Cousin Bette

by Honore Balzac

  ‘Yes, I know,’ answered Crevel. ‘You are a pearl among spinsters.… Only, there are exceptions, hang it! See here, they have never made up an income for you, in the family.…’

  ‘But I have my pride. I don’t want to be beholden to anyone,’ said Bette.

  ‘Ah! if you were willing to help me to have my revenge,’ the retired shopkeeper continued, ‘I could set aside a life interest in ten thousand francs for you. Tell me, fair cousin, only tell me who Josépha’s successor is, and you shall have the wherewithal to pay your rent and buy your breakfast in the morning, your morning coffee, the good coffee you like so much, pure Mocha you will be able to treat yourself to… how about that? Oh! just think how delicious the best Mocha is!’

  ‘I don’t care so much for a ten-thousand-franc annuity, which would mean nearly five hundred francs a year, as I do for keeping my own counsel absolutely,’ said Lisbeth; ‘because you know, my good Monsieur Crevel, the Baron is very kind to me, he is going to pay my rent.…’

  ‘Oh, yes, and for how long? You think you can count on that!’ cried Crevel.’ Where will the Baron find the money?’

  ‘Ah, that I don’t know. But he’s spending more than thirty thousand francs on the apartment he’s preparing for the little lady.’

  ‘She’s a lady, is she? What! a society woman? The rascal, doesn’t he land on his feet! He has all the luck!’

  ‘A married woman, a real lady,’ Cousin Bette went on.

  ‘You don’t say?’ exclaimed Crevel, opening envious eyes set burning by the magic words ‘a real lady’.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Bette, ‘talented, musical, twenty-three years old, with a pretty innocent face, a dazzlingly fair skin, teeth like a puppy’s, eyes like stars, a superb brow… and tiny feet; I’ve never seen anything like them, they’re no bigger than her bodice front.’

  ‘What about her ears?’ demanded Crevel, deeply stirred by this recital of charms.

  ‘Ears you would like to take a cast of,’ she replied.

  ‘Little hands?’

  ‘I tell you, in a word, she’s a jewel of a woman, and with such perfect good manners, such reserve, such refinement!… with a lovely nature, an angel, distinguished in every way, for her father was a Marshal of France.’

  ‘A Marshal of France!’ Crevel exclaimed, with a prodigious start of excitement. ‘Good Lord! Bless my soul! Confound it! Blast it and bother it! Ah! the scoundrel! Excuse me, Cousin, it drives me mad! I would give a hundred thousand francs, I believe…’

  ‘Yes, indeed! I can tell you she’s a respectable woman, a virtuous wife. And the Baron has done things handsomely for her.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a sou, I tell you.’

  ‘There’s a husband that he has pushed…’

  ‘Pushed where?’ said Crevel with a sardonic laugh.

  ‘He’s already been appointed deputy head clerk, this husband, and he’ll no doubt prove accommodating… and nominated for the Cross of the Legion of Honour.’

  ‘The Government ought to be careful and respect the persons it has decorated, and not go scattering Crosses broadcast,’ said Crevel, with the air of a man piqued on political grounds. ‘But what has that confounded sly old dog of a Baron got?’ he went on. ‘It seems to me I’m just as good as he is,’ he added, turning to look at himself in a glass, and striking his pose. ‘Héloïse has often told me, at a moment when women tell the truth, that I am astonishing.’

  ‘Oh!’ replied Cousin Bette, ‘women love fat men, they are nearly all kind-hearted; and if I had to choose between you and the Baron, I would choose you. Monsieur Hulot is clever, a handsome man, he cuts a fine figure; but you, you’re solid, and then, you see… you strike one as being even more of a scamp than he is!’

  ‘It’s incredible how all the women, even the pious ones, fall for men who have that look!’ exclaimed Crevel, advancing upon Bette and taking her by the waist in his exhilaration.

  ‘That’s not where the difficulty lies,’ continued Bette. ‘You understand that a woman who is doing so well for herself will not be unfaithful to her protector for a mere trifle, and that would cost at least a hundred thousand francs, because the little lady looks forward to seeing her husband head clerk of a department within two years from now. It is poverty that’s driving this poor little angel astray…’

  Crevel strode up and down his drawing-room frantically.

