UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES BROWSING ROOM THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES e toe JEJonorfc ire PRIVATE LIFE VOLUME XI LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND COMPLETE COPIES 713 NO. RASTIGNAC TO THE MARQUISE DE LISTOMERE. At the hour when the Marquise de Listomere rose, about two o'clock in the afternoon, her maid, Caro- line, handed her a letter ; she read it while Caroline was dressing her hair an imprudence which a great many young women commit : O dear angel of love, treasure of life and of happiness ! At these words, the marchioness was going to throw the letter into the fire. THE NOVELS OF HONORE DE BALZAC NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME COMPLETELY TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH A DOUBLE FAMILY THE PEACE OF THE HOUSEHOLD A STUDY OF WOMAN ANOTHER STUDY OF WOMAN THE PRETENDED MISTRESS BY WILLIAM WALTON WITH FIVE ETCHINGS BY GEORGES CHARDON, EUGENE DECISY, PIERRE-SALVY-FREDERIC TEYSSONNIERES, AND CHARLES-RENE THEVENIN AFTER PAINT- INGS BY JOSE ROY AND PIERRE VIDAL IN ONE VOLUME PRINTED ONLY FOR SUBSCRIBERS BY GEORGE BARRIE & SON, PHILADELPHIA COPYRIGHTED, 1897, BY G. B. A SON - r . . . , / . . ; ..-. A DOUBLE FAMILY tt o S 3Q fe o 189946 TO MADAME LA COMTESSE LOUISE DE TURHEIM As a token of remembrance and of the affectionate respect of her humble servant, DE BALZAC (3) A DOUBLE FAMILY The Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, not so long ago one of the most tortuous and most obscure of the streets of the old quarter which surrounds the H6tel de Ville, wandered along by the little gardens of the prefecture of Paris and came out in the Rue du Martroi, exactly at the angle of an old wall, now demolished. Here stood the turnstile to which this street was indebted for its name, and which was not destroyed till 1823, at the time that the city of Paris erected, on the site of a little garden of the Hotel de Ville, a ball room for the fte given to the Due d'Angouleme on his return from Spain. The widest part of the Rue du Tourniquet was at its opening into the Rue de la Tixeranderie, where it was only about five feet wide. Thus, in rainy weather, the floods of blackish waters rose promptly to bathe the feet of the old houses on each side of this street, bringing with them the refuse deposited by each household in the corners. As the scav- engers' carts were not able to pass through it, the inhabitants depended upon the storms to clean their always muddy street; and how could it be clean? (5) 6 A DOUBLE FAMILY When in summer the sun darts its rays perpendicu- larly upon Paris, a scrap of gold, as sharp as the blade of a sabre, illuminated, momentarily, the shadows of this street without being able to dry the permanent dampness which prevailed from the pavement up to the first floor of these black and silent houses. The inhabitants, who, in the month of June, lit their lamps at five o'clock in the afternoon, did not extin- guish them at all during the winter. Even to-day, if some courageous pedestrian should wish to go from the Marais to the quais, by taking, at the end of the Rue du Chaume, the Rues de I'Homme-Arme, Des Billettes and Des Deux-Portes, which lead to that of the Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, he will think that he has walked over nothing but cellars. Nearly all the streets of old Paris, the splendor of which has been so vaunted in the chronicles, resembled this damp and gloomy labyrinth in which the anti- quarians may still find a few historical curiosities to admire. Thus, when the house which was at the corner of the Rues du Tourniquet and De la Tix- eranderie was still standing, there might still be seen by observers the marks of the two great iron rings let into the wall, a remnant of those chains which the officer of the quarter caused to be stretched across the street every.night for the public security. This house, remarkable for its age, had been built with precautions which bore testimony to the insa- lubrity of these ancient dwellings, for, in order to render the apartments on the ground floor more healthful, the arches of the basement had been A DOUBLE FAMILY 7 elevated about two feet above the ground, which necessitated the mounting of three steps in order to enter the building. The casing of the outer door described a round arch, the keystone of which was ornamented with a female head and some ara- besques defaced by time. Three windows, the sills of which were at the height of a man from the ground, opened into a little apartment in that part of the ground floor which faced the Rue du Tourniquet, from which it got its light These dilapidated windows were defended by great bars of iron widely separated and finishing in a round boss similar to that which terminates the gratings of the bakers. If, during the day, some curious passer-by looked into the two chambers which composed this apartment, it would have been im- possible for him to have seen anything, for, in order to perceive in the second chamber two beds covered with green serge, placed together under the woodwork of an old alcove, it would have required the sunshine of July; but in the afternoon, about three o'clock, when the candle was lit, there could be seen, through the window of the first room, an old woman seated on a stool at the corner of the fireplace, where she was stirring a chafing-dish in which was seething one of those ragouts similar to the stews which the porters' wives prepare. A few scarce cooking or household utensils hanging on the wall at the end of this room were faintly revealed in the obscurity. At this hour, an old table, placed upon an X, but unfurnished with linen, was set out 8 A DOUBLE FAMILY with a few dishes in tin and the repast cooked by the old woman. Three dilapidated chairs furnished this apartment, which served both for kitchen and for dining-room. Over the mantel was placed a piece of a mirror, a steel, three glasses, some matches and a large white pot with a piece broken out of it. The square space of the room, the utensils, the chimney-piece, everything, however, was pleasant because of the spirit of order and of economy which prevailed in this sombre and cold retreat The pale and wrinkled countenance of the old woman was in harmony with the obscurity of the street and the rustiness of the house. To see her in repose, seated in her chair, you would have said that she belonged in this house as a snail belongs in its brownish shell ; her countenance, in which an undefmable, vague expression of malice revealed itself through an affected good-nature, was crowned by a tulle cap, round and flat, which concealed but indifferently her white hair ; her large gray eyes were as quiet as the street, and the innumerable wrinkles of her face might be compared to the cracks in the walls. Whether it were that she had been born in poverty, or that she had fallen from a past state of splendor, she seemed to have long been resigned to her sad existence. From the rising of the sun to the even- ing, excepting during the moments when she was preparing the repasts and those in which, with a basket on her arm, she went out to procure the pro- visions, this old woman lived in the other room, before the last window, opposite a young girl. At A DOUBLE FAMILY 9 any hour of the day, the passers-by could see this young workwoman, seated in an old red velvet arm- chair, her head bent over an embroidery frame, toiling assiduously. Her mother had a green tam- bour on her knees and occupied herself with making tulle; but her fingers managed the bobbins but stiffly; her eyesight was poor, for her sexagenarian nose carried a pair of those antique glasses which maintained themselves on the end of her nostrils by the pressure of a spring. In the evening, these two laborious creatures placed between them a lamp, the light of which, passing through two glass globes filled with water, threw upon their work a strong illumination which enabled one to see the finest threads furnished by the bobbins of her tambour, and the other, the most delicate designs traced upon the stuff to be embroidered. The curving of the window bars had enabled the young girl to place upon the sill a long wooden box filled with earth in which grew sweet peas, nasturtiums, a little sickly honeysuckle and a convolvulus, the feeble tendrils of which clutched at the bars. These almost etio- lated plants produced pale flowers, one harmony the more which contributed something undefmable of sorrowful and of gentle to the picture presented by this window, the opening of which framed in well these two figures. From only a casual glimpse of this interior, the most egotistical passer-by might carry away a complete picture of the life which the working-classes lead in Paris, for the embroiderer seemed to live only by her needle. There were a 10 A DOUBLE FAMILY great many who did not get as far as the turnstile without asking themselves how a young girl could keep her color while living in such a cellar. Had a student passed by there to gain the Latin Quarter, his lively imagination would have compared this obscure and vegetative life to that of the ivy which tapestries the cold walls, or to that of those peasants devoted to toil, and who are born, labor, die unknown by the world which they have nourished. A retired merchant said to himself, after having examined the house with the eye of an owner : "What would become of these two women if em- broidery should go out of fashion ?" Among all those whom an employment in the H&tel de Ville or in the Palais compelled to pass through this street at certain hours, either to go to their respective avocations or to return to their various dwellings, perhaps there might be found some charitable heart Perhaps some widower, or some Adonis of forty, from having explored the depths of this unhappy life, came to count upon being able to possess, through the distress of the mother and the daughter, at some cheap price, the innocent workwoman whose dimpled and active hands, fresh neck and white skin, an attraction doubtless due to living in this street without sun, might have excited his admiration. Perhaps also some honest employe with a salary of twelve hundred francs, a daily witness of the assiduity which this young girl brought to her work, counting upon the purity of her life, was waiting for an advancement A DOUBLE FAMILY II to unite an obscure life to an obscure life, one per- sistent labor to another, bringing at least a man's arm to sustain this existence and a peaceful love, uricolored as the flowers in her window. Some vague hopes animated the dull and gray eyes of the old mother. In the morning, after the most modest of possible breakfasts, she returned to take up her tambour rather through habit than through obliga- tion, for she placed her glasses upon a little work- table of reddened wood, as old as herself, and passed in review, from half-past eight o'clock to about ten, the people who were in the habit of traversing the street; she received their glances, made observations upon their walk, upon their toilets, upon their physi- ognomies, and seemed to offer them her daughter, so much did her talkative eyes endeavor to establish between them sympathetic affections, by a by-play worthy of the side-scenes. It could readily be seen that this review was for her a theatrical show, and perhaps her sole pleasure. The daughter seldom lifted her head; modesty, or perhaps the painful feeling of her poverty, seemed to keep her eyes con- stantly on her work; so that, for her to have shown to the passers-by her ruffled aspect, it was neces- sary for her mother to have uttered some exclama- tion of surprise. The employe wearing a new coat, or the habitue who showed himself with a woman on his arm, might then perceive the slightly retrousse nose of the young workwoman, her little pink mouth, and her gray eyes always sparkling with life, not- withstanding her wearing fatigue; her laborious 12 A DOUBLE FAMILY sleeplessness scarcely betrayed itself other than by a circle more or less white under each of her eyes, upon the fresh skin of her cheeks. The poor child seemed to have been born for love and for mirth; for love, which had painted over her close eyelids two perfect arches, and which had given her a so ample wealth of chestnut hair that she could have hidden herself in her tresses as in a drapery impene- trable to a lover's eye; for mirth, which moved her sensitive nostrils, which made two little pits in her fresh cheeks and enabled her to so promptly forget her troubles: for mirth, that flower of hope, which gave her the strength to perceive, without shudder- ing, the arid highway of life. The hair of the young girl was always carefully combed. According to the custom of the workwomen of Paris, her toilet seemed to her to be finished when she had smoothed her hair and brought up in two bows the little cluster which played on each side on the temples and was relieved against the whiteness of her skin. The line of the growth of her hair was so graceful, the edge of bistre so distinctly defined on her neck sug- gested such charming ideas of her youth and of her attractiveness, that the observer, seeing her con- stantly bent over her work, unless some noise caused her to lift her head, might readily have accused her of coquetry. Such seductive promises excited the curi- osity of more than one young man, who looked back in vain in the hope of seeing this modest countenance. "Caroline, we have one more regular passer-by, and not one of our old ones is worthy of him." A DOUBLE FAMILY 13 These words, pronounced in a low voice by the mother, one morning in the month of August, 1815, had overcome the indifference of the young work- woman, who looked out in the street in vain; the unknown was already at a distance. "In which direction did he fly away?" she asked. "He will come back, doubtless, at four o'clock; I shall see him coming, and I will give you notice by pushing your foot I am certain that he will pass again, it is now three days that he has been going through our street ; but he does not keep exactly the same hours : the first day he came at six o'clock ; the day before yesterday at four, and yesterday at three. I remember having seen him before, at different times. He is some employe of the prefecture who has changed his apartment in the Marais. Look," she added, after having cast her eyes again into the street, "our monsieur with the chestnut-colored coat has put on a wig; how it changes him !" The monsieur with the chestnut-colored coat seemed to have been that one of the habitues who closed the daily procession, for the old mother resumed her glasses and took up her work again, uttering a sigh and throwing upon her daughter a look so singular that it would have been difficult for Lavater himself to have analyzed it; admiration, thankfulness, a sort of hope for a better future were mingled in it with the pride of possessing so pretty a daughter. That afternoon, about four o'clock, the old woman pushed Caroline's foot, and the latter lifted her nose in time to see the new actor whose 14 A DOUBLE FAMILY periodical passage was going to animate the scene. Tall, slender, pale and clothed in black, this man, of about forty years of age, had something solemn in his walk and his appearance; when his wild and piercing eye met the dulled look of the old woman, he caused her to tremble, he seemed to her to have the gift or the habit of reading the depths of human hearts, and his encounter must be as glacial as was the air of this street. The earthy and greenish tint of this terrible visage, was it the result of exces- sive labors, or produced by delicate health? This problem was solved by the old mother in twenty different manners ; but the next morning, Caroline discovered at once on this countenance which frowned so easily, the traces of a long suffering of the soul. Slightly hollowed, the cheeks of the un- known retained the impression of the seal with which Misfortune marks his subjects, as if to leave them the consolation of recognizing each other with a fraternal eye and of uniting to resist him. The heat was at this moment so great, and the distrac- tion of this monsieur so complete, that he had not put on his hat in traversing this unwholesome street Caroline could thus notice the appearance of severity which the stiff and upright manner in which the hair was worn on the forehead, gave to this countenance. If the young girl's look was at first animated by a quite innocent curiosity, it took on a gentle expression of sympathy as the passer-by disappeared, not unlike that of the last relative who brings up the end of the funeral procession. The A DOUBLE FAMILY 15 impression, lively, but without any charm, which Caroline experienced at the sight of this man, had no resemblance to any of the sensations which the other frequenters of the street had caused her : for the first time her compassion was awakened for another than for herself or her mother ; she made no response to the grotesque conjectures which fur- nished food for the irritating loquacity of the old woman, and drew in silence her long needle over and under the stretched tulle ; she regretted that she had not seen the stranger better, and waited for the next day, to form a definite judgment concerning him. It was the first time, also, that one of the fre- quenters of the street had suggested to her so many reflections. Usually, she replied only by a sad smile to the suppositions of her mother, who in each passer-by hoped to find a protector for her daughter. If such ideas, imprudently announced, did not awaken any evil thoughts, we may attribute the thoughtlessness of Caroline to that obstinate labor, unfortunately necessary, which consumed the strength of her precious youth, and which must infallibly alter some day the limpidity of her eyes, or ravish from the white cheeks the tender colors which still shaded them. For nearly two long months the black monsieur, so was he called, had very capricious habits, he did not always pass through the Rue du Tourniquet; the old woman often saw him in the evening without having per- ceived him in the morning; he did not return at such fixed hours as the other employes who served as a 16 A DOUBLE FAMILY clock to Madame Crochard ; and finally, excepting at the first meeting, when his eyes had inspired a sort of fear in the old mother, his attention never seemed to be attracted to the picturesque tableau presented by these two female gnomes. With the exception of two great gates and the obscure shop of a dealer in old iron, there were to be found at this period in the Rue du Tourniquet only windows with gratings which lit grudgingly the stairways of some neigh- boring houses the lack of curiosity on the part of the passer-by could not then be justified by danger- ous rivalries ; Madame Crochard was therefore vexed to see her black monsieur always gravely preoccupied, keeping his eyes fixed on the pavement, or raised and looking ahead of him, as if to read the future in the fogs of the Tourniquet Nevertheless, one morn- ing, toward the end of the month of September, the sprightly head of Caroline Crochard detached itself so brilliantly against the dusky background of her chamber, and showed itself so fresh in the midst of the belated flowers and the withered leafage inter- laced around the bars of the window; in short, the daily scene presented oppositions of shadow and light, of white and of pink, so happily united with the muslin dress of the gentle workwoman, with the brownish and reddish tones of the armchair, that the unknown looked very attentively at the effects of this living picture. Wearied with the indiffer- ence of her black monsieur the old mother had, in truth, taken it upon herself to make such a clicking with her bobbins that the mournful and anxious A DOUBLE FAMILY 17 pedestrian was perhaps compelled by this unusual noise to look in at her house. The stranger ex- changed with Caroline only a look, rapid it is true, but in which their souls came lightly into touch, and the presentiment came to both of them that they would think of each other. When in the after- noon at four o'clock the unknown returned, Caro- line distinguished the sound of his footsteps upon the resonant pavement, and when they examined each other there was on each side a sort of premedi- tation, the eyes of the pedestrian were animated by a sentiment of friendliness which caused him to smile.and Caroline blushed; the old mother watched them both with a satisfied air. Dating from that memorable morning, the black monsieur traversed twice a day the Rue du Tourniquet, with some rare exceptions, which the two women readily recog- nized; they judged, from the irregularity of his hours of return, that he was neither so promptly released nor so strictly exact as a minor employe. During the first three months of the winter, twice a day, Caroline and the passer saw each other thus during the time it took him to traverse the portion of the sidewalk opposite the door and the three windows of the house. From day to day, this rapid interview took on a character of friendly intimacy, which in the end contracted something of a fraternal character. Caroline and the unknown seemed to have comprehended each other from the first ; then, through examining each other's countenances, they acquired a profound acquaintance with each other. 