The good man’s excellent heart was concealed by a misleading appearance of joviality in keeping with his puffy cheeks and rotund figure, the vivacity of his fat little body, and the frankness of his speech. He was anxious to marry that he might have a daughter who should transfer his property to some poor noble; he did not like his station as bonesetter and wished to rescue his family name from the position in which the prejudices of the times had placed it. He himself took willingly enough to the feasts and jovialities which usually followed his principal operations. The habit of being on such occasions the most important personage in the company, had added to his natural gaiety a sufficient dose of serious vanity. His impertinences were usually well received in crucial moments when it often pleased him to perform his operations with a certain slow majesty. He was, in other respects, as inquisitive as a nightingale, as greedy as a hound, and as garrulous as all diplomatists who talk incessantly and betray no secrets. In spite of these defects developed in him by the endless adventures into which his profession led him, Antoine Beauvouloir was held to be the least bad man in Normandy. Though he belonged to the small number of minds who are superior to their epoch, the strong good sense of a Norman countryman warned him to conceal the ideas he acquired and the truths he from time to time discovered.
As soon as he found himself placed by the count in presence of a woman in childbirth, the bonesetter recovered his presence of mind. He felt the pulse of the masked lady; not that he gave it a single thought, but under cover of that medical action he could reflect, and he did reflect on his own situation. In none of the shameful and criminal intrigues in which superior force had compelled him to act as a blind instrument, had precautions been taken with such mystery as in this case. Though his death had often been threatened as a means of assuring the secrecy of enterprises in which he had taken part against his will, his life had never been so endangered as at that moment. He resolved, before all things, to find out who it was who now employed him, and to discover the actual extent of his danger, in order to save, if possible, his own little person.
“What is the trouble?” he said to the countess in a low voice, as he placed her in a manner to receive his help.
“Do not give him the child — ”
“Speak loud!” cried the count in thundering tones which prevented Beauvouloir from hearing the last word uttered by the countess. “If not,” added the count who was careful to disguise his voice, “say your ‘In manus.’”
“Complain aloud,” said the leech to the lady; “cry! scream! Jarnidieu! that man has a necklace that won’t fit you any better than me. Courage, my little lady!”
“Touch her lightly!” cried the count.
“Monsieur is jealous,” said the operator in a shrill voice, fortunately drowned by the countess’s cries.
For Maitre Beauvouloir’s safety Nature was merciful. It was more a miscarriage than a regular birth, and the child was so puny that it caused little suffering to the mother.
“Holy Virgin!” cried the bonesetter, “it isn’t a miscarriage, after all!”
The count made the floor shake as he stamped with rage. The countess pinched Beauvouloir.
“Ah! I see!” he said to himself. “It ought to be a premature birth, ought it?” he whispered to the countess, who replied with an affirmative sign, as if that gesture were the only language in which to express her thoughts.
“It is not all clear to me yet,” thought the bonesetter.
Like all men in constant practice, he recognized at once a woman in her first trouble as he called it. Though the modest inexperience of certain gestures showed him the virgin ignorance of the countess, the mischievous operator exclaimed: —
“Madame is delivered as if she knew all about it!”
The count then said, with a calmness more terrifying than his anger: —
“Give me the child.”
“Don’t give it him, for the love of God!” cried the mother, whose almost savage cry awoke in the heart of the little man a courageous pity which attached him, more than he knew himself, to the helpless infant rejected by his father.
“The child is not yet born; you are counting your chicken before it is hatched,” he said, coldly, hiding the infant.
Surprised to hear no cries, he examined the child, thinking it dead. The count, seeing the deception, sprang upon him with one bound.
“God of heaven! will you give it to me?” he cried, snatching the hapless victim which uttered feeble cries.
“Take care; the child is deformed and almost lifeless; it is a seven months’ child,” said Beauvouloir clinging to the count’s arm. Then, with a strength given to him by the excitement of his pity, he clung to the father’s fingers, whispering in a broken voice: “Spare yourself a crime, the child cannot live.”
“Wretch!” replied the count, from whose hands the bonesetter had wrenched the child, “who told you that I wished to kill my son? Could I not caress it?”
“Wait till he is eighteen years old to caress him in that way,” replied Beauvouloir, recovering the sense of his importance. “But,” he added, thinking of his own safety, for he had recognized the Comte d’Herouville, who in his rage had forgotten to disguise his voice, “have him baptized at once and do not speak of his danger to the mother, or you will kill her.”
