by Eugène Sue
“Another cowardice that you are meditating,” cried Hubert, exasperated. “Let me receive your workingman!”
“I thank you, brother-in-law, for your offer. Please leave me alone. I shall know how to guard my dignity.” Then, addressing Gertrude.
“Show Monsieur Lebrenn in.”
“We shall leave you, my friend,” said Madam Lebrenn to her husband. “Come, brother, let us find Charlotte. I count on your influence to dissuade her from this match, and to bring her back to herself.”
Hubert took the arm of his sister, and left the room; but not without saying to himself as he did so, “By heaven, I shall not lose the opportunity of speaking my mind to that workingman, if only for the honor of the family. I shall have my chance to talk.”
As the wife and brother-in-law of lawyer Desmarais disappeared through one of the side-doors of the room, John Lebrenn was shown in by Gertrude through the principal entrance. Desmarais, at the sight of John, controlled and hid his anger under a mask of cordial hospitality. He took two steps to meet the young man, and clasped him affectionately by the hand:
“With what pleasure do I see you again, my dear friend! Your hurt, I hope, is not serious? We were quite alarmed about you.”
“Thanks to God, my wound is slight; and I am truly touched by the interest you show in me.”
“Nothing surprising, my dear John. Do you not know that I am your friend?”
“It is just to throw myself upon your friendship that I have come to see you.”
“Well, well! And what is it?”
“It is my duty at this solemn moment to answer you without circumlocution, monsieur,” said John Lebrenn in a voice filled with emotion. “I love your daughter. She has returned my love, and I am come to ask of you her hand.”
“What do I hear!” exclaimed advocate Desmarais, feigning extreme surprise.
“Mademoiselle Charlotte, I am certain, will approve the request that I now prefer to you, and which accords with the sentiments she has shown me.”
“So, my dear John,” continued the attorney with a paternal air that seemed to augur the best for the young workman, “my daughter and you — you love, and you have sworn to belong to each other? So stands the situation?”
“Six months ago, Monsieur Desmarais, we pledged ourselves to each other.”
“After all, there is nothing in this love that should surprise me,” continued Desmarais, as if talking to himself. “Charlotte has a hundred times heard me appreciate, as they deserve to be, the character, the intelligence, the excellent conduct of our dear John. She knows that I recognize no social distinction between man and man, except only that of worth. All are equal in my eyes, whatever the accidents of their birth or fortune. Nothing more natural — I should rather say, nothing more inevitable — than this love of my daughter for my young and worthy friend.”
“Ah, monsieur,” cried the young mechanic, his eyes filling with tears and his voice shaken with inexpressible gratitude, “you consent, then, to our union?”
“Well!” replied Monsieur Desmarais, continuing to affect imperturbable good-fellowship, “if the marriage pleases my daughter, it shall be according to her desire. I would not go against her wishes.”
“Oh, please, monsieur, ask mademoiselle at once!”
“It is needless, my dear John, perfectly needless; for, between ourselves, a thousand circumstances until now insignificant now flock to my memory. There is no necessity for my questioning my daughter Charlotte to know that she loves you as much as you love her, my young friend. I am already convinced of it!”
“Hold, monsieur — pardon me, I can hardly believe what I hear. Words fail me to express my joy, my gratitude, my surprise!”
“And what, my dear John, have you to be surprised at?”
“At seeing this marriage meet with not a single objection on your part, monsieur. I am astonished, in the midst of my joy. The language so touching, so flattering, in which you frame your consent, doubles its value to me.”
“Good heaven! And nothing is more simple than my conduct. Neither I nor my wife — I answer to you for her consent — can raise any objection to your marriage. Is it the question of fortune? I am rich, you are poor — what does that matter? Is the value of men measured by the franc mark? Is not, in short, your family as honorable, in other words, as virtuous as mine, my dear John? Are not both our families equally without reproach and without stain? Are not—”
And Desmarais stopped as if smitten with a sudden and terrible recollection. His features darkened, and expressed a crushing sorrow. He hid his face in his hands and murmured:
“Great God! What a frightful memory! Ah, unhappy young man! Unhappy father that I am!”
