Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘One in the family is quite enough,’ replied Lisbeth.

  ‘Artists ought never to marry!’ Steinbock exclaimed.

  ‘Ah! that’s what I used to tell you when we lived in the rue du Doyenné. Your children, your real children, are your groups, your statues, the things you make.’

  ‘What’s that you’re discussing?’ asked Valérie, coming over and joining Lisbeth. ‘Pour out the tea, Cousin.’

  Steinbock, out of Polish swagger, wanted to show himself as on familiar terms with the presiding genius of the salon. With an insolent glance at Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Crevel, he took Valérie’s hand and obliged her to sit down beside him on the divan.

  ‘You lord it over us rather too much, Count Steinbock!’ she said, resisting a little.

  And she began to laugh as she was pulled down beside him, and toyed, not unnoticed, with the little rosebud displayed on her bodice.

  ‘Alas! If I could lord it, I should not come here to borrow money,’ he said.

  ‘Poor boy! I remember your nights of toil at the rue du Doyenné. You were rather a noodle. You snatched at marriage like a starving man snatching bread. You haven’t an idea what Paris is like! And now just see where you’ve been landed! But you wouldn’t listen to Bette. You cared as little for her and her devotion as you did for the love of a Parisian woman who knows her Paris by heart.’

  ‘Don’t say another word,’ Steinbock begged. ‘I bow my head.’

  ‘You shall have your ten thousand francs, my dear Wenceslas; but on one condition,’ she said, running her fingers through his fine wavy hair.

  ‘What condition?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want interest.’

  ‘Madame!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be angry; you shall repay me with a bronze group. You began the story of Samson; go on and finish it.… Show Delilah cutting off the hair of her Jewish Hercules! Oh, but I hope you really know your subject – you’ll be a great artist if you listen to me! It’s the woman’s power that you must show. Samson is nothing now. He’s the strength that has been destroyed – a dead body. Delilah is the passion that brings down everything to destruction. That replica – is that the correct term?’ she went on, less intimately, as she saw Claude Vignon and Stidmann coming towards them, to join in what sounded like talk about sculpture, ‘– the replica showing Hercules at the feet of Omphale, has a far finer subject than the Greek myth! Did the Greeks copy the Jews, or was it the Jews who took that symbol from the Greeks?’

  ‘Ah! you raise an important question there, Madame – the question of the dates when the different books of the Bible were composed. The great and immortal Spinoza, so idiotically classed as an atheist, who worked out mathematical proofs of the existence of God, declared that Genesis and the political parts – if one may so call them – of the Bible date from the time of Moses, and he deduced the various interpolations by philological considerations. And for that he was stabbed three times at the door of the synagogue.’

  ‘I had no idea I was so learned,’ said Valérie, rather piqued at this interruption of her tête à tête.

  ‘Women know everything by instinct,’ replied Claude Vignon.

  ‘Well, do you promise me?’ she asked Steinbock, taking his hand with the shy hesitation of a young girl in love.

  ‘You’re a lucky man, my dear fellow,’ exclaimed Stidmann, ‘if Madame Marneffe has asked you to do something for her.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Claude Vignon.

  ‘A little bronze group,’ Steinbock replied. ‘Delilah cutting off Samson’s hair.’

  ‘A difficult subject,’ observed Claude Vignon, ‘because of the bed.’

  ‘Not at all; it’s perfectly simple,’ Valérie said, smiling.

  ‘Ah! Do some sculpture for us!’ said Stidmann.

  ‘But Madame is sculpture’s subject!’ objected Claude Vignon, with a languishing look at Valérie.

  ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘this is how I see the composition. Samson has awakened with no hair, like plenty of dandies who wear false fronts. The hero sits on the bed, so you have only to indicate it as a base concealed by sheets and drapery. He is sitting there like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, his arms crossed, his head shaved: Napoleon on Saint Helena, if you like! Delilah is on her knees, rather like Canova’s Magdalen. A woman adores the man she has destroyed. As I see it, the Jewess feared Samson when he was terrible in his strength, but she must have loved him when he was brought low and was like a little boy again. So Delilah is weeping for her sin, she wishes she could restore his locks to her lover, she hardly dares look at him, and yet she is looking at him, smiling, because in Samson’s weakness she sees her forgiveness. With a group like that, and another of the ferocious Judith, you would have shown the whole truth about woman. Virtue cuts off the head. Vice only cuts off the hair. Look out for your toupées, gentlemen!’

