Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  And Marneffe left for the Ministry, where, thanks to his Director’s invaluable friendship, he did not need to arrive before eleven o’clock. He had little to do there, in any case, in consideration of his notorious incapacity and his aversion to work.

  Left alone, Lisbeth and Valérie looked at each other for a moment like a couple of Augurs, then burst simultaneously into a great gust of laughter.

  ‘Look here, Valérie, is this true?’ said Lisbeth. ‘Or are you only playing a farce?’

  ‘It’s a physical fact!’ replied Valérie. ‘But Hortense riles me! And last night I had the brilliant idea of dropping this baby like a bomb into Wenceslas’s household.’

  Valérie went back to her bedroom, followed by Lisbeth, and she showed Lisbeth the following letter, already concocted:

  Wenceslas dear, I still believe that you love me, although it is nearly three weeks since I saw you. Is that because you despise me? Delilah believes that cannot be true. It seems more likely to be due to some exercise of power on the part of a woman whom you told me you could never love again. Wenceslas, you are too great an artist to let yourself be so tyrannized over. Family life is the tomb of glory.… Ask yourself whether you are the Wenceslas that you were in the rue du Doyenné. In my father’s statue you scored a failure; but in you the lover far exceeds the artist – you were more successful with my father’s daughter, and you are to be a father, my adored Wenceslas. If you did not come to see me in my present condition, your friends would hold a very low opinion of you; but I love you so madly, I feel in my heart that I should never have the strength to think badly of you. May I call myself, always,

  Your VALÉRIE?

  ‘What do you think of my plan to send this letter to the studio at a time when our dear Hortense is alone there?’ Valérie asked Lisbeth. ‘Stidmann told me, yesterday evening, that Wenceslas is to call for him at eleven to go to Chanor’s to discuss some work; so that ninny Hortense will be alone.’

  ‘After a trick like that,’ Lisbeth replied, ‘I cannot still be your friend openly. I’ll have to walk out of your house. I must be thought not to visit you any more, or even speak to you.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Valérie; ‘but…’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Lisbeth interrupted. ‘We’ ll see each other again when I am the Marshal’s wife. They are all in favour of it now. The Baron is the only one who doesn’t know of the plan; but you’ll persuade him.’

  ‘But,’ returned Valérie, ‘it is possible that my relations with the Baron may soon be slightly strained.’

  ‘Madame Olivier is the only person we can trust to let Hortense make her give up the letter,’ said Lisbeth. ‘We’ll have to send her first to the rue Saint-Dominique, on her way to the studio.’

  ‘Oh, our pretty little dear will be at home,’ replied Madame Marneffe, ringing for Reine, in order to send her for Madame Olivier.

  Ten minutes after the despatch of the fateful letter, Baron Hulot arrived. Madame Marneffe, with a kittenish spring threw herself upon the old man’s neck.

  ‘Hector, you are a father!’ she whispered in his ear. ‘That’s what happens when people quarrel and make it up again.…’

  Perceiving a certain surprise which the Baron was not quick enough to dissemble, Valérie looked coldly in a way that reduced the Councillor of State to despair. She allowed him to draw the most convincing proofs from her, one after another. When persuasion, taken sweetly by the hand by vanity, had entered the old man’s mind, she told him of Monsieur Marneffe’s rage.

  ‘My own old soldier of the Old Guard,’ she said to him, ‘it will be really very difficult for you to avoid having your responsible editor, our managing director if you like, appointed head clerk and Officer of the Legion of Honour, for you have dealt the man a cruel blow. He adores his Stanislas, the little monstrico who takes after him, whom I can’t endure. Unless you would rather give Stanislas an annuity of twelve hundred francs, with possession of the capital, naturally, and the interest in my name.’

  ‘But if I bestow annuities, I prefer it to be for the benefit of my own son, not for the monstrico!’ said the Baron.

  That imprudent remark, from which the words ‘my own son’ burst like a river in flood, was transformed at the end of an hour’s discussion into a formal promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the child that was to come. And after that, the promise, on Valérie’s lips and in her rapturous face, was like a drum in a small boy’s hands; she had to beat on it without stopping for twenty days.

