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

hatred of Valerie that she could not contain the expression of it.

"Cousin Lisbeth," she exclaimed, "my mother and I are avenged! that venomous snake is herself bitten--she is rotting in her bed!"

"Hortense, at this moment you are not a Christian. You ought to pray to God to vouchsafe repentance to this wretched woman."

"What are you talking about?" said Betty, rising from her couch. "Are you speaking of Valerie?"

"Yes," replied Adeline; "she is past hope--dying of some horrible disease of which the mere description makes one shudder----"

Lisbeth's teeth chattered, a cold sweat broke out all over her; the violence of the shock showed how passionate her attachment to Valerie had been.

"I must go there," said she.

"But the doctor forbids your going out."

"I do not care--I must go!--Poor Crevel! what a state he must be in; for he loves that woman."

"He is dying too," replied Countess Steinbock. "Ah! all our enemies are in the devil's clutches--"

"In God's hands, my child--"

Lisbeth dressed in the famous yellow Indian shawl and her black velvet bonnet, and put on her boots; in spite of her relations' remonstrances, she set out as if driven by some irresistible power.

She arrived in the Rue Barbet a few minutes after Monsieur and Madame Hulot, and found seven physicians there, brought by Bianchon to study this unique case; he had just joined them. The physicians, assembled in the drawing-room, were discussing the disease; now one and now another went into Valerie's room or Crevel's to take a note, and returned with an opinion based on this rapid study.

These princes of science were divided in their opinions. One, who stood alone in his views, considered it a case of poisoning, of private revenge, and denied its identity with the disease known in the Middle Ages. Three others regarded it as a specific deterioration of the blood and the humors. The rest, agreeing with Bianchon, maintained that the blood was poisoned by some hitherto unknown morbid infection. Bianchon produced Professor Duval's analysis of the blood. The remedies to be applied, though absolutely empirical and without hope, depended on the verdict in this medical dilemma.

Lisbeth stood as if petrified three yards away from the bed where Valerie lay dying, as she saw a priest from Saint-Thomas d'Aquin standing by her friend's pillow, and a sister of charity in attendance. Religion could find a soul to save in a mass of rottenness which, of the five senses of man, had now only that of sight. The sister of charity who alone had been found to nurse Valerie stood apart. Thus the Catholic religion, that divine institution, always actuated by the spirit of self-sacrifice, under its twofold aspect of the Spirit and the Flesh, was tending this horrible and atrocious creature, soothing her death-bed by its infinite benevolence and inexhaustible stores of mercy.

The servants, in horror, refused to go into the room of either their master or mistress; they thought only of themselves, and judged their betters as righteously stricken. The smell was so foul that in spite of open windows and strong perfumes, no one could remain long in Valerie's room. Religion alone kept guard there.

How could a woman so clever as Valerie fail to ask herself to what end these two representatives of the Church remained with her? The dying woman had listened to the words of the priest. Repentance had risen on her darkened soul as the devouring malady had consumed her beauty. The fragile Valerie had been less able to resist the inroads of the disease than Crevel; she would be the first to succumb, and, indeed, had been the first attacked.

"If I had not been ill myself, I would have come to nurse you," said Lisbeth at last, after a glance at her friend's sunken eyes. "I have kept my room this fortnight or three weeks; but when I heard of your state from the doctor, I came at once."

"Poor Lisbeth, you at least love me still, I see!" said Valerie. "Listen. I have only a day or two left to think, for I cannot say to live. You see, there is nothing left of me--I am a heap of mud! They will not let me see myself in a glass.--Well, it is no more than I deserve. Oh, if I might only win mercy, I would gladly undo all the mischief I have done."

"Oh!" said Lisbeth, "if you can talk like that, you are indeed a dead woman."

"Do not hinder this woman's repentance, leave her in her Christian mind," said the priest.

"There is nothing left!" said Lisbeth in consternation. "I cannot recognize her eyes or her mouth! Not a feature of her is there! And her wit has deserted her! Oh, it is awful!"

"You don't know," said Valerie, "what death is; what it is to be obliged to think of the morrow of your last day on earth, and of what is to be found in the grave.--Worms for the body--and for the soul, what?--Lisbeth, I know there is another life! And I am given over to terrors which prevent my feeling the pangs of my decomposing body.--I, who could laugh at a saint, and say to Crevel that the vengeance of God took every form of disaster.--Well, I was a true prophet.--Do not trifle with sacred things, Lisbeth; if you love me, repent as I do."

"I!" said Lisbeth. "I see vengeance wherever I turn in nature; insects even die to satisfy the craving for revenge when they are attacked. And do not these gentlemen tell us"--and she looked at the priest--"that God is revenged, and that His vengeance lasts through all eternity?"