  And she left the two artists – beaten on their own ground and the critic to sing her praises.

  ‘No one could be more delightful!’ exclaimed Stidmann.

  ‘Oh, she’s a very intelligent woman,’ said Claude Vignon, ‘the cleverest as well as the most attractive that I have ever met. It is so rare to have wit as well as beauty!’

  ‘And you had the honour of knowing Camille Maupin well! If you think so highly of her, you may guess what we think!’

  ‘If you make Delilah a portrait of Valérie, my dear Count,’ said Crevel, who had left the card-table for a moment and overheard the conversation, ‘I will stump up a thousand crowns for the group. Yes, a thousand crowns, damn me! I’ll fork that out!’

  ‘Fork that out? What does that mean?’ Beauvisage asked Claude Vignon.

  ‘Madame would perhaps do me the honour of sitting,’ Steinbock said to Crevel, with a glance at Valérie. ‘Ask her.’

  At that moment Valérie brought Steinbock a cup of tea. It was more than an attention; it was a favour. There is a whole language in the way this office is performed, and women are very well aware of it. It is a rewarding study to watch their movements, gestures, looks, the intonation and varying emphasis of their voices, when they proffer this apparently simple courtesy. From the inquiry ‘Do you drink tea?’ ‘Will you have some tea?’ ‘A cup of tea?’ coldly made, with the order to the nymph at the tea-urn to bring it, to the dramatic poem of the odalisque walking from the tea-table, cup in hand, approaching her heart’s pasha and presenting it to him as an act of submission, with a caressing voice and a look of voluptuous promise, the physiologist may observe the entire gamut of feminine emotions, from aversion, through indifference, to Phèdre’s declaration to Hippolyte. A woman can make this act of politeness, as she chooses, disdainful to the point of insult, or humble to a degree of Oriental servility. And Valérie was not only a woman; she was the serpent in woman’s form. She completed her devil’s work, walking towards Steinbock with a cup of tea in her hand.

  ‘I will take as many cups of tea as you offer me,’ whispered the artist in Valérie’s ear, rising and touching her fingers with his own, ‘just to see them brought to me like this!’

  ‘What were you saying about posing?’ she asked, with no sign that this explosion of feeling, awaited with such passionate expectation, had gone straight to her triumphant heart.

  ‘Papa Crevel wants to buy a cast of your group for a thousand crowns.’

  ‘A thousand crowns, from Crevel, for a piece of sculpture?’

  ‘Yes, if you will sit for Delilah,’ said Steinbock.

  ‘He won’t be present, I hope,’ she rejoined; ‘the group would be worth more than his entire fortune, for Delilah’s dress must be a trifle scanty.’

  Just like Crevel, striking his favourite attitude, all women have an all-conquering mannerism, a studied pose, in which they are irresistible and know that they must be admired. One may see them, in a drawing-room, pass hours of their lives gazing down at the lace on their bodice, or pulling the shoulders of their dress into place, or making play with the brilliance of their eyes by raising them t
o the cornices. Madame Marneffe’s prize card was not played face to face, as most other women play theirs. She turned away abruptly to go to Lisbeth at the tea-table, swinging her skirts in the dancer’s movement that had captivated Hulot. Steinbock was enchanted.

  ‘Your vengeance is complete now,’ Valérie whispered to Lisbeth. ‘Hortense shall weep all the tears she’s got, and curse the day when she took Wenceslas from you.’

  ‘Until I am Madame la Maréchale, nothing is complete,’ replied the peasant woman. ‘But they are all beginning to wish for it.… This morning I saw Victorin – I forgot to tell you. The young Hulots have bought back the Baron’s bills from Vauvinet, and tomorrow they are going to sign a bond for seventy-two thousand francs, at five per cent interest repayable in three years, with a mortgage on their house as security. So there are the young Hulots, in straitened circumstances for three years, and they won’t be able to raise any more money on that property. Victorin is terribly depressed: he knows now just what his father is like. And then Crevel is quite capable of refusing to see them again, he will be so enraged at their throwing their money away.’

