Part 8

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_ The Pole, sublime in suffering, has tired his oppressors' arms by sheer endurance of beating; and, in the nineteenth century, has reproduced the spectacle presented by the early Christians. Infuse only ten per cent of English cautiousness into the frank and open Polish nature, and the magnanimous white eagle would at this day be supreme wherever the two-headed eagle has sneaked in. A little Machiavelism would have hindered Poland from helping to save Austria, who has taken a share of it; from borrowing from Prussia, the usurer who had undermined it; and from breaking up as soon as a division was first made.

At the christening of Poland, no doubt, the Fairy Carabosse, overlooked by the genii who endowed that attractive people with the most brilliant gifts, came in to say:

"Keep all the gifts that my sisters have bestowed on you; but you shall never know what you wish for!"

If, in its heroic duel with Russia, Poland had won the day, the Poles would now be fighting among themselves, as they formerly fought in their Diets to hinder each other from being chosen King. When that nation, composed entirely of hot-headed dare-devils, has good sense enough to seek a Louis XI. among her own offspring, to accept his despotism and a dynasty, she will be saved.

What Poland has been politically, almost every Pole is in private life, especially under the stress of disaster. Thus Wenceslas Steinbock, after worshiping his wife for three years and knowing that he was a god to her, was so much nettled at finding himself barely noticed by Madame Marneffe, that he made it a point of honor to attract her attention. He compared Valerie with his wife and gave her the palm. Hortense was beautiful flesh, as Valerie had said to Lisbeth; but Madame Marneffe had spirit in her very shape, and the savor of vice.

Such devotion as Hortense's is a feeling which a husband takes as his due; the sense of the immense preciousness of such perfect love soon wears off, as a debtor, in the course of time, begins to fancy that the borrowed money is his own. This noble loyalty becomes the daily bread of the soul, and an infidelity is as tempting as a dainty. The woman who is scornful, and yet more the woman who is reputed dangerous, excites curiosity, as spices add flavor to good food. Indeed, the disdain so cleverly acted by Valerie was a novelty to Wenceslas, after three years of too easy enjoyment. Hortense was a wife; Valerie a mistress.

Many men desire to have two editions of the same work, though it is in fact a proof of inferiority when a man cannot make his mistress of his wife. Variety in this particular is a sign of weakness. Constancy will always be the real genius of love, the evidence of immense power--the power that makes the poet! A man ought to find every woman in his wife, as the squalid poets of the seventeenth century made their Manons figure as Iris and Chloe.

"Well," said Lisbeth to the Pole, as she beheld him fascinated, "what do you think of Valerie?"

"She is too charming," replied Wenceslas.

"You would not listen to me," said Betty. "Oh! my little Wenceslas, if you and I had never parted, you would have been that siren's lover; you might have married her when she was a widow, and you would have had her forty thousand francs a year----"

"Really?"

"Certainly," replied Lisbeth. "Now, take care of yourself; I warned you of the danger; do not singe your wings in the candle!--Come, give me your arm, dinner is served."

No language could be so thoroughly demoralizing as this; for if you show a Pole a precipice, he is bound to leap it. As a nation they have the very spirit of cavalry; they fancy they can ride down every obstacle and come out victorious. The spur applied by Lisbeth to Steinbock's vanity was intensified by the appearance of the dining-room, bright with handsome silver plate; the dinner was served with every refinement and extravagance of Parisian luxury.

"I should have done better to take Celimene," thought he to himself.

All through the dinner Hulot was charming; pleased to see his son-in-law at that table, and yet more happy in the prospect of a reconciliation with Valerie, whose fidelity he proposed to secure by the promise of Coquet's head-clerkship. Stidmann responded to the Baron's amiability by shafts of Parisian banter and an artist's high spirits. Steinbock would not allow himself to be eclipsed by his friend; he too was witty, said amusing things, made his mark, and was pleased with himself; Madame Marneffe smiled at him several times to show that she quite understood him.

The good meal and heady wines completed the work; Wenceslas was deep in what must be called the slough of dissipation. Excited by just a glass too much, he stretched himself on a settee after dinner, sunk in physical and mental ecstasy, which Madame Marneffe wrought to the highest pitch by coming to sit down by him--airy, scented, pretty enough to damn an angel. She bent over Wenceslas and almost touched his ear as she whispered to him:

"We cannot talk over business matters this evening, unless you will remain till the last. Between us--you, Lisbeth, and me--we can settle everything to suit you."

"Ah, Madame, you are an angel!" replied Wenceslas, also in a murmur. "I was a pretty fool not to listen to Lisbeth--"

"What did she say?"

"She declared, in the Rue du Doyenne, that you loved me!"

Madame Marneffe looked at him, seemed covered with confusion, and hastily left her seat. A young and pretty woman never rouses the hope of immediate success with impunity. This retreat, the impulse of a virtuous woman who is crushing a passion in the depths of her heart, was a thousand times more effective than the most reckless avowal. Desire was so thoroughly aroused in Wenceslas that he doubled his attentions to Valerie. A woman seen by all is a woman wished for. Hence the terrible power of actresses. Madame Marneffe, knowing that she was watched, behaved like an admired actress. She was quite charming, and her success was immense.

"I no longer wonder at my father-in-law's follies," said Steinbock to Lisbeth.

"If you say such things, Wenceslas, I shall to my dying day repent of having got you the loan of these ten thousand francs. Are you, like all these men," and she indicated the guests, "madly in love with that creature? Remember, you would be your father-in-law's rival. And think of the misery you would bring on Hortense."

"That is true," said Wenceslas. "Hortense is an angel; I should be a wretch."

"And one is enough in the family!" said Lisbeth.

"Artists ought never to marry!" exclaimed Steinbock.