  ‘He must think a lot of this woman?’ he asked, after a pause during which his desire, spurred on by Bette, rose to a kind of frenzy.

  ‘It’s not hard to guess!’ replied Lisbeth. ‘I don’t believe he’s had that from her!’ she added, clicking her thumb-nail against one of her huge white teeth, ‘and he’s already spent about ten thousand francs in presents for her.’

  ‘Oh, what a joke,’ cried Crevel, ‘if I got in before him!’

  ‘Heavens, it’s very wrong of me to pass on this tittle-tattle,’ said Lisbeth, appearing to experience some feeling of remorse.

  ‘No. I’m going to put your family to shame. Tomorrow I’ll set aside a sum of money in five per cents, enough to give you six hundred francs a year, but you must tell me everything: the name of this Dulcinea, and where she lives. I may as well tell you, I’ve never had a real lady, and the greatest of my ambitions is to have one as my mistress. Mohammed’s houris are nothing in comparison with society women as I imagine them. In short, they are my ideal, my passion, to such a degree that, believe me or not, Baroness Hulot will never be fifty years old in my eyes,’ he said, echoing unawares one of the finest wits of the past century. ‘Listen, my good Lisbeth. I’ve made up my mind to sacrifice a hundred, two hundred… Hush! here come my young folk, I see them crossing the court. I have never heard a whisper of this from you, I give you my word; for I don’t want to lose the Baron’s trust – on the contrary.… He must be pretty deeply in love with this woman, my old crony!’

  ‘Oh, he’s mad about her!’ said Cousin Bette. ‘He couldn’t find forty thousand francs for his daughter’s dowry, and he has managed to dig them up for this new flame.’

  ‘And do you think she cares for him?’ asked Crevel.

  ‘What! At his age?’ the old maid answered.

  ‘Oh, what a fool I am!’ exclaimed Crevel. ‘Of course I put up with Héloïse’s artist, just like Henri IV letting Gabrielle have Bellegarde. Oh! old age, old age! How are you, Célestine, how are you, my pet? And where is the youngster? Ah! here he is! Upon my word, he’s beginning to look like me. How d’ye do, Hulot, my boy, how are you?… So we are soon to have another wedding in the family?’

  Célestine and her husband looked at Lisbeth, and then exchanged a look with Crevel; and the girl coolly answered her father:

  ‘A marriage? Whose?’

  Crevel looked slyly at her, as if to reassure her that he would cover up his indiscretion, and said: ‘Hortense’s marriage; but it’s not settled yet, of course. I’ve been staying with the Lebas, and they were talking of Mademoiselle Popinot for our young Councillor. He is very anxious to become president of a provincial court.… Come, let’s have dinner.’

  By seven o’clock Lisbeth was already on an omnibus on her way home, for she could not wait to see Wenceslas again, whose dupe she had been for the past three weeks. She was bringing him her work-basket piled high with fruit by Crevel himself; for Crevel had become twice as solicitously attentive to his Cousin Bette.

  She climbed to the attic in breathless haste, and found the artist busy completing the decoration of a box which he intended to give to his dear Hortense. The lid was ornamented with a border of hydrangeas – hydrangea hortensis – among whose flower-heads Cupids played. To raise money for the malachite box, the penniless lover had made two candelabra, fine pieces of work, for Florent and Chanor, selling them the copyright.

  ‘You have been working too hard, lately, my dear boy,’ said Lisbeth wiping the sweat from his forehead and kissing him. ‘So much exertion in the month of August seems dangerous to me. Really, you might damage your health by it.
Look, here are some peaches and plums from Monsieur Crevel. There is no need to worry so much. I have borrowed two thousand francs, and all being well we can pay it back if you sell your clock! I have some doubts about the lender, all the same, for he has just sent this document.’

  She placed the writ of arrest for debt under a sketch of Marshal Montcornet.

  ‘For whom are you making these lovely things?’ she asked, lifting the red wax clusters of hydrangea flowers that Wenceslas had laid down in order to eat the fruit.

  ‘A jeweller.’

  ‘Which jeweller?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stidmann asked me to twist the thing together for him because he’s very busy.’

