Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  Valérie’s first words to her husband, indeed, will explain the delay in serving dinner, which had been kept back for her, probably by a self-interested devotion on the part of the cook.

  ‘Samanon will only take your bills of exchange at fifty per cent, and wants part of your salary assigned to him as security.’

  Financial distress, which could still be concealed in the household of the Departmental Chief in the Ministry of War, who was cushioned against it by a salary of twenty-four thousand francs plus bonuses, had plainly reached its last stage in the case of the clerk.

  ‘You have made my chief,’ said the husband, looking at his wife.

  ‘I believe I have,’ she replied, without blinking at the expression, borrowed from stage-door slang.

  ‘What are we to do?’ Marneffe went on. ‘The landlord is all set to seize our things tomorrow. And your father must needs go and die without making a will! Upon my word, those Empire fellows all believe that they’re immortal like their Emperor.’

  ‘Poor Father,’ she said. ‘I was the only child he had, and he was very fond of me! The Countess must have burned the will. How could he possibly have forgotten me, when he always used to give us two or three thousand-franc notes at a time?’

  ‘We owe four quarters’ rent, fifteen hundred francs! Is our furniture worth that? “That is the question”, as Shakespeare says.’

  ‘Well, good-bye, my pet,’ said Valérie, who had taken only a couple of mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted the juices for a gallant soldier back from Algiers. ‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies!’

  ‘Valérie, where are you going?’ cried Marneffe, moving to stand between his wife and the door.

  ‘I’m going to see our landlord,’ she answered, as she arranged her ringlets under her charming hat. ‘And you had better try to get on the right side of that old maid, if she really is the Director’s cousin.’

  The ignorance of one another’s social position in which tenants of the same house live is something constantly noted, and shows clearly how people are borne along in the swift current of existence in Paris. It is easy to understand, however, that a civil servant who leaves early every morning for his office, returns home for dinner, and goes out every evening, and a wife addicted to the gaieties of Paris, may know nothing of how an old maid lives on the third floor across the court in their block, especially when the old maid has Mademoiselle Fischer’s habits.

  The first person to stir in the house, Lisbeth would go to bring in her milk, bread, and charcoal without exchanging a word with anyone, and she went to bed with the sun. She never received either letters or visitors, and was not on neighbourly terms with her fellow tenants. Hers was one of those anonymous insect-like existences to be found in certain houses, in which one may discover at the end of four years that there is an old gentleman living on the fourth floor who once knew Voltaire, Pilâtre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel, Molé, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre. What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said about Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know because the quarter was so isolated and because of the friendly relations with the porters which their financial embarrassment had obliged them to establish, for they were too dependent on the porters’ good-will not to have carefully cultivated it. It so happened that the old maid’s pride, closed lips, and reserve had provoked in the porters that exaggerated show of respect and cold attitude which spring from an unacknowledged discontent and a sense of being treated as inferior. The porters, moreover, in the case in question, as they say in the law courts, considered themselves just as good as a tenant paying a rent of two hundred and fifty francs. Since Cousin Bette’s confidences to her second cousin Hortense were in fact true, one can understand how the portress, gossiping with the Marneffes, might have slandered Mademoiselle Fischer in the belief that she was simply passing on a scandalous piece of news.

  When the spinster had taken her candlestick from the hands of the portress, the respectable Madame Olivier, she moved forward to see whether there was a light in the attic windows above her apartment. At that hour, even in July, it was so dark at the end of the court that the old maid could not go to bed without a light.

  ‘Oh, you needn’t worry; Monsieur Steinbock is in. He hasn’t even been out,’ Madame Olivier said to Mademoiselle Fischer, maliciously.

  The spinster made no reply. She had remained a peasant in this respect, that she cared little for what people not close to her might say. Peasants are aware of nothing outside their own village, and to her the opinion of the little circle in the midst of which she lived was still the only one that mattered. She climbed the stairs, then, purposefully, to the attic instead of her own apartment. At dessert, she had put some fruit and sweetmeats into her bag for her sweetheart, and she was going up to present them, for all the world like an old maid bringing home a titbit for her dog.

