Cousin Bette (17 page)

‘Water!… water!' cried Lisbeth, when she had looked at the print and read the words below it:' Group in the possession of Mademoiselle Hulot d'Ervy'. ‘Water! My head's on fire! I'm going mad!'

Madame Marneffe brought water: the spinster removed her bonnet, shook down her black hair, and dipped her head in the basin held by her new friend. She plunged her forehead into the water several times, and arrested the spreading inflammation. After this immersion she regained complete self-control.

‘Not a word,' she said to Madame Marneffe as she dried her face and head; ‘don't breathe a word of all this.… You see!… I am quite easy in my mind now, and it's all forgotten; I have very different things to think of!'

‘She'll be in Charenton tomorrow, that's sure,' Madame Marneffe said to herself as she watched the peasant from Lorraine.

‘What's to be done?' Lisbeth went on. ‘Do you see, my angel? I must hold my tongue, bow my head, and go to the grave as water flows to the river. What could I attempt to do? I would like to grind them all: Adeline, her daughter, and the Baron, into the dust! But what can a poor relation do against a whole rich family? It would be the story of the clay pot against the iron pot.'

‘Yes, you are right,' replied Valérie. ‘All one can do is to snatch as much hay as one can from the hayrack. That's what life amounts to in Paris.'

‘And,' said Lisbeth, ‘I'll die very soon, you know, if I lose this child, whose mother I thought I should always be, with whom I counted on living all my life.…'

She had tears in her eyes as she came to a stop. So much feeling in this woman of fire and brimstone made Madame Marneffe's flesh creep.

‘At least, I've found you,' she went on, taking Valérie's hand. ‘That's one consolation in this dreadful trouble. We
shall be dear friends; and why should we ever leave each other? I will never poach on your preserves. No one will ever fall in love with me! All the men who presented themselves wanted to marry me only for the sake of having my cousin's backing. To have enough vital force to scale the walls of paradise, and to have to spend it earning bread and water, some rags to wear, and a garret: ah, that, my dear, is torture! Under that I have withered.'

She stopped abruptly, and into Madame Marneffe's blue eyes plunged a dark look that pierced that pretty woman's soul, like the blade of a dagger transfixing her heart.

‘But what's the use of talking?' she exclaimed, in self-reproach. ‘I have never said so much about this before I Treachery, like chickens, will come home to roost,' she added after a pause, in a nursery phrase. ‘As you so wisely say – let's sharpen our teeth and snatch as much hay as we can from the hayrack.'

‘You're quite right,' said Madame Marneffe, who was frightened out of her wits by all this emotion and did not remember having suggested this principle of conduct. ‘I think you have quite the right idea, my dear. It's true, life doesn't last so long; we must get as much out of it as we can and use other people for our own advantage. I have come to see that now, even at my age! I was brought up as a spoilt child. Then my father made an ambitious marriage and practically forgot me, after making me his idol and bringing me up like a queen's daughter! My poor mother, who cherished such fond hopes for me, died of grief when she saw me married to a petty official with a salary of twelve hundred francs, a coldblooded libertine worn-out at thirty-nine, as corrupt as a convict hulk, who saw in me no more than they saw in you, a means of getting on! Well, in the end, I have found that this contemptible man is the best kind of husband. By preferring the filthy drabs from the street-corner to me, he leaves me free. If he spends his whole salary on himself, he never asks me where my money comes from –'

In her turn, she stopped short, as if she felt herself being carried away by the torrent of her confidences, and, suddenly struck by the close attention that Lisbeth was giving to her,
judged it prudent to be sure of her before disclosing her most intimate secrets.

‘You see, my dear, how much I trust you!' Madame Mar-neffe went on, and Lisbeth responded with a gesture of absolute reassurance.

More solemn oaths are often sworn by a look and a movement of the head than are heard in law-courts.

