Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘We have been friends for too long for me not to give you a piece of advice. If you want to maintain your position you must look after your own interests, make the bed you mean to lie in. In your place, instead of asking the Marshal to give Coquet’s place to Marneffe, I would beg him to use his influence to ensure a place for me on the General Council of State, where I could end my days in peace. I should act like the beaver retreating before the hunters, and give up what they’re attacking – the Director-generalship.’

  ‘What do you mean? The Marshal would surely never forget…’

  ‘My friend, the Marshal defended you so hotly in one Council of Ministers that no one now thinks of giving you the sack; but there was some question of it! So don’t give them a pretext. I don’t want to say more. Just at present you can make what conditions you like, be a Councillor of State and Peer of France. If you wait too long, if you give them a handle to use against you, I don’t answer for anything.… Do you still want me to go off on leave?’

  ‘Wait for a while. I’ll see the Marshal,’ Hulot answered; ‘and I’ll send my brother to sound him first and see how matters stand.’

  The frame of mind in which the Baron returned to Madame Marneffe’s may be imagined; he had almost forgotten that he was to be a father. Roger, in warning him of the realities of his situation, had acted as a true and kind friend. Yet such was Valérie’s influence that by the time dinner was half over the Baron was in harmony with the rest, and waxed all the louder in his merriment because he had more worries to silence. The unfortunate man did not suspect that that very evening he was to find himself caught between the prospect of losing his happiness and the danger that the Personnel Director had warned him of, forced to choose between Madame Marneffe and his position.

  About eleven o’clock, when the party was at its height and very gay, for the room was full of people, Valérie beckoned Hector to a corner of her sofa.

  ‘My dear old thing,’ she said to him, in a lowered voice, ‘your daughter is so vexed with Wenceslas for coming here that she has left him. She’s a bit too hot-headed is Hortense. Ask Wenceslas to let you see the letter the little fool wrote him. This separation of two lovers, of which I’m made out to be the cause, might do me an enormous amount of harm; for that’s the sort of slanderous gossip by which virtuous women assert their superiority. It’s a shocking thing that a person should pretend to be injured in order to throw blame on a woman who is guilty of nothing but having a house that people find agreeable. If you love me, you will clear me by sending the two turtle-doves home to their nest. I’m not at all anxious, anyway, to receive your son-in-law; it was you who brought him here, so you take him away again! If you have any authority over your family, it seems to me that you might well make your wife arrange a reconciliation. Tell the good old lady from me that if I am unjustly credited with coming between a young husband and wife, breaking up a family and grabbing both father and son-in-law, then I’ll live up to my reputation by harrying them in my own fashion! Haven’t I got Lisbeth, here, talking of leaving me? She prefers her family to mine, and I can’t very well blame her. She has told me she will stay only if the young people patch up their quarrel. Just see the fix that leaves us in! Expenses in this house will be tripled!’

  ‘Oh, leave that to me,’ said the Baron, when he had heard the scandalous story of his daughter’s flight. ‘I’ll soon put that right.’

  ‘Well,’ went on Valérie, ‘to go on to another thing. What about Coquet’s place?’

  ‘That is more difficult,’ replied Hector, lowering his eyes, ‘not to say impossible!’

  ‘Impossible, my dear Hector?’ said Madame Marneffe, softly and confidentially. ‘But you just don’t know what lengths Marneffe is prepared to go to. I am in his power. He is quite immoral where his own interests are concerned, like most men; but he is exceedingly vindictive, in the way only petty and physically weak people can be. In the position you have placed me in, I am at his mercy. If I were obliged to smooth him down for a few days, he is capable of never leaving my room again!’

  Hulot gave a violent start.

  ‘He was leaving me alone on condition that he should be head clerk. It’s an outrage, but it’s logical.’

  ‘Valérie, do you love me?’

  ‘To ask me such a question now, my dear, in the condition I’m in, is grossly unjust.’

  ‘Well, if I should try, merely attempt, to ask the Marshal for promotion for Marneffe, I should be done for and Marneffe would be dismissed.’

  ‘But I thought that you and the Prince were intimate friends!’