  Baron Hulot left the rue Vanneau, as happy as a man a year married who wants an heir. Meanwhile, Madame Olivier had induced Hortense to demand the letter from her that she was to deliver only into Monsieur le Comte’s own hands. The young wife paid twenty francs for this letter. The suicide pays for his opium, his pistol, or his charcoal. When Hortense had read the letter, and re-read it, she could see only the white paper barred with black lines; only the paper existed in the universe, everything else was darkness. The glare of the conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness lit up the paper, while utter darkness surrounded her. Her little boy’s cries as he played came to her ear as if he were in a deep valley and she were high on a mountain. To be so insulted, at twenty-four years of age, in the full splendour of her beauty, adorned with a pure and devoted love: it was not a mere dagger-thrust, it was death. The first attack she had suffered had been nervous – her body had reacted in the grip of jealousy; but certainty of the truth assailed the soul, and the body was unconscious of pain. Hortense remained for about ten minutes in this stunned state; then her mother’s image came before her mind, and produced a sudden violent change. She became collected and cold; she recovered her reason. She rang the bell.

  ‘My dear, get Louise to help you,’ she said to the cook. ‘You must pack everything here that belongs to me, as quickly as possible, and all my son’s things. I give you an hour. When everything is ready, fetch a cab from the square, and let me know. Make no comment! I’m leaving the house, and I shall take Louise with me. You must stay here with Monsieur. Take good care of him.…’

  She went into her room, sat down at her table and wrote the following letter:

  Monsieur le Comte,

  The enclosed letter will explain why I have taken the course that I have resolved to follow.

  When you read these lines, I shall have left your house and returned to my mother, with our child.

  Do not imagine that I shall ever change my mind about this decision. Do not think that I am acting on impulse with youthful hotheadedness, with the vehement reaction of outraged young love: you would be quite mistaken.

  I have thought very deeply, during the past fortnight, about life, love, our marriage, and our duty to each other. I have heard the whole story of my mother’s devotion – she has told me all her sorrows. She bears her sufferings heroically every day, and has done so for twenty-three years; but I do not feel that I have the strength to follow her example, not because I have loved you less than she loves my father, but for reasons deriving from my nature. Our home could easily become a hell, and I might lose my head to the point of dishonouring you, dishonouring myself, and our child. I have no desire to be a Madame Marneffe, and on that slope a woman of my temperament might perhaps not be able to stop herself. I am, unhappily for me, a Hulot, not a Fischer.

  Alone, and away from the sight of your dissipation, I can answer for myself, especially occupied as I shall be with our child, near my strong and sublime mother, whose living example will have its effect on the tumultuous impulses of my heart. There I can be a good mother, bring up our son well, and live. If I stayed with you, the wife would kill the mother, and incessant quarrels would embitter my character.

  I could accept death at one stroke; but I cannot bear to suffer for twenty-five years, like my mother. If you have betrayed me after three years of absolute, unwavering, love, for your father-in-law’s mistress, what rivals would you not give me later? Ah, Monsieur, you have begun much earli
er in life than my father the rake’s progress, the vicious way of life, that disgraces the father of a family, loses him his children’s respect, and leads in the end to shame and despair.

  I am not irreconcilable. Unforgiving resentment does not befit frail human beings who live under the eye of God. If you achieve fame and success by sustained effort, if you give up courtesans, ignoble and defiling courses, in me you will find a wife worthy of you again.

  I believe you have too much dignity to have recourse to law-courts. You will respect my wish, Monsieur le Comte, and leave me with my mother; and above all, never present yourself there. I have left you all the money that that vile woman lent you. Good-bye.

  HORTENSE HULOT

  The letter was written painfully. As she wrote Hortense gave way to tears, to the outcries of slaughtered passion. She laid down her pen, but took it up again to write simply what love usually, in such testamentary letters, declaims in unmeasured terms. Her heart poured out its emotion in exclamations, cries, and tears; but what she wrote was dictated by reason.

