Cousin Bette

  ‘Here are the papers,’ replied Bette; ‘and if I am not to lose my three thousand two hundred and ten francs, this scoundrel must be put in prison.’

  ‘Ah! I told you so!’ exclaimed the oracle of the Quartier Saint-Denis.

  The firm of Rivet, successor to Pons Brothers, was still established in the rue des Mauvaises-Paroles, in the former Langeais mansion, built by that illustrious family at the time when noble families lived in the neighbourhood of the Louvre.

  ‘Indeed I have been calling down blessings on you, on my way here!’ answered Lisbeth.

  ‘If it so happens that he suspects nothing, he will be locked up by four in the morning,’ said the magistrate, consulting his calendar to verify the hour of sunrise; ‘but not tomorrow, the day after, for he can’t be imprisoned without a notification that he is to be arrested by means of an order with a warrant. So…’

  ‘What a stupid law,’ said Cousin Bette, ‘for the debtor can make off.’

  ‘He has a good right to,’ replied the magistrate, with a smile. ‘So this is how –’

  ‘Oh, for that matter, I can take the paper,’ Bette interrupted him. ‘I’ll take it to him and tell him that I have been obliged to raise money, and that the lender required this formality. I know my Pole, he will not even unfold the paper, he’ll light his pipe with it.’

  ‘Ah! not bad, not bad, Mademoiselle Fischer! Well, set your mind at rest, we’ll get this affair fixed up. But wait a minute! It’s not enough just to lock up a man; people only indulge in that luxury of the law for the sake of getting their money back. Who will pay you?’

  ‘The people who give him money.’

  ‘Ah, yes! I was forgetting that the Minister of War has given him the commission for the monument of one of our clients. Ah! this firm has supplied many a uniform for General Montcornet. It didn’t take him long to blacken them in cannon smoke, that soldier! A brave man! And he paid on the nail!’

  A Marshal of France may have saved the Emperor or his country, but ‘He paid on the nail’ will always be the finest encomium a tradesman can pronounce on him.

  ‘Well then, I’ll see you on Saturday, Monsieur Rivet. You shall have your tassels then. By the way, I am leaving the rue du Doyenné and going to live in the rue Vanneau.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. I didn’t like to see you living in that hole, which I must say, in spite of my aversion to anything that smacks of Opposition views, disgraces, yes, is a disgrace to the Louvre and the place du Carrousel! I worship Louis-Philippe. He is my idol, he is the august and perfect representative of the class on which he has founded his throne, and I’ll never forget what he has done for the trimming trade by re-establishing the National Guard.…’

  ‘When I hear you talking like this,’ said Lisbeth, ‘I wonder why you aren’t a Deputy.’

  ‘They’re afraid of my attachment to the royal house,’ replied Rivet. ‘My political enemies are the King’s. Ah! his is a noble character, an admirable family. In a word,’ he went on, returning to his theme, ‘he is our ideal – in principles, direction of the country’s economy, everything! But the completion of the Louvre was one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, to which no limit was set; and we’re left, I must say, with the heart of Paris in a deplorable state. It’s because I am a moderate, strictly middle-of-the-road man, that I would like to see the middle of Paris in a different state. Your district makes one shudder. You would have had your throat cut there sooner or later.… Well, I see that your Monsieur Crevel has been nominated Major of his Legion. I hope that we are to have the making of his big epaulettes for him.’

  ‘I am dining there today. I’ll send him to see you.’

  Lisbeth’s belief was that she would have her Livonian to herself, because she assumed that she would be cutting all his means of communication with the outer world. When he was no longer doing any work, the artist would be forgotten, and be like a man buried alive in a vault, where she would be the only one to go to see him. So she had two days of happiness, for she hoped to inflict a mortal blow on the Baroness and her daughter.

