Cousin Bette

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Give Lisbeth a kiss, darling,’ Wenceslas said to his wife. ‘She’s going to help us out of this difficulty by lending us her savings.’

  And he glanced meaningly at Lisbeth.

  ‘I hope that you are really going to set to work now, my cherub?’ said Hortense.

  ‘Yes, indeed!’ assented the artist. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘The word tomorrow is our ruin !’ said Hortense, smiling at him.

  ‘Well, dear child, don’t you know that there has been one thing after another getting in my way, business to be done and other hindrances, every single day?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, dear.’

  ‘In here,’ Steinbock went on, tapping his forehead, ‘I have such wonderful ideas ! Oh, I’m going to astonish all my enemies. I’ll make a dinner service in the sixteenth-century German style, the fantastic style, with convoluted foliage full of insects, and children laid sleeping among the leaves, and new inventions of real chimeras, live fantasies never seen before, the stuff of our dreams embodied! I have them in my mind! The work will be intricate in detail, but airy, in spite of all its rich ornament. When Chanor left me, he was filled with admiration.… I needed some encouragement, I can tell you, for that last article about Montcornet’s monument really had me down.’

  When Lisbeth and Wenceslas were alone for a moment, later in the day, the artist arranged with the spinster to go to see Madame Marneffe next day, for either his wife would have agreed to his going, or he would go without telling her.

  Valérie, informed of this triumph the same evening, dispatched Baron Hulot to invite Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Steinbock to dinner; for she was beginning to send him on errands, be the domestic tyrant that women of her kind usually become to old men, who are sent trotting here and there round the town, carrying invitations to anyone whose presence is necessary to the interests or vanity of their exacting mistresses.

  Next day, Valérie prepared for battle by making such a toilet as Parisians can confection when they intend to make use of all their natural weapons. She studied her appearance to this end, much as a man about to fight a duel works at his lunges and recoils. There was not a blemish, not a wrinkle anywhere! Valérie was in her finest bloom: white, soft, and delicate. As a crowning touch, her beauty ‘patches’ insensibly drew the eye. People imagine that artifices to heighten beauty, such as eighteenth-century patches, have disappeared, been discarded as out of date, but they are quite mistaken. Women today are cleverer than they ever were in the use of daring devices to provoke quizzing opera-glasses. One woman may invent the knot of ribbons with a diamond set in the centre, and for a whole evening all eyes turn in her direction. Another revives the net veiling cap, or twists a dagger-like pin in her hair in a way that somehow reminds you of her garter. Someone else ties black velvet ribbon round her wrists; and a rival appears with feather plumes. The results of this high endeavour, achievements in coquetry or love comparable with Austerlitz, then become fashionable in lower spheres, while their happy creators are looking round for new inspirations.

  For that evening, when Valérie intended to be a brilliant success, she applied the equivalent of three patches. First, she had her hair washed with a rinse which for a few days turned her fair hair to ashen fairness. Madame Steinbock was a golden blonde, and she did not want to resemble her at all. This change of colour gave something piquant and strange to Valérie’s appearance, which disturbed the minds of her faithful adorers to the point of making Montès say ‘What’s come over you this evening?’ Next, she tied a rather wide black velvet ribbon round her neck, throwing the whiteness of her bosom into relief. The third provocative patch was what our grandmothers used to call ‘the man-slayer’. Valérie set a darling little rosebud in the stiffened top of her bodice, just in the centre, in the sweetest hollow. It was calculated to draw the eyes of all men under thirty downwards.

  ‘I look delicious, good enough to eat!’ she said to herself, practising her poses before the glass, exactly like a dancer doing her pliés.

  Lisbeth had gone to market, and the dinner was to be a choice repast, such as Mathurine used to cook for her bishop when he entertained the prelate of the neighbouring diocese.