  The young wife, informed by Louise that all was ready, slowly wandered through the little garden, the bedroom, the drawing-room, looking at everything for the last time. Then to the cook she gave the most earnest injunctions to look after Monsieur well, promising to reward her if she behaved like an honest reliable girl. And at last she got into the cab to go to her mother’s, her heart broken, weeping so bitterly that her maid was distressed, covering the baby Wenceslas with kisses, with a feverish joy in him that revealed much love still remaining for his father.

  The Baroness had already been told by Lisbeth that Wenceslas’s father-in-law was much to blame for his son-in-law’s fault. She was not surprised to see her daughter arrive; she approved of the action she had taken, and agreed to keep her with her. Adeline, perceiving that gentleness and devotion had never done anything to check Hector, for whom her regard was beginning to diminish, considered that her daughter was right to take another way. Within three weeks the poor mother had received two blows that had given her greater pain than even the tortures previously endured. Through the Baron, Victorin and his wife had been impoverished; and now, according to Lisbeth, it was his fault that Wenceslas had gone astray, he had corrupted his son-in-law. The veneration in which the head of this family had been held, for so long maintained by means of extravagant sacrifices, was losing its authority. While not bewailing the lost money, the younger Hulots began to feel both mistrust and anxiety with regard to the Baron. This feeling of theirs, which was obvious enough, deeply distressed Adeline; she had a foreboding of the dissolution of the family.

  The Baroness gave up her dining-room to her daughter’s use, and it was quickly transformed into a bedroom, with the help of the Marshal’s money; and the hall became, as it is in many households, the dining-room.

  When, on his return home, Wenceslas had read and laid down the two letters, he experienced something like a feeling of joy amidst his sadness. Not allowed to stray, so to speak, out of sight of his wife, he had inwardly rebelled against this new form of the imprisonment that Lisbeth had imposed upon him. He had been gorged with love for three years. He too had had reason to reflect during the past fortnight; and the outcome was that he found family life a tiresome burden to bear. He had just heard himself congratulated by Stidmann on the passion he had aroused in Valérie; for Stidmann, with an ulterior motive easy to guess, deemed it an opportune moment to flatter the vanity of Hortense’s husband in the hope of consoling the victim. And so Wenceslas was glad to be able to return to Madame Marneffe. Yet at the same time he could not help remembering the entire and undiluted happiness that he had enjoyed with Hortense, all her perfections, her wisdom, her innocent and uncomplicated love, and he acutely regretted her. He had an impulse to hurry after her to his mother-in-law’s and beg forgiveness, but he did as Hulot and Crevel had done, he went to see Madame Marneffe, and he took his wife’s letter with him in order to show her what a disaster she had caused and, so to speak, profit by this misfortune to demand favours from his mistress as a recompense.

  He found Crevel with Valérie. The Mayor, swollen with pride, was restlessly moving about the drawing-room as if blown before a gusty wind of emotion. He repeatedly struck his pose as if about to burst into speech, and then, not daring, stopped the words on his lips. He looked radiant. Time and again he was drawn to the window to drum with his fingers on the panes. He followed Valérie with his eyes, with a touched and tender expression on his face. Fortunately for Crevel, Lisbeth came in.

  ‘Cousin,’ he whispered to her, ‘have you heard the news? I am a father! It seems to me that I love my poor Célestine less. Oh! what a wonderful thing it is to have a child by a woman whom one idolizes, to be a father in one’s heart as well as by blood! Oh, do tell Valérie what I say. I intend to work for this child, I mean him to be rich! She told me that from certain signs she believes it is to be a boy! If it’s a boy I want him to have the name Crevel: I’ll see my lawyer about it.’

  ‘I know how much she loves you,’ said Lisbeth; ‘but for the sake of your own future and hers, control yourself; don’t keep rubbing your hands every two minutes.’

  While Lisbeth and Crevel were talking aside, Valérie had asked Wenceslas for her letter; and her whisperings soon dispelled his sadness.

