Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac
‘Wait, Hector; it’s better for your wife to perish than to let our uncle, your brother, be destroyed, and the family honour!’ said the Baroness, struck by a sudden idea. ‘Yes, I can save you all.… O God! what a dreadful thought! How could I have thought it!Ń’
She clasped her hands, slipped to her knees, and prayed. As she rose again, she saw an expression of such wild joy on her husband’s face that the devil-inspired thought returned, and Adeline fell into an almost insane vacancy of mind.
‘Go, dear, hurry to the War Office,’ she exclaimed, rousing herself from her stupor. ‘Try to send out someone on a special mission. You must! Get round the Marshall And when you come back at five o’clock, you may perhaps find… yes! you shall find two hundred thousand francs. Your family, your honour as a man, as a Councillor of State, a Government official, your integrity, your son, will all be saved; but your Adeline will be lost, and you will never see her again. Hector, my love,’ she said, kneeling before him, clasping his hand and kissing it, ‘bless me and say good-bye!’
It was utterly heart-rending; and as he took his wife’s hand, raised her to her feet, and kissed her, Hulot said:
‘I don’t understand!’
‘If you understood,’ she answered, ‘I should die of shame, or perhaps I should not be strong enough to accomplish this final sacrifice.’
‘Lunch is served, Madame,’ Mariette came to announce.
Hortense came in to wish her father and mother good morning. It was necessary to go and eat, and show serene and cheerful faces.
‘Go and start the meal without me. I’ll join you later,’ said the Baroness. She sat down at her table and wrote the following letter:
My dear Monsieur Crevel,
I have a favour to ask of you, and I shall hope to see you this morning, for I count on your gallantry, which is known to me, not to keep me waiting too long.
Yours very sincerely,
ADELINE HULOT
‘Louise,’ she said to her daughter’s maid, who was serving lunch, ‘take this letter down to the porter. Tell him to deliver it immediately to this address, and wait for an answer.’
The Baron, who was reading the newspapers, held out a Republican sheet to his wife, pointing to an article, and said, ‘Will there be time?’
Here is the article, one of those scandal-hunting paragraphs with which newspapers spice their solid political fare:
One of our correspondents writes from Algiers that such grave abuses have come to light in the commissariat department of the province of Oran that official inquiries are being made. The malpractices are evident, and the culprits are known. If stern measures are not taken, we shall continue to lose more men by the fraudulent diversion of supplies affecting their rations, than we do by Arab steel or the torrid climate. We await fresh information, and will report further on these deplorable occurrences. The alarm excited in Algeria by the establishment of the Press there, in accordance with the 1830 Charter, no longer causes us surprise.
‘I’ll dress and go to the Ministry,’ said the Baron, rising from the table. ‘Time is so precious. A man’s life hangs in the balance every minute.’
‘Oh, Mama, I have no longer any hope!’ said Hortense. And, unable to restrain her tears, she held out a copy of the Revue des Beaux-Arts to her mother. Madame Hulot saw a reproduction of the group Delilah by Count Steinbock, below which was the caption ‘In the possession of Madame Mar-neffe’. The article below, signed V., gave evidence in every line of Claude Vignon’s style and partial eye.
‘Poor child!’ said the Baroness.
Startled by her mother’s almost indifferent tone, Hortense looked at her, and recognized in her expression a grief compared with which her own paled; and she came to kiss her mother and ask:
‘What’s the matter, Mama? What’s happening? Can we be more unhappy than we already are?’
‘My dear child, it seems to me that compared with what I am suffering today, my dreadful sufferings in the past are nothing. When will my suffering end?’
‘In heaven, Mother!’ said Hortense gravely.
‘Come, my angel, you shall help me to dress.… Or rather, no… I do not want you to have anything to do with my toilet on this occasion. Send me Louise.’
Adeline, when she had returned to her room, went to the looking-glass to examine her face. She considered her reflection sadly and curiously, asking herself:
‘Am I beautiful still? Am I still desirable? Have I wrinkles?’
