Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  Just when Cousin Bette, the best workwoman in the Pons establishment where she was in charge of the workroom, might have set up in business for herself, the Empire fell to its ruin. The olive branch of peace borne in the hands of the Bourbons alarmed Lisbeth; she was apprehensive of a slump in this trade, which would in future have only eighty-six Departments to exploit instead of a hundred and thirty-three, to say nothing of its loss of clients through the enormous reduction of the Army. Taking fright at the uncertain prospects of the industry, she refused the offers made her by the Baron, who thought her mad. She justified this opinion by quarrelling with Monsieur Rivet, the purchaser of the Pons Brothers’ business, with whom the Baron had proposed to set her up in partnership, and she went back to being just an ordinary workwoman.

  Meanwhile the Fischer family had relapsed into the precarious situation from which Baron Hulot had rescued it.

  Ruined by the disaster of Fontainebleau, the three Fischer brothers had fought with the Volunteer Corps of 1815 with the recklessness of despair. The eldest, Lisbeth’s father, was killed. Adeline’s father, sentenced to death by a court-martial, fled to Germany and died at Trèves in 1820. The youngest, Johann, came to Paris to entreat the help of the queen of the family, who was said to eat off gold and silver, and who never appeared on public occasions without diamonds in her hair and round her neck, diamonds that were as big as hazelnuts and had been given to her by the Emperor. Johann Fischer, at that time aged forty-three, received a sum of ten thousand francs from Baron Hulot in order to start a small business supplying forage at Versailles, the contract for which was obtained from the Ministry of War by the private influence of friends whom the former Commissary general still had there.

  These family misfortunes, Baron Hulot’s fall from favour, the knowledge borne in upon her that she counted for little in the immense turmoil of contending people, ambitions, and enterprises that makes Paris both a heaven and an inferno, intimidated Bette. The young woman at that time gave up all idea of competing with or rivalling her cousin, whose many and various points of superiority she had realized; but envy remained hidden in her heart, like a plague germ which may come to life and devastate a city if the fatal bale of wool in which it lies hidden is ever opened. From time to time, indeed, she would say to herself: ‘Adeline and I are of the same blood; our fathers were brothers. Yet she lives in a mansion, and I in a garret.’ However, year in year out, Lisbeth received presents from the Baroness and the Baron, on her birthday and on New Year’s Day. The Baron, who was exceedingly kind to her, paid for her winter firewood. Old General Hulot entertained her to dinner one day a week. Her place was always laid at her cousin’s table. They laughed at her, certainly, but they never blushed to acknowledge her. They had in fact enabled her to live independently in Paris, where she led the life that suited her.

  Lisbeth was, indeed, very apprehensive of possible restriction of her liberty. Should her cousin invite her to live under her roof… Bette at once caught sight of the halter of domestic servitude. Several times the Baron had found a solution to the difficult problem of arranging a marriage for her; but on each occasion, although the prospect attracted her at first, she soon refused to entertain it, afraid that she might see her lack of education, ignorance, and want of fortune, cast in her face. Then, when the Baroness suggested that she should live with their uncle and look after his household in place of his housekeeper, who must be expensive, she replied that she would make a match in that position even less easily.

  Cousin Bette had that kind of oddity in her cast of mind that one notices in people who have developed late, and among savages, who think much but say little. Her native peasant intelligence had, however, acquired through her workshop conversations, in her constant contacts with the men and women of her trade, a Parisian keenness of edge. This young woman, who had a temperament notably resembling the Cor-sican temperament, in whom the active instincts of a strong nature were frustrated, would have found a happy outlet in protecting some less robust-natured man. In her years of living in the capital, the capital had changed her superficially, yet the Parisian veneer left her spirit of strongly-tempered metal to rust. Endowed with an insight that had become profoundly penetrating, as are all men and women who live genuinely celibate lives, with the original twist which she gave to all her ideas, she would have appeared formidable in any other situation. With ill will, she could have sown discord in the most united family.

