Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Woman,’ said Hulot, ‘is an inexplicable creature!’

  ‘I can explain her,’ said Crevel. ‘We are old, the Brazilian is young and handsome.…’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Hulot. ‘I must admit that we are not getting younger. But how, my friend, is a man to give up seeing these lovely creatures undressing, twisting up their hair, peeping at us through their fingers with a little smile as they roll their curl-papers in, practising all their little arts,telling their fibs, saying that we don’t love them when they see us preoccupied with business worries, and distracting us from our troubles in spite of everything?’

  ‘Yes, upon my word, it’s the only pleasure in life!…’ exclaimed Crevel. ‘Ah ! when a little puss smiles at you, and you hear her say: “My darling pet, if you only knew how nice you are! I suppose other women are different. I just don’t understand how they can go mad about youths with billy-goat tufts on their chins, silly brats who smoke and have manners like footmen, because being so young they think they can be as impudent as they please! And then they’re here today and gone tomorrow.… You think I am a flirt, but really I would much rather have men of fifty than those little whipper-snappers: they stay with us longer. They’re devoted: they know that women are not so easily found, and they appreciate us. That’s why I love you, you old rascal!” And while they are confiding these thoughts to you they are petting and caressing you, and smiling.… Ah ! it’s all as false as the promises on election posters.…’

  ‘Falsehood is often better than the truth,’ said Hulot, recalling some charming scenes evoked by Crevel’s mimicry of Valérie. ‘They have to decorate their act, sew spangles on their stage costumes.…’

  ‘And then, after all, we have them, these lying little cheats!’ said Crevel brutally.

  ‘Valérie is a witch,’ said the Baron, with conviction. ‘She can change an old man into a young one.’

  ‘Ah, yes, she really is,’ Crevel joined in. ‘She’s a snake that slips between your fingers, but the prettiest of snakes… so white, and as sweet as sugar! As funny as Arnal, and so full of devilish inventions! Ah!’

  ‘Oh, yes, she is a lively spirit!’ enthusiastically agreed the Baron, no longer thinking of his wife.

  The two comrades went to bed the best friends in the world, recalling Valérie’s perfections to each other, one by one, the inflections of her voice, her malicious remarks, her gestures, the comic things she did, her flashes of wit, the warm impulses of her heart; for that artist in love had admirable moments when she surpassed herself, as tenors may sing a part better one day than the next. And they both fell asleep rocked by these tender and diabolical reminiscences, lit by the fires of hell.

  Next day, at nine o’clock, Hulot spoke of going to the Ministry; Crevel had business in the country. They left the house together, and Crevel held out his hand to the Baron, saying:

  ‘There’s no ill-feeling between us, is there? For after all, we’ve no further interest in Madame Marneffe, either of us.’

  ‘Oh, we’re finished with her!’ replied Hulot with something approaching horror.

  At half past ten, Crevel was climbing Madame Marneffe’s stairs, four at a time. He found the shameless creature, the adorable enchantress, in the most charming boudoir wrap imaginable, eating a choice little luncheon in the company of Baron Henri Montès de Montejanos and Lisbeth. In spite of the painful shock of seeing the Brazilian there, Crevel begged Madame Marneffe to give him two minutes in private, and Valérie passed into the drawing-room with him.

  ‘Valérie, my angel,’ said the amorous Crevel, ‘Monsieur Marneffe has not long to live. If you will be faithful to me, when he dies we can be married. Think it over. I have got rid of Hulot for you.… So just consider whether that Brazilian is worth a Mayor of Paris, a man who would be ambitious to attain the highest dignities for your sake, and who, at this very moment, possesses eighty-odd thousand francs a year.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be at the rue du Dauphin at two o’clock, and we can talk about it. But be careful! And don’t forget the transfer of shares you promised me yesterday.’

  She returned to the dining-room, followed by Crevel, who was delighted to think that he had found the way to have Valérie to himself; but the first person he saw was Baron Hulot, who, during this short interview, had come in with the same object in mind. The Councillor of State, like Crevel, asked for a moment in private. Madame Marneffe rose to return to the drawing-room, smiling at the Brazilian as she did so, as if to say: ‘They’re mad! Can’t they see you here?’

