Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (71 page)

Dussardier was annoyed at this on account of his friend. He remembered the cigar-case that had been presented to him at the guard-house, the evenings spent in the Quai Napoleon, the many pleasant chats, the books lent to him, the thousand acts of kindness which Frédéric had done on his behalf. He begged Vatnaz to abandon the proceedings.

She laughed at his good nature, while exhibiting a loathing for Rosanette which he could not understand. She longed for wealth, in fact, in order to crush her, only, with her four-wheeled carriage.

Dussardier was terrified by these black abysses of hate, and once he knew the date fixed for the sale, he hurried out. On the following morning he made his appearance at Frédéric’s house with a look of embarrassment on his face.

“I owe you an apology.”

“For what?”

“You must take me for an ingrate, I, whom she is the—” He faltered.

“Oh! I’ll see no more of her. I am not going to be her accomplice!” And as the other was gazing at him in astonishment:

“Isn’t your mistress’s furniture to be sold in three days’ time?”

“Who told you that?”

“Herself—Vatnaz! But I am afraid of offending you—”

“Impossible, my dear friend!”

“Ah! that is true—you are so good!”

And he held out to him, in a cautious fashion, a hand in which he clasped a little wallet made of sheep-leather.

It contained four thousand francs-all his savings.

“What! Oh! no! no!—”

“I knew well I would hurt your feelings,” returned Dussardier, with a tear in the corner of his eye.

Frédéric pressed his hand, and the honest fellow went on in a plaintive voice:

“Take the money! Give me that much pleasure! I am in such a state of despair. Can it be, furthermore, that all is over ? I thought we should be happy when the Revolution had come. Do you remember what a beautiful thing it was? how freely we breathed! But here we are flung back into a worse condition than ever.

“Now, they are killing our Republic, just as they killed the other one—the Roman one! ay, and poor Venice! poor Poland! poor Hungary!
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What abominable deeds! First of all, they knocked down the trees of Liberty, then they restricted the right to vote, shut down the clubs, re-established censorship and surrendered to the priests the power of teaching, so that we now wait for the Inquisition. Why not? The Conservatives would like to see the Cossacks back
^da
. The newspapers are punished merely for speaking out against the death-penalty. Paris is overflowing with bayonets; sixteen departments are in a state of siege; and then the demand for amnesty is again rejected!”

He placed both hands on his forehead, then, spreading out his arms as if in great distress:

“If, however, we only made the effort! if we were only sincere, we might understand each other. But no! The workmen are no better than the capitalists, you see! At Elbœuf recently they refused to help at a fire! There are wretches who treat Barbès as an aristocrat! In order to ridicule the people, they want to nominate Nadaud for the presidency, a mason—just imagine! And there is no way out of it—no remedy! Everybody is against us! For my part, I have never done any harm; and yet this is like a weight pressing down on my stomach. If this state of things continues, I’ll go mad. I have a mind to kill myself I tell you I don’t need my money! You’ll pay it back to me, dammit! I am lending it to you.”

Frédéric, who felt himself constrained by necessity, ended by taking the four thousand francs from him. And so they had no more worries as far as Vatnaz was concerned.

But it was not long before Rosanette was defeated in her suit against Arnoux; and through sheer obstinacy she wished to appeal.

Deslauriers exhausted his energies in trying to make her understand that Arnoux’s promise constituted neither a gift nor a proper transfer. She did not even pay the slightest attention to him, her notion being that the law was unjust—it was because she was a woman; men backed up each other amongst themselves. In the end, however, she followed his advice.

He made himself so much at home in the house, that on several occasions he brought Sénécal to dine there. Frédéric, who had advanced him money, and even got his own tailor to supply him with clothes, did not like this lack of ceremony; and the lawyer gave his old clothes to the Socialist, whose means were now exceedingly uncertain.

He was, however, anxious to be of service to Rosanette. One day, when she showed him a dozen shares in the Kaolin Company (that enterprise which had resulted in Arnoux paying thirty thousand francs in damages), he said to her:

“But this is a shady transaction! This is splendid!”

