Honore de Balzac (8 page)

Monsieur d'Hauteserre's costume, expressive envelope of his distinctive
character, described to the eye both the man and his period. He always
wore one of those nut-colored great-coats with small collars which the
Duc d'Orleans made the fashion after his return from England, and which
were, during the Revolution, a sort of compromise between the hideous
popular garments and the elegant surtouts of the aristocracy. His velvet
waistcoat with flowered stripes, the style of which recalled those of
Robespierre and Saint-Just, showed the upper part of a shirt-frill in
fine plaits. He still wore breeches; but his were of coarse blue cloth,
with burnished steel buckles. His stockings of black spun-silk defined
his deer-like legs, the feet of which were shod in thick shoes, held
in place by gaiters of black cloth. He retained the former fashion of
a muslin cravat in innumerable folds fastened by a gold buckle at the
throat. The worthy man had not intended an act of political eclecticism
in adopting this costume, which combined the styles of peasant,
revolutionist, and aristocrat; he simply and innocently obeyed the
dictates of circumstances.

Madame d'Hauteserre, forty years of age and wasted by emotions, had a
faded face which seemed to be always posing for its portrait. A lace
cap, trimmed with bows of white satin, contributed singularly to give
her a solemn air. She still wore powder, in spite of a white kerchief,
and a gown of puce-colored silk with tight sleeves and full skirt, the
sad last garments of Marie-Antoinette. Her nose was pinched, her chin
sharp, the whole face nearly triangular, the eyes worn-out with weeping;
but she now wore a touch of rouge which brightened their grayness. She
took snuff, and each time that she did so she employed all the pretty
precautions of the fashionable women of her early days; the details of
this snuff-taking constituted a ceremony which could be explained by one
fact—she had very pretty hands.

For the last two years the former tutor of the Simeuse twins, a friend
of the late Abbe d'Hauteserre, named Goujet, Abbe des Minimes, had
taken charge of the parish of Cinq-Cygne out of friendship for the
d'Hauteserres and the young countess. His sister, Mademoiselle Goujet,
who possessed a little income of seven hundred francs, added that sum to
the meagre salary of her brother and kept his house. Neither church nor
parsonage had been sold during the Revolution on account of their small
value. The abbe and his sister lived close to the chateau, for the wall
of the parsonage garden and that of the park were the same in places.
Twice a week the pair dined at the chateau, but they came every evening
to play boston with the d'Hauteserres; for Laurence, unable to play a
game, did not even know one card from another.

The Abbe Goujet, an old man with white hair and a face as white as that
of an old woman, endowed with a kindly smile and a gentle and persuasive
voice, redeemed the insipidity of his rather mincing face by a fine
intellectual brow and a pair of keen eyes. Of medium height, and
very well made, he still wore the old-fashioned black coat, silver
shoe-buckles, breeches, black silk stockings, and a black waistcoat
on which lay his clerical bands, giving him a distinguished air which
detracted nothing from his dignity. This abbe, who became bishop of
Troyes after the Restoration, had long made a study of young people
and fully understood the noble character of the young countess; he
appreciated her at her full value, and had shown her, from the first,
a respectful deference which contributed much to her independence at
Cinq-Cygne, for it led the austere old lady and the kind old gentleman
to yield to the young girl, who by rights should have yielded to them.
For the last six months the abbe had watched Laurence with the intuition
peculiar to priests, the most sagacious of men; and although he did
not know that this girl of twenty-three was thinking of overturning
Bonaparte as she lay there twisting with slender fingers the frogged
lacing of her riding-habit, he was well aware that she was agitated by
some great project.

Mademoiselle Goujet was one of those unmarried women whose portrait can
be drawn in one word which will enable the least imaginative mind to
picture her; she was ungainly. She knew her own ugliness and was the
first to laugh at it, showing her long teeth, yellow as her complexion
and her bony hands. She was gay and hearty. She wore the famous short
gown of former days, a very full skirt with pockets full of keys, a cap
with ribbons and a false front. She was forty years of age very early,
but had, so she said, caught up with herself by keeping at that age for
twenty years. She revered the nobility; and knew well how to preserve
her own dignity by giving to persons of noble birth the respect and
deference that were due to them.