  Stidmann, Claude Vignon, and Count Steinbock arrived almost together, about six o’clock. Any ordinary woman, or a natural one if you like, would have hurried down when the name of the person so ardently desired was announced; but Valérie, who since five o’clock had been waiting in her room, left her three guests together, certain of being the subject of their conversation or of their secret thoughts. With her own hands, when she was directing the arrangement of her drawing-room, she had placed her trinkets where they would catch the eye, a collection of those delightful toys that Paris produces, and that no other city could, which evoke a woman and, as it were, declare her presence: keepsakes bound in enamel and set with pearls, goblets filled with pretty rings, pieces of Sèvres or Dresden china mounted with exquisite taste by Florent and Chanor, statuettes, albums – all the madly expensive baubles that passion commissions from the makers in its first delirium, or to celebrate its latest reconciliation.

  Success, moreover, had gone to Valérie’s head. She had promised Crevel to marry him, if Marneffe died; and the amorous Crevel had arranged the transfer of shares worth ten thousand francs a year to the account of Valérie Fortin. This sum was the amount of his profit on his investments in railways for the past three years, the yield of a hundred thousand crowns once offered to Baroness Hulot. So Valérie was the possessor of an income of thirty-two thousand francs. Crevel had just blurted out a promise even more substantial than the gift of his profits. In the paroxysm of passion into which ‘his duchess’ had thrown him between two o’clock and four (he gave Madame de Marneffe that title to make his illusion complete), for Valérie had surpassed herself that day in the rue du Dauphin, he felt himself compelled to encourage her promised fidelity by holding out the prospect of a pretty little house that a rash speculator had built for himself in the rue Barbette, and now wanted to sell. Valérie saw a vision of herself in this charming house, set in its court and garden, with her own carriage!

  ‘What respectable life could give all this so quickly and with so little trouble?’ she had asked Lisbeth, as she put the finishing touches to her toilet.

  Lisbeth was dining with Valérie on this occasion, in order to be able to say those things about her to Steinbock that a person cannot say about herself. Madame Marneffe, her face radiant with pleasure, made her entrance with modest grace, followed into the drawing-room by Bette, who, dressed in black and yellow, served as her foil, to use a studio term.

  ‘Good evening, Claude,’ she said, giving her hand to the distinguished former critic.

  Claude Vignon, like so many others, had become a ‘politician’ – a word newly invented to denote an ambitious man in the first stages of his career. The ‘politician’ of 1840 more or less fills the place of the eighteenth-century ‘abbé’. No salon would be complete without its ‘politician’.

  ‘My dear, this is my cousin, Count Steinbock,’ said Lisbeth, introducing Wenceslas, whom Valérie apparently had not noticed.

  ‘Yes, I recognized Monsieur le Comte,’ replied Valérie with a gracious little inclination of the head to the artist. ‘I often used to see you in the rue du Doyenné. I had the pleasure of being present at your wedding. My dear,’ she turned to Lisbeth, ‘it would be difficult to forget your foster-child, even if one had only seen him once.… Monsieur Stidmann, how very good of you,’ she went on, bowing to the sculptor, ‘to have accepted my invitation at such short notice! You know, necessity is above the law! I knew that you were a friend of these two gentlemen, and as nothing is more chilling, more tedious, than a dinner at which the guests are strangers to one another, I begged your company for their sakes; but you will come on another occasion for mine, won’t you? Do say yes!’

  And she turned aside for a few moments with Stidmann, her attention apparently wholly preoccupied with him.

 
; In succession, Crevel, Baron Hulot, and a Deputy named Beauvisage were announced. This personage, a provincial Crevel, one of those people born to be one of a crowd, voted under the banner of Giraud, the Councillor of State, and Victorin Hulot. Those two politicians were anxious to create a nucleus of progressives in the solid mass of the Conservative party. Giraud was in the habit of coming occasionally in the evening to the rue Vanneau, and Madame Marneffe had hopes of also capturing Victorin Hulot; but the strait-laced barrister had so far found pretexts for refusing his father and father-in-law. To be seen in the house of the woman who was the cause of his mother’s tears would, it seemed to him, be a crime. Among the puritanical element in politics, Victorin Hulot held the same place as a pious woman among the devout.

