extremely slim, showed it off to excess, and
never knew a dull moment when it became ridiculous; when, reduced by the
dull weariness of her life, she looked like a skeleton in clothes; and
her friends, seeing her every day, did not observe the gradual change in
her appearance.
This is one of the natural results of a provincial life. In spite of
marriage, a young woman preserves her beauty for some time, and the town
is proud of her; but everybody sees her every day, and when people meet
every day their perception is dulled. If, like Madame de la Baudraye,
she loses her color, it is scarcely noticed; or, again, if she flushes
a little, that is intelligible and interesting. A little neglect is
thought charming, and her face is so carefully studied, so well known,
that slight changes are scarcely noticed, and regarded at last as
“beauty spots.” When Dinah ceased to have a new dress with a new season,
she seemed to have made a concession to the philosophy of the place.
It is the same with matters of speech, choice of words and ideas, as it
is with matters of feeling. The mind can rust as well as the body if
it is not rubbed up in Paris; but the thing on which provincialism
most sets its stamp is gesture, gait, and movement; these soon lose the
briskness which Paris constantly keeps alive. The provincial is used to
walk and move in a world devoid of accident or change, there is nothing
to be avoided; so in Paris she walks on as raw recruits do, never
remembering that there may be hindrances, for there are none in her
way in her native place, where she is known, where she is always in her
place, and every one makes way for her. Thus she loses all the charm of
the unforeseen.
And have you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in
common? By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend to
copy each other. Each one, without knowing it, acquires the gestures,
the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very countenance of
others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the society she
lived in. As she acquired Monsieur de Clagny’s ideas she assumed his
tone of voice; she unconsciously fell into masculine manners from seeing
none but men; she fancied that by laughing at what was ridiculous in
them she was safe from catching it; but, as often happens, some hue of
what she laughed at remained in the grain.
A Parisian woman sees so many examples of good taste that a contrary
result ensues. In Paris women learn to seize the hour and moment when
they may appear to advantage; while Madame de la Baudraye, accustomed
to take the stage, acquired an indefinable theatrical and domineering
manner, the air of a _prima donna_ coming forward on the boards, of
which ironical smiles would soon have cured her in the capital.
But after she had acquired this stock of absurdities, and, deceived by
her worshipers, imagined them to be added graces, a moment of terrible
awakening came upon her like the fall of an avalanche from a mountain.
In one day she was crushed by a frightful comparison.
In 1829, after the departure of Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, she was excited
by the anticipation of a little pleasure; she was expecting the Baronne
de Fontaine. Anna’s husband, who was now Director-General under the
Minister of Finance, took advantage of leave of absence on the occasion
of his father’s death to take his wife to Italy. Anna wished to spend
the day at Sancerre with her school-friend. This meeting was strangely
disastrous. Anna, who at school had been far less handsome than Dinah,
now, as Baronne de Fontaine, was a thousand times handsomer than the
Baronne de la Baudraye, in spite of her fatigue and her traveling
dress. Anna stepped out of an elegant traveling chaise loaded with Paris
milliners’ boxes, and she had with her a lady’s maid, whose airs quite
frightened Dinah. All the difference between a woman of Paris and a
provincial was at once evident to Dinah’s intelligent eye; she saw
herself as her friend saw her--and Anna found her altered beyond
recognition. Anna spent six thousand francs a year on herself alone, as
much as kept the whole household at La Baudraye.
In twenty-four hours the friends had exchanged many confidences; and the
Parisian, seeing herself so far superior to the phoenix of Mademoiselle
Chamarolles’ school, showed her provincial friend such kindness, such
attentions, while giving her certain explanations, as were so many stabs
to Dinah, though she perfectly understood that Anna’s advantages all lay
on the surface, while her own were for ever buried.
When Anna had left, Madame de la Baudraye, by this time two-and-twenty,
fell into the depths of despair.
“What is it that ails you?” asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so
dejected.
“Anna,” said she, “has learned to live, while I have been learning to
endure.”
A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye’s
house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her
successive transformations--a drama to which no one but Monsieur de
Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in sheer
idleness, or perhaps sheer vanity, revealed the secret of her anonymous
fame.
Though a mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French
literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be
one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of
narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which
may excuse, though it cannot absolve Dinah, it is necessary to give an
analysis of a poem which was the outcome of her deep despair.
Her patience and her resignation alike broken by the departure of the
Vicomte de Chargeboeuf, Dinah took the worthy Abbe’s advice to exhale
her evil thoughts in verse--a proceeding which perhaps accounts for some
poets.
“You will find such relief as those who write epitaphs or elegies over
those whom they have lost. Pain is soothed in the heart as lines surge
up in the brain.”
This strange production caused a great ferment in the departments of
the Allier, the Nievre, and the Cher, proud to possess a poet capable
of rivalry with the glories of Paris. _Paquita la Sevillane_, by
_Jan Diaz_, was published in the _Echo du Morvan_, a review which
for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial
indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz
was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric
verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced
by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and
Romanesque mannerisms.
The poem began with this ballad:
Ah! if you knew the fragrant plain,
The air, the sky, of golden Spain,
Its fervid noons, its balmy spring,
Sad daughters of the northern gloom,
Of love, of heav’n, of native home,
You never would presume to sing!