  ‘Valérie’ said the Councillor of State, ‘my child, that cousin of yours is a cousin from the blue.…’

  ‘Oh, that’s enough!’ she interrupted the Baron, with some emphasis. ‘Marneffe has never been, shall never be, and never can be my husband. The first and only man that I have ever loved has just returned, quite unexpectedly.… That’s not my fault! But just take a look at Henri, and then look at yourself. And ask yourself how any woman, especially a woman in love, could hesitate. My dear, I am not a kept woman. From today, I don’t intend to be any longer like Susannah between the two Elders. If you care for me, you can be, you and Crevel, our friends; but everything else is at an end between us, for I am twenty-six years old, and in the future I mean to be a saint, a woman worthy of respect and admiration… like your wife.’

  ‘So that’s the way of it?’ said Hulot. ‘Is that how you welcome me, when I was coming, like a Pope, with my hands full of indulgences? Well, your husband will never be a head clerk nor an Officer of the Legion of Honour.…’

  ‘We’ll see about that!’ said Madame Marneffe, looking at Hulot in no uncertain fashion.

  ‘Don’t let’s quarrel,’ said Hulot in despair. ‘I’ll come back this evening and we can talk things over.’

  ‘In Lisbeth’s room, then. Very well!’

  ‘Well, then,’ said the love-sick old man; ‘in Lisbeth’s room!’

  Hulot and Crevel went downstairs together to the street without a word. But on the pavement, they looked at each other and began to laugh ruefully.

  ‘We are two old fools!’ said Crevel.

  ‘I have got rid of them,’ Madame Marneffe told Lisbeth, sitting down again at the table. ‘I have never loved, do not now love, and never shall love anyone but my jaguar,’ she added, smiling at Henri Montès. ‘Lisbeth, my dear, do you know that Henri has forgiven me all the dreadful things that my need for money forced me to do?’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ the Brazilian said. ‘I ought to have sent you a hundred thousand francs.…’

  ‘Poor dear !’ exclaimed Valérie. ‘I ought to have worked for my living, but my fingers weren’t made for that… ask Lisbeth if they were.’

  The Brazilian went away the happiest man in Paris.

  About noon, Valérie and Lisbeth were talking in the luxurious bedroom where this formidable Parisian was adding those finishing touches to her toilette that no woman cares to entrust to a maid. Behind locked doors and drawn curtains, Valérie related all the happenings of the previous evening, the night, and that morning, in the most minute detail.

  ‘Are you pleased, my sweet?’ she asked Lisbeth when she had finished. ‘Which should I choose to be, Madame Crevel or Madame Montès? What do you say?’

  ‘Crevel won’t last more than ten years, he’s such a libertine,’ said Lisbeth, ‘and Montés is young. Crevel will leave you about thirty thousand francs a year. Let Montès wait; he’ll be happy enough to be the Benjamin. And then, at about thirty-three, my dear child, if you take good care of your looks, you can marry your Brazilian and cut a fine figure in society with sixty thousand francs a year of your own – under the wing of a Marshal’s wife!’

  ‘Yes, but Montès is a Brazilian – he’ll never get anywhere,’ observed Valérie.

  ‘We live in an age of railway construction,’ said Lisbeth; ‘and foreigners now may reach high positions in France.’

  ‘We shall see,’ answered Valérie, ‘w
hen Marneffe is dead, and he has not a long time left now to suffer.’

  ‘These attacks of illness which keep returning,’ said Lisbeth, ‘seem like his body’s penitence.… Well, I must go to visit Hortense.’

  ‘Yes, do go, my angel,’ Valérie answered, ‘and bring me my artist! In three years, it’s unbelievable, I have not gained an inch of ground! That’s no credit to either of us. Wenceslas and Henri – those are my two only passions. One is love, and the other my fancy!’

  ‘How lovely you look this morning!’ said Lisbeth, coming over to put her arm round Valérie’s waist and kiss her forehead. ‘I share in the enjoyment of all your pleasures, your good fortune, your dresses… I didn’t know what it was to live until the day when we became sisters.’

  ‘Wait a moment, my tigress!’ said Valérie, laughing. ‘Your shawl is crooked.… After three years you still don’t know how to wear a shawl, in spite of all my lessons – and you aspire to be Madame la Maréchale Hulot!’