This little company was a god-send to Madame d'Hauteserre, who had not,
like her husband, rural occupations, nor, like Laurence, the tonic of
hatred, to enable her to bear the dulness of a retired life. Many things
had happened to ameliorate that life within the last six years. The
restoration of Catholic worship allowed the faithful to fulfil their
religious duties, which play more of a part in country life than
elsewhere. Protected by the conservative edicts of the First Consul,
Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre had been able to correspond with their
sons, and no longer in dread of what might happen to them could even
hope for the erasure of their names from the lists of the proscribed and
their consequent return to France. The Treasury had lately made up
the arrearages and now paid its dividends promptly; so that the
d'Hauteserres received, over and above their annuity, about eight
thousand francs a year. The old man congratulated himself on the
sagacity of his foresight in having put all his savings, amounting to
twenty thousand francs, together with those of his ward, in the public
Funds before the 18th Brumaire, which, as we all know, sent those stocks
up from twelve to eighteen francs.

The chateau of Cinq-Cygne had long been empty and denuded of furniture.
The prudent guardian was careful not to alter its aspect during the
revolutionary troubles; but after the peace of Amiens he made a journey
to Troyes and brought back various relics of the pillaged mansions which
he obtained from the dealers in second-hand furniture. The salon was
furnished for the first time since their occupation of the house.
Handsome curtains of white brocade with green flowers, from the hotel de
Simeuse, draped the six windows of the salon, in which the family were
now assembled. The walls of this vast room were entirely of wood, with
panels encased in beaded mouldings with masks at the angles; the whole
painted in two shades of gray. The spaces over the four doors were
filled with those designs, painted in cameo of two colors, which were
so much in vogue under Louis XV. Monsieur d'Hauteserre had picked up
at Troyes certain gilded pier-tables, a sofa in green damask, a crystal
chandelier, a card-table of marquetry, among other things that served
him to restore the chateau. In 1792 all the furniture of the house had
been taken or destroyed, for the pillage of the mansions in town was
imitated in the valley. Each time that the old man went to Troyes he
returned with some relic of the former splendor, sometimes a fine carpet
for the floor of the salon, at other times part of a dinner service, or
a bit of rare old porcelain of either Sevres or Dresden. During the last
six months he had ventured to dig up the family silver, which the cook
had buried in the cellar of a little house belonging to him at the end
of one of the long faubourgs in Troyes.

That faithful servant, named Durieu, and his wife had followed the
fortunes of their young mistress. Durieu was the factotum of the
chateau, and his wife was the housekeeper. He was helped in the cooking
by the sister of Catherine, Laurence's maid, to whom he was teaching his
art and who gave promise of becoming an excellent cook. An old gardener,
his wife, a son paid by the day, and a daughter who served as a
dairy-woman, made up the household. Madame Durieu had lately and
secretly had the Cinq-Cygne liveries made for the gardener's son and for
Gothard. Though blamed for this imprudence by Monsieur d'Hauteserre,
the housekeeper took great pleasure in seeing the dinner served on the
festival of Saint-Laurence, the countess's fete-day, with almost as much
style as in former times.

This slow and difficult restoration of departed things was the delight
of Monsieur and Madame d'Hauteserre and the Durieus. Laurence smiled
at what she thought nonsense. But the worthy old d'Hauteserre did not
forget the more solid matters; he repaired the buildings, put up the
walls, planted trees wherever there was a chance to make them grow, and
did not leave an inch of unproductive land. The whole valley regarded
him as an oracle in the matter of agriculture. He had managed to recover
a hundred acres of contested land, not sold as national property, being
in some way confounded with that of the township. This land he had
turned into fields which afforded good pasturage for his horses and
cattle, and he planted them round with poplars, which now, at the end
of six years, were making a fine growth. He intended to buy back some of
the lost estate, and to utilize all the out-buildings of the chateau by
making a second farm and managing it himself.