The gesture of satisfaction which escaped the count when the child’s death was prophesied, suggested this speech to the bonesetter as the best means of saving the child at the moment. Beauvouloir now hastened to carry the infant back to its mother who had fainted, and he pointed to her condition reprovingly, to warn the count of the results of his violence. The countess had heard all; for in many of the great crises of life the human organs acquire an otherwise unknown delicacy. But the cries of the child, laid beside her on the bed, restored her to life as if by magic; she fancied she heard the voices of angels, when, under cover of the whimperings of the babe, the bonesetter said in her ear: —
“Take care of him, and he’ll live a hundred years. Beauvouloir knows what he is talking about.”
A celestial sigh, a silent pressure of the hand were the reward of the leech, who had looked to see, before yielding the frail little creature to its mother’s embrace, whether that of the father had done no harm to its puny organization. The half-crazed motion with which the mother hid her son beside her and the threatening glance she cast upon the count through the eye-holes of her mask, made Beauvouloir shudder.
“She will die if she loses that child too soon,” he said to the count.
During the latter part of this scene the lord of Herouville seemed to hear and see nothing. Rigid, and as if absorbed in meditation, he stood by the window drumming on its panes. But he turned at the last words uttered by the bonesetter, with an almost frenzied motion, and came to him with uplifted dagger.
“Miserable clown!” he cried, giving him the opprobrious name by which the Royalists insulted the Leaguers. “Impudent scoundrel! your science which makes you the accomplice of men who steal inheritances is all that prevents me from depriving Normandy of her sorcerer.”
So saying, and to Beauvouloir’s great satisfaction, the count replaced the dagger in its sheath.
“Could you not,” continued the count, “find yourself for once in your life in the honorable company of a noble and his wife, without suspecting them of the base crimes and trickery of your own kind? Kill my son! take him from his mother! Where did you get such crazy ideas? Am I a madman? Why do you attempt to frighten me about the life of that vigorous child? Fool! I defy your silly talk — but remember this, since you are here, your miserable life shall answer for that of the mother and the child.”
The bonesetter was puzzled by this sudden change in the count’s intentions. This show of tenderness for the infant alarmed him far more than the impatient cruelty and savage indifference hitherto manifested by the count, whose tone in pronouncing the last words seemed to Beauvouloir to point to some better scheme for reaching his infernal ends. The shrewd pra
ctitioner turned this idea over in his mind until a light struck him.
“I have it!” he said to himself. “This great and good noble does not want to make himself odious to his wife; he’ll trust to the vials of the apothecary. I must warn the lady to see to the food and medicine of her babe.”
As he turned toward the bed, the count who had opened a closet, stopped him with an imperious gesture, holding out a purse. Beauvouloir saw within its red silk meshes a quantity of gold, which the count now flung to him contemptuously.
“Though you make me out a villain I am not released from the obligation of paying you like a lord. I shall not ask you to be discreet. This man here,” (pointing to Bertrand) “will explain to you that there are rivers and trees everywhere for miserable wretches who chatter of me.”
So saying the count advanced slowly to the bonesetter, pushed a chair noisily toward him, as if to invite him to sit down, as he did himself by the bedside; then he said to his wife in a specious voice: —
“Well, my pretty one, so we have a son; this is a joyful thing for us. Do you suffer much?”
“No,” murmured the countess.
The evident surprise of the mother, and the tardy demonstrations of pleasure on the part of the father, convinced Beauvouloir that there was some incident behind all this which escaped his penetration. He persisted in his suspicion, and rested his hand on that of the young wife, less to watch her condition than to convey to her some advice.
“The skin is good, I fear nothing for madame. The milk fever will come, of course; but you need not be alarmed; that is nothing.”
At this point the wily bonesetter paused, and pressed the hand of the countess to make her attentive to his words.
“If you wish to avoid all anxiety about your son, madame,” he continued, “never leave him; suckle him yourself, and beware of the drugs of apothecaries. The mother’s breast is the remedy for all the ills of infancy. I have seen many births of seven months’ children, but I never saw any so little painful as this. But that is not surprising; the child is so small. You could put him in a wooden shoe! I am certain he doesn’t weight more than sixteen ounces. Milk, milk, milk. Keep him always on your breast and you will save him.”
These last words were accompanied by a significant pressure of the fingers. Disregarding the yellow flames flashing from the eyeholes of the count’s mask, Beauvouloir uttered these words with the serious imperturbability of a man who intends to earn his money.
“Ho! ho! bonesetter, you are leaving your old felt hat behind you,” said Bertrand, as the two left the bedroom together.
The reasons of the sudden mercy which the count had shown to his son were to be found in a notary’s office. At the moment when Beauvouloir arrested his murderous hand avarice and the Legal Custom of Normandy rose up before him. Those mighty powers stiffened his fingers and silenced the passion of his hatred. One cried out to him, “The property of your wife cannot belong to the house of Herouville except through a male child.” The other pointed to a dying countess and her fortune claimed by the collateral heirs of the Saint-Savins. Both advised him to leave to nature the extinction of that hated child, and to wait the birth of a second son who might be healthy and vigorous before getting rid of his wife and first-born. He saw neither wife nor child; he saw the estates only, and hatred was softened by ambition. The mother, who knew his nature, was even more surprised than the bonesetter, and she still retained her instinctive fears, showing them at times openly, for the courage of mothers seemed suddenly to have doubled her strength.
