LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mr. H. H. Kil iani
 
 UCSB LIBRARY 
 
 V-
 
 H. DE BALZAC 
 
 THE COMEDIE HUMAINE
 
 HE LISTENED PATIENTLY TO TALES OF THE LITTLE WOES 
 
 OF LIFE IN A COUNTRY TOWN.
 
 H. DE BALZAC 
 THE 
 
 JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY 
 TOWN 
 
 (LES RlVALITgS) 
 ETC. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 ELLEN MARRIAGE 
 
 WITH A PEEFACE BY 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 THE GEBBIE PUBLISHING Co., Ltd. 
 1899
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 FAGS 
 
 PREFACE . 
 
 IX 
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 
 
 THE OLD MAID 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES 153 
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT 313
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 HE LISTENED PATIENTLY TO TALES OF THE LITTLE WOES OF 
 
 LIFE IN A COUNTRY TOWN (p. 8) ... Frontispiece. 
 
 PACK 
 
 AT ONCE HE TURNED TO LOOK AT ATHANASE . . . . 80 
 
 HE SAW WITH DEEP EMOTION, ALMOST BEYOND CONTROL, HIS 
 PATRON STANDING IN THE MIDST OF THE EMPTY COURT- 
 YARD 156 
 
 "WHAT IS IT, MONSIEUR?" SHE ASKED, POSING IN HER. DIS- 
 ORDER 250 
 
 Drawn by W. Boucher. 
 
 THE YOUNG MAN ARRIVED NEXT MORNING 343 
 
 Drawn by F. C. TUney.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE two stories of " Les Rivalites" are more closely con- 
 nected than it was always Balzac's habit to connect the tales 
 which he united under a common heading. Not only are 
 both devoted to the society of Alencon a town and neigh- 
 borhood to which he had evidently strong, though it is not 
 clearly known what, attractions not only is the Chevalier de 
 Valois a notable figure in each ; but the community, imparted 
 by the elaborate study of the old noblesse in each case, is even 
 greater than either of these ties could give. Indeed, if instead 
 of "Les Rivalites" the author had chosen some label indi- 
 cating the study of the noblesse qui s 1 en va, it might almost 
 have been preferable. He did not, however ; and though in 
 a man who so constantly changed his titles and his arrange- 
 ments the actual ones are not excessively authoritative, they 
 have authority. 
 
 "LaVieille Fille," despite a certain tone of levity which, 
 to do Balzac justice, is not common with him, and which is 
 rather hard upon the poor heroine is one of the best and 
 liveliest things he ever did. The opening picture of the chev- 
 alier, though, like other things of its author's, especially in his 
 overtures, liable to the charge of being elaborated a little too 
 much, is one of the very best things of its kind, and is a sort 
 of locus classicus for its subject. The whole picture of country 
 town society is about as good as it can be ; and the only blot that 
 I know is to be found in the sentimental Athanase, who was not 
 quite within Balzac's province, extensive as that province is. 
 If we compare Mr. Augustus Moddle, we shall see one of the 
 not too numerous instances in which Dickens has a clear ad- 
 vantage over Balzac ; and if it be retorted that Balzac's object 
 was not to present a merely ridiculous object, the rejoinder is 
 
 M
 
 x PREFACE. 
 
 not very far to seek. Such a character, with such a fate as 
 Balzac has assigned to him, must be either humorously gro- 
 tesque or unfeignedly pathetic, and Balzac has not quite made 
 Athanase either. 
 
 He is, however, if he is a failure, about the only failure in 
 the book, and he is atoned for by a whole bundle of successes. 
 Of the chevalier, little more need be said. Balzac, it must be 
 remembered, was the oldest novelist of distinct genius who 
 had the opportunity of delineating the survivors of the ancien 
 rtgime from the life, and directly. It is certain even if we 
 hesitate at believing him quite so familiar with all the classes 
 of higher society from the Faubourg down ward, as he would 
 have us believe him that he saw something of most of them, 
 and his genius was unquestionably of the kind to which a mere 
 thumbnail study, a mere passing view, suffices for the acquisi- 
 tion of a thorough working knowledge of the object. In this 
 case the chevalier has served, and not improperly served, as 
 the original of a thousand after-studies. His rival, less care- 
 fully projected, is also perhaps a little less alive. Again, 
 Balzac was old enough to have foregathered with many men of 
 the Revolution. But the most characteristic of them were not 
 long lived, the "little window" and other things having had 
 a bad effect on them ; and most of those who survived had, by 
 the time he was old enough to take much notice, gone through 
 metamorphoses of Bonapartism, Constitutional Liberalism, and 
 what not. But still du Bosquier is alive, as well as all the 
 minor assistants and spectators in the battle for the old maid's 
 hand. Suzanne, that tactful and graceless Suzanne to whom 
 we are introduced first of all, is very much alive ; and for all 
 her gracelessness not at all disagreeable. I am only sorry that 
 she sold the counterfeit presentment of the Princess Goritza 
 after all. 
 
 "Le Cabinet des Antiques," in its Alencon scenes, is a 
 worthy pendant to " La Vieille Fille." The old-world honor 
 of the Marquis d'Esgrignon, the thankless sacrifices of Ar-
 
 PREFACE. xi 
 
 mande, the prisca fide s of Maitre Chesnel, present pictures for 
 which, out of Balzac, we can look only in Jules Sandeau, and 
 which in Sandeau, though they are presented with a more 
 poetical touch, have less masterly outline than here. One 
 takes or, at least, I take less interest in the ignoble intrigues 
 of the other side, except in so far as they menace the fortunes 
 of a worthy house unworthily represented. Victurnien d'Es- 
 grignon, like his companion, Savinien de Portenduere (who, 
 however, is, in every respect, a very much better fellow), does 
 not argue in Balzac any high opinion of the^/f/j defamille. 
 He is, in fact, an extremely feeble youth, who does not seem 
 to have got much real satisfaction out of the escapades, for 
 which he risked not merely his family's fortune, but his own 
 honor, and who would seem to have been a rake, not from 
 natural taste and spirit and relish, but because it seemed to 
 him to be the proper thing to be. But the beginnings of the 
 fortune of the aspiring and intriguing Camusots are admirably 
 painted ; and Madame de Maufrigneuse, that rather doubtful 
 divinity, who appears so frequently in Balzac, here acts the 
 dea ex machina with considerable effect. And we end well 
 (as we generally do when Blondet, whom Balzac seems more 
 than once to adopt as mask, is the narrator), in the last 
 glimpse of Mile. Armande left alone with the remains of her 
 beauty, the ruins of everything dear to her and God. 
 
 These two stories were written at no long interval, yet, for 
 some reason or other, Balzac did not at once unite them. 
 "La Vieille Fille" first appeared in November and December, 
 1836, in the " Presse," and was inserted next year in the 
 Scenes de la Vie de Province. It had three chapter divisions. 
 The second part did not appear all at once. Its first install- 
 ment, under the general title, came out in the " Chronique de 
 Paris" even before the " Vieille Fille" appeared in March, 
 1836; the completion was not published (under the title of 
 " Les Rivalites en Province") till the autumn of 1838, when 
 the " Constitutionnel " served as its vehicle. There were eight
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 chapter divisions m this latter. The whole of the " Cabinet " 
 was published in book form (with "Gambara" to follow it) 
 in 1839. There were some changes here; and the divisions 
 were abolished when the whole book in 1844 entered the 
 Com6die. One of the greatest mistakes which, in my humble 
 judgment, the organizers of the Edition definitive have made, 
 is their adoption of Balzac's never executed separation of the 
 pair and deletion of the excellent joint-title "Les Rivalites." 
 
 If Balzac had been acquainted with the works of Chaucer 
 (which would have been extremely surprising) he might have 
 called "Le Contrat de Manage" "A Legend of Bad 
 Women." He has not been exactly sparing of studies in 
 that particular kind ; but he has surpassed himself here. 
 Mme. de Maufrigneuse redeems herself by her character, 
 however imperfectly supported, of grande dame, Beatrix de 
 Rochefide by a certain naturalness and weakness, Flore Brazier 
 by circumstances and education, others by other things. But 
 Madame Evangelista and her daughter Natalie may be said to 
 be bad all through thoroughly poisonous persons who, much 
 more than the actual Milady of " Les Trois Mousquetaires " 
 (there was some charm in her), deserved to be taken and 
 "justified" by lynch law. If the "Thirteen" (who were 
 rather interested in the matter) had descended upon both in 
 the fashion of d'Artagnan and his friends, I do not know that 
 any one would have had much right to complain. How far 
 the picture is exaggerated must be a question to be decided 
 partly by individual experience, partly by other arguments. 
 Although I am not always disposed to defend Balzac from the 
 charge of exaggeration, I think he is fairly free from it here. 
 
 Madame Evangelista, beside the usual womanly desire to 
 make a figure in the capital, has (not to excuse, but to explain 
 her) the equally natural tendency to regard everybody out- 
 side her own family as an at least possible enemy to be " ex- 
 ploited " pitilessly, together with bad blood which, though 
 luckily not common, is by no means impossible nor even ex-
 
 PREFACE. xiil 
 
 tremely rare. Her daughter, as Balzac has acutely suggested, 
 both here and elsewhere, is, like not a few women, destitute 
 of that sense of abiding gratitude for pleasure mutually en- 
 joyed which tempers the evil tendencies of the male sex to no 
 inconsiderable extent. She has never cared for her husband ; 
 she has no morals ; and (as in another book and subject, her letter 
 to Felix de Vandenesse, well deserved as it is in the particular 
 instance, shows) she has the fortunately not universal but ex- 
 cessively dangerous combination of utter selfishness with very 
 clear-sighted commonsense. 
 
 The men are equally true, and much more agreeable. It is 
 noteworthy that here only does Balzac's pattern Byronic 
 dandy Marsay cut a distinctly agreeable figure. He is still 
 something of a coxcomb, but he is, as he is not very often, a 
 gentleman ; he is, as he is scarcely ever, a good fellow ; and 
 he deserves his character as un homme tres fort, to say the 
 least, better than he does in some places. The two family 
 lawyers are excellent. As for Paul de Manerville, the unfor- 
 tunate fleur des pots (the title for some time of the book) 
 himself, he is one of the profoundest of Balzac's studies, and 
 it was perhaps rather unkind of his creator to call him a mat's. 
 At any rate, he was not more so than that very creator when 
 he committed slow suicide by waiting and working till a 
 woman, who cannot have been worth the trouble, at last made 
 up her mind to "derogate" a little, and, without any pecuni- 
 ary sacrifice, to exchange the position of widow of a member 
 of a second-rate aristocracy for that of wife of one of the 
 foremost living men of letters in Europe, who was himself 
 technically a gentleman. Marsay's letters to Paul only put 
 pointedly what the whole story puts suggestively, the great 
 truth that you may "see life" without knowing it, and that 
 for a certain kind of respectable person the sowing of wild 
 oats is a far more dangerous kind of husbandry than for the 
 wildest profligate. It is true that Paul has exceedingly bad 
 luck, and that in countries other than France he might have
 
 xiv PREFACE. 
 
 subsided into a most respectable and comfortable country 
 gentleman. But as a great authority, whom he probably 
 knew, Paul de Florae, his namesake and contemporary, 
 remarked, "Do not adopt our institutions a demi," so it 
 would seem to be a maxim that the two kinds of life cannot 
 be combined at least, that seems to be Balzac's moral. 
 
 The first titles of the two main stories have been given 
 above. " La Fleur des pois," as such, appeared in no news- 
 paper, but in the "Scenes de la Vie Privee " of 1834-35. 
 It had three divisions, which disappeared in the first edition 
 of the Comedie, when also the title was changed. Its com- 
 panion was printed under its first title, and with fourteen 
 chapter divisions, in a paper called " La Legislature," between 
 July and September, 1842. Balzac at first meant to call it 
 "Les Jeunes Gens,"* but changed this to "Le Danger des 
 Mystifications," and that again to the present form, when it 
 appeared (with "La fausse Maitresse ") as a book in 1844. 
 Next year it was classed in the Comedie, undergoing the 
 usual process of deletion of the chapter divisions and head- 
 ings. 
 
 G. S. 
 * This refers to "A Start in Life."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY 
 TOWN. 
 
 THE OLD MAID 
 
 (La Vieille Fille). 
 
 To M, Eugene Auguste Georges Louis Midy de la 
 GrenerayeSurville, Civil Engineer of (he Corps-Royal, 
 a token of affection from his brother-in-law. 
 
 DE BALZAC. 
 
 PLENTY of people must have come across at least one Cheva- 
 lier de Valois in the provinces ; there was one in Normandy, 
 another was extant at Bourges, a third flourished at Alencon 
 in the year 1816, and the South very likely possessed one of 
 its own. But we are not here concerned with the numbering 
 of the Valois tribe. Some of them, no doubt, were about as 
 much of Valois as Louis XIV. was a Bourbon ; and every 
 chevalier was so slightly acquainted with the rest that it was 
 anything but politic to mention one of them when speaking to 
 another. All of them, however, agreed to leave the Bourbons 
 in perfect tranquillity on the throne of France, for it is a little 
 too well proven that Henri IV. succeeded to the crown in 
 default of heirs male in the Orleans, otherwise the Valois 
 branch ; so that if any Valois exist at all, they must be de- 
 scendants of Charles of Valois, Duke of AngoulSme, and 
 Marie Touchet ; and even there the direct line was extinct 
 (unless proof to the contrary is forthcoming) in the person of 
 the Abbe de Rothelin. As for the Valois Saint-Remy, de- 
 scended from Henri II., they likewise came to an end with 
 the too famous Lamothe- Valois of the Diamond Necklace 
 affair. 
 
 (1)
 
 2 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Every one of the chevaliers, if information is correct, was, 
 like the chevalier of Alencon, an elderly noble, tall, lean, and 
 without fortune. The Bourges chevalier had emigrated, the 
 Touraine Valois went into hiding during the Revolution, and 
 the Alenc.on chevalier was mixed up in the Vendean war, 
 and implicated to some extent in Chouannerie.* The last- 
 named gentleman spent the most part of his youth in Paris, 
 where, at the age of thirty, the Revolution broke in upon his 
 career of conquests. Accepted as a true Valois by persons of 
 the highest quality in his province, the Chevalier de Valois 
 d'Alenon (like his namesakes) was remarkable for his fine 
 manners, and had evidently been accustomed to move in the 
 best society. 
 
