Cousin Bette (9 page)

The younger Hulot was a perfect type of the kind of young man produced by the 1830 revolution; with a mind absorbed in politics, taking his ambitions very seriously and containing them behind a solemn mask, very envious of established reputations, uttering sententious phrases instead of the incisive sallies that are the diamonds of French conversation, but with a self-possessed correctness, mistaking arrogance for dignity. Such men are walking coffins containing the Frenchman of an older France. This Frenchman stirs at times and kicks out against his English envelope, but ambition checks him and he consents to stifle in it. These coffins always go draped in black cloth.

‘Ah! here is my brother!' said Baron Hulot, going forward to welcome the Count at the drawing-room door.

He greeted the probable successor of the late Marshal Montcornet warmly, then took his arm and led him into the room with every mark of affection and respect.

This Peer of France, who was excused from sittings of the Chamber by reason of his deafness, had a fine head, frosted by the years, whose grey thatch was still thick enough to show a mark left by the pressure of his hat. Small and stocky and
grown lean, he wore his green old age with a sprightly gaiety; and as he preserved an exceedingly active spirit, condemned to idleness, he divided his time between reading and walking. His kind and gentle approach to life was reflected in his pale face, his bearing and his tactful conversation, which was full of good sense. He never talked war or campaigns; he knew himself too great to need a show of greatness. In a drawing-room he confined the part he played to a constant attentiveness to the ladies' wishes.

‘You are all very gay,' he said, seeing the animation that the Baron had infused into this little family gathering. ‘Hortense has still to be married, however,' he added, noting traces of melancholy on his sister-in-law's face.

‘Time enough for that!' Bette shouted in his ear, in a formidable voice.

‘That's what you say, you bad seed that refused to flower!' he replied, laughing.

The hero of Forzheim was fond of Cousin Bette, for they had a certain amount in common. He was a man without education, sprung from the people; his courage alone had carved out his military achievement, and his practical good sense took the place of brilliance. Full of honours, his hands immaculate, he was ending his fine life radiantly, surrounded by this family in which all his affections were centred, with no suspicion of his brother's still secret aberrations. No one enjoyed more than he did the pleasant sight presented by the meetings of this family group, among whom no slightest discord ever arose, and brothers and sisters were equally affectionate, for Célestine had been immediately accepted as one of the family. Indeed, the kind little Comte Hulot habitually inquired from time to time why old Crevel was not there. ‘My father is in the country!' Célestine would shout. On this occasion they told him that the retired perfumer was on a journey.

Surrounded by this truly united family group, Madame Hulot said to herself: ‘This is the surest kind of happiness, and who, indeed, could take it from us?'

Seeing the Baron so attentive to his favourite, Adeline, the General teased him so much about his preference that the
Baron, afraid of appearing ridiculous, transferred his gallantry to his daughter-in-law, whom he always singled out for flattery and attention at these family dinners, for he was hoping through her to bring old Crevel round and induce him to get over his resentment. Any witness of the family scene would have found it hard to believe that ruin was staring the father in the face, the mother was in despair, the son to the last degree uneasy about his father's future, and the daughter busy planning to steal a sweetheart from her cousin.

At seven o'clock, seeing his brother, his son, the Baroness, and Hortense absorbed in their game of whist, the Baron left to go and applaud his mistress at the Opera, taking Cousin Bette away with him. She lived in the rue du Doyenné, and was accustomed to make the loneliness of that desolate quarter a pretext for always leaving soon after dinner. Any Parisian will acknowledge that the old maid's precaution was sensible enough.

The continued existence of the conglomeration of houses running the length of the old Louvre is one of those reassuring defiances of common sense by which the French fondly hope to persuade Europe that Frenchmen have not much intelligence and are not to be feared. We have here, perhaps, hit upon an important principle of international strategy. It will not, certainly, be supererogatory to describe this corner of present-day Paris. Later, it will be unimaginable; and our nephews, who will no doubt see the Louvre completed, will refuse to believe that such an outrageous eyesore should have existed for thirty-six years, in the heart of Paris, facing the palace where during the same thirty-six years three dynasties have received the
élite
of France and Europe.