  ‘The Baron can have nothing at all left now?’ Valérie said softly to Lisbeth, while she smiled at Hulot.

  ‘Nothing, so far as I can see; but he will be able to draw his salary again in September.’

  ‘And he has his insurance policies; he had them renewed! Well it’s high time he made Marneffe head clerk. I’ll deal with him this evening.’

  ‘Cousin,’ said Lisbeth, walking over to Wenceslas, ‘do please go home now. You are making a fool of yourself. You will compromise Valérie, looking at her like that, and her husband is a wildly jealous man. Don’t imitate your father-in-law’s conduct. Go home; I’m sure Hortense is waiting up for you.…’

  ‘Madame Marneffe told me stay until the others had gone, so that the three of us could arrange our little piece of business,’ Wenceslas replied.

  ‘No,’ said Lisbeth. ‘I’ll get the ten thousand francs for you, for her husband has his eye on you and it would not be wise for you to stay. Bring your note of hand tomorrow, at eleven o’clock. That Turk, Marneffe, is at his office by that time, and Valérie is not worried about him.… Did you really ask her to pose for you for a group?… Come up to my apartment first.… Ah! I always knew,’ she went on, as she caught the look with which Steinbock said good-bye to Valérie, ‘that you were a promising young rake. Valérie is very lovely, but try not to hurt Hortense!’

  Nothing is more irritating to a married man than to meet his wife at every turn, standing in the way of a desire, however fleeting.

  *

  Wenceslas returned home about one in the morning. Hortense had been expecting him since nine thirty. Between half past nine and ten, she listened for the sound of carriage wheels, telling herself that Wenceslas had never stayed so late before when he had dined without her with Chanor and Florent. She was sewing as she sat by her son’s cradle, for she had begun to save a sewing-woman’s wages by doing some of the mending herself. Between ten and ten thirty, a certain suspicion entered her mind. She said to herself:

  ‘Has he really gone to dinner with Chanor and Florent, as he told me? When he was dressing he picked out his best cravat and his finest tie-pin. He spent as long over his toilet as any woman trying to look her most attractive.… Oh, I’m crazy! He loves me. And here he comes.’

  But instead of stopping, the carriage that the young wife had heard went past. Between eleven and midnight, nightmare terrors assailed Hortense, inspired by the loneliness of their quarter.

  ‘If he returned on foot,’ she said to herself, ‘some accident may have happened! People have been killed stumbling over a kerb or an unexpected hole in the road. Artists are so absent-minded! He may have been held up by thieves! This is the first time he has ever left me alone like this, for six and a half hours.… Why do I torment myself? He loves me, and he loves only me.’

  Men have a moral obligation to be faithful to the women who love them, if only because of the perpetual miracles that true love can create in the supernatural regions that we call the world of the spirit. In her knowledge of the man she loves, a woman in love is like a hypnotist’s subject to whom the hypnotist has given the unhappy power of remembering what she has seen in her trance. Passion heightens a woman’s nervous tension to the point of inducing an ecstatic state, in which presentiment has an acute awareness like clairvoyant vision. A woman knows when she is betrayed, although her love will not allow her to acknowledge or heed the voice of her sibylline power. This sharpened vision of love is worthy of religious veneration. In noble minds, wonder at this divine phenomenon will always be a barrier in the way of infidelity. How can a man fail to adore a beautiful, divinely gifted being, whose soul attains the power of such revelations?

  … By one o’clock in the morning, Hortense’s torturing anxiety had reached such a pitch that she rushed to the door when she recognized Wenceslas’s ring, threw her arms round him, and clung to him as if he were her child.

  ‘Here you are, at last!’ she said, when she had recovered the power of speech. ‘Dearest, in future wherever you go I shall go too, for I could not bear the torture of waiting for you like this again.… I was sure you must have had a fall, stumbling over a kerb, and broken your head, or been killed by thieves! No, if that ever happened again, I know I should go mad.… Were you having a good time? Without me? How could you?’

  ‘What could I do, my darling little good angel? Bixiou was there, and he had some new commissions for us; and Léon de Lora, overflowing with wit, as usual; and Claude Vignon, who wrote the only article I had that gave me any encouragement about Marshal Montcornet’s monument – I feel I owe him something. Then there were…’

  ‘There were no women?’ asked Hortense quickly.

