Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  Entering the vast hall, where a dozen chairs, a barometer, a huge stove, and long white calico curtains bordered with red suggested the comfortless waiting-rooms in government buildings, one felt one’s heart contract; one had an oppressive sense of the solitude in which this woman lived. Sorrow, like pleasure, creates its own atmosphere. A first glance into any home tells one whether love reigns there, or despair.

  Adeline was to be found in an enormous bedroom, surrounded by the fine furniture created by Jacob Desmalters, in speckled mahogany, with that Empire ornament of ormolu that contrives to look colder even than Louis XVI bronzes. And it was a chilling sight to see this woman, seated on a Roman chair before her work-table decorated with sphinxes, her colour gone, affecting a show of gaiety, preserving her proud Imperial air, as she had so carefully preserved the blue velvet dress that she wore in the house. Her proud spirit sustained her body and maintained her beauty. The Baroness, by the end of the first year of her exile in this place, had taken the full measure of the extent of her misfortune.

  ‘He may banish me here, but my Hector has still given me a better life than a simple peasant woman has any right to expect,’ she said to herself. ‘This is the decision he has made: his will be done! I am Baroness Hulot, sister-in-law of a Marshal of France. I have done nothing that I can reproach myself with. My two children are established in life. I am able to wait for death, wrapped in the immaculate veils of a virtuous wife, in the crape of my vanished happiness.’

  A portrait of Hulot in the uniform of a Commissary general of the Imperial Guard, painted by Robert Lefebvre in 1810, hung above the worktable. When a visitor was announced, Adeline would put away in a drawer of the table a copy of the Imitation of Christ which was her constant study. This blameless Magdalen in her retreat heard the voice of the Holy Spirit.

  ‘Mariette, my girl,’ said Lisbeth to the cook, who opened the door to her, ‘how is my dear Adeline?’

  ‘Oh, well enough, she seems, Mademoiselle. But, between ourselves, if she goes on with her notions, they’ll be the end of her,’ said Mariette, in a whisper. ‘Indeed, you really ought to make her promise to eat more. Yesterday, Madame told me to give her only two sous’ worth of milk and one little roll in the morning, and for dinner either a herring or a little cold veal, and to cook a pound of veal to last the week, with her dining here alone, of course. She won’t spend more than ten sous a day on her food. It’s not right. If I said a word about this pinching and scrimping to Monsieur le Maréchal, he could easily have a quarrel with Monsieur le Baron about it and cut him out of his will; instead of which, you are so good and clever, perhaps you’ll be able to fix things up.…’

  ‘But why don’t you speak to Monsieur le Baron?’ inquired Lisbeth.

  ‘Ah, my dear Miss, it’s quite twenty or twenty-five days since he was here; well, the length of the time since we last saw you! Besides, Madame said I’m not ever to ask Monsieur for money. She says she’ll send me away if I do. But talk about trouble… ah! what poor Madame has had to bear! It’s the first time Monsieur has forgotten her for so long… Every time there was a ring at the door, she used to fly to the window… but for the past five days she hasn’t stirred from her chair. She goes on reading! Every time she goes to see Madame la Comtesse, she says to me “Mariette,” she says, “if Monsieur comes, tell him that I’m at home, and send the porter for me; he’ll be well paid for his trouble!”’

  ‘Poor Cousin!’ said Bette. ‘It breaks my heart to hear it. I speak to Monsieur le Baron about her every day, but what use is it? He says, “You are right, Bette, I’m a wretch. My wife is an angel and I am a monster! I’ll go tomorrow.…” And he stays with Madame Marneffe. That woman is ruining him and he adores her; he can’t bear to let her out of his sight. I do what I can! If I were not there, and if I hadn’t Mathurine with me, the Baron would have spent twice as much; and as he has hardly anything left, he might easily have blown his brains out before this. And you know, Mariette, Adeline would not go on living after her husband’s death, I’m sure of that. At least I can try to make ends meet there, and stop my cousin from throwing too much money away.…’

  ‘Ah, that’s just what the poor mistress says herself. She knows well enough how much she owes you,’ replied Mariette. ‘She says that for a long time she misjudged you.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Lisbeth. ‘She didn’t say anything else?’