1 8 A DOUBLE FAMILY It soon came to be like a visit which the passer owed to Caroline; if, by chance, her black monsieur passed without bringing her the smile half formed round his eloquent mouth or the friendly look in his brown eyes, there was something lacking in her day. She was like those old men to whom the reading of their daily journal has become such a pleasure that, the day after a solemn fte, they go about all distracted, demanding, as much through oversight as through impatience, the sheet by the aid of which they forget for a moment the emptiness of their existence. But these fugitive appearances had, as much for the unknown as for Caroline, the interest of a familiar conversation between two friends. The young girl could no more hide away from the intelligent eye of her silent friend a sad- ness, an anxiety, an illness, than the latter could conceal his preoccupation from Caroline. "Some- thing went wrong with him yesterday," was the thought which often arose in the workwoman's heart when she looked at the changed countenance of the black monsieur. "Oh! how much he has worked!" was an exclamation due to other shades of expression which Caroline knew how to distin- guish. The unknown divined also that the young girl had passed her Sunday in finishing the dress in the design of which he was interested ; he saw, at the approach of rent day, that pretty face shadowed by anxiety, and he felt instinctively that Caroline had watched the night before ; but he had, above all, noticed how the sad thoughts, which took the bloom A DOUBLE FAMILY 19 from the gay and delicate features of this young countenance, dissipated themselves as their acquaint- ance had ripened. When the winter came to wither the stems, the leafage of the little garden which had adorned the window, and when the window was closed, the unknown saw, not without a gently malicious smile, the extraordinary clearness of the glass at the level of Caroline's head. The parsi- mony of fire, some traces of a redness which dyed the faces of the two women, revealed to him the indigence of the little household; but if some sor- rowful compassion was then depicted in his eyes, Caroline proudly opposed to him a feigned gaiety. In the meanwhile, the sentiments that had budded in the depths of their hearts remained buried there, without any event coming to teach one to the other their strength and their extent; they did not even know the sound of each other's voices. These two mute friends guarded themselves, as against an unhappiness, from engaging themselves in any more intimate union. Each of them seemed to fear to bring to the other a misfortune heavier than that with which separation tried him. Was it this modesty of friendship which thus arrested them? Was it that apprehension of egotism, or that atro- cious distrust which separates all the inhabitants inclosed within the walls of a populous city? Did the secret voice of their conscience warn them of a near peril ? It would be difficult to explain the sen- timent which rendered them as much enemies as friends, indifferent one to the other as they were 20 A DOUBLE FAMILY mutually attached, as united by instincts as they were separated by the actual facts. Perhaps each of them wished to preserve his own illusions. It might have been said sometimes that the black monsieur feared to hear some coarse words issue from those lips, as fresh, as pure as a flower, and that Caroline did not think herself worthy of this mysterious being in whom everything revealed power and fortune. As to Madame Crochard, that tender mother, almost discontented with the inde- cision in which her daughter remained, showed a pouting air to her black monsieur, on whom she had up to this time smiled with an air as complaisant as servile. Never had she complained so bitterly to her daughter of being obliged, at her age, to do the cooking; at no period had her rheumatism and her catarrh drawn from her so many groans ; and, finally, she was not able to make, during this winter, the number of yards of tulle on which Caroline had reckoned up to this time. Under these circum- stances, and toward the end of the month of Decem- ber, at the period when the price of bread was the highest, and when there was already experienced the beginning of that dearness of grain which ren- dered the year 1816 so cruel to the poor, the passer observed on the young girl's countenance her name being still unknown to him the dreadful ravages of some secret care, which her friendly smiles did not dissipate. Presently, he recognized in Caroline's eyes the withering indications left by nocturnal work. On one of the last nights of this month, he A DOUBLE FAMILY 21 returned, contrary to his custom, about one o'clock in the morning, by the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint- Jean. The silence of the night permitted him to hear at a distance, before reaching Caroline's house, the tearful voice of the old mother and the still more mournful one of the young workwoman, the echoing sounds of which were mingled with the whistling of a snow-storm ; he endeavored to approach with noiseless footsteps; then, at the risk of being ar- rested, he concealed himself before the window to listen to the mother and daughter, watching them through the largest of the holes which riddled the curtains of yellowed muslin, and made them resemble the large leaves of the cabbage when eaten full of round holes by the caterpillars. The curious pedes- trian saw a stamped paper upon the table which separated the tambour from the embroidery frame, and on which was placed the lamp between its two globes full of water. He readily recognized a sum- mons. Madame Crochard was weeping, and Caro- line's voice had a guttural sound which altered its gentle and caressing timbre. "Why do you afflict yourself so, mother? Monsieur Molineux will not sell our furniture and turn us out of the house before I have finished this dress ; only two nights more, and I will take it to Madame Roguin." "And if she makes you wait, as she always does? But will the price of your dress also pay the baker ?" The spectator of this scene had such skill in read- ing the human countenance, that he thought he per- ceived as much falseness in the grief of the mother 22 A DOUBLE FAMILY as of truth in the daughter's distress; he immedi- ately disappeared, and returned a few moments later. When he looked again through the hole in the muslin, the mother was in bed; bending over her task, the young workwoman was plying her needle with an indefatigable activity ; on the table, by the side of the legal summons, was a triangular piece of bread, doubtless placed there for her nourishment during the night, while at the same time reminding her of the reward of her courage. The black mon- sieur shuddered with pity and sorrow; he threw his purse through a broken pane of the window in such a manner that it fell at the feet of the young girl ; then, without waiting to enjoy her surprise, he hastened away, his heart beating, his cheeks on fire. The next morning, the gloomy and mournful unknown passed by, affecting a preoccupied air, but he could not escape Caroline's gratitude, she had opened the window and was amusing herself by digging with a knife in the square box covered with snow, a pretext, the ingenious awkwardness of which announced to her benefactor that she did not wish, this time, to see him only through the window panes. The embroiderer, with her eyes full of tears, made a sign of her head toward her protector as if to say to him : "I can only pay you with my heart " But the black monsieur appeared to comprehend nothing of the expression of this true gratitude. In the evening when he passed again, Caroline, who was occupying herself by pasting a piece of paper over the broken pane, was able to smile upon him, A DOUBLE FAMILY 23 showing him, like a promise, the enamel of her white teeth. The black monsieur from that date took another road, and no longer showed himself in the Rue du Tourniquet In the first days of the following May, one Satur- day morning when Caroline perceived, between the two black lines of the houses, a little portion of a cloudless sky, and while she was watering from a glass the stalk of her honeysuckle, she said to her mother : "Mamma, we must go to-morrow to take a walk at Montmorency !" Scarcely had she uttered this phrase with a joyous air when the black monsieur came by, more sad and overwhelmed than ever; the chaste and caressing look which Caroline threw upon him might be taken for an invitation. Thus, the next morning, when Madame Crochard, arrayed in a redingote of brown- ish-red merino, a silk hat and a shawl with large stripes imitating cashmere, presented herself at the corner of the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and of the Rue d'Enghien to select one of those little public car- riages that run out to the suburbs of Paris and are called "cuckoos," she found her unknown there, planted on his two feet like a man who was waitingfor his wife. A smile of pleasure unwrinkled the stran- ger's face when he saw Caroline, whose little foot was shod with a gaiter of prunella, puce color, whose white dress, blown by a wind treacherous for badly shaped women, revealed attractive outlines, and whose face, shaded by a hat of rice straw lined with 24 A DOUBLE FAMILY pink satin, was as if illuminated by a celestial reflection; her large girdle of puce color set off a waist that could be enclosed between the two hands ; her hair, parted in two large bandeaux of bistre upon a forehead as white as snow, gave her an air of candor which nothing could deny. Pleasure seemed to render Caroline as light as the straw of her hat, but there was in her a hope which eclipsed all at once her adornment and her beauty when she saw the black monsieur. The latter, who seemed irreso- lute, was perhaps decided to serve as traveling com- panion to the workwoman by the sudden revelation of the happiness caused by his presence. He secured, to go to Saint-Leu-Taverny, a cabriolet, the horse of which seemed good enough; he invited Madame Crochard and her daughter to take their places in it The mother accepted without any urging; but when the carriage was on the Saint- Denis road she bethought herself to have scruples and hazarded a few civilities upon the inconvenience which two women would cause their companion. "Monsieur perhaps wished to go alone to Saint- Leu?" she said with a counterfeit good nature. But she did not delay complaining of the heat, and above all of her catarrh, which, she said, had not permitted her to close her eyes during the night; therefore, the vehicle had hardly reached Saint-Denis when Madame Crochard appeared to go to sleep; some of her snores seemed suspicious to the black monsieur, who knit his brows and looked at the old woman with a singularly suspicious air. A DOUBLE FAMILY 2$ "Oh! she is asleep," said Caroline, naively; "she has not stopped coughing since yesterday evening. She must be very tired. " For all reply, the traveling companion threw upon the young girl a shrewd smile, as if to say to her : "Innocent creature, you do not know your mother!" Meanwhile, notwithstanding his suspicions, and when the carriage was rolling along in that long avenue of poplars which leads to Eaubonne, the black monsieur believed Madame Crochard really asleep; perhaps also he did not care to examine just to what degree this slumber was feigned or real. Whether it were that the beauty of the sky, the pure air of the country and those intoxicating per- fumes diffused by the first shoots of the poplars, by the buds of the willows and by those of the white thorns had disposed his heart to expand, as Nature herself expanded ; whether it were that a long con- straint had become tiresome to him, or that the sparkling eyes of Caroline had responded to the disquietude of his own, the black monsieur began with her a conversation as vague as the swaying of the trees under the effects of the breeze, as wander- ing as the turnings of the butterfly in the blue air, as little reasoning as the softly melodious voice of the fields, but tinged like Nature with a mysterious love. At this period of the year, is not the country trembling like a bride who has assumed her wedding dress, and does it not convoke to pleasure the coldest souls? To leave the gloomy streets of the Marais, for the first time since the last autumn, and to find 26 A DOUBLE FAMILY one's self in the bosom of the harmonious and pic- turesque valley of Montmorency ; to traverse it in the morning, having before the eyes the infinite of its horizons, and to be able to bring back from them one's regard to eyes that also depict the infinite in expressing love, what hearts would remain icy, what lips would keep a secret? The unknown found Caroline more cheerful than intelligent and imaginative, more loving than learned; but if her laugh revealed her frolicsomeness, her words prom- ised a true feeling. When to the sagacious inter- rogations of her companion, the young girl replied with that effusion of the heart of which the inferior classes are so prodigal without any of the reticences of people of the world, the countenance of the black monsieur became animated and seemed to take on a new life; his physiognomy lost by degrees the sadness which contracted his features; then, from one tint to another, it took on an air of youth- fulness and a character of beauty which rendered Caroline both happy and proud. The pretty em- broiderer divined that her protector, long separated from all tenderness and love, no longer believed in the devotion of a woman. Finally, an unexpected sally of Caroline's light gossip lifted the last veil which concealed on the face of the unknown his real youthfulness and his primitive character ; he seemed to declare an eternal separation from his importu- nate ideas, and displayed the vivacity of soul which the solemnity of his countenance did not reveal. The conversation became insensibly so familiar that at A DOUBLE FAMILY 27 the moment when the carriage stopped at the first houses of the long village of Saint-Leu, Caroline was calling the unknown "Monsieur Roger." For the first time only then, the old mother awoke. "Caroline, she has heard everything?" said Roger, with a suspicious voice in the young girl's ear. Caroline replied with a ravishing smile of in- credulity which dissipated the dark cloud which the fear of a cold calculation on the part of the mother had caused to fall on the forehead of this mistrustful man. Without being surprised at anything, Madame Crochard approved of everything, followed her daughter and Monsieur Roger into the park of Saint- Leu, which the two young people had agreed to enter to visit the laughing meadows and the balmy groves celebrated by the taste of Queen Hortense. "Mon Dieu! how beautiful that is!" cried Caro- line when, mounted upon the green brow where the forest of Montmorency commences, she perceived at her feet the immense valley which unrolled its sinu- osities sown with villages, the bluish horizons of its hills, its steeples, its meadows, its fields, and the murmur of which came to expire in the young girl's ear like a sound of the sea. The three travelers kept close to the edge of a factitious little river, and arrived at that Swiss valley, the chalet of which had received more than once Queen Hortense and Napoleon. When Caro- line had seated herself with a sacred respect upon the mossy wooden bench on which had rested the 28 A DOUBLE FAMILY kings, the princesses and the Emperor, Madame Crochard manifested a desire to examine more closely a bridge suspended between two rocks which she perceived from a distance, and directed her steps toward this rustic curiosity, leaving her child under the guardianship of Monsieur Roger, but saying to her that she would not lose sight of them. "Ah! what, poor little thing," cried Roger, "you have never desired fortune and the enjoyments of luxury? You have not wished sometimes to wear the beautiful dresses which you embroider?" "I would lie to you, Monsieur Roger, if I should say to you that I do not think of the happiness which the rich enjoy. Ah! yes, I dream often, above all when I go to sleep, of the pleasure which I should have in seeing my poor mother no longer obliged at her age to go out in bad weather to get our little provisions. I would wish that in the morn- ing a woman of the house should bring to her, while she was still in bed, her coffee well sugared with white sugar. She loves to read romances, the poor, good woman, well, I had much rather see her use her eyes for her favorite reading instead of in moving the bobbins from morning until night She ought also to have a little good wine. In short, I should like to know her happy, she is so good!" "She has then proved her goodness to you?" "Oh! yes," replied the young girl, with a depth in her voice. Then, after a sufficiently brief moment of silence, during which the two young people looked at A DOUBLE FAMILY 29 Madame Crochard, who, having reached the middle of the rustic bridge, threatened them with her finger, Caroline went on: "Oh! yes, she has proved it to me. How much care did she not bestow upon me when I was little ! She sold her last silver dishes to put me to the ap- prenticeship with the old maid from whom I learned embroidering. And my poor father! how much trouble did she not have that he might be enabled to pass his last moments happily!" At this recollection, the young girl shuddered, and made a veil of her two hands. "Ah! bah! let us not think of past misfortunes," she said, endeavoring to resume her gay air. She blushed on perceiving that Roger was moved, but she did not dare to look at him. "What did your father do?" he asked. "My father was a dancer at the Opera before the Revolution," she replied, with the most natural air in the world ; "and my mother sang in the choruses. My father, who directed the evolutions at the theatre, accidentally found himself at the taking of the Bas- tile. He was recognized by some of the assail- ants, who asked him if he could not direct a real attack, he who commanded the sham ones at the theatre. My father was brave, he accepted, led the insurgents, and was rewarded by the grade of cap- tain in the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, where he conducted himself in such a way as to rise rapidly in grade, he became colonel ; but he was so badly wounded at Lutzen that he came back to die at 30 A DOUBLE FAMILY Paris, after a year of illness. The Bourbons came in, my mother was unable to obtain a pension, and we fell into such poverty that we were obliged to work for our living. Within a short time that good woman has become sickly; I have never seen her with so little resignation; she complains, and I can readily understand it; she has tasted the pleasures of a happy life. As for myself, who would not know how to regret delights which I have never known, I ask only one thing of Heaven " "What one ?" Roger, who seemed to be dreaming, asked quickly. "That the women may always wear embroidered tulle, so that the work may never fail." The frankness of these avowals interested the young man, who regarded with a somewhat less hostile eye Madame Crochard when she returned toward them with a slow step. "Well, my children, have you had a good gossip ?" she asked them with an air at once indulgent and jesting. "When one thinks, monsieur, that the Little Corporal has sat there where you are!" she went on after a moment of silence. "Poor man!" she added, "my husband loved him! Ah! Crochard also did well to die, for he could not have endured to know where they have put him." Roger placed his finger to his lips, and the good woman, shaking