For men are there of other mould
Than those who live in this dull cold.
And there to music low and sweet
Sevillian maids, from eve till dawn,
Dance lightly on the moonlit lawn
In satin shoes, on dainty feet.
Ah, you would be the first to blush
Over your dancers’ romp and rush,
And your too hideous carnival,
That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,
And skips the mud in hob-nail’d shoe--
A truly dismal festival.
To pale-faced girls, and in a squalid room,
Paquita sang; the murky town beneath
Was Rouen whence the slender spires rise
To chew the storm with teeth.
Rouen so hideous, noisy, full of rage--
And here followed a magnificent description of Rouen--where Dinah had
never been--written with the affected brutality which, a little later,
inspired so many imitations of Juvenal; a contrast drawn between the
life of a manufacturing town and the careless life of Spain, between
the love of Heaven and of human beauty, and the worship of machinery, in
short, between poetry and sordid money-making.
Then Jan Diaz accounted for Paquita’s horror of Normandy by saying:
Seville, you see, had been her native home,
Seville, where skies are blue and evening sweet.
She, at thirteen, the sovereign of the town,
Had lovers at her feet.
For her three Toreadors had gone to death
Or victory, the prize to be a kiss--
One kiss from those red lips of sweetest breath--
A longed-for touch of bliss!
The features of the Spanish girl’s portrait have served so often as
those of the courtesan in so many self-styled _poems_, that it would be
tiresome to quote here the hundred lines of description. To judge of the
lengths to which audacity had carried Dinah, it will be enough to give
the conclusion. According to Madame de la Baudraye’s ardent pen, Paquita
was so entirely created for love that she can hardly have met with a
knight worthy of her; for
.... In her passionate fire Every man would have swooned from the heat,
When she at love’s feast, in her fervid desire,
As yet had but taken her seat.
“And yet she could quit the joys of Seville, its woods and fields of
orange-trees, for a Norman soldier who won her love and carried her away
to his hearth and home. She did not weep for her Andalusia, the Soldier
was her whole joy.... But the day came when he was compelled to start
for Russia in the footsteps of the great Emperor.”
Nothing could be more dainty than the description of the parting between
the Spanish girl and the Normandy Captain of Artillery, who, in the
delirium of passion expressed with feeling worthy of Byron, exacted from
Paquita a vow of absolute fidelity, in the Cathedral at Rouen in front
of the alter of the Blessed Virgin, who
Though a Maid is a woman, and never forgives
When lovers are false to their vows.
A large part of the poem was devoted to describing Paquita’s sufferings
when alone in Rouen waiting till the campaign was over; she stood
writhing at the window bars as she watched happy couples go by; she
suppressed her passion in her heart with a determination that consumed
her; she lived on narcotics, and exhausted herself in dreams.
Almost she died, but still her heart was true;
And when at last her soldier came again,
He found her beauty ever fresh and new--
He had not loved in vain!
“But he, pale and frozen by the cold of Russia, chilled to the very
marrow, met his yearning fair one with a melancholy smile.”
The whole poem was written up to this situation, which was worked out
with such vigor and boldness as too entirely justified the Abbe Duret.
Paquita, on reaching the limits set to real love, did not, like Julie
and Heloise, throw herself into the ideal; no, she rushed into the paths
of vice, which is, no doubt, shockingly natural; but she did it without
any touch of magnificence, for lack of means, as it would be difficult
to find in Rouen men impassioned enough to place Paquita in a suitable
setting of luxury and splendor. This horrible realism, emphasized by
gloomy poetic feeling, had inspired some passages such as modern poetry
is too free with, rather too like the flayed anatomical figures known to
artists as _ecorches_. Then, by a highly philosophical revulsion, after
describing the house of ill-fame where the Andalusian ended her days,
the writer came back to the ballad at the opening:
Paquita now is faded, shrunk, and old,
But she it was who sang:
“If you but knew the fragrant plain,
The air, the sky, of golden Spain,” etc.
The gloomy vigor of this poem, running to about six hundred lines,
and serving as a powerful foil, to use a painter’s word, to the two
_seguidillas_ at the beginning and end, the masculine utterance of
inexpressible grief, alarmed the woman who found herself admired by
three departments, under the black cloak of the anonymous. While she
fully enjoyed the intoxicating delights of success, Dinah dreaded the
malignity of provincial society, where more than one woman, if the
secret should slip out, would certainly find points of resemblance
between the writer and Paquita. Reflection came too late; Dinah
shuddered with shame at having made “copy” of some of her woes.
“Write no more,” said the Abbe Duret. “You will cease to be a woman; you
will be a poet.”
Moulins, Nevers, Bourges were searched to find Jan Diaz; but Dinah was
impenetrable. To remove any evil impression, in case any unforeseen
chance should betray her name, she wrote a charming poem in two cantos
on _The Mass-Oak_, a legend of the Nivernais:
“Once upon a time the folks of Nevers and the folks of Saint-Saulge, at
war with each other, came at daybreak to fight a battle, in which one or
other should perish, and met in the forest of Faye. And then there stood
between them, under an oak, a priest whose aspect in the morning sun was
so commanding that the foes at his bidding heard Mass as he performed it
under the oak, and at the words of the Gospel they made friends.”--The
oak is still shown in the forest of Faye.