  ‘But these are hortensias,’ she said in a hollow voice. ‘Why is it that you have never modelled anything in wax for me? Was it so difficult to design a dagger, or a little box, or some little thing as a keepsake!’ she said, flashing a terrifying look at the artist, whose eyes, fortunately, were lowered. ‘And you say that you love me!’

  ‘Can you have any doubt about that… Mademoiselle?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a nice cordial “Mademoiselle”.… You know, you have been my only thought since I saw you dying there. When I saved you, you gave yourself to me. I have never spoken to you of that pledge, but I pledged myself too, in my own mind. I said to myself: “Since this boy gives himself into my hands, I will make him happy and rich!” Well, now I have succeeded in making your fortune!’

  ‘How?’ asked the poor artist, brim-full of happiness, and too naïve to suspect a trap.

  ‘In this way,’ the Lorraine peasant continued. Lisbeth could not deny herself the agonizing pleasure of watching Wenceslas, who was looking at her with a son’s affection, made more intense by the overflow of his love for Hortense; and the spinster was misled. When she saw for the first time in her life the fires of passion in a man’s eyes she believed she had lighted them there.

  ‘Monsieur Crevel is ready to advance us a hundred thousand francs to start a business, if, so he says, you wish to marry me. He has odd notions, that fat man.… What do you think of it?’ she asked.

  The artist, grown deathly pale, looked at his benefactress with a dulled eye which revealed all his thought. He stood there dumbfounded and dazed.

  ‘No one has ever told me so plainly before,’ she said with a bitter laugh, ‘that I am hideously ugly!’

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ replied Steinbock, ‘my benefactress will never be ugly to me. I have a very deep affection for you, but I am not yet thirty years old, and…’

  ‘And I am forty-three I’ said Bette. ‘My cousin, Baroness Hulot, who is forty-eight, still inspires desperate passion; but then she is beautiful!’

  ‘Fifteen years between us, Mademoiselle I What kind of marriage would that be? For our own sakes I think we should reflect very seriously. My gratitude to you will certainly not fall short of your great goodness to me. And your money, what’s more, will be returned in a few days!’

  ‘My money!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh I you treat me as if I were a heartless usurer!’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ replied Wenceslas, ‘but you have talked so often about it.… Well, it is you who have made me, do not destroy me.’

  ‘You want to leave me, I see,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘Who can have given you the power to be ungrateful, you who are like a man made of papier mâché? Do you not trust me – me, your good angel? I have so often spent the night working for you, have handed over to you the savings of my whole life-time; for four years I have shared my bread with you, a poor working-woman’s bread; have lent you everything I had, even to my courage!’

  ‘Mademoiselle, stop! stop!’ he said, throwing himself on his knees and holding out his hands to her. ‘Don’t say anything more! In three days’ time I will explain, I will tell you everything. Let me…’ he went on, and kissed her hand, ‘let me be happy. I love someone and I am loved in return.’

  ‘Very well, be happy, my child,’ she said, as she drew him to his feet. Then she kissed his forehead and hair, with the desperation a condemned man must feel as he lives his last morning on earth.

  ‘Ah! you are the noblest and best of human beings; you are the peer of the woman I love,’ said the poor artist.

  ‘I love you dearly enough to tremble for your future,’ she said sombrely. ‘Judas hanged himself! All ingrates come to a terrible end. You are leaving me, and you will never do work worth while again. Consider: we need not marry – I am an old maid, I know. I do not want to stifle the flower of your youth, your poetry as you call it, in my arms that are like vine-stocks, but, without marrying, can we not stay together? Listen. I have a head for business. I can gather a fortune for you in ten years’ work, for my name is Thrift; whereas with a young wife, who will bring only expenses, you will throw everything away, you will only work to make her happy. Happiness creates nothing but memories. When I think of you, I stay for hours with my hands idle.… Well, Wenceslas, stay with me.… You know, I understand everything. You shall have mistresses, pretty women like that little Marneffe who wants to meet you, who will give you the kind of happiness you could not find with me. Then you shall get married when I have saved thirty thousand francs a year for you.’

  ‘You are an angel, Mademoiselle, and I shall never forget this moment,’ Wenceslas answered, wiping away tears.

