Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

While the whole family in concert was preaching marriage to the Marshal and Lisbeth was on her way back to the rue Vanneau, one of those incidents occurred which give new impetus to the evil in women like Madame Marneffe, by compelling them to have recourse to vice, to make use of all the help it can give them. We may at least acknowledge an unquestionable fact: in Paris life is lived in a whirl too giddy for vicious people to seek occasion for wickedness. They use vice as a defensive weapon, that is all.

  *

  Madame Marneffe, with a drawing-room full of her faithful admirers, had set the usual games of whist going, when the footman, an old soldier that the Baron had taken into his service, announced:

  ‘Monsieur le Baron Montès de Montejanos.’

  Valérie experienced a violent shock, but she flew to the door, exclaiming, ‘My cousin!’

  And as she met the Brazilian, she whispered to him:

  ‘You are a relative of mine, or everything is over between us! Well, Henri,’ she went on aloud, leading the Brazilian to the fire: ‘so you weren’t shipwrecked after all, as I was told? I’ve been mourning you for three years.…’

  ‘How are you, my dear fellow?’ said Monsieur Marneffe, holding out his hand to the Brazilian, who looked exactly like a millionaire from Brazil as one imagines him.

  Monsieur le Baron Henri Montès de Montejanos, the product of an equatorial climate, had the physique and complexion that we all associate with Othello. At first sight he intimidated by his glowering looks, but this was a purely plastic effect, for his character was extremely gentle and affectionate, and predestined him to the kind of exploitation that weak women practise on strong men. The disdain expressed in his face, the muscular strength of his body, his obvious aggressive powers, were offensive only to men; to women homage from such a man was flattering, and flattering in a way that goes powerfully to women’s heads. All men are conscious of women’s susceptibility to pugnacious masculinity; and one may see a man, giving his arm to his mistress, assume a swashbuckling swagger that is very amusing. With his superb figure set off by a blue coat with buttons of solid gold, and black trousers, wearing well-polished boots of fine leather, conventionally gloved, the Baron had nothing Brazilian about his dress but a huge diamond, worth about a hundred thousand francs, that glittered like a star on a sumptuous blue silk cravat. A white waistcoat revealed a glimpse of shirt of fabulously fine material. His forehead, projecting like a satyr’s, a sign of obstinate tenacity in passion, was surmounted by a jet-black head of springing hair like a virgin forest, below which a pair of clear eyes glittered, so tawny and untamed as to make it seem credible that his mother when carrying him had been frightened by a jaguar.

  This magnificent specimen of Portuguese Brazilian man-hood took up his stand, back to the fireplace, in an attitude which showed Parisian habits; and, his hat in one hand, resting an arm against the velvet-draped mantelpiece, he bent over Madame Marneffe to talk in a low voice to her, concerning himself very little about all the frightful bourgeois people who seemed to him to be very inopportunely cluttering up the room.

  This dramatic entry upon the scene, and the Brazilian’s bearing and air, provoked an identical reaction of curiosity mixed with apprehension in Crevel and the Baron. The same expression appeared on both faces, revealing the same foreboding. And the sudden, simultaneous, emotion of these two genuinely passion-possessed men was so comical that those of the company who were sufficiently observant to perceive that a secret had been disclosed could not but smile. Crevel, unalterably a middle-class shopkeeper, Mayor of Paris or no, unfortunately remained frozen in his attitude longer than his fellow-victim, so that the Baron caught a fleeting glimpse of Crevel’s involuntary self-revelation. It was an additional blow to the heart of the elderly lover, who made up his mind to have the matter out with Valérie.

  ‘This evening,’ Crevel, too, was saying to himself as he arranged his cards, ‘we’ll have an end put to this.…’

  ‘You have a heart!’ cried Marneffe, ‘and you have just revoked!’

  ‘Ah! excuse me,’ said Crevel, putting out his hand to take back his card. ‘That Baron strikes me as being a bit too much,’ he continued in his interior monologue. ‘If Valérie lives with my own Baron, that’s my revenge, and I know how to get rid of him, but that cousin!… that’s a Baron too many. I don’t intend to be made a fool of. I should like to know in exactly what way he is related to her!’