This poem, immeasurably superior to _Paquita la Sevillane_, was far less
admired.
After these two attempts Madame de la Baudraye, feeling herself a poet,
had a light on her brow and a flash in her eyes that made her handsomer
than ever. She cast longing looks at Paris, aspiring to fame--and fell
back into her den of La Baudraye, her daily squabbles with her husband,
and her little circle, where everybody’s character, intentions, and
remarks were too well known not to have become a bore. Though she found
relief from her dreary life in literary work, and poetry echoed loudly
in her empty life, though she thus found an outlet for her energies,
literature increased her hatred of the gray and ponderous provincial
atmosphere.
When, after the Revolution of 1830, the glory of George Sand was
reflected on Le Berry, many a town envied La Chatre the privilege of
having given birth to this rival of Madame de Stael and Camille Maupin,
and were ready to do homage to minor feminine talent. Thus there arose
in France a vast number of tenth Muses, young girls or young wives
tempted from a silent life by the bait of glory. Very strange doctrines
were proclaimed as to the part women should play in society. Though the
sound common sense which lies at the root of the French nature was not
perverted, women were suffered to express ideas and profess opinions
which they would not have owned to a few years previously.
Monsieur de Clagny took advantage of this outbreak of freedom to
collect the works of Jan Diaz in a small volume printed by Desroziers at
Moulins. He wrote a little notice of the author, too early snatched from
the world of letters, which was amusing to those who were in the secret,
but which even then had not the merit of novelty. Such practical jokes,
capital so long as the author remains unknown, fall rather flat if
subsequently the poet stands confessed.
From this point of view, however, the memoir of Jan Diaz, born at
Bourges in 1807, the son of a Spanish prisoner, may very likely some
day deceive the compiler of some _Universal Biography_. Nothing is
overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College,
nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and
other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy,
melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called
_Tristesse_ (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems _Paquita la
Sevillane_ and _Le Chene de la Messe_; three sonnets, a description of
the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale
called _Carola_, published as the work he was engaged on at the time
of his death, constituted the whole of these literary remains; and the
poet’s last hours, full of misery and despair, could not fail to wring
the hearts of the feeling public of the Nievre, the Bourbonnais, the
Cher, and the Morvan, where he died near Chateau-Chinon, unknown to all,
even to the woman he had loved!
Of this little yellow paper volume two hundred copies were printed;
one hundred and fifty were sold--about fifty in each department. This
average of tender and poetic souls in three departments of France is
enough to revive the enthusiasm of writers as to the _Furia Francese_,
which nowadays is more apt to expend itself in business than in books.
When Monsieur de Clagny had given away a certain number of copies,
Dinah still had seven or eight, wrapped up in the newspapers which had
published notices of the work. Twenty copies forwarded to the Paris
papers were swamped in the editors’ offices. Nathan was taken in as well
as several of his fellow-countrymen of Le Berry, and wrote an article on
the great man, in which he credited him with all the fine qualities we
discover in those who are dead and buried.
Lousteau, warned by his fellow-schoolfellows, who could not remember Jan
Diaz, waited for information from Sancerre, and learned that Jan Diaz
was a pseudonym assumed by a woman.
Then, in and around Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye became the rage; she
was the future rival of George Sand. From Sancerre to Bourges a poem was
praised which, at any other time, would certainly have been hooted. The
provincial public--like every French public, perhaps--does not share the
love of the King of the French for the happy medium: it lifts you to the
skies or drags you in the mud.
By this time the good Abbe, Madame de la Baudraye’s counselor, was dead;
he would certainly have prevented her rushing into public life. But
three years of work without recognition weighed on Dinah’s soul, and
she accepted the clatter of fame as a substitute for her disappointed
ambitions. Poetry and dreams of celebrity, which had lulled her grief
since her meeting with Anna Grossetete, no longer sufficed to exhaust
the activity of her morbid heart. The Abbe Duret, who had talked of the
world when the voice of religion was impotent, who understood Dinah, and
promised her a happy future by assuring her that God would compensate
her for her sufferings bravely endured,--this good old man could no
longer stand between the opening to sin and the handsome young woman he
had called his daughter.
The wise old priest had more than once endeavored to enlighten Dinah
as to her husband’s character, telling her that the man could hate; but
women are not ready to believe in such force in weak natures, and hatred
is too constantly in action not to be a vital force. Dinah, finding her
husband incapable of love, denied him the power to hate.
“Do not confound hatred and vengeance,” said the Abbe. “They are two
different sentiments. One is the instinct of small minds; the other is
the outcome of law which great souls obey. God is avenged, but He does
not hate. Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all
their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny. So beware
of offending Monsieur de la Baudraye; he would forgive an infidelity,
because he could make capital of it, but he would be doubly implacable
if you should touch him on the spot so cruelly wounded by Monsieur
Milaud of Nevers, and would make your life unendurable.”