The priest looked mildly at Lisbeth and said:

"You, madame, are an atheist!"

"But look what I have come to," said Valerie.

"And where did you get this gangrene?" asked the old maid, unmoved from her peasant incredulity.

"I had a letter from Henri which leaves me in no doubt as to my fate. He has murdered me. And--just when I meant to live honestly--to die an object of disgust!

"Lisbeth, give up all notions of revenge. Be kind to that family to whom I have left by my will everything I can dispose of. Go, child, though you are the only creature who, at this hour, does not avoid me with horror--go, I beseech you, and leave me.--I have only time to make my peace with God!"

"She is wandering in her wits," said Lisbeth to herself, as she left the room.

The strongest affection known, that of a woman for a woman, had not such heroic constancy as the Church. Lisbeth, stifled by the miasma, went away. She found the physicians still in consultation. But Bianchon's opinion carried the day, and the only question now was how to try the remedies.

"At any rate, we shall have a splendid _post-mortem_," said one of his opponents, "and there will be two cases to enable us to make comparisons."

Lisbeth went in again with Bianchon, who went up to the sick woman without seeming aware of the malodorous atmosphere.

"Madame," said he, "we intend to try a powerful remedy which may save you--"

"And if you save my life," said she, "shall I be as good-looking as ever?"

"Possibly," said the judicious physician.

"I know your _possibly_," said Valerie. "I shall look like a woman who has fallen into the fire! No, leave me to the Church. I can please no one now but God. I will try to be reconciled to Him, and that will be my last flirtation; yes, I must try to come round God!"

"That is my poor Valerie's last jest; that is all herself!" said Lisbeth in tears.

Lisbeth thought it her duty to go into Crevel's room, where she found Victorin and his wife sitting about a yard away from the stricken man's bed.

"Lisbeth," said he, "they will not tell me what state my wife is in; you have just seen her--how is she?"

"She is better; she says she is saved," replied Lisbeth, allowing herself this play on the word to soothe Crevel's mind.

"That is well," said the Mayor. "I feared lest I had been the cause of her illness. A man is not a traveler in perfumery for nothing; I had blamed myself.--If I should lose her, what would become of me? On my honor, my children, I worship that woman."

He sat up in bed and tried to assume his favorite position.

"Oh, Papa!" cried Celestine, "if only you could be well again, I would make friends with my stepmother--I make a vow!"

"Poor little Celestine!" said Crevel, "come and kiss me."

Victorin held back his wife, who was rushing forward.

"You do not know, perhaps," said the lawyer gently, "that your disease is contagious, monsieur."

"To be sure," replied Crevel. "And the doctors are quite proud of having rediscovered in me some long lost plague of the Middle Ages, which the Faculty has had cried like lost property--it is very funny!"

"Papa," said Celestine, "be brave, and you will get the better of this disease."

"Be quite easy, my children; Death thinks twice of it before carrying off a Mayor of Paris," said he, with monstrous composure. "And if, after all, my district is so unfortunate as to lose a man it has twice honored with its suffrages--you see, what a flow of words I have!--Well, I shall know how to pack up and go. I have been a commercial traveler; I am experienced in such matters. Ah! my children, I am a man of strong mind."

"Papa, promise me to admit the Church--"

"Never," replied Crevel. "What is to be said? I drank the milk of Revolution; I have not Baron Holbach's wit, but I have his strength of mind. I am more _Regence_ than ever, more Musketeer, Abbe Dubois, and Marechal de Richelieu! By the Holy Poker!--My wife, who is wandering in her head, has just sent me a man in a gown--to me! the admirer of Beranger, the friend of Lisette, the son of Voltaire and Rousseau.--The doctor, to feel my pulse, as it were, and see if sickness had subdued me--'You saw Monsieur l'Abbe?' said he.--Well, I imitated the great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor--see, like this," and he turned to show three-quarters face, like his portrait, and extended his hand authoritatively--"and I said:


"The slave was here,
He showed his order, but he nothing gained.


"_His order_ is a pretty jest, showing that even in death Monsieur le President de Montesquieu preserved his elegant wit, for they had sent him a Jesuit. I admire that passage--I cannot say of his life, but of his death--the passage--another joke!--The passage from life to death--the Passage Montesquieu!"

Victorin gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering whether folly and vanity were not forces on a par with true greatness of soul. The causes that act on the springs of the soul seem to be quite independent of the results. Can it be that the fortitude which upholds a great criminal is the same as that which a Champcenetz so proudly walks to the scaffold?

By the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after dreadful sufferings; and Crevel followed her within two days. Thus the marriage-contract was annulled. Crevel was heir to Valerie.

On the very day after the funeral, the friar called again on the lawyer, who received him in perfect silence. The monk held out his hand without a word, and without a word Victorin