Apparently overcome, Desmarais threw himself into an arm-chair, still holding his hands before his eyes as if to conceal his emotion. Stunned and alarmed, John Lebrenn gazed at the lawyer with inexpressible anguish. A secret presentiment flashed through his mind, and he said to Charlotte’s father as he drew closer to him, “Monsieur, explain the cause of the sudden emotion under which I see you suffering.”
“Leave me, my poor friend, leave me! I am annihilated, crushed!”
John Lebrenn, more and more uneasy, contemplated Charlotte’s father in silent anguish, and failed to notice that one of the side doors of the room was half-opened by Monsieur Hubert, who warily put his head through the crack, muttering to himself, “While my sister and her daughter are in their apartment, let me see what is going on here, where my intervention may come in handy.”
After a long silence which John feared to break, advocate Desmarais rose. He pretended to wipe away a tear, then, stretching out his arms to John, he said in a smothered voice:
“My friend, we are very unfortunate.”
The young artisan, already much moved by the anxieties the scene had aroused, responded to Desmarais’s appeal. He threw himself into the latter’s arms, saying solicitously:
“Monsieur, what ails you? I know not the cause of the chagrin, which, all so sudden, seems to have struck you; but, whatever it be, I shall fight it with all my spirit.”
“Your tender compassion, my friend, gives me consolation and comfort,” said Desmarais in a broken voice, pressing John several times to his heart; and seeming to make a violent effort to master himself, he resumed in firmer tones, “Come, my friend, courage. We shall need it, you and I, to touch upon so sad a matter.”
“Monsieur, I know not what you are about to say, and yet I tremble.”
“Ah, at least, my dear John, our friendship will still be left to us. It will remain our refuge in our common sorrow.”
“But to what purpose?”
Perceiving out of the corner of his eye the nonplussed countenance of John Lebrenn, who stood pale and speechless, advocate Desmarais heaved another lamentable sigh, pulled out his handkerchief and again buried his face in his hands.
“What the devil is my brother-in-law getting at?” exclaimed Hubert to himself, cautiously introducing his head again through the half-open door, and observing the young artisan. The latter, dejected, his head bowed, his gaze fixed, was in a sort of daze, and searched in vain in his troubled brain for the true significance of Desmarais’s lamentations. Finally, desirous at any price to escape from the labyrinth of anxiety that tortured his soul and filled his heart with anguish, he said falteringly to the lawyer:
“Monsieur, it is impossible for me to picture the apprehension with which I am tortured. I adjure you, in the name of the friendship you have up to this moment shown me, to explain yourself clearly. What is this cause for our common sorrow? You have just appealed to my courage; I have courage. But, I pray you, let me at least know the blow with which I, with which we, are threatened!”
“You are right, my dear John. Excuse my weakness. Let us face the truth like men of heart, howsoever hard it may be.” Desmarais took the hands of the young artisan in his own and contemplated him with an expression of fatherly tenderness. “You would have rendered certain
the happiness of my only child, of that I am sure. But this marriage is impossible!”
Seeing the young artisan, at these words, grow mortally pale, and stagger, the lawyer supported him, and continued in his mock-paternal voice: “John, I counted on you to help us bear the blow that was to fall on us. Now you weaken—”
Young Lebrenn pulled himself together, summoned back his spirits, and in a voice which he strove hard to render firm, said: “Now I am calmer. Be pleased to inform me how these projects of marriage, first hailed by you with such kindness, are now suddenly become impossible?”
“Helas! — because of all the joy — which your proposal heaped upon me, I forgot, as you did — a sad circumstance. And then, all of a sudden the memory — came back to me. Your family — is it, like mine, stainless? Alas, no! Your father wrote — printed — published a pamphlet in which he recorded that his daughter — your sister — had been the mistress of King Louis XV. You know my susceptibility where honor is concerned! My daughter may never enter the family which bears that indelible blot.”
