An Old Maid, Honoré de Balzac [an ebook reader TXT] 📗

everything here below happens according to the will of God, there must be a reason for everything."

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

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

"Yes, my child," replied the abbe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have too much mind, Rose; you don't need so much to be happy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_They_ are all in the garden."

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

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

"You have heard?"

"Yes."

"Du Bousquier?"

"And that handsome Suzanne."

"Does Mademoiselle Cormon know of it?"

"No."

"Ha!"

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

"Ha! the devil!" he said to himself; "what a checkmate I'm exposed to!"

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

"What a pity that he isn't a trifle dissipated!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Distant ones," she said, interrupting him.

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