 He dined out every day, and played cards of an evening, 
 and, thanks to one of his weaknesses, was regarded as a great 
 wit j he had a habit of relating a host of anecdotes of the 
 times of Louis Quinze, and those who heard his stories for the 
 first time thought them passably well narrated. The Chevalier 
 de Valois, moreover, had one virtue : he refrained from re- 
 peating his own good sayings, and never alluded to his con- 
 quests, albeit his smiles and airs were delightfully indiscreet. 
 The old gentleman took full advantage of the old-fashioned 
 Voltairean noble's privilege of staying away from mass, but 
 his irreligion was very tenderly dealt with out of regard for 
 his devotion to the Royalist cause. 
 
 One of his most remarked graces (Mole must have learned 
 it of him) was his way of taking snuff from an old-fashioned 
 snuff-box with a portrait of a lady on the lid. The Princess 
 Goritza, a lovely Hungarian, had been famous for her beauty 
 toward the end of the reign of Louis XV. ; and the chevalier 
 could never speak without emotion of the foreign great lady 
 whom he loved in his youth, for whom he had fought a duel 
 with M. de Lauzun. 
 
 But by this time the chevalier had lived fifty-eight years, 
 * The Royalist rising in Vend6e.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 3 
 
 and if he owned to but fifty of them, he might safely indulge 
 himself in that harmless deceit. Thin, fair-complexioned 
 men, among other privileges, retain their youthfulness of 
 shape which in men, as in women, contributes as much as 
 anything to stave off any appearance of age. And, indeed, 
 it is a fact that all the life, or rather, all the grace, which is 
 the expression of life, lies in the figure. Among the chevalier's 
 personal traits, mention must be made of the portentous nose 
 with which nature had endowed him. It cut a pallid coun- 
 tenance sharply into two sections which seemed to have noth- 
 ing to do with each other ; so much so, indeed, that only one- 
 half of his face would flush with the exertion of digestion after 
 dinner ; all the glow being confined to the left side, a phe- 
 nomenon worthy of note in times when physiology is so much 
 occupied with the human heart. M. de Valois' health was not 
 apparently robust, judging by his long, thin legs, lean frame, 
 and sallow complexion ; but he ate like an ogre, alleging, 
 doubtless by way of excuse for his voracity, that he suffered 
 from a complaint known in the provinces as a " hot liver." 
 The flush on his left cheek confirmed the story ; but in a land 
 where meals are developed on the lines of thirty or forty dishes, 
 and last for four hours at a stretch, the chevalier's abnormal 
 appetite might well seem to be a special mark of the favor of 
 Providence vouchsafed to the good town. That flush on the 
 left cheek, according to divers medical authorities, is a sign 
 of prodigality of heart ; and, indeed, the chevalier's past 
 record of gallantry might seem to confirm a professional dic- 
 tum for which the present chronicler (most fortunately) is in 
 nowise responsible. But in spite of these symptoms, M. de 
 Valois was of nervous temperament, and in consequence long- 
 lived ; and if his liver was hot, to use the old-fashioned phrase, 
 his heart was not a whit less inflammable. If there was a line 
 worn here and there in his face, and a silver thread or so in 
 his hair, an experienced eye would have discerned in these 
 signs and tokens the stigmata of desire, the furrows traced by
 
 4 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 past pleasure. And, in fact, in his face, the unmistakable 
 marks of the crow's foot and the serpent's tooth took the 
 shape of the delicate wrinkles so prized at the court of 
 Cytherea. 
 
 Everything about the gallant chevalier revealed the " ladies' 
 man." So minutely careful was he over his ablutions that it 
 was a pleasure to see his cheeks ; they might have been brushed 
 over with some miraculous water. That portion of his head 
 which the hair refused to hide from view shone like ivory. 
 His eyebrows, like his hair, had a youthful look, so carefully 
 was their growth trained and regulated by the comb. A 
 naturally fair skin seemed to be yet further whitened by some 
 mysterious preparation ; and while the chevalier never used 
 scent, there was about him, as it were, a perfume of youth 
 which enhanced the freshness of his looks. His hands, that 
 told of race, were as carefully kept as if they belonged to some 
 coxcomb of the gentler sex; you could not help noticing 
 those rose-pink neatly-trimmed finger-nails. Indeed, but for 
 his lordly superlative nose, the chevalier would have looked 
 like a doll. 
 
 It takes some resolution to spoil this portrait with the ad- 
 mission of a foible ; the chevalier put cotton wool in his ears, 
 and still continued to wear earrings two tiny negroes' heads 
 set with brilliants. They were of admirable workmanship, it 
 is true, and their owner was so far attached to the singular 
 appendages that he used to justify his fancy by saying that his 
 "sick headaches had left him since his ears were pierced." 
 He used to suffer from sick headaches. The chevalier is not 
 held up as a flawless character ; but even if an old bachelor's 
 heart sends too much blood to his face, is he never therefore 
 to be forgiven for his adorable absurdities? Perhaps (who 
 knows?) there are sublime secrets hidden away beneath them. 
 And beside, the Chevalier de Valois made amends for his 
 negroes' heads with such a variety of other and different 
 charms that society ought to have felt itself sufficiently com-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 5 
 
 pensated. He really was at great pains to conceal his age and 
 to make himself agreeable. 
 
 First and foremost, witness the extreme care which he gave 
 to his linen, the one distinction in dress which a gentleman 
 may permit himself in modern days. The chevalier's linen 
 was invariably fine and white, as befitted a noble. His coat, 
 though remarkably neat, was always somewhat worn, but 
 spotless and uncreased. The preservation of this garment 
 bordered on the miraculous in the opinion of those who 
 noticed the chevalier's elegant indifference on this head ; not 
 that he went so far as to scrape his clothes with broken glass 
 (a refinement invented by the Prince of Wales), but he set 
 himself to carry out the first principles of dress as laid down 
 by Englishmen of the very highest and finest fashion, and this 
 with a personal element of coxcombry which Alencon was 
 scarcely capable of appreciating. Does the world owe no 
 esteem to those that take such pains for it ? And what was 
 all this labor but the fulfillment of that very hardest of sayings 
 in the Gospel, which bids us return good for evil ? The fresh- 
 ness of the toilet, the care for dress, suited well with the 
 chevalier's blue eyes, ivory teeth, and bland personality; still, 
 the superannuated Adonis had nothing masculine in his appear- 
 ance, and it would seem that he employed the illusion of the 
 toilet to hide the ravages of other than military campaigns. 
 
 To tell the whole truth, the chevalier had a voice singularly 
 at variance with his delicate fairness. So full was it and 
 sonorous, that you would have been startled by the sound of 
 it unless, with certain observers of human nature, you held 
 the theory that the voice was only what might be expected of 
 such a nose. With something less of volume than a giant 
 double-bass, it was a full, pleasant baritone, reminding you of 
 the hautboy among musical instruments, sweet and resonant, 
 deep and rich. 
 
 M. de Valois had discarded the absurd costume still worn 
 by a few antiquated Royalists, and frankly modernized his
 
 6 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 dress. He always appeared in a maroon coat with gilt but- 
 tons, loosely-fitting breeches with gold buckles at the knees, a 
 white sprigged vest, a tight stock, and a collarless shirt ; this 
 being a last vestige of eighteenth-century costume, which its 
 wearer was the less willing to relinquish because it enabled 
 him to display a throat not unworthy of a lay abbe. Square 
 gold buckles of a kind unknown to the present generation 
 shone conspicuous upon his patent-leather shoes. Two watch 
 chains hung in view in parallel lines from a couple of fobs, 
 another survival of an eighteenth-century mode which the old 
 boy did not disdain to copy in the time of the Directory. 
 This costume of a transition period, reuniting two centuries, 
 was worn by the chevalier with the grace of an old-world 
 marquis, a grace lost to the French stage since Mole's last 
 pupil, Fleury, retired from the boards and took his secret with 
 him. 
 
 The old bachelor's private life, seemingly open to all eyes, 
 was in reality inscrutable. He lived in a modest lodging (to 
 say the least of it) up two sets of stairs in a house in the Rue 
 du Cours, his landlady being the laundress most in request in 
 Alencon which fact explains the extreme elegance of the 
 chevalier's linen. Ill luck was so to order it that Alencon 
 one day could actually believe that he had not always con- 
 ducted himself as befitted a man of his quality, and that in his 
 old age he privately married one Cesarine, the mother of an 
 infant which had the impertinence to come without being 
 called. 
 
 " He gave his hand to her who for so long had lent her 
 hand to iron his linen," said a certain M. du Bousquier. 
 
 The sensitive noble's last days were the more vexed by this 
 unpleasant scandal, because, as shall be shown in the course 
 of this present Scene, he had already lost a long-cherished 
 hope for which he had made many a sacrifice. 
 
 Mme. Lardot's two rooms were let to M. le Chevalier de 
 Valois at the moderate rent of a hundred francs per annum.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 7 
 
 The worthy gentleman dined out every night, and only came 
 home to sleep ; he was therefore at charges for nothing but his 
 breakfast, which always consisted of a cup of chocolate with 
 butter and fruit, according to the season. A fire was never 
 lighted in his rooms except in the very coldest winters, and 
 then only while he was dressing. Between the hours of eleven 
 and four M. de Valois took his walks abroad, read the news- 
 papers, and paid calls. 
 
 When the chevalier first settled in Alencon, he magnan- 
 imously owned that he had nothing but an annuity of six hun- 
 dred livres paid in quarterly installments by his old man of 
 business, with whom the certificates were deposited. This 
 was all that remained of his former wealth. And every three 
 months, in fact, a banker in the town paid him a hundred and 
 fifty francs remitted by one M. Bordin of Paris, the last of 
 the procureurs du Ch&telet* These particulars everybody 
 knew, for the chevalier had taken care to ask his confidant to 
 keep the matter a profound secret. He reaped the fruits of 
 his misfortunes. A cover was laid for him in all the best 
 houses in Alengon ; he was asked to every evening party. 
 His talents as a card-player, a teller of anecdotes, a pleasant 
 and well-bred man of the world were so thoroughly appreci- 
 ated that an evening was spoiled if the connoisseur of the town 
 was not present. The host and hostess and all the ladies pres- 
 ent missed his little approving grimace. "You are adorably 
 well dressed," from the old bachelor's lips, was sweeter to a 
 young woman in a ballroom than the sight of her rival's de- 
 spair. 
 
 There were certain old-world expressions which no one 
 could pronounce so well. "My heart," "my jewel," "my 
 little love," " my queen," and all the dear diminutives of the 
 year 1770 took an irresistible charm from M. de Valois' lips; 
 in short, the privilege of superlatives was his. His compli- 
 ments, of which, moreover, he was chary, won him the good- 
 * Fiduciary agent.
 
 8 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 will of the elderly ladies ; he flattered every one down to the 
 officials of whom he had no need. 
 
 He was so fine a gentleman at the card-table that his be- 
 havior would have marked him out anywhere. He never com- 
 plained ; when his opponents lost he praised their play ; he 
 never undertook the education of his partners by showing them 
 what they ought to have done. If a nauseating discussion of 
 this kind began while the cards were making, the chevalier 
 brought out his snuff-box with a gesture worthy of Mole, looked 
 at the Princess Goritza's portrait, took off the lid in a stately 
 manner, heaped up a pinch, rubbed it to a fine powder be- 
 tween finger and thumb, blew off the light particles, shaped a 
 little cone in his hand, and by the time the cards were dealt 
 he had replenished the cavities in his nostrils and replaced 
 the princess in his waistcoat pocket always on the left-hand 
 side. 
 
 None but a noble of the Gracious as distinguished from the 
 Great Century could have invented such a compromise 'be- 
 tween a disdainful silence and an epigram which would have 
 passed over the heads of his company. The chevalier took 
 dull minds as he found them, and knew how to turn them to 
 account. His irresistible evenness of temper caused many a 
 one to say: "I admire the Chevalier de Valois ! " Every- 
 thing about him, his conversation and his manner, seemed in 
 keeping with his mild appearance. He was careful to come 
 into collision with no one, man or woman. Indulgent with 
 deformity as with defects of intellect, he listened patiently 
 (with the help of the Princess Goritza) to tales of the little 
 woes of life in a country town ; to anecdotes of the under- 
 cooked egg at breakfast, or the sour cream in the coffee ; to 
 small grotesque details of physical ailments ; to tales of 
 dreams and visitations and wakings with a start. The 
 chevalier was an exquisite listener. He had a languishing 
 glance, a stock attitude to denote compassion ; he put in his 
 "Ohs" and "Poohs" and " What-did-you-dos?" with
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 9 
 
 charming appropriateness. Till his dying day no one ever 
 suspected that while these avalanches of nonsense lasted, the 
 chevalier in his own mind was rehearsing the warmest passages 
 of an old romance, of which the Princess Goritza was the 
 heroine. Has any one ever given a thought to the social uses 
 of extinct sentiment ? or guessed in how many indirect ways 
 love benefits humanity ? 
 
 Possibly this listener's faculty sufficiently explains the 
 chevalier's popularity ; he was always the spoiled child of the 
 town, although he never quitted a drawing-room without carry- 
 ing off about five livres in his pocket. Sometimes he lost, 
 and he made the most of his losses, but it very seldom 
 happened. All those who knew him say with one accord that 
 never in any place have they met with so agreeable a mummy, 
 not even in the Egyptian museum at Turin. Surely in no 
 known country of the globe did parasite appear in such a 
 benignant shape. Never did selfishness in its most concen- 
 trated form show itself so inoffensive, so full of good offices," 
 as in this gentleman ; the chevalier's egoism was as good as 
 another man's devoted friendship. If any person went to 
 ask M. de Valois to do some trifling service which the worthy 
 chevalier could not perform without inconvenience, that 
 person never went away without conceiving a great liking for 
 him, and departed fully convinced that the chevalier could do 
 nothing in the matter, or might do harm if he meddled with 
 it. 
 
