Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  And, taking advantage of Hulot’s state of stupefaction, he pushed him outside and shut the door.

  ‘What a downright rascal the fellow is!’ Hulot said to himself as he climbed the stair to Lisbeth’s apartment. ‘Oh, I understand her letter now! We’ll leave Paris, Valérie and I. Valérie is mine for the rest of my days; she will close my eyes.’

  Lisbeth was not at home. Madame Olivier informed Hulot that she had gone to call on Madame la Baronne, expecting to find Monsieur le Baron there.

  ‘Poor woman! I should not have thought her capable of such a grasp of the situation as she showed this morning,’ thought the Baron, recalling Lisbeth’s behaviour, as he walked from the rue Vanneau to the rue Plumet.

  At the corner of the rue Vanneau and the rue de Babylone he looked back at the Eden from which Conjugal Right was banishing him, armed with the sword of the Law. Valérie, at her window, was watching Hulot on his way. When he looked up she waved her handkerchief; but the miserable Marneffe aimed a cuff at his wife’s cap and pulled her violently from the window. Tears rose to the Councillor of State’s eyes.

  ‘How can a man bear to be loved as I am loved, see a woman ill-treated, and be nearly seventy years old!’ he thought.

  Lisbeth had gone to carry the good news to the family. Adeline and Hortense already knew that the Baron, unwilling to dishonour himself in the eyes of the entire Ministry by appointing Marneffe chief clerk, was to be shown the door by the husband, who, now turned Hulotophobe, was violently against him. And so Adeline, rejoicing, had ordered such a dinner as her Hector should find superior to those that Valérie could provide, and the devoted Lisbeth was helping Mariette to achieve this difficult aim. Cousin Bette was the heroine of the hour, almost the idol. Mother and daughter kissed her hands, and they had told her with a touching joy that the Marshal had consented to take her as his housekeeper.

  ‘And from that, my dear, to becoming his wife, there is only one step,’ said Adeline.

  ‘In fact, he didn’t say no when Victorin spoke to him about it,’ added Countess Steinbock.

  The Baron was welcomed by his family with such graceful, touching marks of affection, with such overflowing love for him, that he was forced to conceal his anxieties. The Marshal came to dinner. After dinner Hulot stayed at home. Victorin and his wife came in. A rubber of whist was started.

  ‘It’s a long time, Hector,’ said the Marshal gravely, ‘since you have given us a pleasant evening like this.’

  This speech from the old soldier, who was so indulgent to his brother and who in these words was implicitly rebuking him, made a profound impression. It was realized then that during the past months his heart, in which all the sorrows that he had divined had found an echo, had been deeply hurt. At eight o’clock, when Lisbeth took her departure, the Baron insisted on escorting her home, promising to return.

  ‘Do you know, Lisbeth, he ill-treats her!’ he said to her, in the street. ‘Ah! I have never before felt so deeply in love with her.’

  ‘I should never have believed that Valérie could be so much in love with you,’ Lisbeth replied. ‘She is volatile and flirtatious, she likes to see herself a centre of attraction, to have the comedy of love played out for her, as she says; but she is really attached only to you.’

  ‘What message did she give you for me?’

  ‘Here it is,’ answered Lisbeth. ‘You know she has been kind to Crevel. You must not bear her a grudge for that, for it has spared her poverty for the rest of her life. But she detests him, and the affair is practically finished. Well, she has kept the key of some rooms…’

  ‘In the rue du Dauphin!’ exclaimed the delighted Hulot. ‘If it were only for that, I would forgive her Crevel. I have been there; I know.’

  ‘Here is the key,’ said Lisbeth. ‘Have a duplicate made tomorrow – two if you can.’

  ‘And then?’ said Hulot, avidly.

  ‘Well, I will come to dinner with you again tomorrow. You ought to return Valérie’s key, for old Crevel may ask for the one he gave her, and you can go and meet her the day after. Then you can make up your minds about what you are going to do. You will be quite safe there, for there are two entrances. If, by any chance, Crevel, who has Regency habits, or so he says, should come in by the passage, you would go out through the shop, and vice versa. Now you see, you rascal, you owe all this to me. What are you going to do for me?’

