Cousin Bette (33 page)

‘Between five and six thousand francs.'

‘I have only three thousand, or barely that,' said Lisbeth. ‘What is Wenceslas doing at present?'

‘He's been asked to make a dessert service for the Duc d' Hérouville, in collaboration with Stidmann, for six thousand francs. If he does, Monsieur Chanor will advance four thousand francs that we owe to Monsieur Léon de Lora and Monsieur Brideau – a debt of honour.'

‘Do you mean to tell me that you have been paid for the statue and the bas-reliefs of Marshal Montcornet's monument, and that you haven't settled that debt?'

‘But,' said Hortense, ‘for the past three years we have been spending twelve thousand francs a year, on an income of two thousand francs. The Marshal's monument, when all the expenses were paid, did not give us more than sixteen thousand francs. In plain fact, if Wenceslas does not work, I don't know what is going to become of us. Ah! if only I could learn to make statues, how I would make the clay fly!' she said, throwing wide her lovely arms.

In the mature woman, the young girl's promise was fulfilled. Hortense's eyes sparkled. In her veins the impetuous blood ran red. She lamented that her energy should be only partly used in looking after her baby.

'Ah, my dear innocent child, a sensible girl marries an
artist after he has made his fortune, not when it is still to make.'

Just then they heard footsteps and the voices of Stidmann and Wenceslas, who came in after showing Chanor to the door. Stidmann, an artist popular in the world of journalists, prominent actresses, and socially well known courtesans, was a distinguished young man whom Valérie was anxious to have in her own circle, and whom Claude Vignon had already introduced to her. Stidmann's liaison with the celebrated Madame Schontz had recently been broken off. She had married some months before and gone to live in the country. Valérie and Lisbeth, who had learned of the break through Claude Vignon, thought it good policy to attract this friend of Wenceslas's to the rue Vanneau. Stidmann, through a feeling of delicacy, visited the Steinbocks infrequently, and Lisbeth had not been present when Claude Vignon had introduced him, so she was meeting him for the first time. As she watched the artist, she several times surprised him glancing in Hortense's direction, and this suggested to her the possibility of giving him by way of consolation to Countess Steinbock, if Wenceslas should be unfaithful. The thought had occurred to Stidmann, as a matter of fact, that, if Wenceslas were not his friend, the wonderfully lovely young Countess, Hortense, would be an adorable mistress; but he had honourably repressed the thought and kept away from the house. Lisbeth took note of his revealing embarrassment, as of a man in the presence of a woman with whom he refuses to allow himself to flirt.

‘He's a very good-looking young man,' she whispered to Hortense.

‘Oh, do you think so?' she replied. ‘I have never noticed him.…'

‘Stidmann, my boy,' said Wenceslas in a low voice to his friend. ‘You know we don't stand on ceremony with each other. Well, we've some business to discuss with this old girl.'

Stidmann took his leave of the two cousins, and departed.

‘That's arranged,' said Wenceslas, returning after seeing Stidmann out. ‘But the work will take six months, and we have to live meantime.'

‘I have my diamonds!' cried young Countess Steinbock, with the superb impulsive generosity of a woman in love.

Wenceslas suddenly had tears in his eyes.

‘Oh, but I'm going to work,' he said, sitting down beside his wife and drawing her to his knee. ‘I'll do knick-knacks, wedding presents for bridegrooms, bronze groups…'

‘Well, my dear children,' said Lisbeth,' – for you are my heirs, you know, and believe me I'll have a nice little pocketful to leave you some day, especially if you help me to marry the Marshal; if we could manage to fix that up quickly, I would have you all to live with me, you and Adeline. Ah, we could live very happily together! But meantime listen to what long experience has taught me. Don't borrow money on the security of your possessions: that spells ruin for the borrower. I have seen it happen time and again that when the interest had to be paid there was no money to pay it, and so the borrowers lost everything. I can get someone to lend you the money at five per cent, on your note of hand.'

‘Ah, that would save us!' said Hortense.

‘Well, child, Wenceslas should come with me to see the person who will help him if I ask her. It is Madame Marneffe. If you flatter her, for she's very vain like all newly rich climbers, she'll be quite ready to help you out. Come and see her too, my dear Hortense.'