Now, at the time when the whole countryside--Nevers and Sancerre, Le
Morvan and Le Berry--was priding itself on Madame de la Baudraye, and
lauding her under the name of Jan Diaz, “little La Baudraye” felt her
glory a mortal blow. He alone knew the secret source of _Paquita la
Sevillane_. When this terrible work was spoken of, everybody said of
Dinah--“Poor woman! Poor soul!”
The women rejoiced in being able to pity her who had so long oppressed
them; never had Dinah seemed to stand higher in the eyes of the
neighborhood.
The shriveled old man, more wrinkled, yellower, feebler than ever, gave
no sign; but Dinah sometimes detected in his eyes, as he looked at her,
a sort of icy venom which gave the lie to his increased politeness
and gentleness. She understood at last that this was not, as she had
supposed, a mere domestic squabble; but when she forced an explanation
with her “insect,” as Monsieur Gravier called him, she found the cold,
hard impassibility of steel. She flew into a passion; she reproached
him for her life these eleven years past; she made--intentionally--what
women call a scene. But “little La Baudraye” sat in an armchair with his
eyes shut, and listened phlegmatically to the storm. And, as usual, the
dwarf got the better of his wife. Dinah saw that she had done wrong in
writing; she vowed never to write another line, and she kept her vow.
Then was there desolation in the Sancerrois.
“Why did not Madame de la Baudraye compose any more verses?” was the
universal cry.
At this time Madame de la Baudraye had no enemies; every one rushed to
see her, not a week passed without fresh introductions. The wife of the
presiding judge, an august _bourgeoise_, _nee_ Popinot-Chandier, desired
her son, a youth of two-and-twenty, to pay his humble respects to La
Baudraye, and flattered herself that she might see her Gatien in the
good graces of this Superior Woman.--The words Superior Woman had
superseded the absurd nickname of _The Sappho of Saint-Satur_.--This
lady, who for nine years had led the opposition, was so delighted at the
good reception accorded to her son, that she became loud in her praises
of the Muse of Sancerre.
“After all,” she exclaimed, in reply to a tirade from Madame de Clagny,
who hated her husband’s supposed mistress, “she is the handsomest and
cleverest woman in the whole province!”
After scrambling through so many brambles and setting off on so many
different roads, after dreaming of love in splendor and scenting the
darkest dramas, thinking such terrible joys would be cheaply purchased
so weary was she of her dreary existence, one day Dinah fell into the
pit she had sworn to avoid. Seeing Monsieur de Clagny always sacrificing
himself, and at last refusing a high appointment in Paris, where his
family wanted to see him, she said to herself, “He loves me!” She
vanquished her repulsion, and seemed willing to reward so much
constancy.
It was to this impulse of generosity on her part that a coalition was
due, formed in Sancerre to secure the return of Monsieur de Clagny at
the next elections. Madame de la Baudraye had dreamed of going to Paris
in the wake of the new deputy.
But, in spite of the most solemn promises, the hundred and fifty votes
to be recorded in favor of this adorer of the lovely Dinah--who hoped
to see this defender of the widow and the orphan wearing the gown of the
Keeper of the Seals--figured as an imposing minority of fifty votes. The
jealousy of the President de Boirouge, and Monsieur Gravier’s hatred,
for he believed in the candidate’s supremacy in Dinah’s heart, had been
worked upon by a young Sous-prefet; and for this worthy deed the allies
got the young man made a prefet elsewhere.
“I shall never cease to regret,” said he, as he quitted Sancerre, “that
I did not succeed in pleasing Madame de la Baudraye; that would have
made my triumph complete!”
The household that was thus racked by domestic troubles was calm on
the surface; here were two ill-assorted but resigned beings, and the
indescribable propriety, the lie that society insists on, and which to
Dinah was an unendurable yoke. Why did she long to throw off the mask
she had worn for twelve years? Whence this weariness which, every day,
increased her hope of finding herself a widow?
The reader who has noted all the phases of her existence will have
understood the various illusions by which Dinah, like many another
woman, had been deceived. After an attempt to master Monsieur de la
Baudraye, she had indulged the hope of becoming a mother. Between those
miserable disputes over household matters and the melancholy conviction
as to her fate, quite a long time had elapsed. Then, when she had looked
for consolation, the consoler, Monsieur de Chargeboeuf had left her.
Thus, the overwhelming temptation which commonly causes women to sin had
hitherto been absent. For if there are, after all, some women who make
straight for unfaithfulness, are there not many more who cling to hope,
and do not fall till they have wandered long in a labyrinth of secret
woes?
Such was Dinah. She had so little impulse to fail in her duty, that she
did not care enough for Monsieur de Clagny to forgive him his defeat.
Then the move to the Chateau d’Anzy, the rearrangement of her collected
treasures and curiosities, which derived added value from the splendid
setting which Philibert de Lorme seemed to have planned on purpose for
this museum, occupied her for several months, giving her leisure to
meditate one of those decisive steps that startle the public, ignorant
of the motives which, however, it sometimes discovers by dint of gossip
and suppositions.
