Part 13

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_ On going into the boudoir, the singer found that Madame Hulot had fainted; but in spite of having lost consciousness, her nervous trembling kept her still perpetually shaking, as the pieces of a snake that has been cut up still wriggle and move. Strong salts, cold water, and all the ordinary remedies were applied to recall the Baroness to her senses, or rather, to the apprehension of her sorrows.

"Ah! mademoiselle, how far has he fallen!" cried she, recognizing Josepha, and finding that she was alone with her.

"Take heart, madame," replied the actress, who had seated herself on a cushion at Adeline's feet, and was kissing her hands. "We shall find him; and if he is in the mire, well, he must wash himself. Believe me, with people of good breeding it is a matter of clothes.--Allow me to make up for you the harm I have done you, for I see how much you are attached to your husband, in spite of his misconduct--or you should not have come here.--Well, you see, the poor man is so fond of women. If you had had a little of our dash, you would have kept him from running about the world; for you would have been what we can never be --all the women man wants.

"The State ought to subsidize a school of manners for honest women! But governments are so prudish! Still, they are guided by men, whom we privately guide. My word, I pity nations!

"But the matter in question is how you can be helped, and not to laugh at the world.--Well, madame, be easy, go home again, and do not worry. I will bring your Hector back to you as he was as a man of thirty."

"Ah, mademoiselle, let us go to see that Madame Grenouville," said the Baroness. "She surely knows something! Perhaps I may see the Baron this very day, and be able to snatch him at once from poverty and disgrace."

"Madame, I will show you the deep gratitude I feel towards you by not displaying the stage-singer Josepha, the Duc d'Herouville's mistress, in the company of the noblest, saintliest image of virtue. I respect you too much to be seen by your side. This is not acted humility; it is sincere homage. You make me sorry, madame, that I cannot tread in your footsteps, in spite of the thorns that tear your feet and hands. --But it cannot be helped! I am one with art, as you are one with virtue."

"Poor child!" said the Baroness, moved amid her own sorrows by a strange sense of compassionate sympathy; "I will pray to God for you; for you are the victim of society, which must have theatres. When you are old, repent--you will be heard if God vouchsafes to hear the prayers of a--"

"Of a martyr, madame," Josepha put in, and she respectfully kissed the Baroness' skirt.

But Adeline took the actress' hand, and drawing her towards her, kissed her on the forehead. Coloring with pleasure Josepha saw the Baroness into the hackney coach with the humblest politeness.

"It must be some visiting Lady of Charity," said the man-servant to the maid, "for she does not do so much for any one, not even for her dear friend Madame Jenny Cadine."

"Wait a few days," said she, "and you will see him, madame, or I renounce the God of my fathers--and that from a Jewess, you know, is a promise of success."

At the very time when Madame Hulot was calling on Josepha, Victorin, in his study, was receiving an old woman of about seventy-five, who, to gain admission to the lawyer, had used the terrible name of the head of the detective force. The man in waiting announced:

"Madame de Saint-Esteve."

"I have assumed one of my business names," said she, taking a seat.

Victorin felt a sort of internal chill at the sight of this dreadful old woman. Though handsomely dressed, she was terrible to look upon, for her flat, colorless, strongly-marked face, furrowed with wrinkles, expressed a sort of cold malignity. Marat, as a woman of that age, might have been like this creature, a living embodiment of the Reign of Terror.

This sinister old woman's small, pale eyes twinkled with a tiger's bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's face would have said that artists had failed in their conceptions of Mephistopheles.

"My dear sir," she began, with a patronizing air, "I have long since given up active business of any kind. What I have come to you to do, I have undertaken, for the sake of my dear nephew, whom I love more than I could love a son of my own.--Now, the Head of the Police--to whom the President of the Council said a few words in his ear as regards yourself, in talking to Monsieur Chapuzot--thinks as the police ought not to appear in a matter of this description, you understand. They gave my nephew a free hand, but my nephew will have nothing to say to it, except as before the Council; he will not be seen in it."

"Then your nephew is--"

"You have hit it, and I am rather proud of him," said she, interrupting the lawyer, "for he is my pupil, and he soon could teach his teacher.--We have considered this case, and have come to our own conclusions. Will you hand over thirty thousand francs to have the whole thing taken off your hands? I will make a clean sweep of all, and you need not pay till the job is done."

"Do you know the persons concerned?"