her head, said with a serious air: "Enough, mouths shall be shut and tongues dead. But," she added, opening the edges of her corsage and showing a cross and its red ribbon hung round A DOUBLE FAMILY 31 her neck by a narrow black silk one, "they will not prevent me from wearing that which the other gave to my poor Crochard, and I will certainly have myself buried with " On hearing these words, which then passed for sedition, Roger interrupted the old mother by rising brusquely, and they returned to the village through the alleys of the park. The young man disappeared for a few moments to order a repast at the best cook's in Taverny; then he returned for the two women and conducted them thither through the forest paths. The dinner was gay. Roger was no longer that sinister shadow which formerly passed through the Rue du Tourniquet; he resembled less the black monsieur than a confident young man ready to abandon himself to the current of life, like these two women, taking no care and laborious, who to- morrow perhaps would be wanting bread; he ap- peared to be under the influence of the joys of the first age, his smile had in it something caressing and childlike. When, toward five o'clock, the cheerful dinner was ended with a few glasses of champagne, Roger was the first to propose to go to the village ball under the chestnut trees, where Caroline and he danced together; their hands con- veyed a mutual intelligence by their pressure, their hearts beat, animated by the same hope; and under the blue sky, in the oblique and ruddy rays of the setting sun, their glances attained a brilliancy which for them eclipsed that of the sky. Strange power of a thought and of a desire! Nothing seemed 32 A DOUBLE FAMILY impossible to these two beings. In those magic moments in which pleasure throws its reflections even upon the future, the soul foresees only happi- ness. This charming day had already created for these two, souvenirs with which they could compare nothing in the past of their existence. Is the source then more gracious than the river, is desire more ravishing than enjoyment, and that which we hope for, more attractive than all which we possess ? "Here is the day already ended!" At this exclamation which escaped from the unknown at the moment when the dance ceased, Caroline looked at him with a compassionate air on seeing on his countenance a slight tinge of sadness. "Why should you not be as contented at Paris as here ?" she said. "Is happiness to be found only at Saint-Leu ? It seems to me now that I cannot be unhappy anywhere." Roger trembled slightly at these words, dictated by that soft abandon which always carries women farther than they wish to go, just as prudery often gives them more cruelty than they have. For the first time since the look which had in a measure been the beginning of their friendship, Caroline and Roger had the same thought ; if they did not express it, they felt it at the same moment by a mutual impression, not unlike that of a beneficent hearth which would have protected them against the rigors of the winter; then, as though they feared to be silent, they proceeded toward the spot where the carriage was waiting for them ; but, before getting A DOUBLE FAMILY 33 into it, they took each other fraternally by the hand and hastened into a dusky alley before Madame Crochard. When they no longer saw the white tulle bonnet which, like a point of light amid the foliage, indicated to them the locality of the old mother : "Caroline!" said Roger, with a troubled voice, his heart beating. The young girl, confused, fell back some steps, comprehending the desires which this interrogation revealed ; nevertheless she extended her hand, which was ardently kissed and which she quickly with- drew, for, rising on her toes, she had perceived her mother. Madame Crochard pretended to have seen nothing, as if, in recollection of her ancient r61es, she should only figure here as an "aside." The adventure of these two young people did not continue in the Rue du Tourniquet In order to find Caroline and Roger again, it will be necessary to transport ourselves into the midst of modern Paris, where there exist, in the houses newly built, those apartments which seem expressly arranged for newly-married couples to pass there their honey- moon : the paintings and the papers are as young there as the spouses, and the decoration is in its flower, like their love; everything is there in har- mony with young ideas, with ardent desires. About the middle of the Rue Taitbout, in a house, the cut stone of which was still white, of which the columns of the vestibule and of the doorway were as yet unsoiled, and the walls of which shone with that 3 34 A DOUBLE FAMILY coquettish painting which our first relations with England had brought into fashion, there was to be found on the second floor a little apartment arranged by the architect as if he had guessed its destination. A fresh and simple antechamber, the walls faced breast-high with stucco, led into a salon and into a little dining-room. The salon communicated with a pretty bedchamber to which was attached a bathroom. The chimneys were all finished with high mirrors carefully framed. The doors had for ornaments arabesques in very good taste, and the cornices were pure in style. An amateur would have recognized there, better than elsewhere, that science of distribution and of decoration which dis- tinguishes the works of our modern architects. Caroline had been living for about a month in this apartment, which had been furnished by oneof those upholsterers who are directed by artists. A brief description of the most important room will suffice to give an idea of the marvels which this apartment offered to the eyes of Caroline, brought hither by Roger. Hangings in a gray stuff, set off by ornaments in green silk, decorated the walls of her bedchamber. The furniture, covered with a light-colored kersey- mere, presented the light and graceful forms required by the latest fashionable caprice; a commode in native wood, inlaid with brown stripes, guarded the treasures of the wardrobe; a secretary of similar make served for the writing of pretty notes on per- fumed paper; the bed, draped & I' antique, could only inspire ideas of voluptuousness by the softness of its A DOUBLE FAMILY 35 elegantly arranged muslins; the curtains, of gray silk with green fringes, were always drawn in such a manner as to intercept the light; a bronze clock represented Love crowning Psyche; and finally, a carpet with Gothic designs printed upon a reddish background served to bring out the accessories of this place full of delights. Opposite a large psyche- glass was placed a little toilet table, before which the ex-embroiderer was expressing her impatience at the science of Plaisir, an illustrious hairdresser. "Do you hope to finish my coiffure to-day?" she said. "Madame's hair is so long and so thick!" replied Plaisir. Caroline could not keep from smiling. The artiste's flattery had doubtless awakened in her heart the souvenir of the passionate praises ad- dressed to her by her friend on the beauty of this hair, which he adored. When the hairdresser had departed, the femme de chambre came to hold council with her concerning the toilet which would most please Roger. They were then at the commence- ment of September, 1816, the weather was cold, a dress of green grenadine trimmed with chinchilla was selected. As soon as her toilet was completed, Caroline fled into the salon, opened one of the win- dows which gave access to the elegant balcony which decorated the facade, and there crossed her arms in a charming attitude, not for the purpose of offering herself to the admiration of the passers-by and seeing them turn their heads toward her, but to 36 A DOUBLE FAMILY look down the boulevard at the end of the Rue Tait- bout This vista, which could readily be compared to the hole practised by actors in a theatre curtain, permitted her to distinguish a multitude of elegant carriages and a crowd of people carried along with the rapidity of a phantasmagoria. As she did not know whether Roger were coming on foot or in a carriage, the former workwoman of the Rue du Tour- niquet examined alternately the pedestrians and the tilburies, light carriages recently imported into France by the English. Various expressions, of frowardness and of love, passed over her young face when, at the end of a quarter of an hour's waiting, neither her quick eye nor her heart had yet indi- cated to her him whom she knew should be coming. What scorn, what indifference were depicted on her beautiful countenance for all the creatures which swarmed like ants below her feet! Her gray eyes, sparkling with malice, blazed. All absorbed in her passion, she avoided homage with as much care as the proudest take to receive it during their prom- enades through Paris, and certainly concerned herself but little if the souvenir of her white face leaning over, or of her little foot which protruded through the balcony, if the piquant image of her animated eyes or of her nose voluptuously retrousse, should be effaced the next day or should not from the hearts of the passers-by who admired her; she saw only one face and had but one thought When the spotted head of a certain brown-bay horse came in sight on this side of the high line traced in space by the walls A DOUBLE FAMILY 37 of the houses, Caroline trembled and lifted herself on the points of her toes, endeavoring to recognize the white reins and the color of the tilbury. It was he! Roger turned the angle of the street, saw the balcony, whipped up his horse, which sprang for- ward and arrived before that bronzed door which he knew as well as his master. The door of the apart- ment was opened in advance by the femme de chambre, who had heard the cry of joy uttered by her mistress. Roger precipitated himself toward the salon, pressed Caroline in his arms and embraced her with that effusion of sentiment which is always induced by the infrequent reunion of two beings who love each other ; he drew her, or, rather, they walked by mutual impulse, although enlaced in each other's arms, toward that discreet and balmy cham- ber ; a sofa received them before the fire, and they contemplated each other a moment in silence, ex- pressing their happiness only by the quiet pressure of their hands, communicating their thoughts to each other by a long look. "Yes, it is he," she said finally; "yes, it is you. Do you know that it has been three long days since I saw you, a century ! But what is the matter with you? You are in trouble. " "My poor Caroline " "Oh! see now, 'my poor Caroline' " "No, do not laugh, my angel; we cannot go this evening to Feydeau's." Caroline made a little pouting mouth, but it im- mediately disappeared. 38 A DOUBLE FAMILY "I am a silly! How can I think of the theatre when I see you ? To see you, is not that the only theatre that I love?" she cried, passing her fingers through Roger's hair. "I am obliged to go to see the Procureur General, we have on hand just now a difficult affair. He met me in the grande salle; and as it is I who am the spokesman, he has engaged me to come and dine with him; but, my dear, you can go to Feydeau's with your mother, I will rejoin you there if the con- ference finishes early." "Go to the theatre without you!" she cried with an expression of astonishment, "take a pleasure which you do not share ! Oh my Roger, you deserve not to be embraced," she added, throwing herself upon his neck with a movement as ingenuous as voluptuous. "Caroline, I must return to dress. The Marais is at a distance, and I have still some affairs to attend to." "Monsieur," replied Caroline, interrupting him, "be careful of those words ! My mother has told me that when men begin to talk to us of their affairs, they no longer love us." "Caroline, have I not come? have I not stolen this hour from my pitiless " "Hush!" said she, placing a finger on Roger's mouth, "hush! do you not see that I am jesting?" At this moment they had both returned to the salon. Roger perceived there a piece of furniture that had been brought that very morning by the A DOUBLE FAMILY 39 cabinet-maker, the old embroidery frame in rose- wood, the productions of which had supported Caro- line and her mother when they lived in the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, had been done up anew, and a tulle robe of a rich design was already stretched upon it "Ah! well, my dear friend, this evening I will work. While I am embroidering, I will think that I am still in those first days when you used to pass by before me without saying a word, but not with- out looking at me ; in those days when the remem- brance of your look kept me awake during the night O my dear embroidery frame, the most beautiful piece of furniture in my salon, although it did not come from you ! You do not know ?" she said, seat- ing herself on the knees of Roger who, unable to resist his emotions, had fallen into an armchair "Listen to me, then! I wish to give to the poor all that I gain by my embroidery. You have made me so rich ! How I love that pretty place of Bellefeuille, less for what it is than because it is you who have given it to me. But, tell me, my Roger, I should like to call myself Caroline de Bellefeuille, can I? you should know; would that be legal, or permitted?" When she saw the little affirmative motion of Roger's mouth, inspired by his hatred for the name of Crochard, Caroline leaped for joy, clapping her hands. "It seems to me as if I should belong to you better that way. Usually, a young girl renounces her name and takes that of her husband " 40 A DOUBLE FAMILY An importunate thought, which, however, she im- mediately drove away, made her blush; she took Roger by the hand and led him to an open piano. "Listen," she said. "I know my sonata now like an angel." And her fingers were already wandering over the ivory keys when she felt herself seized and lifted by the waist. "Caroline, I should be away from here." "You wish to go? Well, go then," she said, pouting. But she smiled as she looked at the clock and cried joyously : "I have at least kept you a quarter of an hour longer." "Adieu, Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille," he said, with the gentle irony of love. She took a kiss and conducted her Roger as far as the threshold of the door; when the sound of his footsteps was no longer heard on the stairway, she ran to the balcony to see him mounting in his til- bury, to see him take the reins, to receive a last look, to hear the rolling of the wheels on the pave- ment, and to follow with her eyes the shining horse, the hat of the master, the gold lace which orna- mented that of the groom, finally, to look for a long time afterward at the black angle of the street which had robbed her of this vision. Five years after the installation of Mademoiselle Caroline de Bellefeuille in the pretty house of the Rue Taitbout, there passed there, for the second A DOUBLE FAMILY 41 time, one of those domestic scenes which draw still closer the ties of affection between two beings who love each other. In the middle of the blue salon, before the window which opened on the balcony, a little boy of four years was making an infernal hubbub, whipping his toy horse of which the two rockers which sustained its feet did not go fast enough to please him; his pretty little countenance, around which his fair hair fell in a thousand curls on his embroidered collar, smiled like an angel's face at his mother when, from the depths of her couch, she said to him : "Not so much noise, Charles, you will waken your little sister." The child, filled with curiosity, immediately de- scended from his horse, came on the tips of his toes as if he feared to make a noise with his feet on the carpet, put the end of a finger between his little teeth, standing in one of those infantile attitudes which have so much grace only because they are entirely natural, and lifted the veil of white muslin which concealed the fresh face of a very little girl asleep on her mother's knees. "She is asleep then, Eugenie?" he said in great surprise. "But why does she sleep when we are awake?" he added, opening his great black eyes, humid and brilliant. "God alone knows that," replied Caroline, smiling. The mother and the child contemplated this little maid, baptized that very morning. Caroline, now 42 A DOUBLE FAMILY about the age of twenty-four, presented a fully de- veloped beauty which an unclouded happiness and constant pleasures had made to bloom. In her, the woman was completed. Delighted to fulfill the wishes of her dear Roger, she had acquired the accomplishments which she had lacked, she played the piano sufficiently well, and sang agreeably. Ignorant of the usages of a society which would have repulsed her, and into which she would not have entered even had she been welcomed by it, for the happy woman does not go out into the world, she had neither known how to assume that ele- gance of manners nor to acquire that conversation full of words and empty of thoughts, which holds sway in salons; but, instead, she had laboriously acquired the knowledge indispensable to a mother whose whole ambition lies in educating her children well. Never to leave her son, to give him at every moment from the cradle those lessons which impress upon the young soul the love of the beautiful and the good, to preserve him from every evil influence, to fulfill at once the troublesome functions of the nurse and the sweet obligations of the mother, these were her only pleasures. From the very first day, this gentle and discreet creature resigned herself so entirely to not taking a step outside the enchanted sphere in which for her lay all joys, that after six years of the most tender union she knew no more of her companion than the name of Roger. Hung in her bedchamber, the engraving of Psyche coming A DOUBLE FAMILY 43 with her lamp to see the sleeping Cupid notwith- standing his commands, recalled to her the condi- tions of her happiness. During these six years, her modest desires never, by an ill-placed ambition, wearied Roger's heart, a real treasury of kindness. Never did she wish for diamonds or ornaments, and she refused the luxury of a carriage, twenty times offered to her vanity. To wait on the balcony for Roger's tilbury, to go with him to the theatre or to walk together during the fine weather in the en- virons of Paris, to hope, to see him, and to hope again, this was the history of her life, poor in events but rich in love. While lulling on her knees with a song the little daughter who had arrived a few months before this day, she pleased herself by calling up her souvenirs. She dwelt most willingly on the month of September, at which period, each year, her Roger took her to Bellefeuille, there to pass those beautiful days which seem to belong to all the seasons. Nature then is as prodigal of flowers as of fruits, the evenings are tepid, the mornings are soft, and the splendor of summer often succeeds the melancholy of autumn. During the first period of her love, Caroline had attributed the evenness of soul and the gentleness of character, all the proofs of which were given to her by Roger, to the infre- quency of their interviews, always desired, and to their manner of living which did not bring them constantly into each other's presence, as is the case with two married people. She remembered then 44 A DOUBLE FAMILY with delight how, tormented by vain fears, she had watched him with trembling during their first sojourn at this little estate of the Gatinais, useless espionage of love ! each one of those months of hap- piness passed like a dream, in the bosom of a felicity which never denied itself. She had always seen on the lips of this kind being a tender smile, a smile which seemed to be the repetition of her own. Her eyes filled with tears at these pictures too vividly recalled ; she thought that she did not love enough and was tempted to see, in the misfortune of her equivocal situation, a species of tax levied by fate upon her love. Finally, an invincible curiosity led her to seek, for the thousandth time, the events which could have induced a man as loving as Roger to enjoy only an illegal and clandestine happiness. She imagined a thousand romances, precisely to furnish a pretext for not admitting the real reason, long ago divined, but in which she endeavored not to believe. She rose, still keeping her sleeping infant on her arm, to go and preside in the dining- room over all the preparations for the dinner. This day was the sixth of May, 