"Ah! that is what I always told you in the Rue du Doyenne. Your groups, your statues, your great works, ought to be your children."

"What are you talking about?" Valerie asked, joining Lisbeth.--"Give us tea, Cousin."

Steinbock, with Polish vainglory, wanted to appear familiar with this drawing-room fairy. After defying Stidmann, Vignon, and Crevel with a look, he took Valerie's hand and forced her to sit down by him on the settee.

"You are rather too lordly, Count Steinbock," said she, resisting a little. But she laughed as she dropped on to the seat, not without arranging the rosebud pinned into her bodice.

"Alas! if I were really lordly," said he, "I should not be here to borrow money."

"Poor boy! I remember how you worked all night in the Rue du Doyenne. You really were rather a spooney; you married as a starving man snatches a loaf. You knew nothing of Paris, and you see where you are landed. But you turned a deaf ear to Lisbeth's devotion, as you did to the love of a woman who knows her Paris by heart."

"Say no more!" cried Steinbock; "I am done for!"

"You shall have your ten thousand francs, my dear Wenceslas; but on one condition," she went on, playing with his handsome curls.

"What is that?"

"I will take no interest----"

"Madame!"

"Oh, you need not be indignant; you shall make it good by giving me a bronze group. You began the story of Samson; finish it.--Do a Delilah cutting off the Jewish Hercules' hair. And you, who, if you will listen to me, will be a great artist, must enter into the subject. What you have to show is the power of woman. Samson is a secondary consideration. He is the corpse of dead strength. It is Delilah --passion--that ruins everything. How far more beautiful is that _replica_--That is what you call it, I think--" She skilfully interpolated, as Claude Vignon and Stidmann came up to them on hearing her talk of sculpture--"how far more beautiful than the Greek myth is that _replica_ of Hercules at Omphale's feet.--Did Greece copy Judaea, or did Judaea borrow the symbolism from Greece?"

"There, madame, you raise an important question--that of the date of the various writings in the Bible. The great and immortal Spinoza --most foolishly ranked as an atheist, whereas he gave mathematical proof of the existence of God--asserts that the Book of Genesis and all the political history of the Bible are of the time of Moses, and he demonstrates the interpolated passages by philological evidence. And he was thrice stabbed as he went into the synagogue."

"I had no idea I was so learned," said Valerie, annoyed at this interruption to her _tete-a-tete_.

"Women know everything by instinct," replied Claude Vignon.

"Well, then, you promise me?" she said to Steinbock, taking his hand with the timidity of a girl in love.

"You are indeed a happy man, my dear fellow," cried Stidmann, "if madame asks a favor of you!"

"What is it?" asked Claude Vignon.

"A small bronze group," replied Steinbock, "Delilah cutting off Samson's hair."

"It is difficult," remarked Vignon. "A bed----"

"On the contrary, it is exceedingly easy," replied Valerie, smiling.

"Ah ha! teach us sculpture!" said Stidmann.

"You should take madame for your subject," replied Vignon, with a keen glance at Valerie.

"Well," she went on, "this is my notion of the composition. Samson on waking finds he has no hair, like many a dandy with a false top-knot. The hero is sitting on the bed, so you need only show the foot of it, covered with hangings and drapery. There he is, like Marius among the ruins of Carthage, his arms folded, his head shaven--Napoleon at Saint-Helena--what you will! Delilah is on her knees, a good deal like Canova's Magdalen. When a hussy has ruined her man, she adores him. As I see it, the Jewess was afraid of Samson in his strength and terrors, but she must have loved him when she saw him a child again. So Delilah is bewailing her sin, she would like to give her lover his hair again. She hardly dares to look at him; but she does look, with a smile, for she reads forgiveness in Samson's weakness. Such a group as this, and one of the ferocious Judith, would epitomize woman. Virtue cuts off your head; vice only cuts off your hair. Take care of your wigs, gentlemen!"

And she left the artists quite overpowered, to sing her praises in concert with the critic.

"It is impossible to be more bewitching!" cried Stidmann.

"Oh! she is the most intelligent and desirable woman I have ever met," said Claude Vignon. "Such a combination of beauty and cleverness is so rare."

"And if you who had the honor of being intimate with Camille Maupin can pronounce such a verdict," replied Stidmann, "what are we to think?"

"If you will make your Delilah a portrait of Valerie, my dear Count," said Crevel, who had risen for a moment from the card-table, and who had heard what had been said, "I will give you a thousand crowns for an example--yes, by the Powers! I will shell out to the tune of a thousand crowns!"

"Shell out! What does that mean?" asked Beauvisage of Claude Vignon.

"Madame must do me the honor to sit for it then," said Steinbock to Crevel. "Ask her--"

At this moment Valerie herself brought Steinbock a cup of tea. This was more than a compliment, it was a favor. There is a complete language in the manner in which a woman does this little civility; but women are fully aware of the fact, and it is a curious thing to study their movements, their manner, their look, tone, and accent when they perform this apparently simple act of politeness.--From the question, "Do you take tea?"--"Will you have some tea?"--"A cup of tea?" coldly asked, and followed by instructions to the nymph of the urn to bring it, to the eloquent poem of the odalisque coming from the tea-table, cup in hand, towards the pasha of her heart, presenting it submissively, offering it in an insinuating voice, with a look full of intoxicating promises, a physiologist could deduce the whole scale of feminine emotion, from aversion or indifference to Phaedra's declaration to Hippolytus. Women can make it, at will, contemptuous to the verge of insult, or humble to the expression of Oriental servility.

And Valerie was more than woman; she was the serpent made woman; she crowned her diabolical work by going up to Steinbock, a cup of tea in her hand.

"I will drink as many cups of tea as you will give me," said the artist, murmuring in her ear as he rose, and touching her fingers with his, "to have them given to me thus!"

