Cousin Bette (12 page)

‘If you are able to make him work hard,' he said, ‘it will turn out better for you than your rashness deserves; you will get your money back: interest, costs, and capital. This Pole has talent, he is capable of earning a living; but lock up his trousers and shoes, prevent him from going to La Chaumière and the Notre-Dame de Lorette quarter, keep him on a leash. If you don't take such precautions your sculptor will be idle, and if you only knew what artists mean by
idleness
! –such horrors, you've no ideal! I've just been told that a thousand-franc note may be frittered away in a single day!'

This episode had a disastrous effect on the relationship
between Wenceslas and Lisbeth. The benefactress soaked the exile's bread in the bitter wormwood draught of reproach whenever it seemed to her that her savings were in danger, and she very often believed that they were gone for ever. The kind mother became a cruel stepmother; she rated the poor boy and nagged him, reproached him with not working fast enough and with having chosen a hard profession. She could not believe that models in red wax, small figures, trial designs for ornament, sketches, could be of any use. Presently, reacting against her own harshness, she tried to efface its effect by her concern for the Pole's needs, by kind and thoughtful services. The poor young man, groaning to find himself dependent on this shrew, domineered over by a peasant woman from the Vosges, was disarmed by her affectionate coaxing and her motherly solicitude for his physical and material well-being. He was like a wife who forgives a week's ill-treatment in the caresses of a fleeting reconciliation. In this fashion, Mademoiselle Fischer gained an absolute empire over his spirit.

The love of power which had lain dormant in the old maid's heart developed rapidly. She was able to satisfy her pride and her need to find an outlet for her energy: had she not a creature of her own to scold, manage, spoil, make happy – with no need to fear any rival? The good and evil in her character were equally employed and active. If she sometimes tormented the wretched artist, at other times she could show a delicacy of feeling and a kindness that had the charm of meadow flowers. It was her delight to see that he lacked nothing. She would have given her life for him, Wenceslas was sure of that. Magnanimous like all noble spirits, the poor boy forgot the bad side, the shortcomings of this woman, who, indeed, had told him the story of her life in excuse of her roughnesses, and he constantly remembered only her generosities. One day, exasperated because Wenceslas had gone out for a stroll instead of working, the spinster made a scene.

‘You belong to me!' she told him. ‘As an honourable man you ought to try to pay back what you owe me as quickly as possible.…'

The young aristocrat turned pale. His Steinbock blood kindled in his veins.

‘God knows,' she said, ‘we'll soon have nothing left to live on but the thirty sous I earn, a poor working woman like me.…'

In need of money as they both were, provoked by the exchange of bitter words, they became incensed against each other; and then the poor artist for the first time reproached his benefactress for having snatched him from death to make him live a galley-slave's life; worse than annihilation, so he said, in which one at least had peace. And he spoke of running away.

‘Run away!' cried the spinster. ‘Ah! Monsieur Rivet was right!'

And she explained categorically to the Pole how he might within twenty-four hours be put in prison for the rest of his days. It was a staggering blow. Steinbock sank into a black melancholy and absolute silence.

More than a day later, in the night, Lisbeth, who had heard preparations being made for suicide, climbed the stairs to her pensioner, and presented him with the file of papers and a legal receipt for the money he owed her.

‘Take these, my child, and forgive me!' she said, with tears in her eyes. ‘Be happy; leave me: I torment you too much. But tell me that you will sometimes think of the poor girl who set you in the way of earning a living for yourself. What can I do? It's for your own sake I am unkind. I may die, and what would become of you without me? That's the reason for my impatience to see you able to make articles that can be sold. I'm not asking for my money for my own sake, believe me! I am afraid of your idleness that you call reverie, of your thinking out of ideas that consumes so many hours while you stare at the sky; and I would like to have seen you develop the habit of work.'

This was said in a tone of voice, with a look, tears, an expression, that went straight to the magnanimous artist's heart. He put his arms round his benefactress, pressed her to him, and kissed her forehead.

‘Keep these papers,' he said, almost with gaiety. ‘Why
should you put me in Clichy? Don't you see that gratitude makes me a prisoner here?'