"No, my dear sir; I look for information from you. What we are told is, that a certain old idiot has fallen into the clutches of a widow. This widow, of nine-and-twenty, has played her cards so well, that she has forty thousand francs a year, of which she has robbed two fathers of families. She is now about to swallow down eighty thousand francs a year by marrying an old boy of sixty-one. She will thus ruin a respectable family, and hand over this vast fortune to the child of some lover by getting rid at once of the old husband.--That is the case as stated."

"Quite correct," said Victorin. "My father-in-law, Monsieur Crevel--"

"Formerly a perfumer, a mayor--yes, I live in his district under the name of Ma'ame Nourrisson," said the woman.

"The other person is Madame Marneffe."

"I do not know," said Madame de Saint-Esteve. "But within three days I will be in a position to count her shifts."

"Can you hinder the marriage?" asked Victorin.

"How far have they got?"

"To the second time of asking."

"We must carry off the woman.--To-day is Sunday--there are but three days, for they will be married on Wednesday, no doubt; it is impossible.--But she may be killed--"

Victorin Hulot started with an honest man's horror at hearing these five words uttered in cold blood.

"Murder?" said he. "And how could you do it?"

"For forty years, now, monsieur, we have played the part of fate," replied she, with terrible pride, "and do just what we will in Paris. More than one family--even in the Faubourg Saint-Germain--has told me all its secrets, I can tell you. I have made and spoiled many a match, I have destroyed many a will and saved many a man's honor. I have in there," and she tapped her forehead, "a store of secrets which are worth thirty-six thousand francs a year to me; and you--you will be one of my lambs, hoh! Could such a woman as I am be what I am if she revealed her ways and means? I act.

"Whatever I may do, sir, will be the result of an accident; you need feel no remorse. You will be like a man cured by a clairvoyant; by the end of a month, it seems all the work of Nature."

Victorin broke out in a cold sweat. The sight of an executioner would have shocked him less than this prolix and pretentious Sister of the Hulks. As he looked at her purple-red gown, she seemed to him dyed in blood.

"Madame, I do not accept the help of your experience and skill if success is to cost anybody's life, or the least criminal act is to come of it."

"You are a great baby, monsieur," replied the woman; "you wish to remain blameless in your own eyes, while you want your enemy to be overthrown."

Victorin shook his head in denial.

"Yes," she went on, "you want this Madame Marneffe to drop the prey she has between her teeth. But how do you expect to make a tiger drop his piece of beef? Can you do it by patting his back and saying, 'Poor Puss'? You are illogical. You want a battle fought, but you object to blows.--Well, I grant you the innocence you are so careful over. I have always found that there was material for hypocrisy in honesty! One day, three months hence, a poor priest will come to beg of you forty thousand francs for a pious work--a convent to be rebuilt in the Levant--in the desert.--If you are satisfied with your lot, give the good man the money. You will pay more than that into the treasury. It will be a mere trifle in comparison with what you will get, I can tell you."

She rose, standing on the broad feet that seemed to overflow her satin shoes; she smiled, bowed, and vanished.

"The Devil has a sister," said Victorin, rising.

He saw the hideous stranger to the door, a creature called up from the dens of the police, as on the stage a monster comes up from the third cellar at the touch of a fairy's wand in a ballet-extravaganza.

After finishing what he had to do at the Courts, Victorin went to call on Monsieur Chapuzot, the head of one of the most important branches of the Central Police, to make some inquiries about the stranger. Finding Monsieur Chapuzot alone in his office, Victorin thanked him for his help.

"You sent me an old woman who might stand for the incarnation of the criminal side of Paris."

Monsieur Chapuzot laid his spectacles on his papers and looked at the lawyer with astonishment.

"I should not have taken the liberty of sending anybody to see you without giving you notice beforehand, or a line of introduction," said he.

"Then it was Monsieur le Prefet--?"

"I think not," said Chapuzot. "The last time that the Prince de Wissembourg dined with the Minister of the Interior, he spoke to the Prefet of the position in which you find yourself--a deplorable position--and asked him if you could be helped in any friendly way. The Prefet, who was interested by the regrets his Excellency expressed as to this family affair, did me the honor to consult me about it.