Hortense gazed at Wenceslas, looking like a condemned prisoner mounting the scaffold.

‘Claude Vignon took Stidmann there,' said Wenceslas. ‘It's a very pleasant house.'

Hortense bowed her head. One word only is adequate to describe what she felt: it was not a mere agonizing pang, it was death.

‘But, my dear Hortense, you must learn what life is like!' exclaimed Lisbeth, rightly interpreting Hortense's eloquent gesture. ‘If you don't face it, you'll be like your mother – relegated to a deserted lodging to weep like Calypso after the departure of Ulysses, and at an age when there's no hope of a Telemachus!' she went on, repeating one of Madame Marneffe's witticisms. ‘You must look on people in the social world as tools to be made use of, taken up or laid down as
serves one's purpose. Make use of Madame Marneffe, my dear children, and drop her later. Are you afraid of Wenceslas, who adores you, being overwhelmed with passion for a woman four or five years older than you, and as withered as a bundle of lucerne hay, and…'

‘I would rather pawn my diamonds,' said Hortense. ‘Oh, don't ever go there, Wenceslas! It's hell itself!'

‘Hortense is quite right!' said Wenceslas, kissing his wife.

‘Thank you, dear,' the young wife said, her cup full. ‘You see, Lisbeth, what an angel my husband is. He doesn't gamble, we go everywhere together, and if he could only settle down to work… no, that would be just too much joy. Why should we publicly call on our father's mistress, a woman who is ruining him, and who is the cause of the troubles which are killing our heroic Mama?'

‘That's not what ruined your father, child. It was his opera-singer that ruined him, and then your marriage!' returned Cousin Bette. ‘Heavens! Madame Marneffe is very useful to him, if you only knew! But I mustn't say anything.…'

‘Dear Bette, you stand up for everyone.'

Screams from her baby called Hortense to the garden, and Lisbeth was alone with Wenceslas.

‘You have an angel for a wife, Wenceslas!' said Cousin Bette. ‘Love her well; never give her cause for sorrow.'

‘Yes, I love her so much that I'm hiding our situation from her,' Wenceslas answered; ‘but I can talk to you, Lisbeth. Well, if we did pawn my wife's diamonds, we should be no better off.'

‘Borrow from Madame Marneffe, then,' said Lisbeth. ‘Persuade Hortense to let you go there, Wenceslas; or, goodness me, go without her knowing!'

‘I thought of that,' said Wenceslas, ‘when I said I would not go, in order to spare Hortense's feelings.'

‘Listen, Wenceslas. I love you both too much not to warn you of the danger. If you go there you must hold fast to your heart, for that woman is a demon. Everyone who sees her, adores her; she is so wicked, and so enticing! She fascinates men like a work of art. Borrow her money, but don't leave your heart as a pledge. I should never forgive myself if you
were unfaithful to my cousin.… Here she comes! Say nothing more. I will arrange things for you.

‘Give Lisbeth a kiss, darling,' Wenceslas said to his wife. ‘She's going to help us out of this difficulty by lending us her savings.'

And he glanced meaningly at Lisbeth.

‘I hope that you are really going to set to work now, my cherub?' said Hortense.

‘Yes, indeed!' assented the artist. ‘Tomorrow.'

‘The word
tomorrow
is our ruin !' said Hortense, smiling at him.

‘Well, dear child, don't you know that there has been one thing after another getting in my way, business to be done and other hindrances, every single day?'

‘Yes, you're right, dear.'

‘In here,' Steinbock went on, tapping his forehead, ‘I have such wonderful ideas ! Oh, I'm going to astonish all my enemies. I'll make a dinner service in the sixteenth-century German style, the fantastic style, with convoluted foliage full of insects, and children laid sleeping among the leaves, and new inventions of real chimeras, live fantasies never seen before, the stuff of our dreams embodied! I have them in my mind! The work will be intricate in detail, but airy, in spite of all its rich ornament. When Chanor left me, he was filled with admiration.… I needed some encouragement, I can tell you, for that last article about Montcornet's monument really had me down.'

When Lisbeth and Wenceslas were alone for a moment, later in the day, the artist arranged with the spinster to go to see Madame Marneffe next day, for either his wife would have agreed to his going, or he would go without telling her.

