Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (69 page)

She approved of his notion of taking a trip immediately to Nogent. Their parting was an affectionate one; then, on the threshold, she murmured once more:

“You do love me—don’t you?”

“Eternally,” was his reply.

A messenger was waiting for him at his own house with a line written in lead-pencil informing him that Rosanette was about to give birth. He had been so preoccupied for the past few days that he had not bestowed a thought upon the matter.

She had been placed in a special establishment at Chaillot.

Frédéric took a cab and set out for this institution.

At the corner of the Rue de Marbeuf he read on a board in big letters: “Private Lying-in-Hospital, kept by Madame Alessandri, first-class midwife, ex-pupil of the Maternity, author of various works, etc.” Then, in the centre of the street, over the door—a little side-door-there was another sign-board: “Private Hospital of Madame Alessandri,” with all her titles.

Frédéric gave a knock. A saucy-looking maid brought him into the reception-room, which was adorned with a mahogany table, armchairs of garnet colored velvet, and a clock in a glass case.

Almost immediately Madame appeared. She was a tall brunette of forty, with a slender waist, fine eyes, and the manners of good society. She apprised Frédéric of the mother’s happy delivery, and brought him up to her room.

Rosanette broke into a smile of unutterable bliss, and, as if drowned in the floods of love that overwhelmed her, she said in a low tone:

“A boy—there, there!” pointing towards a cradle close to her bed.

He flung open the curtains, and saw, wrapped up in linen, a yellowish-red object, exceedingly shrivelled-looking, which had a bad smell, and was bawling.

“Embrace him!”

He replied, in order to hide his repugnance:

“But I am afraid of hurting him.”

“No! no!”

Then, very gingerly he kissed his child.

“How like you he is!”

And with her two weak arms, she clung to his neck with an outburst of feeling which he had never witnessed on her part before.

The remembrance of Madame Dambreuse came back to him. He reproached himself as a monster for having deceived this poor creature, who loved and suffered with all the sincerity of her nature. For several days he kept her company until the evening.

She felt happy in this quiet place; the window-shutters in front of it remained always closed. Her room, hung with bright chintz, looked out on a large garden. Madame Alessandri, whose only shortcoming was that she liked to talk about her intimate acquaintanceship with eminent physicians, showed her the utmost attention. Her associates, nearly all provincial young ladies, were exceedingly bored, as they had nobody to come to see them. Rosanette saw that they looked upon her with envy, and told this to Frédéric with pride. It was desirable to speak low, nevertheless. The partitions were thin, and everyone tried to eavesdrop, in spite of the constant noise of the pianos.

At last, he was about to take his departure for Nogent, when he got a letter from Deslauriers. Two fresh candidates had offered themselves, one a Conservative, the other a Red; a third, whatever he might be, would have no chance. It was all Frédéric’s fault; he had let the lucky moment pass by; he should have come sooner and gotten himself moving.

“You have not even been seen at the agricultural assembly!” The lawyer blamed him for not having any newspaper connections.

“Ah! if you had followed my advice long ago! If we had only a paper of our own!”

He laid special stress on this point. However, many people who would have voted for him out of consideration for M. Dambreuse, abandoned him now. Deslauriers was one of them. Not having anything more to expect from the capitalist, he had thrown over his
protégé.

Frédéric took the letter to show it to Madame Dambreuse.

“You have not been to Nogent, then?” said she.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I saw Deslauriers three days ago.”

Having learned that her husband was dead, the lawyer had come to make a report about the coalmines, and to offer his services to her as a man of business. This seemed strange to Frédéric; and what was his friend doing down there?

Madame Dambreuse wanted to know how he had spent his time since they had parted.

“I have been ill,” he replied.

“You ought at least to have told me about it.”

“Oh! it wasn’t worth while;” besides, he had to settle a number of things, to keep appointments and to pay visits.

