Cousin Bette

by Honore Balzac

  BUSINESS AGENCY

  Petitions drawn up. Accounts audited.

  All business confidential and promptly executed.

  The interior was like the waiting-rooms where Paris omnibus passengers wait for their connexions. A flight of stairs inside led, no doubt, to a mezzanine apartment let with the shop and looking out on the alley. The Baroness noticed a blackened deal desk, cardboard boxes, and a battered, shabby, second-hand arm-chair. A cap and greasy green silk eye-shade attached with copper wire suggested either some idea of disguise or an eye weakness not unlikely in an old man.

  ‘He is upstairs,’ said the stove-fitter. ‘I’ll go up and tell him that you are here and bring him down.’

  The Baroness lowered her veil and sat down. A heavy step made the little wooden staircase creak, and Adeline could not restrain a piercing cry when she saw her husband, Baron Hulot, appear, dressed in a grey knitted jacket, old grey flannel trousers, and slippers.

  ‘What can I do for you, Madame?’ said Hulot politely.

  Adeline rose, took hold of Hulot, and in a voice broken with emotion said:

  ‘At last I’ve found you!’

  ‘Adeline!…’ the Baron exclaimed, in amazement. He locked the shop door. ‘Joseph!’ he called to the stove-fitter. ‘Go out by the back way.’

  ‘My dear,’ she said, forgetting everything but her overwhelming joy, ‘you can return to your family. We are rich! Your son’s income is a hundred and sixty thousand francs. There is no claim now on your pension, and you only have to present a statement that you’re dive in order to draw fifteen thousand francs arrears. Valérie is dead, and she has left you three hundred thousand francs. Everything has been quite forgotten. You can return to society, and you will find a fortune waiting for you in your son’s house. Come, and our happiness will be complete. I’ve been searching for you for nearly three years, and I was so sure that I should find you that there’s a room prepared, all ready for you. Oh, come away from his place! Leave the dreadful situation I see you in here!’

  ‘Gladly,’ said the Baron, dazedly; ’but can I bring the little girl with me?’

  ‘Hector, give her up! Do so much for your Adeline, who has never before asked you to make even the least sacrifice! I promise you I’ll give this child a dowry, arrange a good marriage for her, have her taught. Let it be said that one of those who made you happy is happy herself, and will not fall further into vice, into the mire!’

  ‘So you’re the person,’ said the Baron, with a smile, ‘who wanted to have me married?… Stay here a moment,’ he added. ‘I must go upstairs and dress. I have proper clothes in a box up there.…’

  When Adeline was alone, looking again round the dingy shop, she shed tears.

  ‘He was living here,’ she said to herself,’ while we have been living in luxury!… Poor man, how he has been punished – he who used to be elegance itself!’

  The stove-fitter came to say good-bye to his benefactress, and she asked him to fetch a cab. When he returned, the Baroness asked him to take in little Atala Judici, and take her home with him there and then.

  ‘Tell her,’ she added, ‘that if she is willing to put herself under the guidance of Monsieur le Cure at the Madeleine, on the day she makes her first communion I’ll give her a dowry of thirty thousand francs and a good husband, some fine young man!’

  ‘My eldest son, Madame! He is twenty-two and he adores that child!’

  The Baron now came downstairs. His eyes were wet.

  ‘You are making me leave the only creature whose love for me is anything like your own,’ he whispered to his wife.’ The child is in tears, and I cannot desert her like this.…’

  ‘Set your mind at rest, Hector. She is going to be settled with a respectable family and I can answer for what her way of life will be.’

  ‘Ah, then I can come with you,’ the Baron said, and he escorted his wife to the cab.

  Hector, now Baron d’Ervy again, had put on a greatcoat and trousers of blue cloth, a white waistcoat, black cravat and gloves. When the Baroness had taken her seat in the cab, Atala slipped in like a snake.

  ‘Oh, Madame,’ she begged, ‘let me go with you wherever you’re going!… I can tell you, I’ll be very good and very obedient. I’ll do anything you want; but don’t leave me behind and take Papa Vyder away, my gentleman who is so kind and gives me such nice things. Because I’ll be beaten!…’

  ‘Come, Atala,’ said the Baron. ‘This lady is my wife, and we have to say good-bye.…’

  ‘Her? As old as that!’ the girl said artlessly. ‘And shaking like a leaf! Oh, what a sight!’