1822, the anniversary of the visit to the park of Saint-Leu, on which her life was decided ; thus each year this day brought back a fe"te for her heart Caroline designated the linen which was to serve for the repast and directed the arrangement of the dessert When she had thus taken these pains for Roger in which her happiness lay, she put the baby down in her pretty cradle-bed, went to take her stand on the balcony and it was not A DOUBLE FAMILY 45 long before she saw the cabriolet with which her friend, now attained to a man's maturity, had re- placed the elegant tilbury of their first days. After having extinguished the first fire of the caresses of Caroline and of the little frolicsome one who called hrm "Papa," Roger went to the cradle, contem- plated his daughter's sleep, kissed her on the fore- head, and drew from the pocket of his coat a long paper ruled with black lines. "Caroline," said he, "here is the dot of Made- moiselle Eugenie de Bellefeuille." The mother took gratefully the deed of the dot, a legal enrollment on the general list of the creditors of the State. "Why three thousand francs of income to Eugenie, when you have given only fifteen hundred francs to Charles?" "Charles, my angel, will be a man," he replied. "Fifteen hundred francs will suffice him. With this revenue, a courageous man is always above poverty. If, by chance, your son should be a worthless man, 1 do not wish that he should commit follies. If he has ambition, this modest fortune will inspire him with the taste for work. Eugenie is a woman, she must have a dot." The father commenced to play with Charles, whose caressing demonstrations betrayed the inde- pendence and the freedom of his education. No fear established between the father and the child destroyed this charm which recompenses paternity for its obligations, and the gaiety of this little family 46 A DOUBLE FAMILY was as gentle as it was real. In the evening, a magic lantern displayed upon a white sheet its decoys and its mysterious pictures, to the great sur- prise of Charles. More than once the celestial joys of this innocent creature excited the extravagant laughter of Caroline and Roger. When, later, the little boy was put to bed, the baby, awakening, demanded her limpid nourishment By the light of the lamp, at the corner of the fire, in this chamber of peace and of pleasure, Roger then abandoned himself to the happiness of contemplating the gentle picture which was presented to him by this infant hanging at Caroline's breast, white, fresh as a lily newly opened, and whose hair falling in innumer- able brown curls, scarcely permitted her neck to be seen. The light brought out all the graces of this young mother, by multiplying upon her, around her, on her garments and on the infant, those picturesque effects produced by the combinations of shadow and light The visage of this woman, calm and silent, appeared a thousand times sweeter than ever to Roger, who looked tenderly at those dimpled and vermilion lips from which no discordant word had ever issued. The same thought lit up the eyes of Caroline, who examined Roger sideways, slyly, to enjoy the effect she produced upon him, or to divine the future of this evening. Roger, who comprehended the coquetry of this subtle look, said with a feigned sadness : "It is necessary that I should go. I have a very grave affair to bring to a conclusion, and I am waited A DOUBLE FAMILY 47 for at my house. Duty before everything, is it not, my dearest?" Caroline watched him with an air at once gentle and sad, but with that resignation which does not leave unknown any of the sorrow of sacrifice. "Adieu," she said. "Go away! If you should stay an hour longer, I would not easily give you your freedom." "My angel," he then replied, smiling, "I have three days' leave of absence, and am believed to be twenty leagues from Paris." A few days after the anniversary of this sixth of May, Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille hastened one morning to the Rue Saint-Louis, in the Marais, hoping that she might not arrive too late at a house to which she usually went every week. A message which had come to her announced that her mother, Madame Crochard, had succumbed to a complication of ailments produced in her by her catarrh and her rheumatism. Whilst the coachman of the fiacre whipped up his horses in pursuance of Caroline's pressing directions, strengthened by the promise of an ample pourboire, the timorous old women, among whom the widow Crochard had found her society during her last days, had introduced a priest into the clean and commodious apartment occupied by the old gossip, on the second floor of the house. Madame Crochard's servant was ignorant that the pretty demoiselle at whose house her mistress often went to dine, was her own daughter; and, one of the first, she had solicited the intervention of a 48 A DOUBLE FAMILY confessor, hoping that this ecclesiastic would be at least as advantageous for her as for the sick woman. Between two games of boston, or in walking in the Turkish garden, the old women with whom the widow Crochard gabbled all day long, had succeeded in awakening in the frozen heart of their friend some scruples concerning her past life, some thoughts of the future, some fears relative to hell, and certain hopes of pardon founded upon a sincere return to religion. On this solemn morning, three old women of the Rue Saint-Francois and of the Rue Vieille-du- Temple were therefore established in the salon in which Madame Crochard received them every Tues- day. Each one in her turn left her armchair to go to sit by the bedside of the poor old creature and entertain her with those false hopes with which the dying are soothed. Meanwhile, when the crisis seemed to them to be approaching, at the moment when the physician, called in the evening before, would no longer answer for the widow's life, the three old dames consulted together to decide whether it were necessary to notify Mademoiselle de Belle- feuille. Francoise having been duly consulted, it was agreed that a commissionaire should set off for the Rue Taitbout to notify the young relative whose influence seemed so important to the four women ; but they hoped that the Auvergnat would bring back too late this young person who received so large a portion of Madame Crochard's affection. This widow, who had evidently at least a thousand ecus of income, was so tenderly looked after by the female A DOUBLE FAMILY 49 trio only because not one of these good friends, not even Francoise, knew of any heir. The opulence which Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille enjoyed, she to whom Madame Crochard had forbidden herself to give the sweet name of daughter, following thus the customs of the ancient Opera, all but made legiti- mate the plan formed by these four women to divide the inheritance of the dying one among themselves. Presently, that one of the three sibyls who was mounting guard over the sick woman, came to show a shaking head to the anxious couple outside, and said : "It is time to send for Monsieur 1'Abbe Fontanon. Two hours from now and she will have neither her head nor the strength to write a word." The toothless old servant accordingly went off, and returned with a man clothed in a black red- ingote. A narrow forehead revealed a small mind in this priest, endowed, moreover, with a commonplace countenance; his large and pendant cheeks, his double chin, bore witness to an egotistical love of comfort; his powdered hair gave him a mawkish air as long as he did not lift his little brown eyes, start- ing from his head, and which would not have been out of place under the eyebrows of a Tartar. "Monsieur 1'Abbe," said Francoise to him, "I thank you very much for your notification ; but also consider that I have taken very great care of that dear woman there." The domestic with her dragging footsteps and her mourning countenance became silent when she saw that the door of the apartment was open, and that 4 50 A DOUBLE FAMILY the most insinuating of the three dowagers was sta- tioned on the landing in order to be the first to speak to the confessor. When the ecclesiastic had com- plaisantly received the triple broadside of the hon- eyed and devoted discourse of the widow's friends, he took his seat at the bedside of Madame Crochard. Decency and a certain restraint compelled the three dames and the old Francoise to remain, all four, in the salon, there to assume the expressions of sorrow which only these wrinkled faces can coun- terfeit so perfectly. "Ah! how unlucky it is!" said Francoise with a sigh. "Here is now the fourth mistress that I have had the grief to bury. The first one left me a hun- dred francs for life, the second, fifty ecus, and the third, a thousand ecus cash down. After thirty years of service, this is all that I possess!" The servant made use of her right of going and coming to place herself in a little cabinet from which she could hear the priest "I see with pleasure," said Fontanon, "that you entertain, my daughter, pious sentiments : you wear about you a blessed relic." Madame Crochard made an undecided movement which did not reveal her to be in the full possession of all her faculties, for she showed the imperial cross of the Legion of Honor. The ecclesiastic pushed back his chair when he saw the symbol of the Em- peror ; then he presently drew nearer to his penitent, who, for some moments, conversed with him in so low a tone that Francoise heard nothing. A DOUBLE FAMILY $1 "Curses upon me !" suddenly cried the old woman, "do not abandon me. How, Monsieur 1'Abbe, you think that I shall be held responsible for my daugh- ter's soul?" The ecclesiastic spoke in too low a tone and the partition was too thick for Francoise to hear all. "Alas!" cried the widow weeping, "the black- guard has left me nothing that I can dispose of. When he took my poor Caroline, he separated me from her and allotted me only three thousand francs of income, the principal of which belongs to my daughter." "Madame has a daughter and has only a life allow- ance!" cried Francoise, running into the salon. The old women looked at each other with profound astonishment. That one of them whose nose and chin on the point of meeting revealed in her a sort of superiority of hypocrisy and of shrewdness, winked her eyes, and, as soon as Francoise had turned her back, she made to her two friends a sign which indicated: "This girl is very sharp, she has already put away three inheritances." The three old women therefore remained ; but the abbe pres- ently appeared, and when he had uttered a word, the sorceresses tumbled down the stairs together after him, leaving Francoise alone with her mis- tress. Madame Crochard, whose sufferings increased cruelly, might ring in vain at this moment for her servant, the latter only replied by exclaiming: "Eh! everybody is going away! In a minute!" The doors of the wardrobes and of the commodes 52 A DOUBLE FAMILY swung backward and forward as if Franchise were searching for some lost lottery ticket At the moment when this crisis attained its height, Made- moiselle de Bellefeuille arrived at her mother's bed- side to pour out to her a flood of gentle words. "Oh! my poor mother, how criminal I am! You are suffering, and I did not know it, my heart did not reveal it to me! But here 1 am " "Caroline" "What?" "They have brought me a priest." "But a doctor, then," replied Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille. "Franchise, a doctor! How is it that these ladies did not send for a doctor?" "They brought me a priest," repeated the old woman with a sigh. "How she suffers! and not a soothing potion, nothing on her table " The mother made an indistinct sign, but the quick eye of Caroline understood, for she became silent that the other might speak. "They brought me a priest they said, to confess me. Take care of yourself, Caroline, " cried the old gossip with a last effort, "the priest got from me the name of your benefactor !" "And who was able to tell it to you, my poor mother?" The old woman expired in endeavoring to assume a malicious air. If Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille had been able to observe her mother's countenance, she would A DOUBLE FAMILY 53 have seen that which no one will see, Death laugh. In order to understand the interest which is con- cealed in the introduction to this scene, it will be necessary to forget the personages for a moment in order to follow the recital of anterior events, the last of which, however, is connected with the death of Madame Crochard. These two portions will then form one history which, by a law peculiar to Paris- ian life, had produced two distinct actions. Near the end of November, 1805, a young advo- cate, of about twenty-six years of age, was descend- ing, about three o'clock in the morning, the grand staircase of the h&tel in which resided the high chancellor of the Empire. When he arrived in the courtyard, in a ball costume, in a fine frosty air, he could not restrain a dolorous exclamation, through which pierced, however, that gaiety which seldom abandons a Frenchman, for he did not see any fiacre through the railing of the hotel, and could not hear in the distance any of those sounds produced by the sabots or by the hoarse voices of the Parisian coachmen. From time to time, the stampings of the horses of the chief justice whom the young man had just left at Cambaceres* bouillotte tables, resounded through the courtyard of the hotel, which was scarcely lighted by the lanterns Of the carriage. Suddenly the young man, clapped on the shoulders in a friendly manner, turned round, recognized the chief justice and saluted him. As the lackey let down the steps of his carriage, the former legislator of the Convention divined the embarrassment of the advocate. "In the night all cats are gray," he said to him gaily. "The chief justice will not compromise himself by setting an advocate on his road ! Above all," he added, "when that advocate is the nephew (55) 56 A DOUBLE FAMILY of a former colleague, one of the luminaries of that great council of State which gave the Code Napoleon to France." The pedestrian got into the carriage in obedience to a gesture of the supreme chief of the Imperial Justice. "Where do you live?" asked the minister of the advocate, before the carriage door was closed by the footman who was waiting for his orders. "Quai des Augustins, monseigneur. " The horses set off and the young man found him- self in for a te'te-a-te'te with a minister to whom he had vainly endeavored to speak before and after the sumptuous dinner of Cambaceres, for the chief justice had evidently avoided him all the evening. "Well, Monsieur de Granville, you are in a suffi- ciently good way." "Why, yes, so long as I am by your Excellency's side" "I am not jesting," said the minister. "Your probation terminated two years ago, and your defence in the case of Ximeuse and of Hauteserre has set you up very high." "I had thought, up to to-day, that my devotion to those unfortunate 'emigres had injured me." "You are very young," said the minister in a grave tone. "But," he resumed after a pause, "you have this evening pleased the high chancellor greatly. Take your place in the magistracy of the Parquet, we need good members. The nephew of a man in whom we, Cambaceres and I, take the A DOUBLE FAMILY 57 liveliest interest, should not remain an advocate through want of protection. Your uncle aided us in traversing very stormy times, and that sort of service is not forgotten." The minister was silent for a moment. "In a short time," he went on, "I shall have three places vacant in the inferior court for civil causes and in the Imperial Court of Paris, come to see me then and choose whichever you prefer. Up to that time, work, but do not present yourself at my hearings. In the first place, I am overwhelmed with work; then, your rivals would divine your intentions and might injure you with the 'patron.' Cambaceres and I, by not saying a word to you this evening, have protected you from the dangers of favoritism." As the minister uttered these last words, the car- riage stopped on the Quai des Augustins; the young advocate thanked his generous protector with a very sincere gratitude for the two places which he had given him, and betook himself to pounding vigor- ously on his own door, for the wintry wind blew keenly around the calves of his legs. Finally an old porter pulled the cord of the door, and when the advocate passed before his lodge : "Monsieur Granville, there is a letter for you," he cried with a hoarse voice. The young man took the letter, and endeavored, notwithstanding the cold, to read the address by the light of a pale lamp, the flame of which was on the point of expiring. 58 A DOUBLE FAMILY "It is from my father," he cried, taking his candle, which the porter had finally lighted. And he ascended rapidly to his apartment to read the following letter: " Take the mail-coach, and if you can arrive here promptly, your fortune is made. Mademoiselle Angelique Bontems has lost her sister, she is now the only daughter, and we know that she does not hate you. Madame Bontems is now able to leave her nearly forty thousand francs of income, in addition to what she will give her as a dot. I have prepared the way. Our friends will be surprised to see the former nobles allying themselves with the family Bontems. The pere Bontems was a red cap of the deepest dye who acquired a great deal of national property, purchased at the lowest prices. But at first he had only some glebe meadows which will never come back ; then, since you have already derogated in becoming an advocate, I do not see why we should hesitate before another concession to the present ideas. The little girl will have three hundred thousand francs, 1 will give you a hundred, your mother's property should be worth fifty thousand dcus, or nearly so ; 1 see you then in a position, my dear son, if you wish to throw yourself into the magistracy, to become a senator like anybody else. My brother-in-law, the councillor of State, will not do you an ill turn because of that, for instance ; but, as he is not married, his inheritance will fall to you some day ; if you do not become senator on your own account, you would then have the reversion of his. There- fore, you would be perched high enough to be able to watch events. Adieu, I embrace you." The young De Granville therefore went to his bed occupied with a thousand projects, each one finer than the other. Protected by the powerful influence of the high chancellor, of the chief justice and of his A DOUBLE FAMILY 59 maternal uncle, one of those who had drawn up the Code, he would commence his career in an envied position, before the first court of France, and already saw himself a member of that Parquet from which Napoleon selected the high officials of his empire. He presented himself also with a fortune of sufficient brilliancy to aid him in maintaining his rank, for which the petty revenue of five thousand francs from an estate which came to him in his mother's inheritance, would never suffice. And, to complete his dreams of ambition with happiness, he evoked the ingenuous figure of Mademoiselle Angelique Bontems, the companion of his childish sports. While he had not yet attained the age of reason his father and mother offered no opposition to his inti- macy with the pretty daughter of their country neighbor ; but when, during the brief visits which his vacations enabled him to make to Bayeux, his parents, prejudiced by their pride of birth, perceived his friendship for the young girl, they forbade him to think of her. For the last ten years, therefore, Granville had been able to see only at rare intervals this one whom he had called his little wife. In these moments, snatched from the active surveillance of their families, they had been able only to exchange some unimportant words while passing each other in the church or in the street. Their finest days were those in which, brought together by one of those rural festivals which in Normandy are called assemblies, they watched each other furtively and at a distance. During his last vacations Granville had 60 A DOUBLE FAMILY seen Angelique twice, and the downcast counte- nance, the sorrowful attitude of his little wife had led him to believe that she was bending under the weight of some unknown domestic tyranny. When he arrived, at seven o'clock in the morning, at the coach office in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Vic- toires, the young advocate was fortunate enough to find a place in the conveyance that departed at that hour for the city of Caen. This avocat stagiare who was going through his course was not able to see again without deep emotion the steeples of the cathedral of Bayeux. No one hope of his life having as yet been disap- pointed, his heart was open to all those beautiful sentiments which agitate young souls. After the too-long and festive banquet at which his father and some friends waited for him, the impatient young man was conducted to a certain house situated in the Rue Teinture, and well known by him. His heart was beating strongly when his father, who was still known in Bayeux as the Comte de Gran- ville, knocked loudly at a porte-cochere, the green paint on which was falling off in scales. