Marneffe, seeing his wife in her glory at the centre of the circle of admirers over whom she ruled as queen, like the sun of a solar system, seemed, in the eyes of the world, to have felt his passion for her spring to life again – he was now obviously quite mad about her. If this jealousy made Marneffe, the lord and master, something of a spoil-sport, it added enormously to the value of Valérie’s favours. At the same time, Marneffe manifested a trust in his Director that degenerated into a compliant good nature verging on the ridiculous. The only person to arouse fierce resentment in him was Crevel!
Marneffe, destroyed by the debaucheries characteristic of great cities, described by the Roman poets, but for which our modern squeamishness has no name, had grown hideous as a wax anatomical figure, but this walking disease was clothed in fine cloth, walked on its hop-pole legs in an elegant pair of trousers. The emaciated chest was dressed in scented white linen, and musk overlaid the fetid odours of human corruption. Crevel was intimidated by this personification of the hideousness of vice: dying, yet sporting red-heeled shoes – for Valérie had seen to it that Marneffe’s dress was in keeping with his situation, his promotion, and his Cross– and he could not easily meet the deputy head clerk’s pale-eyed gaze. Marneffe was the Mayor’s nightmare. As he became aware of the singular power that Lisbeth and his wife had conferred upon him, the malicious scamp diverted himself by using it, by playing upon it as if it were an instrument; and, drawing-room games of cards being the last resource of a mind as worn-out as his body, he fleeced Crevel, who thought himself obliged to ‘go easy’ with the respectable official ‘whom he was deceiving’.
Seeing Crevel as a child in the hands of that vile and hideous mummy, whose depravity was a sealed book to the Mayor, and more important, seeing him so completely despised by Valérie, who laughed at Crevel as if he had been created for her entertainment, the Baron believed, apparently, that he had little to fear from any rivalry in that quarter, and often invited Crevel to dinner.
Valérie, protected by these two passions standing sentinel on either side, and by a jealous husband, was the cynosure of all eyes, excited everyone’s desires, in the sphere in which she shone. Thus, while keeping up appearances, in about three years she had attained the difficult success that courtesans seek by means of scandal, their audacity, and the glitter of their life in the sun, and that they so rarely achieve. Like a well-cut diamond exquisitely set by Chanor, Valérie’s beauty, once buried in the gloomy depths of the rue du Doyenné, was worth more than its intrinsic value. She broke men’s hearts! Claude Vignon secretly loved Valérie.
This retrospective account, very necessary when people are met again after a three years’ interval, shows Valérie’s balance-sheet. Now that of her associate, Lisbeth, must be considered.
*
In the Marneffe household, Cousin Bette held the position of a relation acting as both companion and housekeeper; but she had none of the humiliations to endure which are most often the lot of poor creatures so unlucky as to be obliged to take those ambiguous situations. Lisbeth and Valérie presented the touching spectacle of a bosom friendship, one of those friendships so close and so unlikely between women that Parisians, always too clever by half, are quick to call scandalous. The contrast between the masculine stiff temperament of the peasant from Lorraine and Valérie’s warm creole indolence gave colour to the calumny. Madame Marneffe, moreover, had unthinkingly lent weight to the gossiping tales by the trouble she took over her friend’s appearance, with an eye to a certain marriage, which was, as we shall see, to complete Lisbeth’s vengeance. A revolutionary change had taken place in Cousin Bette, and Valérie, anxious to reform her way of dressing, had turned it to the best possible account. This strange woman, now properly corseted, cut a figure of slender elegance; she used bandoline lotion on her smooth well-brushed hair, wore her dresses without protest as the dressmaker made them, and fine little boots, and grey silk stockings. Their cost was added, of course, to Valérie’s accounts, and paid for by whoever had the privilege of settling these.