  ‘No, Mademoiselle. If you want to please her, talk about Monsieur. She thinks you’re lucky to see him every day.’

  ‘Is she alone?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss, the Marshal is here. Oh! he comes every day; and she always tells him that she has seen Monsieur that morning, that he comes in very late at night.’

  ‘And is there a good dinner today?’ asked Bette.

  Mariette hesitated, and lowered her eyes. Just then the drawing-room door opened, and Marshal Hulot came out in such a hurry that he bowed to Bette without looking at her, and dropped a paper. Bette picked it up and ran to the stairs, for it was no use calling after a deaf man; but she managed not to overtake the Marshal, and returned, surreptitiously reading the following note, written in pencil:

  My dear brother,

  My husband has given me my allowance for this quarter; but my daughter Hortense needed it so badly that I have lent her the entire sum, which is barely enough to tide her over her difficulty. Can you lend me a few hundred francs? Because I do not want to ask Hector for money again; I should be too miserable if he reproached me.

  ‘Ah!’ thought Lisbeth, ‘if she can bend her pride to this, she must be in desperate straits!’

  Lisbeth went in, taking Adeline by surprise, and, finding her in tears, threw her arms round her neck.

  ‘Adeline, my poor dear, I know everything!’ she said. ‘Look, the Marshal let this paper fall; he seemed so distressed, he was dashing away like a greyhound. When did that dreadful Hector last give you any money?’

  ‘He gives me my allowance regularly,’ replied the Baroness; ‘but Hortense needed some money, and…’

  ‘And you had nothing to pay for our dinner,’ Bette interrupted her. ‘Now I understand why Mariette looked so embarrassed, when I said something to her about the soup. You’re behaving childishly, Adeline! Let me give you what I have saved.’

  ‘Thank you, my kind Bette,’ Adeline answered, wiping away a tear. ‘This little difficulty is only temporary, and I have made arrangements for the future. I shall not have to spend more than two thousand four hundred francs a year, in future, including rent, and I shall have enough. But, whatever you do, Bette, don’t say a word to Hector. How is he?’

  ‘Oh! as solid as the pont Neuf! He’s as blithe as a lark; he has no thought for anything but his bewitching Valérie.’

  Madame Hulot was looking at a tall silver fir, in the field of her vision from the window, and Lisbeth could read nothing of what her eyes might express.

  ‘Did you remind him that this is the day when everyone dines here?’

  ‘Yes; but bah! Madame Marneffe is giving a big dinner; she is hoping to get Monsieur Coquet to resign! And that takes precedence of everything! Listen, Adeline, you know how fiercely determined I have always been to live an independent life. Your husband, my dear, is certainly going to ruin you. I thought that I could be helpful to you all by staying with that woman, but the depravity of the creature goes beyond all bounds; she will extract so much from your husband that in the end he will bring disgrace upon you all.’

  Adeline recoiled as if she had been struck by a dagger, thrust through her heart.

  ‘Indeed, my dear Adeline, I’m sure of it. It’s my duty to try to open your eyes. Well, now we must think of the future! The Marshal is old, but he will live a long time yet; in his circumstances he is likely to wear well. His widow, when he died, would have a pension of six thousand francs. With that amount I could undertake to look after you all! Use your influence with the old man to persuade him to marry me. It’s not that I want to be Madame la Maréchale – that sort of
nonsense means nothing to me, or as little as Madame Marneffe’s conscience; but then you would all be assured of your daily bread. I can see that Hortense is in want of hers, since she has to borrow yours.’

  The Marshal appeared. The old soldier had gone home and returned with all possible speed, and was mopping his forehead with his silk handkerchief.

  ‘I have given two thousand francs to Mariette,’ he whispered in his sister-in-law’s ear.

  Adeline blushed to the roots of her hair. Tears hung on her lashes, which were still as long as ever, and she silently pressed the old man’s hand; while his face expressed a favoured lover’s contentment.

  ‘I meant to use this money to give you a present, Adeline,’ he went on. ‘Don’t repay it. Instead you shall choose for yourself the present you would like best.’