"Ever since the present Prefet has held the reins of this department --so useful and so vilified--he has made it a rule that family matters are never to be interfered in. He is right in principle and in morality; but in practice he is wrong. In the forty-five years that I have served in the police, it did, from 1799 till 1815, great services in family concerns. Since 1820 a constitutional government and the press have completely altered the conditions of existence. So my advice, indeed, was not to intervene in such a case, and the Prefet did me the honor to agree with my remarks. The Head of the detective branch has orders, in my presence, to take no steps; so if you have had any one sent to you by him, he will be reprimanded. It might cost him his place. 'The Police will do this or that,' is easily said; the Police, the Police! But, my dear sir, the Marshal and the Ministerial Council do not know what the Police is. The Police alone knows the Police; but as for ours, only Fouche, Monsieur Lenoir, and Monsieur de Sartines have had any notion of it.--Everything is changed now; we are reduced and disarmed! I have seen many private disasters develop, which I could have checked with five grains of despotic power.--We shall be regretted by the very men who have crippled us when they, like you, stand face to face with some moral monstrosities, which ought to be swept away as we sweep away mud! In public affairs the Police is expected to foresee everything, or when the safety of the public is involved--but the family?--It is sacred! I would do my utmost to discover and hinder a plot against the King's life, I would see through the walls of a house; but as to laying a finger on a household, or peeping into private interests--never, so long as I sit in this office. I should be afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of the Press, Monsieur le Depute, of the left centre."

"What, then, can I do?" said Hulot, after a pause.

"Well, you are the Family," said the official. "That settles it; you can do what you please. But as to helping you, as to using the Police as an instrument of private feelings, and interests, how is it possible? There lies, you see, the secret of the persecution, necessary, but pronounced illegal, by the Bench, which was brought to bear against the predecessor of our present chief detective. Bibi-Lupin undertook investigations for the benefit of private persons. This might have led to great social dangers. With the means at his command, the man would have been formidable, an underlying fate--"

"But in my place?" said Hulot.

"Why, you ask my advice? You who sell it!" replied Monsieur Chapuzot. "Come, come, my dear sir, you are making fun of me."

Hulot bowed to the functionary, and went away without seeing that gentleman's almost imperceptible shrug as he rose to open the door.

"And he wants to be a statesman!" said Chapuzot to himself as he returned to his reports.

Victorin went home, still full of perplexities which he could confide to no one.

At dinner the Baroness joyfully announced to her children that within a month their father might be sharing their comforts, and end his days in peace among his family.

"Oh, I would gladly give my three thousand six hundred francs a year to see the Baron here!" cried Lisbeth. "But, my dear Adeline, do not dream beforehand of such happiness, I entreat you!"

"Lisbeth is right," said Celestine. "My dear mother, wait till the end."

The Baroness, all feeling and all hope, related her visit to Josepha, expressed her sense of the misery of such women in the midst of good fortune, and mentioned Chardin the mattress-picker, the father of the Oran storekeeper, thus showing that her hopes were not groundless.

By seven next morning Lisbeth had driven in a hackney coach to the Quai de la Tournelle, and stopped the vehicle at the corner of the Rue de Poissy.

"Go to the Rue des Bernardins," said she to the driver, "No. 7, a house with an entry and no porter. Go up to the fourth floor, ring at the door to the left, on which you will see 'Mademoiselle Chardin --Lace and shawls mended.' She will answer the door. Ask for the Chevalier. She will say he is out. Say in reply, 'Yes, I know, but find him, for his _bonne_ is out on the quay in a coach, and wants to see him.'"

Twenty minutes later, an old man, who looked about eighty, with perfectly white hair, and a nose reddened by the cold, and a pale, wrinkled face like an old woman's, came shuffling slowly along in list slippers, a shiny alpaca overcoat hanging on his stooping shoulders, no ribbon at his buttonhole, the sleeves of an under-vest showing below his coat-cuffs, and his shirt-front unpleasantly dingy. He approached timidly, looked at the coach, recognized Lisbeth, and came to the window.

"Why, my dear cousin, what a state you are in!"

"Elodie keeps everything for herself," said Baron Hulot. "Those Chardins are a blackguard crew."

"Will you come home to us?"

"Oh, no, no!" cried the old man. "I would rather go to America."

"Adeline is on the scent."

"Oh, if only some one would pay my debts!" said the Baron, with a suspicious look, "for Samanon is after me."

"We have not paid up the arrears yet; your son still owes a hundred thousand francs."

"Poor boy!"

"And your pension will not be free before seven or eight months.--If you will wait a minute, I have two thousand francs here."