 To explain this problematical existence the chronicler is 
 bound to admit, while Truth that ruthless debauchee has 
 caught him by the throat, that latterly, after the three sad, 
 glorious Days of July, Alencon discovered that M. de Valois' 
 winnings at cards amounted to something like a hundred and 
 fifty crowns every quarter, which amount the ingenious cheva- 
 lier intrepidly remitted to himself as an annuity, so that he 
 might not appear to be without resources in a country with a 
 great turn for practical details. Plenty of his friends he was
 
 10 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 dead by that time, please to remark plenty of his friends de- 
 nied this in tola ; they maintained that the stories were fables 
 and slanders set in circulation by the Liberal party, and that 
 M. de Valois was an honorable and worthy gentleman. Luckily 
 for clever gamblers, there will always be champions of this 
 sort for them among the onlookers. Feeling ashamed to 
 excuse wrongdoing, they stoutly deny that wrong has been 
 done. Do not accuse them of wrong-headedness ; they have 
 their own sense of self-respect, and the Government sets 
 them an example of the virtue which consists in burying its 
 dead by night without chanting a Te Deum over a defeat. 
 And suppose that M. de Valois permitted himself a neat 
 stratagem that would have won Gramont's esteem, a smile from 
 Baron de Foeneste, and a shake of the hand from the Marquis 
 de Moncade, was he any the less the pleasant dinner guest, the 
 wit, the unvarying card-player, the charming retailer of anec- 
 dotes, the delight of Alencon ? In what, moreover, does the 
 action, lying, as it does, outside the laws of right and wrong, 
 offend against the elegant code of a man of birth and breed- 
 ing ? When so many people are obliged to give pensions to 
 others, what more natural than of one's own accord to allow 
 an annuity to one's own best friend ? But Laius is dead. 
 
 After some fifteen years of this kind of life, the chevalier 
 had amassed ten thousand and some odd hundred francs. 
 When the Bourbons returned, he said that an old friend of 
 his, M. le Marquis de Pombreton, late a lieutenant in the 
 Black Musketeers, had returned a loan of twelve hundred 
 pistoles with which he emigrated. The incident made a sen- 
 sation. It was quoted afterward as a set-off against droll 
 stories in the " Constitutionnel " of the ways in which some 
 emigres paid their debts. The poor chevalier used to blush 
 all over the right side of his face whenever this noble trait in 
 the Marquis de Pombreton came up in conversation. At the 
 time every one rejoiced with M. de Valois ; he used to con- 
 sult capitalists, as to the best way of investing this wreck of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. il 
 
 his former fortune ; and, putting faith in the Restoration, in- 
 vested it all in Government stock when the Funds had fallen 
 to fifty-six francs twenty-five centimes. MM. de Lenoncourt, 
 de Navarreins, de Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La Billardiere, 
 to whom he was known, had obtained a pension of a hundred 
 crowns for him from the privy purse, he said, and the cross 
 of St. Louis. By what means the old chevalier obtained the 
 two solemn confirmations of his title and quality, no one ever 
 knew ; but this much is certain, the cross of St. Louis gave 
 him brevet rank as a colonel on a retiring pension, by reason 
 of his services with the Catholic army in the West. 
 
 Beside the fiction of the annuity, to which no one gave a 
 thought, the chevalier was now actually possessed of a genuine 
 income of a thousand francs. But with this improvement in 
 his circumstances he made no change in his life or manners ; 
 only the red ribbon looked wondrous well on his maroon 
 coat ; it was a finishing touch, as it were, to this portrait of a 
 gentleman. Ever since the year 1802 the chevalier had aealed 
 his letters with an ancient gold seal, engraved roughly enough, 
 but not so badly but that the Casterans, d'Esgrignons, and 
 Troisvilles might see that he bore the arms of France impaled 
 with his own, to wit, France per pale, gules two bars gemelles, 
 a cross of five mascles conjoined or, on a chief sable a cross 
 pattee argent over all ; with a knight's casquet for crest and 
 the motto VALEO. With these noble arms the so-called 
 bastard Valois was entitled to ride in all the royal coaches in 
 the world. 
 
 Plenty of people envied the old bachelor his easy life, made 
 up of boston, trictrac, reversis, whist, and piquet ; of good 
 play, dinners well digested, pinches of snuff gracefully taken, 
 and quiet walks abroad. Almost all Alenc.on thought that his 
 existence was empty alike of ambitions and cares ; but where 
 is the man whose life is quite as simple as they suppose who 
 envy him ? 
 
 In the remotest country village you shall find human mol-
 
 12 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 luscs, rotifers inanimate to all appearance, which cherish a 
 passion for lepidoptera or conchology, and are at infinite 
 pains to acquire some new butterfly, or a specimen of Concha 
 Vcncris. And the chevalier had not merely shells and butter- 
 flies of his own, he cherished an ambitious desire with a perti- 
 nacity and profound strategy worthy of a Sixtus V. He meant 
 to marry a rich old maid ; in all probability because a wealthy 
 marriage would be a stepping-stone to the high spheres of the 
 Court. This was the secret of his royal bearing and prolonged 
 abode in Alencon. 
 
 Very early one Tuesday morning in the middle of spring in 
 the year '16 (to use his own expression), the chevalier was 
 just slipping on his dressing-gown, an old-fashioned green 
 silk damask of a flowered pattern, when, in spite of the cotton 
 in his ears, he heard a girl's light footstep on the stairs. In 
 another moment some one tapped discreetly three times on 
 the door, and then, without waiting for an answer, a very 
 handsome damsel slipped like a snake into the old bachelor's 
 apartment. 
 
 "Ah, Suzanne, is that you?" said the Chevalier deValois, 
 continuing to strop his razor. " What are you here for, dear 
 little jewel of mischief?" 
 
 "I have come to tell you something which perhaps will 
 give you as much pleasure as annoyance." 
 
 " Is it something about Cesarine? " 
 
 " Much I trouble myself about your Cesarine," pouted she, 
 half careless, half in earnest. 
 
 The charming Suzanne, whose escapade was to exercise so 
 great an influence on the lives of all the principal characters 
 in this story, was one of Mme. Lardot's laundry girls. And 
 now for a few topographical details: 
 
 The whole first floor of the house was given up to the 
 laundry. The little yard was a drying ground where em- 
 broidered handkerchiefs, collarettes, lawn slips, cuffs, frilled 
 shirts, cravats, laces, embroidered petticoats, all the fine wash-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 13 
 
 ing of the best houses in the town, in short, hung out along 
 the lines of hair rope. The chevalier used to say that he was 
 kept informed of the progress of the receiver-general's wife's 
 flirtations by the number of slips thus brought to light ; and 
 the amount of frilled shirts and cambric cravats varied directly 
 with the petticoats and collarettes. By this system of^double 
 entry, as it were, he detected all the assignations in the town ; 
 but the chevalier was always discreet, he never let fall an 
 epigram that might have closed a house to him. And yet he 
 was a witty talker ! For which reason you may be sure that 
 M. de Valois' manners were of the finest, while his talents, as 
 so often happens, were thrown away upon a narrow circle. 
 Still, for he was only human after all, he sometimes could not 
 resist the pleasure of a searching side-glance which made 
 women tremble, and nevertheless they liked him when they 
 found out how profoundly discreet he was, how full of sym- 
 pathy for their pretty frailties. 
 
 Mme. Lardot's forewoman and factotum, an alarmingly 
 ugly spinster of five-and-forty, occupied the rest of the third 
 floor with the chevalier. Her door on the landing was exactly 
 opposite his; and her apartments, like his own, consisted of 
 two rooms, looking respectively upon the street and the yard. 
 Above, there was nothing but the attics where the linen was 
 dried in winter. Below lodged Mme. Lardot's grandfather. 
 The old man, Grevin by name, had been a privateer in his 
 time, and had served under Admiral Simeuse in the Indies ; 
 now he was paralyzed and stone deaf. Mme. Lardot herself 
 occupied the rooms beneath her forewoman, and so great was 
 her weakness for people of condition that she might be said 
 to be blind where the chevalier was concerned. In her eyes, 
 M. de Valois was an absolute monarch, a king that could do 
 no wrong ; even if one of her own work-girls had been said to 
 be guilty of finding favor in his sight, she would have said, 
 " He is so amiable !" 
 
 And so, if M. de Valois, like most people in the provinces,
 
 14 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 lived in a glass house, it was secret as a robber's cave so far 
 as he at least was concerned. A born confidant of the little 
 intrigues of the laundry, he never passed the door which 
 always stood ajar without bringing something for his pets 
 chocolate, bonbons, ribbons, laces, a gilt cross, and the jokes 
 that grisettes love. Wherefore the little girls adored the 
 chevalier. Women can tell by instinct whether a man is at- 
 tracted to anything that wears a petticoat ; they know at once 
 the kind of man who enjoys the mere sense of their presence, 
 who never thinks of making blundering demands of repayment 
 for his gallantry. In this respect womankind has a canine 
 faculty ; a dog in any company goes straight to the man who 
 respects animals. The Chevalier de Valois in his poverty pre- 
 served something of his former life ; he was as unable to live 
 without some fair one under his protection as any great lord of 
 a bygone age. He clung to the traditions of the petite maison.* 
 He loved to give to women, and women alone can receive 
 gracefully, perhaps because it is always in their power to repay. 
 
 In these days, when every lad on leaving school tries his 
 hand at unearthing symbols or sifting legends, is it not extra- 
 ordinary that no one has explained that portent, the Courtesan 
 of the Eighteenth Century. What was she but the tourna- 
 ment of the Sixteenth in another shape ? In 1550 the knights 
 displayed their prowess for their ladies; in 1750 they dis- 
 played their mistresses at Longchamps ; to-day they run their 
 horses over the course. The noble of every age has done his 
 best to invent a life, which he, and he only, can live. The 
 pointed shoes of the Fourteenth Century are the red heels of 
 the Eighteenth ; the parade of a mistress was one fashion in 
 ostentation ; the sentiment of chivalry and the knight-errant 
 was another. 
 
 The Chevalier de Valois could no longer ruin himself for a 
 mistress, so for bonbons wrapped in bank-bills he politely 
 offered a bag of genuine cracknels ; and to the credit of 
 * Little house : place of a mistress' installment.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 15 
 
 Alencon, be it said, the cracknels caused far more pleasure to 
 the recipients than M. d' Artois' presents of carriages or silver- 
 gilt toilet sets ever gave to the fair Duthe. There was not a 
 girl in the laundry but recognized the chevalier's fallen great- 
 ness, and kept his familiarities in the house a profound secret. 
 
 In answer to questions, they always spoke giravely of the 
 Chevalier de Valois ; they watched over him. For others he 
 became a venerable gentleman, his life was a flower of sanctity. 
 But at home they would have lighted on his shoulders like 
 paroquets. 
 
 The chevalier liked to know the intimate aspects of family 
 life which laundresses learn ; they used to go up to his room 
 of a morning to retail the gossip of the town ; he called them 
 his "gazettes in petticoats," his "living feuilletons." M. 
 Sartine himself had not such intelligent spies at so cheap a 
 rate, nor yet so loyal in their rascality. Remark, moreover, 
 that the chevalier thoroughly enjoyed his breakfasts. 
 
 Suzanne was one of his favorites. A clever and ambitious 
 girl with the stuff of a Sophie Arnould in her, she was beside 
 as beautiful as the loveliest courtesan that Titian ever prayed 
 to pose against a background of dark velvet as a model for his 
 Venus. Her forehead and all the upper part of her face about 
 the eyes were delicately moulded ; but the contours of the 
 lower half were cast in a commoner mould. Hers was the 
 beauty of a Norman, fresh, plump, and brilliant-complexioned, 
 with that Rubens fleshiness which should be combined with 
 the muscular development of the Farnese Hercules. This was 
 no Venus dei Me ici, the graceful feminine counterpart of 
 Apollo. 
 
 "Well, child," said the chevalier, " tell me your adventures 
 little or big." 
 
 The chevalier's fatherly benignity with these grisettes would 
 have marked him out anywhere between Paris and Pekin. 
 The girls put him in mind of the courtesans of another age, of 
 the illustrious queens of opera of European fame during a good
 
 16 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 third of the eighteenth century. Certain it is that he who 
 had lived for so long in a world of women now as dead and 
 forgotten as the Jesuits, the buccaneers, the abbes, and the 
 farmers-general, and all great things generally certain it is 
 that the chevalier had acquired an irresistible good-humor, a 
 gracious ease, an unconcern, with no trace of egoism discern- 
 ible in it. So might Jupiter have appeared to Alcmena a 
 king that chooses to be a woman's dupe, and flings majesty 
 and its thunderbolts to the winds, that he may squander 
 Olympus in follies, and "little suppers," and feminine ex- 
 travagance ; wishful, of all things, to be far enough away 
 from Juno. 
 
 The room in which the chevalier received company was 
 bare enough, with its shabby bit of tapestry to do duty as a 
 carpet, and very dirty, old-fashioned easy-chairs; the walls 
 were covered with a cheap paper, on which the countenances 
 of Louis XVI. and his family, framed in weeping willow, 
 appeared at intervals among funeral urns, bearing the sublime 
 testament by way of inscription, amid a whole host of senti- 
 mental emblems invented by royalism under the Terror; 
 but in spite of all this, in spite of the old, flowered green silk 
 dressing-gown, in spite of its owner's air of dilapidation, a 
 certain fragrance of the eighteenth century clung about the 
 Chevalier de Valois as he shaved himself before the old- 
 fashioned toilet glass, covered with cheap lace. All the 
 graceless graces of his youth seemed to reappear; he might 
 have had three hundred thousand francs' worth of debts to 
 his name and a chariot at his door. He looked a great man, 
 great as Berthier in the Retreat from Moscow issuing the 
 order of the day to battalions which were no more. 
 
 " Monsieur le Chevalier," Suzanne replied archly, "it seems 
 to me that I have nothing to tell you you have only to 
 look!" 
 
 So saying, she turned and stood sideways to prove her 
 words by ocular demonstration ; and the chevalier, deep old
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 17 
 
 gentleman, still holding his razor across his chin, cast his 
 right eye downward upon the damsel, and pretended to 
 understand. 
 
 "Very good, my little pet, we will have a little talk 
 together presently. But you come first, it seems to me." 
 
 "But, Monsieur le Chevalier, am I to wait till my mother 
 beats me and Madame Lardot turns me away ? If I do not 
 go to Paris at once, I shall never get married here, where the 
 men are so ridiculous." 
 
 " These things cannot be helped, child ! Society changes, 
 and women suffer just as much as the nobles from the shock- 
 ing confusion which ensues. Topsy-turvydom in politics ends 
 in topsy-turvy manners. Alas ! woman soon will cease to be 
 woman " (here he took the cotton-wool out of his ears to 
 continue his toilet). "Women will lose a great deal by 
 plunging into sentiment ; they will torture their nerves, and 
 there will be an end of the good old ways of our time, when 
 a little pleasure was desired without blushes, and accepted 
 without more ado, and the vapors " (he polished the earrings 
 with the negroes' heads) " the vapors were only known as a 
 means of getting one's way; before long they will take the 
 proportions of a complaint only to be cured by an infusion 
 of orange-blossoms." (The chevalier burst out laughing.) 
 "Marriage, in short," he resumed, taking a pair of tweezers 
 to pluck out a gray hair, " marriage will come to be a very 
 dull institution indeed, and it was so joyous in my time. The 
 reign of Louis Quatorze and Louis Quinze (bear this in 
 mind, my child) saw the last of the finest manners in the 
 world." 
 