  She found the hero of Hortense’s dreams working by the light of a little lamp, whose rays were concentrated by passing through a globe filled with water – a pale, fair young man, sitting at a kind of work-bench littered with sculptor’s tools, red wax, chisels, roughed out bases, bronze copies of models, wearing a workman’s blouse, with a little group in modelling wax in his hand, which he was scrutinizing with the concentration of a poet at work.

  ‘Here, Wenceslas, look what I’ve brought you,’ she said, spreading her handkerchief on a corner of the bench. Then she carefully took the sweets and fruit from her reticule.

  ‘You are very kind, Mademoiselle,’ the poor exile replied, in a melancholy voice.

  ‘These will refresh you, my poor child. You heat your blood working like this. You weren’t born for such hard work.’

  Wenceslas Steinbock looked at the old maid in some surprise.

  ‘Well, eat them,’ she said then, roughly, ‘and don’t gaze at me as if I were one of your figures that you’re feeling pleased with.’

  This verbal cuff on the ear put an end to the young man’s astonishment; for he recognized the voice of the female mentor to whose bullying he was so inured that tenderness from her always took him by surprise. Although Steinbock was twenty-nine, he appeared, as fair men sometimes do, to be five or six years younger; and anyone seeing his youthful face – although its bloom had vanished in the fatigues and hardships of exile – side by side with Mademoiselle Fischer’s lean, hard countenance, might have thought that Nature had made a mistake in assigning their sexes. He got up and flung himself into an old Louis XV easy chair upholstered in yellow Utrecht velvet, apparently ready to take a breather. The old maid then selected a greengage and gently offered it to her friend.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the fruit.

  ‘Are you tired?’ she asked, giving him another.

  ‘I am not tired with work, but tired of life,’ he replied.

  ‘What nonsense you talk!’ she said, somewhat tartly. ‘Haven’t you got a guardian angel to watch over you?’ she went on, offering him the sweetmeats and watching with pleasure as he ate them all. ‘You see, while I was at dinner at my cousin’s I was thinking of you.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, turning a look at once caressing and plaintive on Lisbeth. ‘Without you I should have died long ago. But you know, my dear lady, artists need some distraction.…’

  ‘Ah, so that’s what’s in your mind!’ she interrupted him, sharply, setting her hands on her hips and fixing him with kindling eyes. ‘You want to ruin your health in the stews of Paris, and end up like so many artists, dying in the workhouse! No, no, make a fortune for yourself first, and when you have money stacked away you can take your fun then, my child. You will have the wherewithal then, you libertine, to pay for the doctors as well as the pleasures!’

  Wenceslas Steinbock took this broadside, delivered with looks that searched him with their magnetic flame, and bowed his head. The most bitter-tongued of Mademoiselle Fischer’s detractors, watching even the beginning of this scene, would have acknowledged that the scandalous suggestions of the
Olivier pair must be false. Everything in the tone, the gestures, and the looks of these two beings declared the purity of their life together. The old maid evinced the tender feeling of a dictatorial but sincere maternal affection. The young man submitted like a respectful son to a mother’s tyranny. This strange relationship appeared to be the result of a powerful will constantly acting upon a malleable nature, upon that inconsistency of the Slav temperament which allows Slavs to display heroic courage upon the battlefield and yet show an incredible lack of resolution in their conduct of ordinary life, a kind of flabbiness of the moral fibre whose causes might well be investigated by physiologists, for physiologists are to politics what entomologists are to agriculture.

  ‘And what if I die before I get rich?’ Wenceslas asked gloomily.

  ‘Die?’ exclaimed the spinster. ‘Oh, I won’t let you die! I have life enough for two, and I would give you my life-blood if it came to that.’

  As he listened to that frank, vehement declaration, tears rose to Steinbock’s eyes.