The Baron held out his hand with fearful avidity.

"Give it me, Lisbeth, and may God reward you! Give it me; I know where to go."

"But you will tell me, old wretch?"

"Yes, yes. Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be depraved."

"Do not forget the police-court," said Lisbeth, who flattered herself that she would some day see Hulot there.

"No.--It is in the Rue de Charonne," said the Baron, "a part of the town where no fuss is made about anything. No one will ever find me there. I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my back to be shorn any more."

"No, that has been done," said Lisbeth, looking at his coat. "Supposing I take you there."

Baron Hulot got into the coach, deserting Mademoiselle Elodie without taking leave of her, as he might have tossed aside a novel he had finished.

In half an hour, during which Baron Hulot talked to Lisbeth of nothing but little Atala Judici--for he had fallen by degrees to those base passions that ruin old men--she set him down with two thousand francs in his pocket, in the Rue de Charonne, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at the door of a doubtful and sinister-looking house.

"Good-day, cousin; so now you are to be called Thorec, I suppose? Send none but commissionaires if you need me, and always take them from different parts."

"Trust me! Oh, I am really very lucky!" said the Baron, his face beaming with the prospect of new and future happiness.

"No one can find him there," said Lisbeth; and she paid the coach at the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and returned to the Rue Louis-le-Grand in the omnibus.

On the following day Crevel was announced at the hour when all the family were together in the drawing-room, just after breakfast. Celestine flew to throw her arms round her father's neck, and behaved as if she had seen him only the day before, though in fact he had not called there for more than two years.

"Good-morning, father," said Victorin, offering his hand.

"Good-morning, children," said the pompous Crevel. "Madame la Baronne, I throw myself at your feet! Good Heavens, how the children grow! they are pushing us off the perch--'Grand-pa,' they say, 'we want our turn in the sunshine.'--Madame la Comtesse, you are as lovely as ever," he went on, addressing Hortense.--"Ah, ha! and here is the best of good money: Cousin Betty, the Wise Virgin."

"Why, you are really very comfortable here," said he, after scattering these greetings with a cackle of loud laughter that hardly moved the rubicund muscles of his broad face.

He looked at his daughter with some contempt.

"My dear Celestine, I will make you a present of all my furniture out of the Rue des Saussayes; it will just do here. Your drawing-room wants furnishing up.--Ha! there is that little rogue Wenceslas. Well, and are we very good children, I wonder? You must have pretty manners, you know."

"To make up for those who have none," said Lisbeth.

"That sarcasm, my dear Lisbeth, has lost its sting. I am going, my dear children, to put an end to the false position in which I have so long been placed; I have come, like a good father, to announce my approaching marriage without any circumlocution."

"You have a perfect right to marry," said Victorin. "And for my part, I give you back the promise you made me when you gave me the hand of my dear Celestine--"

"What promise?" said Crevel.

"Not to marry," replied the lawyer. "You will do me the justice to allow that I did not ask you to pledge yourself, that you gave your word quite voluntarily and in spite of my desire, for I pointed out to you at the time that you were unwise to bind yourself."

"Yes, I do remember, my dear fellow," said Crevel, ashamed of himself. "But, on my honor, if you will but live with Madame Crevel, my children, you will find no reason to repent.--Your good feeling touches me, Victorin, and you will find that generosity to me is not unrewarded.--Come, by the Poker! welcome your stepmother and come to the wedding."

"But you have not told us the lady's name, papa," said Celestine.

"Why, it is an open secret," replied Crevel. "Do not let us play at guess who can! Lisbeth must have told you."

"My dear Monsieur Crevel," replied Lisbeth, "there are certain names we never utter here--"

"Well, then, it is Madame Marneffe."

"Monsieur Crevel," said the lawyer very sternly, "neither my wife nor I can be present at that marriage; not out of interest, for I spoke in all sincerity just now. Yes, I am most happy to think that you may find happiness in this union; but I act on considerations of honor and good feeling which you must understand, and which I cannot speak of here, as they reopen wounds still ready to bleed----"

The Baroness telegraphed a signal to Hortense, who tucked her little one under her arm, saying, "Come Wenceslas, and have your bath! --Good-bye, Monsieur Crevel."

The Baroness also bowed to Crevel without a word; and Crevel could not help smiling at the child's astonishment when threatened with this impromptu tubbing.