She lifted her beautiful fair hair and uncovered her temples.… The skin was as fresh as a young girl’s. Adeline explored further. She bared her shoulders, and was satisfied; she even felt a thrill of pride. The beauty of lovely shoulders is the last to desert a woman, especially when she has lived a pure life. Adeline chose the elements of her toilet with care; but the demure fashion of a pious and modest woman’s dress is not altered by the little inventions of coquetry. Of what use was it to put on new grey silk stockings and low-cut satin slippers tied above the ankle with ribbons, when she was totally ignorant of the art of advancing a pretty foot at the crucial moment, beyond a skirt slightly raised, so opening new horizons to desire? She selected her prettiest dress, it is true, of flowered muslin, cut low in the neck and short-sleeved; but, taking fright at this bareness, she veiled her beautiful arms with transparent gauze sleeves, and hid her bosom and shoulders in an embroidered fichu. Her English ringlets seemed to her too obviously designed to captivate, so she extinguished their gaiety with a very pretty cap; but, with or without the cap, would she have had the art to play with her golden curls in order to show off her hands and hold her tapered fingers up for admiration? Her only cosmetic, her only aid to beauty, was provided by the conviction of guilt, the preparations for deliberate sin, which raised this saintly woman’s emotions to a fever pitch that fleetingly gave her again the brilliancy of youth. Her eyes glittered; her cheeks glowed. But instead of assuming fascinating graces, she saw herself as appearing almost shameless, and was horrified.
Lisbeth, when Adeline had questioned her, had described the circumstances of Wenceslas’s infidelity, and the Baroness had learned then, to her great surprise, that in one evening, in one instant, Madame Marneffe had successfully enticed the bewitched artist.
‘How do these women do it?’ the Baroness had asked Lisbeth.
The curiosity of virtuous women, on this subject, is bottomless. They would like, while remaining untouched, to possess the seductions of vice.
‘Oh, they are seductive; that’s their business,’ Cousin Bette had replied. ‘My dear, that evening, believe me, Valérie was enough to damn an angel.’
‘But tell me how she set about it!’
‘There’s no theory in that profession; only practice,’ Lisbeth had said dryly.
The Baroness, recalling that conversation, would have liked to consult Cousin Bette; but there was no time. Poor Adeline, who was incapable of inventing a beauty-patch, of setting a rosebud in the cleft of her bodice, of contriving tricks of dress calculated to fan men’s smouldering desires into flame, was no more than carefully dressed. One isn’t a courtesan for the wishing!
‘Woman is man’s meat’ according to Molière’s witticism, through the mouth of the judicious Gros-René. *. Such a comparison implies a kind of culinary art in love. In that case, the dignified virtuous wife is the Homeric feast, flesh thrown on glowing embers. The courtesan, on the other hand, is a confection of Careme’s,† with its condiments and spices, and its studied refinements. The Baroness could not, did not know how to, serve up her white bosom in a magnificent dish of lace, after the fashion of Madame Marneffe. The appeal of certain attitudes, the effect of certain glances, were a sealed book to her. In short, she had no magic secret weapon. This noble woman might have turned away provocatively a hundred times, but without Valérie’s swing of the skirts she would have had nothing to offer to the libertine’s knowing eye.
To be a virtuous and even prudish woman in the world’s eyes, and a courtesan to h
The scene with which this serious and awe-inspiring study of Parisian manners began was now about to be re-enacted, with the singular difference that the afflictions foretold by the bourgeois Militia Captain had reversed the roles. Madame Hulot was waiting for Crevel with the purpose that had brought him, smiling down upon the citizens of Paris from the elevation of his milord, three years before. And then, most strangely, the Baroness was faithful to herself and to her love in yielding to the grossest infidelity, so unforgivable, in the eyes of some judges, that even the compelling force of passion does not justify it.
‘What can I do to be a Madame Marneffe?’ she asked herself, as she heard the door-bell ring.
She repressed her tears. Her face was feverishly animated as she promised herself that she would be truly a courtesan, poor noble creature!
‘What the devil can the good Baroness Hulot want with me?’ Crevel was wondering as he walked up the main staircase. ‘Ah bah! she’s going to talk to me about my quarrel with Célestin and Victorin, no doubt; but I’ll not give way!’