Madame de la Baudraye had been greatly struck by the reputation of
Lousteau, who was regarded as a lady’s man of the first water in
consequence of his intimacies among actresses; she was anxious to know
him; she read his books, and was fired with enthusiasm, less perhaps for
his talents than for his successes with women; and to attract him to the
country, she started the notion that it was obligatory on Sancerre to
return one of its great men at the elections. She made Gatien Boirouge
write to the great physician Bianchon, whom he claimed as a cousin
through the Popinots. Then she persuaded an old friend of the departed
Madame Lousteau to stir up the journalist’s ambitions by letting him
know that certain persons in Sancerre were firmly bent on electing a
deputy from among the distinguished men in Paris.
Tired of her commonplace neighbors, Madame de la Baudraye would thus at
last meet really illustrious men, and might give her fall the lustre of
fame.
Neither Lousteau nor Bianchon replied; they were waiting perhaps till
the holidays. Bianchon, who had won his professor’s chair the year
before after a brilliant contest, could not leave his lectures.
In the month of September, when the vintage was at its height, the two
Parisians arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in the
unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore be
no public demonstration in their favor. “We have fallen flat,” said
Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of the stage.
In 1836, Lousteau, worn by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital,
and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and
disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than
thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in
harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face
by over-indulgence in champagne. He ascribed these signs-manual of
dissipation to the severities of a literary life, declaring that the
Press was murderous; and he gave it to be understood that it consumed
superior talents, so as to lend a grace to his exhaustion. In his native
town he thought proper to exaggerate his affected contempt of life and
his spurious misanthropy. Still, his eyes could flash with fire like
a volcano supposed to be extinct, and he endeavored, by dressing
fashionably, to make up for the lack of youth that might strike a
woman’s eye.
Horace Bianchon, who wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was fat and
burly, as beseems a fashionable physician, with a patriarchal air, his
hair thick and long, a prominent brow, the frame of a hard worker, and
the calm expression of a philosopher. This somewhat prosaic personality
set off his more frivolous companion to advantage.
The two great men remained unrecognized during a whole morning at the
inn where they had put up, and it was only by chance that Monsieur de
Clagny heard of their arrival. Madame de la Baudraye, in despair at
this, despatched Gatien Boirouge, who had no vineyards, to beg the two
gentlemen to spend a few days at the Chateau d’Anzy. For the last
year Dinah had played the chatelaine, and spent the winter only at La
Baudraye. Monsieur Gravier, the Public Prosecutor, the Presiding Judge,
and Gatien Boirouge combined to give a banquet to the great men, to meet
the literary personages of the town.
On hearing that the beautiful Madame de la Baudraye was Jan Diaz,
the Parisians went to spend three days at Anzy, fetched in a sort of
wagonette driven by Gatien himself. The young man, under a genuine
illusion, spoke of Madame de la Baudraye not only as the handsomest
woman in those parts, a woman so superior that she might give George
Sand a qualm, but as a woman who would produce a great sensation in
Paris. Hence the extreme though suppressed astonishment of Doctor
Bianchon and the waggish journalist when they beheld, on the garden
steps of Anzy, a lady dressed in thin black cashmere with a deep tucker,
in effect like a riding-habit cut short, for they quite understood the
pretentiousness of such extreme simplicity. Dinah also wore a black
velvet cap, like that in the portrait of Raphael, and below it her hair
fell in thick curls. This attire showed off a rather pretty figure, fine
eyes, and handsome eyelids somewhat faded by the weariful life that has
been described. In Le Berry the singularity of this _artistic_ costume
was a cloak for the romantic affectations of the Superior Woman.
On seeing the affectations of their too amiable hostess--which were,
indeed, affectations of soul and mind--the friends glanced at each
other, and put on a deeply serious expression to listen to Madame de la
Baudraye, who made them a set speech of thanks for coming to cheer the
monotony of her days. Dinah walked her guests round and round the
lawn, ornamented with large vases of flowers, which lay in front of the
Chateau d’Anzy.
“How is it,” said Lousteau, the practical joker, “that so handsome a
woman as you, and apparently so superior, should have remained buried in
the country? What do you do to make life endurable?”
“Ah! that is the crux,” said the lady. “It is unendurable. Utter despair
or dull resignation--there is no third alternative; that is the arid
soil in which our existence is rooted, and on which a thousand stagnant
ideas fall; they cannot fertilize the ground, but they supply food
for the etiolated flowers of our desert souls. Never believe in
indifference! Indifference is either despair or resignation. Then each
woman takes up the pursuit which, according to her character, seems to
promise some amusement. Some rush into jam-making and washing, household
management, the rural joys of the vintage or the harvest, bottling
fruit, embroidering handkerchiefs, the cares of motherhood, the
intrigues of a country town. Others torment a much-enduring piano,
which, at the end of seven years, sounds like an old kettle, and ends
its asthmatic life at the Chateau d’Anzy. Some pious dames talk over the
different brands of the Word of God--the Abbe Fritaud as compared with
the Abbe Guinard. They play cards in the evening, dance with the same
partners for twelve years running, in the same rooms, at the same dates.
This delightful life is varied by solemn walks on the Mall, visits of
politeness among the women, who ask each other where they bought their
gowns.
“Conversation is bounded on the south by remarks on the intrigues lying
hidden under the stagnant water of provincial life, on the north by
proposed marriages, on the west by jealousies, and on the east by sour
remarks.