"What were you saying about sitting?" said she, without betraying that this declaration, so frantically desired, had gone straight to her heart.

"Old Crevel promises me a thousand crowns for a copy of your group."

"He! a thousand crowns for a bronze group?"

"Yes--if you will sit for Delilah," said Steinbock.

"He will not be there to see, I hope!" replied she. "The group would be worth more than all his fortune, for Delilah's costume is rather un-dressy."

Just as Crevel loved to strike an attitude, every woman has a victorious gesture, a studied movement, which she knows must win admiration. You may see in a drawing-room how one spends all her time looking down at her tucker or pulling up the shoulder-piece of her gown, how another makes play with the brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown Hulot, now fascinated Steinbock.

"Your vengeance is secure," said Valerie to Lisbeth in a whisper. "Hortense will cry out all her tears, and curse the day when she robbed you of Wenceslas."

"Till I am Madame la Marechale I shall not think myself successful," replied the cousin; "but they are all beginning to wish for it.--This morning I went to Victorin's--I forgot to tell you.--The young Hulots have bought up their father's notes of hand given to Vauvinet, and to-morrow they will endorse a bill for seventy-two thousand francs at five per cent, payable in three years, and secured by a mortgage on their house. So the young people are in straits for three years; they can raise no more money on that property. Victorin is dreadfully distressed; he understands his father. And Crevel is capable of refusing to see them; he will be so angry at this piece of self-sacrifice."

"The Baron cannot have a sou now," said Valerie, and she smiled at Hulot.

"I don't see where he can get it. But he will draw his salary again in September."

"And he has his policy of insurance; he has renewed it. Come, it is high time he should get Marneffe promoted. I will drive it home this evening."

"My dear cousin," said Lisbeth to Wenceslas, "go home, I beg. You are quite ridiculous. Your eyes are fixed on Valerie in a way that is enough to compromise her, and her husband is insanely jealous. Do not tread in your father-in-law's footsteps. Go home; I am sure Hortense is sitting up for you."

"Madame Marneffe told me to stay till the last to settle my little business with you and her," replied Wenceslas.

"No, no," said Lisbeth; "I will bring you the ten thousand francs, for her husband has his eye on you. It would be rash to remain. To-morrow at eleven o'clock bring your note of hand; at that hour that mandarin Marneffe is at his office, Valerie is free.--Have you really asked her to sit for your group?--Come up to my rooms first.--Ah! I was sure of it," she added, as she caught the look which Steinbock flashed at Valerie, "I knew you were a profligate in the bud! Well, Valerie is lovely--but try not to bring trouble on Hortense."

Nothing annoys a married man so much as finding his wife perpetually interposing between himself and his wishes, however transient.

Wenceslas got home at about one in the morning; Hortense had expected him ever since half-past nine. From half-past nine till ten she had listened to the passing carriages, telling herself that never before had her husband come in so late from dining with Florent and Chanor. She sat sewing by the child's cot, for she had begun to save a needlewoman's pay for the day by doing the mending herself.--From ten till half-past, a suspicion crossed her mind; she sat wondering:

"Is he really gone to dinner, as he told me, with Chanor and Florent? He put on his best cravat and his handsomest pin when he dressed. He took as long over his toilet as a woman when she wants to make the best of herself.--I am crazy! He loves me!--And here he is!"

But instead of stopping, the cab she heard went past.

From eleven till midnight Hortense was a victim to terrible alarms; the quarter where they lived was now deserted.

"If he has set out on foot, some accident may have happened," thought she. "A man may be killed by tumbling over a curbstone or failing to see a gap. Artists are so heedless! Or if he should have been stopped by robbers!--It is the first time he has ever left me alone here for six hours and a half!--But why should I worry myself? He cares for no one but me."

Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant. A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still--she loves so much! She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power. This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship.

In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity. How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations?

By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband's ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother.

"At last--here you are!" cried she, finding her voice again. "My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.--I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull! Killed by thieves!--No, a second time I know I should go mad.--Have you enjoyed yourself so much?--And without me! --Bad boy!"

"What can I say, my darling? There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue. There were--"

"Were there no ladies?" Hortense eagerly inquired.

"Worthy Madame Florent--"

"You said the Rocher de Cancale.--Were you at the Florents'?"

"Yes, at their house; I made a mistake."

"You did not take a coach to come home?"

"No."

"And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?"

"Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way."

"It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne? You are not muddy at all!" said Hortense, looking at her husband's patent leather boots.

It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled.

"Here--here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me," said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination.

He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs' worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing. He owed money to his foreman and his workmen.

"Now your anxieties are relieved," said he, kissing his wife. "I am going to work to-morrow morning. So I am going to bed this minute to get up early, by your leave, my pet."

The suspicion that had dawned in Hortense's mind vanished; she was miles away from the truth. Madame Marneffe! She had never thought of her. Her fear for her Wenceslas was that he should fall in with street prostitutes. The names of Bixiou and Leon de Lora, two artists noted for their wild dissipations, had alarmed her.

Next morning she saw Wenceslas go out at nine o'clock, and was quite reassured.

"Now he is at work again," said she to herself, as she proceeded to dress her boy. "I see he is quite in the vein! Well, well, if we cannot have the glory of Michael Angelo, we may have that of Benvenuto Cellini!"

Lulled by her own hopes, Hortense believed in a happy future; and she was chattering to her son of twenty months in the language of onomatopoeia that amuses babes when, at about eleven o'clock, the cook, who had not seen Wenceslas go out, showed in Stidmann.

"I beg pardon, madame," said he. "Is Wenceslas gone out already?"

"He is at the studio."

"I came to talk over the work with him."

"I will send for him," said Hortense, offering Stidmann a chair.