“Ah, by my faith! The trick is great!” muttered Hubert, the financier, stepping out of the neighboring room and slowly entering the parlor without at first being perceived by either John Lebrenn or Desmarais.
Hearing only the words of the father of his beloved one, John at first reeled with dismay. But his good sense quickly coming to his aid, and remembering the doubts of his father and Victoria as to Desmarais’s consent to his daughter’s union with an ironsmith’s apprentice, he detected the refusal hypocritically veiled under the excuse employed by the advocate. Cruel was the young man’s disillusionment. It dashed at once his dearest hopes, and his confidence, until then implicit, in the sincerity of the principles professed by the deputy of the Third Estate. The double shock was so severe that John, refusing, like all generous characters, to believe evil, began to cast about for excuses for the advocate’s conduct. The following thought sprang up in his head: Perhaps Desmarais had learned of the consequences of the debauchery of Louis XV; perhaps he knew that Victoria had been held in the lupanar in King Louis’s “Doe Park,” and had later been imprisoned in the Repentant Women. If he knew all this, John thought, Desmarais could not help, as Victoria had told him, but refuse, upon a very pardonable scruple, to grant him his daughter.
Preserving, then, his hope, not indeed of overcoming the objections of Charlotte’s father, but of being saved from having to regard him as a double-dealer and a traitor, John controlled his emotions, raised his head, and turned his eyes square upon Desmarais. Only then did he perceive the presence of banker Hubert, the sight of whom always inspired him with the profoundest antipathy. Surprised and pained, above all, at the presence of this personage at so delicate a juncture, John remarked that the financier conversed in a low and sardonic voice with his brother-in-law.
“Monsieur,” said John to Desmarais, “you will recognize, I hope, that our interview is of such a nature that it can not continue except between you and me?”
“From which it seems that Citizen John Lebrenn politely shows me the door!” retorted Hubert, with a mocking leer.
“Sir,” impatiently answered the young mechanic, “I desire to remain alone with Monsieur Desmarais, to discuss family matters.”
“I would beg to remark to — Citizen John Lebrenn, that my brother-in-law has no secrets from me, in what touches the honor of our family. I shall, therefore, assist at this conference.”
Desmarais, at first highly opposed to the unforeseen presence of the banker, soon resigned himself gracefully to the intrusion, hoping to find in it a pretext for hastening to an end an interview which was becoming quite embarrassing to him. Accordingly, he made haste to say very affectionately to the young artisan:
“My dear friend, I have acquainted you with the cause which bars a marriage that would otherwise have been the embodiment of my views. Let us never again refer to a subject justly so painful to us both.”
“Pardon me, monsieur,” returned the young workman firmly; “but before taking my leave of you, I have just one more question to ask, and which you will please to answer.”
“Speak, my dear John, what is it?”
“You refuse me the hand of Mademoiselle Charlotte because my sister was the mistress of Louis XV?”
“Alack, yes. Your father himself, without naming, it is true, his daughter, stigmatized, denounced to the public indignation that horrible fact. He told how your unfortunate sister, having been kidnapped at the age of eleven and a half, left the Doe Park only to disappear forever. Since that sad day, no one has ever heard of the poor creature, who embarked in all probability for America, there to await the end of her unhappy life. That is my opinion.”
“So, monsieur, you share our belief on the subject of my sister’s disappearance? The victim has been sacrificed?”
“Eh, surely! But whence your insistence on the subject, my dear John?”
The voice, the features of the lawyer proved his sincerity. He was manifestly ignorant of Victoria’s prolonged sojourn in the royal pleasure-house at Versailles, and her subsequent imprisonment in the Repentant Women — fatal circumstances, which in John’s mind, might have explained Desmarais’s refusal. The last illusion that John Lebrenn still hugged to heart now vanished. But containing his indignation, he addressed the advocate: “And so, monsieur, my marriage with Mademoiselle Charlotte is impossible, solely because my sister, snatched from the bosom of her family by a procuress at the age of eleven, was violated by Louis XV?”
“Is not that good and sufficient cause?”