  That evening, by one of those happy chances that occur only to pretty women, Valérie was looking charming. Her bosom gleamed dazzlingly white, framed in lace whose russet tint set off the matt satin of her beautiful shoulders. All Parisian women, by what means no one knows, manage to possess lovely contours and yet remain slender. Her dress, of black velvet, seemed about at any moment to slip from her shoulders; and she wore a lace cap trimmed with clusters of flowers. Her arms, at once slender and rounded, emerged from puff sleeves frilled with lace. She was like those luscious fruits, arranged enticingly on a fine plate, which make the very metal of the knife-blade ache to bite into them.

  ‘Valérie,’ the Brazilian was saying in the young woman’s ear, ‘I have come back still faithful to you. My uncle is dead, and I am twice as rich as I was when I went away. I want to live and die in Paris, for your sake and with you!’

  ‘Hush, Henri, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Ah bah! Even if I have to throw all this mob out of the window first, I mean to speak to you this evening, especially as I’ve wasted two days trying to find you. You’ll let me stay after the others, won’t you?’

  Valérie smiled at her so-called cousin, and said:

  ‘Remember that you are the son of a sister of my mother’s, who married your father during Junot’s campaign in Portugal.’

  ‘I, Montès de Montejanos, great-grandson of one of the conquerors of Brazil, tell a lie!’

  ‘Not so loud, or we’ll never see each other again.…’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘Because of Marneffe. He’s like all dying men – they set their minds on a last passion, and he’s taken a fancy for me.’

  ‘That worm?’ said the Brazilian, who knew his Marneffe. ‘I’ll settle him.…’

  ‘You’re dreadfully violent!’

  ‘I say, where did you get all these fine things?’ said the Brazilian, at last taking note of the splendours of the drawing-room.

  She began to laugh.

  ‘What bad manners, Henri!’ she said.

  She had just caught two pairs of eyes fixed on her, full of such blazing jealousy that she could not help but look at the two souls in pain. Crevel was playing against the Baron and Monsieur Coquet, and had Marneffe for partner. The pairs were equally matched, because Crevel and the Baron were equally distracted, and were piling mistake upon mistake. The two old men had both, in the same instant, declared the passion that Valérie had succeeded in making them conceal for three years; but Valérie herself had not known how to hide the joy in her eyes, her happiness at seeing again the first man to make her heart beat faster, her first love. The rights of these fortunate mortals endure for the whole lifetime of the woman over whom they have acquired them.

  In the centre of these three absolute passions, sustained in one man by the insolent pride of money, in another by right of possession, and in the third by youth, strength, fortune and priority, Madame Marneffe remained as calm and self-possessed as Bonaparte besieging Mantua, when he had to hold off two armies in order to continue his blockade of the city.

  The jealousy distorting Hulot’s face made him as terrible to look upon as the late Marshal Montcornet leading a cavalry charge against a Russian square. As a handsome man, the Councillor of State had never before known jealousy, just as Murat never experienced fear. He had always been confident of triumph. His setback with Josépha, the first of his life, he had attributed to her greed for money. He told himself that he had been supplanted by a million and not by an abortion, meaning the Duc d’Hérouville. The poisons and dizzy potions which that insane emotio
n secretes in quantity had poured into his heart, in that instant. Throwing down his cards, he turned violently from the whist-table towards the fireplace with an eloquent gesture, reminiscent of Mirabeau; and fixed the Brazilian and Valérie with a challenging stare. The company felt the mixed alarm and curiosity excited by the spectacle of violence threatening momently to erupt. The so-called cousin looked at the Councillor of State as if he were examining some globular Chinese pot. The situation could not continue without leading to a shattering scene. Marneffe was just as much afraid of what Baron Hulot might do as Crevel was of Marneffe, for he did not care for the idea of dying a deputy head clerk. Dying men have their minds fixed on life as convicts have on liberty. This man was determined to be head clerk, come what might. Alarmed, with good reason, by the pantomime being enacted by Crevel and the Councillor of State, he got up and said a word in his wife’s ear; and to the great surprise of the company, Valérie went into her bedroom with the Brazilian and her husband.

  ‘Has Madame Marneffe ever mentioned this cousin to you?’ Crevel demanded of Baron Hulot.