“And so,” she went on, striking an attitude, “you see a woman wrinkled
at nine-and-twenty, ten years before the time fixed by the rules of
Doctor Bianchon, a woman whose skin is ruined at an early age, who turns
as yellow as a quince when she is yellow at all--we have seen some turn
green. When we have reached that point, we try to justify our normal
condition; then we turn and rend the terrible passion of Paris with
teeth as sharp as rat’s teeth. We have Puritan women here, sour enough
to tear the laces of Parisian finery, and eat out all the poetry of your
Parisian beauties, who undermine the happiness of others while they cry
up their walnuts and rancid bacon, glorify this squalid mouse-hole,
and the dingy color and conventual smell of our delightful life at
Sancerre.”
“I admire such courage, madame,” said Bianchon. “When we have to
endure such misfortunes, it is well to have the wit to make a virtue of
necessity.”
Amazed at the brilliant move by which Dinah thus placed provincial life
at the mercy of her guests, in anticipation of their sarcasms, Gatien
Boirouge nudged Lousteau’s elbow, with a glance and a smile, which said:
“Well! did I say too much?”
“But, madame,” said Lousteau, “you are proving that we are still in
Paris. I shall steal this gem of description; it will be worth ten
thousand francs to me in an article.”
“Oh, monsieur,” she retorted, “never trust provincial women.”
“And why not?” said Lousteau.
Madame de la Baudraye was wily enough--an innocent form of cunning, to
be sure--to show the two Parisians, one of whom she would choose to be
her conquerer, the snare into which he would fall, reflecting that she
would have the upper hand at the moment when he should cease to see it.
“When you first come,” said she, “you laugh at us. Then when you have
forgotten the impression of Paris brilliancy, and see us in our own
sphere, you pay court to us, if only as a pastime. And you, who are
famous for your past passions, will be the object of attentions which
will flatter you. Then take care!” cried Dinah, with a coquettish
gesture, raising herself above provincial absurdities and Lousteau’s
irony by her own sarcastic speech. “When a poor little country-bred
woman has an eccentric passion for some superior man, some Parisian
who has wandered into the provinces, it is to her something more than a
sentiment; she makes it her occupation and part of all her life. There
is nothing more dangerous than the attachment of such a woman; she
compares, she studies, she reflects, she dreams; and she will not give
up her dream, she thinks still of the man she loves when he has ceased
to think of her.
“Now one of the catastrophes that weigh most heavily on a woman in the
provinces is that abrupt termination of her passion which is so often
seen in England. In the country, a life under minute observation as keen
as an Indian’s compels a woman either to keep on the rails or to start
aside like a steam engine wrecked by an obstacle. The strategies of
love, the coquetting which form half the composition of a Parisian
woman, are utterly unknown here.”
“That is true,” said Lousteau. “There is in a country-bred woman’s heart
a store of surprises, as in some toys.”
“Dear me!” Dinah went on, “a woman will have spoken to you three times
in the course of a winter, and without your knowing it, you will be
lodged in her heart. Then comes a picnic, an excursion, what not, and
all is said--or, if you prefer it, all is done! This conduct, which
seems odd to unobserving persons, is really very natural. A poet, such
as you are, or a philosopher, an observer, like Doctor Bianchon, instead
of vilifying the provincial woman and believing her depraved, would be
able to guess the wonderful unrevealed poetry, every chapter, in short,
of the sweet romance of which the last phrase falls to the benefit of
some happy sub-lieutenant or some provincial bigwig.”
“The provincial women I have met in Paris,” said Lousteau, “were, in
fact, rapid in their proceedings--”
“My word, they are strange,” said the lady, giving a significant shrug
of her shoulders.
“They are like the playgoers who book for the second performance,
feeling sure that the piece will not fail,” replied the journalist.
“And what is the cause of all these woes?” asked Bianchon.
“Paris is the monster that brings us grief,” replied the Superior
Woman. “The evil is seven leagues round, and devastates the whole
land. Provincial life is not self-existent. It is only when a nation is
divided into fifty minor states that each can have a physiognomy of its
own, and then a woman reflects the glory of the sphere where she reigns.
This social phenomenon, I am told, may be seen in Italy, Switzerland,
and Germany; but in France, as in every country where there is but
one capital, a dead level of manners must necessarily result from
centralization.”
“Then you would say that manners could only recover their individuality
and native distinction by the formation of a federation of French states
into one empire?” said Lousteau.
“That is hardly to be wished, for France would have to conquer too many
countries,” said Bianchon.
“This misfortune is unknown in England,” exclaimed Dinah. “London does
not exert such tyranny as that by which Paris oppresses France--for
which, indeed, French ingenuity will at last find a remedy; however, it
has a worse disease in its vile hypocrisy, which is a far greater evil!”
“The English aristocracy,” said Lousteau, hastening to put a word in,
for he foresaw a Byronic paragraph, “has the advantage over ours
of assimilating every form of superiority; it lives in the midst of
magnificent parks; it is in London for no more than two months. It lives
in the country, flourishing there, and making it flourish.”