  To reach Monsieur Crevel’s house, which was in the rue des Saussayes, she went by the pont du Carrousel, the quai Voltaire, the quai d’Orsay, the rue Bellechasse, the rue de l’Université, the pont de la Concorde, and the avenue de Marigny. This illogical route was traced by the logic of passion, which is always excessively hard on the legs. While she was walking along the quays, Cousin Bette watched the the right bank of the Seine, loitering and going very slowly. Her reasoning proved correct. She had left Wenceslas getting dressed; she thought that as soon as she was out of the way the lover would go to call on the Baroness by the shortest route. And, in fact, while she was lingering by the parapet of the quai Voltaire, gazing across the river and walking in spirit on the other side, she caught sight of the artist coming from the Tuileries, making for the pont Royal. Her route joined her faithless friend’s there, and she was able to follow him without being seen, for lovers rarely look back. She accompanied him as far as Madame Hulot’s house, and saw him go in with the air of a habitual visitor.

  At this final proof, confirming Madame Marneffe’s confidences, Lisbeth was beside herself.

  She arrived at the house of the newly-elected Major in the state of mind in which murders are committed, and found old Crevel in his drawing-room, waiting for his children, the young Monsieur and Madame Hulot.

  But Célestin Crevel is such a naïve and perfect specimen of the Parisian climber that it is difficult to enter the house of this fortunate successor to César Birotteau without due ceremony. Célestin Crevel is a whole world in himself. And, besides, much more than Rivet he deserves the honour of having his portrait painted, because of the importance of the part he plays in this domestic drama.

  Have you observed how readily, in childhood or at the beginning of our social life, we set up a model for ourselves, spontaneously and often unawares? So a bank clerk dreams, as he enters his manager’s drawing-room, of possessing one just like it. If he makes his way, twenty years later it will not be the luxury then in fashion that he will want to display in his house, but the out-of-date luxury that fascinated him long before. No one knows how much obvious bad taste this retrospective envy accounts for; and we cannot tell how many wildly foolish actions are due to the secret rivalries that drive men to mirror the type that they have set up as ideal, to consume their energies in making themselves a moonshine reflection of someone else. Crevel was Deputy Mayor because his employer had been a Deputy Mayor; he was a major because he had coveted César Birotteau’s epaulettes. And in the same way, because he had been impressed by the marvels created by the architect Grindot at the time when his employer had been carried to the top of fortune’s wheel, Crevel, as he said himself, had ‘never thought twice about it’ when it came to decorating his apartment. He had betaken himself, with his purse open and his eyes shut, to Grindot, an architect by then quite forgotten. Who can tell how long extinct glory may survive, sustained by such post-dated admiration?

  So Grindot had created his white and gold drawing-room hung with red damask, for the thousandth time, there. The rosewood furniture decorated with the usual carving, mediocre in design and execution, had been a product of Parisian workmanship to be proud of, in the provinces, at the time of the Paris Industrial Exhibition. The candlesticks, the sconces, the fender, the chandelier, the clock, were highly ornamented, in pseudo-rococo style. The round table, immovable in the middle of the room, displayed a marble top inlaid with samples of all the antique and Italian marbles in Rome, where this kind of mineralogical map, rather like a tailor’s display card of patterns, is manufactured. It was a centre of attraction for all the parties of bourgeois visitors that Crevel received at regular intervals. Portraits of the late Madame Crevel, Crevel himself, and his daughter and son-in-law from the brush of Pierre Grassou – a painter, popular in middle-class circles, to whom Crevel was indebted for his ridiculous Byronic pose – adorned the walls, painte
d and hung as a matching series. The frames, which had cost a thousand francs apiece, were in keeping with all this café splendour, which would certainly have made a true artist shrug his shoulders.

  Money never misses the slightest occasion to demonstrate its stupidity. Paris would by now contain ten times the treasures of Venice if our retired businessmen had had the instinct for fine things that distinguishes the Italians. Even in our own times, it is possible for a Milanese merchant to leave five hundred thousand francs to the Duomo for the gilding of the colossal Virgin that surmounts its cupola. Canova in his will instructed his brother to build a church costing four millions, and the brother added something from his own pocket. Would a bourgeois citizen of Paris (and they all, like Rivet, have a warm spot for their Paris in their hearts) ever dream of building the spires missing from the towers of Notre-Dame? And yet, consider the sums of money that have reverted to the state from property left without heirs. The whole of Paris might have been made beautiful with the money spent on idiotic follies of moulded stucco, gilded plaster, pretentious sculpture, during the past fifteen years, by persons of Crevel’s kind.