Beyond the archway leading from the pont du Carrousel to the rue du Musée, anyone visiting Paris, even for a few days, is bound to notice a number of houses with decayed façades, whose discouraged owners do no maintenance work upon them. These are all that remains of an old quarter, in process of demolition since the day when Napoleon decided to complete the Louvre. The rue du Doyenné and the blind alley of the same name are the only passages that penetrate this sombre and deserted block, inhabited presumably by ghosts,
for one never catches sight of anyone here. The footway, standing much lower than the pavement of the rue du Musée, comes out on a level with the rue Froidmanteau. These houses, submerged and darkened by the raising of the Square, also lie wrapped in the perpetual shadow cast by the high galleries of the Louvre, blackened on this side by the north wind. The gloom, the silence, the glacial air, the hollow sunken ground level, combine to make these houses seem so many crypts, or living tombs. If, passing in a cab through this dead area, one happens to glance down the impasse du Doyenné, a chill strikes one's heart, one wonders who can possibly live here and what may happen here at night, at the hour when the alley becomes a place of cut-throats, when the vices of Paris, shrouded in night's mantle, move as they will.

The problem the area presents, alarming enough already, becomes frightening when one sees that these so-called dwellings are bounded by a swamp on the rue de Richelieu side, a sea of jostling broken paving-stones towards the Tuileries, small plots and sinister hovels facing the galleries, and steppes of dressed stone and half-demolished ruins by the old Louvre. Henri III and his minions looking for their breeches, Marguerite's lovers in search of their heads, must dance sarabands by moonlight in these barren wastes, dominated by the vault of a chapel still standing, as if to demonstrate that the Catholic religion, so tenacious in France, outlasts everything. For nearly forty years the Louvre has been crying from the open mouths of all the gashed walls, the gaping windows, ‘Strike these excrescences from my face!' One must suppose that the utility of this cut-throat place has been recognized, and the need to symbolize in the heart of Paris that intimate alliance of squalor and splendour which is characteristic of the queen of capital cities. Indeed, these stark ruins, in the midst of which the legitimist newspaper contracted the malady of which it is dying, the shocking hovels of the rue du Musée, the boarded enclosure where the street-stall vendors display their wares, may perhaps have a longer and more prosperous existence than three dynasties!

In 1823, the moderate rent asked for rooms in condemned houses had brought Cousin Bette to live here, in spite of the
necessity, imposed on her by the isolation of the quarter, to reach home before nightfall. She did not consider this a hardship, in fact, because she had preserved the country habit of going to bed and rising with the sun, a habit which enables country people to make substantial economies in light and heating. She lived, then, in one of the houses that, thanks to the demolition of the famous house once occupied by Cambacérès, now had a view of the Square.

Just as Baron Hulot was setting down his wife's cousin at the door of this house and saying ‘Good-night, Cousin!', a young woman, small, slender, pretty, dressed with great elegance and moving in a waft of expensive scent, passed between the cab and the wall to enter the same house. The eyes of this lady, turning simply in order to have a look at her fellowtenant's cousin, met the Baron's eyes, quite without premeditation; but the libertine experienced the sharp reaction that all Parisians feel when they meet a pretty woman who realizes, as the entomologists put it, all their
desiderata
, and he stood pulling on one of his gloves with a careful deliberation before getting into his cab again, so as to keep himself in countenance and be able to follow the young woman with his eye, a young woman whose dress was agreeably set swaying by something rather different from those hideous and fraudulent crinoline bustles.

‘There,' he said to himself, ‘goes a charming little woman whom I would be very pleased to make happy, for I have no doubt she would do the same by me.'