“Yes,” said Madame de la Baudraye, “London is the capital of trade and
speculation and the centre of government. The aristocracy hold a ‘mote’
there for sixty days only; it gives and takes the passwords of the day,
looks in on the legislative cookery, reviews the girls to marry, the
carriages to be sold, exchanges greetings, and is away again; and is so
far from amusing, that it cannot bear itself for more than the few days
known as ‘the season.’”
“Hence,” said Lousteau, hoping to stop this nimble tongue by an epigram,
“in Perfidious Albion, as the _Constitutionnel_ has it, you may happen
to meet a charming woman in any part of the kingdom.”
“But charming _English_ women!” replied Madame de la Baudraye with
a smile. “Here is my mother, I will introduce you,” said she, seeing
Madame Piedefer coming towards them.
Having introduced the two Paris lions to the ambitious skeleton that
called itself woman under the name of Madame Piedefer--a tall, lean
personage, with a red face, teeth that were doubtfully genuine, and hair
that was undoubtedly dyed, Dinah left her visitors to themselves for a
few minutes.
“Well,” said Gatien to Lousteau, “what do you think of her?”
“I think that the clever woman of Sancerre is simply the greatest
chatterbox,” replied the journalist.
“A woman who wants to see you deputy!” cried Gatien. “An angel!”
“Forgive me, I forgot you were in love with her,” said Lousteau.
“Forgive the cynicism of an old scamp.--Ask Bianchon; I have no
illusions left. I see things as they are. The woman has evidently dried
up her mother like a partridge left to roast at too fierce a fire.”
Gatien de Boirouge contrived to let Madame de la Baudraye know what
the journalist had said of her in the course of the dinner, which was
copious, not to say splendid, and the lady took care not to talk
too much while it was proceeding. This lack of conversation betrayed
Gatien’s indiscretion. Etienne tried to regain his footing, but all
Dinah’s advances were directed to Bianchon.
However, half-way through the evening, the Baroness was gracious to
Lousteau again. Have you never observed what great meanness may
be committed for small ends? Thus the haughty Dinah, who would not
sacrifice herself for a fool, who in the depths of the country led such
a wretched life of struggles, of suppressed rebellion, of unuttered
poetry, who to get away from Lousteau had climbed the highest and
steepest peak of her scorn, and who would not have come down if she
had seen the sham Byron at her feet, suddenly stepped off it as she
recollected her album.
Madame de la Baudraye had caught the mania for autographs; she possessed
an oblong volume which deserved the name of album better than most, as
two-thirds of the pages were still blank. The Baronne de Fontaine, who
had kept it for three months, had with great difficulty obtained a line
from Rossini, six bars written by Meyerbeer, the four lines that Victor
Hugo writes in every album, a verse from Lamartine, a few words from
Beranger, _Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart d’Ulysse_ (the first
words of _Telemaque_) written by George Sand, Scribe’s famous lines on
the Umbrella, a sentence from Charles Nodier, an outline of distance by
Jules Dupre, the signature of David d’Angers, and three notes written
by Hector Berlioz. Monsieur de Clagny, during a visit to Paris, added a
song by Lacenaire--a much coveted autograph, two lines from Fieschi, and
an extremely short note from Napoleon, which were pasted on to pages of
the album. Then Monsieur Gravier, in the course of a tour, had persuaded
Mademoiselle Mars to write her name on this album, with Mademoiselles
Georges, Taglioni, and Grisi, and some distinguished actors, such as
Frederick Lemaitre, Monrose, Bouffe, Rubini, Lablache, Nourrit, and
Arnal; for he knew a set of old fellows brought up in the seraglio, as
they phrased it, who did him this favor.
This beginning of a collection was all the more precious to Dinah
because she was the only person for ten leagues round who owned an
album. Within the last two years, however, several young ladies had
acquired such books, in which they made their friends and acquaintances
write more or less absurd quotations or sentiments. You who spend your
lives in collecting autographs, simple and happy souls, like Dutch tulip
fanciers, you will excuse Dinah when, in her fear of not keeping her
guests more than two days, she begged Bianchon to enrich the volume she
handed to him with a few lines of his writing.
The doctor made Lousteau smile by showing him this sentence on the first
page:
“What makes the populace dangerous is that it has in its pocket an
absolution for every crime.
“J. B. DE CLAGNY.”
“We will second the man who is brave enough to plead in favor of the
Monarchy,” Desplein’s great pupil whispered to Lousteau, and he wrote
below:
“The distinction between Napoleon and a water-carrier is evident
only to Society; Nature takes no account of it. Thus Democracy,
which resists inequality, constantly appeals to Nature.
“H. BIANCHON.”
“Ah!” cried Dinah, amazed, “you rich men take a gold piece out of your
purse as poor men bring out a farthing.... I do not know,” she went
on, turning to Lousteau, “whether it is taking an unfair advantage of a
guest to hope for a few lines--”
“Nay, madame, you flatter me. Bianchon is a great man, but I am too
insignificant!--Twenty years hence my name will be more difficult to
identify than that of the Public Prosecutor whose axiom, written in your
album, will designate him as an obscurer Montesquieu. And I should
want at least twenty-four hours to improvise some sufficiently bitter
reflections, for I could only describe what I feel.”
“I wish you needed a fortnight,” said Madame de la Baudraye graciously,
as she handed him the book. “I should keep you here all the longer.”
