Cousin Bette (24 page)

Crevel had married money in the person of the daughter of a miller of Brie, an only child whose inheritance made up three-quarters of his fortune; for shopkeepers grow rich, as a rule, not so much from their business as by the alliance of the shop with rural interests. A large number of the farmers, millers, stock-breeders, market-gardeners round Paris dream of the glories of shopkeeping for their daughters, and in a retailer, a jeweller, a moneylender, see a son-in-law much more to their taste than a solicitor or an attorney would be; for the lawyers' social status makes them uneasy; they are afraid of later being despised by persons so influential in the bourgeois world.

Madame Crevel, a rather plain woman, very vulgar and stupid, had died early and unregretted, having given her husband no pleasures but those of paternity. At the beginning of his career in trade, then, this libertine, restrained by the duties of his position, his passions curbed by lack of means, had experienced the thirst of Tantalus. In touch, to use his own expression, with the most elegant women in Paris, he used to bow them to the door with a shopkeeper's effusive politeness, admiring as he did so their grace, their way of wearing their fashionable clothes, and all the indefinable marks
of what is called ‘good breeding'. To raise himself to the height of one of these presiding geniuses of the
salon
had been an aspiration conceived in his youth and held repressed in his heart. To win Madame Marneffe's ‘favours' therefore, meant the realization of his castle in Spain; as well as involving his injured pride, striking a necessary blow on behalf of vanity and self-respect, as we have seen. His ambition grew with success. His swelling sense of his own importance gave him enormous pleasure; and when the imagination is captivated, the heart responds, and happiness increases tenfold. Madame Marneffe, besides, gave Crevel a refinement of pleasure that he had never before thought possible, for neither Josépha nor Héloïse had loved him, while Madame Marneffe deemed it necessary to pull the wool thoroughly over the eyes of this man, whom she saw as a perennially available cash-box.

The illusions of pretended love are more beguiling than the real thing. True love admits of sparrows' bickering quarrels, in which one may be pierced to the heart; but a quarrel which is only make-believe, on the contrary, is a caress to a dupe's vanity. Also, the rarity of his opportunities with Valérie maintained Crevel's passion at white heat. He was for ever coming up against Valérie's obdurate virtue, for she feigned remorse and talked of what her father must be thinking of her in his heaven of the brave. He had to overcome a kind of coldness, over which the wily lady made him think he won a victory, as she appeared to yield before this shopkeeper's consuming passion; but she clothed herself again, as if she were ashamed, in her respectable woman's pride and airs of virtue, like nobody so much as an Englishwoman, and always crushed her Crevel with the heavy weight of her dignity; for Crevel had swallowed her virtuous pose whole from the beginning. Finally, Valérie possessed special accomplishments in tenderness that made her indispensable to both Crevel and the Baron. When the world was present she displayed an enchanting combination of dreamy, modest innocence, impeccable propriety, and native wit, enhanced by charm, grace, and easy creole manners. But in a private conversation she outdid the courtesans, she was droll, amusing, fertile in invention. A contrast of this sort is enormously pleasing to a
man of Crevel's kind: he is flattered to be the unique inspirer of such a comedy; he believes that it is played for his benefit exclusively, and laughs at the delicious hypocrisy, while admiring the actress.

Of Baron Hulot Valérie had taken complete possession, and she performed wonders in adapting him to suit herself. She had persuaded him to let himself grow old, using a kind of subtle flattery that serves well enough to show the diabolical cleverness of women of her sort. To even a privileged human constitution, as to a besieged fortress that has stood long apparently impregnable, there comes a moment when the true state of affairs declares itself. Foreseeing the approaching collapse of the Empire beau, Valérie thought it necessary to hasten it.

‘Why do you bother, my own old soldier?' she said to him, six months after their clandestine and doubly adulterous union. ‘Have you aspirations elsewhere, I wonder? Do you want to be unfaithful to me? I should like you so much better if you stopped using make-up. Sacrifice artificial charms for my sake. Surely you don't think that the things I love you for are the two sous' worth of polish on your boots, your rubber belt, your tight waistcoat, the dye on your hair? Besides, the older you look, the less afraid I shall be of seeing my Hulot carried off by some rival!'