  And she drolly mimicked the Baroness’s shaking. The stove-fitter, hurrying after the Judici child, appeared at the cab door.

  ‘Take her away!’ said the Baroness.

  The stove-fitter took Atala in his arms and forcibly bore her off to his house.

  ‘Thank you for that sacrifice, my dear,’ said Adeline, taking the Baron’s hand and pressing it with feverish joy. ‘How you have changed! How you must have suffered! What a surprise for your daughter and your son!’

  Adeline talked – like a woman meeting her lover after a long absence – of a thousand things at once. Ten minutes later, the Baron and his wife reached the rue Louis-le-Grand, and Adeline found the following letter waiting for her:

  Madame la Baronne,

  Monsieur le Baron d’Ervy stayed a month in the rue de Charonnc, under the name of Thorec, an anagram of Hector. He is now living in the passage du Soleil under the name of Vyder. He calls himself an Alsatian, has a scrivener’s business, and is living with a girl called Atala Judici. You should be careful, Madame, for the Baron is being actively searched for, on whose behalf I do not know.

  The actress has kept her word, and remains, as always, Madame la Baronne,

  Your humble servant,

  J. m.

  The Baron’s return was welcomed with a warmth and pleasure which quite reconciled him to family life. He forgot little Atala Judici, for the damage caused by his life of excess had now made him subject to the rapid changes of feeling characteristic of age and childhood. The family happiness was clouded by the alteration in the Baron. He had left his children a still sound, hale man, and returned a centenarian almost, in appearance – broken, stooping, his face no longer noble. A fine dinner, hastily arranged by Célestine, reminded the old man of the opera-singer’s parties, and he was dazzled by his family’s splendours.

  ‘You are celebrating the return of the prodigal father!’ he whispered to Adeline.

  ‘Hush! That’s all forgotten,’ she answered him.

  ‘Where is Lisbeth?’ the Baron asked, noticing the old maid’s absence.

  ‘She’s in bed,’ said Hortense, ‘sad to say. She doesn’t get up at all now, and we must have the grief of losing her before long. She is hoping to see you after dinner.’

  Next morning, at dawn, Victorin Hulot was warned by his door-keeper that his house was surrounded by the Municipal Guard. The police were looking for Baron Hulot. The bailiff, who then came in, following the door-keeper’s wife, presented a summons to the lawyer, and asked if he was willing to pay his father’s debt. It was a matter of ten thousand francs, in notes of hand made out to a moneylender named Samanon, who had probably lent Baron d’Ervy two or three thousand francs. The young lawyer asked the officer to send the Guard away, and paid.

  ‘Will this be the last?’ he asked himself, with some misgiving.

  Lisbeth, already afflicted by the family’s increasingly bright circumstances, was unable to endure this latest happy turn of events. Her condition deteriorated so much that Bianchon gave her no more than a week to live. She must die, defeated, at the end of that long struggle marked by so many victories. She kept the secret of her hatred through the terrible suffering of the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis. And she had the supreme satisfaction of seeing Adeline, Hortense, Hulot, Victorin, Steinbock, Célestine, and their children, all in tears round her bed, mourning her as the famil
y’s angel.

  Baron Hulot, on a substantial diet that he had not known for nearly three years, regained strength and was almost himself again. This restoration made Adeline so happy that her nervous shaking diminished in intensity.

  ‘So she is to be happy in the end!’ said Lisbeth to herself, on the eve of her death, as she saw the profound respect, almost veneration, that the Baron showed towards his wife, whose sufferings had been described to him by Hortense and Victorin. Her bitter resentment hastened Cousin Bette’s death. She was followed to her grave by a whole family in tears.

  Baron and Baroness Hulot, feeling that they had reached an age for undisturbed rest, gave the splendid rooms on the first floor to Count and Countess Steinbock, and took up their dwelling on the second. The Baron, through his son’s efforts on his behalf, obtained a directorship of a railway company, at the beginning of the year 1845, with a salary of six thousand francs, which, with the six thousand francs of his retirement pension and the money left to him by Madame Crevel, gave him an income of twenty-four thousand francs.