"You, monsieur," said Victorin, when he found himself alone with Lisbeth, his wife, and his father-in-law, "are about to marry a woman loaded with the spoils of my father; it was she who, in cold blood, brought him down to such depths; a woman who is the son-in-law's mistress after ruining the father-in-law; who is the cause of constant grief to my sister!--And you fancy that I shall seem to sanction your madness by my presence? I deeply pity you, dear Monsieur Crevel; you have no family feeling; you do not understand the unity of the honor which binds the members of it together. There is no arguing with passion--as I have too much reason to know. The slaves of their passions are as deaf as they are blind. Your daughter Celestine has too strong a sense of her duty to proffer a word of reproach."

"That would, indeed, be a pretty thing!" cried Crevel, trying to cut short this harangue.

"Celestine would not be my wife if she made the slightest remonstrance," the lawyer went on. "But I, at least, may try to stop you before you step over the precipice, especially after giving you ample proof of my disinterestedness. It is not your fortune, it is you that I care about. Nay, to make it quite plain to you, I may add, if it were only to set your mind at ease with regard to your marriage contract, that I am now in a position which leaves me with nothing to wish for--"

"Thanks to me!" exclaimed Crevel, whose face was purple.

"Thanks to Celestine's fortune," replied Victorin. "And if you regret having given to your daughter as a present from yourself, a sum which is not half what her mother left her, I can only say that we are prepared to give it back."

"And do you not know, my respected son-in-law," said Crevel, striking an attitude, "that under the shelter of my name Madame Marneffe is not called upon to answer for her conduct excepting as my wife--as Madame Crevel?"

"That is, no doubt, quite the correct thing," said the lawyer; "very generous so far as the affections are concerned and the vagaries of passion; but I know of no name, nor law, nor title that can shelter the theft of three hundred thousand francs so meanly wrung from my father!--I tell you plainly, my dear father-in-law, your future wife is unworthy of you, she is false to you, and is madly in love with my brother-in-law, Steinbock, whose debts she had paid."

"It is I who paid them!"

"Very good," said Hulot; "I am glad for Count Steinbock's sake; he may some day repay the money. But he is loved, much loved, and often--"

"Loved!" cried Crevel, whose face showed his utter bewilderment. "It is cowardly, and dirty, and mean, and cheap, to calumniate a woman! --When a man says such things, monsieur, he must bring proof."

"I will bring proof."

"I shall expect it."

"By the day after to-morrow, my dear Monsieur Crevel, I shall be able to tell you the day, the hour, the very minute when I can expose the horrible depravity of your future wife."

"Very well; I shall be delighted," said Crevel, who had recovered himself.

"Good-bye, my children, for the present; good-bye, Lisbeth."

"See him out, Lisbeth," said Celestine in an undertone.

"And is this the way you take yourself off?" cried Lisbeth to Crevel.

"Ah, ha!" said Crevel, "my son-in-law is too clever by half; he is getting on. The Courts and the Chamber, judicial trickery and political dodges, are making a man of him with a vengeance!--So he knows I am to be married on Wednesday, and on a Sunday my gentleman proposes to fix the hour, within three days, when he can prove that my wife is unworthy of me. That is a good story!--Well, I am going back to sign the contract. Come with me, Lisbeth--yes, come. They will never know. I meant to have left Celestine forty thousand francs a year; but Hulot has just behaved in a way to alienate my affection for ever."

"Give me ten minutes, Pere Crevel; wait for me in your carriage at the gate. I will make some excuse for going out."

"Very well--all right."

"My dears," said Lisbeth, who found all the family reassembled in the drawing-room, "I am going with Crevel: the marriage contract is to be signed this afternoon, and I shall hear what he has settled. It will probably be my last visit to that woman. Your father is furious; he will disinherit you--"

"His vanity will prevent that," said the son-in-law. "He was bent on owning the estate of Presles, and he will keep it; I know him. Even if he were to have children, Celestine would still have half of what he might leave; the law forbids his giving away all his fortune.--Still, these questions are nothing to me; I am only thinking of our honor. --Go then, cousin," and he pressed Lisbeth's hand, "and listen carefully to the contract."

Twenty minutes after, Lisbeth and Crevel reached the house in the Rue Barbet, where Madame Marneffe was awaiting, in mild impatience, the result of a step taken by her commands. Valerie had in the end fallen a prey to the absorbing love which, once in her life, masters a woman's heart. Wenceslas was its object, and, a failure as an artist, he became in Madame Marneffe's hands a lover so perfect that he was to her what she had been to Baron Hulot.