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. A young ser- vant maid, wearing a cotton cap, saluted the two gentlemen with an abrupt curtsy and replied that the ladies would soon return from vespers. The count and his son entered a low apartment serving as a salon, and which resembled the parlor of a convent The ceiling in polished walnut darkened this room, around which a few chairs covered with A DOUBLE FAMILY 6l tapestry and some antique armchairs were symmet- rically ranged. The chimney-piece, in stone, had no other ornament than a greenish glass, on each side of which projected the twisted branches of those ancient candelabra which were made about the time of the peace of Utrecht. On the woodwork in front of this chimney, the young Granville perceived an enormous crucifix of ebony and ivory inclosed in consecrated box-wood. Although lit by three win- dows which opened on a garden of the provinces, the symmetrical squares of which were defined by long edges of box, the apartment received so little light that there could scarcely be distinguished on the wall parallel to these windows three religious paintings, the work of skilful brushes, and pur- chased doubtless during the Revolution by the old Bontems who, in his quality as chief of the district, never forgot his own interests. Everything, from the carefully waxed floor to the curtains in linen, with green squares, shone with a cleanliness that was monastic. The young man's heart involun- tarily contracted in this silent retreat in which Angelique lived. The habit of frequenting the bril- liant salons of Paris and the distraction of its festivals, had readily effaced from the memory of Granville the dull and peaceful existence of the provinces; so that the contrast was for him so sudden that he experienced a sort of inward shudder. To come from an assemblage under the roof of Cam- baceres, where life showed itself so ample, where the intelligences had such amplitude, where the 62 A DOUBLE FAMILY Imperial glory was so brilliantly reflected, and to fall suddenly into a circle of contracted ideas, was not that to be transported from Italy to Greenland ? "To live here, is not to live," he said to himself while examining this Methodist's parlor. The old count, who perceived his son's surprise, took his hand, led him before one of the windows through which still entered a little daylight, and while the servant lit the candles in the old cande- labra, he endeavored to dissipate the clouds which gathered on his brow at this aspect "Listen, my son," he said to him, "the widow of Pere Bontems is furiously devout When the devil gets old you know! I see that the look of this office does not agree with you. Well, here is the truth. The old woman is besieged by the priests, they have persuaded her that it is never too late to gain Heaven, and, to be more certain of securing Saint Peter and his keys, she buys them. She goes to mass every day, attends all the services, takes the communion every Sunday that God has made, and amuses herself by restoring chapels. She has given to the cathedral ever so many orna- ments, albs, copes; she has bedizened the canopy with so many feathers that at the procession on the last Corpus-Christi there was such a crowd as if it were a hanging, all to see the priests magnifi- cently arrayed and their utensils all regilded like new. Thus this house is a veritable consecrated ground. It was I who prevented the old fool giving these three pictures to the church, a Domenichino, A DOUBLE FAMILY 63 a Correggio and an Andrea del Sarto, which are worth a great deal of money." "But Angelique?" said the young man quickly. "If you do not marry her, Angelique is lost," said the count. "Our good apostles have advised her to live virgin and martyr. I have had all the trouble in the world to awaken her little heart by speaking to her of you, when I saw that she was an only daughter ; but you will readily understand that, once you are married, you will take her off to Paris. There, the fetes, marriage, the comedy and the whirl of Parisian life will soon make her forget the con- fessionals, the fastings, the hair-shirts and the masses with which these creatures nourish them- selves exclusively." "But the fifty thousand francs of income derived from the ecclesiastical properties, will they not come back? " "That is where we are," said the count with a sly air. "In consideration of the marriage, for the vanity of Madame Bontems has not been a little tickled by the idea of grafting the Bontems upon the genealogical tree of the Granvilles, the aforesaid mother gives her fortune in its entirety to the little one, reserving to herself only the usufruct. There- fore, the priesthood opposes your marriage; but I have had the banns published, everything is ready, and in a week you will be safe from the claws of the mother or of her abbes. You will possess the prettiest maid in Bayeux, a nice little gossip who will give you no fears because she has principles. 64 A DOUBLE FAMILY She has been mortified, as they say in their jargon, by fastings, by prayers, and," he added in a low voice, "by her mother." A discreet knock at the door imposed silence upon the count, who thought that it announced the arrival of the two ladies. A little servant with a hurried air appeared; but, intimidated by the aspect of the two strangers, he made a sign to the nurse-girl who came with him. Clothed in a waistcoat of blue cloth with little skirts which flapped on his hips and in pantaloons striped blue and white, this boy had his hair cut close round his face, his counte- nance was like that of a chorister, so strongly did it reveal that compulsory compunction which is con- tracted by all the inhabitants of a devout household. "Mademoiselle Gatienne, do you know where are the books for the office of the Virgin ? The ladies of the congregation of the Sacred Heart are going to walk in procession this evening in the church." Gatienne went to get the books. "Will it be for much longer, my little militia- man?" asked the count "Oh! for a half-hour at the most" "Let us go and see it, there are some pretty women," said the father to the son. "Moreover, a visit to the cathedral will not hurt us." The young advocate followed his father with an irresolute air. "Of what are you thinking?" asked the count "I am, father, I am that I am right" "You have not yet said anything." A DOUBLE FAMILY 65 "Yes, but I have thought that you have preserved ten thousand francs of income of your former for- tune, you will leave them to me at as distant a date as possible, I desire it; but, if you give me a hun- dred thousand francs to make a foolish marriage, you will permit me to ask of you only fifty thousand to escape a misfortune and to enjoy, while still re- maining a bachelor, a fortune equal to that which would be brought me by your demoiselle Bontems." "Are you crazy?" "No, father. Here are the facts. The chief jus- tice promised me, the day before yesterday, a place in the Parquet of Paris. Fifty thousand francs, added to what I now have and to the income from my position, will give me a revenue of twelve thou- sand francs. I will certainly then have chances for fortune a thousand times preferable to those fur- nished by an alliance as poor in happiness as it is rich in worldly goods." "It is very easily to be seen," replied the father, smiling, "that you have not lived during the ancient regime. Have we ever been embarrassed by a wife, we others ? ' ' "But, father, to-day marriage has become " "Ah! there!" said the count, interrupting his son, "all that my old comrades of the emigration have related to me is then quite true? The Revo- lution has then bequeathed to us manners without any gaiety ? it has infected the young people with equivocal principles ? Just like my brother-in-law, the Jacobin, you will talk to me of the nation, of 5 66 A DOUBLE FAMILY public morality, of disinterestedness. Oh, won Dieu! were it not for the Emperor's sisters, what would become of us!" This ever-green old man, whom the peasants of his estates always called the Seigneur de Granville, ended his sentence as he passed in under the vault- ings of the cathedral. Notwithstanding the sanctity of the place, he hummed, even while he touched the holy water, an air of the opera of Rose et Colas, and conducted his son along the lateral galleries of the nave, stopping at each column to examine the long lines of heads, arrayed in the body of the church like soldiers on parade. The particular office of the Sacred Heart was about to commence. The ladies connected with this congregation being placed near the choir, the count and his son directed their steps toward this portion of the nave, and leaned against one of the columns deepest in the shadow, from which they could see the entire mass of these heads which resembled a meadow spotted with flowers. Suddenly, at two steps from the young Granville, a voice, sweeter than it seemed possible for a human creature to possess, broke out, like the first nightin- gale which sings when the winter is passed. Although accompanied by the thousand voices of the women, and by the strains of the organ, this voice stirred his nerves as if they had been as- sailed by the too rich and too living notes of the musical glasses. The Parisian turned, saw a young girl whose face, owing to the inclination of her head, was entirely concealed under a large hat of A DOUBLE FAMILY 67 some white stuff, and concluded that only from her could come this clear melody; he thought he recog- nized Angelique, notwithstanding the pelisse of brown merino which enveloped her, and he touched his father's arm. "Yes, it is she," said the count, after having looked in the direction indicated by his son. The old seigneur pointed by a gesture to the pale countenance of an old woman whose eyes, sur- rounded by a deep black circle, had already per- ceived the strangers without, in their duplicity, having appeared to leave the book of prayers which she held. Angelique lifted her head toward the altar, as if to inhale the penetrating perfume of the incense, the clouds of which floated to the two women. By the mysterious light diffused in this sombre building by the tapers, the lamp of the nave and some candles lit around the pillars, the young man then perceived a face which made his resolu- tion waver. A hat of white moire framed in exactly a visage of an admirable regularity, by the oval de- scribed by the ribbon of satin tied under a little dimpled chin. On a forehead, narrow but very delicate, tresses of the color of pale gold were divided into two bandeaux and fell around the cheeks like the shadow of a foliage over a tuft of flowers. The two arches of the brows were defined with that correctness which we admire in the hand- some Chinese faces. The nose, almost aquiline, was marked by a rare firmness in its contours, and the two lips resembled two rosy lines traced by love 68 A DOUBLE FAMILY with a delicate pencil. The eyes, of pale blue, expressed candor. If Granville remarked in this visage a sort of silent rigidity, he could attribute it to the religious sentiments which then animated Angel ique. The holy words of the prayer issued from between two rows of pearls, from which the cold permitted to be seen the escape, as it were, of a faint cloud of perfumes. The young man involun- tarily endeavored to stoop over to respire this divine breath. This movement attracted the attention of the young girl, and her fixed look, raised toward the altar, turned upon Granville, whom the obscurity permitted her to see only indistinctly, but in whom she recognized the companion of her childhood: a memory more powerful than prayer came to give a more than mortal light to her countenance, she blushed. The advocate trembled with joy in seeing the hopes of the other life vanquished by the hopes of love, and the glory of the sanctuary eclipsed by terrestrial souvenirs; but his triumph was of short duration: Angelique lowered her veil, assumed a calm countenance, and continued her singing with- out the slightest emotion betraying itself in the tone of her voice. Granville found himself under the tyranny of one sole desire, and all his ideas of prudence vanished. When the service was ended, his impatience had already become so great that, without giving the two ladies time to return home alone, he went immediately to salute his little wife. A recognition, timid on both sides, took place under the porch of the cathedral, in the presence of the A DOUBLE FAMILY 69 worshipers. Madame Bontems trembled with pride in taking the arm of the Comte de Granville, who, obliged to offer it to her before so many people, was very little thankful to his son for an impatience so little regardful of decency. During the space of about a fortnight which elapsed between the official presentation of the young Vicomte de Granville as a suitor for the hand of Mademoiselle Bontems and the solemn day of his marriage, he went assiduously to see his friend in her sombre parlor, to which he became accustomed. His long visits had for their object to discover Angelique's character, for his prudence had happily reawakened the day after his first interview. He nearly always found his prom- ised bride seated before a little table in mahalep wood, and occupied in marking, herself, the linen of her trousseau. Angel ique was never the first to speak of religion. If the young advocate amused himself by playing with the rich rosary kept in a little green velvet bag, if he contemplated laugh- ingly the relic which was always attached to this instrument of devotion, Angel ique took the rosary softly from his hands, throwing upon him a look of entreaty, and, without saying a word, put it back in its bag, which she immediately closed. If sometimes Granville hazarded maliciously certain declamations against certain religious practices, the charming Norman listened to him, opposing only the smile of conviction. "It is necessary to believe nothing, or to believe everything that the Church teaches," she replied. 70 A DOUBLE FAMILY "Would you wish to have for the mother of your children, a girl without religion? No. What man would dare to be the judge between the disbelievers and God? Well, how can I blame that which the Church admits?" Angelique seemed animated by such a melting charity, the young advocate saw her turn upon him such penetrating looks, that he was sometimes tempted to embrace the religion of his betrothed; the profound conviction which she had of walking in the true path, reawakened in the heart of the future magistrate doubts which she endeavored to encourage. Granville then committed the enormous fault of mistaking the fascinations of desire for those of love. Angelique was so happy in reconciling the voice of her heart and that of duty by abandoning herself to an inclination that had had its origin in her childhood, that the advocate, deceived, did not know which of these two voices was the stronger. Are not young people always disposed to trust in the promises of a pretty face, to conclude as to the beauty of the soul from that of the features? An indefinable sentiment leads them to believe that the moral perfection is always in accord with the physi- cal perfection. If religion had not permitted Ange- lique to give herself up to her feelings, they would very soon have been withered in her heart like a plant watered by a deadly acid. How could a beloved lover recognize a fanaticism so well con- cealed? This was the history of the sentiments of the young Granville during this fortnight, devoured A DOUBLE FAMILY Jl like a book of which the denouement is strongly interesting. Angelique, carefully watched, seemed to him to be the sweetest of women, and he even surprised himself by sentiments of thankfulness to Madame Bontems, who, by so strongly inculcating religious principles in her, had in some sort prepared her for the trials of life. On the day chosen for the signing of the fatal contract, Madame Bontems caused her son-in-law to swear solemnly to respect the religious habits of her daughter, to give her entire liberty of conscience, to allow her to take communion, to go to church, to confession, as often as she wished, and never to interfere with the choice of her spiritual directors. At this solemn moment, Angelique looked at her betrothed with an air so pure and so candid, that Granville did not hesitate to take the required oath. A smile stirred the lips of the Abbe Fontanon, a pale man who had charge of the consciences of the household. By a slight movement of her head, Mademoiselle Bontems prom- ised her lover never to abuse this freedom of con- science. As for the old count, he whistled, very softly, the air of Va-t'en voir s'ilsviennent "Go to see if they are coming!" After a few days given up to the retours de noces, so celebrated in the provinces, Granville and his wife returned to Paris, where the young advocate was called by his appointment as advocate general to the Imperial Court of the Seine. When the newly-married couple were looking for an apart- ment, Angelique made use of the influence which 72 A DOUBLE FAMILY the honeymoon gives to all wives to induce Gran- ville to take a large apartment situated on the ground floor of a h6tel which stood at the corner of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple and the Rue Neuve-Saint- Francois. The principal reason for her choice was that this house was situated at a distance of two steps from the Rue d'Orleans, where there was a church, and near a little chapel in the Rue Saint-Louis. "It is the part of a good housewife to make pro- visions," her husband said to her, laughing. Angelique observed to him, very justly, that the quarter of the Marais was in the neighborhood of the Palais de Justice, and that the magistrates whom they had come to visit, lived there. A sufficiently large garden gave, for a young household, value to the apartment: children, if Heaven sent them any, could there find plenty of air, the courtyard was spacious, the stables were handsome. The advocate general wished to take a hdtel in the Chaussee- d'Antin, where everything is youthful and lively, where the fashions appear in all their freshness, where the population of the boulevards is elegant, from which the distances are shorter to the theatres and to find distractions; but he was obliged to yield to the coaxings of a young wife who was claiming her first favor, and, to please her, he buried him- self in the Marais. Granville's functions necessi- tated labors all the more assiduous that they were new to him ; he occupied himself, then, before all, in the furnishing of his cabinet and the arrangement of his library ; he installed himself promptly then A DOUBLE FAMILY 73 in a room that was soon encumbered with legal documents, and left to his young wife the direction of the decoration of the house. He was the more willing to plunge Angel ique into all the embarrass- ments of the first acquisitions of the household, that source of so many pleasures and souvenirs for young wives, that he was ashamed to deprive her of his presence oftener than was required by the laws of the honeymoon. Once fairly accustomed to his work, the advocate general allowed his wife to draw him out of his cabinet and to take him off to show him the effect of the furnishings and the decorations which he had seen previously only in detail, or by portions. If it be true, according to the adage, that you can judge of a woman by seeing the door of her house, her apartments should reveal her mind with still more fidelity. Whether it were that Madame de Granville had given her confidence to furnishers without taste, or whether she had inscribed her own character on the multitude of articles that she had ordered, the young magistrate was surprised at the dryness and the cold solemnity