From that time forth he led a double life, spending every night at the Maréchale’s and passing the afternoon with Madame Dambreuse, so that there was scarcely a single hour of freedom left to him in the middle of the day.

The infant was in the country at Andilly.
^cx
They went to see it once a week.

The wet-nurse’s house was in the upper part of the village, at the back of a little yard as dark as a pit, with straw on the ground, hens here and there, and a vegetable-cart in the shed.

Rosanette would begin by frantically kissing her baby, and, seized with a kind of delirium, moved about constantly, trying to milk the she-goat, eating farmhouse bread, and sniffing at the manure; she even wanted to put a little of it into her handkerchief.

Then they took long walks, in the course of which she went into the nursery gardens, tore off branches from the lilac-trees which hung down over the walls, and exclaimed, “Gee up, donkey!” to the asses that were drawing cars along, and stopped to gaze through the gate into the interior of one of the lovely gardens; or else the wet-nurse would take the child and place it under the shade of a walnut-tree; and for hours the two women would keep talking about the most tiresome nonsense.

Frédéric, not far away from them, gazed at the beds of vines on the slopes, with a clump of trees here and there, at the dusty paths resembling strips of grey ribbon; at the houses, which looked like white and red spots in the midst of the greenery; and sometimes the smoke of a locomotive stretched out horizontally across the bases of the hills, covered with foliage, like a gigantic ostrich feather, the thin end of which was disappearing from view.

Then his eyes once more rested on his son. He imagined the child grown into a young man; he would make a companion of him; but perhaps he would be a blockhead, a failure, in any event. His illegitimate birth would always be a burden to him; it would have been better if he had never been born! And Frédéric would murmur, “Poor child!” his heart swelling with unutterable sadness.

They often missed the last train. Then Madame Dambreuse would scold him for his lack of punctuality. He would invent some falsehood.

It was necessary to invent some explanations, too, to satisfy Rosanette. She could not understand how he spent all his evenings; and when she sent a messenger to his house, he was never there! One day, when he happened to be at home, the two women made their appearance almost at the same time. He got the Maréchale to go away, and concealed Madame Dambreuse, pretending that his mother was coming up to Paris.

Soon, he found these lies amusing. He would repeat to one the oath which he had just uttered to the other, send them both identical bouquets, write to them at the same time, and then would make comparisons between them. There was a third always present in his thoughts. The impossibility of possessing her seemed to him a justification of his duplicity, which intensified his pleasure with the spice of variety; and the more he deceived one of the two, no matter which, the fonder of him she grew, as if the love of one of them added heat to that of the other, and, as if by a sort of rivalry, each of them were seeking to make him forget the other.

“See how I trust you!” said Madame Dambreuse one day to him, opening a sheet of paper, in which she was informed that M. Moreau and a certain Rose Bron were living together as husband and wife.

“Can it be that this is the lady from the races?”

“Don’t be absurd!” he returned. “Let me have a look at it!”

The letter, written in capitals, had no signature. Madame Dambreuse, in the beginning, had tolerated this mistress, who served as a cover for their adultery. But, as her passion became stronger, she had insisted that he give her up—a thing which had been effected long since, according to Frédéric’s account; and when he had ceased to protest, she replied, narrowing her eyes, in which shone a look as sharp as the point of a stiletto under a muslin robe:

“Well—what about the other one?”

“What other one?”

“The earthenware-dealer’s wife!”

He shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. She did not press him on the matter.

But, a month later, while they were talking about honour and loyalty, and he was boasting about his own (in a casual sort of way, for safety’s sake), she said to him:

“It is true—are you being honest—you don’t go back there any more?”

Frédéric, who was at the moment thinking of the Maréchale, stammered:

“Where, pray?”

“To Madame Arnoux’s.”

He implored her to tell him from whom she got the information. It was through her second dressmaker, Madame Regimbart.