  ‘I see you now as I want you to be, my child,’ she said, gazing at him in ecstasy.

  So strong is vanity in us, that Lisbeth believed that she had triumphed. She had made such a great concession in offering Madame Marneffe! She experienced the keenest emotion of her life. For the first time she felt joy flood her heart. For such another hour she would have sold her soul to the devil.

  ‘My word is pledged,’ he answered, ‘and I love a woman against whom no other can prevail. But you are and you will always be the mother I have lost.’

  These words fell like an avalanche of snow upon that blazing crater. Lisbeth sat down and sombrely contemplated the youthfulness and distinguished good looks before her: the artist’s brow, the mane of silky hair, everything that called to her repressed instincts as a woman; and a few tears, instantly dried, dimmed her eyes for a moment. She looked like one of the frail, meagre, figures carved by medieval sculptors above tombs.

  ‘I place no curse upon you,’ she said, rising abruptly. ‘You are only a child. May God protect you!’

  She went away, and shut herself in her room.

  ‘She’s in love with me,’ Wenceslas said to himself, ‘poor soul. What a torrent of burning eloquence! She’s out of her mind.’

  The supreme effort of that stiff, matter-of-fact nature to hold the image of beauty and poetry in its keeping can only be compared, in its vehemence, to a shipwrecked sailor’s wild striving as he makes his last attempt to reach the shore.

  Two days later, at half past four in the morning, when Count Steinbock was wrapped in deep sleep, he was awakened by knocking at his garret door. He went to open it, and two shabbily dressed men walked in, accompanied by a third who looked like a wretched process-server.

  ‘You are Monsieur Wenceslas, Count Steinbock?’ this third man said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Grasset, Monsieur, successor to Louchard, sheriff’s officer.’

  ‘Yes. Well?’

  ‘You are under arrest, Monsieur. You must come with us to the Clichy prison. Please get dressed. We have done this as courteously as possible, as you see. I have not brought police, and there’s a cab waiting downstairs.’

  ‘You are properly caught,’ added one of the bailiff’s men, ‘and we count on your coming quietly.’

  Steinbock dressed and walked downstairs with a bailiff’s man gripping each arm. When he had been put in the cab, the driver set off without being directed, like a man who knows where to go. Within half an hour, the poor foreigner found himself well and truly locked up, and had lodged no protest, so completely had he been surprised.

  At ten o’clock he wa
s called to the prison office, and there found Lisbeth, who, bathed in tears, gave him money to pay for additional food and a room large enough to work in.

  ‘My child,’ she said, ‘speak of your arrest to no one; don’t write to a living soul. It would be the ruin of your career. This stigma must be kept concealed. I’ll soon have you out of this. I’ll get the money together… never fear. Write down what I should bring for your work. I’ll die or you’ll soon be free.’

  ‘Oh! I’ll owe you my life again!’ he exclaimed. ‘For I should lose more than life if my reputation were lost.’

  Lisbeth left, with joy in her heart. She was hoping, with the artist under lock and key, to wreck his marriage with Hor-tense by saying that he was a married man, had been pardoned through his wife’s efforts on his behalf, and had left for Russia. And so, in order to carry out this plan, she betook herself about three o’clock to visit the Baroness, although it was not the day when she usually dined there. She was anxious to savour the tortures her young cousin would suffer at the time when Wenceslas generally arrived.

  ‘You are staying to dinner, Bette?’ the Baroness asked, concealing her disappointment.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Good!’ answered Hortense. ‘I’ll go and tell them to be punctual, since you don’t like being late.’

  Hortense nodded reassuringly to her mother, for she intended to tell the man-servant to send Monsieur Steinbock away when he presented himself; but as the man had gone out, Hortense was obliged to give her message to the parlour maid, and the parlour maid went upstairs to fetch her needlework before taking up her post in the anteroom.

  ‘And what about my sweetheart?’ Cousin Bette said to Hortense, when she returned. ‘You never ask me about him nowadays.’

  ‘Now that I think of it, what’s he doing?’ said Hortense. ‘For he’s famous now. You must be pleased,’ she added, whispering in her cousin’s ear. ‘Everyone’s talking of Monsieur Wenceslas Steinbock.’