 "But, Monsieur le Chevalier," urged the girl, "it is your 
 little Suzanne's character and reputation that is at stake, and 
 you are not going to forsake her, I hope ! " 
 
 "What is all this?" cried the chevalier, with a finishing 
 touch to his hair ; " I would sooner lose my name ! " 
 
 "Ah!" said Suzanne. 
 2
 
 18 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "Listen to me, little masquerader. " He sat down in a 
 large, low chair, a duchcssc, as it used to be called, which 
 Mme. Lardot had picked up somewhere for her lodger. Then 
 he drew the magnificent Suzanne to him till she stood between 
 his knees; and Suzanne submitted Suzanne who held her 
 head so high in the streets, and had refused a score of over- 
 tures from admirers in Alenson, not so much from self-respect 
 as in disdain of their pettiness. Suzanne so brazenly made 
 the most of the supposed consequences of her errors that the 
 old sinner, who had fathomed so many mysteries in persons 
 far more astute than Suzanne, saw the real state of affairs 
 at once. He knew well enough that a grisette does not 
 laugh when disgrace is really in question, but he scorned 
 to throw down the scaffolding of an engaging fib with a 
 touch. 
 
 " We are slandering ourselves," said he, and there was an 
 inimitable subtlety in his smile. " We are as well conducted 
 as the fair one whose name we bear ; we can marry without 
 fear. But we do not want to vegetate here ; we long for 
 Paris, where charming creatures can be rich if they are clever, 
 and we are not a fool. So we should like to find out whether 
 the City of Pleasure has young Chevaliers de Valois in store 
 for us, and a carriage and diamonds and an opera box. 
 There are Russians and English and Austrians that are bring- 
 ing millions to spend in Paris, and some of that money mamma 
 settled on us as a marriage-portion when she gave us our good 
 looks. And beside, we are patriotic ; we should like to help 
 France to find her own money in these gentlemen's pockets. 
 Eh ! eh ! my dear little devil's lamb, all this is not bad. The 
 neighbors will cry out upon you a little at first, perhaps, but 
 success will make everything right. The real crime, my child, 
 is poverty ; and you and I both suffer for it. As we are not 
 lacking in intelligence, we thought we might turn our dear 
 little reputation to account to take in an old bachelor, but 
 the old bachelor, sweetheart, knows the alpha and omega of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 19 
 
 woman's wiles; which is to say, that you would find it easier 
 to put a grain of salt upon a sparrow's tail than to persuade 
 me, the Chevalier de Valois, to believe that I have had any 
 share in your affair. 
 
 " Go to Paris, my child, go at the expense of a bachelor's 
 vanity ; I am not going to hinder you, I will help you, for the 
 old bachelor, Suzanne, is the cash-box provided by nature for 
 a young girl. But do not thrust me into the affair. Now, 
 listen, my queen, understanding life so well a,s you do you 
 see, you might do me a good deal of harm and give me 
 trouble ; harm, because you might spoil my marriage in a 
 place where people are so particular ; trouble on your account, 
 because you will get yourself in a scrape for nothing, a scrape 
 entirely of your own invention, sly girl ; and you know, my 
 pet, that I have no money left, I am as poor as a church 
 mouse. Ah ! if I were to marry Mademoiselle Cormon, if I 
 were rich again, I would certainly rather have you than 
 Cesarine. You were always fine gold enough to gild lead, it 
 seemed to me ; you were made to be a great lord's love ; and 
 as I knew you were a clever girl, I am not at all surprised by 
 this trick of yours, I expected as much. For a girl, this 
 means that you burn your boats. It is no common mind, 
 my angel, that can do it ; and for that reason you have my 
 esteem," and he bestowed confirmation upon her cheek after 
 the manner of a bishop, with two fingers. 
 
 " But, Monsieur le Chevalier, I do assure you that you are 
 
 mistaken, and " she blushed, and dared not finish her 
 
 sentence, at a glance he had seen through her, and read her 
 plans from beginning to end. 
 
 "Yes, I understand, you wish me to believe you. Very 
 well, I believe. But take my advice and go to Monsieur du 
 Bousquier. You have taken Monsieur du Bousquier's linen 
 home from the wash for five or six months, have you not ? 
 Very good. I do not ask to know what has happened between 
 you; but I know him, he is vain, he is an old bachelor, he is
 
 20 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 very -rich, he has an income of two thousand five hundred 
 livres, and spends less than eight hundred. If you are the 
 clever girl that I take you for, you will find your way to Paris 
 at his expense. Go to him, my pet, twist him round your 
 fingers, and of all things be supple as silk, and make a double 
 twist and a knot at every word ; he is just the man to be afraid 
 of a scandal ; and if he knows that you can make him sit 
 
 on the stool of repentance In short, you understand, 
 
 threaten to apply to the ladies of the charitable fund. He is 
 ambitious beside. Well and good, with a wife to help him 
 there should be nothing beyond a man's reach ; and are you 
 not handsome enough and clever enough to make your hus- 
 band's fortune? Why, plague take it, you might hold your 
 own with a court lady." 
 
 The chevalier's last words let the light into Suzanne's brain; 
 she was burning with impatience to rush off to du Bousquier; 
 but as she could not hurry away too abruptly, she helped the 
 chevalier to dress, asking questions about Paris as she did so. 
 As for the chevalier, he saw that his remarks had taken effect, 
 and gave Suzanne an excuse to go, asking her to tell Cesarine 
 to bring up the chocolate that Mme. Lardot made for him 
 every morning, and Suzanne forthwith slipped off in search of 
 her prey. 
 
 And here follows du Bousquier's biography. He came of 
 an old Alengon family in a middle rank between the burghers 
 and the country squires. On the death of his father, a magis- 
 trate in the criminal court, he was left without resource, and, 
 like most ruined provincials, betook himself to Paris to seek 
 his fortune. When the Revolution broke out, du Bousquier 
 was a man of affairs ; and in those days (in spite of the Re- 
 publicans, who are all up in arms for the honesty of their 
 government) the word "affairs" was used very loosely. Po- 
 litical spies, jobbers, and contractors, the men who arranged 
 with the syndics of communes for the sale of the property of 
 emigres, and then brought up land at low prices to sell again
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 21 
 
 all these people, like ministers and generals, were men of 
 affairs. 
 
 From 1793 to 1799 du Bousquier held contracts to supply 
 the army with forage and provisions. During those years he 
 lived in a splendid mansion ; he was one of the great capital- 
 ists of the time ; he went shares with Ouvrard ; k pt open 
 house and led the scandalous life of the times. A Cincinna- 
 tus, reaping where he had not sowed, and rich with stolen 
 rations and sacks of corn, he kept petites maisons and a bevy 
 of mistresses, and gave fine entertainments to the directors of 
 the Republic. Citizen du Bousquier was one of Barras' in- 
 timates ; he was on the best of terms with Fouche, and hand 
 and glove with Bernadotte. He thought to be a minister of 
 State one day, and threw himself heart and soul into the party 
 that secretly plotted against Bonaparte before the battle of 
 Marengo. And but for Kellermann's charge and the death of 
 Desaix, du Bousquier would have played a great part in the 
 State. He was one of the upper members of the permanent 
 staff of the promiscuous government which was driven by 
 Napoleon's luck to vanish into the side-scenes of 1793.* 
 
 The victory unexpectedly won by stubborn fighting ended 
 in the downfall of this party ; they had placards ready printed, 
 and were only waiting for the First Consul's defeat to proclaim 
 a return to the principles of the Mountain. 
 
 Du Bousquier, feeling convinced that a victory was impos- 
 sible, had two special messengers on the battlefield, and spec- 
 ulated with the larger part of his fortune for a fall in the Funds. 
 The first courier came with the news that Melas was victorious ; 
 but the second arriving four hours afterward, at night, brought 
 the tidings of the Austrian defeat. Du Bousquier cursed Kel- 
 lermann and Desaix ; the First Consul owed him millions, he 
 dared not curse him. But between the chance of making mil- 
 lions on the one hand, and stark ruin on the other, he lost his 
 head. For several days he was half idiotic ; he had under- 
 * See " A Historical Mystery."
 
 22 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 mined his constitution with excesses to such an extent that the 
 thunderbolt left him helpless. He had something to hope 
 from the settlement of his claims upon the Government ; but 
 in spite of bribes, he was made to feel the weight of Napoleon's 
 displeasure against army contractors who speculated on his 
 defeat. M. de Fermon, so pleasantly nicknamed "Fermons 
 la caisse," left du Bousquier without a penny. The First 
 Consul was even more incensed by the immorality of his pri- 
 vate life and his connection with Barras and Bernadotte than 
 by his speculations on the Bourse ; he erased M. du Bousquier's 
 name from the list of receivers-general, on which a last remnant 
 of credit had placed him for Alencon. 
 
 Of all his former wealth, nothing now remained to du 
 Bousquier save an income of twelve hundred francs from the 
 Funds, an investment entirely due to chance, which saved 
 him from actual want. His creditors, knowing nothing of 
 the results of his liquidation, only left him enough in consols 
 to bring in a thousand francs per annum ; but their claims 
 were paid: in full after all, when the outstanding debts had 
 been collected, and the Hotel de Beauseant, du Bousquier's 
 town house, sold beside. So, after a close shave of bank- 
 ruptcy, the sometime speculator emerged with his name intact. 
 Preceded by a tremendous reputation due to his relations with 
 former heads of government departments, his manner of life, 
 his brief day of authority, and final ruin through the First 
 Consul, the man interested the city Alencon, where Royalism 
 was secretly predominant. Du Bousquier, exasperated against 
 Bonaparte, with his tales of the First Consul's pettiness, of 
 Josephine's lax morals, and a whole store of anecdotes of ten 
 years of revolution, seen from within, met with a good recep- 
 tion. 
 
 It was about this period of his life that du Bousquier, now 
 well over his fortieth year, came out as a bachelor of thirty- 
 six. He was of medium height, fat as became a contractor, 
 and willing to display a 'pair of calves that would have done
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 23 
 
 credit to a gay and gallant attorney. He had strongly marked 
 features; a flattened nose with tufts of hair in the equine 
 nostrils ; bushy black brows, and eyes beneath them that 
 looked out shrewd as M. de Talleyrand's own, though they 
 had lost something of their brightness. He wore his brown 
 hair very long, and retained the side-whiskers (nageoires, as 
 they were called) of the time of the Republic. You had 
 only to look at his fingers, tufted at every joint, or at the blue 
 knotted veins that stood out upon his hands, to see the unmis- 
 takable signs of a very remarkable muscular development; 
 and, in truth, he had the chest of the Farnese Hercules, and 
 shoulders fit to bear the burden of the national debt ; you 
 never see such shoulders nowadays. His was a luxuriant 
 virility admirably described by an eighteenth-century phrase 
 which is scarcely intelligible to-day; the gallantry of a by- 
 gone age would have summed up du Bousquier as a "payer 
 of arrears " un vrai pay cur d* arrZrages. 
 
 Yet, as in the case of the Chevalier de Valois, there were 
 sundry indications at variance with the ex-contractor's general 
 appearance. His vocal powers, for instance, were not in 
 keeping with his muscles ; not that it was the mere thread of 
 a voice which sometimes issues from the throats of such two- 
 footed seals ; on the contrary, it was loud but husky, some- 
 thing like the sound of a saw cutting through damp, soft 
 wood ; it was, in fact, the voice of a speculator brought to 
 grief. For a long while du Bousquier wore the costume in 
 vogue in the days of his glory : the boots with turned-down 
 tops, the white silk stockings, the short cloth breeches, 
 ribbed with cinnamon color, the blue coat, the Robespierre 
 vest. 
 
 His hatred of the First Consul should have been a sort of 
 passport into the best Royalist houses of Alencon ; but the 
 seven or eight families that made up the local Faubourg 
 Saint-Germain, into which the Chevalier de Valois had the 
 entrance, held aloof. Almost from the first, du Bousquier had
 
 24 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 aspired to marry one Mile. Armande, whose brother was one 
 of the most esteemed nobles of the town ; he thought to make 
 this brother play a great part in his own schemes, for he was 
 dreaming of a brilliant return match in politics. He met with 
 a refusal, for which he consoled himself with such compensation 
 as he might find among some half-score of retired manufac- 
 turers of Point d' Alencon lace, owners of grass lands or cattle, 
 or wholesale linen merchants, thinking that among these 
 chance might put a good match in his way. Indeed, the old 
 bachelor had centred all his hopes on a prospective fortunate 
 marriage, which a man, eligible in so many ways, might fairly 
 expect to make. For he was not without a certain financial 
 acumen, of which not a few availed themselves. He pointed 
 out business speculations as a ruined gambler gives hints to 
 new hands ; and he was expert at discovering the resources, 
 chances, and management of a concern. People looked upon 
 him as a good administrator. It was an often-discussed ques- 
 tion whether he should not be mayor of Alencon, but the 
 recollection of his Republican jobberies spoiled his chances, 
 and he was never received at the prefecture. 
 
 Every successive government, even the government of the 
 Hundred Days, declined to give him the coveted appointment, 
 which would have assured his marriage with an elderly spinster 
 whom he now had in his mind. It was his detestation of the 
 Imperial Government that drove him into the Royalist camp, 
 where he stayed in spite of insults there received ; but when 
 the Bourbons returned, and still he was excluded from the 
 prefecture, that final rebuff filled him with a hatred deep as 
 the profound secrecy in which he wrapped it. Outwardly, he 
 remained patiently faithful to his opinions ; secretly, he be- 
 came the leader of the Liberal party in Alencon, the invisible 
 controller of elections ; and, by his cunningly devised manoeu- 
 vres and underhand methods, he worked no little harm to the 
 restored Monarchy. 
 
 When a man is reduced to live through his intellect alone,
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 25 
 
 his hatred is something as quiet as a little stream ; insignifi- 
 cant to all appearance, but unfailing. This was the case with 
 du Bousquier. His hatred was like a negro's, so placid, so 
 patient, that it deceives the enemy. For fifteen years he 
 brooded over a revenge which no victory, not even the Three 
 Days of July, 1830, could sate. 
 
 When the chevalier sent Suzanne to du Bousquier, he had 
 his own reasons for so doing. The Liberal and the Royalist 
 divined each other, in spite of the skillful dissimulation which 
 hid their common aim from the rest of the town. 
 