Thanking Heaven for this piece of luck, Hortense was glad to detain Stidmann to ask some questions about the evening before. Stidmann bowed in acknowledgment of her kindness. The Countess Steinbock rang; the cook appeared, and was desired to go at once and fetch her master from the studio.

"You had an amusing dinner last night?" said Hortense. "Wenceslas did not come in till past one in the morning."

"Amusing? not exactly," replied the artist, who had intended to fascinate Madame Marneffe. "Society is not very amusing unless one is interested in it. That little Madame Marneffe is clever, but a great flirt."

"And what did Wenceslas think of her?" asked poor Hortense, trying to keep calm. "He said nothing about her to me."

"I will only say one thing," said Stidmann, "and that is, that I think her a very dangerous woman."

Hortense turned as pale as a woman after childbirth.

"So--it was at--at Madame Marneffe's that you dined--and not--not with Chanor?" said she, "yesterday--and Wenceslas--and he----"

Stidmann, without knowing what mischief he had done, saw that he had blundered.

The Countess did not finish her sentence; she simply fainted away. The artist rang, and the maid came in. When Louise tried to get her mistress into her bedroom, a serious nervous attack came on, with violent hysterics. Stidmann, like any man who by an involuntary indiscretion has overthrown the structure built on a husband's lie to his wife, could not conceive that his words should produce such an effect; he supposed that the Countess was in such delicate health that the slightest contradiction was mischievous.

The cook presently returned to say, unfortunately in loud tones, that her master was not in the studio. In the midst of her anguish, Hortense heard, and the hysterical fit came on again.

"Go and fetch madame's mother," said Louise to the cook. "Quick--run!"

"If I knew where to find Steinbock, I would go and fetch him!" exclaimed Stidmann in despair.

"He is with that woman!" cried the unhappy wife. "He was not dressed to go to his work!"

Stidmann hurried off to Madame Marneffe's, struck by the truth of this conclusion, due to the second-sight of passion.

At that moment Valerie was posed as Delilah. Stidmann, too sharp to ask for Madame Marneffe, walked straight in past the lodge, and ran quickly up to the second floor, arguing thus: "If I ask for Madame Marneffe, she will be out. If I inquire point-blank for Steinbock, I shall be laughed at to my face.--Take the bull by the horns!"

Reine appeared in answer to his ring.

"Tell Monsieur le Comte Steinbock to come at once, his wife is dying--"

Reine, quite a match for Stidmann, looked at him with blank surprise.

"But, sir--I don't know--did you suppose----"

"I tell you that my friend Monsieur Steinbock is here; his wife is very ill. It is quite serious enough for you to disturb your mistress." And Stidmann turned on his heel.

"He is there, sure enough!" said he to himself.

And in point of fact, after waiting a few minutes in the Rue Vanneau, he saw Wenceslas come out, and beckoned to him to come quickly. After telling him of the tragedy enacted in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Stidmann scolded Steinbock for not having warned him to keep the secret of yesterday's dinner.

"I am done for," said Wenceslas, "but you are forgiven. I had totally forgotten that you were to call this morning, and I blundered in not telling you that we were to have dined with Florent.--What can I say? That Valerie has turned my head; but, my dear fellow, for her glory is well lost, misfortune well won! She really is!--Good Heavens!--But I am in a dreadful fix. Advise me. What can I say? How can I excuse myself?"

"I! advise you! I don't know," replied Stidmann. "But your wife loves you, I imagine? Well, then, she will believe anything. Tell her that you were on your way to me when I was on my way to you; that, at any rate, will set this morning's business right. Good-bye."

Lisbeth, called down by Reine, ran after Wenceslas and caught him up at the corner of the Rue Hillerin-Bertin; she was afraid of his Polish artlessness. Not wishing to be involved in the matter, she said a few words to Wenceslas, who in his joy hugged her then and there. She had no doubt pushed out a plank to enable the artist to cross this awkward place in his conjugal affairs.

At the sight of her mother, who had flown to her aid, Hortense burst into floods of tears. This happily changed the character of the hysterical attack.

"Treachery, dear mamma!" cried she. "Wenceslas, after giving me his word of honor that he would not go near Madame Marneffe, dined with her last night, and did not come in till a quarter-past one in the morning.--If you only knew! The day before we had had a discussion, not a quarrel, and I had appealed to him so touchingly. I told him I was jealous, that I should die if he were unfaithful; that I was easily suspicious, but that he ought to have some consideration for my weaknesses, as they came of my love for him; that I had my father's blood in my veins as well as yours; that at the first moment of such discovery I should be mad, and capable of mad deeds--of avenging myself--of dishonoring us all, him, his child, and myself; that I might even kill him first and myself after--and so on.

"And yet he went there; he is there!--That woman is bent on breaking all our hearts! Only yesterday my brother and Celestine pledged their all to pay off seventy thousand francs on notes of hand signed for that good-for-nothing creature.--Yes, mamma, my father would have been arrested and put into prison. Cannot that dreadful woman be content with having my father, and with all your tears? Why take my Wenceslas? --I will go to see her and stab her!"

Madame Hulot, struck to the heart by the dreadful secrets Hortense was unwittingly letting out, controlled her grief by one of the heroic efforts which a magnanimous mother can make, and drew her daughter's head on to her bosom to cover it with kisses.

"Wait for Wenceslas, my child; all will be explained. The evil cannot be so great as you picture it!--I, too, have been deceived, my dear Hortense; you think me handsome, I have lived blameless; and yet I have been utterly forsaken for three-and-twenty years--for a Jenny Cadine, a Josepha, a Madame Marneffe!--Did you know that?"

"You, mamma, you! You have endured this for twenty----"

She broke off, staggered by her own thoughts.