  Beauvisage, a former hosier of Arcis, was anxious to ‘pick up the Parisian style’. This out-of-touch back-bencher was at the rue Vanneau to acquire sophistication under the tutelage of the delicious, the ravishing, Madame Marneffe, and there he had been fascinated by Crevel, and had adopted him, under Valérie’s guidance as model and master. He consulted him in everything, asked for the address of his tailor, imitated him, tried to strike poses like him; in short, Crevel was his great man.

  Valérie, surrounded by these personages and the three artists, well seconded by Lisbeth, impressed Wenceslas as a woman of no common kind, all the more so because Claude Vignon sang Madame Marneffe’s praises to him, like a man in love.

  ‘She is Madame de Maintenon in Ninon’s skirts!’ said the critic. ‘To please her, one need only be on one’s wittiest form for an evening; but to be loved by her, ah, there’s a triumph to satisfy a man’s pride, and fill his life!’

  Valérie, by her apparent coldness and indifference to her former neighbour, insulted his vanity, quite unwittingly, as she knew nothing of the Polish temperament.

  All Slavs have a childish side, as have all primitive races that have rather made incursion among the civilized nations than become properly civilized themselves. The primitive races have spread like a flood and cover an immense area of the globe, inhabiting desert wastes, in whose vast empty spaces they feel at home, untroubled by the European jostling of neighbour against neighbour; and civilization is impossible without the constant rubbing upon one another of minds and the rivalry of material interests. The inhabitants of the Ukraine, Russia, the plains of the Danube, in short, the Slav peoples, are a link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism. And the Pole, who belongs to the richest of the Slav nations, has in his character the childishness and instability of immature peoples. He possesses courage, quick intelligence and vigour; but since he lacks consistency of purpose, his courage, vigour and keen wits are not controlled, have no intellectual direction; and the Pole is as unstable as the wind that sweeps over his vast plains broken by swamps. He may have the irresistible impetus of avalanches telescoping houses and carrying them away, but like those formidable snow masses of the mountain heights he ends by losing himself in the first pool reached, dissolved in water.

  Men always assimilate something from the regions where they live. In their ceaseless struggle against the Turks, the Poles have acquired the Oriental taste for magnificence. They often sacrifice the necessaries of life in order to make a show; they have a feminine love of dress. And yet, the climate has given them the Arabs’ tough constitution.

  In his sublime endurance of suffering, the Pole has exhausted his oppressors’ power to strike, and has shown the world again, in the nineteenth century, the same victory that was won by the early Christian martyrs. Add ten per cent of English guile to the Polish nature, which is so frank and open, and the noble white eagle would be reigning today in all those regions where the two-headed eagle has stealthily glided in. A little Machiavellism would have prevented Poland from going to the aid of Austria, who has partitioned her; from borrowing from Prussia, the usurer who has undermined her; from splitting into factions at the time of the first partition. At Poland’s christening, a Fairy Carabosse, forgotten by the spirits who endowed this captivating nation with the most brilliant qualities, must have turned up to say, ‘Keep all the gifts that my sisters have bestowed upon you, but you shall never know what you want!’ If in her heroic duel with Russia, Poland had triumphed, the Poles would be fighting one another today, as they formerly fought in their Diets, to prevent one another from being king. On the day when this nation, uniquely constituted of beings of full-blooded courage, has the good sense to seek out a Louis XI in her midst, to accept a tyranny and a dynasty, she will be saved.

  What is true of Poland in politics, is true of most Poles in their private lives, especially in time of disaster. And so Wenceslas Steinbock, who had adored his wife for three years, and knew that to her he was a god, was so nettled at seeing himself barely remarked by Madame Marneffe that it became a point of honour with him to obtain some notice from her. Comparing her with his wife, he thought Valérie superior. Hortense was lovely in form and flesh, as Valérie had observed to Lisbeth; but Madame Marneffe had mettle in every inch of her body, and the piquancy of vice. Hortense’s devotion was a grace that a husband takes for granted as his due. The consciousness of the enormous value of an absolute love is soon lost, by the same process that makes a debtor imagine after a lapse of time that the money he has borrowed is his own. Sublime loyalty becomes the equivalent of daily bread to the soul, and infidelity attracts like a delicacy. A disdainful woman, above all a dangerous woman, stimulates curious interest as spice seasons good food. Moreover, disdain, so cleverly feigned by Valérie, was a novelty for Wenceslas, after three years of easily-won pleasures. Hortense was a wife, but Valérie was a mistress.