Valerie was holding a slipper in one hand, and Steinbock clasped the other, while her head rested on his shoulder. The rambling conversation in which they had been engaged ever since Crevel went out may be ticketed, like certain lengthy literary efforts of our day, "_All rights reserved_," for it cannot be reproduced. This masterpiece of personal poetry naturally brought a regret to the artist's lips, and he said, not without some bitterness:

"What a pity it is that I married; for if I had but waited, as Lisbeth told me, I might now have married you."

"Who but a Pole would wish to make a wife of a devoted mistress?" cried Valerie. "To change love into duty, and pleasure into a bore."

"I know you to be so fickle," replied Steinbock. "Did I not hear you talking to Lisbeth of that Brazilian, Baron Montes?"

"Do you want to rid me of him?"

"It would be the only way to hinder his seeing you," said the ex-sculptor.

"Let me tell you, my darling--for I tell you everything," said Valerie --"I was saving him up for a husband.--The promises I have made to that man!--Oh, long before I knew you," said she, in reply to a movement from Wenceslas. "And those promises, of which he avails himself to plague me, oblige me to get married almost secretly; for if he should hear that I am marrying Crevel, he is the sort of man that --that would kill me."

"Oh, as to that!" said Steinbock, with a scornful expression, which conveyed that such a danger was small indeed for a woman beloved by a Pole.

And in the matter of valor there is no brag or bravado in a Pole, so thoroughly and seriously brave are they all.

"And that idiot Crevel," she went on, "who wants to make a great display and indulge his taste for inexpensive magnificence in honor of the wedding, places me in difficulties from which I see no escape."

Could Valerie confess to this man, whom she adored, that since the discomfiture of Baron Hulot, this Baron Henri Montes had inherited the privilege of calling on her at all hours of the day or night; and that, notwithstanding her cleverness, she was still puzzled to find a cause of quarrel in which the Brazilian might seem to be solely in the wrong? She knew the Baron's almost savage temper--not unlike Lisbeth's --too well not to quake as she thought of this Othello of Rio de Janeiro.

As the carriage drove up, Steinbock released Valerie, for his arm was round her waist, and took up a newspaper, in which he was found absorbed. Valerie was stitching with elaborate care at the slippers she was working for Crevel.

"How they slander her!" whispered Lisbeth to Crevel, pointing to this picture as they opened the door. "Look at her hair--not in the least tumbled. To hear Victorin, you might have expected to find two turtle-doves in a nest."

"My dear Lisbeth," cried Crevel, in his favorite position, "you see that to turn Lucretia into Aspasia, you have only to inspire a passion!"

"And have I not always told you," said Lisbeth, "that women like a burly profligate like you?"

"And she would be most ungrateful, too," said Crevel; "for as to the money I have spent here, Grindot and I alone can tell!"

And he waved a hand at the staircase.

In decorating this house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc d'Herouville had placed Josepha's villa. But Crevel, incapable of understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had found it impossible to embody his architectural dream.

The difference between Josepha's house and that in the Rue Barbet was just that between the individual stamp on things and commonness. The objects you admired at Crevel's were to be bought in any shop. These two types of luxury are divided by the river Million. A mirror, if unique, is worth six thousand francs; a mirror designed by a manufacturer who turns them out by the dozen costs five hundred. A genuine lustre by Boulle will sell at a public auction for three thousand francs; the same thing reproduced by casting may be made for a thousand or twelve hundred; one is archaeologically what a picture by Raphael is in painting, the other is a copy. At what would you value a copy of a Raphael? Thus Crevel's mansion was a splendid example of the luxury of idiots, while Josepha's was a perfect model of an artist's home.

"War is declared," said Crevel, going up to Madame Marneffe.

She rang the bell.

"Go and find Monsieur Berthier," said she to the man-servant, "and do not return without him. If you had succeeded," said she, embracing Crevel, "we would have postponed our happiness, my dear Daddy, and have given a really splendid entertainment; but when a whole family is set against a match, my dear, decency requires that the wedding shall be a quiet one, especially when the lady is a widow."