  ‘Anything you like!’

  ‘Well then, don’t oppose my marrying your brother I’

  ‘You, the Maréchale Hulot I The Comtesse de Forzheim!’ exclaimed Hulot, in some surprise.

  ‘Adeline is a Baroness, after all!’ returned Bette, in an acid and formidable tone. ‘See here, my old rake, you know the state your affairs are in! Your family may find itself begging bread, in the gutter.…’

  ‘That’s what I’m terrified of!’ said Hulot, with a sudden shock.

  ‘If your brother should die, who would look after your wife and daughter? The widow of a Marshal of France could get a pension of six thousand francs at least, couldn’t she? Well, I only want to marry in order to make sure that your daughter and wife will have bread to eat, you old fool!’

  ‘That didn’t occur to me,’ said the Baron. ‘I will talk to my brother, for we can rely on you.… Tell my angel that my life is bers!’

  And the Baron, after seeing Lisbeth home to the rue Vanneau, returned to play whist, and stayed at home. The Baroness’s cup of happiness was full. Her husband apparently had returned to family life; and for nearly a fortnight he left every morning for the Ministry at nine o’clock, came back at six for dinner, and spent the evening with his family. He twice took Adeline and Hortense to the theatre. Mother and daughter had three thanksgiving masses said, and prayed to God to keep safely with them the husband and father he had restored. Victorin Hulot, seeing his father go off to bed one evening, said to his mother:

  ‘Well, we are fortunate my father has come back to us; and my wife and I will not regret our lost capital, if only this lasts.…’

  ‘Your father is nearly seventy years old,’ answered the Baroness. ‘He still thinks of Madame Marneffe, I realize that, but it will not be for long. A passion for women is not like a passion for gambling or speculation or hoarding money; one can see an end to it.’

  The beautiful Adeline – and she was still beautiful, at fifty, and in spite of her sorrows – was mistaken in this. Libertines, those men endowed by nature with the precious faculty of loving beyond the usual term of love, rarely appear to be their age. During this virtuous interlude the Baron had gone three times to the rue du Dauphin, and there he had never seemed to be seventy. The new lease of life granted to his passion made him young again, and he would have thrown away his reputation for Valérie, and his family, everything and anyone, without a qualm. But Valérie, now completely changed, never mentioned money to him, nor spoke of the twelve hundred francs a year to be settled on their son. On the contrary, she offered him money, and loved Hulot as a woman of thirty-six might love a handsome law student who is very poor, very romantic, and very much in love. And poor Adeline believed that she had recaptured her dear Hector!

  The fourth rendez-vous of the two lovers had been arranged in the last moment of the third, exactly as the next day’s play used to be announced in the old days, at the end of a play by the Comédie-Italienne. Nine in the morning was the appointed time. About eight o’clock on the day when this felicity was due, the expectation of which made it possible for the passionately fond old man to accept family life, Reine asked to see the Baron. Hulot, apprehensive of catastrophe, went out to speak to her, as she would not enter the apartment. The faithful maid handed the following letter to the Baron:

  Dear Old Soldier,

  Don’t go to the rue du Dauphin now; our nightmare is ill and I must look after him; but be there this evening at nine o’clock. Crevel is at Corbeil, with Monsieur Lebas, and I am sure that he will not be bringing a princess to his little house. I’ll make arrangements to spend
the night there; I can be home before Marneffe wakes. Send me an answer o this, for perhaps your long elegy of a wife doesn’t let you do as you please, as you used to. They say she is sufficiently beautiful still to make you unfaithful to me, you are such a rake! Burn my letter; I don’t trust anything.

  In reply, the Baron wrote this little note:

  My love,

  In twenty-five years, my wife, as I have told you, has never stood in the way of my pleasure. I would sacrifice a hundred Adelines for you! I will be there this evening, at nine o’clock, in Crevel’s temple, awaiting my divinity. May the deputy clerk soon expire, and then we need never be separated again I That is the dearest wish of

  Your

  HECTOR

  That evening the Baron told his wife that he had some work to do with the Minister at Saint-Cloud, and would be back between four and five in the morning, and he went to the rue du Dauphin. It was then the end of June.