‘I keep up all the appearances of respectability,' Madame Marneffe went on, laying her hand on Lisbeth's hand as if in acceptance of her good faith. ‘I am a married woman and I am my own mistress: so much so that if Marneffe takes it into his head to say good-bye to me before he leaves for the Ministry in the morning and he finds the door of my room locked, off he goes quite serenely. He cares less for his own child than I care for one of the marble children playing at the feet of the statues of the Rivers in the Tuileries. If I don't come home to dinner, he dines very happily with the maid, for the maid is quite devoted to Monsieur; and every evening after dinner he goes out, and doesn't come back until midnight or one o'clock. Unfortunately, for the past year I have had no maid of my own, which means that for a year I have been a widow.… I have only been in love once, had one piece of happiness – he was a rich Brazilian, who has been gone a year – my only infidelity! He went to sell his property, realize all he owns, in order to be able to settle in France. What will he find of his Valérie? A dunghill. Bah! it will be his fault, not mine, for why does he stay so long away? I suppose he may have been shipwrecked too, like my virtue.'

‘Good-bye, my dear,' said Lisbeth abruptly. ‘We will always stick together from now on. I love you and admire you; I am on your side! My cousin has been plaguing me to go and live in your new house in the rue Vanneau. I did not want to, for I could easily guess the reason for his sudden kindness.'

‘Yes, you were to be there to keep an eye on me; that's clear enough,' said Madame Marneffe.

‘It's certainly the reason for his generosity,' replied Lisbeth. ‘In Paris most kindnesses are just investments, and most ingratitude is a plain act of revenge! A poor relation is someone
to be treated like the rats, enticed with a scrap of bacon. I will accept the Baron's offer, for this house has become hateful to me. I fancy that we are both sharp enough to know how to keep quiet about things that would damage us, and say what has to be said; so, still tongues, and friendship between us.'

‘Come what may!' cried Madame Marneffe joyfully, delighted to have a chaperon, a confidante, a kind of respectable aunt. ‘Do you know? The Baron is doing things in style in the rue Vanneau.…'

‘I should just think he is,' Lisbeth answered. ‘He's footing a bill for thirty thousand francs for it. Indeed I don't know where he has found the money, for Josépha, the singer, bled him white. Oh! you are in luck,' she added. ‘The Baron would commit a robbery for the woman who holds his heart between two soft, white, little hands like yours.'

‘Well, my dear,' Madame Marneffe went on, with the confident unconcern of such women, who are generous because they really do not care, ‘you may as well take anything from these rooms that might suit you for your new apartment – that chest of drawers, the wardrobe with the mirror, this carpet, the curtains…'

Lisbeth's eyes dilated with incredulous pleasure; she could not believe that she was being given such a present.

‘You do more for me in a moment than my rich relations have done in thirty years!' she exclaimed. ‘It has never crossed their minds to wonder whether I had furniture! The first time the Baron visited me, a few weeks ago, he pulled a rich man's face at the sight of my poor things.… Well, thank you, my dear. I will repay you for this. You shall see later how!'

Valérie saw
her
Cousin Bette out, as far as the landing, where the two women kissed.

‘She stinks of hard work!' the pretty woman said to herself when she was alone. ‘I won't kiss her often, that cousin of mine! But I had better walk warily; I must handle her carefully. She will be very useful; she will help me make my fortune!'

Like a true Parisian creole, Madame Marneffe detested having to exert herself. She had the cool indifference of cats,
who run and pounce only when obliged to by necessity. She required life to be all pleasure, and pleasure to be all calm plain sailing. She loved flowers, provided someone sent them to her. A visit to the theatre could not be considered unless she had a good box of her own, and a carriage to take her there. These courtesan tastes Valérie derived from her mother, who had had everything lavished upon her by General Montcornet during his visits to Paris, and who for twenty years had seen the world at her feet; who, a spendthrift by nature, had frittered away all her wealth, squandered everything, in luxurious living of a kind whose programme has been lost since Napoleon's fall. The great men and women of the Empire, in their follies, rivalled the great aristocrats of the old régime. Under the Restoration the aristocracy has always remembered having been persecuted and robbed, and so, with few exceptions, become economical, careful, and provident: in fact bourgeois and inglorious. Now, 1830 has completed the work of 1793. In France, from now on, there will be great names but no more great houses, unless there are political changes, difficult to foresee. Everything bears the stamp of personal interest. The wisest buy annuities with their money. The family has been destroyed.