"On the contrary, I intend to make a display of magnificence _a la_ Louis XIV.," said Crevel, who of late had held the eighteenth century rather cheap. "I have ordered new carriages; there is one for monsieur and one for madame, two neat coupes; and a chaise, a handsome traveling carriage with a splendid hammercloth, on springs that tremble like Madame Hulot."

"Oh, ho! _You intend?_--Then you have ceased to be my lamb?--No, no, my friend, you will do what _I_ intend. We will sign the contract quietly--just ourselves--this afternoon. Then, on Wednesday, we will be regularly married, really married, in mufti, as my poor mother would have said. We will walk to church, plainly dressed, and have only a low mass. Our witnesses are Stidmann, Steinbock, Vignon, and Massol, all wide-awake men, who will be at the mairie by chance, and who will so far sacrifice themselves as to attend mass.

"Your colleague will perform the civil marriage, for once in a way, as early as half-past nine. Mass is at ten; we shall be at home to breakfast by half-past eleven.

"I have promised our guests that we will sit at table till the evening. There will be Bixiou, your old official chum du Tillet, Lousteau, Vernisset, Leon de Lora, Vernou, all the wittiest men in Paris, who will not know that we are married. We will play them a little trick, we will get just a little tipsy, and Lisbeth must join us. I want her to study matrimony; Bixiou shall make love to her, and --and enlighten her darkness."

For two hours Madame Marneffe went on talking nonsense, and Crevel made this judicious reflection:

"How can so light-hearted a creature be utterly depraved? Feather-brained, yes! but wicked? Nonsense!"

"Well, and what did the young people say about me?" said Valerie to Crevel at a moment when he sat down by her on the sofa. "All sorts of horrors?"

"They will have it that you have a criminal passion for Wenceslas --you, who are virtue itself."

"I love him!--I should think so, my little Wenceslas!" cried Valerie, calling the artist to her, taking his face in her hands, and kissing his forehead. "A poor boy with no fortune, and no one to depend on! Cast off by a carrotty giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas is my poet, and I love him as if he were my own child, and make no secret of it. Bah! your virtuous women see evil everywhere and in everything. Bless me, could they not sit by a man without doing wrong? I am a spoilt child who has had all it ever wanted, and bonbons no longer excite me.--Poor things! I am sorry for them!

"And who slandered me so?"

"Victorin," said Crevel.

"Then why did you not stop his mouth, the odious legal macaw! with the story of the two hundred thousand francs and his mamma?"

"Oh, the Baroness had fled," said Lisbeth.

"They had better take care, Lisbeth," said Madame Marneffe, with a frown. "Either they will receive me and do it handsomely, and come to their stepmother's house--all the party!--or I will see them in lower depths than the Baron has reached, and you may tell them I said so! --At last I shall turn nasty. On my honor, I believe that evil is the scythe with which to cut down the good."

At three o'clock Monsieur Berthier, Cardot's successor, read the marriage-contract, after a short conference with Crevel, for some of the articles were made conditional on the action taken by Monsieur and Madame Victorin Hulot.

Crevel settled on his wife a fortune consisting, in the first place, of forty thousand francs in dividends on specified securities; secondly, of the house and all its contents; and thirdly, of three million francs not invested. He also assigned to his wife every benefit allowed by law; he left all the property free of duty; and in the event of their dying without issue, each devised to the survivor the whole of their property and real estate.

By this arrangement the fortune left to Celestine and her husband was reduced to two millions of francs in capital. If Crevel and his second wife should have children, Celestine's share was limited to five hundred thousand francs, as the life-interest in the rest was to accrue to Valerie. This would be about the ninth part of his whole real and personal estate.

Lisbeth returned to dine in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, despair written on her face. She explained and bewailed the terms of the marriage-contract, but found Celestine and her husband insensible to the disastrous news.

"You have provoked your father, my children. Madame Marneffe swears that you shall receive Monsieur Crevel's wife and go to her house," said she.

"Never!" said Victorin.

"Never!" said Celestine.

"Never!" said Hortense.

Lisbeth was possessed by the wish to crush the haughty attitude assumed by all the Hulots.

"She seems to have arms that she can turn against you," she replied. "I do not know all about it, but I shall find out. She spoke vaguely of some history of two hundred thousand francs in which Adeline is implicated."

The Baroness fell gently backward on the sofa she was sitting on in a fit of hysterical sobbing.

"Go there, go, my children!" she cried. "Receive the woman! Monsieur Crevel is an infamous wretch. He deserves the worst punishment imaginable.--Do as the woman desires you! She is a monster--she knows all!"