"Do as I have done, my child," said her mother. "Be gentle and kind, and your conscience will be at peace. On his death-bed a man may say, 'My wife has never cost me a pang!' And God, who hears that dying breath, credits it to us. If I had abandoned myself to fury like you, what would have happened? Your father would have been embittered, perhaps he would have left me altogether, and he would not have been withheld by any fear of paining me. Our ruin, utter as it now is, would have been complete ten years sooner, and we should have shown the world the spectacle of a husband and wife living quite apart--a scandal of the most horrible, heart-breaking kind, for it is the destruction of the family. Neither your brother nor you could have married.

"I sacrificed myself, and that so bravely, that, till this last connection of your father's, the world has believed me happy. My serviceable and indeed courageous falsehood has, till now, screened Hector; he is still respected; but this old man's passion is taking him too far, that I see. His own folly, I fear, will break through the veil I have kept between the world and our home. However, I have held that curtain steady for twenty-three years, and have wept behind it --motherless, I, without a friend to trust, with no help but in religion--I have for twenty-three years secured the family honor----"

Hortense listened with a fixed gaze. The calm tone of resignation and of such crowning sorrow soothed the smart of her first wound; the tears rose again and flowed in torrents. In a frenzy of filial affection, overcome by her mother's noble heroism, she fell on her knees before Adeline, took up the hem of her dress and kissed it, as pious Catholics kiss the holy relics of a martyr.

"Nay, get up, Hortense," said the Baroness. "Such homage from my daughter wipes out many sad memories. Come to my heart, and weep for no sorrows but your own. It is the despair of my dear little girl, whose joy was my only joy, that broke the solemn seal which nothing ought to have removed from my lips. Indeed, I meant to have taken my woes to the tomb, as a shroud the more. It was to soothe your anguish that I spoke.--God will forgive me!

"Oh! if my life were to be your life, what would I not do? Men, the world, Fate, Nature, God Himself, I believe, make us pay for love with the most cruel grief. I must pay for ten years of happiness and twenty-four years of despair, of ceaseless sorrow, of bitterness--"

"But you had ten years, dear mamma, and I have had but three!" said the self-absorbed girl.

"Nothing is lost yet," said Adeline. "Only wait till Wenceslas comes."

"Mother," said she, "he lied, he deceived me. He said, 'I will not go,' and he went. And that over his child's cradle."

"For pleasure, my child, men will commit the most cowardly, the most infamous actions--even crimes; it lies in their nature, it would seem. We wives are set apart for sacrifice. I believed my troubles were ended, and they are beginning again, for I never thought to suffer doubly by suffering with my child. Courage--and silence!--My Hortense, swear that you will never discuss your griefs with anybody but me, never let them be suspected by any third person. Oh! be as proud as your mother has been."

Hortense started; she had heard her husband's step.

"So it would seem," said Wenceslas, as he came in, "that Stidmann has been here while I went to see him."

"Indeed!" said Hortense, with the angry irony of an offended woman who uses words to stab.

"Certainly," said Wenceslas, affecting surprise. "We have just met."

"And yesterday?"

"Well, yesterday I deceived you, my darling love; and your mother shall judge between us."

This candor unlocked his wife's heart. All really lofty women like the truth better than lies. They cannot bear to see their idol smirched; they want to be proud of the despotism they bow to.

There is a strain of this feeling in the devotion of the Russians to their Czar.

"Now, listen, dear mother," Wenceslas went on. "I so truly love my sweet and kind Hortense, that I concealed from her the extent of our poverty. What could I do? She was still nursing the boy, and such troubles would have done her harm; you know what the risk is for a woman. Her beauty, youth, and health are imperiled. Did I do wrong? --She believes that we owe five thousand francs; but I owe five thousand more. The day before yesterday we were in the depths! No one on earth will lend to us artists. Our talents are not less untrustworthy than our whims. I knocked in vain at every door. Lisbeth, indeed, offered us her savings."

"Poor soul!" said Hortense.

"Poor soul!" said the Baroness.

"But what are Lisbeth's two thousand francs? Everything to her, nothing to us.--Then, as you know, Hortense, she spoke to us of Madame Marneffe, who, as she owes so much to the Baron, out of a sense of honor, will take no interest. Hortense wanted to send her diamonds to the Mont-de-Piete; they would have brought in a few thousand francs, but we needed ten thousand. Those ten thousand francs were to be had free of interest for a year!--I said to myself, 'Hortense will be none the wiser; I will go and get them.'

"Then the woman asked me to dinner through my father-in-law, giving me to understand that Lisbeth had spoken of the matter, and I should have the money. Between Hortense's despair on one hand, and the dinner on the other, I could not hesitate.--That is all.

"What! could Hortense, at four-and-twenty, lovely, pure, and virtuous, and all my pride and glory, imagine that, when I have never left her since we married, I could now prefer--what?--a tawny, painted, ruddled creature?" said he, using the vulgar exaggeration of the studio to convince his wife by the vehemence that women like.

"Oh! if only your father had ever spoken so----!" cried the Baroness.

Hortense threw her arms round her husband's neck.

"Yes, that is what I should have done," said her mother. "Wenceslas, my dear fellow, your wife was near dying of it," she went on very seriously. "You see how well she loves you. And, alas--she is yours!"

She sighed deeply.

"He may make a martyr of her, or a happy woman," thought she to herself, as every mother thinks when she sees her daughter married. --"It seems to me," she said aloud, "that I am miserable enough to hope to see my children happy."

"Be quite easy, dear mamma," said Wenceslas, only too glad to see this critical moment end happily. "In two months I shall have repaid that dreadful woman. How could I help it," he went on, repeating this essentially Polish excuse with a Pole's grace; "there are times when a man would borrow of the Devil.--And, after all, the money belongs to the family. When once she had invited me, should I have got the money at all if I had responded to her civility with a rude refusal?"

