Vanity Fair (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by William Makepeace Thackeray

  She rouged regularly now: and—and her maid got cognac for her besides that which was charged in the hotel bill.

  Perhaps the insults of the men were not, however, so intolerable to her as the sympathy of certain women. Mrs. Crackenbury and Mrs. Washington White passed through Boulogne on their way to Switzerland. (The party were protected by Colonel Horner, young Beaumoris, and of course old Crackenbury, and Mrs. White‘s little girl.) They did not avoid her. They giggled, cackled, tattled, condoled, consoled, and patronized her until they drove her almost wild with rage. To be patronized by them! she thought, as they went away simpering after kissing her. And she heard Beaumoris‘s laugh ringing on the stair, and knew quite well how to interpret his hilarity.

  It was after this visit that Becky, who had paid her weekly bills, Becky who had made herself agreeable to everybody in the house, who smiled at the landlady, called the waiters ‘monsieur‘, and paid the chambermaids in politeness and apologies, what far more than compensated for a little niggardliness in point of money (of which Becky never was free), that Becky, we say, received a notice to quit from the landlord, who had been told by some one that she was quite an unfit person to have at his hotel, where English ladies would not sit down with her. And she was forced to fly into lodgings, of which the dullness and solitude were most wearisome to her.

  Still she held up, in spite of these rebuffs, and tried to make a character for herself, and conquer scandal. She went to church very regularly, and sang louder than anybody there. She took up the cause of the widows of the shipwrecked fishermen, and gave work and drawings for the Quashyboo Mission; she subscribed to the Assembly, and wouldn‘t waltz. In a word, she did everything that was respectable, and that is why we dwell upon this part of her career with more fondness than upon subsequent parts of her history, which are not so pleasant. She saw people avoiding her, and still laboriously smiled upon them; you never could suppose from her countenance what pangs of humiliation she might be enduring inwardly.

  Her history was after all a mystery. Parties were divided about her. Some people, who took the trouble to busy themselves in the matter, said that she was the criminal; whilst others vowed that she was as innocent as a lamb, and that her odious husband was in fault. She won over a good many by bursting into tears about her boy, and exhibiting the most frantic grief when his name was mentioned, or she saw anybody like him. She gained good Mrs. Alderney‘s heart in that way, who was rather the queen of British Boulogne, and gave the most dinners and balls of all the residents there, by weeping when Master Alderney came from Doctor Swishtail‘s academy to pass his holidays with his mother. ‘He and her Rawdon were of the same age, and so like,‘ Becky said, in a voice choking with agony; whereas there was five years‘ difference between the boys‘ ages, and no more likeness between them than between my respected reader and his humble servant. Wenham, when he was going abroad, on his way to Kissingen to join Lord Steyne, enlightened Mrs. Alderney on this point, and told her how he was much more able to describe little Rawdon than his mamma, who notoriously hated him, and never saw him; how he was thirteen years old, while little Alderney was but nine; fair, while the other darling was dark,—in a word, caused the lady in question to repent of her good humour.

  Whenever Becky made a little circle for herself with incredible toils and labour, somebody came and swept it down rudely, and she had all her work to begin over again. It was very hard: very hard; lonely, and disheartening.

  There was Mrs. Newbright, who took her up for some time, attracted by the sweetness of her singing at church, and by her proper views upon serious subjects, concerning which in former days, at Queen‘s Crawley, Mrs. Becky had had a good deal of instruction.—Well, she not only took tracts, but she read them. She worked flannel petticoats for the Quashyboos—cotton nightcaps for the Cocoanut Indians—painted hand-screens for the conversion of the Pope and the Jews—sat under Mr. Rowls on Wednesdays, Mr. Huggleton on Thursdays, attended two Sunday services at church, besides Mr. Bawler, the Darbyite,ug in the evening, and all in vain. Mrs. Newbright had occasion to correspond with the Countess of Southdown about the Warming-pan Fund for the Feejee Islanders (for the management of which admirable charity both these ladies formed part of a female committee), and having mentioned her ‘sweet friend‘, Mrs. Rawdon Crawley, the dowager countess wrote back such a letter regarding Becky, with such particulars, hints, facts, falsehoods, and general commi nations, that intimacy between Mrs. Newbright and Mrs. Crawley ceased forthwith: and all the serious world of Tours, where this misfortune took place, immediately parted company with the reprobate. Those who know the English colonies abroad know that we carry with us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces,uh cayenne-peppers, and other Lares,ui making a little Britain wherever we settle down.