which prevailed in his apartments: he could discover nothing grace- ful there, everything was discord, nothing relieved the eye. The spirit of rectitude and of littleness which marked the parlor at Bayeux was revived in his h6tel, under the wide ceilings hollowed in circles and decorated with those ornaments the long twisted fillets of which are in such bad taste. With the desire to find excuses for his wife, the young man returned 74 A DOUBLE FAMILY on his steps, and examined again the long antecham- ber, of the height of one floor, through which the apartment was entered. The color of the woodwork which his wife had required of the painter was too sombre, and the velvet, of very dark green, which covered the long seats, added a serious tone to this room, not very important, it is true, but which still gave an idea of the house, just as you judge of a man's mind by his first phrase. An antechamber is a species of preface which should announce every- thing, but promise nothing. The young deputy asked himself if his wife had really been able to select the lamp, like an antique lantern, which was placed in the middle of this naked hall, paved in white and black marble, decorated with a paper which imitated courses of stone marked here and there by patches of green moss. A rich but old barometer was hung in the middle of one of these walls, as if to make the emptiness still more strongly felt At the aspect of this room, the young man looked at his wife, he saw her so well satisfied with the red galloon which edged the curtains of percale, so content with the barometer and with the decent statue, the ornament of a great Gothic stove, that he had not the barbaric courage to destroy such strong illusions. Instead of condemning his wife, Granville condemned himself, he accused himself of having failed in his first duty, which commanded him to direct in Paris the first steps of a young girl educated in Bayeux. From this specimen, who could not imagine the decoration of the other rooms? A DOUBLE FAMILY 75 What could be expected of a young woman who took fright at seeing the naked legs of a caryatide, who promptly rejected a candelabra, a candlestick, a piece of furniture, as soon as she perceived on it the nudity of an Egyptian torso? At this period, the school of David had arrived at the height of its glory, everything in France felt the effects of the correction of his design and of his love for the antique which made in some sort his painting a colored sculpture. Not one of all the inventions of the Imperial luxury obtained right of entrance to Madame de Granville's house. The immense square salon of her hotel retained the faded white and gold which had ornamented it in the time of Louis XV., and in which the architect had been prodigal of the lozenge-shaped grilles and those insupportable fes- toons due to the sterile fecundity of the designers of that epoch. If at least a harmony had been obtained, if the furniture had required of the modern mahogany an affectation of the distorted forms made the fashion by the corrupted taste of Boucher, the mansion of Angelique might have offered only a pleasant con- trast to those young people who live in the nine- teenth century as if they belonged to the eighteenth ; but a multitude of objects here produced absurd antitheses. The consoles, the clocks, the candle- sticks, represented those warlike attributes which the triumphs of the Empire rendered so valuable in Paris. These Greek casques, these Roman swords crossed, the bucklers which were due to the military enthusiasm and which decorated at this time the 76 A DOUBLE FAMILY most pacific implements, were scarcely in accord with the delicate and prolix ornaments which had been the delight of Madame de Pompadour. Devotion in- duces a species of fatiguing humility which does not exclude pride. Whether it were modesty, or inclina- tion, Madame de Granville seemed to have a horror of soft and transparent colors. Perhaps also she thought that purple and brown were suited to the dignity of the magistracy. But how could a young girl accustomed to an austere life have conceived of those voluptuous divans which inspire evil thoughts, those elegant and perfidious boudoirs in which the sins are first conceived. The poor magistrate was overwhelmed. By the tone of approbation in which he subscribed to the eulogies which his wife gave herself, she perceived that nothing pleased her hus- band ; she manifested so much mortification at not having succeeded, that the amorous Granville saw a proof of love in this deep pain, instead of seeing in it a wound to her self-love. A young girl suddenly snatched from the mediocrity of provincial ideas, unskilful at coquetries, unused to the elegance of the Parisian life, could she have done any better ? The magistrate preferred to believe that the selec- tions of his wife had been imposed upon her by the furnishers, rather than to admit the truth to himself. If he had been less in love, he would have felt that the merchants, so prompt to divine the character of their customers, had thanked heaven for hav- ing sent them a devout young person without any taste to assist them in getting rid of articles gone A DOUBLE FAMILY 77 out of fashion. He therefore consoled his pretty Norman. "Happiness, my dear Angelique, does not come to us from a piece of furniture more or less elegant; it depends upon the sweetness, the compliance and the love of a wife." "But it is my duty to love you, and never will there be a duty that will please me more to fulfill," said Angelique softly. Nature has planted in the heart of a woman such a desire to please, such a need of love, that, even with a devout young woman, the thoughts of the future and of salvation should give way under the first joys of Hymen. Thus, ever since the month of April, the date at which they were married, up to the beginning of the winter, the two spouses lived in a state of perfect union. Love and work have the virtue of rendering a man sufficiently in- different to exterior things. Obliged to pass at the Palais the half of his day, called upon to debate the grave interests of men's lives or fortunes, Granville could, less than another, perceive certain things in the interior of his household. If, on Friday, his table should be meagrely supplied, if perchance he asked for, without obtaining it, a plate of meat, his wife, to whom the Gospel forbade every species of falsehood, was able nevertheless, by little tricks permitted in the interest of religion, to lay the blame of her premeditated design upon her heedless- ness, or upon the bareness of the markets ; she fre- quently justified herself at the expense of the cook, 78 A DOUBLE FAMILY and sometimes went so far as to scold him. At this period, the young magistrates did not observe, as to-day, the fast days, Ember-week and the eves of church festivals; thus Granville did not remark at first the periodical recurrence of these meagre repasts, which his wife, moreover, with perfidious care, took pains to render very delicate by means of teals, moor-hen, pies of fish of which the amphibious flesh or the seasoning deceived the taste. The magis- trate thus lived in a very orthodox manner without knowing it and worked out his salvation incognito. On week days, he did not know whether his wife went to mass or not ; on Sundays, by a condescen- sion natural enough, he accompanied her to the church, as if to make up to her for the occasional sacrifices of vespers which she made to him; he could not at first recognize the rigidity of the reli- gious manners of his wife. The theatres being insup- portable in summer because of the heat, Granville had not even the occasion of a very successful piece to offer to take his wife to them; thus the grave question of the theatre did not come up. In short, in the first moments of a marriage which a man has been induced to take by the beauty of a young girl, it is difficult for him to show himself exacting in his pleasures. Youth is more gormandizing than dainty, and, moreover, possession alone is a charm. How can we recognize the coldness, the dignity or the reserve of a wife so long as we ascribe to her the exaltation which we feel ourselves, when we illu- minate her with the fire with which we ourselves A DOUBLE FAMILY 79 are animated ? It is necessary to have attained a certain conjugal tranquillity in order to perceive that a devout woman waits for love with her arms crossed. Granville then believed himself suffi- ciently happy up to the moment when a fatal event arrived to influence the destinies of his marriage. In the month of November, 1808, the canon of the cathedral of Bayeux, who had been formerly the spiritual director of Madame Bontems and her daugh- ter, came to Paris, brought thither by the ambition of succeeding to one of the livings of the capital, a position which he contemplated perhaps as the stepping-stone to a bishopric. In resuming his ancient empire over the lamb of his flock, he was shocked to find her already so changed by the air of Paris, and desired to bring her back to his frigid fold. Terrified by the remonstrances of the ex- canon, a man of about thirty-eight years of age, who brought into the midst of the Parisian clergy, so tolerant and so enlightened, that bitterness of the provincial Catholicism, that inflexible bigotry the multiplied exigencies of which are so many bonds for timorous souls, Madame de Granville did peni- tence and returned to her Jansenism. It would be wearisome to paint in detail the incidents which insensibly introduced unhappiness into the midst of this household, it will suffice perhaps to relate the principal facts without arranging them scrupulously by their periods or in order. As it happened, the first misunderstanding of this young couple was sufficiently remarkable. When Granville conducted 80 A DOUBLE FAMILY his wife into society, she did not refuse to go to the grave reunions, to the dinners, the concerts, the receptions of those magistrates who were placed higher than her husband in the judicial hierarchy; but she was able, for some time, to make a pretence of headaches whenever it was a question of a ball. One day, Granville, grown impatient of these indis- positions to order, suppressed the letter which con- tained the invitation to a ball at the house of a councillor of State, he deceived his wife by a verbal invitation, and, on an evening when her health was not in the least doubtful, he produced her in the midst of a magnificent fete. "My dear," he said to her on their return, seeing a sorrowful air about her which vexed him, "your condition as a wife, the rank which you occupy in the world, and the fortune which you enjoy, impose upon you obligations which no divine law can abrogate. Are you not the glory of your husband? You should then go to a ball whenever I do, and appear there in a proper manner." "But, my dear, what was there then in my toilet that was so unfortunate?" "It was your air, my dear. When a young man accosts you, speaks to you, you become so solemn that a light-minded person might think that your virtue was frail. You seem to fear that a smile will compromise you. You had really the air of asking forgiveness of God for the sins which might be committed around you. The world, my dear angel, is not a convent But, since you speak of your A DOUBLE FAMILY 8l toilet, I must say to you that it is also a duty for you to follow the fashions and the customs of the world." "Would you have me show myself like those shameless women who are so decolletee as to permit indecent looks to be thrown upon their naked shoulders, on ?" "There is a difference, my dear," said the deputy, interrupting her, "between uncovering the entire bust and giving a graceful appearance to its cor- sage. You wear a triple row of tulle ruching which envelops your neck up to the chin. It would seem that you had requested your dressmaker to take away all grace from the lines of your shoulders and the forms of your breast, with as much care as a coquette employs to obtain it in her dresses which suggest the most secret forms. Your bust is buried under such numberless folds that everybody laughs at your affected reserve. You would suffer if I should repeat to you the ridiculous things that have been said about you." "Those whom these obscenities please will not be charged with the weight of our sins," replied the young wife shortly. "You have not danced?" asked Granville. "I will never dance," she replied. "Supposing I should say to you that you should dance," replied the magistrate quickly. "Yes, you should follow the fashions, wear flowers in your hair, put on your diamonds. Consider, ma belle, that rich people, and we are such, are under obligations to 6 82 A DOUBLE FAMILY foster luxury in a State. Is it not better to en- courage manufactures than scatter your money in alms by the hands of the clergy?" "You speak as a statesman," said Angelique. "And you as a churchman," he replied quickly. The discussion became very sharp. Madame de Granville put into her replies, always gentle and pronounced in a tone of voice as clear as the hand- bell of a church, an obstinacy which betrayed some priestly influence. When, in claiming the rights to which she was entitled by Granville's promise, she said that her confessor had especially forbidden her to go to a ball, the magistrate endeavored to prove to her that this priest had exceeded the regulations of the Church. This dispute, odious and theological, was renewed with much more violence and sharp- ness on both sides when Granville wished to take his wife to the theatre. Finally the magistrate, with the sole object of demolishing the pernicious influence exercised over his wife by the ex-canon, carried the quarrel to such a length that Madame de Granville, driven to defiance, wrote to the papal court at Rome to know if a wife could, without com- promising her salvation, wear decolletee gowns, go to a ball and to the theatre, to please her husband. The reply of the venerable Pius VII. was not de- layed, it condemned completely the wife's resist- ance, and blamed the confessor. This letter, a veritable conjugal catechism, might have been dic- tated by the tender voice of Fenelon, whose grace- fulness and gentle spirit seemed to breathe through A DOUBLE FAMILY 83 it "A wife is well placed wherever her husband conducts her. If she commit sins through his orders, it will not be she who will some day have to answer for them." These two passages of the Pope's homily caused him to be accused of irreligion by Madame de Granville and her confessor. But, before the brief arrived, the deputy perceived by the strict observance of the ecclesiastical laws that his wife imposed fasting days upon him, and he ordered his servants to serve him with meats all the year round. However displeasing this order might be to his wife, Granville, to whom fat or lean mat- tered but little, maintained it with a virile firmness. Is not the feeblest thinking creature wounded in that which she holds the most dear when she accom- plishes, at the instigation of another will than her own, something which she would have done natu- rally ? Of all tyrannies, the one most odious is that which takes away perpetually from the soul the merit of its actions and of its thoughts : it is abdi- cating without having reigned. The word which is the softest to pronounce, the sentiment which is the sweetest to express, expire when we believe them or- dered. Presently, the young magistrate was obliged to renounce receiving his friends, giving either balls or dinners; his household seemed enveloped in crape. A house, the mistress of which is devout, as- sumes an aspect peculiar to itself. The domestics, always placed under the surveillance of the wife, are chosen only among those soi-disant pious indi- viduals who wear countenances to match. In the 84 A DOUBLE FAMILY same manner as the most jovial youth, enrolled among the gendarmerie, assumes the gendarme visage, so those who are given to the practices of devotion all contract a uniform character of physi- ognomy; the habit of lowering the eyes, of main- taining an attitude of compunction, endows them with a hypocritical livery which the impostors know perfectly how to assume. Then these devout women form a sort of republic among themselves, they all know each other; the domestics, whom they recommend to each other, are like a race apart, preserved by them after the manner of those ama- teurs of horseflesh who will not admit any animal in their stables the genealogy of which is not per- fectly approved. The more closely the so-called impious examine a pious household, the more surely they recognize that everything about it is charac- terized by some undefmable ill-favor ; they find in it an appearance at once of avarice or of mystery as among the usurers, and that dampness perfumed with incense which chills the atmosphere of chapels. This niggardly regularity, this poverty of ideas which is betrayed by everything, is expressed by one word only and that word is bigotry. In these sinister and implacable households, bigotry is de- picted in the furniture, in the engravings, in the paintings; speech there is bigoted, the silence is bigoted, and the faces are bigoted. The transforma- tion of things and men into bigotry is an inexpli- cable mystery, but the fact remains. Everyone may have observed that the bigots do not walk, do A DOUBLE FAMILY 85 not sit down, do not speak, as walk, speak and sit the people of the world; with them you are always constrained, with them you do not laugh, with them stiffness, symmetry prevail in every- thing, from the bonnet of the mistress of the house- hold to her pincushion; the looks are not frank, the servants are like shadows, and the lady of the dwelling appears to be seated on a throne of ice. One morning, the poor Granville observed with sorrow and heaviness all the symptoms of bigotry in his household. There are to be met with in the world certain societies in which the same effect exists without having been produced by the same causes. Weariness and disgust trace around these unfortunate houses a circle of brass which incloses the horror of the desert and the infinitude of space. A household is not then a tomb, but something worse, a convent In the midst of this glacial sphere the magistrate contemplated his wife without pas- sion; he remarked, not without a sharp pain, the narrowness of ideas which was betrayed by the manner in which her hair grew on her low and slightly hollowed forehead; he perceived in the so perfect regularity of her features something fixed, rigid, which would presently render hateful to him the feigned sweetness by which he had been se- duced. He foresaw that some day those thin lips would say to him when a misfortune arrived, "It is for thy good, my friend. " The visage of Madame de Granville took on a wan tint, a serious expres- sion which killed all cheerfulness in those who 86 A DOUBLE FAMILY approached her. Was this change brought about by the ascetic habits of a devotion which is no more piety than avarice is economy ? was it produced by the dryness inherent in bigoted souls? It would be difficult to decide: beauty without expression is perhaps an imposture. The imperturbable smile with which the young wife contracted her counte- nance when regarding Granville appeared to be with her a Jesuitical formula of happiness with which she thought to satisfy all the requirements of mar- riage; her charity wounded, her beauty without passion seemed a monstrosity to those who knew her, and the softest of her words made the hearer impatient; she did not obey sentiments, but duties. There are certain faults which, in a woman, may yield to the vigorous lessons given by experience or by a husband, but nothing can combat the tyranny of false religious ideas. An eternal happiness to be gained, when put in the balance with a worldly pleasure, triumphs over everything and makes everything supportable. Is it not selfishness deified, the / beyond the tomb ? Thus the Pope himself was condemned by the tribunal of the infallible canon and the young dfrvote. Not to be in the wrong is one of the sentiments which replace all others in these despotic souls. For some time there had been established a secret conflict between the ideas of husband and wife, and the young magistrate soon wearied of a contest which would never cease. What man, what character will resist the sight of a visage lovingly hypocritical, and a categorical A DOUBLE FAMILY 87 remonstrance opposed to the slightest wish? What position to take against