Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  Reine, a girl with a face pitted like a colander, who seemed to have been created expressly to serve as a foil for Valérie, exchanged a smile with her mistress and brought the dressing-gown. Valérie took off her wrap, under which she was wearing her vest, and slid into the dressing-gown like a snake under its tuft of grass.

  ‘Madame is at home to no one?’

  ‘What a question!’ said Valérie. ‘Come, tell me, my big pussy, have the railway shares slumped?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They’ve raised the price of the house?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are afraid that you are not the father of your little Crevel?’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Crevel replied, in the full conviction that he was loved.

  ‘Well, really, I’m not playing this game any longer!’ said Madame Marneffe. ‘When I’m forced to screw his troubles out of a friend like corks out of champagne bottles, I just give up. Go away; you annoy me.…’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Crevel. ‘I have to find two hundred thousand francs within two hours.…’

  ‘Oh, you’ll certainly find them! Well, for that matter, I haven’t used the fifty thousand francs we got out of Hulot over the police business, and I can ask Henri for fifty thousand!’

  ‘Henri! Always Henri!’ said Crevel, with some heat.

  ‘Do you imagine, my green infant Machiavelli, that I would send Henri away? Does France disarm her fleet?… Henri is a dagger hanging in its sheath suspended from a nail. That boy acts as a test of whether you love me or not.… And you don’t love me this morning.’

  ‘I don’t love you, Valérie?’ said Crevel. ‘I love you a million!’

  ‘That’s not enough!’ she retorted, jumping on to Crevel’s knee and hanging on to him with both arms round his neck, like a coat on a coat-peg. ‘You have to love me ten millions, all the gold in the world, and more. Henri would never leave me for five minutes in doubt as to what was weighing on his mind! Now, now, what’s the matter, my old sweetie? Let’s get it off our little chest… Let’s tell it all, and smartly too, to our little ducky darling!’

  And she brushed Crevel’s face with her hair, and nudged the end of his nose.

  ‘How can a man have a nose like this,’ she said, ‘and keep a secret from his Vava – lélé – ririel’

  ‘Vava,’ the nose went to the right; ‘lélé,’ to the left; ‘ririe,’ and she pushed it gently in the centre again.

  ‘Well, I’ve just seen…’

  Crevel stopped, and looked at Madame Marneffe.

  ‘Valérie, my jewel, do you promise me on your honour… you know, out honour, not to repeat a word of what I’m going to tell you?’

  ‘Agreed, Mayor! We raise our right hand so, look!… And our foot as well!’

  She struck a pose in a fashion that was enough to lay Crevel wide open, as Rabelais put it, from his brain to his heels; she was so funny and so bewitching, with her bare flesh visible through the mist of fine lawn.

  ‘I have just seen virtue in despair!’

  ‘Is there any virtue in despair?’ she inquired, shaking her head and crossing her arms like Napoleon.

  ‘It’s poor Madame Hulot. She has to have two hundred thousand francs! Otherwise the Marshal and old Fischer will blow their brains out; and because you are a little the cause of all that, my little duchess, I’m going to mend the damage. Oh! she’s a saint of a woman. I know her; she’ll pay it all back.’

  At the name ‘Hulot’, and mention of two hundred thousand francs, Valérie flashed a look between her long lashes, like the flash of a cannon amidst its smoke.

  ‘What did the old lady do to get round you? She showed you what? Her religion?’

  ‘Don’t jeer at her, sweetheart; she’s a truly saintly, very noble, very devout woman, and she deserves respect!’

  ‘And so I don’t deserve respect, don’t I?’ said Valérie, giving Crevel an ominous look.

  ‘I don’t say that,’ replied Crevel, understanding how painful the praise of virtue must be to Madame Marneffe.

  ‘I’m a devout woman too,’ said Valérie, moving away and sitting down by herself; ‘but I don’t make a show of my religion. I go to church without parading the fact.’

  She sat in silence, taking no further notice of Crevel. Much perturbed, he went and stood before the chair Valérie had buried herself in; but she was lost in the thoughts that he had so foolishly aroused.

  ‘Valérie, my little angel…!’

