Cousin Bette (42 page)

‘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.

‘Why should I deprive you of your illusions?' replied the officer. ‘It is such a rare thing to have any left at your age.'

‘Illusions? Open my eyes then I' commanded the Councillor of State.

‘The doctor gets cursed later,' the superintendent answered with a grin.

‘I ask you, Monsieur le Commissaire…'

‘Well, that woman was in collusion with her husband.'

‘Oh…'

‘It happens, Monsieur, in two cases out of ten. Oh, we meet plenty like them.'

‘What proof have you of collusion?'

‘Oh, the husband, to begin with!' said the shrewd superintendent, with the calm unconcern of a surgeon, to whom probing wounds is all in the day's work. ‘It's written in his mean ugly face that he's a scamp. But there's also a certain letter, written by that woman, in which the child is mentioned, that must have some value for you?'

‘That letter means so much to me that I always carry it on me,' Baron Hulot replied, fumbling in his breast pocket for the little note-case that he was never parted from.

‘Leave the note-case where it is,' said the officer, as if he
were pronouncing an indictment; ‘here is the letter. I now know all I wanted to know. Madame Marneffe must have known what this note-case contained.'

‘She is the only person in the world who did.…'

‘That's what I thought. Now, here's the proof you were asking for of that little lady's complicity.'

‘It's not possible!' said the Baron, still incredulous.

‘When we came here, Monsieur le Baron,' the superintendent went on, ‘that cur, Marneffe, went in first, and he took the letter, here, from the writing-table, where his wife must have placed it. Obviously, putting it here was prearranged between the pair, if she could manage to take it from you while you were asleep; because the letter the lady wrote to you, taken with those you sent to her, is conclusive evidence for the court.'

The police officer showed Hulot the letter that Reine had brought to the Baron's office at the War Office.

‘It's a document in the case,' he said. ‘Give it back to me, Monsieur.'

‘If this is true,' said Hulot, changing countenance, ‘the woman is battening on calculated debauchery. I am certain, now, that she has three lovers.'

‘It's as clear as day,' said the officer. ‘Ah! they're not all walking the streets, women of that sort. When they ply that trade with their carriages, their drawing-rooms, and their fine houses, Monsieur le Baron, it's not a matter of pence and ha'pence. That Mademoiselle Esther whom you mentioned, who poisoned herself, swallowed up millions. If you'll take my advice, you'll settle down, Monsieur le Baron. This little party will cost you dear. That rascally husband has the law behind him. And if I hadn't told you, the little lady would have caught you again!'

‘Thank you, Monsieur,' said the Councillor-of State, trying to preserve his dignity.

‘We are going to close the apartment now, Monsieur; the farce is played out, and you will return the key to Monsieur le Maire.'

Hulot went home in a state of depression verging on collapse, plunged in unutterably sombre thoughts. He woke
his noble, pure, and saintly wife, and cast the story of the past three years upon her heart, sobbing like a child deprived of a toy. This confession, from an old man still young in heart, an appalling and heart-rending tale, moved Adeline to pity, but at the same time she experienced a sensation of the keenest joy. She thanked heaven for this final blow, for she saw her husband as now made fast for ever in the bosom of his family.

‘Lisbeth was right!' Madame Hulot said gently, avoiding useless reproaches. ‘she warned us of this some time ago.'

‘Yes. Ah, if only I had listened to her instead of getting angry that day when I wanted poor Hortense to return to her husband, in order not to compromise the reputation of that – Oh, dear Adeline, we must save Wenceslas! He is in this morass up to the chin!'

‘My poor dear, you have been no luckier with the middle-class wife than you were with the actresses,' said Adeline, trying to smile.

The Baroness was alarmed at the change in her Hector. When she saw him, unhappy, suffering, bowed under the weight of trouble, she was all tenderness, all compassion, all love. She would have given her life to make Hulot happy.

‘Stay with us, dear Hector. Tell me how those women contrive to make themselves so attractive. I will try.… Why have you not taught me to be what you want? Is it because I am not clever? There are still men who think me beautiful enough to pay court to.'

Many married women, faithful to family duty and their husbands, will at this point probably ask themselves why such strong men, so really good and kind, who are so vulnerable to women like Madame Marneffe, do not find the realization of their dreams and the fulfilment of their passions in their wives, especially when their wives are like Adeline Hulot.

The reason is linked with one of the most fundamental mysteries of human nature. Love, which awakens the mind to joy and delight, the virile, austere pleasure of the most noble faculties of the soul, and sex, the vulgar commodity sold in the market, are two aspects of the same thing. Women capable of satisfying the hunger for both are geniuses in their own
kind, and no more numerous than the great writers, artists, and inventors of a nation. Men of all kinds, the distinguished man and the fool, the Hulots as much as the Crevels, desire both an ideal love and pleasure. They are all in quest of that mysterious hermaphrodite, that rare work, which most often turns out to be a work in two volumes. Morally and socially, their search is reprehensible. Obviously, marriage must be accepted as a duty: it is life, with its toil and its bitter sacrifices exacted from both partners. Libertines, those treasure-seekers, are as culpable as other malefactors more severely punished.

Such reflections are no mere sop to conventional morality; they offer an explanation of the causes of many misunderstood social evils. This drama, moreover, has its own moral lessons, of different kinds.

The Baron went without delay to Marshal Prince de Wissembourg, whose high protection was his last resource. As the old warrior's protégé for thirty-five years, he had access to him at all times, and might call on him very early.

‘Ah, good morning, my dear Hector!' said that great leader and fine man. ‘What's the matter? You look worried. And yet the parliamentary session is over. That's another one finished with! Nowadays I talk about the sittings as I once used to do about our campaigns. Well, I believe the newspapers do refer to parliamentary campaigns.'