  ‘Never!’ replied the Baron, rising to his feet. ‘That’s enough for this evening,’ he added. ‘I’ve lost two louis; here they are.’

  He tossed two gold coins down on the table, and went to sit on the divan with an expression on his face that everyone interpreted as a hint to be gone. Monsieur and Madame Coquet exchanged a few remarks and left the room, and Claude Vignon, in despair, followed their example. These two departures gave a lead to the more unperceptive guests, who now realized that they were in the way. The Baron and Crevel were left alone, neither of them saying a word. Hulot, who had reached the point of not even noticing that Crevel was there, went on tiptoe to listen at the bedroom door, only to recoil with a hasty leap backwards as Marneffe opened the door and appeared, looking quite calm, and evidently astonished to find only two people in the room.

  ‘What about tea?’ he said.

  ‘Where is Valérie?’ returned the Baron furiously.

  ‘My wife?’ said Marneffe. ‘Oh, she’s gone up to your cousin, Mademoiselle Lisbeth. She’ll come back.’

  ‘And why has she given us the slip for the sake of that stupid nanny?’

  ‘Oh, but Mademoiselle Lisbeth,’ said Marneffe, ‘came back from visiting Madame la Baronne, your wife, with some kind of indigestion, and Mathurine asked Valérie for tea, and she has just gone to see what’s the matter with Mademoiselle Lisbeth.’

  ‘What about the cousin?’

  ‘He’s gone!’

  ‘And you believe that?’

  ‘I saw him to his carriage!’ replied Marneffe, with a leer.

  Wheels were heard rolling down the rue Vanneau. The Baron, accounting Marneffe’s word as not worth a fig, left the room and climbed the stairs to Lisbeth’s apartment. One thought filled his mind, kindled by a spark from the blazing fires of jealousy in his heart. He was so well aware of Marneffe’s baseness that he suspected a shameful complicity between wife and husband.

  ‘What’s become of everyone?’ asked Marneffe, finding himself left alone with Crevel.

  ‘When the sun goes to bed, so does the poultry-yard,’ replied Crevel. ‘Madame Marneffe has disappeared, her adorers have left. What about a game of piquet?’ Crevel added, for he intended to stay.

  He too believed that the Brazilian was in the house. The Mayor was as wily as the Baron: he could remain where he was indefinitely, playing with the husband, who, since the suppression of public gambling, had had to content himself with the restricted penny-counting game played socially. Monsieur Marneffe agreed to his suggestion.

  Baron Hulot hurried upstairs to his Cousin Bette’s room; but he found the door shut, and the conventional inquiries through the door gave sufficient time for alert and guileful women to stage the spectacle of a sufferer from indigestion being well plied with tea. Lisbeth was evidently in such pain that Valérie felt the most serious concern, and so paid practically no attention to the Baron’s furious entrance. Illness is women’s most useful storm-screen against a quarrel’s tempests. Hulot looked covertly about him into every corner of Cousin Bette’s bedroom, but found no spot suitable for hiding a Brazilian in.

  ‘Your indigestion, Bette, does credit to my wife’s dinner,’ he said, scrutinizing the old maid, who felt extremely well and was doing her best to simulate an attack of hiccups as she drank her tea.

  ‘You see how fortunate it is that our dear Bette lives in my house! If I hadn’t been here the poor girl would have died.…’ said Madame Marneffe.

  ‘You look as if you don’t believe me,’ Lisbeth added, to the Baron. ‘And that would be scandalous.…’

  ‘Why?’ the Baron asked peremptorily. ‘So you know the reason for my visit, do you?’

  And he eyed the door of a dressing-room, from which the key had been removed.

  ‘Are you talking Greek?’ said Madame Marneffe in reply, with a heart-rending expression on her face, of misunderstood love and fidelity.

  ‘And it’s all on your account, my dear cousin; yes, it’s your fault that I’m in such a state,’ said Lisbeth, with some emphasis.

  This accusation distracted the Baron’s attention, and he stared at the old maid in complete surprise.

  ‘You have reason to know my devotion to you,’ Lisbeth went on. ‘I am here – I need say no more than that. I wear out my strength and spend what’s left of my life, here, watching over your interests by looking after our dear Valérie’s. Her housekeeping costs only a tenth of what it would in any other household, run as well as hers. If it were not for me, Cousin, instead of two thousand francs a month, you would be paying out three or four thousand.’