  In the early days, when she had still cherished some hopes, the secret of which she had confided to no one, she had brought herself to wear stays, to follow the fashion, and had then achieved a brief season of splendour during which the Baron considered her marriageable. Lisbeth was at that time the piquante nut-brown maid of old French romance. Her piercing eye, her olive skin, her reed-like slenderness, might have brought her an admirer in the shape of a major on half-pay, but she was content – so she said, laughing – with her own admiration. She came indeed to find her life a sufficiently pleasant one, once she had eliminated the need to concern herself about material comfort, for she went out to dinner every evening at houses in town, after a day of work that began at sunrise. With dinner provided, she had only her lunches and her rent to pay for. In addition she was given most of her clothes, and many acceptable provisions for her household supplies such as sugar, coffee, wine, etc.

  By 1837, after twenty-seven years of an existence largely paid for by the Hulot family and her Uncle Fischer, Cousin Bette had resigned herself to being a nobody and allowed herself to be treated with scant ceremony. She refused, of her own accord, to go to large dinner-parties because she preferred the intimacy of family gatherings in which she had her own importance; and so she avoided wounds to her pride. Where-ever she went she seemed to be at home: in the houses of General Hulot, Crevel, the younger Hulots, Rivet – the successor to the Pons brothers, with whom she had made up her differences and who welcomed and made much of her – and with the Baroness. She knew how to ingratiate herself with the servants in these houses, too, giving them small tips from time to time and never forgetting to spend a few minutes chatting with them before going into the drawing-room. The absence of patronage with which she put herself frankly on their level earned her the servants’ good will, which it is absolutely essential for parasites to have. ‘She’s an excellent woman, and a really good sort tool’ – that was what everyone said about her. Her willingness to oblige, unlimited when not taken for granted, like her air of friendly good nature, was of course a necessary consequence of her position. She had come at last to understand what life was like in her world, having seen herself at everyone’s mercy. In the wish to be generally agreeable, she laughed in sympathy with the young people, who liked her because of that kind of adulation in her manner that always beguiles the young. She guessed and made herself the champion of the things that lay near their hearts; she was their go-between. She struck them as being the best possible person to confide in, since she had not the right to shake her head at them. Her absolute discretion earned her the trust of older people too, for, like Ninon, she had some masculine qualities. As a general rule, confidences are made to persons below one socially rather than to those above. Much more readily than we can employ our superiors in secret affairs, we make use of our inferiors, who consequently become committed sharers in our most hidden thoughts; they are present at our deliberations. Now, Richelieu considered that he had achieved success when he had the right to take part in privy councils. Everyone believed this poor spinster to be so dependent that she had no alternative but to keep her mouth shut. Cousin Bette herself called herself the family confessional. Only the Baroness, with the memory of the harsh usage that she had received in childhood from this cousin, then stronger – though younger – than she, still felt some mistrust. In any case, in shame, she would not have confided her domestic sorrows to anyone but God.

  Here, perhaps, it should be remarked that the Baroness’s house preserved all its former splendour in the eyes of Cousin Bette, who
was not impressed, as the newly rich ex-perfumer had been, by the signs of distress written on the worn chairs, the discoloured hangings, and the split silk. The furniture with which we live is in the same case as ourselves. Seeing ourselves every day, we come, like the Baron, to think ourselves little changed, still young, while other people see on our heads hair turning to chinchilla, V-shaped furrows on our foreheads, and great pumpkins in our bellies. These rooms were still lit for Cousin Bette by the Bengal lights of Imperial victories and shone with perennial splendour.