"Oh, mamma, what mischief papa is bringing on us!" cried Hortense.

The Baroness laid her finger on her daughter's lips, aggrieved by this complaint, the first blame she had ever uttered of a father so heroically screened by her mother's magnanimous silence.

"Now, good-bye, my children," said Madame Hulot. "The storm is over. But do not quarrel any more."

When Wenceslas and his wife returned to their room after letting out the Baroness, Hortense said to her husband:

"Tell me all about last evening."

And she watched his face all through the narrative, interrupting him by the questions that crowd on a wife's mind in such circumstances. The story made Hortense reflect; she had a glimpse of the infernal dissipation which an artist must find in such vicious company.

"Be honest, my Wenceslas; Stidmann was there, Claude Vignon, Vernisset.--Who else? In short, it was good fun?"

"I, I was thinking of nothing but our ten thousand francs, and I was saying to myself, 'My Hortense will be freed from anxiety.'"

This catechism bored the Livonian excessively; he seized a gayer moment to say:

"And you, my dearest, what would you have done if your artist had proved guilty?"

"I," said she, with an air of prompt decision, "I should have taken up Stidmann--not that I love him, of course!"

"Hortense!" cried Steinbock, starting to his feet with a sudden and theatrical emphasis. "You would not have had the chance--I would have killed you!"

Hortense threw herself into his arms, clasping him closely enough to stifle him, and covered him with kisses, saying:

"Ah, you do love me! I fear nothing!--But no more Marneffe. Never go plunging into such horrible bogs."

"I swear to you, my dear Hortense, that I will go there no more, excepting to redeem my note of hand."

She pouted at this, but only as a loving woman sulks to get something for it. Wenceslas, tired out with such a morning's work, went off to his studio to make a clay sketch of the _Samson and Delilah_, for which he had the drawings in his pocket.

Hortense, penitent for her little temper, and fancying that her husband was annoyed with her, went to the studio just as the sculptor had finished handling the clay with the impetuosity that spurs an artist when the mood is on him. On seeing his wife, Wenceslas hastily threw the wet wrapper over the group, and putting both arms round her, he said:

"We were not really angry, were we, my pretty puss?"

Hortense had caught sight of the group, had seen the linen thrown over it, and had said nothing; but as she was leaving, she took off the rag, looked at the model, and asked:

"What is that?"

"A group for which I had just had an idea."

"And why did you hide it?"

"I did not mean you to see it till it was finished."

"The woman is very pretty," said Hortense.

And a thousand suspicions cropped up in her mind, as, in India, tall, rank plants spring up in a night-time.

By the end of three weeks, Madame Marneffe was intensely irritated by Hortense. Women of that stamp have a pride of their own; they insist that men shall kiss the devil's hoof; they have no forgiveness for the virtue that does not quail before their dominion, or that even holds its own against them. Now, in all that time Wenceslas had not paid one visit in the Rue Vanneau, not even that which politeness required to a woman who had sat for Delilah.

Whenever Lisbeth called on the Steinbocks, there had been nobody at home. Monsieur and madame lived in the studio. Lisbeth, following the turtle doves to their nest at le Gros-Caillou, found Wenceslas hard at work, and was informed by the cook that madame never left monsieur's side. Wenceslas was a slave to the autocracy of love. So now Valerie, on her own account, took part with Lisbeth in her hatred of Hortense.

Women cling to a lover that another woman is fighting for, just as much as men do to women round whom many coxcombs are buzzing. Thus any reflections _a propos_ to Madame Marneffe are equally applicable to any lady-killing rake; he is, in fact, a sort of male courtesan. Valerie's last fancy was a madness; above all, she was bent on getting her group; she was even thinking of going one morning to the studio to see Wenceslas, when a serious incident arose of the kind which, to a woman of that class, may be called the spoil of war.

This is how Valerie announced this wholly personal event.

She was breakfasting with Lisbeth and her husband.

"I say, Marneffe, what would you say to being a second time a father?"

"You don't mean it--a baby?--Oh, let me kiss you!"

He rose and went round the table; his wife held up her head so that he could just kiss her hair.

"If that is so," he went on, "I am head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor at once. But you must understand, my dear, Stanislas is not to be the sufferer, poor little man."

"Poor little man?" Lisbeth put in. "You have not set your eyes on him these seven months. I am supposed to be his mother at the school; I am the only person in the house who takes any trouble about him."

"A brat that costs us a hundred crowns a quarter!" said Valerie. "And he, at any rate, is your own child, Marneffe. You ought to pay for his schooling out of your salary.--The newcomer, far from reminding us of butcher's bills, will rescue us from want."

"Valerie," replied Marneffe, assuming an attitude like Crevel, "I hope that Monsieur le Baron Hulot will take proper charge of his son, and not lay the burden on a poor clerk. I intend to keep him well up to the mark. So take the necessary steps, madame! Get him to write you letters in which he alludes to his satisfaction, for he is rather backward in coming forward in regard to my appointment."

And Marneffe went away to the office, where his chief's precious leniency allowed him to come in at about eleven o'clock. And, indeed, he did little enough, for his incapacity was notorious, and he detested work.

No sooner were they alone than Lisbeth and Valerie looked at each other for a moment like Augurs, and both together burst into a loud fit of laughter.

"I say, Valerie--is it the fact?" said Lisbeth, "or merely a farce?"

"It is a physical fact!" replied Valerie. "Now, I am sick and tired of Hortense; and it occurred to me in the night that I might fire this infant, like a bomb, into the Steinbock household."