  ‘I know all that,’ replied the Baron impatiently. ‘You shelter and guard us in all sorts of ways,’ he added, walking over to Madame Marneffe and taking her by the throat. ‘Doesn’t she, my dear little beauty?’

  ‘Upon my word,’ screamed Valérie, ‘I think you’re mad!’

  ‘Well, you can’t doubt my attachment,’ said Lisbeth; ‘but I also love my Cousin Adeline, and I found her in tears. She hasn’t seen you for a month! No, that’s not right. You leave poor Adeline without any money. Your daughter Hortense nearly broke her heart when she heard that it was only thanks to your brother that we had a dinner to eat! There wasn’t a crust of bread in your house today! Adeline has made up her mind like a heroine to do what she can for herself. She said to me, “I shall do as you have done!” That lay so heavy on my heart, after dinner, that, thinking of what my cousin was in 1811, and what she is now, thirty years later in 1841, I could not digest my food. I did my best to fight off the attack; but when I got home, I thought I should die.…’

  ‘You see, Valérie,’ said the Baron, ‘what my adoration for you has driven me to!… to crimes against my family.…’

  ‘Oh, how right I was to remain a spinster!’ Lisbeth exclaimed with savage joy. ‘You are a good and fine man; Adeline is an angel – and look at the reward of blind devotion!’

  ‘An old angel!’ said Madame Marneffe softly, casting a half-tender half-laughing look at her Hector, who was contemplating her like an examining magistrate considering the accused.

  ‘Poor woman!’ said the Baron. ‘It’s more than nine months since I had any money to give her, and I always find money for you, Valérie, and at such a cost! You will never be loved by anyone as I love you, and what unhappiness you give me in return!’

  ‘Unhappiness?’ she said. ‘What do you call happiness then?’

  ‘I don’t yet know what your relations have been with that alleged cousin, whom you never mentioned to me before,’ the Baron went on, paying no attention to Valérie’s exclamation; ‘but when he came in, it was like a knife-stab in my heart. I may be hoodwinked, but I am not blind. I read your eyes and his. Sparks flew from that gorilla’s eyes, and you, your look… Oh! you have never looked at me like that, no, never! As for this mystery, Valérie, it must be cleared up. You are the only woman who has ever made me know jealousy, so
you need not be surprised that I speak to you like this.… But there’s another mystery, another cat has jumped out of the bag, and it seems disgraceful to me.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Valérie.

  ‘And it is that Crevel, the great gross idiotic lump, loves you, and you receive his gallantries so kindly that the fool displays his passion to the whole world.’

  ‘So that makes three! You can’t find any more?’ inquired Madame Marneffe.

  ‘There may be more!’ said the Baron.

  ‘If Monsieur Crevel loves me, he’s within his rights as a man. If I looked kindly on his passion, it would be the act of a coquette, or of a woman who had many shortcomings to forgive you.… Very well, love me as I am, or leave me. If you let me go, neither you nor Monsieur Crevel shall ever return here. I will take my cousin; since you accuse me of such charming habits I must do something to deserve my reputation. Good-bye, Monsieur le Baron Hulot.’

  And she rose, but the Councillor of State seized her arm and forced her to sit down. The old man could never again replace Valérie; she had become more imperatively necessary to him than the necessaries of life, and he would rather remain in uncertainty than be given the faintest shadow of proof of Valérie’s infidelity.

  ‘My dear Valérie,’ he said, ‘do you not see how I am suffering? I am only asking you to tell me why… Give me some explanation…’

  ‘Well, go downstairs and wait for me there, for you don’t want to stay and watch the treatment I have to give your cousin, I suppose.’

  Hulot walked slowly to the door.

  ‘Old debauchee!’ cried Cousin Bette. ‘You don’t even ask for news of your children! What are you going to do about Adeline? What I’ll do, for a start, is take her my savings tomorrow.’

  ‘A man owes his wife at least wheaten bread,’ said Madame Marneffe, with a smile.

  The Baron took no offence at Lisbeth’s aggressive tone, although she was sending him about his business as roughly as Josépha had done, and slipped away like a man glad to evade an inconvenient question.