  ‘Certainly we are, and he has often proved it; but, child, above the Marshal there are others… there’s the whole Council of Ministers, for example. With a little time, if we beat about and manoeuvre, we’ll get there. To have what we want, we need to wait for the opportune moment when I’m asked to do some service. Then I can say “One good turn deserves another.…”’

  ‘If I say that to Marneffe, my poor Hector, he will do us an ill turn. Go and tell him yourself that he’ll have to wait, I won’t undertake it. Oh! I know what will happen to me; he knows how to punish me; he won’t leave my bedroom.… Don’t forget the twelve hundred francs annuity for the little one.’

  Hulot, feeling his pleasure threatened, took Marneffe aside; and for the first time he dropped the authoritative tone he had used until then – he was so revolted by the thought of that moribund man in his pretty wife’s room.

  ‘Marneffe, my dear fellow,’ he said,’ I was talking about you at the Ministry today! But you can’t be promoted head clerk just yet.… We need time.’

  ‘Oh yes I can, Monsieur le Baron,’ Marneffe said flatly.

  ‘But, my dear fellow…’

  ‘Oh yes I can, Monsieur le Baron,’ Marneffe repeated coldly, looking from the Baron to Valérie, and then at the Baron again. ‘My wife finds it necessary to be reconciled to me, thanks to your behaviour, so I shall keep her; for she is charming, my dear fellow,’ he added, with scathing irony. ‘I am master here, even though you can’t say the same at the Ministry.’

  The Baron felt a pain at his heart like an agonizing toothache, and it was all he could do to prevent tears appearing in his eyes. During this brief exchange, Valérie was whispering to Henri Montès, telling him of the course Marneffe was determined on, so she said, and so getting rid of Montès for a time.

  Of the four faithful adorers, only Crevel, the possessor of his snug little house, was exempted from this treatment; and his face wore an expression of almost insolent beatitude, in spite of the reproofs that Valérie silently addressed to him by frowning and looking at him meaningfully. His radiant paternity beamed in every feature. When Valérie went up to him to whisper an urgent reproach, he caught her hand and said:

  ‘Tomorrow, my duchess, you shall have your little house! I shall be signing the conveyance document tomorrow.’

  ‘And what about the furniture?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘I have a thousand shares in the Versailles and South Seine railway bought at a hundred and twenty-five francs, and they’ll go to three hundred because the two lines are to be linked – I have had secret information about it. You’ll have furniture fit for a queen! But from now on you’ll belong only to me, won’t you?…’

  ‘Yes, my big Mayor,’ said that middle-class Madame de Merteuil, with a smile; ‘but behave nicely! Respect the future Madame Crevel.’

  ‘My dear Cousin,’ Lisbeth was saying to the Baron, ‘I’ll be with Adeline early tomorrow, for you know I can’t in all decency stay here. I’ll go and keep house for your brother, the Marshal.’

  ‘I’m going home tonight,’ said the Baron.

  ‘Well then, I’ll come to lunch tomorrow,’ said Lisbeth, with a smile.

  She knew how necessary it was that she should be present at the family scene that was bound to take place the following day. Early in the morning, too, she paid a visit to Victorin, and told him that Hortense and Wenceslas had separated.


  *

  When the Baron returned home about half past ten that evening, Mariette and Louise, who had spent a hard-working day, were just locking the door of the apartment, so that he did not need to ring. This husband, virtuous perforce and very vexed at having to be so, went straight to his wife’s room; and through the half-open door saw her kneeling before her crucifix, lost in prayer, in one of those poses that are the inspiration and glory of painters and sculptors endowed with the genius to reproduce them. Adeline, lost in exaltation, was saying aloud:

  ‘Have mercy upon us, O God, and open his eyes to see the light!…’

  So prayed the Baroness for her Hector. This scene, so different from the one he had just left, and these words, prompted by the events of that day, affected the Baron, and he sighed. Adeline turned a face wet with tears towards him. She so instantly believed that her prayer had been answered that she jumped to her feet and embraced her Hector fervently. Adeline’s feminine self-regarding instincts were all outworn; grief had drowned even the memory. There was no passion left in her but motherhood, reverence for the family honour, and the purest affection of a Christian wife for a husband who has gone astray, that saintly tenderness that survives all else in a woman’s heart. All this was evident.

  ‘Hector,’ she said at last, ‘have you come back to us? Has God taken pity on our family?’