So, she knew all about his life, and he knew nothing about hers! In the meantime, he had found in her dressing-room the miniature of a gentleman with a long moustache—was this the same person about whose suicide a vague story had been told him at one time? But there was no way of learning any more about it!

What was the use of it? The hearts of women are like little cabinets, full of secret drawers fitted one inside the other; you hurt yourself, break your nails in opening them, and then find within only some dried flowers, a few grains of dust—or nothing! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning too much about the matter.

She made him refuse invitations where she was unable to accompany him, stuck to his side, was afraid of losing him; and, in spite of this union which was becoming stronger every day, all of a sudden, abysses opened up between them about the most trivial matters—appreciating a certain person or a work of art.

She had a style of playing on the piano which was precise and heavy-handed. Her spiritualism (Madame Dambreuse believed in the transmigration of souls into the stars) did not prevent her from taking the utmost care of her finances. She was haughty towards her servants; her eyes remained dry at the sight of the rags of the poor. An unconscious egoism revealed itself in her everyday expressions: “What concern is that of mine? I’d be a fool if I did! What need have I?” and a thousand little acts incapable of analysis revealed hateful qualities in her. She would have been capable of listening behind doors: she could not help lying to her confessor. Out of a spirit of domination, she insisted on Frédéric going to the church with her on Sunday. He obeyed, and carried her prayer-book.

The loss of her inheritance had changed her considerably. These marks of grief, which people attributed to the death of M. Dambreuse, made her more interesting, and, as in former times, she had a great number of visitors. Since Frédéric’s defeat at the election, she was ambitious of obtaining for both of them a diplomatic post in Germany; therefore, the first thing they should do was to follow the current trends of ideas.

Some people were in favour of the Empire, others of the Orléans family, and others of the Comte de Chambord; but they were all of one opinion as to the urgency of decentralisation, and several methods were proposed with that view, such as to cut up Paris into many large streets in order to establish villages there, to transfer the seat of government to Versailles, to have the schools set up at Bourges, to do away with the libraries, and to entrust everything to the generals; and they glorified a rustic existence on the assumption that the uneducated man had naturally more sense than other men! Hatreds increased—hatred of primary teachers and winemerchants, of philosophy classes, of history courses, of novels, red waistcoats, long beards, of independence in any shape, or any manifestation of individuality, for it was necessary “to restore the principle of authority”—let it be exercised in the name of no matter whom; let it come from no matter where, as long as it was Force, Authority! The Conservatives now talked in the very same way as Sénécal. Frédéric was completely puzzled, and once more he found at the house of his former mistress the same remarks made by the same men.

The salons of unmarried women (it was from this period that their importance dates) were a sort of neutral ground where reactionaries of different kinds met. Hussonnet, who was engaged in criticizing the great men of the day (a good thing for the restoration of Order), inspired Rosanette with a longing to have evening parties of her own. He said he would publish accounts of them, and first of all he brought Fumichon, a serious-minded man, then came Nonancourt, M. de Grémonville, the Sieur de Larsilloix, ex-prefect, and Cisy, who was now an agriculturist in Lower Brittany, and more devoutly Christian than ever.

In addition, men who had at one time been the Maréchale’s lovers came, such as the Baron de Comaing, the Comte de Jumillac, and others, and Frédéric was annoyed by their free-and-easy behaviour.

In order to make himself look like the master of the house, he improved their style of living. So he hired a groom, moved to a new house, and got new furniture. These displays of extravagance were useful for the purpose of making his upcoming marriage appear less out of proportion with his fortune. The result was that his fortune was soon alarmingly reduced—and Rosanette didn’t understand any of it!

A woman of the middle-class, who had come down in the world, she adored a domestic life, a quiet little home. All the same, it gave her pleasure to have “an at home day.” Referring to persons of her own class, she called them “Those women!” She wished to be a society lady, and believed herself to be one. She begged of him not to smoke in the drawing-room any more, and for the sake of good form tried to make him observe fast days.