  As Hortense had obtained control of her own money during her three years’ estrangement from her husband, Victorin did not hesitate now to invest the two hundred thousand francs left in trust, in his sister’s name, and gave her the income from it: twelve thousand francs a year. Wenceslas, now the husband of a rich woman, was not in any way unfaithful to her; but he idled his time away, unable to make up his mind to start a piece of work, however small. An artist again, in partibus, he had a great deal of drawing-room success, he was consulted by many amateurs of art; in other words, he was accepted as a critic, like all such ineffectual men whose early promise proves delusive.

  Each of these families, then, enjoyed its own separate income, although they lived under one roof. Made wise by so many disasters, the Baroness left all her financial business to her son; and the Baron was limited to his salary and pension, in the hope that a restricted income would prevent him from relapsing into his old ways.

  By a remarkable piece of luck, however, which neither his wife nor his son could have hoped for, the Baron seemed to have given the fair sex up. His untroubled peace, which they attributed to natural causes, at last set his family’s mind so completely at rest that they were able to enjoy again wholeheartedly Baron d’Ervy’s many amiable and charming qualities. He was thoughtfully attentive to his wife and children, accompanied them to the theatre and into society – where he now appeared once more – and did the honours of his son’s drawing-room with a delightfully gracious hospitality.

  Altogether, this reformed prodigal father gave the greatest possible pleasure to his family. He was a charming old man, quite finished with life and worn out, of course, but full of sensibility, retaining only enough of his old vice to make a social virtue. Everyone naturally came by degrees to feel completely reassured. His children and the Baroness praised the father of the family to the skies, forgetting the deaths of two uncles! Life cannot go on without a great deal of forgetting.

  Madame Victorin, who did the housekeeping for this large household with notable efficiency, which owed something, no doubt, to Lisbeth’s instruction, found it necessary to employ a cook. The cook, of course, had to have a kitchen-maid. Kitchen-maids are ambitious creatures nowadays, busy trying to find out the chef’s secrets, and ready to become cooks themselves as soon as they know how to blend a sauce. Consequently, kitchen-maids are constantly changing.

  At the beginning of December, 1845, Célestine engaged as kitchen-maid a buxom girl from Isigny in Normandy, short, thick-set, with stout red arms and a common face, as heavy and dull as an occasional theatrical piece, a girl who was only reluctantly induced to abandon the classical cotton bonnet worn by the girls of lower Normandy. She was as well-furnished with fat as a wet nurse, bursting out of the cotton cloth that she wore swathed round her bodice. The solid contours of her sun-tanned coarse red face might have been carved out of stone. No one in the house, naturally, remarked the arrival of this girl, called Agathe, the kind of knowing girl that comes up to Paris from the provinces every day. The chef did not like Agathe much, because of her foul tongue – for she had been used to the company of carters in the low-class inn in which she had served – and she was so far from making a conquest of him and persuading him to teach her the high art of cookery that he despised her. The chef’s attentions were all for Louise, Countess Steinbock’s maid. And so the country girl thought herself badly used, and was for ever complaining of her lot; she was always sent out on some pretext or other when the chef was putting the last touches to a dish, or finishing off a sauce.

  ‘True enough, I don’t have any luck here, at all,’ she kept saying. ‘I’ll try somewhere else.’

  She stayed on, however, although she had twice given notice.

  One night, Adeline, awakened by some unaccustomed sound, discovered that Hector was not in his bed near her own, for, like most old people, they slept in single beds, side by side. She lay awake for an hour, but the Baron did not return. Filled with apprehension, fearing some dreadful disaster, a stroke perhaps, she went first upstairs, to the attic floor where the servants slept, and was drawn to Agathe’s room by the murmur of two voices and a bright light shining from the half-open door. She stopped in utter dismay as she recognized the Baron’s voice. Seduced by Agathe’s charms, he had reached the point, led on by the calculated resistance of that atrocious slut, of saying these hateful words:

  ‘My wife has not long to live, and if you like you can be Baroness.’

  Adeline uttered a cry, dropped her candlestick, and fled.