She had the right to sue him for the reimbursement of her shares. In the first place, she could prove that he was jointly bound to pay all the company’s liabilities, since he had certified personal debts as collective debts—in short, he had embezzled sums which were payable only to the company.

“All this renders him guilty of fraudulent bankruptcy under articles 586 and 587 of the Commercial Code, and you may be sure, my pet, we’ll send him packing.”

Rosanette threw her arms around his neck. He entrusted her case next day to his former employer, not having time to devote attention to it himself, as he had business at Nogent. In case of any urgency, Sénécal could write to him.

His negotiations for the purchase of an office were a mere pretext. He spent his time at M. Rogue’s house, where he had begun not only by singing the praises of their friend, but by imitating his manners and language as much as possible; and in this way he had gained Louise’s confidence, while he won over her father by making an attack on Ledru-Rollin.

If Frédéric did not return, it was because he mingled in aristocratic society, and gradually Deslauriers led them to understand that he was in love with somebody, that he had a child, and that he was keeping a fallen woman.

Louise’s despair was intense. The indignation of Madame Moreau was just as strong. She saw her son whirling towards the bottom of a gulf the depth of which could not be determined, was wounded in her religious ideas as to propriety, and as it were, experienced a sense of personal dishonour; then all of a sudden her expression changed. To the questions which people put to her with regard to Frédéric, she replied in a sly fashion:

“He is well, quite well.”

She was aware that he was about to be married to Madame Dambreuse.

The date of the event had been set, and he was even trying to think of some way of making Rosanette swallow it.

About the middle of autumn she won her suit relative to the kaolin shares. Frédéric was informed about it by Sénécal, whom he met at his own door, on his way back from the courts.

It had been held that M. Arnoux was an accomplice to all the fraudulent transactions, and the ex-tutor had such an air of delight over it that Frédéric prevented him from coming further, assuring Sénécal that he would convey the news to Rosanette. He entered her house with a look of irritation on his face.

“Well, now you are satisfied!”

But, without minding what he had said:

“Look!”

And she pointed towards her child, which was lying in a cradle close to the fire. She had found it so sick at the house of the wet-nurse that morning that she had brought it back with her to Paris.

All the infant’s limbs were exceedingly thin, and the lips were covered with white specks, which in the interior of the mouth looked like clots of milk.

“What did the doctor say?”

“Oh! the doctor! He pretends that the journey has increased his—I don’t know what it is, some name ending in ‘itis’—in short, that he has thrush. Do you know what that is?”

Frédéric replied without hesitation: “Certainly,” adding that it was nothing.

But in the evening he was alarmed by the child’s debilitated look and by the progress of these whitish spots, resembling mould, as if life, already abandoning this little frame, had left now nothing but matter from which vegetation was sprouting. His hands were cold; he was no longer able to drink anything; and the nurse, another woman, whom the porter had gone and gotten at random in an agency, kept repeating:

“It seems to me he’s very bad, very bad!”

Rosanette was up all night with the child.

In the morning she went to look for Frédéric.

“Just come and look at him. He isn’t moving.”

In fact, he was dead. She took him up, shook him, clasped him in her arms, calling him most tender names, covered him with kisses, broke into sobs, turned on herself in a frenzy, screamed and tore her hair, and then let herself sink into the divan, where she lay with her mouth open and a flood of tears rushing from her wildly-glaring eyes.

Then a torpor fell upon her, and all became still in the apartment. The furniture was overturned. Two or three napkins were lying on the floor. The clock struck six. The night-light had gone out.

Frédéric, as he gazed at the scene, almost felt like he was dreaming. His heart was overcome with anguish. It seemed to him that this death was only a beginning, and that behind it was a worse calamity, which was just about to come on.

Suddenly, Rosanette said in an appealing tone:

“We’ll preserve the body—shall we not?”