  ‘Dear Adeline!’ replied the Baron, leading his wife to a chair and sitting down beside her. ‘You are the saintliest person that I have ever known, and for a long time I have felt myself no longer worthy of you.’

  ‘You would have very little to do, my dear,’ she said, holding Hulot’s hand and trembling violently, as if her feeling were physically uncontrollable, ‘very little indeed to do to set things right again.’

  She dared not go on; she felt that every word would be a reproach, and she did not wish to mar the happiness that filled her heart to overflowing in this meeting with her husband.

  ‘It is Hortense who brings me here,’ Hulot began. ‘That little girl may do us more harm by her hasty action than my absurd passion for Valérie. But we will talk about all that tomorrow morning. Hortense is asleep, so Mariette tells me, so let’s leave her in peace.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Madame Hulot, suddenly overwhelmed by profound sadness.

  She saw that it was less a desire to see his family that had brought the Baron home to them, than some interest in which they had no share.

  ‘Let’s leave her in peace tomorrow too, for the poor child is in a pitiable state; she’s been weeping all day,’ said the Baroness.

  The next morning at nine, the Baron was waiting for his daughter, whom he had sent for, and was walking up and down the vast empty drawing-room, searching his mind for arguments to overcome the most obdurate kind of determination, the obstinacy of an offended young wife, uncompromising like all the blameless young, who cannot envisage the shameful compromises commonly arrived at, because they are untouched by worldly passions and selfish interests.

  ‘Here I am, Papa!’ said a trembling voice, and Hortense appeared, pale with unhappiness.

  Hulot, sitting down, put his arm round his daughter and made her sit on his knee.

  ‘Well, child,’ he said, setting a kiss on her forehead, ‘so there’s been some upset at home, and we have acted impulsively? That’s not behaving like a well-brought-up girl. My Hortense should not have taken a decisive step like leaving her home, deserting her husband, by herself, without consulting her parents. If my dear Hortense had come to see her kind and admirable mother, she would have spared me the acute regret I feel!… You do not know the world; it is very malicious. People may quite likely say that your husband has sent you back to your patents. Children brought up, like you, by their mother’s side, remain children longer than others; they do not know what life is! An innocent and naive love, like yours for Wenceslas, unhappily considers nothing; it is at the mercy of any impulse that moves it. Our little heart takes the lead, our head follows. We would burn down Paris to have our revenge, without a thought of the police courts! When your old father comes to tell you that you have not acted with propriety, you may believe him; and I say nothing of the deep sorrow I have been feeling. It is very bitter, for you are throwing blame on a woman whose heart you do not know, whose hostility may have terrible consequences. A girl like you, who are so open, so full of innocence and purity, has no conception of how things are in the world, I am sorry to say; it is possible you may be slandered, your name blackened. Besides, my dear little angel, you have taken a joke seriously; and I, personally, can vouch for your husband’s innocence. Madame Marneffe…’

  So far, the Baron, an artist in diplomacy, had admirably modulated the tone of his remonstrances. He had, as we see, skilfully led up to the introduction of that name. But Hortense when she heard it, started, as if cut to the quick.

  ‘Listen to me. I am a man of experience, and I have seen the whole thing,’ her father went on, preventing her from speaking. ‘That lady treats your husband very coldly. Yes, you’ve been taken in by some hoax, and I’ll give you proofs of it. For example, yesterday Wenceslas was there at dinner.…’

  ‘He dined there?’ exclaimed the young wife, jumping to her feet and staring at her father with a horror-stricken face. ‘Yesterday! After reading my letter? Oh! God! Why did I not enter a convent instead of marrying? My life is not mine to dispose of now, I have a child!’ she said, sobbing.

  Her tears reached Madame Hulot’s heart. She left her room, ran to her daughter, took her in her arms and asked her the futile questions of grief, the first that come to the lips.

  ‘Here’s a fine tempest!’ said the Baron to himself. ‘And it was all going so well! Now what’s a man to do with crying women?’