  With the years, Cousin Bette had developed some very odd old-maidish quirks. For example, instead of following the fashion, she tried to make fashion fit her peculiarities and conform to what she liked, which was always a long way behind the mode. If the Baroness gave her a pretty new hat, or a dress cut in the style of the moment, Cousin Bette at once took it home and remodelled it according to her own ideas, completely spoiling it in the process of producing a garment or headgear reminiscent of Empire styles and the clothes she used to wear long ago in Lorraine. Her thirty-franc hat after that treatment was just a shapeless head-covering, and her dress like something out of the rag-bag. Bette was, in such matters, as obstinate as a mule; she was determined to please herself and consult no one else, and she thought herself charming in her own mode. Certainly the assimilation of the style of the day to her own style was harmonious, giving her from head to foot the appearance of an old maid; but it made her such a figure of fun that, with the best will in the world, no one could invite her on smart occasions.

  The stubborn, crotchety, independent spirit, the inexplicable inability to conform, of this young woman for whom the Baron had on four different occasions found a possible husband (a clerk in his department, a regimental adjutant, an army contractor, a retired army captain), and who had also refused an embroiderer who had become a rich man since theft, had earned for her the nickname ‘Nanny’, which the Baron jokingly gave her.

  But that nickname applied only to the superficial oddities, to those variations from the norm which, in one another’s eyes, we all exhibit within society’s conventions. This woman, more closely observed, would have revealed the fiercely ungovernable side of the peasant character. She was still the child who had tried to tear her cousin’s nose off, and who, if she had not learned rational behaviour, would perhaps have killed her in a paroxysm of jealousy. She held in check, only by her knowledge of law and the world, the primitive impetuous directness with which country people, like savages, translate emotion into action.

  In this directness, perhaps, lies the whole difference between primitive and civilized man. The savage has only emotions. The civilized man has emotions plus ideas. In the savage, the brain receives, one may conclude, few impressions, so that he is at the mercy of one all-pervading emotion; whereas thoughts, in the civilized man, act upon his feelings and alter them. He is alive to a host of interests and many emotions, while the savage entertains only one concept at a time. The momentary ascendancy that a child holds over his parents is due to a similar cause, but it ceases when his wish is satisfied, whereas in primitive people this cause operates constantly.

  Cousin Bette, a primitive peasant from Lorraine and not without a strain of treachery, had a nature of this savage kind, a kind that is commoner among the masses than is generally supposed and that may explain their behaviour during revolutions.

  At the time when the curtain rises on this drama, if Cousin Bette had chosen to allow herself to be well dressed, if she had learned to follow the fashion – like Parisian women – through every change of style, she would have been presentable and acceptable; but she remained as stiff as a stick. Now, without charm or grace a woman might as well not exist in Paris. Her black head of hair, her fine hard eyes, the rigid lines of her face, the Spanish darkness of her complexion – which made her look like a figure by Giotto, and which a true Parisian would have set off and used as assets – above all her strange clothes, gave Cousin Bette such a bizarre appearance that at times she reminded one of the monkeys dressed up as women that children, in Savoy, lead about on a string. As she was well known in the households connected by family ties among whom she moved, as she restricted her social movements to that circle and liked to keep herself to herself, her oddities no longer surprised anyone and, out-of-doors, were lost to view in the ceaseless maelstrom of life thronging Parisian streets, where it is only pretty women that attract attention.

  Hortense’s laughter at that moment was caused by a triumph over an obstinate refusal of Cousin Bette’s. She had just caught her out in an admission which she had been trying for three years to wring from her. However secretive an old maid may be, there is one emotion that will always make her break silence, and that is vanity! For three years Hortense had been extremely inquisitive about a certain topic, and had bombarded her cousin with questions, which, indeed, revealed her completely innocent mind: she wanted to know why her cousin had not married. Hortense, who knew the story of the five rejected suitors, had built up her own little romance. She believed that Cousin Bette was cherishing a secret passion in her heart, and a half-serious game of attack and riposte had developed between them. Hortense would speak of ‘marriageable young girls like us!’ meaning herself and her cousin. Cousin Bette had on several occasions retorted provocatively: ‘How do you know that I haven’t a sweetheart?’ So Cousin Bette’s sweetheart, real or fictitious, was now a centre of interest and a subject for playful teasing. On Bette’s last visit, after three years of this light-hearted warfare, Hortense had greeted her with the words:

  ‘How is your sweetheart?’