  ‘Don’t he sad, my little Wenceslas,’ Lisbeth, touched in her turn, went on. ‘Do you know, I think my cousin Hortense thought your seal very nice. Now I’m going to set about getting your bronze group sold; you’ll be able to pay off your debt to me, and do what you like; you’ll be free! Come now, smile!’

  ‘I shall never be able to pay off my debt to you, Mademoiselle,’ the poor exile replied.

  ‘And why not?’ demanded the Vosges peasant, ready to take up the cudgels for the Livonian against herself.

  ‘Because you have not only fed, housed, and cared for me in my need, you have given me strength! You have made me what I am. You have often been harsh, you have made me suffer.…’

  ‘I?’ said the old maid. ‘Are you going to start on your usual nonsense about poetry and the arts, and crack your fingers and wave your arms, talking about ideal beauty and all your northern moonshine? Beauty is nothing compared with solid practical common sense, and I represent common sense. You have ideas in your mind, have you? That’s all very fine! I have my ideas too.… Of what use is what’s in the head if you don’t turn it to practical account? People with ideas don’t get on so well as those who have none, but know how to bestir themselves. Instead of thinking of your dreams, you need to work. What have you done while I was out?’

  ‘What did your pretty cousin say?’

  ‘Who told you she was pretty?’ Lisbeth instantly took him up, in a tone behind which could be heard the roar of a tigerish jealousy.

  ‘You did, of course.’

  ‘That was to see the face you would put on. You want to go chasing after petticoats, do you? You like women: well, model them, express your desires in bronze; for you’ll have to do without your little love-affairs for some time yet, and especially love-affairs with my cousin, my dear boy. She’s not game for your game-bag. That girl has to find a husband worth sixty thousand francs a year… and he’s been found.… Goodness, the bed is not made!’ she said, looking across into the other room. ‘Oh, poor dear, I’ve been neglecting you.’

  And the energetic spinster at once took off her gloves, her cape and hat, and briskly set to work like a servant to make the narrow camp-bed on which the artist slept. The combination of brusqueness, of downright roughness even, and kindness in Lisbeth’s treatment of him may account for the ascendancy she had acquired over this man, of whom she was taking complete possession. Life binds us, surely, by both the good and the evil that come our way, fortuitously. If the Livonian had encountered Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found a complaisance in his patroness that would have led him into some miry and dishonourable path, in which he would have been lost. He would certainly not have worked, and the artist in him would not have burst the bud. And indeed, even while he groaned under the old maid’s bitter tongue and grasping ways, his good sense told him that he should prefer her iron rule to the idle and precarious existence which some of his compatriots led.

  Here is the story of the events which brought about that alliance of feminine energy and masculine weakness – a kind of reversal of attributes said to be not uncommon in Poland.

  In 1833, Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes used to work late at night when she had a great deal of work on hand, at about one o’clock in the morning noticed a strong smell of carbonic acid gas and heard the groans of a man at the point of death. The charcoal fumes and the throat-rattle came from an attic above the two rooms of her apartment. She surmised that a young man who had recently come to the house and rented the attic, empty for the previous three years, was attempting to commit suicide. She rushed upstairs, threw herself against the door, and with her peasant strength succeeded in bursting it open. She found the tenant of the room writhing on a camp-bed, in the convulsions, apparently, of his death-agony. She extinguished the stove. With the door opened, fresh air flowed in, and the exile was saved. Later, when Lisbeth had put him to bed like a nurse, she was able to deduce the reason for his suicide from the extreme bareness of the two rooms of the attic, which contained nothing but a rickety table, the camp-bed, and a couple of chairs.

  On the table was the following statement, which she read:

  I am Count Wenceslas Steinbock, born at Prelia, in Livonia.

  Let no one be blamed for my death; the reasons for my suicide are in these words of Kosciusko’s: Finis Poloniae!

  The great-nephew of à brave general of Charles XII could not beg. A delicate constitution made military service impossible for me, and yesterday saw the end of the hundred thalers with which I came to Paris from Dresden. I leave twenty-five francs in the drawer of this table to pay the rent that I owe to the landlord.