“And is not Citizen Lebrenn satisfied?” put in Hubert, who for several minutes had been with difficulty bottling up his rage. “The dismissal is given in good form, by heaven! You have nothing to do but retire.”
“Please, my dear John, attach no importance to the temper of my brother-in-law,” interposed advocate Desmarais, extending his hand to the young man. “Excuse, I beseech you, his thrusts; I should be very sorry to have you depart from my house under a false impression.”
“Citizen Desmarais, I long trusted in your friendship,” replied John, without taking the hand that the lawyer held out to him. “I am not the dupe of the vain pretext with which you color your refusal. It is not the brother of the unhappy child dishonored by Louis XV that you repulse; it is the artisan, the ironsmith.”
“Ah, my dear John, I protest, in the name of our common principles, against such a supposition. You are in error!”
“Blue death! brother-in-law, have the courage of your opinion!” shouted Hubert, unable to contain himself. “Dare to tell the truth! Such hypocrisy and cowardice revolt me.”
“Once more, brother-in-law, mix in your own affairs!” cried the advocate, exasperated. “I know what I am saying! I find intolerable your pretension to dictate my answers to me.”
John Lebrenn turned to the financier, as if to address his words through him to the lawyer. “You, Citizen Hubert, are sincere in your aversion, in your disdain for us. You are an enemy of the working class, but an open one. We can esteem you while we join battle with you. You are a man of courage, in spite of your prejudices. Alas, the people and the bourgeoisie, united and pursuing the same object, would be invincible and would change the face of this old world. But the bourgeois mistrust the workers and turn against them, when they should sustain them, guide them, direct them in the uprisings whose object is the reconquest of their common rights. The people have so far borne witness by their conduct to their affection, their trust in the bourgeoisie. They have had, they will have faith in it to the end. But sad and irreparable will be the evil for you and for us, if one day the bourgeoisie, having utilized the people to overcome the nobility, should seek to reign in the shadow of a fictitious royalty; to substitute its own privileges for those we will have helped it to overthrow; to perjure itself by merely changing the style of our yoke; and refuse to satisfy our legitimate demands. That day, we shall fight the bastard royalty of the shekel, the bourgeois oligarchy, eve
n as we now fight the royalty of divine right and the aristocracy!”
“And hunger will defeat you, vile mechanics! For the moment always comes when you must resume the yoke of forced labor!”
Hardly had Hubert hurled this threat of savage exultation at John Lebrenn, when the door flew open, and Charlotte, her eyes red and filled with tears, rushed in, followed by her mother.
The change in Charlotte’s features, her grief-stricken appearance, gripped John Lebrenn’s heart as if in a vise. Lawyer Desmarais and his brother-in-law seemed as much irritated as astonished at the presence of the young girl. She, after a momentary struggle, spoke straight to Desmarais in a firm and even voice:
“I have just learned from mother that Monsieur John Lebrenn came to ask of you my hand, and that your intention was to answer the request with a refusal—”
“Yes, niece,” interjected Hubert, “your father has just now refused your hand to Monsieur Lebrenn. We all oppose the union, which would be a disgrace to our family.”
“Father, have you so made up your mind?”
“Daughter, reasons which it is useless to inform you of, oppose, indeed, this marriage. I can not give my consent to it.”
“Do these reasons attaint, in any way, the honor, probity, or conduct of Monsieur John Lebrenn?” asked the young girl unfalteringly.
“Monsieur Lebrenn is an upright man; but the lawyer Desmarais can not give, will not give, his daughter in marriage to an ironsmith’s apprentice. It is out of all reason.”
“So, then, father, you refuse for no other reason than prejudice against the inequality of condition between Monsieur Lebrenn and me?”
“No other reason; but that suffices to make this union impossible.”
“Monsieur John Lebrenn,” then said Charlotte, advancing toward the young artisan and tendering him her hand with a gesture full of grace and dignity, “in the presence of God, who sees me and hears me, — you have my pledge! I shall wed none other but you. I shall be your wife, — or die a maid.”