  Profound silence. An exceedingly problematical tear was furtively wiped away.

  ‘Say just one word, my darling duck…’

  ‘Monsieur!’

  ‘What are you thinking about, my precious?’

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Crevel, I was thinking about the day of my first Communion! How lovely I was! How pure and saintly! Immaculate! Ah, if anyone had said to my mother: “Your daughter will be a kept woman; she will deceive her husband. One day a police officer will find her in a little house. She will sell herself to a Crevel in order to betray a Hulot, two horrid old men…” Oh, horrible!… Why, she would have died before the end of the sentence, she loved me so much, poor woman.…’

  ‘Don’t upset yourself like this!’

  ‘You don’t know how much a woman must love a man to silence the pangs of remorse that gnaw an adulterous heart. I’m sorry Reine has gone; she could have told you how she found me in tears this morning, on my knees, praying. I’m not a person, you must understand, Monsieur Crevel, who scoffs at religion. Have you ever heard me say a single wrong word on the subject?’

  Crevel shook his head.

  ‘I never allow people to talk about it in my presence. I’ll make fun of anything you like: royalty, or politics, or money, everything that the world holds sacred: judges, marriage, love, young girls, old men! But not the Church! Not God! Oh, there I draw the line! I know very well that I am doing wrong, that I am sacrificing my future happiness for you.… And you haven’t the faintest idea of what my love for you involves!’

  Crevel clasped his hands.

  ‘Ah! you would have to see into my heart, see how truly and deeply I believe, to be able to understand all I am sacrificing for you! I feel that I have in me the stuff of which a Magdalen is made. And you know what respect I show to priests! Just think of the presents I give to the Church! My mother brought me up in the Catholic faith, and I am conscious of God! It is to wrongdoers like us that he speaks most terribly.’

  Valérie wiped away two tears that rolled down her cheeks. Crevel was aghast. Madame Marneffe rose to her full height, in a state of exaltation.

  ‘Keep calm, my ducky darling! You frighten me!’

  Madame Marneffe sank to her knees.

  ‘I am not really wicked, O God!’ she said, clasping her hands. ‘Deign to gather in your wandering lamb. Beat and punish her to bring her back from the hands that make her a byword and adulteress, and with what joy she will hide her head upon your shoulder! How gladly she will return to the fold!’

  She rose, and gazed at Crevel, and Crevel was appalled to see her wide-eyed blank stare.

  ‘And sometimes, Crevel, do you know, I’m sometimes afraid. God’s justice is effective in this world as well as in the next. What good can I hope for from God? His vengeance falls upon the guilty in every kind of way; it takes every form of ill fortune. All the misfortunes that foolish people find impossible to explain are an expiation of sin. That is what my mother told me on her death-bed, speaking of her old age. And if I were to lose you!…’ she added, hugging Crevel close in a frantic clasp. ‘Ah! I should die!’

  Madame Marneffe released Crevel, fell on her knees again before her chair, clasped her hands (and in what a ravishing pose!), and with unbelievable fervour recited the following prayer:

  ‘And oh, St Valérie, my kind patron saint, why do you not come more often to visit the pillow of the child entrusted to your care? Oh, come this night as you came this morning, inspire me with good thoughts and I will leave the way of wickedness. I will ren
ounce, like Magdalen, deceptive joys, the deluding glamour of the world, renounce even the one I love so much!’

  ‘My darling duck!’ said Crevel.

  ‘No longer a darling duck, Monsieur!’

  She turned her head proudly, like a virtuous wife; and with her eyes full of tears still looked dignified, cold, indifferent.

  ‘Leave me,’ she said, repulsing Crevel. ‘Where lies my duty? It is to be my husband’s. That husband is a dying man, and what do I do? I deceive him on the very verge of the tomb! He believes your son is his.… I shall tell him the truth, begin by begging his forgiveness and then ask for God’s. We must part! Adieu, Monsieur Crevell’ and, rising, she held out a glacial hand. ‘Good-bye, my friend; we shall meet again only in a better world. You owe some happiness to me, very sinful happiness, but now I want… yes, I mean to have, your respect.’

  Crevel was weeping bitter tears.