Thus groomed, Bette, still wearing the yellow cashmere shawl, at the end of three years was improved out of all recognition. This other different diamond, a black diamond, the most rare of all, cut by an expert hand and mounted in the setting that suited it, was appreciated at its full value by several ambitious clerks. To see Bette for the first time was to thrill involuntarily at the savage poetic beauty which Valérie’s skill had thrown into relief, by her use of dress to dramatize the appearance of this bitter nun, by the art with which she framed the sharp olive face with its glittering black eyes in heavy bands of jet-black hair and called attention to the stiff narrow-waisted figure. Bette, like one of Cranach’s Virgins, or Van Eyck’s, or a Byzantine Virgin, stepping from the frame, maintained the inflexibility, the erect hieratic carriage of those mysterious figures, which are cousins-german of Isis and the sheath-swathed divinities of the Egyptian sculptors. She was walking granite, basalt, porphyry.
Secure from want for the rest of her days, Bette was in a charming mood; she brought gaiety with her wherever she went to dine. To add to her satisfaction, the Baron paid the rent of her little apartment, furnished, as we know, from the discarded contents of her friend Valérie’s boudoir and sitting-room.
‘After starting life as a hungry nanny, I am ending it now like a lioness,’ she used to say.
She continued to sew the most difficult pieces of passementerie work for Monsieur Rivet, but only, so she said, in order not to have to sit with her hands idle. And yet her life, as we shall see, was exceedingly busy. But it is ingrained in the nature of people come up from the country to be very chary of giving up their means of earning a living; they resemble the Jews in this.
Every morning, very early, Cousin Bette went herself to the central market with the cook. In Bette’s design, the household bills, by which the Baron was being ruined, were to enrich her dear Valérie, and did in fact effectively enrich her.
What mistress of a house has not, since 1838, experienced the disastrous consequences of anti-social doctrines spread among the lower classes by inflammatory writers? The leakage of money through servants is the most serious of all the unnecessary drains upon the family purse. With only very few exceptions, deserving the Montyon prize, chefs and women cooks are domestic robbers, and brazen salaried robbers at that; and the Government complaisantly make themselves receivers of the booty, thus encouraging the tendency to steal, which in cooks is practically given official approval by the ancient jest about ‘waggling the market-basket handle,’ or making sure of one’s cut. Where these women once looked for forty sous to buy their lottery ticket, they now appropriate fifty francs to put in the savings-bank. And yet the cold puritans who amuse themselves by making philanthropic experiments in France imagine that they have raised the moral standards of the common people! Between the market-place and the master’s table the servants have set up their secret toll-bar, and the City of Paris is much less efficient at collecting its import duty than they are at levying their tax upon everything. In addition to charging all foodstuffs with a fifty-per-cent toll, they demand handsome presents from the shopkeepers. The most solidly established tradesmen tremble before their underground power; they all pay up without a word: carriage-builders, jewellers, tailors, and everyone else. If any attempt is made to control them, the servants retaliate with insolence or the costly accidents of deliberate clumsiness. They make inquiries about employers’ characters now, as formerly employers inquired about theirs.
The evil has indeed gone beyond all bounds, and the law-courts are at last beginning to deal with it severely, though ineffectively. Only a law compelling wage-earning servants to hold a workman’s testimonial-book will eradicate it. That would end it as if by magic. If servants were obliged to produce their book, and masters to enter the reasons for dismissal, corruption would undoubtedly receive a powerful check. The heads of government, absorbed in the high politics of the moment, have no idea of the extreme dishonesty of the
lower classes in Paris: it is equalled only by their consuming greed. No statistics are available to reveal the alarming number of twenty-year-old working men who marry cooks of forty or fifty, enriched by theft. One trembles at the thought of the consequences of such unions, considering the possible effects in increase of crime, degeneracy of the race, and unhappy family life. As for the economic consequences of the merely financial loss caused by domestic thieving, they are enormous. The cost of living, doubled in this way, deprives many households of a margin for luxury. Luxury! It is responsible for half the trade of a nation, as well as for life’s elegance. Books and flowers are as necessary as bread to a very great many people.
Lisbeth, who knew all about this shocking imposition on Paris households, had had management of Valérie’s housekeeping in mind when she had promised her support during that terrible scene in the course of which they had sworn to be like sisters. She had therefore brought from the depths of the Vosges to Paris a relative on her mother’s side, a former cook to the Bishop of Nancy, a pious spinster of the strictest honesty. Because she was afraid, nevertheless, of the dangers of her inexperience in Paris, above all the danger of evil counsels, which destroy so many necessarily fragile loyalties, Lisbeth accompanied Mathurine to the central market, and tried to train her in the art of buying.