 The two old bachelors were rivals. Both of them had 
 planned to marry the Demoiselle Cormon, whose name came 
 up in the course of the chevalier's conversation with Suzanne. 
 Both of them, engrossed by their idea and masquerading in 
 indifference, were waiting for the moment when some chance 
 should deliver the old maid to one or other of them. And 
 the fact that they were rivals in this way would have been 
 enough to make enemies of the pair even if each had not been 
 the living embodiment of a political system. 
 
 Men take their color from their time. This pair of rivals 
 is a case in point ; the historic tinge of their characters stood 
 out in strong contrast in their talk, their ideas, their costume. 
 The one, blunt and energetic, with his burly abrupt ways, 
 curt speech, dark looks, dark hair, and dark complexion, 
 alarming in appearance, but impotent in reality as insurrec- 
 tion, was the Republic personified ; the other, bland and 
 polished, elegant and fastidious, gaining his ends slowly but 
 surely by diplomacy, and never unmindful of good taste, was 
 the typical old-world courtier. They met on the same ground 
 almost every evening. It was a rivalry always courteous and 
 urbane on the part of the chevalier, less ceremonious on du 
 Bousquier's, though he kept within the limits prescribed by 
 Alencon, for he had no wish to be driven ignominiously from 
 the field. The two men understood each other well ; but no 
 one else saw what was going on. In spite of the minute and
 
 26 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 curious interest which provincials take in the small details of 
 which their lives are made up, no one so much as suspected 
 that the two men were rivals. 
 
 M. le Chevalier's position was somewhat the stronger; he 
 had never proposed for Mile. Cormon, whereas du Bousquier 
 had declared himself after a rebuff from one of the noblest fami- 
 lies, and had met with a second refusal. Still, the chevalier 
 thought so well of his rival's chances that he considered it 
 worth while to deal him a coup de Jarnac, a treacherous thrust 
 from a weapon as finely tempered as Suzanne. He had fath- 
 omed du Bousquier ; and, as will shortly be seen, he was not 
 mistaken in any of his conjectures. 
 
 Suzanne tripped away down the Rue du Cours, along the 
 Rue de la Porte de Seez and the Rue du Bercail to the Rue 
 du Cygne, where du Bousquier, five years ago, had bought a 
 small countrified house built of the gray stone of the district, 
 which is used like granite in Normandy, or Breton schist in 
 the West. The sometime forage-contractor had established 
 himself there in more comfort than any other house in the 
 town could boast, for he had brought with him some relics of 
 past days : of splendor; but provincial manners and customs 
 were slowly darkening the glory of the fallen Sardanapalus. 
 The vestiges of past luxury looked about as much out of place 
 in the house as a chandelier in a barn. Harmony, which links 
 the works of man or of God together, was lacking in all 
 things large or small. A ewer with a metal lid, such as you 
 only see on the outskirts of Brittany, stood on a handsome 
 nest of drawers ; and while the bedroom floor was covered 
 with a fine carpet, the window-curtains displayed a flower pat- 
 tern only known to cheap, printed cottons. The stone mantel- 
 piece, daubed over with paint, was out of all keeping with a 
 handsome clock disgraced by a shabby pair of candlesticks. 
 Local talent had made an unsuccessful attempt to paint the 
 doors in vivid contrasts of startling colors ; while the stair-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 27 
 
 case, ascended by all and sundry in muddy boots, had not 
 been painted at all. In short, du Bousquier's house, like the 
 time which he represented, was a confused mixture of grandeur 
 and squalor. * 
 
 Du Bousquier was regarded as well-to-do, but he led the 
 parasitical life of the Chevalier de Valois, and he is always 
 rich enough that spends less than his income. His one ser- 
 vant was a country bumpkin, a dull-witted youth enough ; but 
 he had been trained, by slow degrees, to suit du Bousquier's 
 requirements, until he had learned, much as an ourang-outang 
 might learn, to scour floors, black boots, brush clothes, and to 
 come for his master of an evening with a lantern if it was dark, 
 and a pair of sabots if it rained. On great occasions, du 
 Bousquier made him discard the blue-checked cotton blouse 
 with loose sagging pockets behind, which always bulged with 
 a handkerchief, a clasp knife, apples, or "stickjaw taffy." 
 Arrayed in a regulation suit of clothes, he accompanied his 
 master to wait at table, and overate himself afterward with 
 the other servants. Like many other mortals, Rene had only 
 stuff enough in him for one vice, and his was gluttony. Du 
 Bousquier made a reward of this service, and in return his 
 Breton factotum was absolutely discreet. 
 
 "What, have you come our way, miss? " Rene asked when 
 he saw Suzanne in the doorway. "It is not your day; we 
 have not got any linen for Madame Lardot." 
 
 "Big stupid ! " laughed the fair Suzanne, as she went up 
 the stairs, leaving Rene to finish a porringer full of buckwheat 
 bannocks boiled in milk. 
 
 Du Bousquier was still in bed, ruminating his plans for 
 fortune. To him, as to all who have squeezed the orange of 
 pleasure, there was nothing left but ambition. Ambition, 
 like gambling, is inexhaustible. And, moreover, given a 
 good constitution, the passions of the brain will always out- 
 live the heart's passions. 
 
 " Here I am ! " said Suzanne, sitting down on the bed; the
 
 28 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 curtain-rings grated along the rods as she swept them sharply 
 back with an imperious gesture. 
 
 "Quesaco, my charmer?" asked du Bousquier, sitting 
 upright. 
 
 "Monsieur," Suzanne began, with much gravity, "you 
 must be surprised to see me come in this way ; but, under 
 the circumstances, it is no use my minding what people will 
 say." 
 
 "What is all this about?" asked du Bousquier, folding his 
 arms. 
 
 "Why, do you not understand?/' returned Suzanne. "I 
 know" (with an engaging little pout), "I know how ridicu- 
 lous it is when a poor girl comes to bother a man about things 
 that you think mere trifles. But if you really knew me, mon- 
 sieur, if you only knew all that I would do for a man, if he 
 cared about me as I could care about you, you would never 
 repent of marrying me. It is not that I could be of so much' 
 use to you here, by the way; but if we went to Paris, you should 
 see how far I could bring a man of spirit with such brains as 
 yours, and especially just now, when they are re-making the 
 Government from top to bottom, and the foreigners are the 
 masters. Between ourselves, does this thing in question really 
 matter after all ? Is it not a piece of good fortune for which 
 you would be glad to pay a good deal one of these days? 
 For whom are you going to think and work?" 
 
 "For myself, to be sure!" du Bousquier answered most 
 brutally. 
 
 " Old monster ! you shall never be a father ! " said Suzanne, 
 with a ring in her voice which turned the words to a prophecy 
 and a curse. 
 
 "Come, Suzanne, no nonsense; I am dreaming still, I 
 think." 
 
 " What more do you want in the way of reality?" cried 
 Suzanne, rising to her feet. Du Bousquier scrubbed his head 
 with his cotton nightcap, which he twisted round and round
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 29 
 
 with a fidgety energy that told plainly of prodigious mental 
 ferment. 
 
 "He actually believes it!" Suzanne said within herself. 
 "And his vanity is tickled. Good Lord, how easy it is to 
 take them in ! " 
 
 "Suzanne ! What the deuce do you want me to do? It 
 
 is so extraordinary I that thought The fact is 
 
 But no, no, it can't be " 
 
 " Do you mean that you cannot marry me?" 
 
 "Oh, as to that, no. I am not free." 
 
 "Is it Mademoiselle Armande or Mademoiselle Cormon, 
 who have both refused you already? Look here, Monsieur 
 du Bousquier, it is not as if I was obliged to get gendarmes to 
 drag you to the registrar's office to save my character. There 
 are plenty that would marry me, but I have no intention 
 whatever of taking a man that does not know my value. You 
 may be sorry some of these days that you behaved like this ; 
 for if you will not take your chance to-day, not for gold, nor 
 silver, nor anything in this world will I give it you again." 
 
 " But, Suzanne are you sure ? " 
 
 "Sir, for what do you take me?" asked the girl, draping 
 herself in her virtue. " I am not going to put you in mind 
 of the promises you made, promises that have been the ruin 
 of a poor girl, when all her fault was that she looked too high 
 and loved too much." 
 
 But joy, suspicion, self-interest, and a host of contending 
 emotions had taken possession of du Bousquier. For a long 
 time past he had made up his mind that he would marry Mile. 
 Cormon ; for, after long ruminations over the Charter, he 
 saw that it opened up magnificent prospects to his ambition 
 through the channels of a representative government. His 
 marriage with that mature spinster would raise his social posi- 
 tion very much ; he would acquire a great influence in Alen^on. 
 And here this wily Suzanne had conjured up a storm, which 
 put him in a most awkward dilemma But for that private
 
 30 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 hope of his, he would have married Suzanne out of hand, and 
 put himself openly at the head of the Liberal party in the 
 town. Such a marriage meant the final renunciation of the 
 best society, and a drop into the ranks of the wealthy trades- 
 men, storekeepers, rich manufacturers, and graziers, who, 
 beyond a doubt, would carry him as their candidate in 
 triumph. Already du Bousquier caught a glimpse of the 
 Opposition benches. He did not attempt to hide his solemn 
 deliberations; he rubbed his hand over his head, made a wisp 
 of the cotton nightcap, and a damaging confession of the 
 nudity beneath it. As for Suzanne, after the wont of those 
 who succeed beyond their utmost hopes, she sat dumfounded. 
 To hide her amazement at his behavior, she drooped like a 
 hapless victim before her seducer, while within herself she 
 laughed like a grisette on a frolic. 
 
 "My dear child, I. will have nothing to do with hanky- 
 panky of this sort." 
 
 This brief formula was the result of his cogitations. The 
 ex-contractor to the Government prided himself upon belong- 
 ing to that particular school of cynic philosophers which 
 declines to be "taken in" by women, and includes the 
 whole sex in one category as suspicious characters. Strong- 
 minded men of this stamp, weaklings are they for the most 
 part, have a catechism of their own in the matter of woman- 
 kind. Every woman, according to them, from the Queen of 
 France to the milliner, is at heart a rake, a hussy, a dangerous 
 creature, not to say a bit of a rascal, a liar in grain, a being 
 incapable of a serious thought. For du Bousquier and his 
 like, woman is a maleficent bayadere* that must be left to 
 dance, and sing, and laugh. They see nothing holy, nothing 
 great in woman ; for them she represents, not the poetry of 
 the senses, but gross sensuality. They are like gluttons who 
 mistake the kitchen for the dining-room. On this showing, a 
 man must be a consistent tyrant, unless he means to be en- 
 * Indian dancing-girl.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 31 
 
 slaved. And in this respect, again, du Bousquier and the 
 Chevalier de Valois stood at opposite poles. 
 
 As he delivered himself of the above remark, he flung his 
 nightcap to the foot of the bed, much as Gregory the Great 
 might have flung down the candle while he launched the 
 thunders of an excommunication ; and Suzanne learned that 
 the old bachelor wore a false front. 
 
 " Bear in mind, Monsieur du Bousquier, that by coming 
 here I have done my duty," she remarked majestically. 
 " Remember that I was bound to offer you my hand and to 
 ask for yours ; but, at the same time, remember that I have 
 behaved with the dignity of a self-respecting woman ; I did 
 not lower myself so far as to cry like a fool ; I did not insist ; 
 I have not worried you at all. Now you know my position. 
 You know that I cannot stay in Alencon. If I do, my mother 
 will beat me ; and Madame Lardot is as high and mighty over 
 principles as if she washed and ironed with them. She will 
 turn me away. And where am I to go, poor workgirl that I 
 am ? To the hospital ? Am I to beg for bread ? Not I. I 
 would sooner fling myself into the Brillante or the Sarthe. 
 Now, would it not be simpler for me to go to Paris ? Mother 
 might find some excuse for sending me, an uncle wants me 
 to come, or an aunt is going to die, or some lady takes an 
 interest in me. It is just a question of money for the travel- 
 ing expenses and you know what " 
 
 This news was immeasurably more important to du 
 Bousquier than to the Chevalier de Valois, for reasons which 
 no one knew as yet but the two rivals, though they will appear 
 in the course of the story. At this point, suffice it to say that 
 Suzanne's fib had thrown the sometime forage-contractor's 
 ideas into such confusion that he was incapable of thinking 
 seriously. But for that bewilderment, but for the secret joy 
 in his heart (for a man's own vanity is a swindler that never 
 lacks a dupe), it must have struck him that any honest girl, 
 with a heart still unspoiled, would have died a hundred deaths
 
 32 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 rather than enter upon such a discussion, or make a demand 
 for money. He must have seen the look in the girl's eyes, 
 seen the gambler's ruthless meanness that would take a life to 
 gain money for a stake. 
 
 " Would you really go to Paris ? " he asked. 
 
 The words brought a twinkle to Suzanne's gray eyes, but it 
 was lost upon du Bousquier's self-satisfaction. 
 
 "I would indeed, sir." 
 
 But at this du Bousquier broke out into a singular lament. 
 He had just paid the balance of the purchase-money for his 
 house ; and there was the painter, and the glazier, and the 
 bricklayer, and the carpenter. Suzanne let him talk ; she was 
 waiting for the figures. Du Bousquier at last proposed three 
 hundred francs, and at this Suzanne, with an assumption of 
 dignity, got up as if to go. 
 
 " Eh, what ! Where are you going?" du Bousquier cried 
 uneasily. "A fine thing to be a bachelor," he said to him- 
 self. " I'll be hanged if I remember doing more than rumple 
 the girl's collar ; and hey presto ! on the strength of a joke 
 she takes upon herself to draw a bill upon you, point-blank ! " 
 
 Suzanne meanwhile began to cry. " Monsieur," she said, 
 " I am going to Madame Granson, the treasurer of the Ma- 
 ternity Fund ; she pulled one poor girl in the same strait out 
 of the water (as you may say) to my knowledge." 
 
 " Madame Granson ? " 
 
 "Yes. She is related to Mademoiselle Cormon, the lady 
 patroness of the society. Asking your pardon, some ladies in 
 the town have started a society that will keep many a poor 
 creature from making away with her child, like that pretty 
 Faustine of Argentan did ; and paid for it with her life at 
 Mortagne just three years ago." 
 
 " Here, Suzanne," returned du Bousquier, holding out a 
 key, " open the desk yourself. There is a bag that has been 
 opened, with six hundred francs still left in it. It is all I 
 have."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 33 
 
 Du Bousquier's chopfallen expression plainly showed how 
 little good-will went with his compliance. 
 
 "An old thief!" said Suzanne to herself. "I will tell 
 tales about his false hair ! " Mentally she compared him with 
 that delightful old Chevalier de Valois ; he had given her 
 nothing, but he understood her, he had advised her, he had 
 the welfare of his grisettes at heart. 
 