  At the far end of this drawing-room there was a magnificent study, furnished with imitation Boule tables and cabinets. The bedroom, all hung and covered with chintz, also led into the drawing-room. The dining-room was overpoweringly filled with mahogany, in all its handsome weight, and had richly framed views of Switzerland set in the panelling. Old Crevel, whose dream it was to travel in Switzerland, enjoyed possessing that country in paintings until the day when he should see it in reality.

  Crevel, former Deputy Mayor, officer of the National Guard, wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, had, as we see, faithfully reproduced all the grandeur, even the very furniture, of his unfortunate predecessor. Where under the Restoration the one had fallen, the other, quite overlooked, had risen not by any singular stroke of fortune but simply by the force of events. In revolutions as in storms at sea solid worth goes to the bottom, while the current brings light trash floating to the surface. Cesar Birotteau, a royalist and in favour, was an object of envy, and became a target for bourgeois hostility, while the bourgeoisie triumphant saw its own face mirrored in Crevel.

  This apartment, rented for one thousand crowns per annum, stuffed with all the vulgarly fine things that money could buy, occupied the first floor of an old mansion, set between a court and a garden. Everything was in a state of preservation here, like beetles in an entomologist’s cabinet, for Crevel lived here very little.

  These sumptuous premises constituted the official domicile of the ambitious bourgeois. He was waited upon here by a cook and a valet, and hired two servants to help them, and had a grand dinner brought in from Chevet when he entertained political friends, people whom he desired to impress, or his family.

  The seat of Crevel’s real existence, formerly in the rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, where Mademoiselle Héloïse Brisetout used to live, had been transferred, as we have seen, to the rue Chauchat. Every morning, the retired merchant (all ex-shopkeepers call themselves ‘retired merchants’) spent a couple of hours in the rue des Saussayes, attending to his affairs, and gave the rest of his time to Zaïre,* much to Zaïre’s annoyance. Zaïre’s Orosmane (alias Crevel) had a fixed arrangement with Mademoiselle Heloïse: she owed him five hundred francs’ worth of happiness every month, with nothing carried over. Crevel paid for his dinner, and all the extras as well. This contract, with bonuses – for he gave many presents – seemed economical to the ex-lover of the famous singer. On this subject, he was in the habit of saying to widowed merchants who were devoted to their daughters that it was a better bargain to rent horses by the month than to keep your own stable. If one remembers what the porter of the establishment in the rue Chauchat confided to the Baron, however, it seems that Crevel was not spared the expense of either coachman or groom.

  Crevel, as we see, had turned his great affection for his daughter to account, as an advantage in seeking his pleasures. The immorality of his situation was justified on highly moral grounds. In addition, the ex-perfumer acquired from this way of life (doing the done thing, living a free life, being Regency, Pompadour, Maréchal de Richelieu, etc.) a gloss of superiority. Crevel saw himself as a broad-minded man, a gentleman who lived like a minor lord, an open-handed man with no narrowness in his views, and all for the expenditure of some twelve to fifteen hundred francs a month. This attitude was the effect, not of political hypocrisy, but of middle-class vanity, but the result was the same. At the Bourse, Crevel was regarded as a man who saw further than most, and above all, as a gay dog, a convivial soul. In this respect, Crevel considered that he had outdistanced his pace-maker, Birotteau, by about a hundred and fifty yards.

  ‘Well,’ exclaimed Crevel, flying into a rage at the sight of Cousin Bette, ‘so it’s you who are marrying off Mademoiselle Hulot to some young Count that you have been rearing for her by hand?’

  ‘Anyone would suppose that that doesn’t please you!’ retorted Lisbeth, turning a penetrating eye upon him.’ Why are you interested in preventing my cousin from marrying? I hear that you spoiled her chances of marrying Monsieur Lebas’s son.…’

  ‘You are a sensible woman, and know how to keep your mouth shut,’ the worthy Crevel replied. ‘Well, do you imagine that I can ever forgive Monsieur Hulot for the crime he committed in stealing Josépha from me? Especially when by it he turned an honest creature, whom I would have married in the end, in my old age, into a worthless baggage, a play-actress, an opera-singer? Oh, no, never in this life!’