And so, believing that Madame Marneffe loved him and was a divine friend too, and meaning to end his days with her, the Councillor of State followed her private counsel and gave up dyeing his whiskers and hair. The imposing, handsome Hector, one fine day, after Valérie had made this touching declaration, appeared white-haired. Madame Marneffe easily convinced her dear Hector that she had, dozens of times, noticed the white line made by the growing hair.

‘White hair suits your face admirably,' she said, when she saw him. ‘The effect is softening. You look infinitely nicer; you are charming.'

And by degrees the Baron, once started off in that direction, left off wearing his leather waistcoat and his stays; he got rid of all his harness. His stomach sagged; obesity was obvious. The oak tree became a tower. The Baron's heaviness of
movement was the more ominous because he had greatly aged in the role of Louis XII. His eyebrows were still black, and vaguely recalled the Hulot of his handsome days, as on bare medieval walls some dim detail of carving may remain to suggest the bygone glories of the castle. The incongruity made his eyes, which were still alert and young, seem all the stranger in his weathered face. There, where Rubens's ruddy flesh-tones had bloomed for so long, one could see, in certain ravages and tense taut lines, the struggling of a passion in rebellion against nature. Hulot, during this period, was one of those fine human ruins whose virility asserts itself in a kind of bushy growth of hair from ears and nose and fingers, like the moss springing up on the almost indestructible monuments of the Roman Empire.

How had Valérie managed to keep Crevel and Hulot together at her side, when the Major was yearning for revenge, and all agog to score an open triumph over Hulot? Leaving this question unanswered for the moment to be resolved in the unfolding of the drama, we may note that Lisbeth and Valérie between them had concocted a wonderful plot, which worked very effectively to help her.

Marneffe, seeing his wife in her glory at the centre of the circle of admirers over whom she ruled as queen, like the sun of a solar system, seemed, in the eyes of the world, to have felt his passion for her spring to life again – he was now obviously quite mad about her. If this jealousy made Marneffe, the lord and master, something of a spoil-sport, it added enormously to the value of Valérie's favours. At the same time, Marneffe manifested a trust in his Director that degenerated into a compliant good nature verging on the ridiculous. The only person to arouse fierce resentment in him was Crevel!

Marneffe, destroyed by the debaucheries characteristic of great cities, described by the Roman poets, but for which our modern squeamishness has no name, had grown hideous as a wax anatomical figure, but this walking disease was clothed in fine cloth, walked on its hop-pole legs in an elegant pair of trousers. The emaciated chest was dressed in scented white linen, and musk overlaid the fetid odours of human corruption. Crevel was intimidated by this personification of the
hideousness of vice: dying, yet sporting red-heeled shoes – for Valérie had seen to it that Marneffe's dress was in keeping with his situation, his promotion, and his Cross– and he could not easily meet the deputy head clerk's pale-eyed gaze. Marneffe was the Mayor's nightmare. As he became aware of the singular power that Lisbeth and his wife had conferred upon him, the malicious scamp diverted himself by using it, by playing upon it as if it were an instrument; and, drawing-room games of cards being the last resource of a mind as worn-out as his body, he fleeced Crevel, who thought himself obliged to ‘go easy' with the respectable official ‘whom he was deceiving'.

Seeing Crevel as a child in the hands of that vile and hideous mummy, whose depravity was a sealed book to the Mayor, and more important, seeing him so completely despised by Valérie, who laughed at Crevel as if he had been created for her entertainment, the Baron believed, apparently, that he had little to fear from any rivalry in that quarter, and often invited Crevel to dinner.

Valérie, protected by these two passions standing sentinel on either side, and by a jealous husband, was the cynosure of all eyes, excited everyone's desires, in the sphere in which she shone. Thus, while keeping up appearances, in about three years she had attained the difficult success that courtesans seek by means of scandal, their audacity, and the glitter of their life in the sun, and that they so rarely achieve. Like a well-cut diamond exquisitely set by Chanor, Valérie's beauty, once buried in the gloomy depths of the rue du Doyenné, was worth more than its intrinsic value. She broke men's hearts! Claude Vignon secretly loved Valérie.

This retrospective account, very necessary when people are met again after a three years' interval, shows Valérie's balance-sheet. Now that of her associate, Lisbeth, must be considered.