She taught her to know the proper price of goods in order to command the salesmen’s respect, to include luxuries, fish for example, in the menu when they were least expensive, to watch prices and be able to forecast a rise in order to buy before it occurred. In Paris such housewifely thrift is most necessary for the domestic economy. As Mathurine was paid good wages and given generous presents, she was sufficiently attached to the household to delight in making bargains on its behalf. For some time now her judgement had been almost equal to Lisbeth’s, and Lisbeth thought her sufficiently well-trained, sufficiently dependable, to do the marketing alone, except on the days when Valérie was entertaining guests – which, by the way, were frequent, and for this reason:
The Baron had at first observed unimpeachable propriety; but his passion for Madame Marneffe was, within a very short time, so ardent, so all-absorbing, that he became anxious to spend as little time away from her as possible. He began by dining with her four times a week, and soon found it delightful to dine there every day. Six months after his daughter’s marriage, he was paying an allowance of two thousand francs a month for his board. Madame Marneffe invited to her table any friends that the dear Baron wished to entertain. Dinner, then, was always prepared for six, for the Baron might bring in three guests without warning. Lisbeth, by her good management, solved the difficult problem of keeping a lavish table for an expenditure of one thousand francs, so handing over a thousand francs a month to Madame Marneffe. As Valérie’s wardrobe was amply paid for by both Crevel and the Baron, the two friends made another thousand francs a month on that.
In this way, the candid, transparently open creature had already amassed about a hundred and fifty thousand francs. She had saved her yearly allowance and monthly benefits, used them as capital to invest, and increased them by vast profits gained through Crevel’s generosity in making the capital of his ‘little duchess’ share in the successes of his own financial speculation. Crevel had initiated Valérie into the jargon and procedure of the Bourse; and, like all Parisian women, she had rapidly become more adept than her master. Lisbeth, who never spent a sou of her twelve hundred francs, whose rent and clothes were paid for, who did not need to put her hand into her pocket for anything, also possessed a little capital of five or six thousand francs, which Crevel, in a fatherly way, made the most of for her.
The Baron’s love and Crevel’s were, all the same, a heavy burden for Valérie. On the day on which this drama is taken up again, Valérie, irritated by one of those crisis-provoking incidents that are rather like the bell whose clamour induces swarming bees to settle, had gone upstairs to Lisbeth. She wanted to indulge in the soothingly long-drawn lamentations, the equivalent of sociably smoked cigarettes, with which women alleviate the minor miseries of their lives.
‘Lisbeth, my love, two hours of Crevel this morning! What a frightful bore! Oh, how I wish I could send you in my place!’
‘That can’t be done, unfortunately,’ said Lisbeth, with a smile. ‘I’m an old maid for life.’
‘Belonging to those two old men! There are times when I’m ashamed of myself! Ah, if my poor mother could only see me!’
‘No need to talk to me as if I were Crevel,’ replied Lisbeth.
‘Tell me, my own little Bette, you don’t despise me, do you?’
‘Ah! if I had been pretty… such adventures I would have had!’ exclaimed Lisbeth. ‘That’s how I excuse you.’
‘But you would only have listened to your heart,’ said Madame Marneffe, sighing.
‘Bah!’ replied Lisbeth. ‘Marneffe is a corpse that they’ve forgotten to bury, the Baron is practically your husband, Crevel is your admirer. As I see it, you’re like any other married woman, perfectly in order.’
‘No, that’s not the point, my sweet, my trouble’s different. But you don’t choose to understand me.…’
‘Oh, yes, I understand you all right!’ said the peasant from Lorraine. ‘For what you are hinting at is part of my revenge. But what do you want me to do? I’m doing my best.’
‘Loving Wenceslas to the pitch of pining away for him!’ cried Valérie, flinging her arms wide, ‘and not being able to contrive to see him – how can I bear it? Hulot suggests that he should come to dinner here, and my artist declines I He doesn’t know how he’s idolized, that monster of a man. What has his wife got? A good figure, that’s all! She’s beautiful, there’s no denying; but I am a good deal more than that, I should think!’