  ‘Why, you great donkey!’ she exclaimed, with a peal of diabolical laughter. ‘That’s the method pious women use to diddle you out of two hundred thousand francs! You talk about Maréchal de Richelieu, the original of Lovelace, and you let yourself be taken in by that tired old confidence trick, as Steinbock would call it. I could soon part you from two hundred thousand francs, if I wanted to, you great idiot! Just keep your money! If you have too much, it belongs to me! If you give two sous to that worthy dame who has taken up religion because she is fifty-seven years old, you’ll never see me again, and you can have her as your mistress. You’ll come back to me next morning all black and blue from her bony caresses, and saturated with her tears, and sick of her provincial little bonnets and her weeping and wailing that must make the recipient of her favours feel as if he were out in a rain-storm!’

  ‘It’s true enough,’ said Crevel, ‘that two hundred thousand francs – well, it’s a lot of money.…’

  ‘Pious women open their mouths wide! Ah, it seems to me, they can sell their sermons at a better price than we can sell the most precious and most certain thing on earth – pleasure.… And what yarns they can tell! It’s incredible! Ah, I know them. I have seen them at my mother’s. They think it right to go to any lengths for the sake of the Church, for… Well, really, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, my pet – you who aren’t an open-handed man at all. Why, you haven’t given me two hundred thousand francs, all told!’

  ‘Oh, indeed I have,’ protested Crevel. ‘The little house alone will cost that.…’

  ‘So you must have four hundred thousand francs?’ she said reflectively.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well then, Monsieur, you were going to lend the two hundred thousand francs for my house to that old horror? That’s high treason against your darling duck!’

  ‘But, just listen to me!’

  ‘If you were giving that money to some silly philanthropic scheme, you would be accepted as a coming man,’ she said, warming to her theme, ‘and I would be the first to urge you to do it; because, after all, you are too simple to write big books about politics to make a reputation for yourself, and you haven’t a good enough style to cook up those long-winded pamphlets. You might be able to set yourself up in the way other people in your position have done, advertise yourself and write your name big, in gold letters, by leading some cause or other, social, moral, national, or what not.… Relief Committees – that’s no good; nobody thinks much of them nowadays. Young criminals saved from a life of crime and given a better chance than the poor honest devils – that’s hackneyed too. For two hundred thousand francs I would like you to think up something more difficult, something really worth while. Then you would be talked about as another Edme Champion,* or a Montyon,* and I should be proud of you! But to throw two hundred thousand francs into a stoup of holy water, lend it to a religious fanatic deserted by her husband for whatever reason you like – you needn’t tell me there isn’t always a reason (does anyone desert me?) – that’s an idiotic notion that only an ex-perfumer’s noddle would think up nowadays! It smells of the shop counter. Two days after doing it you wouldn’t dare to look at your face in the glass! Go away and deposit the money for the house quick, for I won’t let you in here again without the receipt! Go now, at once, and be quick about it!’

  She pushed Crevel out of her room by the shoulders, having seen the flame of ambition re-kindle in his face. When the outer door had closed behind him, she said:

  ‘And there goes Lisbeth’s revenge, heaped up and running over! What a pity she’s at her old Marshal’s! How we would have laughed! So the old lady would like to take the bread out of my mouth, would she?… That’ll shake her!’

  *

  It was necessary for Marshal Hulot to live in a style befitting his high military rank, and he had taken a fine house in the rue du Montparnasse, in which there are two or three princely residences. Although he rented the whole house, he occupied only the ground floor. When Lisbeth came to keep house for him, she immediately wanted to let the first floor. That, as she said, would pay for the whole place, so that the Count would be able to live almost rent free; but the old soldier refused to allow it.

  In the past few months, sad thoughts had troubled the Marshal. He had remarked his sister-in-law’s poverty, and was aware of her deep distress, although he had no knowledge of the cause. The deaf old man, who had been so gay in his deafness, became taciturn. He had it in mind that his house might one day be a refuge for Baroness Hulot and her daughter, and so he was keeping the first floor for them.