This crisis of their secret life together, which had happened six months earlier, had roused Wenceslas to produce three pieces of work: the seal that Hortense was keeping, the group at the antique dealer's, and a beautiful clock which he was now just finishing – he was in the act of tightening the last screws.

The clock represented the twelve Hours, admirably symbolized by twelve female figures whirling in a dance so swift and full of verve that three Cupids, clambering up on a pile of fruit and flowers, could attempt to check only the Hour of Midnight, whose torn chlamys remained in the grasp of the most daring Cupid. This group was mounted on a circular base gaily ornamented with lively fantastic creatures. The time was indicated in a monster's mouth, gaping in a yawn. The Hours carried apt symbolic tokens of the occupation appropriate to each hour.

It is easy to understand, now, the extraordinary nature of the attachment which Mademoiselle Fischer had come to feel for her Livonian: she wanted him to be happy, yet she watched him pining away, growing blanched and sickly in his garret. How this appalling state of affairs had come about may be imagined. The Lorraine peasant watched over this child of the north with a mother's tenderness, a wife's jealousy, and the temper of a dragon. She so arranged things as to make any kind of escapade or dissipation impossible for him through lack of money. She would have liked to keep her companion and victim entirely to herself, well-behaved as he was of necessity; and she did not understand, because she herself had become accustomed to endure any privation, the barbarity of this insane desire. She loved Steinbock well enough not to marry him, and loved him too well to give him up to another woman. She could not resign herself to being only his mother, yet thought herself crazy when the idea of playing the alternative role crossed her mind.

These warring impulses: her fierce jealousy, her happiness in possessing a man of her own, kept this woman's heart in a state of inordinate agitation. She had been truly in love for the past four years, and she cherished the wild hope of making this
illogical way of life – leading nowhere – permanent, though its continuance must mean the destruction of the person she called her child. The battle between her instincts and her reason made her unjust and tyrannical. Vengeance was wreaked on the young man for the fact that she was not young nor beautiful nor rich. Then, after each vengeful act, recognizing her faults, she achieved infinite depths of humility and tenderness. She knew how she must sacrifice to her idol only after she had marked her power with axe-blows upon it. The situation, in fact, was that of Shakespeare's
Tempest
in reverse, with Caliban master of Ariel and Prospero.

As for the unhappy young man – a man of high ideals, reflective, with a tendency to indolence – his eyes, like the eyes of lions encaged in the Jardin des Plantes, revealed the desert that his benefactress was creating in his soul. The forced labour that Lisbeth imposed upon him did not satisfy the needs of his heart. His boredom was becoming a physical malady and he was dying without being able to ask for, without knowing how he could obtain, money for the distraction that he often needed. Occasionally, on days of restless energy when the consciousness of his unhappiness aggravated his exasperation, he looked at Lisbeth as a thirsty traveller traversing an arid waste must look at undrinkably brackish water.

The bitter fruits of poverty and of their hermit-like existence in Paris were savoured by Lisbeth as pleasures; and she foresaw with terror that the faintest breath of a love-affair would take her slave from her. Sometimes, as by her tyranny and upbraidings she drove on this poet to become a great modeller of small-scale works of art, she reproached herself with having given him the means to do without her.

The following day, those three existences so different from one another and all so truly wretched, the lives of a mother in despair, of the Marneffe couple, and of the hapless refugee, were all to be affected by Hortense's naïve passion, and by the singular events that were to be the outcome of the Baron's ill-fated passion for Josépha.

*

As he was about to enter the opera-house, the Councillor of State was struck by the somewhat gloomy aspect of the
building at the rue Le Peletier entrance, with no gendarmes, no lights or attendants, no crush barriers in evidence. He consulted the poster, and saw a white sticker with the ritual announcement conspicuous across it:
PERFORMANCE CANCELLED OWING TO INDISPOSITION
.

He at once rushed off to Josépha's lodgings in the rue Chau-chat, for like all the singers and dancers attached to the Opera, she lived near by.

‘Whom do you wish to see, Monsieur?' the porter asked him, much to his surprise.

‘Don't you recognize me?' the Baron asked, in some uneasiness.

‘On the contrary, Monsieur, it is because I have the honour to remember Monsieur that I inquire: “Where are you going?”'

The Baron was seized with a mortal chill.