 " If you are deceiving me, Suzanne," exclaimed the object 
 of this unflattering comparison, as he watched her hand in the 
 drawer, " you shall " 
 
 " So, monsieur, you would not give me the money if I 
 asked you for it ? " interrupted she with queenly insolence. 
 
 Once recalled to the ground of gallantry, recollections of 
 his prime came back to the ex-contractor. He grunted assent. 
 Suzanne took the bag and departed, first submitting her fore- 
 head to a kiss which he gave, but in a manner which seemed 
 to say, " This is an expensive privilege ; but it is better than 
 being brow-beaten by counsel in a court of law as the seducer 
 of a young woman accused of child-murder." 
 
 Suzanne slipped the bag into a pouch-shaped basket on her 
 arm, execrating du Bousquier's stinginess as she did so, for 
 she wanted a thousand francs. If a girl is once possessed by a 
 desire, and has taken the first step in trickery and-deceit, she 
 will go to great lengths. As the fair laundress took her way 
 along the Rue de Bercail, it suddenly occurred to her that 
 the Maternity Fund under Mile. Cormon's presidency would 
 probably make up the sum which she regarded as sufficient for 
 a start, a very large amount in the eyes of an Alencon grisette. 
 And beside, she hated du Bousquier, and du Bousquier seemed 
 frightened when she talked of confessing her so-called strait to 
 Mme. Granson. Wherefore Suzanne determined that whether 
 or not she made a centime out of the Maternity Fund, she 
 would entangle du Bousquier in the inextricable undergrowth 
 of the gossip of a country town. There is something of a 
 monkey's love of mischief in every grisette. Suzanne com- 
 3
 
 34 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 posed her countenance dolorously and betook herself accord- 
 ingly to Madame Granson. 
 
 Mme. Granson was the widow of a lieutenant-colonel of 
 artillery who fell at Jena. Her whole yearly income consisted 
 of a pension of nine hundred francs for her lifetime, and her 
 one possession beside was a son whose education and main- 
 tenance had absorbed every penny of her savings. She lived 
 in the Rue du Bercail, in one of the cheerless first-floor apart- 
 ments through which you can see from back to front at a 
 glance as you walk down the main street of any little town. 
 Three steps, rising pyramid fashion, brought you to the level 
 of the house-door, which opened upon a passageway and a 
 little yard beyond, with a wooden-roofed staircase at the 
 farther end. Mme. Granson's kitchen and dining-room oc- 
 cupied the space on one side of the passage, on the other side 
 a single room did duty for a variety of purposes, for the 
 widow's bedroom among others. Her son, a young man of 
 three-and-twenty, slept upstairs in an attic above the second 
 floor. Athanase Granson contributed six hundred francs to 
 the poor mother's housekeeping. He was distantly related to 
 Mile. Cormon, whose influence had obtained him a little post 
 in the registrar's office, where he was employed in making out 
 certificates of births, marriages, and deaths. 
 
 After this, any one can see the little chilly, yellow-curtained 
 parlor, the furniture covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, and 
 Mme. Granson going round the room, after her visitors had 
 left, to straighten the little straw mats put down in front of 
 each chair, so as to save the waxed and polished red brick 
 floor from contact with dirty boots ; and, this being accom- 
 plished, returning to her place beside her work-table under 
 the portrait of her lieutenant-colonel. The becushioned arm- 
 chair, in which she sat at her sewing, was always drawn up 
 between the two windows, so that she could look up and down 
 the Rue du Bercail and see every one that passed. She was a 
 good sort of woman, dressed with a homely simplicity in keep-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 35 
 
 ing with a pale face, beaten thin, as it were, by many cares. 
 You felt the stern soberness of poverty in every little detail in 
 that house, just as you breathed a moral atmosphere of auster- 
 ity and upright provincial ways. 
 
 Mother and son at this moment were sitting together in the 
 dining-room over their breakfast a cup of coffee, bread 
 and butter, and radishes. And here, if the reader is to under- 
 stand how gladly Mme. Granson heard Suzanne, some expla- 
 nation of the secret hopes of the household must be given. 
 
 Athanase Granson was a thin, hollow-cheeked young man 
 of medium height, with a white face in which a pair of dark 
 eyes, bright with thought, looked like two marks made with 
 charcoal. The somewhat worn contours of that face, the 
 curving line of the lips, a sharply turned-up chin, a regularly 
 cut marble forehead, a melancholy expression caused by the 
 consciousness of power on the one hand and of poverty on 
 the other all these signs and characteristics told of impris- 
 oned genius. So much so, indeed, that anywhere but at Alen- 
 <;on his face would have won help for him from distinguished 
 men, or from the women that can discern genius incognito. 
 For if this was not genius, at least it was the outward form 
 that genius takes ; and if the strength of a high heart was 
 wanting, it looked out surely from those eyes. And yet, 
 while Athanase could fine expression for the loftiest feeling, 
 an outer husk of shyness spoiled everything in him, down to 
 the very charm of youth, just as the frost of penury disheart- 
 ened every effort. Shut in by the narrow circle of provin- 
 cial life, without approbation, encouragement, or any way of 
 escape, the thought within him was dying out before its dawn. 
 And Athanase, beside, had the fierce pride which poverty in- 
 tensifies in certain natures, the kind of pride by which a man 
 grows great in the stress of battle with men and circumstance, 
 while at the outset it only handicaps him. 
 
 Genius manifests itself in two ways either by taking its 
 own as soon as it finds it, like a Napoleon or a Moliere, or by
 
 36 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 patiently revealing itself and waiting for recognition. Young 
 Granson belonged to the latter class. He was easily discour- 
 aged, ignorant of his value. His turn of mind was contem- 
 plative, he lived in thought rather than in action, and possibly, 
 to those who cannot imagine genius without the Frenchman's 
 spark of enthusiasm, he might have seemed incomplete. But 
 Athanase's power lay in the world of thought. He was to 
 pass through successive phases of emotion, hidden from 
 ordinary eyes, to one of those sudden resolves which bring 
 the chapter to a close and set fools declaring that "the man 
 is mad." The world's contempt for poverty was sapping the 
 life in Athanase. The bow, continually strung tighter and 
 tighter, was slackened by the enervating close air of a soli- 
 tude with never a breath of fresh air in it. He was giving 
 way under the strain of a cruel and fruitless struggle. Atha- 
 nase had that in him which might have placed his name 
 among the foremost names of France ; he had known what it 
 was to gaze with glowing eyes over Alpine heights and fields 
 of air whither unfettered genius soars, and now he was pining 
 to death like some caged and starved eagle. 
 
 While he had worked on unnoticed in the town library, he 
 buried his dreams of fame in his own soul lest they should 
 injure his prospects; and he carried beside another secret 
 hidden even more deeply in his heart, the secret love which 
 hollowed his cheeks and sallowed his forehead. 
 
 Athanase loved his distant cousin, that Mile. Cormon, for 
 whom his unconscious rivals du Bousquier and the Chevalier 
 de Valois were laying in ambush. It was a love born of self- 
 interest. Mile. Cormon was supposed to be one of the 
 richest people in the town ; and he, poor boy, had been drawn 
 to love her partly through the desire for material welfare, 
 partly through a wish formed times without number to gild 
 his mother's declining years, and partly also through cravings 
 for the physical comfort necessary to men who live an intel- 
 lecttsal life. In his own eyes, his love was dishonored by its
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 37 
 
 very natural origin ; and he was afraid of the ridicule which 
 people pour on the love of a young man of three-and-twenty 
 for a woman of forty. And yet his love was quite sincere. 
 Much that happens in the provinces would be improbable 
 upon the face of it anywhere else, especially in matters of this 
 kind. 
 
 But in a country town there are no unforeseen contingencies ; 
 there is no coming and going, no mystery, no such thing as 
 chance. Marriage is a necessity, and no family will accept a 
 man of dissolute life. A connection between a young fellow 
 like Athanase and a handsome girl might seem a natural thing 
 enough in a great city ; in a country town it would be enough 
 to ruin a young man's chances of marriage, especially if he 
 were poor ; for when the prospective bridegroom is wealthy 
 an awkward business of this sort may be smoothed over. 
 Between ths degradation of certain courses and a sincere 
 love, a man that is not heartless can make but one choice if 
 he happens to be poor ; he will prefer the disadvantages 
 of virtue to the disadvantages of vice. But in a country 
 town the number of women with whom a young man can fall 
 in love is strictly limited. A pretty girl with a fortune is 
 beyond his reach in a place where every one's income is 
 known to a farthing. A penniless beauty is equally out of 
 the question. To take her for a wife would be "to marry 
 hunger and thirst," as the provincial saying goes. Finally, 
 celibacy has its dangers in youth. These reflections explain 
 how it has come to pass that marriage is the very basis of pro- 
 vincial life. 
 
 Men in whom genius is hot and unquenchable, who are 
 forced to take their stand on the independence of poverty, 
 ought to leave these cold regions ; in the provinces thought 
 meets with the persecution of brutal indifference, and no 
 woman cares, or dares, to play the part of a sister of charity 
 to the worker, the lover of art or sciences. 
 
 Who can rightly understand Athanase's love for Mile.
 
 38 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Cormon ? Not the rich, the sultans of society, who can 
 find seraglios at their pleasure; not respectability, keeping 
 to the track beaten hard by prejudice ; nor yet those women 
 who shut their eyes to the cravings of the artist temperament, 
 and, taking it for granted that both sexes are governed by the 
 same laws, insist upon a system of reciprocity in their partic- 
 ular virtues. The appeal must, perhaps, be made to young 
 men who suffer from the repression of young desires just as 
 they are putting forth their full strength ; to the artist whose 
 genius is stifled within him by poverty till it becomes a 
 disease ; to power at first unsupported, persecuted, and too 
 often unfriended till it emerges at length triumphant from 
 the twofold agony of soul and body. 
 
 These will know the throbbing pangs of the cancer which 
 was gnawing Athanase. Such as these have raised long, cruel 
 debates within themselves, with the so high end in sight and 
 no means of attaining it. They have passed through the 
 experience of abortive effort ; they have left the spawn of 
 genius on the barren sands. They know that the strength of 
 desire is as the scope of the imagination ; the higher the leap, 
 the lower the fall ; and how many restraints are broken in 
 such falls ? These, like Athanase, catch glimpses of a glorious 
 future in the distance ; all that lies between seems but a trans- 
 parent film of gauze to their piercing sight ; but of that film 
 which scarcely obscures the vision, society makes a wall of 
 brass. Urged on by their vocation, by the artist's instinct 
 within them, they too seek times without number to make a 
 stepping-stone of sentiments which society turns in the same 
 way to practical ends. What ! when marriages in the prov- 
 inces are calculated and arranged on every side with a view 
 to securing material welfare, shall it be forbidden to a strug- 
 gling artist or man of science to keep two ends in view, to 
 try to insure his own subsistence that the thought within 
 him may live?' 
 
 Athanase Granson, with such ideas as these fermenting in
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 39 
 
 his head, thought at first of marriage with Mile. Cormon as a 
 definite solution of the problem of existence. He would be 
 free to work for fame, he could make his mother comfortable, 
 and he felt sure of himself he knew that he could be faithful 
 to Mile. Cormon. But soon his purpose bred a real passion 
 in him. It was an unconscious process. He set himself to 
 study Mile. Cormon ; then familiarity exercised its spell, and 
 at length Athanase saw nothing but beauties the defects were 
 all forgotten. 
 
 The senses count for so much in the love of a young man 
 of three-and-twenty. Through the heat of desire woman is 
 seen as through a prism. From this point of view it was a 
 touch of genius in Beaumarchais to make the 'page Cherubino 
 in the play strain Marcellina to his heart. If you recollect, 
 moreover, that poverty restricted Athanase to a life of great 
 loneliness, that there was no other woman to look at, that his 
 eyes were always fastened upon Mile. Cormon, and that all 
 the light in the picture was concentrated upon her, it seems 
 natural, does it not, that he should love her? The feeling 
 hidden in the depths of his heart could but grow stronger day 
 by day. Desire and pain and hope and meditation, in silence 
 and repose, were filling up Athanase's soul to the brim ; every 
 hour added its drop. As his senses came to the aid of imagina- 
 tion and widened the inner horizon, Mile. Cormon became 
 more and more awe-inspiring, and he grew more and more 
 timid. 
 
 The mother had guessed it all. She was a provincial, and 
 she frankly calculated the advantages of the match. Mile. 
 Cormon might think herself very lucky to marry a young man 
 of twenty-three with plenty of brains, a likely man to do honor 
 to his name and country. .Still the obstacles, Athanase's 
 poverty and Mile. Cormon's age, seemed to her to be insur- 
 mountable ; there was nothing for it that she could see but 
 patience. She had a policy of her own, like du Bousquier 
 and the Chevalier de Valois ; she was on the lookout for her
 
 40 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 opportunity, waiting, with wits sharpened by self-interest and 
 a mother's love, for the propitious moment. 
 
 Of the Chevalier de Valois, Mme. Granson had no sus- 
 picion whatsoever ; du Bousquier she still credited with views 
 upon the lady, albeit Mile. Cormon had once refused him. 
 An adroit and secret enemy, Mme. Granson did the ex-con- 
 tractor untold harm to serve the son to whom she had not 
 spoken a word. After this, who does not see the importance 
 of Suzanne's lie once confided to Mme. Granson ? What a 
 weapon put into the hands of the charitable treasurer of the 
 Maternity Fund ! How demurely she would carry the tale 
 from house to house when she asked for subscriptions for the 
 chaste Suzanne ! 
 
 At this particular moment Athanase was pensively sitting 
 with his elbow on the table, balancing a spoon on the edge of 
 the empty bowl before him. He looked with unseeing eyes 
 round the poor room, over the walls covered with an old- 
 fashioned paper only seen in wine-saloons, at the window- 
 curtains with a chessboard pattern of pink-and-white squares, 
 at the red-brick floor, the straw-bottomed chairs, the painted 
 wooden sideboard, the glass door that opened into the kitchen. 
 As he sat facing his mother and with his back to the fire, and 
 as the fireplace was almost opposite the door, the first thing 
 which caught Suzanne's eyes was his pale face, with the light 
 from the street window falling full upon it, a face framed in 
 dark hair, and eyes with the gleam of despair in them, and a 
 fever kindled by the morning's thoughts. 
 