The constricting pressure of poverty which was galling Valérie intolerably on that day when, to use Marneffe's expression, she had
made
Hulot, had decided that young woman to use her beauty as a means to fortune. For some time she had felt a need to have a devoted friend at hand, someone rather like a mother, the kind of person to whom may be confided what must be concealed from a maid, who can act, come and go, think on our behalf – a tool in the hand, in fact, resigned to an unequal share of life's spoils. She had guessed, just as easily as Lisbeth, what the Baron's motives were in wishing her to make friends with Cousin Bette. To guide her, she had the formidable knowledge of a Parisian creole who spends her hours lying on a sofa, turning the lantern of her observation on all the dark corners of human souls, studying emotions and investigating intrigues; and she had devised the plan of making an accomplice of the spy. Her wild indiscretion was probably premeditated. She had recognized the true
nature of the fiery-spirited spinster whose passionate impulses were being expended in a void, and was anxious to attach her to herself. The conversation she had held with Lisbeth was like the stone a mountaineer casts into a chasm in order to sound its depth; and Madame Marneffe had recoiled in dismay when she found both an Iago and a Richard III in this woman, who to all appearances was so harmless, so humble, and so little to be feared.

In an instant, Cousin Bette had become her true self again. In an instant, this savage, Corsican, nature, having broken the fragile bonds which restrained it, had sprung back to its menacing height, like a branch whipping from the hands of a child who has bent it down in order to steal its unripe fruit.

To any observer of society, it is always astonishing to see how rapidly virgin natures can conceive ideas, and with what abundance and perfection.

Virginity, like all abnormal states, has its characteristic qualities, its fascinating greatness. Life, whose forces have been kept unspent, takes on in the virgin individual an incalculable power of resistance and endurance. The brain has been enriched by the sum of all its untapped faculties. When celibate persons make demands on their bodies or their minds, need to resort to physical action or thought, they find steel stiffening their muscles or knowledge infused into their minds, a diabolical strength or the black magic of the Will.

In this respect, the Virgin Mary, regarding her for the moment only as a symbol, towers in her greatness above all the Indian, Egyptian, and Greek types of deity. Virginity, the source and mother of everything that is great,
magna parent rerum
, holds in her beautiful white hands the key of the higher worlds. Truly this grandiose and awe-inspiring exception to the normal rule of humanity is worthy of all the honours which the Catholic Church regards as rightly hers.

So, in a moment, Cousin Bette became the Mohican whose snares are inescapable, whose thoughts are impenetrably dissembled, whose swift decisions are reached on the evidence brought by senses developed to perfect keenness. She was hate and vengeance uncompromising, as they are known in Italy, Spain, and the East, for those two passions, the
reverse side of friendship and love pushed to extremes, are known absolutely only in countries bathed by the sun. But Lisbeth was essentially a daughter of Lorraine, which means that she was determined to play a deep game.

She did not easily undertake the second part of her role; indeed, she made a strange move, which was a result of her profound ignorance. She pictured prison as all children imagine it, confusing imprisonment with solitary confinement. Solitary confinement is the harshest form of imprisonment, and to order it is the prerogative of criminal justice.

On leaving Madame Marneffe, Lisbeth hurried off to see Monsieur Rivet, and found him in his office.

‘Well, my dear Monsieur Rivet,' she said, after first bolting the office door, ‘you were quite right. Poles, indeed! Low scoundrels! They're all lawless, faithless, men!'

‘Men who want to set Europe on fire,' said the pacific Rivet, ‘to ruin trade and businessmen, for the sake of a country which, they say, is nothing but bog, full of frightful Jews, not to mention Cossacks and peasants, kinds of ferocious animals not really to be classed as belonging to the human race at all. These Poles don't realize what times we live in. We're not barbarians any more! War is out-of-date, my dear lady; it went out with the kings. Our times have seen the triumph of trade, hard work, and middle-class good sense: the kind of virtues which made Holland what it is. Yes,' he said, warming to his theme, ‘we live in an era when the nations must obtain everything by means of the legitimate development of their liberties
and peaceful
functioning of constitutional institutions; that's what the Poles have no idea of, and I hope – You were saying, my dear?' he added, breaking off as he perceived by his forewoman's expression that high politics were beyond her range.