a wife who makes use of your passion to protect her own insensibility, who seems to remain sweetly inexorable, prepares her- self to play the part of a victim with delight, and looks upon her husband as an instrument in the hands of God, as an evil the flagellations of which will spare her those of purgatory ? Where are the paintings by which can be given any idea of these women who cause virtue to be hated by outraging the sweetest precepts of a religion which Saint John summed up in "Love one another." Was there to be found in the shops a single bonnet condemned to remain on the shelves or to be shipped off to the colonies, Granville was sure to see his wife put it on ; if there was manufactured any stuff of a color or a design particularly unhappy, she appeared in it. These poor devotes are distracting in their toilets. The want of taste is one of the defects which are inseparable from false devotion. Thus, in that intimate existence which wishes the most expan- sion, Granville was without a companion : he went alone into society, to the ftes, to the theatre. Nothing in his own house was in sympathy with him. A great crucifix placed between his wife's bed and his own was there like the symbol of his destiny. Did it not represent a Divinity done to death, a man-God killed in all the beauty of life and of youth? The ivory of that cross was less cold than Angelique crucifying her husband in the name of virtue. It was between their two beds that their 88 A DOUBLE FAMILY unhappiness was born; this young wife saw there only a duty in the pleasures of Hymen. There, on an Ash Wednesday, arose the observance of fasts, a pale and livid figure which in peremptory tones commanded a complete Lent, without Granville's thinking it worth while this time to write to the Pope, in order to have the advice of the consistory on the manner of observing Lent, Ember-days and the eves of the great festivals of the church. The young magistrate's unhappiness was immense ; he could not even complain, what had he to say ? He possessed a wife young, pretty, faithful to her duties, virtuous, the model of all the virtues! every year she was delivered of an infant, which she nursed herself and brought up in the best prin- ciples. The charitable Angel ique was promoted angel. The old women who composed the society in the midst of which she lived, for at this period the young women had not yet conceived the idea of adopting the tone of this high devotion, all admired the devotedness of Madame de Granville, and re- garded her, if not as a virgin, at least as a martyr. They accused, not the scruples of the wife, but the procreating barbarity of the husband. By degrees Granville, overwhelmed with work, separated from all pleasure and wearied with the world in which he wandered solitary, fell toward his thirty-second year into a most terrible marasmus. Life to him was odious. As he had too high an idea of the obli- gations imposed upon him by his position to set the example of an irregular life, he undertook to dull A DOUBLE FAMILY 89 himself by hard work, and occupied himself with a great treatise on law. But he did not long enjoy that monastic tranquillity upon which he counted. When the divine Angelique saw him deserting the worldly festivals and working in his own apart- ments with a sort of regularity, she undertook to convert him. It was a veritable grief for her to know that her husband held opinions so little Chris- tian; she wept sometimes in thinking that if he should chance to die, he would perish in final im- penitence, without her ever being able to hope to snatch him from the eternal flames of hell. Gran- ville then became the object of the little ideas, the empty reasonings, the narrow thoughts, by means of which his wife, who thought to have won a first victory, wished to endeavor to obtain a second by bringing him into the bosom of the Church. This was the last stroke. What could be more afflicting than those dull contests in which the narrow obsti- nacy of the devout endeavored to overcome the dia- lectics of a magistrate? What more frightful to depict than those keen little prickings to which the passionate prefer stabs with a poignard ? Granville deserted his house, in which everything became insupportable to him; his children, crushed under the cold despotism of their mother, did not dare to follow their father to the theatre, and Granville could not procure them any pleasure without draw- ing upon them the punishments of their terrible mother. This man, so loving by nature, had been brought to an indifference, to an egotism worse than 90 A DOUBLE FAMILY death. He at least saved his sons from this hell by sending them to college at an early age, and by reserving to himself the right of directing them. He intervened but rarely between the mother and the daughters; but he resolved to marry them as soon as they had attained the nubile age. If he had wished to take a violent stand, he would have had no justification; his wife, supported by a formi- dable array of dowagers, would have had him con- demned by the entire earth. Granville then had no other resource than to live in a complete isolation; but, bowed under the tyranny of unhappiness, his features, worn by grief and by labor, became dis- pleasing to himself. Finally, his liaisons, his con- nection with women of the world, from whom he despaired of finding any consolation he grew to dread these, too. The didactic history of this melancholy household did not offer, during the fifteen years which elapsed between 1806 and 1821, any scene worthy of being reported. Madame de Granville remained exactly the same from the moment she lost her husband's heart as during the years in which she called herself happy. She undertook neuvaines in which to pray God and the saints to enlighten her as to the fau-lts which were displeasing to her husband and to inform her as to the means of bringing back the strayed sheep to the fold ; but the more fervent her prayers, the less Granville appeared in the house. For the last five years or so, the advocate general, to whom the Restoration accorded very high functions in the A DOUBLE FAMILY 91 magistracy, had dwelt on the ground floor of his hotel in order to avoid living with the Comtesse de Granville. Every morning there took place a scene which, if we may believe the slanders of the world, is repeated in more than one household where it is produced by certain incompatibilities of temper, by moral or physical maladies, or by irregularities which conduct very many marriages to the misfor- tunes depicted in this history. s About eight o'clock in the morning, a femme de chambre, with a suffi- cient resemblance to an inmate of a convent, came to ring at the apartment of the Comte de Granville. When admitted into the salon which led into the magistrate's cabinet, she repeated to the valet de chambre, and always in the same tone, the message of the day before : "Madame wishes to ask of Monsieur le Comte if he has passed the night comfortably, and if she shall have the pleasure of breakfasting with him." "Monsieur," replied the valet de chambre, after having spoken to his master, "presents his homages to Madame la Comtesse, and entreats her to accept his excuses; an important affair obliges him to attend at the Palais." A moment later, the femme de chambre presented herself again and asked on the part of madame if she could have the happiness of seeing Monsieur le Comte before his departure. "He has gone," replied the valet, often while the cabriolet was still in the courtyard. This dialogue by ambassadors became a daily 92 A DOUBLE FAMILY ceremonial. Granville's valet de chambre, who, favored by his master, had caused more than one quarrel in the household by his irreligion and by the laxity of his manners, sometimes gravely trans- ported himself into the cabinet where his master was not, and returned to make the customary re- sponses. The afflicted spouse was always on the lookout for the return of her husband, stationed herself on the perron to intercept him on his passage, and to appear before him like a remorse. The punctilious troublesomeness which animates the monastic characters was at the bottom of that of Madame de Granville who, then at the age of only thirty-five, appeared to be forty. When, obliged by decorum, Granville spoke to his wife or remained in his house to dinner, happy at imposing her pres- ence upon him, her sweetly-sharp discourse and the insupportable weariness of her bigoted society, she then endeavored to put him in the wrong before her servants and her charitable friends. The presi- dency of one of the royal courts was offered to the Comte de Granville, at that moment in very good standing at Court ; he entreated the minister to allow him to remain in Paris. This refusal, the reasons for which were known only to the guardian of the seals, suggested the most grotesque conjectures to the intimate friends and to the confessor of the countess. Granville, with a fortune of a hundred thousand francs of income, belonged to one of the best houses of Normandy; his nomination to a presi- dency was a step for reaching the peerage; whence A DOUBLE FAMILY 93 came this lack of ambition? what had caused the abandonment of his great work on the law ? what had occasioned this dissipation which for nearly six years had rendered him a stranger in his own house, to his family, to his functions, to everything which should be dear to him ? The confessor of the count- ess, who, to attain his bishopric, counted as much upon the support of the houses over which he pre- sided as on the services rendered to a congregation of which he was one of the most ardent propagators, was disappointed by the refusal of Granville and endeavored to calumniate him by suppositions : "If Monsieur le Comte entertained so much repugnance for the provinces, perhaps it was because he was dismayed at the necessity which he would there be under of leading a regular life? Obliged to set a moral example, he would live with the countess, from whom an illicit passion alone could separate him. Would a wife as pure as Madame de Gran- ville ever be able to recognize the disorders which had arisen in her husband's conduct? " Her good friends transformed into truths these words, which unfortunately were not hypotheses, and Madame de Granville was struck as if by a thunderbolt Without any ideas of the manners of the great world, ignorant of love and its follies, Angelique was so far from thinking that marriage could be compat- ible with incidents different from those that had alienated Granville's heart from her, that she be- lieved him incapable of faults which for all women are crimes. When the count ceased to claim 94 A DOUBLE FAMILY anything from her, she had imagined that the calm which he appeared to enjoy was in the course of nature ; finally, as she had given him all that her heart could contain of affection for a man, and as the conjectures of her confessor ruined completely the illusions with which she had nourished herself up to this moment, she took up her husband's defence, but without being able to destroy the sus- picion so skilfully slipped into her soul. These apprehensions caused such ravages in her feeble head that she fell ill and became the prey of a slow fever. All this took place during Lent in the year 1822, she would not consent to relax her aus- terities and gradually arrived at a consumption which endangered her life. The indifferent looks of Granville were killing her. The cares and atten- tions of the magistrate resembled those which a nephew forces himself to be prodigal of for an old uncle. Although the countess had renounced her system of agitating and of remonstrances, and although she endeavored to welcome her husband with soft speeches, the sharpness of the devote would come through, and often destroyed by one word the labor of a week. About the end of the month of May, the warm breath of spring and a regimen somewhat more nourishing than that of Lent, restored some of her strength to Madame de Granville. One morning, on her return from mass, she came to seat herself in her little garden on a stone bench where the caresses of the sun recalled to her the first days of A DOUBLE FAMILY 95 her marriage; she looked back over her whole life to discover in what she had failed as to her duties as mother and wife. The Abbe Fontanon suddenly appeared in a state of agitation difficult to describe. "Has some misfortune come to you, my father?" she asked him with a filial solicitude. "Ah! I could wish," replied the Norman priest, "that all the misfortunes with which the hand of God afflicts you were deputed to me; but, my worthy friend, there are trials to which it is neces- sary to know how to submit yourself." "Oh! can there be for me chastisements greater than those with which Providence overwhelms me by employing my husband as an instrument of wrath?" "Prepare yourself, my daughter, for a still greatet evil than that which we formerly supposed with your pious friends." "I should then thank God," replied the countess, "that He has deigned to make use of you to trans- mit to me His will, placing thus, as always, the treasures of His mercy after the scourge of His anger, as formerly, in banishing Hagar, He discov- ered to her a spring in the desert" "He has measured your trials by the strength of your resignation and by the weight of your faults." "Speak, I am ready to hear all." With these words the countess lifted her eyes to heaven and added : "Speak, Monsieur Fontanon." "For the last seven years, Monsieur Granville has 96 A DOUBLE FAMILY been committing the sin of adultery with a concu- bine by whom he has had two children, and he has squandered for this adulterous household more than five hundred thousand francs which should have belonged to his legitimate family." "I must see them with my own eyes," said the countess. "Be very careful to do no such thing," cried the abbe. "You should pardon, my daughter, and wait in prayer for God to enlighten your husband, at least to employ against him the means which are offered you by human laws." The long conversation which the Abbe Fontanon then had with his penitent produced a violent change in the countess; she dismissed him, showed to her domestics a face almost with color in it and terrified them by her disordered activity; she ordered her carriage, countermanded it, changed her mind twenty times in the same hour; but finally, as if she had taken a great resolution, she went off about three o'clock, leaving her household all in astonishment at so sudden a revolution. "Will monsieur return to dinner?" she had asked of the valet de chambre, to whom she never spoke. "No, madame. " "Did you drive him to the Palais this morning?" "Yes, madame." "Is not to-day Monday?" "Yes, madame." "The Palais is open then on Monday?" "May the devil fly away with you!" said the AT MADEMOISELLE DE BELLEFEUILLE S "Caroline * * * If he should undertake to trouble our happiness, I would know what course to take " What would you do ? " "We would go to Italy, I would fly " A cry, uttered in the adjoining salon, suddenly caused Roger to shiver and Mademoiselle de Belle- feuille to tremble, and they both rushed into the salon there to find the countess in a faint. -<^ $.%}.?.,. A DOUBLE FAMILY 97 valet, as he saw his mistress depart, and she gave to the coachman the order, "Rue Taitbout." Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille was weeping; near her, Roger, holding one of the hands of his friend between his own, kept silence, and looked alter- nately at the little Charles, who, comprehending nothing of his mother's grief, remained mute at seeing her weep, and at the cradle in which Eugenie was sleeping, and at the face of Caroline on which the sorrow resembled rain falling through the rays of a joyous sun. "Well, yes, my angel," said Roger after a long silence, "that is the great secret, I am married. But one day, I hope, we shall make but one family. My wife has been, since the month of March, in a hopeless illness; I do not wish her death; but, if it should please God to call her to Him, I think she will be happier in Paradise than in a world of which neither the pains nor the pleasures affect her." "How I hate that woman! How has she been able to render you unhappy ? However, it is to that unhappiness that I owe my felicity." Her tears were suddenly dried. "Caroline, let us hope," cried Roger, taking a kiss. "Do not be frightened at what that abbe can say. Although my wife's confessor is a redoubtable man through his influence in the congregation, if he should undertake to trouble our happiness, I would know what course to take " "What would you do?" "We would go to Italy, I would fly " 7 98 A DOUBLE FAMILY A cry, uttered in the adjoining salon, suddenly caused Roger to shiver and Mademoiselle de Belle- feuille to tremble, and they both rushed into the salon there to find the countess in a faint. When Madame de Granville had recovered consciousness, she uttered a profound sigh at seeing herself between the count and her rival, and she repulsed the latter with an involuntary gesture full of contempt Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille rose to withdraw. "You are in your own house, madame, remain here," said Granville, arresting Caroline by the arm. The magistrate seized his swooning wife, carried her to her carriage and entered it with her. "Who then has brought you to the point of desiring my death? of fleeing from me?" asked the countess in a feeble voice and looking at her husband with as much indignation as sorrow. "Was I not young? You thought me beautiful. What have you to re- proach me with? Have I deceived you? have I not been a discreet and virtuous wife? My heart has preserved only your image, my ears have heard only your voice. In what duty have I failed? what have I refused you?" "Happiness!" replied the count in a firm voice. "As you know, madame, there are two ways of serving God. Certain Christians imagine that by going to church at fixed hours there to say Pater Nosters, by hearing mass regularly and by abstaining from all sin, they will gain heaven; those persons, madame, end in hell, they have not loved God for A DOUBLE FAMILY 99 Himself, they have not adored Him as He wishes to be, they have made no sacrifice to Him. Although gentle in appearance, they are hard to their neighbor ; they live by the rule, the letter and not the spirit. This is how you have acted with your earthly spouse. You have sacrificed my happiness to your salvation ; you were always in prayer when I came to you with a joyous heart, you wept when you should have lightened my labors, you have not thought it worth while to satisfy a single require- ment of my pleasures." "And, if they were criminal," cried the countess with fire, "was it then necessary to sacrifice my soul to please you?" "It would have been a sacrifice that another, more loving than you, has had the courage to make for me," said Granville coldly. "O my God," she cried weeping, "Thou hearest him ! Was he worthy of the prayers and the aus- terities in the midst of which I have consumed myself in order to redeem his faults and my own ? Of what use is virtue?" "To gain heaven, my dear. One can not be at the same time the spouse of a man and of Jesus Christ; it would be bigamy; you must make your choice between a husband and a convent You have stripped your soul, for the sake of the future, of all the love, of all .the devotion which God has com- manded you to have for me, and you have kept for this world only sentiments of hatred " "Have I not then loved you?" 100 A DOUBLE FAMILY "No, madame." "What then is love?" asked the countess invol- untarily. "Love, my dear," replied Granville with a sort of ironical surprise, "you are not in a condition to comprehend it The cold sky of Normandy cannot be that of Spain. The question of climates is un- doubtedly the secret of our unhappiness. To yield to our caprices, to divine them in advance, to find pleasures in a misfortune, to sacrifice to us the opinion of the world, self-love, religion even, and to regard these offerings only as grains of incense burned in honor of the idol, that is love " "The love of opera dancers," said the countess in horror. "Such fires as those should be but little durable, and leave you very soon only cinders or coal, regrets or despairs. A wife, monsieur, should offer you, it seems to me, a true friendship, an equal warmth, and " "You speak of a warmth as the negroes speak of ice," interrupted the count with a sardonic smile. "Reflect that the most humble of all the daisies is more charming than the proudest and most brilliant of the thorn-roses which attract us in springtime by their penetrating perfumes and their vivid colors. However," he added, "I will do you justice. You have kept yourself so strictly in the line of apparent duty prescribed by the law, that, in order to demon- strate to you that in which you have failed in your duty toward me, it would be necessary to enter into certain details which your dignity would not permit A DOUBLE FAMILY IOI you to consider, and to instruct you in things which would seem to you the overthrow of all morality." "You dare to speak of morality in issuing from the house in which you have dissipated the fortune of your children, in a place of debauchery!" cried the countess, whom the reticence of her husband rendered furious. "Madame, I must stop you there," said the count coolly, interrupting his wife. "If Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille is rich, she is not so at the expense of any other person. My uncle was master of his own fortune, he had several heirs; during his life and through pure friendship for her whom he looked upon as his niece, he gave her his estate of Bellefeuille. As for the rest, I hold it from his liberality " "Such conduct is worthy of a Jacobin!" cried the pious Angelique. "Madame, you forget that your father was one of those Jacobins whom you, a woman, condemn with so little charity," said the count with severity. "The citizen Bontems was signing death warrants at the period when my uncle was rendering naught but services to France." Madame de Granville did not reply. But, after a moment of silence, the remembrance of that which she had just seen reawakening in her soul a jealousy which nothing can extinguish in a woman's heart, she said in a low voice, and as if she were speaking to herself : "How can anyone thus risk his own soul and the souls of others !" 