  ‘The worthy Madame Florent.’

  ‘You told me that it was at the Rocher de Cancale… but it was at their house, was it?’

  ‘Yes, at their house. I was mistaken.’

  ‘You did not take a cab home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You walked all the way from the rue des Tournelles?’

  ‘Stidmann and Bixiou walked back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, as we were talking.’

  ‘It must be quite dry on the boulevards and the place de la Concorde and the rue de Bourgogne – not a sign of mud,’ said Hortense, examining her husband’s shining boots.

  It had been raining; but Wenceslas had had no occasion to get his boots dirty between the rue Vanneau and the rue Saint-Dominique.

  ‘Look, here’s five thousand francs that Chanor has generously lent me,’ said Wenceslas, in an attempt to cut this quasi-judicial inquiry short.

  He had divided his ten thousand-franc notes into two packets, one for Hortense and one for himself, for he had debts for five thousand francs that Hortense knew nothing about. He owed money to his rough-hewer and his workmen.

  ‘Now you’ve nothing more to worry about, dear,’ he said, kissing his wife. ‘Tomorrow I’m really going to set to in earnest I Oh, I’ll clear out at half past eight tomorrow, and be off to the studio. I’ll go to bed at once so as to be able to get up early. You don’t mind, my sweet?’

  The suspicion that had crossed Hortense’s mind vanished; she was a thousand leagues from the truth! Madame Marneffe? The thought of her never entered her head. What she was afraid of for her Wenceslas was the company of courtesans. The names of Bixiou and Léon de Lora, two artists known for their wild lives, had made her uneasy.

  Next day, as she saw Wenceslas off at nine o’clock, she felt entirely reassured.

  ‘Now he has set to work,’ she thought to herself, as she dressed her baby. ‘Oh, I can see he’s in the right frame of mind! Well, if we can’t have Michelangelo’s glory, we shall have Benvenuto Cellini’s!’

  Deluding herself with her own hopes, Hortense believed that the future was bright; and she was talking to her little boy, twenty months old, in the happy onomatopoeic langu
age that makes children laugh, when at about eleven o’clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed Stidmann into the room.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Madame,’ the artist said. ‘Has Wenceslas gone out already?’

  ‘He is at his studio.’

  ‘I came to discuss some work we are doing together.’

  ‘I’ll send for him,’ said Hortense, offering him a chair.

  The young woman, inwardly thanking heaven for this chance, wanted to keep Stidmann, in order to hear some details about the party the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgement of the Countess’s kindness. Madame Steinbock rang, the cook appeared and was told to go to the studio to fetch her master.

  ‘Did you have an enjoyable evening yesterday?’ said Hortense. ‘Wenceslas didn’t come in until after one in the morning.’

  ‘Enjoyable?… not really,’ replied the artist, who had been anxious to make Madame Marneffe the evening before. ‘To find society enjoyable you have to have some special interest there. That little Madame Marneffe is certainly very clever, but she’s a flirt.’

  ‘And what did Wenceslas think of her?’ asked poor Hortense, endeavouring to remain calm. ‘He said nothing to me.’

  ‘I’ll tell you only one thing about her,’ replied Stidmann, ‘and that is that I think she’s a very dangerous woman.’

  Hortense grew as pale as a woman in childbirth.

  ‘So it was really… at Madame Marneffe’s… and not at the Chanors’ that you dined…’ she said, ‘yesterday… with Wenceslas, and he…’

  Stidmann, while not knowing what unlucky blunder he had made, saw that he had made one. The Countess could not finish her sentence, and fainted away. The artist rang the bell and the maid came.

  When Louise tried to help Countess Steinbock to her room, she was seized with the hysterical convulsions of a severe nervous attack. Stidmann, like everyone whose unwitting indiscretion destroys the flimsy edifice of a husband’s lie to his family, could not believe that what he had said could have caused such damage. He thought that the Countess must be in a delicate state of health in which it was dangerous to vex her in any way. The cook returned and said, in a loud voice, unfortunately, that Monsieur was not in his studio. Half-fainting as she was, the Countess heard this announcement, and hysterics began again.