  Few living men have actually experienced the terrible sensation of going to their death, for few return from the scaffold; but there are some who have been vividly conscious of that agony in dreams. They have felt everything, to the very edge of the knife laid against their necks at the moment when dawn woke them up and brought deliverance.… The Councillor of State’s sensations at five in the morning, in Crevel’s elegant and stylish bed, were far more horrible than those of a man laid on the fatal block, in the presence of ten thousand spectators, watching him with eyes that seared him with twenty thousand jets of flame.

  Valérie was sleeping in a charming pose. She was lovely, with the superb loveliness of women who can even look lovely sleeping – an instance of art invading nature, literally a living picture.

  In his horizontal position, the Baron’s eyes were three feet from the ground. His eyes, straying vaguely as eyes do when a man wakes and collects his scattered thoughts, fell on the door sprinkled with flowers painted by Jan, an artist who despises fame. Unlike a man being executed, the Baron did not see twenty thousand seeing rays of flame, he saw only one, but that one was more acutely painful than the gaze of ten thousand in the public square. Such a sensation in mid-pleasure, much rarer than the sensations of condemned prisoners, would certainly be paid for highly by a great many Englishmen suffering from spleen.

  The Baron lay where he was, still stretched out horizontally, bathed in a cold sweat. He tried to doubt his senses; but that murderous eye was talking. A murmur of voices whispered behind the door.

  ‘Let it be only Crevel, wanting to play a trick on me!’ prayed the Baron, no longer able to doubt the presence of some person in the temple.

  The door opened. The majesty of the law, which on public notices comes second only to that of the king, manifested itself in the shape of a jolly little police superintendent, accompanied by a long-legged magistrate, both ushered in by the Sieur Marneffe. The police officer, standing solidly in shoes with barbarously knotted laces, and topped at the other end with an almost hairless yellow cranium, looked a ribald sly old fellow, genial in nature, for whom the life of Paris held no more mysteries at all. His eyes, glittering behind spectacles, shot shrewd and satirical glances through the glass. The magistrate, a retired solicitor, long an adorer of the fair sex, felt some envy of the delinquent.

  ‘Kindly excuse us – we are forced to do our duty, Monsieur le Baron I’ said the officer. ‘We are required to act by a complainant. This gentleman is a magistrate, present to authorize our entrance of a private house. I know your identity, and that of the lady.’

  Valérie opened amazed eyes, uttered the piercing scream that is conventional for actresses demonstrating their madness on the stage, and writhed in convulsions on the bed, like a woman possessed of the devil in the Middle Ages, in her sulphur shift, on a bed of faggots.

  ‘Death!… my dearest Hector! But a police court? Oh! Never!’

  She leapt up, swept like a white cloud past the three spectators, and tried to efface herself under the writing-table, hiding her face in her hands.

  ‘Betrayed! Worse than dead!’ she shrieked.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said Marneffe to Hulot, ‘if Madame Marneffe goes mad, you will be more than a debauchee, you’ll be a murderer!’

  What can a man do, what can he say, when surprised in a bed which is not his, not even on lease, with a woman who is not his either?

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the Baron, with dignity, ‘kindly have some care for the unfortunate lady whose reason appears to me to be in danger… and you can get on with your official business later. The doors are no doubt locked; you need not fear that she or I may escape, in our present state.…’

  The two officials listened to the Councillor of State’s injunction respectfully, and drew back.

  ‘Come here, you miserable reptile, and talk to me!’ said Hulot under his breath to Marneffe, taking him by the arm and pulling him closer. ‘It’s not I who will be the murderer, but you! You want to be head clerk and an Officer of the Legion of Honour, do you?’

  ‘Most certainly I do, sir,’ answered Marneffe, with a bow.

  ‘You shall be all that. Reassure your wife, and send these gentlemen away.’

  ‘No fear,’ replied Marneffe, with spirit. ‘these gentlemen have to note the evidence that you were caught in the act, and draw up the report. My case rests on that document; without it where should I be? Everyone knows all the double-dealing that goes on at the top in the Civil Service. You have stolen my wife and haven’t made me head clerk, Monsieur le Baron. I give you just two days to arrange the promotion. I have letters here…’

  ‘Letters?’ the Baron interrupted him sharply.