  ‘Only middling,’ she had replied. ‘He’s not very well, poor young man.’

  ‘Ah! He’s delicate, is he?’ the Baroness had asked, with a laugh.

  ‘Yes, indeed. He is so fair.… A coal-black creature like me had to fall in love, of course, with a fair man, the colour of moonlight.’

  ‘But who is he? What does he do?’ said Hortense. ‘Is he a prince?’

  ‘A prince of tools, just as I’m a queen of spools. Can a poor girl like me expect to be loved by a rich man with a house of his own, and money in government stocks, or a duke and peer, or some Prince Charming out of one of your fairy tales?’

  ‘Oh, how I should like to see him!’ Hortense had exclaimed, smiling.

  ‘To find out what the man who can love an old nanny looks like?’ asked Cousin Bette.

  ‘He must be some monster of an old clerk with a goatee beard!’ said Hortense, looking at her mother.

  ‘Well, that’s where you are mistaken, Mademoiselle!’

  ‘Ah, then you really have a sweetheart?’ exclaimed Hortense triumphantly.

  ‘Just as really as you have not!’ her cousin had retorted, apparently piqued.

  ‘Well, if you have a sweetheart, Bette, why don’t you marry him?’ the Baroness had said, exchanging a look with her daughter. ‘It’s three years now since we first heard of him, and you have had plenty of time to find out what he is like. If he has remained faithful to you, you ought not to prolong a situation that he must find trying. It’s a question of conscience. And then, even if he is young, it is time that you were thinking of providing a crutch for old age.’

  Cousin Bette had stared at the Baroness, and, seeing that she was laughing, had replied:

  ‘That would be hunger marrying thirst. He works for his living as I work for mine. If we had children they would have to work for theirs.… No, no, ours is a love of the soul. It costs less!’

  ‘Why do you hide him?’ Hortense asked.

  ‘He’s not presentable,’ replied the old maid, laughing.

  ‘Do you love him?’ the Baroness asked.

  ‘Certainly I do! I love him for himself alone, the angel. I have been carrying his image in my heart for four years now.’

  ‘Well, if you love him for himself,’ the Baroness had said gravely, ‘if he really exists, you are treating him shockingly badly. You don’t know what it means to love.’

  ‘We
all know that from birth!’ said her cousin.

  ‘No, some women love and yet remain egoists, which is what you are doing!’

  Cousin Bette had bowed her head, and the look in her eyes would have made anyone who saw it shudder, but she kept her gaze fixed on her reel of silk.

  ‘If you introduced your sweetheart to us, Hector might be able to find him a place, and help him to make his way in the world.’

  ‘That is not possible,’ Cousin Bette had said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s a sort of Pole, a refugee…’

  ‘A conspirator?’ exclaimed Hortense. ‘How lucky you are! Has he had exciting adventures?’

  ‘He fought for Poland. He was a teacher in the school whose students started the revolt, and as it was the Grand Duke Constantine who placed him there he can’t hope to be pardoned.’

  ‘Teacher of what?’

  ‘Art!’

  ‘And he came to Paris after the revolt had been suppressed?’

  ‘In 1833. He had crossed Germany on foot.…’

  ‘Poor young man! And how old is he?’

  ‘He was only just twenty-four at the time of the insurrection. He is twenty-nine now.…’

  ‘Fifteen years younger than you,’ the Baroness had said then.

  ‘How does he live?’ asked Hortense.

  ‘By his talent.…’

  ‘Ah! he gives lessons?’

  ‘No,’ Bette had answered, ‘he takes them, and hard ones too!’

  ‘And what’s his Christian name? Has he a nice one?’

  ‘Wenceslas!’

  ‘What imaginations old maids have!’ the Baroness had exclaimed. ‘From the way you talk, anyone would believe that you were telling the truth, Lisbeth.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Mama? He’s a Pole brought up on the knout, and Bette reminds him of that little amenity of his native land!’