After gasping out these words with tears and sobs, Madame Hulot collected her strength to go to her room, leaning on her daughter and Celestine.

"What is the meaning of all this?" cried Lisbeth, left alone with Victorin.

The lawyer stood rigid, in very natural dismay, and did not hear her.

"What is the matter, my dear Victorin?"

"I am horrified!" said he, and his face scowled darkly. "Woe to anybody who hurts my mother! I have no scruples then. I would crush that woman like a viper if I could!--What, does she attack my mother's life, my mother's honor?"

"She said, but do not repeat it, my dear Victorin--she said you should all fall lower even than your father. And she scolded Crevel roundly for not having shut your mouths with this secret that seems to be such a terror to Adeline."

A doctor was sent for, for the Baroness was evidently worse. He gave her a draught containing a large dose of opium, and Adeline, having swallowed it, fell into a deep sleep; but the whole family were greatly alarmed.

Early next morning Victorin went out, and on his way to the Courts called at the Prefecture of the Police, where he begged Vautrin, the head of the detective department, to send him Madame de Saint-Esteve.

"We are forbidden, monsieur, to meddle in your affairs; but Madame de Saint-Esteve is in business, and will attend to your orders," replied this famous police officer.

On his return home, the unhappy lawyer was told that his mother's reason was in danger. Doctor Bianchon, Doctor Larabit, and Professor Angard had met in consultation, and were prepared to apply heroic remedies to hinder the rush of blood to the head. At the moment when Victorin was listening to Doctor Bianchon, who was giving him, at some length, his reasons for hoping that the crisis might be got over, the man-servant announced that a client, Madame de Saint-Esteve, was waiting to see him. Victorin left Bianchon in the middle of a sentence and flew downstairs like a madman.

"Is there any hereditary lunacy in the family?" said Bianchon, addressing Larabit.

The doctors departed, leaving a hospital attendant, instructed by them, to watch Madame Hulot.

"A whole life of virtue!----" was the only sentence the sufferer had spoken since the attack.

Lisbeth never left Adeline's bedside; she sat up all night, and was much admired by the two younger women.

"Well, my dear Madame de Saint-Esteve," said Victorin, showing the dreadful old woman into his study and carefully shutting the doors, "how are we getting on?"

"Ah, ha! my dear friend," said she, looking at Victorin with cold irony. "So you have thought things over?"

"Have you done anything?"

"Will you pay fifty thousand francs?"

"Yes," replied Victorin, "for we must get on. Do you know that by one single phrase that woman has endangered my mother's life and reason? So, I say, get on."

"We have got on!" replied the old woman.

"Well?" cried Victorin, with a gulp.

"Well, you do not cry off the expenses?"

"On the contrary."

"They run up to twenty-three thousand francs already."

Victorin looked helplessly at the woman.

"Well, could we hoodwink you, you, one of the shining lights of the law?" said she. "For that sum we have secured a maid's conscience and a picture by Raphael.--It is not dear."

Hulot, still bewildered, sat with wide open eyes.

"Well, then," his visitor went on, "we have purchased the honesty of Mademoiselle Reine Tousard, a damsel from whom Madame Marneffe has no secrets--"

"I understand!"

"But if you shy, say so."

"I will play blindfold," he replied. "My mother has told me that that couple deserve the worst torments--"

"The rack is out of date," said the old woman.

"You answer for the result?"

"Leave it all to me," said the woman; "your vengeance is simmering."

She looked at the clock; it was six.

"Your avenger is dressing; the fires are lighted at the _Rocher de Cancale_; the horses are pawing the ground; my irons are getting hot. --Oh, I know your Madame Marneffe by heart!--Everything is ready. And there are some boluses in the rat-trap; I will tell you to-morrow morning if the mouse is poisoned. I believe she will be; good evening, my son."

"Good-bye, madame."

"Do you know English?"

"Yes."

"Well, my son, thou shalt be King. That is to say, you shall come into your inheritance," said the dreadful old witch, foreseen by Shakespeare, and who seemed to know her Shakespeare.

She left Hulot amazed at the door of his study.

"The consultation is for to-morrow!" said she, with the gracious air of a regular client.

She saw two persons coming, and wished to pass in their eyes a pinchbeck countess.

"What impudence!" thought Hulot, bowing to his pretended client. _

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