  He came forward to take the hand that Lisbeth held out to him, and in his pleasure he kissed it absentmindedly.

  ‘That’s promising,’ Adeline told Lisbeth, smiling as well as she could.

  Victorin Hulot and his wife arrived as she was speaking.

  ‘Is my brother dining with us?’ the Marshal inquired sharply.

  Adeline took a pencil and wrote on a slip of paper:

  I expect him; he promised me this morning that he would dine here. But if he doesn’t come it will be because the Marshal has kept him, because he’s terribly busy.

  And she handed him the note. She had contrived this method of conversation with the Marshal, and a supply of little slips of paper and a pencil were laid ready on her work table.

  ‘I know,’ the Marshal replied, ‘that he is overwhelmed with work because of events in Algeria.’

  Hortense and Wenceslas came in at this moment, and with her family about her the Baroness turned again to the Marshal with an expression whose significance only Lisbeth understood.

  The artist, now happily married, adored by his wife and flattered by society, had considerably improved in looks.

  His face had become almost full. The breeding of a true aristocrat was seen to advantage in his elegant figure. His early success, his eminence, the deluding praises tossed by the social world to artists as carelessly as one might say ‘good morning’ or speak of the weather, had given him the kind of consciousness of his own merits which may degenerate into fatuity when talent goes. The Cross of the Legion of Honour seemed to him to add the final touch to the great man that he believed himself to be.

  After three years of marriage, Hortense’s attitude to her husband was like a dog’s to his master. She followed his every movement with an apparently questioning gaze; her eyes never left him, as if she were a miser watching hoarded treasure. Her admiring self-effacement was touching to see. One could perceive in her the temper of her mother, and her mother’s upbringing. Her beauty, as great as ever, was changed, given a tinge of poetry, by the soft shadows of a hidden melancholy.

  As she watched her cousin come in, it occurred to Lisbeth that complaint, long repressed, was on the point of breaking the frail envelope of discretion. It had been Lisbeth’s view from the first days of the honeymoon that the young couple possessed an income much too small to sustain so great a passion.

  Hortense as she kissed her mother whispered a few heartfelt words to her, whose sense was clear to Lisbeth as they both shook their heads.

  ‘Adeline will come, like me, to work for her living,’ thought Cousin Bette. ‘I must see that she tells me what she is going to do. Those pretty fingers will know at last, like mine, what it is to be forced to work, by necessity.’

  At six o’clock the family went into the dining-room. Hector’s place was laid.

  ‘Leave it,’ the Baroness said to Mariette. ‘Monsieur sometimes comes late.’

  ‘Oh, yes, my father will certainly be here,’ said young Hulot to his mother. ‘He promised me so in the Chamber, when we were leaving.’

  Lisbeth, like a spider in the centre of her web, watched every face. She had known Hortense and Victorin since they were born, and their faces were as glass through which she read their young souls. Now, as Victorin kept glancing furtively at his mother, she realized that some misfortune was about to break upon Adeline, and that Victorin was reluctant to give her the bad news. The eminent young lawyer had some sad preoccupation. His profound regard for his mother was strikingly evident in the unhappiness with which he gazed at her. Hortense, too, was obviously preoccupied with troubles of her own. For the past fortnight Lisbeth had known that she was experiencing for the first time the cares that lack of money brings to honest people, to young wives on whom life has always until now turned a smiling face, who try to dissemble the dismay they feel. Cousin Bette had known at a glance, moreover, that the mother had given nothing to her daughter; so that, unable in her sensitive feeling for her husband to tell the truth, Adeline had stooped to the deceit necessity suggests to borrowers.

  Hortense’s preoccupation and her brother’s, and the Baroness’s profound dejection, combined to make this a dull dinner-party, chilled too, as one may imagine, by the old Marshal’s deafness. Three people did something to enliven the occasion: Lisbeth, Célestine, and Wenceslas. Hortense’s love had stimulated the artist’s Polish animation. Vaunting vivacity, like a Gascon’s, attractive high spirits, are qualities characteristic of Poles, those Frenchmen of the north. Wenceslas’s untroubled assurance, his expression, left no doubt of his belief in himself, and made it clear that poor Hortense, faithful to her mother’s counsel, hid all her domestic worries from him.