  ‘Now that you’re free, my dear,’ she said, ‘do you really think great artists ought to marry? You only live by your imagination and your liberty! Don’t worry. I’ll love you so much, my dear poet, that you’ll never miss your wife. However, if you want to preserve appearances, as many people do, I’ll undertake to see to it that Hortense returns to you, without delay.…’

  ‘Oh, if only that were possible!’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ said Valérie, rather piqued. ‘Your poor father-in-law is in every way a finished man. Out of vanity he wants to appear as a man who is loved, he likes people to think that he has a mistress, and the point means so much to his pride that I can twist him round my fingers. The Baroness still loves her old Hector so much (I seem to be perpetually talking about the Iliad) that the old people will induce Hortense to make it up with you. Only, if you don’t want to raise storms at home, don’t leave your mistress for three weeks without a visit from you… I felt like dying. My sweet, an aristocrat like you owes a certain respect and consideration to a woman whom he has compromised to the degree that you have compromised me, especially when the woman has to be very careful about what she does, for the sake of her reputation. Stay to dinner, my angel… and remember that I must treat you with great coldness, all the more so since you are responsible for my only too apparent fall.’

  Baron Montès was announced. Valérie rose and ran to meet him, and whispered to him for a few moments, and gave him the same injunctions as to his behaviour and the reserve he must show as she had just given Wenceslas, for the Brazilian wore an exalted expression appropriate to the great news that had raised him to the seventh heaven – he, at least, had no doubt of his paternity!

  Thanks to these tactics, based on the pride and conceit of man in his capacity as lover, Valérie had four delighted men round her table, all excited and under her spell, each believing that he was adored; Marneffe dubbed them in a jocose aside to Lisbeth, including himself in the band, the five Fathers of the Church.

  Only Baron Hulot, at first, looked care-ridden, and for this reason. When he was ready to leave his office, he had gone to see the head of the Personnel Department, a general, his comrade for thirty years, and had spoken to him about appointing Marneffe to Coquet’s place, for Coquet had agreed to send in his resignation.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ the Baron had said, ‘I would not ask this favour of the Marshal without discussing the matter first with you, and having your concurrence.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ replied the Director of Personnel, ‘allow me to point out to you that for your own sake you ought not to press this nomination. I have already given you my views. It would cause scandalous talk in the Department,
where there is already far too much interest in you and Madame Marneffe. This is between ourselves, of course. I do not want to hurt your feelings, or to go against your wishes in any way, and I’ll prove it to you. If you are absolutely set on this thing, if you must ask for Coquet’s place (and he will be a real loss to the Ministry – he’s been here since 1809), I’ll take a fortnight’s leave and go away to the country to leave you a clear field with the Marshal, who is as fond of you as if you were his son. In this way I’ll be neither for nor against, and I’ll have done nothing against my conscience as responsible Director.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the Baron. ‘I’ll think over what you say.’

  ‘I may perhaps be allowed to make these comments, my dear fellow, since the matter affects your personal interests more than it does me, or my position. The Marshal has the last word, after all. And of course, my dear fellow, we are blamed for so many things – what does one more or less matter? We can reckon ourselves hardened to criticism. Under the Restoration men were appointed just to give them a salary, without too much concern about the advantage to the Civil Service.… We are old comrades.…’

  ‘Quite so,’ said the Baron, ‘and it’s just because I do not want to do anything that might impair an old and valued friendship that I…’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the Director of Personnel, seeing embarrassment painted on Hulot’s face, ‘I’ll go off for a short time, my dear fellow. But take care! You haveenemies, people who covet your fine salary, and you have only one anchor to hold you. Ah! if you were a Deputy, like me, you would have nothing to fear. So be careful!’

  These remarks, so full of friendly feeling, made a strong impression on the Councillor of State.

  ‘But why do you make so much of this, Roger? Is there something behind these mysterious warnings?’

  The person addressed as Roger looked at Hulot, took his hand and clasped it.