Cousin Betty, Honoré de Balzac [best short books to read txt] 📗

good woman and a prude to all the world, and a courtesan to her husband, is the gift of a woman of genius, and they are few. This is the secret of long fidelity, inexplicable to the women who are not blessed with the double and splendid faculty. Imagine Madame Marneffe virtuous, and you have the Marchesa di Pescara. But such lofty and illustrious women, beautiful as Diane de Poitiers, but virtuous, may be easily counted.

So the scene with which this serious and terrible drama of Paris manners opened was about to be repeated, with this singular difference--that the calamities prophesied then by the captain of the municipal Militia had reversed the parts. Madame Hulot was awaiting Crevel with the same intentions as had brought him to her, smiling down at the Paris crowd from his _milord_, three years ago. And, strangest thing of all, the Baroness was true to herself and to her love, while preparing to yield to the grossest infidelity, such as the storm of passion even does not justify in the eyes of some judges.

"What can I do to become a Madame Marneffe?" she asked herself as she heard the door-bell.

She restrained her tears, fever gave brilliancy to her face, and she meant to be quite the courtesan, poor, noble soul.


"What the devil can that worthy Baronne Hulot want of me?" Crevel wondered as he mounted the stairs. "She is going to discuss my quarrel with Celestine and Victorin, no doubt; but I will not give way!"

As he went into the drawing-room, shown in by Louise, he said to himself as he noted the bareness of the place (Crevel's word):

"Poor woman! She lives here like some fine picture stowed in a loft by a man who knows nothing of painting."

Crevel, seeing Comte Popinot, the Minister of Commerce, buy pictures and statues, wanted also to figure as a Maecenas of Paris, whose love of Art consists in making good investments.

Adeline smiled graciously at Crevel, pointing to a chair facing her.

"Here I am, fair lady, at your command," said Crevel.

Monsieur the Mayor, a political personage, now wore black broadcloth. His face, at the top of this solemn suit, shone like a full moon rising above a mass of dark clouds. His shirt, buttoned with three large pearls worth five hundred francs apiece, gave a great idea of his thoracic capacity, and he was apt to say, "In me you see the coming athlete of the tribune!" His enormous vulgar hands were encased in yellow gloves even in the morning; his patent leather boots spoke of the chocolate-colored coupe with one horse in which he drove.

In the course of three years ambition had altered Crevel's pretensions. Like all great artists, he had come to his second manner. In the great world, when he went to the Prince de Wissembourg's, to the Prefecture, to Comte Popinot's, and the like, he held his hat in his hand in an airy manner taught him by Valerie, and he inserted the thumb of the other hand in the armhole of his waistcoat with a knowing air, and a simpering face and expression. This new grace of attitude was due to the satirical inventiveness of Valerie, who, under pretence of rejuvenating her mayor, had given him an added touch of the ridiculous.

"I begged you to come, my dear kind Monsieur Crevel," said the Baroness in a husky voice, "on a matter of the greatest importance--"

"I can guess what it is, madame," said Crevel, with a knowing air, "but what you would ask is impossible.--Oh, I am not a brutal father, a man--to use Napoleon's words--set hard and fast on sheer avarice. Listen to me, fair lady. If my children were ruining themselves for their own benefit, I would help them out of the scrape; but as for backing your husband, madame? It is like trying to fill the vat of the Danaides! Their house is mortgaged for three hundred thousand francs for an incorrigible father! Why, they have nothing left, poor wretches! And they have no fun for their money. All they have to live upon is what Victorin may make in Court. He must wag his tongue more, must monsieur your son! And he was to have been a Minister, that learned youth! Our hope and pride. A pretty pilot, who runs aground like a land-lubber; for if he had borrowed to enable him to get on, if he had run into debt for feasting Deputies, winning votes, and increasing his influence, I should be the first to say, 'Here is my purse--dip your hand in, my friend!' But when it comes of paying for papa's folly--folly I warned you of!--Ah! his father has deprived him of every chance of power.--It is I who shall be Minister!"

"Alas, my dear Crevel, it has nothing to do with the children, poor devoted souls!--If your heart is closed to Victorin and Celestine, I shall love them so much that perhaps I may soften the bitterness of their souls caused by your anger. You are punishing your children for a good action!"

"Yes, for a good action badly done! That is half a crime," said Crevel, much pleased with his epigram.