  Three days later, the Baroness, who had received the last sacraments the evening before, lay at the point of death, surrounded by her weeping family. A moment before her spirit fled, she took her husband’s hand, pressed it, and whispered to him:

  ‘My dear, I had nothing left but my life to give you. In a moment you’ll be free, and you will be able to make a Baroness Hulot.’

  And, a phenomenon that must be rare, tears were seen to fall from a dead woman’s eyes. The fierce persistence of vice had triumphed over the patience of the angel, who on the edge of eternity had spoken the first word of reproach of her life.

  Baron Hulot left Paris three days after his wife’s funeral. Eleven months later, Victorin learned indirectly of his father’s marriage with Mademoiselle Agathe Piquetard, celebrated at Isigny, on I February 1846.

  ‘Parents can oppose their children’s marriages, but children have no way of preventing the follies of parents in their second childhood,’ said Maître Hulot to Maître Popinot, second son of the former Minister of Commerce, and a fellow lawyer, who had spoken to him of that marriage.

  THE END

  CHRONOLOGY

  1799 20 May: Born at Tours, and put out to nurse until the age of four. His father is a civil servant, of peasant stock; his mother from a family of wealthy Parisian drapers.

  Napoleon Bonaparte overthrows the Directory and becomes First Consul of France.

  Hölderlin, Hyperion.

  1804 First Empire: Napoleon becomes Emperor of France, and starts conquering Europe.

  Schiller, William Tell.

  1805 Nelson defeats the French and Spanish fleet in the naval battle of Trafalgar. Napoleon defeats Austro-Russian troops at Austerlitz and then the Prussians at Jena.

  Chateaubriand, René.

  1807 Sent to the Oratorian college in Vendôme, where he boards for the next five years. Birth of his half-brother Henry. (Already has two younger sisters: Laure, Laurence.)

  1812 Napoleon is defeated in his catastrophic Moscow campaign against Tsar Alexander I.

  Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

  1814 Family move to Paris, where Balzac continues his education.

  Allied troops enter Paris. Napoleon abdicates, and becomes King of Elba. First restoration: Accession of Louis XVIII to the French throne.

  Austen, Mansfield Park. Goya, The Second and Third of May 1808.

  1815 Napoleon returns in t
riumph to Paris and rules for 100 days before defeat at Waterloo. Second restoration: Louis XVIII is reinstated on the French throne.

  1816–19 Begins his legal training, attending lectures at the Sorbonne; articled to a solicitor, Maître Guillonet-Merville, then a notary, Maître Passez.

  1819 Determined to make a career from writing, moves into a garret in Rue Lesdiguières.

  Scott, Ivanhoe. Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa.

  1820 Finishes a verse drama, Cromwell, which is judged to be a failure by family and friends.

  Shelley, Prometheus Unbound. Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

  1821 Publishes novels of Gothic inspiration, many produced collaboratively, under the pseudonyms Lord R’hoone, and Horace de St Aubin. Writes poems and plays.

  Constable, Landscape: Noon (The Hay Wain).

  1822 Becomes the lover of Laure de Berny, mother of nine and twenty-two years his senior.

  1824 ‘Horace de St Aubin’ is slated in the Feuilleton littéraire. Balzac contemplates suicide.

  Lous XVIII dies and is succeeded by Charles X.

  Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.

  1825 Launches a publishing and printing venture, producing editions of Molière and La Fontaine. Meets Victor Hugo.

  Grillparzer, King Ottokar’s Rise and Fall.

  1828 Printing business collapses, leaving him in debt. His literary purpose strengthens.

  Schubert, Schwanengesang (Swansong).

  1829 Frequents the salons, introduced by the Duchesse d’Abrantès. His father dies. The Chouans, the first novel he signs with his own name.

  1830 Publishes numerous short stories including ‘Gobseck,’ The Vendetta’ and ‘Sarrasine’.

  July Revolution. Charles X abdicates. July Monarchy. Louis-Philippe becomes king.

  Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique.

  1831 Adopts a lifestyle beyond his means. The Wild Ass’s Skin establishes his reputation. Begins to systematically and publicly use the particle ‘de’ before his surname.