  *

  Lisbeth, wearing prunella ankle boots and grey silk stockings and equipped for battle in a dress of beautiful Levantine silk, her hair braided and coiled round her head under a very pretty black velvet bonnet lined with yellow satin, set off for the rue Saint-Dominique, going by way of the boulevard des Invalides; and as she walked along she wondered whether Hortense’s despondency might at last give that strong spirit into her hand, and whether Slavonic instability, worked upon at a time when the course such natures as his may take is unpredictable, might make Wenceslas’s devotion falter.

  Hortense and Wenceslas occupied the ground floor of a house at the corner of the rue Saint-Dominique and the esplanade des Invalides. This apartment, originally suitable for a honeymoon, now had a rather wilted freshness that might be called the furnishings’ autumn of the year. Young couples are extravagantly wasteful and destructive of their belongings without meaning to be, without even realizing that they are – their love is subject to the same misuse. They are wrapped up in themselves and little concerned about the future, which is later to become the preoccupation of the mother of a family.

  Lisbeth found her Cousin Hortense just as she had finished dressing a little Wenceslas, who had been put out in the garden.

  ‘Good afternoon, Bette,’ said Hortense, who had opened the door to her cousin herself.

  The cook had gone to market. The maid, who was also the nurse, was doing some washing.

  ‘Good afternoon, dear child,’ said Bette, and kissed her; and then, in a whisper, she added, ‘Is Wenceslas at his studio?’

  ‘No, he’s in the drawing-room, talking to Stidmann and Chanor.’

  ‘Where can we have a moment alone together?’

  ‘Come into my bedroom.’

  The floral chintz with which this room was hung, of pink flowers and green leaves on a white ground, and the carpet, left unshaded from the sun, had faded. The curtains had not been laundered for some time. The smell of cigar smoke hung about, for Wenceslas, an aristocrat by birth and now an eminent artist, scattered tobacco ash on the arms of chairs and over the prettiest pieces of furniture in a lordly fashion, like a spoilt darling who is forgiven anything and a rich man above bourgeois carefulness.

  ‘Well, now, let’s talk about your affairs,’ commanded Lisbeth, seeing her lovely cousin sit silent in the big chair into which she had thrown herself. ‘But what’s the matter? I think you look a little pale, my dear.’

  ‘There have been two more articles, slating poor Wenceslas mercilessly. I’ve read them, but I’m hiding them from him, because he would be utterly discouraged. They consider the statue of Marshal Montcornet a poor piece of work. They allow some merit to the bas-reliefs and praise Wenceslas’s talent for ornament, but it’s only out of a mean kind of treachery, to give more weight to the opinion that serious art is beyond him! I begged Stidmann to tell me the truth, and he utterly shattered me by confessing that privately he concurs with the opinion of the other artists, the critics, and the public. “If Wenceslas does not exhibit something really good before the end of the year,” he said to me there in the garden before lunch, “he will have to give up large-scale sculpture and concentrate on romantic groups, small figures, jewellery and high-class goldsmith’s work!” I felt dreadful when I heard him say this, because I know Wenceslas will never agree; he knows his own talent; he has so many brilliant ideas.’

  ‘Ideas don’t pay the tradesmen,’ Lisbeth observed, ‘I used to wear myself out telling him that. It’s money that pays them, and you will only get money for finished work that ordinary people like well enough to buy. When it comes to earning a living, it’s better for the artist to have a model for a candlestick, a fender or a table on his work-bench, than a group or a statue; because everyone needs those things, but the buyer of a group and his money have to be waited for, maybe for months.’

  ‘You are absolutely right, dear Lisbeth! I wish you would tell him that – I haven’t got the courage. Besides, as he said to Stidmann, if he goes back to decorative work and small-scale sculpture, it means giving up the Institut, and large works, and then we shall not get the three hundred thousand francs commission that the Ministry has promised us for work at Versailles and for the City of Paris. You see how those dreadful articles are damaging us! They’re inspired by rivals who would like to fall heir to our commissions.’

  ‘And you dreamed of things turning out quite differently, poor little puss!’ Bette said, giving Hortense a kiss on the forehead. ‘You wanted an aristocrat ruling the world of art, a leading sculptor dominating the rest.… But that’s just romantic dreaming, you know. You need fifty thousand francs a year to realize a dream like that, and you have only two thousand four hundred so long as I’m alive, three thousand after my death.’

  Tears rose to Hortense’s eyes, and Bette watched them with greedy absorption, like a cat lapping milk.