Valerie went back to her room, followed by Lisbeth, to whom she showed the following letter:--

"WENCESLAS MY DEAR,--I still believe in your love, though it is nearly three weeks since I saw you. Is this scorn? Delilah can scarcely believe that. Does it not rather result from the tyranny of a woman whom, as you told me, you can no longer love? Wenceslas, you are too great an artist to submit to such dominion. Home is the grave of glory.--Consider now, are you the Wenceslas of the Rue du Doyenne? You missed fire with my father's statue; but in you the lover is greater than the artist, and you have had better luck with his daughter. You are a father, my beloved Wenceslas.

"If you do not come to me in the state I am in, your friends would think very badly of you. But I love you so madly, that I feel I should never have the strength to curse you. May I sign myself as ever,

"YOUR VALERIE."

"What do you say to my scheme for sending this note to the studio at a time when our dear Hortense is there by herself?" asked Valerie. "Last evening I heard from Stidmann that Wenceslas is to pick him up at eleven this morning to go on business to Chanor's; so that gawk Hortense will be there alone."

"But after such a trick as that," replied Lisbeth, "I cannot continue to be your friend in the eyes of the world; I shall have to break with you, to be supposed never to visit you, or even to speak to you."

"Evidently," said Valerie; "but--"

"Oh! be quite easy," interrupted Lisbeth; "we shall often meet when I am Madame la Marechale. They are all set upon it now. Only the Baron is in ignorance of the plan, but you can talk him over."

"Well," said Valerie, "but it is quite likely that the Baron and I may be on distant terms before long."

"Madame Olivier is the only person who can make Hortense demand to see the letter," said Lisbeth. "And you must send her to the Rue Saint-Dominique before she goes on to the studio."

"Our beauty will be at home, no doubt," said Valerie, ringing for Reine to call up Madame Olivier.

Ten minutes after the despatch of this fateful letter, Baron Hulot arrived. Madame Marneffe threw her arms round the old man's neck with kittenish impetuosity.

"Hector, you are a father!" she said in his ear. "That is what comes of quarreling and making friends again----"

Perceiving a look of surprise, which the Baron did not at once conceal, Valerie assumed a reserve which brought the old man to despair. She made him wring the proofs from her one by one. When conviction, led on by vanity, had at last entered his mind, she enlarged on Monsieur Marneffe's wrath.

"My dear old veteran," said she, "you can hardly avoid getting your responsible editor, our representative partner if you like, appointed head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor, for you really have done for the poor man, he adores his Stanislas, the little monstrosity who is so like him, that to me he is insufferable. Unless you prefer to settle twelve hundred francs a year on Stanislas--the capital to be his, and the life-interest payable to me, of course--"

"But if I am to settle securities, I would rather it should be on my own son, and not on the monstrosity," said the Baron.

This rash speech, in which the words "my own son" came out as full as a river in flood, was, by the end of the hour, ratified as a formal promise to settle twelve hundred francs a year on the future boy. And this promise became, on Valerie's tongue and in her countenance, what a drum is in the hands of a child; for three weeks she played on it incessantly.

At the moment when Baron Hulot was leaving the Rue Vanneau, as happy as a man who after a year of married life still desires an heir, Madame Olivier had yielded to Hortense, and given up the note she was instructed to give only into the Count's own hands. The young wife paid twenty francs for that letter. The wretch who commits suicide must pay for the opium, the pistol, the charcoal.

Hortense read and re-read the note; she saw nothing but this sheet of white paper streaked with black lines; the universe held for her nothing but that paper; everything was dark around her. The glare of the conflagration that was consuming the edifice of her happiness lighted up the page, for blackest night enfolded her. The shouts of her little Wenceslas at play fell on her ear, as if he had been in the depths of a valley and she on a high mountain. Thus insulted at four-and-twenty, in all the splendor of her beauty, enhanced by pure and devoted love--it was not a stab, it was death. The first shock had been merely on the nerves, the physical frame had struggled in the grip of jealousy; but now certainty had seized her soul, her body was unconscious.

For about ten minutes Hortense sat under the incubus of this oppression. Then a vision of her mother appeared before her, and revulsion ensued; she was calm and cool, and mistress of her reason.

She rang.

"Get Louise to help you, child," said she to the cook. "As quickly as you can, pack up everything that belongs to me and everything wanted for the little boy. I give you an hour. When all is ready, fetch a hackney coach from the stand, and call me.

"Make no remarks! I am leaving the house, and shall take Louise with me. You must stay here with monsieur; take good care of him----"

She went into her room, and wrote the following letter:--

"MONSIEUR LE COMTE,--

"The letter I enclose will sufficiently account for the determination I have come to.

"When you read this, I shall have left your house and have found refuge with my mother, taking our child with me.

"Do not imagine that I shall retrace my steps. Do not imagine that I am acting with the rash haste of youth, without reflection, with the anger of offended affection; you will be greatly mistaken.

"I have been thinking very deeply during the last fortnight of life, of love, of our marriage, of our duties to each other. I have known the perfect devotion of my mother; she has told me all her sorrows! She has been heroical--every day for twenty-three years. But I have not the strength to imitate her, not because I love you less than she loves my father, but for reasons of spirit and nature. Our home would be a hell; I might lose my head so far as to disgrace you--disgrace myself and our child.

"I refuse to be a Madame Marneffe; once launched on such a course, a woman of my temper might not, perhaps, be able to stop. I am, unfortunately for myself, a Hulot, not a Fischer.

"Alone, and absent from the scene of your dissipations, I am sure of myself, especially with my child to occupy me, and by the side of a strong and noble mother, whose life cannot fail to influence the vehement impetuousness of my feelings. There, I can be a good mother, bring our boy up well, and live. Under your roof the wife would oust the mother; and constant contention would sour my temper.

