Cousin Bette (60 page)

‘Give me an attic here!' said Carabine.

‘That's what I thought,' said the Brazilian, ‘and I sold all my property and possessions in Rio de Janeiro to come back to Madame Marneffe.'

‘Journeys like that are not made for nothing,' said Madame Nourrisson. ‘You have a right to be loved for yourself, especially being so handsome.… Oh! isn't he handsome?' she said to Carabine.

‘Handsome! He's handsomer than the postilion at Long-jumeau,' replied the girl.

Cydalise took the Brazilian's hand, and he disengaged himself as politely as he could.

‘I came back to carry Madame Marneffe off!' said the Baron, going on with his story. ‘And do you know why I was away three years?'

‘No, dear savage,' said Carabine.

‘Well, she had told me so many times that she wanted to live with me, alone, in some wilderness!…'

‘Oh, not a savage after all,' said Carabine, bursting out laughing; ‘just a member of the tribe of civilized innocents.'

‘She had said it so often,' went on the Baron, not even hearing Carabine's gibes,'that I had a delightful place to live
made ready, in the middle of that immense estate. I came back to France to fetch Valérie, and on the night when I saw her again…'

‘
Saw her again
is proper,' said Carabine. ‘I'll remember the expression!'

‘… She told me to wait until that wretched Marneffe died, and I agreed, and forgave her for accepting Hulot's attentions. I don't know whether the devil has put on petticoats, but from that moment that woman was all I could ask, all I could wish for; and truly never for a moment has she given me any cause to suspect her!'

‘Now, that's piling it on a bit!' said Carabine to Madame Nourrisson.

Madame Nourrisson nodded in agreement.

‘My faith in that woman,' said Montès, giving way to tears, ‘was as strong as my love. I nearly slapped the faces of all those people round the table, just now.…'

‘So I noticed!' said Carabine.

‘If I have been betrayed, if she is going to marry, if she is in Steinbock's arms at this minute, she has earned death a thousand times over, and I will kill her as I would crush a fly…'

‘And what about the gendarmes, my boy?' said Madame Nourrisson, with an old crone's leer that made the flesh creep.

‘And the police superintendent, and the magistrates, and the assize court, and the whole boiling!' said Carabine.

‘You're talking big, dearie!' went on Madame Nourrisson, for she was anxious to learn what the Brazilian's plans for vengeance were.

‘I will kill her!' the Brazilian coldly repeated. ‘You called me a savage, did you?… Do you imagine that I mean to imitate your countrymen's stupidity and buy poison from the druggists?… I was planning, on the way here, how I should execute my vengeance if you were right about Valérie. One of my Negroes carries on him the most deadly of animal poisons, a terrible disease much more effective than any vegetable poison and that can only be cured in Brazil. I will give it to Cydalise to take, and she shall infect me. Then when death is in the veins of Crevel and his wife, I shall be beyond
the Azores with your cousin, whom I shall cure, and take for my wife. We savages have our own methods! Cydalise,' he said, looking at the Norman girl, ‘is the simple creature that I need. How much money does she owe?'

‘A hundred thousand francs!' said Cydalise.

‘She doesn't talk much, but when she does she says a mouthful,' Carabine whispered to Madame Nourrisson.

‘I am going mad!' groaned the Brazilian hollowly, collapsing on a sofa. ‘I cannot survive it! But I must see for myself – it's not possible! A lithographed note.… Who can say that it isn't a forgery?… Baron Hulot – Valérie's lover?…' He recalled what Josépha had said. ‘But the proof that he could not have been is that she's still alive!… But I will not leave her alive if she is not mine.… She shall not be another man's!'

Montès was a terrifying sight, and it was even more frightening to hear him. He roared like a lion, and threw himself about the room. Everything he laid hands on was broken; the rosewood splintered like glass.

‘How he breaks up the place!' said Carabine, looking at Madame Nourrisson. ‘My child,' she went on, tapping the Brazilian on the arm, ‘
Orlando furioso
sounds very well in a poem; but in a flat he's just Roland in a rage, plain prose – and plain expensive!'