  From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily. From Boulogne to Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen to Tours—trying with all her might to be respectable, and alas! always found out some day or other, and pecked out of the cage by the real daws.

  Mrs. Hook Eagles took her up at one of these places:—a woman without a blemish in her character, and a house in Portman Square. She was staying at the hotel at Dieppe, whither Becky fled, and they made each other‘s acquaintance first at sea, where they were swimming together, and subsequently at the table d‘hôte of the hotel. Mrs. Eagles had heard,—who indeed had not?—some of the scandal of the Steyne affair; but after a conversation with Becky, she pronounced that Mrs. Crawley was an angel, her husband a ruffian, Lord Steyne an unprincipled wretch, as everybody knew, and the whole case against Mrs. Crawley, an infamous and wicked conspiracy of that rascal Wenham. ‘If you were a man of any spirit, Mr. Eagles, you would box the wretch‘s ears the next time you see him at the club,‘ she said to her husband. But Eagles was only a quiet old gentleman, husband to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for geology, and not tall enough to reach anybody‘s ears.

  The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to live with her at her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador‘s wife because she would not receive her protégée, and did all that lay in woman‘s power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

  Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long. It was the same routine every day, the same dullness and comfort, the same drive over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening, the same Blair‘s Sermon of a Sunday night—the same opera always being acted over and over again: Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily for her, young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother, seeing the impression which her little friend made upon him, straightway gave Becky warning.

  Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then the double ménage began to quarrel and get into debt. Then she determined upon a boarding-house existence, and lived for some time at that famous mansion kept by Madame de St. Amour, in the Rue Royale at Paris, where she began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies and fly-blown beauties who frequented her landlady‘s salons. Becky loved society, and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy enough at the period of her boarding-house life. ‘The women here are as amusing as those in May Fair,‘ she told an old London friend who met her—‘only, their dresses are not quite so fresh. The men wear cleaned gloves, and are sad rogues, certainly, but they are not worse than Jack This, and Tom That. The mistress of the house is a little vulgar, but I don‘t think she is so vulgar as Lady—‘ and here she named the name of a great leader of fashion that I would die rather than reveal. In fact, when you saw Madame de St. Amour‘s rooms lighted up of a night, men with plaques and cordonsuj at the écarté tables, and the women at a little distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good society, and that madame was a real countess. Many people did so fancy: and Becky was for a while one of the most dashing ladies of the countess‘s salons.

  But it is probable that her old cr
editors of 1815 found her out and caused her to leave Paris, for the poor little woman was forced to fly from the city rather suddenly; and went thence to Brussels.

  How well she remembered the place! She grinned as she looked up at the little entresol which she had occupied, and thought of the Bareacres family, bawling for horses and flight, as their carriage stood in the porte cochère of the hotel. She went to Waterloo and to Laeken, where George Osborne‘s monument much struck her. She made a little sketch of it. ‘That poor Cupid!‘ she said; ‘how dreadfully he was in love with me, and what a fool he was! I wonder whether little Emmy is alive. It was a good little creature: and that fat brother of hers. I have his funny fat picture still among my papers. They were kind simple people.‘

  At Brussels Becky arrived, recommended by Madame de St. Amour to her friend, Madame la Comtesse de Borodino, widow of Napoleon‘s general, the famous Count de Borodino, who was left with no resource by the deceased hero but that of a table d‘hôte and an écarté table. Second-rate dandies and roués, widow ladies who always have a lawsuit, and very simple English folks, who fancy they see ‘Continental society‘ at these houses, put down their money, or ate their meals, at Madame de Borodino‘s tables. The gallant young fellows treated the company round to champagne at the table d‘hôte, rode out with the women, or hired horses on country excursions, clubbed money to take boxes at the play or the Opera, betted over the fair shoulders of the ladies at the écarté tables, and wrote home to their parents in Devonshire about their felicitous introduction to foreign society.