  ‘He’s a good fellow, Baron Hulot, all the same,’ said Cousin Bette.

  ‘A good fellow, very likeable, too likeable!’ agreed Crevel. ‘I don’t wish him any harm; but I want my revenge, and I intend to have it. It’s a notion I’ve got into my head!’

  ‘Has this notion of yours something to do with the fact that you don’t come to visit Madame Hulot any more?’

  ‘That may be.…’

  ‘Ah! So you were courting my cousin?’ said Lisbeth, smiling. ‘I thought as much.’

  ‘And she has treated me like a dog! Worse than that, like a lackey! I’ll go further still, like a political prisoner! But I’ll have my way!’ he said, striking his brow with his clenched fist.

  ‘Poor man, it would be too dreadful for him to find his wife deceiving him, after being cast off by his mistress!’

  ‘Josépha!’ cried Crevel. ‘Josépha has left him, sent him packing, thrown him out? Bravo, Josépha! Josépha, you have avenged me! I will send you two pearls for your ears, my ex-love! This is all news to me, for since I saw you, the day after the fair Adeline last begged me not to darken her door again, I have been at Corbeil, staying with the Lebas, and have only just got back. Héloïse moved heaven and earth to induce me to go to the country, and I have just found out what her little game was: she wanted to have a house-warming party without me, at the rue Chauchat, with artists, barnstormers, literary fellows, I don’t know who all.… She made a fool of me! But I’ll forgive her, for Héloïse makes me laugh. She’s a sort of Déjazet, in a new version. The girl’s a comedian! Just listen to the note I had from her yesterday:

  Dear old chap, I have pitched my tent in the rue Chauchat. I took the precaution of letting some friends dry the plaster out properly first. All goes well. Come when you like, Monsieur. Hagar awaits her Abraham.

  Héloïse will tell me all about it, for she has all the bohemian gossip tripping off her tongue.’

  ‘But my cousin has taken this unpleasantness very well,’ observed Lisbeth.

  ‘That’s not possible!’ said Crevel, stopping short in his pacing to and fro like the pendulum of a clock.

  ‘Monsieur Hulot has reached a certain age,’ Lisbeth pointed out, with malice.

  ‘I know,’ returned Crevel; ‘but we are like one another in one respect; Hulot cannot do without an attachment. He is capable of returning to his wife,’ he said reflectively. ‘That would be a change for him; but farewell my revenge! You sm
ile, Mademoiselle Fischer.… Ah! you know something?…’

  ‘I’m laughing at your ideas,’ Lisbeth replied. ‘Yes, my cousin is still beautiful enough to inspire passion. I should fall in love with her myself, if I were a man.’

  ‘The man who has tasted pleasure once will go to the well again,’ exclaimed Crevel. ‘You’re making fun of me! The Baron must have found some consolation.’

  Lisbeth nodded.

  ‘Well, he’s very lucky to be able to replace Josépha overnight!’ Crevel went on. ‘But I’m not really surprised. He told me once, over supper, that when he was a young man he always had three mistresses so that he should never be caught unprovided for: one that he was on the verge of leaving, the reigning queen, and one that he was courting for the future. He must have kept some gay little shop-girl in reserve in his fish-pond! In his deer-park! He is very Louis XV, the rascal! Oh, what a lucky man he is to be so handsome! All the same, he’s not getting younger, he’s showing signs… he must have taken up with some little working girl.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ answered Lisbeth.

  ‘Ah!’ said Crevel. ‘What would I not give to prevent him from hanging his hat up! I could never hope to cut him out with Josépha. Women like her don’t return to their first love. Besides, as they say, a return is never the same thing. But, Cousin Bette, I would certainly give – that is I would willingly spend – fifty thousand francs to take that big handsome fellow’s mistress away from him and let him see that a fat old papa with a Major’s corporation and the panache of a future Mayor of Paris doesn’t let his girl be snaffled from him without getting even.’

  ‘In the position I am in,’ replied Bette, ‘I have to hear everything and know nothing. You can talk to me freely; I never repeat a word of the things people care to tell me in confidence. What reason should I have to break this rule I follow? If I did, no one would ever trust me again.’