"I can accept a death-blow, but I will not endure for twenty-five years, like my mother. If, at the end of three years of perfect, unwavering love, you can be unfaithful to me with your father-in-law's mistress, what rivals may I expect to have in later years? Indeed, monsieur, you have begun your career of profligacy much earlier than my father did, the life of dissipation, which is a disgrace to the father of a family, which undermines the respect of his children, and which ends in shame and despair.

"I am not unforgiving. Unrelenting feelings do not beseem erring creatures living under the eye of God. If you win fame and fortune by sustained work, if you have nothing to do with courtesans and ignoble, defiling ways, you will find me still a wife worthy of you.

"I believe you to be too much a gentleman, Monsieur le Comte, to have recourse to the law. You will respect my wishes, and leave me under my mother's roof. Above all, never let me see you there. I have left all the money lent to you by that odious woman.-- Farewell.

"HORTENSE HULOT."

This letter was written in anguish. Hortense abandoned herself to the tears, the outcries of murdered love. She laid down her pen and took it up again, to express as simply as possible all that passion commonly proclaims in this sort of testamentary letter. Her heart went forth in exclamations, wailing and weeping; but reason dictated the words.

Informed by Louise that all was ready, the young wife slowly went round the little garden, through the bedroom and drawing-room, looking at everything for the last time. Then she earnestly enjoined the cook to take the greatest care for her master's comfort, promising to reward her handsomely if she would be honest. At last she got into the hackney coach to drive to her mother's house, her heart quite broken, crying so much as to distress the maid, and covering little Wenceslas with kisses, which betrayed her still unfailing love for his father.

The Baroness knew already from Lisbeth that the father-in-law was largely to blame for the son-in-law's fault; nor was she surprised to see her daughter, whose conduct she approved, and she consented to give her shelter. Adeline, perceiving that her own gentleness and patience had never checked Hector, for whom her respect was indeed fast diminishing, thought her daughter very right to adopt another course.

In three weeks the poor mother had suffered two wounds of which the pain was greater than any ill-fortune she had hitherto endured. The Baron had placed Victorin and his wife in great difficulties; and then, by Lisbeth's account, he was the cause of his son-in-law's misconduct, and had corrupted Wenceslas. The dignity of the father of the family, so long upheld by her really foolish self-sacrifice, was now overthrown. Though they did not regret the money the young Hulots were full alike of doubts and uneasiness as regarded the Baron. This sentiment, which was evidence enough, distressed the Baroness; she foresaw a break-up of the family tie.

Hortense was accommodated in the dining-room, arranged as a bedroom with the help of the Marshal's money, and the anteroom became the dining-room, as it is in many apartments.

When Wenceslas returned home and had read the two letters, he felt a kind of gladness mingled with regret. Kept so constantly under his wife's eye, so to speak, he had inwardly rebelled against this fresh thraldom, _a la_ Lisbeth. Full fed with love for three years past, he too had been reflecting during the last fortnight; and he found a family heavy on his hands. He had just been congratulated by Stidmann on the passion he had inspired in Valerie; for Stidmann, with an under-thought that was not unnatural, saw that he might flatter the husband's vanity in the hope of consoling the victim. And Wenceslas was glad to be able to return to Madame Marneffe.

Still, he remembered the pure and unsullied happiness he had known, the perfections of his wife, her judgment, her innocent and guileless affection,--and he regretted her acutely. He thought of going at once to his mother-in-law's to crave forgiveness; but, in fact, like Hulot and Crevel, he went to Madame Marneffe, to whom he carried his wife's letter to show her what a disaster she had caused, and to discount his misfortune, so to speak, by claiming in return the pleasures his mistress could give him.

He found Crevel with Valerie. The mayor, puffed up with pride, marched up and down the room, agitated by a storm of feelings. He put himself into position as if he were about to speak, but he dared not. His countenance was beaming, and he went now and again to the window, where he drummed on the pane with his fingers. He kept looking at Valerie with a glance of tender pathos. Happily for him, Lisbeth presently came in.

"Cousin Betty," he said in her ear, "have you heard the news? I am a father! It seems to me I love my poor Celestine the less.--Oh! what a thing it is to have a child by the woman one idolizes! It is the fatherhood of the heart added to that of the flesh! I say--tell Valerie that I will work for that child--it shall be rich. She tells me she has some reason for believing that it will be a boy! If it is a boy, I shall insist on his being called Crevel. I will consult my notary about it."

"I know how much she loves you," said Lisbeth. "But for her sake in the future, and for your own, control yourself. Do not rub your hands every five minutes."

While Lisbeth was speaking aside on this wise to Crevel, Valerie had asked Wenceslas to give her back her letter, and she was saying things that dispelled all his griefs.

"So now you are free, my dear," said she. "Ought any great artist to marry? You live only by fancy and freedom! There, I shall love you so much, beloved poet, that you shall never regret your wife. At the same time, if, like so many people, you want to keep up appearances, I undertake to bring Hortense back to you in a very short time."

"Oh, if only that were possible!"

"I am certain of it," said Valerie, nettled. "Your poor father-in-law is a man who is in every way utterly done for; who wants to appear as though he could be loved, out of conceit, and to make the world believe that he has a mistress; and he is so excessively vain on this point, that I can do what I please with him. The Baroness is still so devoted to her old Hector--I always feel as if I were talking of the _Iliad_--that these two old folks will contrive to patch up matters between you and Hortense. Only, if you want to avoid storms at home for the future, do not leave me for three weeks without coming to see your mistress--I was dying of it. My dear boy, some consideration is due from a gentleman to a woman he has so deeply compromised, especially when, as in my case, she has to be very careful of her reputation.

"Stay to dinner, my darling--and remember that I must treat you with all the more apparent coldness because you are guilty of this too obvious mishap." _

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