  It was so well known that the Count de Forzheim had only very modest means of his own that the Minister of War, Prince de Wissembourg, had insisted on his old comrade’s accepting a grant of money for the furnishing of his house. Hulot had used this money to furnish the ground floor fittingly, for, as he himself put it, he had not accepted a Marshal’s baton in order to treat it as if it were not worth a brass farthing. The house had belonged to a Senator under the Empire, and the ground floor reception rooms had been decorated with great splendour for him, all in white and gold, with carved panelling; they were in a very good state of preservation. The Marshal had put in suitable good old furniture. He kept a carriage in the coachhouse, with the two crossed batons painted on the panels, and hired horses when he had to go anywhere in fiocchi, in style, to the Minister’s or the Palace, for some ceremony or reception. For the last thirty years he had had an old soldier, now aged sixty, for his servant, whose sister was his cook, and so he was able to save something like ten thousand francs, and add it to a little nest-egg destined for Hortense.

  Every day the old man walked along the boulevard from the rue du Montparnasse to rue Plumet; and no old pensioner from the Invalides, seeing him coming, ever failed to stand at attention and salute him, and be rewarded by the Marshal’s smile.

  ‘Who’s that you come to attention for?’ a young workman asked an old pensioner, a captain from the Invalides, one day.

  ‘I’ll tell you the story, boy,’ the officer answered, and the ‘boy’ leaned back against the wall, as if resigning himself to listen to a garrulous old man.

  ‘In 1809,’ said the pensioner, ‘we were covering the flank of the Grande Armée, marching on Vienna, under the command of the Emperor. We came upon a bridge defended by three batteries disposed one above the other on a projecting rocky cliff, like three redoubts, enfilading the bridge. We were commanded by Marshal Masséna. The man you see there was then Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, and I was one of them.… Our columns held one bank of the river; the batteries were on the other. Three times they attacked the bridge, and three times they were driven back. “Go and fetch Hulotl” the Marshal said. “No one but him and his men can make mincemeat of that mouthful!” So we marched up. The General who was pulling out of the last attack on the bridge stopped Hulot under fire to tell him what he should do, and he was blocking our way. “I don’t need advice, but room to pass,” our Colonel said coolly, going on to reach the bridge at the head of his men. And then-rrrattle! Booooom! Thirty guns letting fly at us!’

>   ‘Ah! by gosh!’ exclaimed the workman. ‘That must have brought out some of these crutches!’

  ‘If you had heard him calmly making that remark, my boy, you would bow down to the ground before a man like that! It’s not so famous as the bridge of Arcoli, but it was perhaps even finer. So we followed Hulot at the double right up to those batteries. All honour to those who did not return!’ said the officer, raising his cap. ‘The kaiserlicks were knocked out by that stroke. And so the Emperor made that veteran there a Count – he honoured us all when he honoured our leader; and these new fellows were quite right to make him a Marshal in the end.’

  ‘Long live the Marshall’ said the workman.

  ‘Oh, you had better shout! The sound of gunfire has made the Marshal deaf.’

  This anecdote may serve to show the respect in which the disabled pensioners held Marshal Hulot, whose unchanging Republican views, moreover, won popular affection for him in the whole neighbourhood.

  It was a desolating sight to see suffering enter such a serene, pure, noble soul. The Baroness could only lie, and use all her feminine tact and skill to hide the whole dreadful truth from her brother-in-law. In the course of that disastrous morning, the Marshal, who like all old men slept little, had extracted the truth from Lisbeth about his brother’s situation, promising to marry her as the price of her indiscretion. The old maid’s pleasure at having confidences drawn from her, which since she entered the house she had been longing to make to her intended husband, may be imagined; for in this way she made her marriage more certain.

  ‘Your brother is incorrigible!’ shouted Lisbeth in the Marshal’s good ear. Her loud clear peasant’s voice made it possible for her to talk to the old man. And she strained her lungs, she was so anxious to demonstrate to her future husband that he would never be deaf to her.

  ‘He has had three mistresses,’ the old man said, ‘and his wife is an Adeline!… Poor Adeline!’

  ‘If you take my advice,’ shouted Lisbeth, ‘you will use your influence with Prince de Wissembourg to find some suitable employment for my cousin. She will need it, for the Baron’s salary has a claim against it for three years.’