  ‘You must be very relieved,’ said Lisbeth to her young cousin, as they left the dining-room, ‘that your mother was able to help you out with her own money.’

  ‘Mama?’ answered Hortense, in astonishment. ‘Oh, poor Mama! Her money for me! I only wish I could make some for her! You have no idea, Lisbeth, but I have a horrible feeling that she is working in secret.’

  They were crossing the great dark unlighted drawing-room, following Mariette, who was carrying the lamp from the dining-room into Adeline’s bedroom, and just then Victorin touched Lisbeth and Hortense on the arm. They understood, and, letting Wenceslas, Célestine, the Marshal, and the Baroness go on into the bedroom, stopped in a window recess.

  ‘What’s wrong, Victorin?’ asked Lisbeth. ‘I could hazard a guess that your father has caused some disaster.’

  ‘Yes, unfortunately,’ Victorin replied. ‘A moneylender called Vauvinet holds bills of my father’s amounting to sixty thousand francs, and means to have them protested! I wanted to talk to my father about this deplorable business in the Chamber, but he refused to understand me, he practically avoided me. Do you think we ought to warn Mother?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Lisbeth. ‘She has too many troubles already; it would be a death blow. We must spare her all we can. You do not know what straits she is reduced to. If it hadn’t been for your uncle, you would have had no dinner here tonight.’

  ‘Ah, good heavens, Victorin, what monsters we are!’ Hortense said to her brother. ‘Lisbeth has to tell us what we ought to have guessed. My dinner chokes me!’

  Hortense stopped short, put her handkerchief to her mouth to stifle a sob, and burst into tears.

  ‘I have told this Vauvinet to come and see me tomorrow,’ Victorin went on. ‘But will he be satisfied with my warranty? I doubt it. People like him always want ready money in order to put it out at exorbitant interest.’

  ‘We could sell our capital!’ Lisbeth said to Hortense.

  ‘What would that amount to? Fifteen or sixteen thousand francs,’ replied Victorin; ‘and we need sixty thousand!’

  ‘Dear Cousin!’ exclaimed Hortense, kissing Lisbeth with all the fervour of an innocent heart.

  ‘No, Lisbeth, keep your little income,’ said Victorin, with a warm pressure of the peasant-woman’s hand. ‘I’ll see tomorrow what this man intends to do. If my wife agrees, I may be able to prevent, or at least delay, the proceedings; for how can I possibly see my father’s good name attacked? It’s unthinkable! What would the Minister
of War say? My father’s salary has been pledged for the past three years, and will not become available until December, so it can’t be offered as security. This Vauvinet has renewed the bills eleven times, so just imagine what my father must have paid in interest! We must cover this bottomless pit.’

  ‘If only Madame Marneffe would leave him.…’ said Hortense bitterly.

  ‘Oh, heaven forbid!’ said Victorin. ‘Father would perhaps go elsewhere; and with her the most costly expenses have already been incurred.’

  What a change in children once so respectful, in whom their mother had instilled for so long an absolute veneration of their father! They had now passed judgement upon him for themselves.

  ‘If it were not for me,’ Lisbeth went on, ‘your father would be even more completely ruined than he is.’

  ‘Let’s go in,’ said Hortense. ‘Mama is quick: she will suspect something, and as our kind Lisbeth says, we must hide all we can from her. We must be cheerful!’

  ‘Victorin, you don’t know what ruin your father will bring on you, with his passion for women,’ said Lisbeth. ‘Think of the future, and try to make sure of some resources by marrying me to the Marshal. You should speak to him about it this evening. I’ll leave early, on purpose.’

  Victorin went on into his mother’s room.

  ‘Well, my poor little girl,’ said Lisbeth in a whisper to her young cousin, ‘what about you? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Come to dinner with us tomorrow, and we can talk,’ replied Hortense. ‘I don’t know which way to turn. You know how to deal with the difficulties of life; you will advise me.’