  Many men desire to have these two editions of the same work, although it is proof of deep inferiority in a man if he cannot make his wife his mistress. Seeking variety is a sign of impotence. Constancy will always be the guardian spirit of love, evidence of immense creative vigour, the vigour that makes a poet! A man must be able to find all women in his wife, as the disreputable poets of the seventeenth century made Irises and Chloes of their Manons!

  ‘Well,’ Lisbeth asked Wenceslas when she saw that he was fascinated, ‘what do you think of Valérie?’

  ‘Only too charming!’ he replied.

  ‘You wouldn’t listen to me,’ said Cousin Bette, driving the point home. ‘Ah, my dear boy, if you and I had only stayed together, you would have been that siren’s lover; you could have married her when she becomes a widow, and had her forty thousand francs a year!’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied Lisbeth. ‘Now, take care. I warned you of the danger. Don’t get singed in the candle-flame! Give me your arm, for dinner is served.’

  Nothing she might have said could have been more demoralizing, for a Pole has only to be shown a precipice to cast himself instantly over it. In the people of this race the cavalryman’s temperament is predominant; they are confident of their ability to ride down all obstacles and come through victorious. The spur which Lisbeth had applied to her cousin’s vanity pricked more sharply at sight of the dining-room, shining with splendid silver. There Steinbock took note of all the refinement and elegance of Parisian luxury.

  ‘I should have done better,’ he said to himself, ‘to marry Célimène.’*

  Hulot was in his best form during dinner. He was pleased to see his son-in-law there, and still happier because he felt certain of a reconciliation with Valérie, who, so he assured himself, would be faithful to him in return for the promise of Coquet’s post for her husband. Stidmann responded to the Baron’s geniality with his artist’s verve and fireworks of Parisian wit. Steinbock could not let himself be eclipsed by his friend; he set himself to shine, had gay inspirations, made an impression, and felt pleased with himself. Madame Marneffe several times smiled at him in token of her good understanding and sympathetic feeling. The good food, the heady wines, also had their effect, and Wenceslas was submerged in what can only be called the slough of pleasure. After dinner,
a little excited with wine, he stretched himself on a divan, filled with a sense of physical and mental well-being that Madame Marneffe sharpened and completed by coming to perch beside him, light, scented, lovely enough to damn the angels. She bent over Wenceslas, she almost brushed his ear to whisper to him privately:

  ‘We can’t talk business this evening, unless you would like to stay after everyone has gone? Between us, you, Lisbeth, and I should be able to arrange things to suit you.…’

  ‘Ah, you are an angel, Madame!’said Wenceslas, whispering in the same intimate fashion. ‘I was a fool not to listen to Lisbeth.’

  ‘Why, what did she say?’

  ‘She maintained, in the rue du Doyenné, that you were in love with me!’

  Madame Marneffe looked at Wenceslas, seemed embarrassed, and got up abruptly. A young and pretty woman never without consequences awakens in a man the idea of immediate success. Her gesture, as of a virtuous woman repressing a passion kept secret in the depths of her heart, was a thousand times more eloquent than the most passionate declaration. And Wenceslas’s desire was so effectively stimulated that he redoubled his attention to Valérie. A woman in the limelight is a woman coveted! Hence derives the formidable power of actresses. Madame Marneffe, aware that she was under scrutiny, comported herself like an idol of the popular stage. She was charming, and her triumph was complete.

  ‘I’m not surprised at my father-in-law’s follies now,’ said Wenceslas to Lisbeth.

  ‘If you’re going to talk like this, Wenceslas,’ replied his cousin, ‘I’ll regret to my dying day getting the loan of those ten thousand francs for you. Are you going to be like all the others,’ she added, indicating the guests, ‘doting on that creature? Just consider – that would make you your father-in-law’s rival. And think of all the unhappiness you would cause Hortense.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Wenceslas. ‘Hortense is an angel. I should be a monster!’