When the stranger had reached the turn of the staircase serving the main building overlooking the street, she looked back at the carriage entrance out of the corner of her eye, without actually turning round, and saw the Baron nailed to the spot with admiration, consumed with desire and curiosity. Such a tribute is a flower, and all Parisian women breathe its fragrance with pleasure when they find it in their path. There are women devoted to their obligations, and virtuous as well as pretty, who come home in a bad temper when they have failed to gather their little bouquet in the course of their walk.

The young woman hurried up the staircase. Presently a
second-floor window opened and she appeared, but in company with a gentleman whose bald pate and placid un-wrathful eye showed him to be a husband.

‘You could hardly call these creatures lacking in knowingness or directness!' reflected the Baron. ‘She's doing this to show me where she lives. It's a little too smart, especially in a quarter like this. I had better take care.'

The Director looked up when he had got into the
milord
, and then the woman and her husband abruptly drew back, as if the Baron's face were Medusa's head.

‘One would suppose they know who I am,' thought the Baron. ‘That would explain the whole thing.'

And when the cab had climbed the slope to the rue du Musée, he leaned out to look back at the stranger again, and found that she had returned to the window. Ashamed at being caught staring at the carriage hood which concealed her admirer, the young woman sprang hastily back.

‘I'll find out who she is from Nanny,' the Baron told himself.

Sight of the Councillor of State's features had startled the couple very much, as we shall see.

‘But that is Baron Hulot, my chief!' exclaimed the husband, as he stepped back from the balcony on to which the window opened.

‘Well then, Marneffe, can the old maid on the third floor at the far end of the court, who is living with that young man, be his cousin? How odd that we should only have found that out today, and by accident!'

‘Mademoiselle Fischer living with a young man!' repeated the civil servant. ‘That's just porters' gossip. Let's not speak so lightly of the cousin of a Councillor of State who makes the sun shine and the rain descend at the Ministry. Come on, let's have dinner; I've been waiting for you since four o'clock!'

The lovely Madame Marneffe, natural daughter of the Comte Montcornet, one of Napoleon's most famous lieutenants, had been married, with the aid of a twenty-thousandfranc dowry, to a junior official in the Ministry of War. Through the influence of the illustrious Lieutenant-General,
Marshal of France for the last six months of his life, this pen-pusher had reached the unlooked-for position of senior book-keeper in his office; but just as he was about to be appointed head clerk, the Marshal's death had cut off Marneffe's and his wife's expectations at the root. Monsieur Marneffe's means were small, for Mademoiselle Valérie Fortin's dowry had already slipped through his fingers and melted away in paying his debts, buying all the things needed by a young man setting up house, and above all in satisfying the demands of a pretty wife accustomed in her mother's house to luxuries which she had no mind to give up; so that the couple had been obliged to economize in house rent. The situation of the rue du Doyenné, not far from the Ministry of War and the centre of Paris, suited Monsieur and Madame Marneffe, and for the past four years or so they had been living in the same building as Mademoiselle Fischer.

Monsieur Jean-Paul-Stanislas Marneffe was an underling of the type that resists the stupefying effects of routine service in an office by the kind of power that depravity gives. This meagre little man, with wispy hair and beard, his face bloodless and wan, drawn rather than wrinkled, his eyes, with slightly reddened eyelids, harnessed with spectacles, of hangdog looks and still more hangdog bearing, was exactly the type of man who is brought before the police courts on a charge of indecent offences, as everyone pictures him.

The apartment occupied by this couple presented the flashy display of meretricious luxury all too often met with in Parisian homes, in establishments like theirs. In the drawing-room, the furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily-carved painted chandelier with its candle-rings of moulded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye – everything in the room, to the very curtains (which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts only for three years), everything cried poverty like a ragged beggar at a church door.

The dining-room, looked after incompetently by a single
servant, had the nauseating atmosphere of provincial hotel dining-rooms; everything in it was greasy, ill-kept.