  ‘Listen to your father, child,’ the Baroness said to Hortense. ‘He loves us, you know.…’

  ‘Come now, Hortense, my dear little daughter, don’t cry, it spoils your looks,’ the Baron said. ‘Come now, be reasonable. Go back, like a good girl, to your home, and I promise you that Wenceslas will never set foot in that house again. I ask you to make the sacrifice, if you call it a sacrifice to forgive your own husband whom you love, for a trifling fault! I ask you to do it for the sake of my grey hairs, for the love you bear your mother. You do not want to fill the days of my old age with bitterness and grief, do you?’

  Hortense flung herself in a frenzy at her father’s feet, so wildly that her loosely-knotted hair came down, and she held out her hands to him in a gesture that showed her utter despair.

  ‘Father, you are demanding my life!’ she said. ‘Take it if you will, but at least take it pure and blameless, and I will give it to you gladly indeed. But do not ask me to die dishonoured, stained with crime! I am not like my mother! I will not swallow outrages! If I return to the home I share with Wenceslas, I may strangle Wenceslas in a fit of jealousy, or do worse still. Do not exact from me what is beyond my strength. Do not have to mourn me while I am still alive! For the least evil thing that may happen to me is to go mad.… I feel madness only two steps away! Yesterday, yesterday, he dined with that woman I After reading my letter! Are other men made like that? I give you my life, but let death not be shameful! His fault? trifling! To have a child by that woman!’

  ‘A child I’ said Hulot, recoiling. ‘Come! That’s certainly a joke.’

  Just at that moment Victorin and Cousin Bette came in, and stood dumbfounded at the sight that met their eyes – the daughter prostrate at her father’s feet, the Baroness, silent, torn between her feelings as a mother and as a wife, watching with an agonized, tear-stained face.

  ‘Lisbeth,’ said the Baron, seizing the spinster by the hand and indicating Hortense, ‘you can help me. Poor Hortense is out of her mind. She thinks Madame Marneffe is her Wenceslas’s mistress, while all Valérie wanted was simply to have a group by him.’

  ‘Delilab!’ cried the young wife, ‘the only piece of work he has done since our marriage that he finished at once, without endless delay. This m
an was not able to work for my sake, or for his son, but he worked for that abominable woman with such ardour.… Oh! give me a stroke to finish me, Father, for every word you speak is a stab.’

  Turning to the Baroness and Victorin, with a glance at the Baron, unseen by him, Lisbeth shrugged her shoulders pityingly.

  ‘Listen to me, Cousin,’ said Lisbeth, ‘I did not know what Madame Marneffe was when you begged me to go and live in the flat above her and look after her house, but in three years one learns a lot. That creature is a harlot! And so depraved! Only her dreadful hideous husband is comparable to her. You are the dupe, the Milord Pot-au-feu of these people, the contented deceived victim that they are keeping in their pocket, and they will lead you farther than you think! I am forced to speak to you quite plainly, for you have fallen into a pit.’

  Hearing her speak in these terms, the Baroness and her daughter gazed at Lisbeth like devout persons thanking the Madonna for preserving their lives.

  ‘She wanted, horrible woman, to disturb your son-in-law’s marital happiness. Why? I’ve no idea. I’m not clever enough to get to the bottom of shady intrigues like this, so perverse and mean and shameful. Your Madame Marneffe does not love your son-in-law, but she wants him on his knees before her as an act of revenge. I have just treated the wretched woman as she deserves. She’s a shameless courtesan, and I told her that I was leaving her house, that I did not want to run the risk of contamination in that sink of vice any longer. I belong to my family, first and foremost. I heard that my cousin’s child had left Wenceslas, and here I am! Your Valérie, whom you think of as a saint, is the person who has caused this cruel separation. Can I stay with such a woman? Our darling Hortense,’ she went on, touching the Baron’s arm meaningfully, ‘may be the victim of a whim, because women of her sort are capable of sacrificing a whole family in order to possess some trifle of artist’s work. I do not think that Wenceslas is guilty, but I think he is weak, and I do not say that he would not yield to such high-powered fascinations. I have made up my mind. That woman is deadly dangerous to you; she will bring you to the gutter. I don’t want to seem to be implicated in my family’s ruin, especially as I’ve been staying there for the past three years for the express purpose of preventing it. You are being deceived, Cousin. Say firmly that you will have nothing to do with the promotion of that scoundrelly Monsieur Marneffe and you’ll see what will happen! You’re in for a beating if you do.’