  ‘Yes, letters which prove that the child my wife is carrying at this very moment is yours. You get the point? You ought by rights to provide an income for my son equal to the amount this bastard does him out of. But I’ll not be too hard on you; that’s nothing much to do with me. I’m not a besotted parent – paternity doesn’t go to my head! A hundred louis a year will do. By tomorrow morning I must be Monsieur Coquet’s successor, and my name must be on the list of Legion of Honour nominations for the July celebrations, or else… the official report will be lodged, with my charge, in court. You’ll agree that that’s letting you off lightly?’

  ‘Heavens, what a pretty woman!’ the magistrate was saying to the police officer. ‘A loss to the world if she goes mad!’

  ‘She’s not mad,’ pronounced the officer authoritatively. The police are always scepticism itself.

  ‘Monsieur le Baron Hulot has walked into a trap,’ he added, loud enough for Valérie to hear.

  The rage in Valérie’s eyes, as she turned to look at him, would have killed him if looks could kill. The officer smiled. He had set his trap too, and the woman had fallen into it. Marneffe invited his wife to return to the bedroom and get decently dressed, for all points had been agreed with the Baron, who took a dressing-gown and went to the other room.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said to the two officials, ‘I don’t need to ask you to keep this secret.’

  They bowed. The police officer rapped twice on the door. His secretary entered, sat down at the writing-table, and began to write, as the officer dictated in a low voice. Valérie continued to shed copious tears. When she had finished her toilet, Hulot entered the bedroom and dressed. Meanwhile the official report was completed. Then Marneffe was about to take his wife away, but Hulot, believing that he was seeing her for the last time, made a gesture asking to be permitted to speak to her.

  ‘Monsieur, your wife is costing me dear, so I think you may allow me to say good-bye to her… in the presence of you all, of course.’

  Valérie went over to him, and Hulot whispered:

  ‘We can do nothing now but run away; but how can we keep in touch? We have been betrayed.…’

  ‘By Reine!’ she answered. ‘But, my dear, after this outrage we ought not to see one another again. I am disgraced. Besides, people will tell you dreadful things about me, and you will believe them.…’

  The Baron
shook his head protestingly.

  ‘You will believe them, and I thank heaven for it, for then you will perhaps not regret me.’

  ‘He shall not die a deputy bead clerk!’ said Marneffe, at the Councillor of State’s ear, coming back to reclaim his wife, to whom he said roughly:

  ‘That’s enough, Madame! I may be weak with you, but I don’t intend to be made a fool of by anyone else.’

  So Valérie left Crevel’s little house, with a parting look at the Baron of such roguish complicity that he was sure she adored him. The magistrate gallantly gave his arm to Madame Marneffe, and escorted her to the cab. The Baron, who had to sign the official report, was left standing there in stunned silence, alone with the superintendent. When the Councillor of State had signed the document, the officer looked at him shrewdly over his spectacles.

  ‘You are very fond of that little lady, Monsieur le Baron?’

  ‘Unfortunately for me, as you see…’

  ‘But suppose she were not fond of you?’ the officer pursued. ‘suppose she were playing you false?’

  ‘I have already heard about that, Monsieur, here in this house Monsieur Crevel and I told each other…’

  ‘Ah! so you know that this is Monsieur le Maire’s little house?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  The officer slightly raised his hat from his head in respectful salutation.

  ‘You are unquestionably in love, so I hold my peace,’ he said.’ I respect incurable passions, just as doctors do incurable diseases.… I have seen Monsieur de Nucingen, the banker, stricken with an infatuation of this kind.…’

  ‘He’s one of my friends,’ replied the Baron. ‘I have often had supper with the lovely Esther. She was worth the two millions she cost him.’

  ‘More than that,’ said the officer. ‘that fancy of the old banker’s cost four persons their lives. Oh, these infatuations are like cholera.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ the Councillor of State demanded, taking this indirect warning very badly.