  Here, as at Paris, Becky was a boarding-house queen: and ruled in select pensions. She never refused the champagne, or the bouquets, or the drives into the country, or the private boxes; but what she preferred was the écarté at night,—and she played audaciously. First she played only for a little, then for five-franc pieces, then for napoleons, then for notes: then she would not be able to pay her month‘s pension: then she borrowed from the young gentlemen: then she got into cash again, and bullied Madame de Borodino, whom she had coaxed and wheedled before: then she was playing for ten sous at a time, and in a dire state of poverty: then her quarter‘s allowance would come in, and she would pay off Madame de Borodino‘s score: and would once more take the cards against Monsieur de Rossignol, or the Chevalier de Raff.

  When Becky left Brussels, the sad truth is, that she owed three months‘ pension to Madame de Borodino, of which fact, and of the gambling, and of the drinking, and of the going down on her knees to the Reverend Mr. Muff, Ministre Anglican, and borrowing money of him, and of her coaxing and flirting with Milor Noodle, son of Sir Noodle, pupil of the Rev. Mr. Muff, whom she used to take into her private room, and of whom she won large sums at écarté—of which fact, I say, and of a hundred of her other knaveries, the Countess de Borodino informs every English person who stops at her establishment, and announces that Madame Rawdon was no better than a vipère.uk

  So our little wanderer went about setting up her tent in various cities of Europe, as restless as Ulysses or Bampfylde Moore Carew.ul Her taste for disrespectability grew more and more remarkable. She became a per fect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it would make your hair stand on end to meet.

  There is no town of any mark in Europe but it has its little colony of English raffs—men whose names Mr. Hemp, the officer, reads out periodically at the Sheriffs‘ Court—young gentlemen of very good family often, only that the latter disowns them; frequenters of billiard-rooms and estaminets,um patrons of foreign races and gaming-tables. They people the debtors‘ prisons—they drink and swagger—they fight and brawl—they run away without paying—they have duels with French and German officers—they cheat Mr. Spoony at écarté—they get the money, and drive off to Baden in magnificent britzkas—they try their infallible martingale,un and lurk about the tables with empty pockets, shabby bullies, penniless bucks, until they can swindle a Jew banker with a sham bill of exchange, or find another Mr. Spoony to rob. The alternations of splendour and misery which these people undergo are very queer to view. Their life must be one of great excite ment. Becky—must it be owned?—took to this life, and took to it not unkindly. She went about from town to town among these Bohemians. The lucky Mrs. Rawdon was known at every play-table in Germany. She and Madame de Cruchecassée kept house at Florence together. It is said she was ordered out of Munich; and my friend Mr. Frederic Pigeon avers that it was at her house at Lausanne that he was hocussed at supper and lost eight hundred pounds to Major Loder and the Honourable Mr. Deuceace. We are bound, you see, to give some account of Becky‘s biography: but of this part, the less, perhaps, that is said the better.

  They say, that when Mrs. Crawley was particularly down on her luck, she gave concerts and lessons in music here and there. There was a Madame de Raudon who certainly had a matinée musicaleuo at Wildbad, accompanied by Herr Spoff, premier pianist to the Hospodar of Wallachia, and my little friend Mr. Eaves, who knew everybody, and had travelled everywhere, always used to declare that he was at Strasburg in the year 1830, when a certain Madame Rebecque made her appearance in the opera of the Dame Blanche,up giving occasion to a furious row in the theatre there. She was hissed off the stage by the audience, partly from her own incompetency, but chiefly from the ill-advised sympathy of some persons in the parquetuq (where the officers of the garrison had their admissions); and Eaves was certain that the unfortunate débutante in question was no other than Mrs. Rawdon Crawley.