‘I am of your way of thinking, son!' said Nourrisson, rising and moving to stand facing the exhausted Brazilian. ‘When two people have that kind of love, when they are fatally, inextricably,
booked together
, they must answer for love with their lives. The one who pulls away tears everything asunder, that's plain! It's total ruin. You have my esteem, my admiration, and above all my approval of the way you refuse to take things lying down, and from now on I'm going to be a firm friend of Negroes. But then, after all, you're in love! You'll stop on the brink!'

‘I… If she's a trollop, I'll…'

‘See here, you talk too much. Better cut the cackle and come to business!' returned Madame Nourrisson, speaking now as her practical down-to-earth self. ‘A man who means vengeance and calls his methods savage should not behave
like this. We'll let you see your loved one in her paradise, but you must take Cydalise and go in there with your sweetheart on your arm, as if a maid had given you the wrong room by mistake. And you must not make a scene! If you want your revenge, you must sing small, look as if you are in despair, and let yourself be bowled over by your mistress! Isn't that the right way to do it?' she asked, seeing the Baron look surprised at such an elaborate, well-plotted scheme.

‘Very well, old ostrich,' he replied; ‘so be it.… I understand.'

‘Good-bye, love,' said Madame Nourrisson to Carabine. She signed to Cydalise to go downstairs with Montès, and remained alone for a moment with Carabine.

‘Now, pet, I'm afraid of only one thing – that he may strangle her! I should be in a fine pickle if he did; we can only get along by keeping things quiet. Oh, I think you have won your Raphael picture, only they do say it's a Mignard. Never mind; that's much finer. They told me that Raphaels are all blackened, and the one I've got is just as nice as a Girodet.'

‘All I care about is going one better than Josépha,' declared Carabine, ‘and it's all the same to me whether it's with a Mignard or a Raphael. You wouldn't believe the pearls that gold-digger had on this evening.… You would have bartered your soul for them!'

Cydalise, Montès, and Madame Nourrisson took a cab that was standing by Carabine's door. Madame Nourrisson, in a low voice, directed the driver to a house in the same block as the Italian Opera, only seven or eight minutes' drive from the rue Saint-Georges, but she told the man to go along the rue Lepelletier, and very slowly, so that they could examine the waiting carriages.

‘Brazilian!' Madame Nourrisson commanded. ‘Look out for your angel's carriage and servants.'

The Baron pointed out Valérie's carriage as the cab drove past.

‘She told her servants to be here at ten o'clock and took a cab to the house, and she's there now with Count Steinbock. She has had dinner there, and in half an hour she'll be on her
way to the Opera. It's very neatly worked out! It shows you how she has been able to keep the blinkers over your eyes for so long,' said Madame Nourrisson.

The Brazilian did not answer. He had reassumed, together with a tiger's savage ferocity, the imperturbable composure that had been so much admired at the dinner party. His calm now, however, was that of a bankrupt the day after his bankruptcy has been declared.

At the door of the fateful house a hackney-carriage with two horses was standing, one of those called a ‘General Company' from the name of the firm that runs them.

‘Stay in your box,' Madame Nourrisson commanded Montès. ‘You can't walk in there as if it were a tap-room. You'll be fetched.'

The paradise that was shared by Madame Marneffe and Wenceslas was not in the least like Crevel's little house, which Crevel had sold to the Comte Maxime de Trailles, as it seemed to him that he had no further use for it. This paradise, by no means their exclusive possession, was a room on the fourth floor, opening on the staircase, in a house in the same block as the Italian Opera. On each floor of this house, on every landing, there was a room once intended to serve as a kitchen for each set of rooms. When the house had become a place of assignation, with rooms let out at an exorbitant rent, the owner, the real Madame Nourrisson, second-hand-clothes dealer in the rue Neuve-Saint-Marc, had realized the enormous potential value of these kitchens, and converted them into something like private dining-rooms. Each of these rooms, shut off on two sides by thick party-walls, with windows looking on the street, was completely isolated by heavy double doors on the fourth side, on the landing. Important secrets could therefore be discussed over dinner in this place without risk of being overheard. For greater security, the windows were provided with sun-blinds on the outside and shutters within. The privacy of the rooms was worth a rent of three hundred francs a month. The entire house, big with paradise and mysteries, was let out for twenty-four thousand francs by Madame Nourrisson the First, and made a profit of twenty thousand francs a year – taking one year with another – when
her manageress (Madame Nourrisson the Second) had been paid, for she did not run the business herself.