102 A DOUBLE FAMILY "Eh! madame," replied the count, wearied of this conversation, "perhaps it will be you who one day will have to answer for all this." This speech made the countess tremble. "You will doubtless be excused in the eyes of the indulgent Judge who will weigh our faults," said he, "because of the sincerity with which you have accomplished my unhappiness. I do not hate you at all, I hate those who have perverted your heart and your reason. You have prayed for me, as Made- moiselle de Bellefeuille has given me her heart and surrounded me with love. You should have been alternately my mistress and the saint praying at the foot of the altar. Do me the justice to admit that I am neither perverse nor debauched. My habits are pure. Alas ! at the end of seven years of sorrows, the necessity of happiness conducted me down an insensible slope to loving another woman than you, to creating for myself another family than my own. Do not think, moreover, that I am the only one ; there exist in this city thousands of hus- bands who have been led by different causes to this double existence." "Grand Dieu!" cried the countess, "how heavy my cross has become! If the spouse whom in Thy anger Thou hast imposed upon me can find no hap- piness here below, except by my death, recall me to Thy bosom." "If you had always had such admirable senti- ments and this devotion, we should still be happy," said the count coldly. A DOUBLE FAMILY 103 "Well," replied Angelique, shedding a torrent of tears, "forgive me if I have committed faults! Yes, monsieur, I am ready to obey you in all things, certain that you will desire nothing that is not just and natural : I will be, henceforward, all that you could wish a wife to be." "Madame, if your intention is to make me say that I no longer love you, I shall have the terrible courage to enlighten you. Can I command my heart? can I efface in a moment the souvenirs of fifteen years of sorrow? I no longer love you. These words enclose a mystery quite as profound as that which is contained in the phrase, 'I love.' Esteem, consideration, regard, may be obtained, dis- appear, return; but, as to love, I might preach to myself for a thousand years, I could not make it be born again, above all for a woman who has wilfully aged herself." "Ah! Monsieur le Comte, I desire very sincerely that these words shall not be uttered to you some day by her whom you love, with the tone and the accent which you give to them " "Will you put on, this evening, a dress la Grecque and accompany me to the Opera?" The shudder which this demand suddenly caused the countess was a mute reply. In the first days of the month of December, 1833, a man whose countenance and whose entirely white hair seemed to indicate that he had aged rather by grief than by years, for he appeared to be about 104 A DOUBLE FAMILY sixty, passed at midnight through the Rue Gaillon. When he arrived before a house of an unassuming appearance, and three stories in height, he stopped to look at one of the three windows placed at equal distances in the mansard roof. A feeble light scarcely illumined this humble casement, some of the panes of which had been replaced by paper. The pedestrian was looking at this vacillating light with the undefmable curiosity of the Parisian idlers when a young man suddenly came out of the house. As the feeble rays of the street lamp fell upon the face of the curious observer, it will not be considered surprising that, notwithstanding the night, the young man advanced toward the other with those precautions customary in Paris when you are afraid of being deceived in recognizing an acquaint- ance. "What!" he cried, "it is you, Monsieur le Presi- dent, alone, on foot, at this hour, and so far from the Rue Saint-Lazare! Permit me to have the honor of offering you my arm. The pavement, this morning, is so slippery that if we do not support each other," he said, that he might not offend the old man, "it would be difficult for us to avoid a fall." "But, my dear monsieur, I am as yet only fifty- five, unfortunately for me," replied the Comte de Granville. "A physician as celebrated as you are should know that at that age a man still has all his vigor." "You are then very fortunate," replied Horace Bianchon. "You are not in the habit, I think, of A DOUBLE FAMILY 105 going on foot about Paris. When one has horses as fine as yours " "But the greater part of the time," replied the Comte de Granville, "when I do not go out in society, I return from the Palais-Royal or from the club des Etrangers on foot" "And carrying about you, doubtless, large sums of money," cried the doctor. "Is not that to invite the assassin's dagger?" "I am not afraid of that," replied the Comte de Granville with an indifferent and mournful air. "But at least you need not stop," replied the physician, drawing the magistrate toward the boule- vard. "But a little more, and I should think that you wished to steal your last sickness from me and to die by another hand than mine." "Ah! you have surprised me playing the spy," replied the count "Whether I pass on foot or in a carriage, and at whatever hour of the night it may be, I have noticed for some time at a window on the third floor of the house from which you came out, the shadow of a person who seems to be working with an heroic courage." At these words the count made a sudden pause, as if he had felt an unexpected pain. "I have taken in this garret," he said continuing, "as great an interest as a bourgeois of Paris can take in the completion of the Palais-Royal." "Well," cried Horace quickly, interrupting the count, "I can give you " "Tell me nothing," replied Granville, cutting 106 A DOUBLE FAMILY short the doctor's speech. "I would not give a cen- time to know whether the shadow which falls on those curtains full of holes is that of a man or a woman, and whether the inhabitant of that garret is happy or unhappy! If I have been surprised to no longer see any one working this evening, if I stopped, it was solely to have the pleasure of form- ing conjectures as numerous and as senseless as those which the idlers conceive at the aspect of a building suddenly abandoned. For the last nine years, my young " The count seemed to hesitate to employ an ex- pression, but he made a gesture and exclaimed : "No, I will not call you my friend, I detest every- thing which resembles sentiment For the last nine years, then, I have no longer been surprised that old men please themselves by cultivating flowers, by planting trees; the events of life have taught them to believe no more in human affections; and within a few days I have become an old man. I no longer wish to become attached to anything but animals, which do not reason, to plants, to anything which is outward. I attach more importance to the move- ments of Taglioni than to all the human sentiments. I abhor life, and a world in which I am alone. Nothing, nothing," added the count with an expres- sion which made the young man shudder, "no, nothing moves me and nothing interests me." "You have children." "My children!" he replied with a singular accent of bitterness. "Well, the elder of my two A DOUBLE FAMILY 107 daughters, is she not Comtesse de Vandenesse ? As to the other, the marriage of her elder sister pre- pares for her a fine alliance. As to my two sons, have they not succeeded brilliantly ? the viscount, from procureur general at Limoges has become first president at Orleans, and the younger is procureur du roi. My children have their own cares, their anxieties, their affairs. If, among these hearts, there had been one which was entirely devoted to me, if it had endeavored by its affection to fill the void which I feel there," he said, striking his breast, "well, that one would have missed its own life, it would have sacrificed it to me. And for what, after all? to cheer the few years that remain to me ? would it have succeeded ? would I not per- haps have considered its generous cares as a debt ? But" Here the old man began to smile with a profound irony. "But, doctor, it is not in vain that we teach them arithmetic, and they know how to calculate. At this moment, perhaps, they are waiting for my estate." "Oh ! Monsieur le Comte, how can you have such an idea, you, so good, so considerate, so humane? In very truth, if I were not, myself, a living proof of that benevolence which you comprehend in so fine and so large a " "For my own pleasure," replied the count quickly. "I pay for a sensation as I would pay to- morrow a heap of gold for the most puerile of the 108 A DOUBLE FAMILY illusions which moves my heart I help my kind for myself, for the same reason that I go to play ; therefore I count on the gratitude of no one. You, yourself, I would see you die without emotion, and I ask of you the same sentiments toward myself. Ah ! young man, the events of life have passed over my heart like the lava of Vesuvius over Herculaneum; the city exists dead." "Those who have brought to this degree of insen- sibility a heart as warm and as living as was yours, are indeed culpable." "Do not add a word," replied the count with a sentiment of horror. "You have a malady which you should permit me to cure," said Bianchon in a voice full of emotion. "But are you then acquainted with a remedy for death?" cried the count impatiently. "Well, Monsieur le Comte, I will engage to reani- mate that heart which you deem so cold." "Are you the equal of Talma?" asked the first president ironically. "No, Monsieur le Comte. But nature is as superior to Talma as Talma may be superior to me. Listen, the garret which interests you is inhabited by a woman of about thirty years of age, with her, love mounts to fanaticism ; the object of her worship is a young man with a handsome face but whom an evil fairy has endowed with all the vices possible. This youth is a gambler, and I do not know which he loves more, women or wine; he has committed, to my knowledge, deeds worthy of the correctional A DOUBLE FAMILY 109 police. Well, this unhappy woman has sacrificed for him a very happy existence, a man by whom she was adored, by whom she has had children But what ails you, Monsieur le Comte?" "Nothing; continue." "She has allowed him to devour an entire fortune, she would give him, I believe, the world if she owned it; she works night and day; and she has often seen, without a murmur, this monster whom she adores wrest from her even the money destined to pay for the clothes of which her children are in need, even to their food for the morrow. Only three days ago, she sold her hair, the most beautiful I ever saw; he came, she was not able to hide quickly enough the gold piece, he demanded it; for a smile, for a caress, she yielded up the price of two weeks of life and of peace. Is it not at once hor- rible and sublime? But toil is beginning to hollow her cheeks. The cries of her children have dis- tracted her soul, she has fallen ill, she is moaning at this moment on her wretched bed. This evening she had nothing to eat, and her children had no longer the strength to cry, they were silent when I arrived." Horace Bianchon stopped. At that moment the Comte de Granville had, as if in spite of himself, thrust his hand into his waistcoat pocket "I understand, my young friend," said the old man, "how she can still be living, if you take care of her." "Ah! the poor creature," cried the physician, 110 A DOUBLE FAMILY "who would not help her ? I should like to be richer, for I hope to cure her of her love." "But," replied the count, withdrawing from his pocket the hand which he had put there without the doctor seeing it, and full of bank notes which seemed to have been sought there, "how can you expect me to be moved to pity over a misery the pleasures of which would not seem to me to be purchased too dearly by the sacrifice of all my for- tune! She feels, she lives, this woman. Would not Louis XV. have given all his kingdom to have been able to rise from his coffin and to have had three days of youth and of life? Is not that the history of a billion of dead men, of a billion of sick men, of a billion of old men?" "Poor Caroline!" sighed the doctor. On hearing this name the Comte de Granville shuddered, and seized the arm of the physician, who thought he felt himself grasped in the two iron jaws of a vice. "Her name is Caroline Crochard?" asked the president in a voice that was visibly altered. "You know her then?" replied the doctor in astonishment "And the wretch's name is Sol vet Ah ! you have kept your word," cried the president, "you have agitated my heart by the most terrible sensation that it will ever experience until it becomes dust This emotion is still another present from hell, and I shall always know how to pay my debts to it" At this moment the count and the doctor had A DOUBLE FAMILY III arrived at the corner of the Rue de la Chaussee- d'Antin. One of those wanderers of the night who, carrying on the back a willow basket and walking with a hook in the hand, were jokingly called, during the Revolution, members of the committee of investi- gation, happened to be near the curbstone by which the president stopped. This rag-picker had an old face, worthy of those which Charlet has immortal- ized in his caricatures of the school of street- sweepers. "Do you often find thousand-franc notes?" asked the count of him. "Sometimes, my bourgeois." "And do you return them?" "That is according to the reward offered." "See here, my man," said the count, presenting to the rag-picker a note of a thousand francs. "Take this," he said to him, "but remember that I give it to you on the condition that you spend it at the tavern, that you get drunk, that you quarrel, that you beat your wife, that you blacken the eyes of your friends. That will set on foot the guard, the surgeons, the druggists; perhaps the gendarmes, the procureurs du roi, the judges and the jailers. You must change nothing in this programme, or the devil will know how, sooner or later, to get even with you." It would be necessary for a man to possess at once the pencils of Charlet and those of Callot, the brushes of Teniers and of Rembrandt, to give an exact idea of this nocturnal scene. 112 A DOUBLE FAMILY "There is my account closed with hell, and I have had satisfaction for my money," said the count in the deepest tones of his voice and indicating to the stupefied physician the indescribable countenance of the open-mouthed rag-picker. "As to Caroline Crochard," he went on, "she may die in the horrors of hunger and thirst, with the heartrending cries of her dying sons in her ears, recognizing the baseness of him whom she loves, I would not give a farthing to prevent her suffering, and I do not wish to see you again for that only that you have helped her" The count left Bianchon more motionless than a statue, and disappeared, directing his steps with all a young man's precipitancy toward the Rue Saint- Lazare, where he quickly reached the little h&tel which he inhabited and at the door of which he saw, not without surprise, a carriage standing. "Monsieur le Procureur du Roi,"said the valet de chambre to his master, "arrived an hour ago to speak to monsieur, and he is waiting for him in his bedchamber." Granville made a sign to his domestic to retire. "What motive has been of sufficient importance to oblige you to disregard the order that I have given to my children not to come to see me unless sent for ?" said the old man to his son as he entered. "Father," replied the magistrate in a trembling voice and with a respectful air, "1 venture to hope that you will forgive me when you have heard me. " "Your reply is reasonable," said the count. A DOUBLE FAMILY 113 "Take a seat." He indicated a chair to the young man. "But," he went on, "whether I walk about or whether I sit down, pay no attention to me." "Father," resumed the baron, "this afternoon at four o'clock a very young man, arrested in the house of one of my friends whom he had robbed of a very considerable amount, claimed your protection, as- serting that he is your son. "What is his name?" asked the count, trembling. "Charles Crochard." "That is enough," said the father, making an im- perative gesture. Granville walked up and down the chamber in the midst of a profound silence, which his son was very careful not to interrupt. "My son," these words were pronounced in a tone so gentle and so paternal that the young magis- trate thrilled with them "Charles Crochard has told you the truth. I am pleased that you have come this evening, my good Eugene," added the old man. "Here is a sum of money sufficiently large," he said, presenting him with a large roll of bank notes, "you will make whatever use of them you think proper in this affair. I trust in you, and I approve, in advance, of all your arrangements, whether for the present or for the future. Eugene, my dear son, come and embrace me, we see each other perhaps for the last time. To-morrow I shall ask of the king leave of absence, I shall set out for Italy. If a father owes no account of his life to his children, he should bequeath to them the experience 8 114 A DOUBLE FAMILY which destiny has sold to him ; is it not a part of their inheritance? When you marry," resumed the count, shuddering involuntarily, "do not lightly un- dertake this act, the most important of all those to which society compels us. Remember to study long and carefully the character of the woman with whom you propose to unite your destiny ; but consult me, too, I wish to judge her myself. A want of union between two married people, by whatever cause it may be produced, brings about frightful evils. We are, sooner or later, punished for not having obeyed the social laws. I will write to you from Florence on this subject; a father, above all, when he has the honor to preside over a supreme court, should not blush before his son. Adieu." Paris, February, 1830 January, 1842. THE PEACE OF THE HOUSEHOLD (us) TO MY DEAR NIECE, VALENTINE SURVILLE THE PEACE OF THE HOUSEHOLD The adventure depicted in this Scene took place toward the end of the month of November, 1809, at the moment in which the transient Empire of Napoleon attained the climax of its splendor. The fanfares of the victory of Wagram still resounded in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was signed between France and the Coalition. The kings and the princes came accordingly, like the stars, to accomplish their revolutions around Na- poleon, who gave himself the pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train, a magnificent trial of power which he later displayed at Dresden. Never, according to the testimony of contem- poraries, had Paris seen more brilliant f