  Here follows the brief history of that honeymoon. The tale will perhaps not be lost on artists.

  The work of the mind, tracking down a quarry in the high regions of the intellect, is one of the most strenuous kinds of human endeavour. To achieve fame in art – and in art must be included all the mind’s creations – courage, above all, is needed, courage of a kind that the ordinary man has no idea of, which is perhaps described for the first time here.

  Driven by the relentless pressure of poverty, kept to his path by Bette like a horse blinkered to prevent its looking to right or left, whipped on by that harsh old maid, an embodiment of Necessity, a kind of underling of Fate, Wenceslas, born a poet and a dreamer, had passed from conception to execution, leaping over the abysses that separate those two hemispheres of art without noticing their depth.

  To think, to dream, to conceive fine works, is a delightful occupation. It is dreaming cigar-smoke dreams, or living a courtesan’s self-indulgent life. The work of art to be created is envisaged in the exhilaration of conception, with its infant grace, and the scented colour of its flower and the bursting juices of its fruit. These are the pleasures in the imagination of a work of art’s conception.

  The man who can formulate his design in words is held to be out of the common run of men. This faculty all artists and writers possess; but execution needs more than this. It means creating, bringing to birth, laboriously rearing the child, putting it to bed every evening gorged with milk, kissing it every morning with a mother’s never spent affection, licking it clean, clothing it over and over again in the prettiest garments, which it spoils again and again. It means never being disheartened by the upheavals of a frenetic life, but making of the growing work of art a living masterpiece, which in sculpture speaks to all eyes, in literature to all minds, in painting to all memories, in music to every heart. This is the travail of execution. The hand must constantly progress, in constant obedience to the mind. And the ability to create is no more to be commanded at will than love is: both powers are intermittent.

  The habit of creation, the unwearying cherishing love which makes a mother (that masterpiece of natur
e so well apprehended by Raphael!), the intellectual maternal power, in short, which is so difficult to acquire, is exceedingly easily lost. Inspiration is the opportunity that genius may seize; and is not even balanced on a razor’s edge, but instantly in the air and flying off with the quick alarm of crows. Inspiration has no scarf by which the poet may grasp her. Her hair is a flame. She is gone like those rose-coloured and white beautiful flamingos that are the despair of sportsmen. And work is a fatiguing struggle, dreaded as well as passionately loved by the fine and powerful natures that are often broken by it. A great poet of our own times, speaking of this appalling toil, has said, ‘I begin it with despair, and leave it with grief’.

  Let the ignorant take note! If the artist does not throw himself into his work like Curtius into the gulf, like a soldier against a fortress, without counting the cost; and if, once within the breach, he does not labour like a miner buried under a fallen roof; if, in short, he contemplates the difficulties instead of conquering them, one by one, like those lovers in the fairy-tales who, to win their princesses, fought ever-renewed enchantments; then the work remains unfinished, it perishes, is lost within the workshop, where production becomes impossible, and the artist is a looker-on at his talent’s suicide. Rossini, Raphael’s brother genius, is a striking example to artists in the battle fought from indigent youth to the success of his maturity. It is for these reasons that the same laurel wreath is bestowed on great poets and great generals: a similar reward is accorded to a similar triumph.

  Wenceslas, a dreamer by nature, had spent so much energy in producing work, in teaching himself, and working under Lisbeth’s despotic rule, that love and happiness brought a reaction. His true character reasserted itself. Indolence and lethargy, the yielding softness of the Slav, returned to find the ready haven in his soul from which the school-mistress’s rod had driven them. The artist, during the first months, was in love with his wife. Hortense and Wenceslas gave themselves up to the charming youthful pleasures of unlimited, happy, married, passion. Hortense was the first, at this time, to excuse Wenceslas from all work, proud of being able to triumph over her rival – his sculpture. A woman’s caresses make the muse languid, and melt the fierce, the brutal, resolution of the worker. Six or seven months went by. The sculptor’s fingers forgot how to hold the chisel. When it became urgently necessary to work, when Prince de Wissem-bourg, president of the committee representing the subscribers, asked to see the statue, Wenceslas gave the idler’s usual answer, ‘I’m just starting work on it!’ And he deluded his dear Hortense with self-deceiving words, with the splendid creations an artist can make from tobacco smoke.