The paradise rented by Count Steinbock had been hung with chintz. The humble flooring, of cold, hard, red-wax-polished tiles, no longer offended the senses under a soft deep-piled carpet. For furniture, it had two pretty chairs and a bed in an alcove, before which just then, and half-concealing it, stood a table covered with what was left of an excellent dinner, amid which two long-necked bottles and an empty champagne bottle, sunk in its melting ice, were landmarks in the fields of Bacchus tilled by Venus. The eye was caught by a handsome, luxuriously upholstered easy-chair, no doubt sent in by Valérie, beside a low fireside seat, and a rosewood chest-of-drawers with a looking-glass gracefully framed in the Pompadour style. A hanging lamp shed subdued light, augmented by the candles standing on the table and the chimney-piece.

This sketch will serve to give some idea,
urbi et orbi
, of the sordid shabbiness of clandestine love in the Paris of 1840. We are so far away, alas! from adulterous passion as symbolized by Vulcan's nets three thousand years ago.

As Cydalise and the Baron were on their way upstairs, Valérie, standing before the logs burning in the fireplace, was having her stays laced up by Wenceslas. It is at such moments that a woman who is neither too plump nor too slender, like the finely-made, elegant, Valérie, seems more than ordinarily beautiful. The rose-tinted flesh and dewy skin invite the most somnolent eye. The lines of the body, then so lightly veiled, are so clearly suggested by the shining folds of the petticoat and the lower part of the stays that a woman becomes quite irresistible, like every joy when we must say good-bye to it. The happy smiling face in the glass, the tapping foot, the raised hand busily tucking up the still disordered curls, eyes brimming with grateful love, the glow of content, like a setting sun, illuminating every detail of the countenance – everything that the eye rests on makes this hour a treasure-house of memories! Any man, indeed, who throws a backward glance at his youthful wild oats will remember some such charming details, and may perhaps, without excusing
them, understand the follies of the Hulots and the Crevels. Women are so well aware of their power at such times that they always find in them what may be called the aftermath of love.

‘Well, well! Just fancy not knowing how to lace up a woman after two years! You're far too much of a Pole, my boy! It's ten o'clock, my Wences… las!' said Valérie, laughing.

At this moment a malicious servant adroitly raised the door-latch with the blade of a knife, the latch of that double door on which the whole security of Adam and Eve depended. She opened the door abruptly, because those who hire such Edens can only count on a short time as their own, and disclosed to view a tableau like one of those charming genre paintings, after Gavarni, that are so often hung in the Paris Exhibition.

‘This way, Madame!' said the maid.

And Cydalise entered, followed by Baron Montès.

‘But there are people here! Excuse me, Madame,' said the Norman girl, in a fright.

‘What! It's Valérie!' exclaimed Montès, violently slamming the door.

Madame Marneffe, overwhelmed by feelings too keen to be dissembled, sank into a chair by the fireside. Tears sprang to her eyes, and dried instantly. She looked at Montès, took in the girl, and gave a forced peal of laughter. The dignity of a woman outraged effaced all thought of the impropriety of her half-clothed state. She walked up to Montès, and looked at him so proudly that her eyes seemed to scintillate like swords.

‘So this,' she said, coming to a standstill facing the Brazilian, and pointing to Cydalise, ‘this is the other face of your fidelity? You, who made promises to me that would have convinced an
unbeliever
in love! – for whose sake I have done so much, to the point of committing crimes!… You are fight, Monsieur: I cannot compete with a girl of that age, and so beautiful!… I know what you are going to say,' she went on, indicating Wenceslas, whose confusion was proof too evident to be denied. ‘That's my affair. If I were still able to love you, after such a mean betrayal, for you must have spied on me, you must have bought every step up these stairs, and the mistress of the house, and the servant, and even Reine
perhaps.… Oh! what a pleasant thing that is! If it were possible for me to have any affection still for a man so shamefully treacherous, I could give him such reasons that he would love me twice as much! But I can only leave you, Monsieur, with all your doubts, which will soon turn to regrets… Wenceslas, my dress!'