"Doing good, my dear Crevel, does not mean sparing money out of a purse that is bursting with it; it means enduring privations to be generous, suffering for liberality! It is being prepared for ingratitude! Heaven does not see the charity that costs us nothing--"

"Saints, madame, may if they please go to the workhouse; they know that it is for them the door of heaven. For my part, I am worldly-minded; I fear God, but yet more I fear the hell of poverty. To be destitute is the last depth of misfortune in society as now constituted. I am a man of my time; I respect money."

"And you are right," said Adeline, "from the worldly point of view."

She was a thousand miles from her point, and she felt herself on a gridiron, like Saint Laurence, as she thought of her uncle, for she could see him blowing his brains out.

She looked down; then she raised her eyes to gaze at Crevel with angelic sweetness--not with the inviting suggestiveness which was part of Valerie's wit. Three years ago she could have bewitched Crevel by that beautiful look.

"I have known the time," said she, "when you were more generous--you used to talk of three hundred thousand francs like a grand gentleman--"

Crevel looked at Madame Hulot; he beheld her like a lily in the last of its bloom, vague sensations rose within him, but he felt such respect for this saintly creature that he spurned all suspicions and buried them in the most profligate corner of his heart.

"I, madame, am still the same; but a retired merchant, if he is a grand gentleman, plays, and must play, the part with method and economy; he carries his ideas of order into everything. He opens an account for his little amusements, and devotes certain profits to that head of expenditure; but as to touching his capital! it would be folly. My children will have their fortune intact, mine and my wife's; but I do not suppose that they wish their father to be dull, a monk and a mummy! My life is a very jolly one; I float gaily down the stream. I fulfil all the duties imposed on me by law, by my affections, and by family ties, just as I always used to be punctual in paying my bills when they fell due. If only my children conduct themselves in their domestic life as I do, I shall be satisfied; and for the present, so long as my follies--for I have committed follies--are no loss to any one but the gulls--excuse me, you do not perhaps understand the slang word--they will have nothing to blame me for, and will find a tidy little sum still left when I die. Your children cannot say as much of their father, who is ruining his son and my daughter by his pranks--"

The Baroness was getting further from her object as he went on.

"You are very unkind about my husband, my dear Crevel--and yet, if you had found his wife obliging, you would have been his best friend----"

She shot a burning glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?--Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? Women are strange creatures!"

And he assumed the position of his second manner, looking at the Baroness with his _Regency_ leer.

"I could almost fancy," she went on, "that you want to visit on him your resentment against the virtue that resisted you--in a woman whom you loved well enough--to--to buy her," she added in a low voice.

"In a divine woman," Crevel replied, with a meaning smile at the Baroness, who looked down while tears rose to her eyes. "For you have swallowed not a few bitter pills!--in these three years--hey, my beauty?"

"Do not talk of my troubles, dear Crevel; they are too much for the endurance of a mere human being. Ah! if you still love me, you may drag me out of the pit in which I lie. Yes, I am in hell torment! The regicides who were racked and nipped and torn into quarters by four horses were on roses compared with me, for their bodies only were dismembered, and my heart is torn in quarters----"

Crevel's thumb moved from his armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an expression of kindness.

"You see a woman, not indeed in despair, but with her honor at the point of death, and prepared for everything, my dear friend, to hinder a crime."

Fearing that Hortense might come in, she bolted the door; then with equal impetuosity she fell at Crevel's feet, took his hand and kissed it.

"Be my deliverer!" she cried.

She thought there was some generous fibre in this mercantile soul, and full of sudden hope that she might get the two hundred thousand francs without degrading herself:

"Buy a soul--you were once ready to buy virtue!" she went on, with a frenzied gaze. "Trust to my honesty as a woman, to my honor, of which you know the worth! Be my friend! Save a whole family from ruin, shame, despair; keep it from falling into a bog where the quicksands are mingled with blood! Oh! ask for no explanations," she exclaimed, at a movement on Crevel's part, who was about to speak. "Above all, do not say to me, 'I told you so!' like a friend who is glad at a misfortune. Come now, yield to her whom you used to love, to the woman whose humiliation at your feet is perhaps the crowning moment of her glory; ask nothing of her, expect what you will from her gratitude!--No, no. Give me nothing, but lend--lend to me whom you used to call Adeline----"

At this point her tears flowed so fast, Adeline was sobbing so passionately, that Crevel's gloves were wet. The words, "I need two hundred thousand francs," were scarcely articulate in the torrent of weeping, as stones, however large, are invisible in Alpine cataracts swollen by the melting of the snows.

This is the inexperience of virtue. Vice asks for nothing, as we have seen in Madame