CHAPTER III. THE MOTHER’S LOVE
For several days the count remained assiduously beside his wife, showing her attentions to which self-interest imparted a sort of tenderness. The countess saw, however, that she alone was the object of these attentions. The hatred of the father for his son showed itself in every detail; he abstained from looking at him or touching him; he would rise abruptly and leave the room if the child cried; in short, he seemed to endure it living only through the hope of seeing it die. But even this self-restraint was galling to the count. The day on which he saw that the mother’s intelligent eye perceived, without fully comprehending, the danger that threatened her son, he announced his departure on the morning after the mass for her churching was solemnized, under pretext of rallying his forces to the support of the king.
Such were the circumstances which preceded and accompanied the birth of Etienne d’Herouville. If the count had no other reason for wishing the death of this disowned son poor Etienne would still have been the object of his aversion. In his eyes the misfortune of a rickety, sickly constitution was a flagrant offence to his self-love as a father. If he execrated handsome men, he also detested weakly ones, in whom mental capacity took the place of physical strength. To please him a man should be ugly in face, tall, robust, and ignorant. Etienne, whose debility would bow him, as it were, to the sedentary occupations of knowledge, was certain to find in his father a natural enemy. His struggle with that colossus began therefore from his cradle, and his sole support against that cruel antagonist was the heart of his mother whose love increased, by a tender law of nature, as perils threatened him.
Buried in solitude after the abrupt departure of the count, Jeanne de Saint-Savin owed to her child the only semblance of happiness that consoled her life. She loved him as women love the child of an illicit love; obliged to suckle him, the duty never wearied her. She would not let her women care for the child. She dressed and undressed him, finding fresh pleasures in every little care that he required. Happiness glowed upon her face as she obeyed the needs of the little being. As Etienne had come into the world prematurely, no clothes were ready for him, and those that were needed she made herself, — with what perfection, you know, ye mothers, who have worked in silence for a treasured child. The days had never hours long enough for these manifold occupations and the minute precautions of the nursing mother; those days fled by, laden with her secret content.
The counsel of the bonesetter still continued in the countess’s mind. She feared for her child, and would gladly not have slept in order to be sure that no one approached him during her sleep; and she kept his cradle beside her bed. In the absence of the count she ventured to send for the bonesetter, whose name she had caught and remembered. To her, Beauvouloir was a being to whom she owed an untold debt of gratitude; and she desired of all things to question him on certain points relating to her son. If an attempt were made to poison him, how should she foil it? In what way ought she to manage his frail constitution? Was it well to nurse him long? If she died, would Beauvouloir undertake the care of the poor child’s health?
To the questions of the countess, Beauvouloir, deeply touched, replied that he feared, as much as she did, an attempt to poison Etienne; but there was, he assured her, no danger as long as she nursed the child; and in future, when obliged to feed him, she must taste the food herself.
“If Madame la comtesse,” he said, “feels anything strange upon her tongue, a prickly, bitter, strong salt taste, reject the food. Let the child’s clothes be washed under her own eye and let her keep the key of the chest which contains them. Should anything happen to the child send instantly to me.”
These instructions sank deep into Jeanne’s heart. She begged Beauvouloir to regard her always as one who would do him any service in her power. On that the poor man told her that she held his happiness in her hands.
Then he related briefly how the Comte d’Herouville had in his youth loved a courtesan, known by the name of La Belle Romaine, who had formerly belonged to the Cardinal of Lorraine. Abandoned by the count before very long, she had died miserably, leaving a child named Gertrude, who had been rescued by the Sisters of the Convent of Poor Clares, the Mother Superior of which was Mademoiselle de Saint-Savin, the countess’s aunt. Having been called to treat Gertrude for an illness, he, Beauvouloir, had fallen in love with her, and if Madame la comtesse, he said, would undertake the affair, she should not only more than repay him for what she t
hought he had done for her, but she would make him grateful to her for life. The count might, sooner or later, be brought to take an interest in so beautiful a daughter, and might protect her indirectly by making him his physician.
The countess, compassionate to all true love, promised to do her best, and pursued the affair so warmly that at the birth of her second son she did obtain from her husband a “dot” for the young girl, who was married soon after to Beauvouloir. The “dot” and his savings enabled the bonesetter to buy a charming estate called Forcalier near the castle of Herouville, and to give his life the dignity of a student and man of learning.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1175