  She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this earth. When she got her money she gambled; when she had gambled it she was put to shifts to live; who knows how or by what means she succeeded? It is said that she once was seen at St. Petersburg, but was summarily dismissed from that capital by the police: so that there cannot be any possibility of truth in the report that she was a Russian spy at Teplitz and Vienna afterwards. I have even been informed, that at Paris she discovered a relation of her own, no less a person than her maternal grandmother, who was not by any means a Montmorenci, but a hideous old box-opener at a theatre on the Boulevards. The meeting between them, of which other persons, as it is hinted elsewhere, seem to have been acquainted, must have been a very affecting interview. The present historian can give no certain details regarding the event.

  It happened at Rome once, that Mrs. de Rawdon‘s half-year‘s salary had just been paid into the principal banker‘s there, and, as everybody who had a balance of above five hundred scudiur was invited to the balls which this prince of merchants gave during the winter, Becky had the honour of a card, and appeared at one of the Prince and Princess Polonia‘s splendid evening entertainments. The princess was of the family of Pompili, lineally descended from the second King of Rome, and Egeria of the house of Olympus, while the prince‘s grandfather, Alessandro Polonia, sold wash-balls,us essences, tobacco, and pocket-handkerchiefs, ran errands for gentlemen, and lent money in a small way. All the great company in Rome thronged to his saloons—princes, dukes, ambassadors, artists, fiddlers, monsignori, young bears with their leadersut—every rank and condition of man. His halls blazed with light and magnificence; were resplendent with gilt frames (containing pictures) and dubious antiques: and the enormous gilt crown and arms of the princely owner, a gold mushroom on a crimson field (the colour of the pocket-handkerchiefs which he sold), and the silver fountain of the Pompili family shone all over the roof, doors, and panels of the house, and over the grand velvet baldaquins prepared to receive popes and emperors.

  So Becky, who had arrived in the diligence from Florence, and was lodged at an inn in a very modest way, got a card for Prince Polonia‘s entertainment, and her maid dressed her with unusual care, and she went to this fine ball leaning on the arm of Major Loder, with whom she happened to be travelling at the time (the same man who shot Prince Ravioli at Naples the next year, and was caned by Sir John Buckskin for carrying four kings in his hat besides those which he used in playing at écarté)—and this pair went into the rooms together, and Becky saw a number of old faces, whi
ch she remembered in happier days, when she was not innocent, but not found out. Major Loder knew a great number of foreigners, keen-looking whiskered men with dirty striped ribbons in their button-holes, and a very small display of linen; but his own countrymen, it might be remarked, eschewed the major. Becky, too, knew some ladies here and there—French widows, dubious Italian countesses, whose husbands had treated them ill—faugh—what shall we say, we who have moved among some of the finest company of Vanity Fair, of this refuse and sediment of rascals? If we play, let it be with clean cards, and not with this dirty pack. But every man who has formed one of the innumerable army of travellers has seen these marauding irregulars hanging on, like Nym and Pistol,uu to the main force; wearing the king‘s colours, and boasting of his commission, but pillaging for themselves, and occasionally gibbeted by the roadside.

  Well, she was hanging on the arm of Major Loder, and they went through the rooms together, and drank a great quantity of champagne at the buffet, where the people, and especially the major‘s irregular corps, struggled furiously for refreshments, of which when the pair had had enough, they pushed on until they reached the duchess‘s own pink velvet saloon, at the end of the suite of apartments (where the statue of the Venus is, and the great Venice looking-glasses, framed in silver), and where the princely family were entertaining their most distinguished guests at a round table at supper. It was just such a little select banquet as that of which Becky recollected that she had partaken at Lord Steyne‘s—and there he sat at Polonia‘s table, and she saw him.