She wished to have the dead child embalmed. There were many objections to this. The principal one, in Frédéric’s opinion, was that the thing was impractical in the case of children so young. A portrait would be better. She adopted this idea. He wrote a line to Pellerin, and Delphine hastened to deliver it.

Pellerin arrived speedily, anxious by this display of zeal to efface all recollection of his former conduct. The first thing he said was:

“Poor little angel! Ah, my God, what a tragedy!”

But gradually (the artist in him getting the upper hand) he declared that nothing could be made out of those darkened eyes, that livid face, that it was a real case of still-life, and would, therefore, require very great talent to treat it effectively; and so he murmured:

“Oh, it isn’t easy—it isn’t easy!”

“No matter, as long as it is life-like,” urged Rosanette.

“Pooh! what do I care about a thing being lifelike? Down with Realism! ’Tis the spirit that must be portrayed by the painter! Leave me alone! I am going to try to conjure up what it ought to be!”

He reflected, with his left hand clasping his brow, and with his right hand clutching his elbow; then, all of a sudden:

“Ah, I have an idea! a pastel! With coloured half-tints, almost spread out flat, a lovely model could be obtained with the outer surface alone!”

He sent the chambermaid to look for his box of colours; then, having a chair under his feet and another by his side, he began to throw out great touches as calmly as if he were copying a bust. He praised the little Saint John of Correggio, the Infanta Rosa of Velasquez, the milk-white flesh-tints of Reynolds, the distinction of Lawrence, and especially the child with long hair that sits in Lady Gower’s lap.
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“Besides, could you find anything more charming than these little toads? The most sublime (Raphael has proved it by his Madonnas) is probably a mother with her child?”

Rosanette, who felt herself suffocating, went away; and presently Pellerin said:

“Well, about Arnoux; you know what has happened?”

“No! What?”

“In any case, it was bound to end that way!”

“What has happened, might I ask?”

“Perhaps by this time he is—Excuse me!”

The artist got up in order to raise the head of the little corpse higher.

“You were saying—” Frédéric resumed.

And Pellerin, half-closing his eyes, in order to take his dimensions better:

“I was saying that our friend Arnoux is perhaps by this time locked up!”

Then, in a tone of satisfaction:

“Just take a look. Have I got it?”

“Yes, ’tis quite right. But about Arnoux?”

Pellerin laid down his pencil.

“As far as I could understand, he was sued by one Mignot, an intimate friend of Regimbart—now there’s a brain, for you, eh? What an idiot! Just imagine! one day—”

“What! it’s not Regimbart that’s in question, is it?”

“That’s true! Well, yesterday evening, Arnoux had to produce twelve thousand francs; if not, he was a ruined man.”

“Oh! this is perhaps exaggerated,” said Frédéric.

“Not a bit. It looked to me a very serious business, very serious!”

At that moment Rosanette reappeared, with red eyelids, which glowed like dabs of rouge. She sat down near the drawing and gazed at it. Pellerin made a sign to the other to hold his tongue on account of her. But Frédéric, without minding her:

“Nevertheless, I can’t believe—”

“I tell you I met him yesterday,” said the artist, “at seven o’clock in the evening, in the Rue Jacob. He had even taken the precaution to have his passport with him; and he spoke about embarking from Le Havre, he and his whole camp.”

“What! with his wife?”

“No doubt. He is too much of a family man to live by himself.”

“And are you sure of this?”

“Certain, faith! Where do you expect him to find twelve thousand francs?”

Frédéric took two or three turns round the room. He panted for breath, bit his lips, and then snatched up his hat.

“Where are you going now?” said Rosanette.

He made no reply, and disappeared.

T
welve thousand francs should be procured, or, if not, he would see Madame Arnoux no more; and until now there had lingered in his heart an unconquerable hope. Did she not, as it were, constitute the very substance of his heart, the very basis of his life? For some minutes he went staggering along the footpath, his mind tortured with anxiety, and nevertheless gladdened by the thought that he was no longer by the other’s side.