Following Louise into the drawing-room, he said to himself as he looked around at the bareness of the ‘premises’ (Crevel’s word):
‘Poor woman! Here she is like a fine picture put in the attics by a man who knows nothing about painting.’
Crevel, seeing Count Popinot, Minister of Commerce, buy paintings and statues, wanted to be eminent himself as a Parisian Maecenas, one of those whose love of the arts consists in the search for something worth twenty francs to be bought for twenty sous.
Adeline smiled graciously on Crevel, and indicated a chair facing her.
‘Here I am, fair lady, at your command,’ said Crevel.
Monsieur le Maire, now a politician, had assumed black cloth. His face appeared above this garb like a full moon rising over a bank of dark clouds. His shirt, studded with three enormous pearls worth five hundred francs each, gave a high idea of his capacity… his thoracic capacity, that is, and he was fond of saying ‘In me you see the future athlete of the Chamber!’ His broad plebeian hands were clothed in yellow gloves from early morning. His patent-leather boots hinted at the little brown coupé with one spanking horse that had brought him there. In the course of three years, ambition had modified Crevel’s pose. Like the great painters he had reached his second period. In society, when he called on the Prince de Wissembourg, or went to the Prefecture, or Count Popinot’s house, or others of that kind, he held his hat in his hand in a negligent fashion that Valérie had taught him, and he inserted the thumb of his other hand in the armhole of his waistcoat with a captivating air, simpering and smirking meanwhile, an activity involving both eyes and head. This new manner of ‘striking an attitude’ was a practical joke of Valéiie’s, who on the pretext of rejuvenating her Mayor had endowed him with one more fashion of making himself ridiculous.
‘I have asked you to come, my dear kind Monsieur Crevel,’ said the Baroness nervously, ‘for a matter of the greatest importance.…’
‘I can guess it, Madame,’ Crevel said, with a knowing air, ‘but you are asking for the impossible.… Oh, I’m not an inhuman father, a pig-headed man, a solid block of stinginess, as Napoleon put it. Listen to me, fair lady. If my children were ruining themselves for their own benefit, I might come to their rescue; but to stand guarantor for your husband I That’s the same as trying to fill the sieve-bottomed casks of the fifty daughters of Danaus! There they are with a house mortgaged for three hundred thousand francs, all for the sake of an incorrigible father! They’ve nothing left now, poor wretches, and they didn’t have any fun out of spending the money either. All they have to live on now is what Victorin makes at the Law Courts. He may wag his tongue, that fine son of yours – that’s all he can do! Ah! he was to be a Minister, the wise little lawyer, the bright hope of us all! A useful sort of tugboat, he is, getting in among the sandbanks in the most senseless way; for if he were borrowing to help himself along, if he had run up debts dining and wining Deputies, getting hold of votes and increasing his influence, I would say “Here’s my purse; dip your hand into that, my boy!”; but to pay for Papa’s follies, follies that I foretold to you! Why, his father has done for any chance he ever had of getting power… I’m the one who’ll end up as a Minister.…’
‘I’m afraid, dear Crevel, it’s not a question of our children, poor self-sacrificing young couple! If you harden your heart against Victorin and Célestine, I will love them enough to do something to sweeten the bitterness of your anger, in their generous hearts. You are punishing your children for a good deed!’
‘Yes, a good deed in the wrong place; and that’s half way to being a crime!’ said Crevel, much pleased with his epigram.
‘Doing good, my dear Crevel,’ the Baroness went on, ‘is not a matter of giving money from a purse stuffed with money! It means giving up something in order to be generous, going short oneself; and expecting nothing but ingratitude! Charity that costs nothing is unnoticed in heaven.…’
‘Saints, Madame, have every right to go to the workhouse if they want to; they know that it’s the gate of heaven for them. But I’m a worldly man. I fear God; but I find the hell of poverty much more frightening. To have empty pockets, in our present social system, is the last degree of misery. I am a man of my time. I respect money!’
‘From the worldly point of view,’ said Adeline, ‘you are right.’