 The grisette surely knows by instinct the pain and sorrow 
 of love ; at the sight of Athanase, she felt that sudden electric 
 thrill which comes we know not whence. We cannot explain 
 it ; some strong-minded persons deny that it exists, but many 
 a woman and many a man has felt that shock of sympathy. 
 It is a flash, lighting up the darkness of the future, and at the 
 same time a presentiment of the pure joy of love shared by 
 two souls, and a certainty that this other too understands. It
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN, 41 
 
 is more like the strong, sure touch of a master hand upon the 
 clavier of the senses than anything else. Eyes are riveted by 
 an irresistible fascination, hearts are troubled, the music of 
 joy rings in the ears and thrills the soul ; a voice cries, "It 
 is he ! " And then then very likely, reflection throws a 
 douche of cold water over all this turbulent emotion, and 
 there is an end of it. 
 
 In a moment, swift as a clap of thunder, a broadside of new 
 thoughts poured in upon Suzanne. A lightning flash of love 
 burned the weeds which had sprung up in dissipation and 
 wantonness. She saw all that she was losing by blighting her 
 name with a lie, the desecration, the degradation of it. Only 
 last evening this idea had been a joke, now it was like a heavy 
 sentence passed upon her. She recoiled before her success. 
 But, after all, it was quite impossible that anything should 
 come of this meeting ; and the thought of Athanase's poverty, 
 and a vague hope of making money and coming back from 
 Paris with both hands full, to say: "I loved you all along" 
 or fate, if you will have it so dried up the beneficent dew. 
 The ambitious damsel asked shyly to speak for a moment with 
 Mine. Granson, who took her into her bedroom. 
 
 When Suzanne came out again she looked once more at 
 Athanase. He was still sitting in the same attitude. She 
 choked back her tears. 
 
 As for Mme. Granson, she was radiant. She had found a 
 terrible weapon to use against du Bousquier at last ; she could 
 deal him a deadly blow. So she promised the poor victim of 
 seduction the support of all the ladies who subscribed to the 
 Maternity Fund. She foresaw a dozen calls in prospect. In 
 the course of the morning and afternoon she would conjure 
 down a terrific storm upon the elderly bachelor's head. The 
 Chevalier de Valois certainly foresaw the turn that matters 
 were likely to take, but he had not expected anything like the 
 amount of scandal that came of it. 
 
 ''We are going to dine with Mademoiselle Cormon, you
 
 42 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 know, dear boy," said Mme. Granson ; "take rather more 
 pains with your appearance. It is a mistake to neglect your 
 dress as you do ; you look so untidy. Put on your best frilled 
 shirt and your green cloth coat. I have my reasons," she 
 added, with a mysterious air. " And beside, there will be a 
 great many people ; Mademoiselle Cormon is going to the 
 Prdbaudet directly. If a young man is thinking of marrying, 
 he ought to make himself agreeable in every possible way. If 
 girls would only tell the truth, my boy, dear me ! you would be 
 surprised at the things that take their fancy. It is often quite 
 enough if a young man rides by at the head of a company of 
 artillery, or comes to a dance in a suit of clothes that fits him 
 passably well. A certain way of carrying the head, a melancholy 
 attitude, is enough to set a girl imagining a whole life ; we invent 
 a romance to suit the hero ; often he is only a stupid young 
 man, but the marriage is made. Take notice of Monsieur de 
 Valois, study him, copy his manners ; see how he looks at 
 ease ; he has not a constrained manner, as you have. And 
 talk a little; any one might think that you knew nothing at 
 a\\, you that know Hebrew by heart." 
 
 Athanase heard her submissively, but he looked surprised. 
 He rose, took his cap, and went back to his work. 
 
 " Can mother have guessed my secret ? " he thought, as he 
 went round by the Rue de Val-Noble where Mademoiselle 
 Cormon lived, a little pleasure in which he indulged of a 
 morning. His head was swarming with romantic fancies. 
 
 " How little she thinks that going past her house at this 
 moment is a young man who would love her dearly, and be 
 true to her, and never cause her a single care, and leave her 
 fortune entirely in her own hands ! Oh me ! what a strange 
 fatality it is that we two should live as we do in the same town 
 and within a few paces of each other, and yet nothing can 
 bring us any nearer ! How if I spoke to her to-night? " 
 
 Meanwhile Suzanne went home to her mother, thinking the 
 while of poor Athanase, feeling that for him she could find it
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 43 
 
 in her heart to do what many a woman must have longed 
 to do for the one beloved with superhuman strength; she 
 could have made a stepping-stone of her beautiful body if so 
 he might come to his kingdom the sooner. 
 
 And now we must enter the house wheYe all the actors in 
 this Scene (Suzanne excepted) were to meet that very evening, 
 the house belonging to the old maid, the converging point of 
 so many interests. As for Suzanne, that young woman with 
 her well-grown beauty, with courage sufficient to burn her 
 boats, like Alexander, and to begin the battle of life with an 
 uncalled-for sacrifice of her character, she now disappears 
 from the stage after bringing about a violently exciting situa- 
 tion. Her wishes, moreover, were more than fulfilled. A 
 few days afterward she left her native place with a stock of 
 money and fine clothes, including a superb green rep gown 
 and a green bonnet lined with rose color, M. de Valois' gifts; 
 which Suzanne liked better than anything else, better even 
 than the Maternity Society's money. If the chevalier had 
 gone to Paris while Suzanne was in her heyday, she would 
 assuredly have left all for him. 
 
 And so this chaste Susannah, of whom the elders scarcely 
 had more than a glimpse, settled herself comfortably and 
 hopefully in Paris, while all Alencon was deploring the mis- 
 fortunes with which the ladies of the Charitable and Maternity 
 Societies had manifested so lively a sympathy. 
 
 While Suzanne might be taken as a type of the handsome 
 Norman virgins who furnish, on the showing of a learned physi- 
 cian, one-third of the supply devoured by the monster, Paris, 
 she entered herself, and remained in those higher branches of 
 her profession in which some regard is paid to appearances. 
 In an age in which, as M. de Valois said, "woman has ceased 
 to be woman," she was known merely as Mme. du Val-Noble ; 
 in other times she would have rivaled an Imperia, a Rhodope, 
 a Ninon. One of the most distinguished writers of the Res-
 
 44 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 toration took her under his protection, and very likely will 
 marry her some day ; he is a journalist, and above public 
 opinion, seeing that he creates a new one every six years. 
 
 In almost every prefecture of the second magnitude there is 
 some salon frequented not exactly by the cream of the local 
 society, but by personages both considerable and well con- 
 sidered. The host and hostess probably will be among the 
 foremost people in the town. To them all houses are open ; 
 no entertainment, no public dinner is given, but they are 
 asked to it ; but in their salon you will not meet the gens a 
 ch&teau lords of the manor, peers of France living on their 
 broad acres, and persons of the highest quality in the depart- 
 ment, though these are all on visiting terms with the family, 
 and exchange invitations to dinners and evening parties. 
 The mixed society to be found there usually consists of the 
 lesser noblesse resident in the town, with the clergy and 
 judicial authorities. It is an influential assemblage. All the 
 wit and sense of the district is concentrated in its solid, un- 
 pretentious ranks. Everybody in the set knows the exact 
 amount of his neighbor's income, and professes the utmost in- 
 difference to dress and luxury, trifles held to be mere childish 
 vanity compared with the acquisition of a mouchoir a bceufs 
 a pocket-handkerchief of some ten or a dozen acres, purchased 
 after as many years of pondering and intriguing and a prodig- 
 ious deal of diplomacy. 
 
 Unshaken in its prejudices whether good or ill, the coterie 
 goes on its way without a look before or behind. Nothing 
 from Paris is allowed to pass without a prolonged scrutiny ; in- 
 novations are ridiculous, and bonds and cashmere shawls alike 
 objectionable. Provincials read nothing and wish to learn 
 nothing ; for them, science, literature, and mechanical inven- 
 tion are as the thing that is not. If a prefect does not suit 
 their notions, they do their best to have him removed ; if this 
 cannot be done, they isolate him. So will you see the in- 
 mates of a beehive wall up an intruding snail with wax.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 45 
 
 Finally, of the gossip of the salon, history is made. Young 
 married women put in an appearance there occasionally 
 (though the card-table is the one resource) that their conduct 
 may be stamped with the approval of the coterie and their 
 social status confirmed. ? 
 
 Native susceptibilities are sometimes wounded by the supre- 
 macy of a single house, but the rest comfort themselves with 
 the thought that they save the expense entailed by the posi- 
 tion. Sometimes it happens that no one can afford to keep 
 open house, and then the big-wigs of the place look about 
 them for some harmless person whose character, position, and 
 social standing offer guarantees for the neutrality of the 
 ground, and alarm nobody's vanity or self-interest. This had 
 been the case at Alencon. For a long time past the best 
 society of the town has been wont to assemble in the house of 
 the old maid before mentioned, who little suspected Mine. 
 Granson's designs on her fortune, or the secret hopes of the 
 two elderly bachelors who have just been unmasked. 
 
 Mile. Cormon was Mme. Granson's fourth cousin. She 
 lived with her mother's brother, a sometime vicar-general of 
 the bishopric of Seez ; she had been her uncle's ward, and 
 would one day inherit his fortune. Rose-Marie- Victoire Cor- 
 mon was the last representative of a house which, plebeian 
 though it was, had associated and often allied itself with the 
 noblesse, and ranked among the oldest families in the pro- 
 vince. In former times the Cormons had been intendants of 
 the duchy of Alencon, and had given a goodly number of 
 magistrates to the bench, and several bishops to the church. 
 M. de Sponde, Mile. Cormon's maternal grandfather, was 
 elected by the noblesse to the States-General ; and M. Cor- 
 mon, her father, had been asked to represent the Third 
 Estate, but neither of them accepted the responsibility. For 
 the last century, the daughters of the house had married 
 into the noble families of the province, in such sort that the 
 Cormons were grafted into pretty nearly every genealogical
 
 46 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 tree in the duchy. No burgher family came so near being 
 noble. 
 
 The house in which the present Mile. Cormon lived had 
 never passed out of the family since it was built by Pierre 
 Cormon in the reign of Henri IV. ; and of all the old maid's 
 worldly possessions, this one appealed most to the greed of 
 her elderly suitors ; though, so far from bringing in money, 
 the ancestral home of the Cormons was a positive expense to 
 its owner. But it is such an unusual thing, in the very centre 
 of a country town, to find a house handsome without, con- 
 venient within, and free from mean surroundings, that all 
 Alencon shared the feeling of envy. 
 
 The old mansion stood exactly half-way down the Rue du 
 Val-Noble, The Val-Noblc, as it was called, probably because 
 the Brillante, the little stream which flows through the town, 
 has hollowed out a little valley for itself in a dip of the land 
 thereabout. The most noticeable feature of the house was its 
 massive architecture, of the style introduced from Italy by 
 Marie de' Medici ; all the corner-stones and facings were cut 
 with diamoned-shaped bosses, in spite of the difficulty of 
 working in the granite of which it is built. It was a two- 
 storied house with a very high-pitched roof, and a row of 
 dormer windows, each with its carved tympanum standing 
 picturesquely enough above the lead-lined parapet with its 
 ornamental balustrade. A grotesque gargoyle, the head of 
 some fantastic bodyless beast, discharged the rain-water 
 through its jaws into the street below, where great stone slabs, 
 pierced with five holes, were placed to receive it. Each gable 
 terminated in a leaden finial, a sign that this was a burgher's 
 house, for none but nobles had a right to put up a weather- 
 cock in olden times. To the right and left of the yard stood 
 the stables and the coach-house ; the kitchen, laundry, and 
 wood-shed. One of the leaves of the great gate used to stand 
 open ; so that passers-by, looking in through the little low 
 wicket with the bell attached, could see the parterre in the
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 47 
 
 middle of a spacious paved court, and the low-clipped privet 
 hedges which marked out miniature borders full of monthly 
 roses, clove gilliflowers, scabious, lilies, and Spanish broom ; 
 as well as the laurel-bushes and pomegranates and myrtles 
 which grew in tubs put out of doors for the summer. 
 
 The scrupulous neatness and tidiness of the place must 
 have struck any stranger, and furnished him with a clue to 
 the old maid's character. The mistress' eyes must have been 
 unemployed, careful, and prying ; less, perhaps, from any 
 natural bent, than for want of any occupation. Who but an 
 elderly spinster, at a loss how to fill an always empty day, 
 would have insisted that no blade of grass should show itself in 
 the paved courtyard, that the wall-copings should be scoured, 
 that the broom should always be busy, that the coach should 
 never be left with the leather curtains undrawn ? Who else, 
 from sheer lack of other employment, could have introduced 
 something like Dutch cleanliness into a little province between 
 Perche, Normandy, and Brittany, where the natives make 
 boast of their crass indifference to comfort? The chevalier 
 never climbed the steps without reflecting inwardly that the 
 house was fit for a peer of France ; and du Bousquier similarly 
 considered that the Mayor of Alencon ought to live there. 
 
 A glass door at the top of the flight of steps gave admittance 
 to an antechamber lighted by a second glass door opposite, 
 above a corresponding flight of steps leading into the garden. 
 This part of the house, a kind of gallery floored with square 
 red tiles, and wainscoted to elbow-height, was a hospital for 
 invalid family portraits ; one here and there had lost an eye 
 or sustained injury to a shoulder, another stood with a hole in 
 the place where his hat should have been, yet another had 
 lost a leg by amputation. Here cloaks, clogs, overshoes, and 
 umbrellas were left ; everybody deposited his belongings in 
 the antechamber on his arrival, and took them again on his 
 departure. A long bench was set against either wall for the 
 servants who came of an evening with their lanterns to fetch
 
 48 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 home their masters and mistresses, and a big stove was set in 
 the middle to mitigate the icy blasts which swept across from 
 door to door. 
 
 This gallery, then, divided the first floor into two equal 
 parts. The staircase rose to the left on the side nearest the 
 courtyard, the rest of the space being taken up by the great 
 dining-room, with its windows looking out upon the garden, 
 and a pantry beyond, which communicated with the kitchen. 
 To the right lay the salon, lighted by four windows, and a 
 couple of smaller rooms beyond it, a boudoir which gave upon 
 the garden, and a room which did duty as a study and looked 
 into the courtyard. There was a complete suite of rooms on 
 the second floor, beside the Abbd de Sponde's apartments ; 
 while the attic story, in all probability roomy enough, had 
 long since been given over to the tenancy of rats and mice. 
 Mile. Cormon used to report their nocturnal exploits to the 
 Chevalier de Valois, and marvel at the futility of all measures 
 taken against them. 
 