Life at the chateau had thus become during the last two years prosperous
and almost happy. Monsieur d'Hauteserre was off at daybreaks to overlook
his laborers, for he employed them in all weathers. He came home to
breakfast, mounted his farm pony as soon as the meal was over, and
made his rounds of the estate like a bailiff,—getting home in time for
dinner, and finishing the day with a game of boston. All the inhabitants
of the chateau had their stated occupations; life was as closely
regulated there as in a convent. Laurence alone disturbed its even
tenor by her sudden journeys, her uncertain returns, and by what Madame
d'Hauteserre called her pranks. But with all this peacefulness there
existed at Cinq-Cygne conflicting interests and certain causes of
dissension. In the first place Durieu and his wife were jealous of
Catherine and Gothard, who lived in greater intimacy with their young
mistress, the idol of the household, than they did. Then the two
d'Hauteserres, encouraged by Mademoiselle Goujet and the abbe, wanted
their sons as well as the Simeuse brothers to take the oath and return
to this quiet life, instead of living miserably in foreign countries.
Laurence scouted the odious compromise and stood firmly for the
monarchy, militant and implacable. The four old people, anxious that
their present peaceful existence should not be risked, nor their spot
of refuge, saved from the furious waters of the revolutionary torrent,
lost, did their best to convert Laurence to their cautious views,
believing that her influence counted for much in the unwillingness of
their sons and the Simeuse twins to return to France. The superb disdain
with which she met the project frightened these poor people, who were
not mistaken in their fears that she was meditating what they called
knight-errantry. This jarring of opinion came to the surface after the
explosion of the infernal machine in the rue Saint-Nicaise, the first
royalist attempt against the conqueror of Marengo after his refusal
to treat with the house of Bourbon. The d'Hauteserres considered
it fortunate that Bonaparte escaped that danger, believing that the
republicans had instigated it. But Laurence wept with rage when she
heard he was safe. Her despair overcame her usual reticence, and she
vehemently complained that God had deserted the sons of Saint-Louis.

"I," she exclaimed, "I could have succeeded! Have we no right," she
added, seeing the stupefaction her words produced on the faces about
her, and addressing the abbe, "no right to attack the usurper by every
means in our power?"

"My child," replied the abbe, "the Church has been greatly blamed by
philosophers for declaring in former times that the same weapons might
be employed against usurpers which the usurpers themselves had employed
to succeed; but in these days the Church owes far too much to the First
Consul not to protect him against that maxim,—which, by the by, was due
to the Jesuits."

"So the Church abandons us!" she answered, gloomily.

From that day forth whenever the four old people talked of submitting
to the decrees of Providence, Laurence left the room. Of late, the abbe,
shrewder than Monsieur d'Hauteserre, instead of discussing principles,
drew pictures of the material advantages of the consular rule, less to
convert the countess than to detect in her eyes some expression
which might enlighten him as to her projects. Gothard's frequent
disappearances, the long rides of his mistress, and her evident
preoccupation, which, for the last few days, had appeared in her face,
together with other little signs not to be hidden in the silence and
tranquillity of such a life, had roused the fears of these submissive
royalists. Still, as no event happened, and perfect quiet appeared to
reign in the political atmosphere, the minds of the little household
were soothed into peace, and the countess's long rides were one more
attributed to her passion for hunting.

It is easy to imagine the deep silence which reigned at nine o'clock in
the evening in the park, courtyards, and gardens of Cinq-Cygne, where at
that particular moment the persons we have described were harmoniously
grouped, where perfect peace pervaded all things, where comfort and
abundance were again enjoyed, and where the worthy and judicious old
gentleman was still hoping to convert his late ward to his system of
obedience to the ruling powers by the argument of what we may call the
continuity of prosperous results.

These royalists continued to play their boston, a game which spread
ideas of independence under a frivolous form over the whole of France;
for it was first invented in honor of the American insurgents, its very
terms applying to the struggle which Louis XVI. encouraged. While making
their "independences" and "poverties," the players kept an eye on the
countess, who had fallen asleep, overcome by fatigue, with a singular
smile on her lips, her last waking thought having been of the terror two
words could inspire in the minds of the peaceful company by informing
the d'Hauteserres that their sons had passed the preceding night under
that roof. What young girl of twenty-three would not have been, as
Laurence was, proud to play the part of Destiny? and who would not have
felt, as she did, a sense of compassion for those whom she felt to be so
far below her in loyalty?