Valérie, informed of this triumph the same evening, dispatched Baron Hulot to invite Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Steinbock to dinner; for she was beginning to send him on errands, be the domestic tyrant that women of her kind usually become to old men, who are sent trotting here and there round the town, carrying invitations to anyone whose presence is necessary to the interests or vanity of their exacting mistresses.

Next day, Valérie prepared for battle by making such a toilet as Parisians can confection when they intend to make use of all their natural weapons. She studied her appearance to this end, much as a man about to fight a duel works at his lunges and recoils. There was not a blemish, not a wrinkle anywhere! Valérie was in her finest bloom: white, soft, and delicate. As a crowning touch, her beauty ‘patches' insensibly drew the eye. People imagine that artifices to heighten beauty, such as eighteenth-century patches, have disappeared, been discarded as out of date, but they are quite mistaken. Women today are cleverer than they ever were in the use of daring devices to provoke quizzing opera-glasses. One woman may invent the knot of ribbons with a diamond set in the centre, and for a whole evening all eyes turn in her direction. Another revives the net veiling cap, or twists a dagger-like pin in her hair in a way that somehow reminds you of her garter. Someone else ties black velvet ribbon round her wrists; and a rival appears with feather plumes. The results of this high endeavour, achievements in coquetry or love comparable with Austerlitz, then become fashionable in lower spheres, while their happy creators are looking round for new inspirations.

For that evening, when Valérie intended to be a brilliant success, she applied the equivalent of three patches. First, she had her hair washed with a rinse which for a few days turned her fair hair to ashen fairness. Madame Steinbock was a golden blonde, and she did not want to resemble her at all. This change of colour gave something piquant and strange to Valérie's appearance, which disturbed the minds of her faithful adorers to the point of making Montès say ‘What's come over you this evening?' Next, she tied a rather wide black velvet ribbon round her neck, throwing the whiteness of her bosom into relief. The third provocative patch was what our grandmothers used to call ‘the man-slayer'. Valérie set a darling little rosebud in the stiffened top of her bodice, just in the centre, in the sweetest hollow. It was calculated to draw the eyes of all men under thirty downwards.

‘I look delicious, good enough to eat!' she said to herself, practising her poses before the glass, exactly like a dancer doing her
pliés.

Lisbeth had gone to market, and the dinner was to be a choice repast, such as Mathurine used to cook for her bishop when he entertained the prelate of the neighbouring diocese.

Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Count Steinbock arrived almost together, about six o'clock. Any ordinary woman, or a natural one if you like, would have hurried down when the name of the person so ardently desired was announced; but Valérie, who since five o'clock had been waiting in her room, left her three guests together, certain of being the subject of their conversation or of their secret thoughts. With her own hands, when she was directing the arrangement of her drawing-room, she had placed her trinkets where they would catch the eye, a collection of those delightful toys that Paris produces, and that no other city could, which evoke a woman and, as it were, declare her presence: keepsakes bound in enamel and set with pearls, goblets filled with pretty rings, pieces of Sèvres or Dresden china mounted with exquisite taste by Florent and Chanor, statuettes, albums – all the madly expensive baubles that passion commissions from the makers in its first delirium, or to celebrate its latest reconciliation.

Success, moreover, had gone to Valérie's head. She had promised Crevel to marry him, if Marneffe died; and the amorous Crevel had arranged the transfer of shares worth ten thousand francs a year to the account of Valérie Fortin. This sum was the amount of his profit on his investments in railways for the past three years, the yield of a hundred thousand crowns once offered to Baroness Hulot. So Valérie was the possessor of an income of thirty-two thousand francs. Crevel had just blurted out a promise even more substantial than the gift of his profits. In the paroxysm of passion into which ‘his duchess' had thrown him between two o'clock and four (he gave Madame
de
Marneffe that title to make his illusion complete), for Valérie had surpassed herself that day in the rue du Dauphin, he felt himself compelled to encourage her promised fidelity by holding out the prospect of a pretty little house that a rash speculator had built for himself in the rue Barbette, and now wanted to sell. Valérie saw a vision of herself in this charming house, set in its court and garden, with her own carriage!