At five next morning all the party in the Chateau d’Anzy were astir,
little La Baudraye having arranged a day’s sport for the Parisians--less
for their pleasure than to gratify his own conceit. He was delighted to
make them walk over the twelve hundred acres of waste land that he
was intending to reclaim, an undertaking that would cost some hundred
thousand francs, but which might yield an increase of thirty to sixty
thousand francs a year in the returns of the estate of Anzy.
“Do you know why the Public Prosecutor has not come out with us?” asked
Gatien Boirouge of Monsieur Gravier.
“Why he told us that he was obliged to sit to-day; the minor cases are
before the Court,” replied the other.
“And did you believe that?” cried Gatien. “Well, my papa said to me,
‘Monsieur Lebas will not join you early, for Monsieur de Clagny has
begged him as his deputy to sit for him!’
“Indeed!” said Gravier, changing countenance. “And Monsieur de la
Baudraye is gone to La Charite!”
“But why do you meddle in such matters?” said Bianchon to Gatien.
“Horace is right,” said Lousteau. “I cannot imagine why you trouble your
heads so much about each other; you waste your time in frivolities.”
Horace Bianchon looked at Etienne Lousteau, as much as to say
that newspaper epigrams and the satire of the “funny column” were
incomprehensible at Sancerre.
On reaching a copse, Monsieur Gravier left the two great men and Gatien,
under the guidance of a keeper, to make their way through a little
ravine.
“Well, we must wait for Monsieur Gravier,” said Bianchon, when they had
reached a clearing.
“You may be a great physician,” said Gatien, “but you are ignorant of
provincial life. You mean to wait for Monsieur Gravier?--By this time
he is running like a hare, in spite of his little round stomach; he is
within twenty minutes of Anzy by now----” Gatien looked at his watch.
“Good! he will be just in time.”
“Where?”
“At the chateau for breakfast,” replied Gatien. “Do you suppose I could
rest easy if Madame de la Baudraye were alone with Monsieur de Clagny?
There are two of them now; they will keep an eye on each other. Dinah
will be well guarded.”
“Ah, ha! Then Madame de la Baudraye has not yet made up her mind?” said
Lousteau.
“So mamma thinks. For my part, I am afraid that Monsieur de Clagny has
at last succeeded in bewitching Madame de la Baudraye. If he has been
able to show her that he had any chance of putting on the robes of the
Keeper of the Seals, he may have hidden his moleskin complexion, his
terrible eyes, his touzled mane, his voice like a hoarse crier’s, his
bony figure, like that of a starveling poet, and have assumed all the
charms of Adonis. If Dinah sees Monsieur de Clagny as Attorney-General,
she may see him as a handsome youth. Eloquence has great
privileges.--Besides, Madame de la Baudraye is full of ambition. She
does not like Sancerre, and dreams of the glories of Paris.”
“But what interest have you in all this?” said Lousteau. “If she is in
love with the Public Prosecutor!--Ah! you think she will not love him
for long, and you hope to succeed him.”
“You who live in Paris,” said Gatien, “meet as many different women as
there are days in the year. But at Sancerre, where there are not half
a dozen, and where, of those six, five set up for the most extravagant
virtue, when the handsomest of them all keeps you at an infinite
distance by looks as scornful as though she were of the blood royal, a
young man of two-and-twenty may surely be allowed to make a guess at her
secrets, since she must then treat him with some consideration.”
“Consideration! So that is what you call it in these parts?” said the
journalist with a smile.
“I should suppose Madame de la Baudraye to have too much good taste to
trouble her head about that ugly ape,” said Bianchon.
“Horace,” said Lousteau, “look here, O learned interpreter of human
nature, let us lay a trap for the Public Prosecutor; we shall be doing
our friend Gatien a service, and get a laugh out of it. I do not love
Public Prosecutors.”
“You have a keen intuition of destiny,” said Horace. “But what can we
do?”
“Well, after dinner we will tell sundry little anecdotes of wives
caught out by their husbands, killed, murdered under the most terrible
circumstances.--Then we shall see the faces that Madame de la Baudraye
and de Clagny will make.”
“Not amiss!” said Bianchon; “one or the other must surely, by look or
gesture--”
“I know a newspaper editor,” Lousteau went on, addressing Gatien, “who,
anxious to forefend a grievous fate, will take no stories but such as
tell the tale of lovers burned, hewn, pounded, or cut to pieces; of
wives boiled, fried, or baked; he takes them to his wife to read, hoping
that sheer fear will keep her faithful--satisfied with that humble
alternative, poor man! ‘You see, my dear, to what the smallest error may
lead you!’ says he, epitomizing Arnolfe’s address to Agnes.”
“Madame de la Baudraye is quite guiltless; this youth sees double,”
said Bianchon. “Madame Piedefer seems to me far too pious to invite her
daughter’s lover to the Chateau d’Anzy. Madame de la Baudraye would have
to hoodwink her mother, her husband, her maid, and her mother’s maid;
that is too much to do. I acquit her.”
“Well with more reason because her husband never ‘quits her,’ said
Gatien, laughing at his own wit.
“We can easily remember two or three stories that will make D
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7929