‘Set your mind at rest, my child; he shall come,’ said Lisbeth, in the tone of voice nurses use to impatient children. ‘I’ll see to that.’
‘But when?’
‘Perhaps this week.’
‘Here’s a kiss for you.’
As may be seen, these two women were in complete accord. All Valérie’s actions, even the most apparently wilful, her pleasures, her fits of the sulks, were decided upon only after mature deliberation on the part of the two women.
Lisbeth, who found this courtesan existence strangely exciting, advised Valérie in everything, and pursued the course of her vengeance with relentless logic. She adored Valérie, moreover; she had made a daughter of her, a friend, someone to love. She found in her a creole docility, a voluptuary’s yielding temper. She chatted with her all morning, with much more pleasure than she had taken in talking to Wenceslas. They could laugh together over the mischief they were plotting and the stupidity of men; and count up in company the accumulating interest of their respective treasure hoards. In both her new plot and her new friendship, Lisbeth had indeed found an outlet for her energy much more rewarding than her insensate love for Wenceslas. The delights of gratified hatred are among the fiercest and most ardent that the heart can feel. Love is the gold, but hate is the iron of that mine of the emotions that lies within us. And then Lisbeth saw beauty in Valérie, in all its splendour, the beauty that she worshipped as we adore what can never be our own, embodied in a person much more sympathetic than Wenceslas, who towards her had always been cold and unresponsive.
By the end of nearly three years Lisbeth was beginning to see some progress in the undermining tunnel, in the driving of which her whole existence was consumed and the energies of her mind absorbed. Lisbeth plotted; Madame Marneffe acted. Madame Marneffe was the axe, Lisbeth the hand that wielded it; and the hand was striking blow upon rapid blow to demolish that family which from day to day became ever more hateful to her; for hatred continually grows, just as love every day increases, when we love. Love and hatred are passions that feed on their own fuel; but of the two, hatred is the more enduring. Love is limited by our human limits; its strength derives from life and giving. Hate is like death and avarice, a denial, a negation, although act
ive, above human beings and human concerns. Lisbeth, having entered upon the life that was congenial to her nature, was devoting to it the strength of all her faculties. She was to be reckoned with, like the Jesuits, as an underground force. Her physical regeneration, too, was complete. Her countenance shone. And Lisbeth dreamed of becoming the wife of Marshal Hulot.
This scene, in which the two friends bluntly told each other all that was in their minds, without the least reserve, took place on Lisbeth’s return from the market, where she had gone to buy the materials for a choice dinner. Marneffe, who coveted Monsieur Coquet’s position, had invited him and the staid, respectable Madame Coquet, and Valérie was hoping to have the subject of the head clerk’s resignation discussed by Hulot that same evening. Lisbeth was dressing for a visit to the Baroness, with whom she was going to dine.
‘You will be back in time to pour out tea, Bette dear?’ asked Valérie.
‘I hope so.…’
‘What do you mean, you hope so? Have you reached the point of staying the night with Adeline, to gloat over her tears while she sleeps?’
‘If only I could!’ replied Lisbeth, with a laugh. ‘I would not refuse. She is paying for the days of her good fortune now, and that suits me, for I remember my childhood. Turn about is fair play. It’s her turn to bite the dust, and I shall be Countess de Forzheim!’
*
Lisbeth went off to the rue Plumet, where she now usually went in the mood of a person visiting the theatre, to indulge in an emotional feast.
The apartment that Hulot had chosen for his wife comprised a large high-ceilinged hall, a drawing-room, and a bedroom with a dressing-room. The dining-room lay beyond the drawing-room and opened into it. Two servants’ rooms and a kitchen, on the third floor, completed the suite, which was not unworthy of a Councillor of State and Director at the War Office. The house, the courtyard, and the staircase were of imposing proportions. The Baroness, as she had to furnish her drawing-room, bedroom, and dining-room with the relics of her days of splendour, had taken the best of the worn-out furniture from her home in the rue de l’Université. The poor woman was fond of these silent witnesses to her happiness: for her they spoke with an eloquence which was almost consoling. In these remembrances of happier days she caught glimpses of flowers, just as she could see on the carpets the patterned roses barely visible to others.
Cousin Bette Page 19