‘What has happened?' he asked.

‘If Monsieur le Baron went up to Mademoiselle Mirah's apartment, he would find Mademoiselle Héloïse Brisetout there, and Monsieur Bixiou, Monsieur Léon de Lora, Monsieur Lousteau, Monsieur de Vernisset, Monsieur Stidmann, and a number of women reeking of patchouli, all having a house-warming party.'

‘But where is…?'

‘Mademoiselle Mirah? I really don't know if it would be right to tell you.'

The Baron slipped two five-franc pieces into the man's palm.

‘Well, she's living in the rue de la Ville-l'Évêque now, in a house which they do say the Duc d'Hérouville gave her,' the porter said, in a confidential whisper, behind his hand.

Having obtained the number of this house, the Baron took a
milord
, and was set down in front of one of those pretty modern double-doored houses where everything, even to the gas lamp at the entrance, makes a display of luxury.

The Baron, in his blue coat, with white cravat, white waistcoat, nankeen trousers, shining patent leather boots, well-starched shirt-frills, looked like a belated guest to the
door-keeper of this new Eden. His imposing presence, his way of walking, everything about him, seemed to justify this supposition.

The porter rang, and a footman appeared in the hall. The footman, new like the house, made way for the Baron, who said in the voice of a man accustomed to Imperial command, with an Imperial gesture:

‘Have this card sent in to Mademoiselle Josépha.'

The shorn sheep mechanically looked round the room he found himself in, and saw an ante-chamber filled with exotic flowers, whose furnishings must have cost at least twenty thousand francs. The footman returned to ask Monsieur to wait in the drawing-room until the party at dinner came in to take their coffee.

Although the Baron had known the undoubtedly extravagant luxury of the Empire, which had created settings – shortlived though they may have been – that had cost fantastic sums, he stood dazzled, dumbfounded, in this drawing-room, whose three windows opened upon a fairytale garden, one of those gardens brought into existence in a month with soil carried to the site and flowers planted out almost in bloom, whose lawns seem to have been produced by alchemists' magic. It was not only the studied elegance that he found admirable – the gilding, the costly carving in the style known as Pompadour, the sumptuous materials – for any tradesman might have ordered and obtained these by the mere expenditure of an ocean of gold. Much more marvellous were the works of art, of a kind that only princes have the discrimination and the ability to choose, find, pay for, and give away: two paintings by Greuze and two by Watteau, two heads by Van Dyck, two landscapes by Ruysdael, two by Le Guaspre, a Rembrandt, a Holbein, a Murillo, and a Titian, two Teniers and two Metzus, a van Huysum and an Abraham Mignon – in sum, two hundred thousand francs' worth of pictures, superbly mounted. The frames were worth almost as much as the canvases.

‘Ah! You understand now, old boy?' said Josépha.

She had come on tiptoe through a noiseless door, over Persian carpets, and surprised her adorer in one of those
moments of stupefaction when through the ringing in one's ears one can hear only the tolling of disaster.

The use of the expression
old boy
, addressed to such a high official as the Baron, admirably illustrates the audacity with which these creatures pull down the greatest to their own level. The Baron was left paralysed. Josépha, all in white and yellow, was adorned for this festivity so beautifully that even in this magnificently luxurious setting she could still shine, like the rarest jewel of all.

‘Isn't it splendid?' she went on. ‘The Duke spent on it all the money he made on a company he floated, when he sold the shares on a rise. He's no fool, my little Duke, eh? There's no one like the great lords of the old families for knowing how to change pit coal into gold. The notary brought me the title-deeds to sign before dinner, with the receipted bills. They're all like lords here: d'Escrignon, Rastignac, Maxime, Lenoncourt, Verneuil, Laginski, Rochefide, La Palférine; or bankers, like Nucingen and du Tillet; and Antonia, and Malaga, and Carabine, and Schontz are here as well; and they're all so sorry for you in your hard luck. Yes, old dear, you're invited to join them, but only on condition that you drink the equal of two bottles of Hungarian wine, champagne and
Cap
, straight off, to catch up with them. We're all too tight here, my pet, to do anything but put off the performance. My director is as drunk as a cornet – he's reached the
couac-couac
stage.'