*

In the Marneffe household, Cousin Bette held the position of a relation acting as both companion and housekeeper; but she had none of the humiliations to endure which are most often
the lot of poor creatures so unlucky as to be obliged to take those ambiguous situations. Lisbeth and Valérie presented the touching spectacle of a bosom friendship, one of those friendships so close and so unlikely between women that Parisians, always too clever by half, are quick to call scandalous. The contrast between the masculine stiff temperament of the peasant from Lorraine and Valérie's warm creole indolence gave colour to the calumny. Madame Marneffe, moreover, had unthinkingly lent weight to the gossiping tales by the trouble she took over her friend's appearance, with an eye to a certain marriage, which was, as we shall see, to complete Lisbeth's vengeance. A revolutionary change had taken place in Cousin Bette, and Valérie, anxious to reform her way of dressing, had turned it to the best possible account. This strange woman, now properly corseted, cut a figure of slender elegance; she used bandoline lotion on her smooth well-brushed hair, wore her dresses without protest as the dressmaker made them, and fine little boots, and grey silk stockings. Their cost was added, of course, to Valérie's accounts, and paid for by whoever had the privilege of settling these.

Thus groomed, Bette, still wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, at the end of three years was improved out of all recognition. This other different diamond, a black diamond, the most rare of all, cut by an expert hand and mounted in the setting that suited it, was appreciated at its full value by several ambitious clerks. To see Bette for the first time was to thrill involuntarily at the savage poetic beauty which Valérie's skill had thrown into relief, by her use of dress to dramatize the appearance of this bitter nun, by the art with which she framed the sharp olive face with its glittering black eyes in heavy bands of jet-black hair and called attention to the stiff narrow-waisted figure. Bette, like one of Cranach's Virgins, or Van Eyck's, or a Byzantine Virgin, stepping from the frame, maintained the inflexibility, the erect hieratic carriage of those mysterious figures, which are cousins-german of Isis and the sheath-swathed divinities of the Egyptian sculptors. She was walking granite, basalt, porphyry.

Secure from want for the rest of her days, Bette was in a
charming mood; she brought gaiety with her wherever she went to dine. To add to her satisfaction, the Baron paid the rent of her little apartment, furnished, as we know, from the discarded contents of her friend Valérie's boudoir and sitting-room.

‘After starting life as a hungry nanny, I am ending it now like a lioness,' she used to say.

She continued to sew the most difficult pieces of
passementerie
work for Monsieur Rivet, but only, so she said, in order not to have to sit with her hands idle. And yet her life, as we shall see, was exceedingly busy. But it is ingrained in the nature of people come up from the country to be very chary of giving up their means of earning a living; they resemble the Jews in this.

Every morning, very early, Cousin Bette went herself to the central market with the cook. In Bette's design, the household bills, by which the Baron was being ruined, were to enrich her dear Valérie, and did in fact effectively enrich her.

What mistress of a house has not, since 1838, experienced the disastrous consequences of anti-social doctrines spread among the lower classes by inflammatory writers? The leakage of money through servants is the most serious of all the unnecessary drains upon the family purse. With only very few exceptions, deserving the Montyon prize, chefs and women cooks are domestic robbers, and brazen salaried robbers at that; and the Government complaisantly make themselves receivers of the booty, thus encouraging the tendency to steal, which in cooks is practically given official approval by the ancient jest about ‘waggling the market-basket handle,' or making sure of one's cut. Where these women once looked for forty sous to buy their lottery ticket, they now appropriate fifty francs to put in the savings-bank. And yet the cold puritans who amuse themselves by making philanthropic experiments in France imagine that they have raised the moral standards of the common people! Between the market-place and the master's table the servants have set up their secret toll-bar, and the City of Paris is much less efficient at collecting its import duty than they are at levying their tax upon everything. In addition to charging all foodstuffs with a
fifty-per-cent toll, they demand handsome presents from the shopkeepers. The most solidly established tradesmen tremble before their underground power; they all pay up without a word: carriage-builders, jewellers, tailors, and everyone else. If any attempt is made to control them, the servants retaliate with insolence or the costly accidents of deliberate clumsiness. They make inquiries about employers' characters now, as formerly employers inquired about theirs.