She found herself leagues away from the point, and felt like St Lawrence on his gridiron as she thought of her uncle, for she pictured him holding a pistol to his head. She lowered her eyes, and then raised them, full of angelic sweetness, to look at Crevel, but quite unprovocatively, with none of Valérie’s enticingly wanton glint. Three years before, she would have fascinated Crevel with that adorable gaze.
‘I have known you when you were more generous,’ she said; ‘you spoke of three hundred thousand francs then, with lordly openhandedness…’
Crevel looked at Madame Hulot, whom he saw as a lily in fading bloom; vague suspicions floated into his mind. But he felt so much respect for this saintly woman that he drove back such half-formed ideas to the more libertine regions of his heart.
‘Madame, I have not changed, but a retired businessman is, and has to be, lordly with some method, and economically. He does everything systematically. He opens an account for his sprees, allows for them, earmarks certain profits for that purpose – but to make a hole in his capital… that would be madness! My children will have all that should be theirs, their mother’s money and mine; but presumably they don’t want their father to die of boredom, turn into a monk or a mummy! I lead a gay life, and go down the river joyously! I do my duty as the law requires with regard for the demands of affection and family feeling too, just as I have always scrupulously paid my debts when they fell due. If my children do as well as I have done in family life, I shall be pleased. And as for the present, so long as my follies – for I do commit some – cost nothing to anyone except gogos… (pardon me! I don’t suppose you know that word we use on the Bourse for suckers), they will have nothing to reproach me with, and will find a tidy sum left for them at my death. Your children will not be able to say as much for their father – he brings off a cannon by ruining both his son and my daughter.…’
The more the Baroness said, the farther she seemed to be from attaining her end.
‘You are very hard on my husband, my dear Crevel; and yet you would be his best friend if you had found his wife frail.…’
She cast a burning look at Crevel. But, like Dubois, who kicked the Regent disguised as his valet with too much enthusiasm, she over-played her part and profligate thoughts returned with such force
‘Can she want to revenge herself on Hulot? Does she like me better as a Mayor than in National Guard uniform? Women are such odd creatures!’ And he struck an attitude in his second manner, looking at the Baroness with a Regency smirk.
‘One might think,’ she went on, ‘that you are having your revenge on him for a virtue that resisted you, for a woman whom you loved enough… to… to buy her,’ she concluded, in a whisper.
‘For a divine woman,’ Crevel returned, leering at the Baroness, who lowered her eyes, finding her lashes suddenly wet; ‘and what a lot of bitter pills you’ve had to swallow… in the past three years… eh, my beauty?’
‘Don’t let’s talk of my sufferings, dear Crevel; they are too much for any human being to endure. Ah, if you still loved me, you could take me from the pit I am in! Yes, I lie in hell! The regicides who were tortured with red-hot pincers, who were drawn and quartered, were on roses compared with me, for it was only their bodies that were dismembered and it is my heart that is torn asunder!’
Crevel’s hand slipped from his waistcoat armhole. He laid his hat on the work-table. He broke his pose. He smiled! His smile was so idiotic that the Baroness misunderstood it: she thought it was an expression of kindness.
‘You see a woman, not in despair, but suffering the death-throes of her honour, and resolved to do anything, my dear, to prevent a crime.…’
Fearing that Hortense might come in, she bolted the door; then in the same impulse cast herself at Crevel’s feet, took his hand and kissed it.
‘Be my deliverer!’ she said.
She believed that there was generous feeling in his shopkeeper’s heart, and a sudden hope flashed through her mind that she might obtain the two hundred thousand francs without losing her honour.
‘Buy a soul, you who sought to buy a virtue!’ she said, looking at him wildly. ‘Trust my integrity as a woman, my honour, whose steadfastness you know! Be my friend! Save a whole family from ruin, shame, despair. Keep it from plunging into a mire whose filth will be mixed with blood! Oh, don’t ask for explanations!’ she went on, as Crevel made a gesture and seemed about to speak. ‘Above all, don’t say “I told you sol” like a person glad at a friend’s misfortune. Only do as you are asked by one you once loved, a woman whose humiliation at your feet is perhaps a noble achievement. Ask her for nothing in return, but be sure that there is nothing her gratitude will withhold! No, do not give, but lend, lend to the one whom you once called Adeline!’