  As I no longer have relatives living, my death concerns no one. I beg my compatriots not to blame the French Government. I did not make myself known as a refugee; I did not ask for aid; I met no other exile; no one in Paris knows that I exist.

  I die in Christian faith. May God forgive the last of the Stein-bocks!

  WENCESLAS

  Mademoiselle Fischer, profoundly touched by the honesty of a dying man who paid his rent, opened the drawer and saw that there were in fact five five-franc pieces there.

  ‘Poor young man!’ she exclaimed. ‘And there’s no one in the world to care about him!‘

  She ran down to her room, fetched her sewing, and went back to work in the attic while keeping watch over the Livonian nobleman. When the refugee awoke, one may imagine his surprise when he saw a woman sitting by his bed: he thought he was still dreaming. As she sat stitching gold aiguillettes for a uniform, the old maid had been making up her mind to look after this poor boy, whom she had watched with admiration as he slept. When the young Count was quite conscious again, Lisbeth spoke cheerfully to him and questioned him in order to find out how she might possibly enable him to make a living. After telling his story, Wenceslas added that he had owed his post as teacher to his acknowledged talent for the arts; he had always felt a natural bent towards sculpture, but the time necessary for study seemed too long for a man without money, and he felt that he was not nearly robust enough at the moment to devote himself to a profession demanding manual labour, or undertake large works of sculpture. This was so much Greek to Lisbeth Fischer. She answered the unfortunate young man by saying that Paris offered so many opportunities that a man who was resolved would always find a living there; men with pluck never came to grief in Paris, provided that they brought with them a certain fund of patience.

  ‘I am just a poor woman, a countrywoman, myself, and I have managed very well to make my own way and earn my own living,’ she said in conclusion. ‘Listen to me. If you are willing to give your whole mind to working in earnest, I have some savings, and I will lend you the money you need to live on, month by month; but only for living frugally, not for leading a gay life and gadding about the town! It is possible to dine in Paris on twenty-five sous a day, and I will make your lunch with my own every morning. And I’ll furnish your room, and pay for whatever apprenticesh
ip you think you need. You shall give me formal receipts for the money I spend for you; and when you are rich you can repay it all. But if you don’t work, I shall not regard myself as bound to do anything further for you, and I’ll leave you to your fate.’

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed the unfortunate refugee, who was still feeling the bitterness of his first encounter with death. ‘The exiles from every country have good reason to stretch out their hands to France like souls in purgatory straining upwards to paradise. Among what other nation could one find help and generous hearts everywhere, even in a garret like this? You shall be the whole world to me, my dear benefactress. I’ll be your slave! Be my sweetheart,’ he said caressingly, in one of those impulsive demonstrations of feeling so characteristic of Poles, which make people accuse them, quite unjustly, of toadyism.

  ‘Oh, no! I am much too jealous, I should make you unhappy; but I will gladly be something like your comrade,’ Lisbeth replied.

  ‘Oh, if you only knew how fervently I longed for any human creature, even a tyrant, who had some use for me, when I was struggling in the empty loneliness of Paris!’ Wenceslas went on. ‘I wished myself in Siberia, where the Emperor would send me if I returned! Be you my Providence.… I’ll work, I’ll be better than I am, although I am not a bad fellow.’

  ‘Will you do everything I tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Well then, I adopt you as my child,’ she said gaily. ‘Here I am with a boy who has risen from the grave. Come! we’ll begin now. I’m going down to do my marketing. You get dressed, and come to have lunch with me when I knock on the ceiling with my broom-handle.’

  Next day, when Mademoiselle Fischer called on the firm who took her work, she made inquiries about a sculptor’s profession. By persistent questioning she succeeded in finding out about the studio of Florent and Chanor, a firm specializing in casting and foundry work and the chasing of fine bronzes and silver services. She presented Steinbock there for employment as an apprentice sculptor, which seemed an odd proposition to the partners. Leading sculptors sent their clay models to the firm to be cast; it did not teach the art of sculpture. Thanks to the old maid’s stubborn persistence, however, her protégé was in the end taken on as an ornament designer.