 The garden, about half an acre in extent, was bounded by 
 the Brillante, so called from the mica spangles which glitter 
 in its bed ; not, however, in the Val-Noble, for the manufac- 
 turers and dyers of Alencon pour all their refuse into the shal- 
 low stream before it reaches this point ; and the opposite 
 bank, as always happens wherever a stream passes through a 
 town, was lined with houses where various thirsty industries 
 were carried on. Luckily, Mile. Cormon's neighbors were all 
 of them quiet tradesmen a baker, a fuller, and one or two 
 cabinet-makers. Her garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, 
 naturally ended in a terrace, by way of a quay, with a short 
 flight of steps down to the water's edge. Try to picture the 
 wallflowers growing in blue-and-white glazed jars along the 
 balustrade by the river, behold a shady walk to right and left 
 beneath the square-clipped lime-trees, and you will have some 
 idea of a scene full of unpretending cheerfulness and sober 
 tranquillity; you can see the views of homely humble life
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 49 
 
 along the opposite bank, the quaint houses, the trickling 
 stream of the Brillante, the garden itself, the linden walks 
 under the garden walls, and the venerable home built by the 
 Cormons. How peaceful, how quiet it was ! If theue was no 
 ostentation, there was nothing transitory, everything seemed 
 to last forever there. 
 
 The first-floor rooms, therefore, were given over to social 
 uses. You breathed the atmosphere of the Province, ancient, 
 unalterable Province. The great square-shaped salon, with 
 its four doors and four windows, was modestly wainscoted 
 with carved panels, and painted gray. On the wall, above 
 the single oblong mirror on the mantel, the Hours, in mono- 
 chrome, were ushering in the Day. For this particular style 
 of decoration, which used to infest the spaces above doors, 
 the artist's invention devised the eternal Seasons which meet 
 your eyes almost anywhere in central France, till you loathe 
 the detestable Cupids engaged, in reaping, skating, sowing 
 seeds, or flinging flowers about. Every window was over- 
 arched with a sort of baldachin with green damask curtains 
 drawn back with cords and huge tassels. The tapestry-covered 
 furniture, with a darn here and there at the edges of the 
 chairs, belonged distinctly to that period of the eighteenth 
 century when curves and contortions were in the very height 
 of fashion ; the frames were painted and varnished, the sub- 
 jects in the medallions on the backs were taken from La Fon- 
 taine. Four card-tables, a table for piquet, and another for 
 backgammon filled up the immense space. A rock crystal 
 chandelier, shrouded in green gauze, hung suspended from the 
 prominent cross-beam which divided the ceiling, the only 
 plastered ceiling in the house. Two branched candle-sconces 
 were fixed into the wall above the mantel, where a couple of 
 blue Sevres vases stood on either side of a copper-gilt clock 
 which represented a scene taken from "Le D6serteur " a proof 
 of the prodigious popularity of Sedaine's work. It was a group 
 of no less than eleven figures, four inches high ; the deserter 
 4
 
 50 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 emerging from jail escorted by a guard of soldiers, while a 
 young person, swoon-ing in the foreground, held out his 
 reprieve. The hearth and fire-irons were of the same date and 
 style. The more recent family portraits one or two Rigauds 
 and three pastels by Latour adorned the handsome wainscot 
 panels. 
 
 The study, paneled entirely in old lacquer work, red and 
 black and gold, would have fetched fabulous sums a few years 
 later ; Mile. Cormon was as far as possible from suspecting its 
 value ; but if she had been offered a thousand crowns for every 
 panel, she would not have parted with a single one. It was a 
 part of her system to alter nothing, and everywhere in the 
 provinces the belief in ancestral hoards is very strong. The 
 boudoir, never used, was hung with the old-fashioned chintz 
 so much run after nowadays by amateurs of the " Pompadour 
 style," as it is called. 
 
 The dining-room was paved with black-and-white stone ; it 
 had not been ceiled, but the joists and beams were painted. 
 Ranged round the walls, beneath a flowered trellis, painted in 
 fresco, stood the portentous, marble-topped sideboards, indis- 
 pensable in the warfare waged in the provinces against the 
 powers of digestion. The chairs were cane-seated and var- 
 nished, the doors of unpolished walnut-wood. Everything 
 combined admirably to complete the general effect, the old- 
 world air of the house within and without. The provincial 
 spirit had preserved all as it had always been ; nothing was 
 new or old, young or decrepit. You felt a sense of chilly 
 precision everywhere. 
 
 Any tourist in Brittany, Normandy, Maine, or Anjou must 
 have seen some house more or less like this in one or other 
 provincial town ; for the Hotel de Cormon was in its way a 
 very pattern and model of burgher houses over a large part of 
 France, and the better deserves a place in this chronicle be- 
 cause it is at once a commentary on the manners of the place 
 and the expression of its ideas. Who does not feel, even
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 51 
 
 now, how much the life within the old walls was one of peace- 
 ful routine ? 
 
 For such library as the house possessed you must have de- 
 scended rather below the level of the Brillante. There stood 
 a solidly clasped oak-bound collection, none the worse, nay, 
 rather the better, for a thick coating of dust ; a collection 
 kept as carefully as a cider-growing district is. wont to keep 
 the products of the presses of Burgundy, Touraine, Gascony, 
 and the South. Here were works full of native force, and 
 exquisite qualities, with an added perfume of antiquity. No 
 one will import poor wines when the cost of carriage is so 
 heavy. 
 
 Mile. Cormon's whole circle consisted of about a hundred 
 and fifty persons. Of these, some went into the country, 
 some were ill, others from home on business in the depart- 
 ment, but there was a faithful band which always came, unless 
 Mile. Cormon gave an evening party in form ; so also did 
 those persons who were bound either by their duties or old 
 habit to live in Alencon itself. All these people were of ripe 
 age. A few among them had traveled, but scarcely any of 
 them had gone beyond the province, and one or two had 
 been implicated in Chouannerie. People could begin to 
 speak freely of the war, now that rewards had come to the 
 heroic defenders of the good cause. M. de Valois had been 
 concerned in the last rising, when the Marquis de Montauran 
 lost his life, betrayed by his mistress ; and Marche-a-Terre, 
 now peacefully driving a grazier's trade by the banks of the 
 Mayenne, had made a famous name for himself. M. de 
 Valois, during the past six months, had supplied the key to 
 several shrewd tricks played off upon Hulot the old Repub- 
 lican, commander of a demi-brigade stationed at Alencon 
 from 1798 till 1800. There was talk of Hulot yet in the 
 countryside.* 
 
 The women made little pretense of dress, except on Wednes- 
 * See "The Chouans."
 
 52 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 days, when Mile. Cormon gave a dinner party, and last week's 
 guests came to pay their " visit of digestion." On Wednes- 
 day evening the rooms were filled. Guests and visitors came 
 in gala dress; here and there a woman brought her knitting 
 or her tapestry work, and some young ladies unblushingly 
 drew patterns for point d'Alencon, by which they supported 
 themselves. Men brought their wives, because there were so 
 few young fellows there ; no whisper could pass unnoticed, 
 and therefore there was no danger of love-making for maid <5r 
 matron. Every evening at six o'clock the lobby was filled 
 with articles of dress, with sticks, cloaks, and lanterns. Every 
 one was so well acquainted, the customs of the house were so 
 primitive, that if by any chance the Abbe de Sponde was in 
 the lime-tree walk, and Mile. Cormon in her room, neither 
 Josette the maid nor Jacquelin the man thought it necessary 
 to inform them of the arrival of visitors. The first comer 
 waited till some one else arrived ; and when they mustered 
 players sufficient for whist or boston, the game was begun 
 without waiting for the Abbe de Sponde or mademoiselle. 
 When it grew dark, Josette or Jacquelin brought lights as 
 soon as the bell rang, and the old abbe out in the garden, 
 seeing the drawing-room windows illuminated, hastened slowly 
 toward the house. Every evening the piquet, boston, and 
 whist tables were full, giving an average of twenty-five or 
 thirty persons, including those who came to chat ; but often 
 there were as many as thirty or forty, and then Jacquelin took 
 candles into the study and the boudoir. Between eight and 
 nine at night the servants began to fill the antechamber; and 
 nothing short of a revolution would have found any one in the 
 salon at ten o'clock. At that hour the frequenters of the 
 house were walking home through the streets, discussing the 
 points made, or keeping up a conversation begun in the salon. 
 Sometimes the talk turned on a pocket-handkerchief of land on 
 which somebody had an eye, sometimes it was the division of 
 an inheritance and disputes among the legatees, or the pre-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWX. 53 
 
 tensions of the aristocratic set. You see exactly the same 
 thing at Paris when the theatres disgorge. 
 
 Some people who talk a great deal about poetry and under- 
 stand nothing about it are wont to rail at provincial towns 
 and provincial ways ; but lean your forehead on your left hand, 
 as you sit with your feet on the fire-dogs, and rest your elbow 
 on your knee, and then if you have fully realized for your- 
 self the level, pleasant landscape, the house, the interior, the 
 folk within it and their interests, interests that seem all the 
 larger because the mental horizon is so limited (as a grain of 
 gold is beaten thin between two sheets of parchment) then 
 ask yourself what human life is. Try to decide between the 
 engraver of the hieroglyphic birds on an Egyptian obelisk, 
 and one of these folk in Alencon playing boston through a 
 score of years with du Bousquier, M. de Valois, Mile. Cormon, 
 the president of the Tribunal, the public prosecutor, the Abbe 
 de Sponde, Mme. Granson, and all the rest. If the daily 
 round, the daily pacing of the same track in the footsteps of 
 many yesterdays, is not exactly happiness, it is so much like 
 it that others, driven by dint of storm- tossed days to reflect 
 on the blessings of calm, will say that it is happiness indeed. 
 
 To give the exact measure of the importance of Mile. Cor- 
 mon's salon, it will suffice to add that du Bousquier, a born 
 statistician, computed that its frequenters mustered among 
 them a hundred and thirty-one votes in the electoral college, 
 and eighteen hundred thousand livres of income derived from 
 lands in the province. The town of Alencon was not, it is 
 true, completely represented there. The aristocratic section, 
 for instance, had a salon of their own, and the receiver-gen- 
 eral's house was a sort of official inn kept, as in duty bound, by 
 the Government, where everybody who was anybody danced, 
 flirted, fluttered, fell in love, and supped. One or two un- 
 classified persons kept up the communications between Mile. 
 Cormon 's salon and the other two, but the Cormon salon 
 criticised all that passed in the opposed camps very severely.
 
 54 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Sumptuous dinners gave rise to unfavorable comment ; ices at 
 a dance caused searchings of heart ; the women's behavior 
 and dress and any innovations were much discussed. 
 
 Mile. Cormon being, as it were, the style of the firm and 
 figure-head of an imposing coterie, was inevitably the object 
 of any ambition as profound as that of the du Bousquier or 
 the Chevalier de Valois. To both gentlemen she meant a 
 seat in the Chamber of Deputies, with a peerage for the chev- 
 alier, a receiver-general's post for du Bousquier. A salon ad- 
 mittedly of the first rank is every whit as hard to build up in 
 a country town as in Paris. And here was the salon ready 
 made. To marry Mile. Cormon was to be lord of Alencon. 
 Finally, Athanase, the only one of the three suitors that had 
 ceased to calculate, cared as much for the woman as for her 
 money. 
 
 Is there not a whole strange drama (to use the modern cant 
 phrase) in the relative positions of these four human beings ? 
 There is something grotesque, is there not, in the idea of 
 three rival suitors eagerly pressing about an old maid who 
 never so much as suspected their intentions, in spite of her 
 intense and very natural desire to be married ? Yet, although 
 things being so, it may seem an extraordinary thing that she 
 should not have married before, it is not difficult to explain 
 how and why, in spite of her fortune and her three suitors, 
 Mile. Cormon was still unwed. 
 
 From the first, following the family tradition, Mile. Cormon 
 had always wished to marry a noble, but between the years 
 1789 and 1799 circumstances were very much against her. 
 While she would have wished to be the wife of a person of con- 
 dition, she was horribly afraid of the Revolutionary Tribunal ; 
 and these two motives weighing about equally, she remained 
 stationary, according to a law which holds equally good in 
 aesthetics or statics. At the same time, the condition of sus- 
 pended judgment is not unpleasant for a girl, so long as she 
 feels young and thinks that she can choose where she pleases.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUiVTRY TOWN. 55 
 
 But, as all France knows, the system of government immedi- 
 ately preceding the wars of Napoleon produced a vast number 1 
 of widows ; and the number of heiresses was altogether out of 
 proportion to the number of eligible men. When order was 
 restored in the country, in the time of the Consulate, external 
 difficulties made marriage as much of a problem as ever for 
 Rose-Marie-Victoire. On the one hand, she declined to marry 
 an elderly man ; and, on the other, dread of ridicule and cir- 
 cumstances put quite young men out of the question. In 
 those days heads of families married their sons as mere boys, 
 because in this way they escaped the conscription. With the 
 obstinacy of a landed proprietor, mademoiselle would not 
 hear of marrying a military man ; she had no wish to take a 
 husband only to give him back to the Emperor, she wished to 
 keep him for herself. And so, between 1804 and 1815, it was 
 impossible to compete with a younger generation of girls, too 
 numerous already in times when cannon-shot had thinned the 
 ranks of marriageable men. 
 
 Again, apart from Mile. Cormon's predilection for birth, ' 
 she had a very pardonable craze for being loved for her own 
 sake. You would scarcely believe the lengths to which she 
 carried this fancy. She set her wits to work to lay snares for 
 her admirers, to try their sentiments ; and that with such suc- 
 cess, that the unfortunates one and all fell into them, and 
 succumbed in the whimsical ordeals through which they passed 
 at unawares. Mile. Cormon did not study her suitors, she 
 played the spy upon them. A careless word or a joke, and 
 the lady did not understand jokes very well, was excuse enough 
 to dismiss an aspirant as found wanting. This had neither 
 spirit nor delicacy; that was untruthful and not a Christian ; 
 one wanted to cut down tall timber and coin money under 
 the marriage canopy ; another was not the man to make her 
 happy ; or, again, she had her suspicions of gout in the family, 
 or took fright at her wooer's antecedents. Like mother church, 
 she would fain see a priest without blemish at her altar. And
 
 56 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 then Rose-Marie-Victoire made the worst of herself, and was 
 as anxious to be loved, with all her factitious plainness and 
 imaginary faults, as other women are to be married for virtues 
 which they have not and for borrowed beauty. Mile. Cor- 
 mon's ambition had its source in the finest instincts of woman- 
 hood. She would reward her lover by discovering to him a 
 thousand virtues after marriage, as other women reveal the 
 many little faults kept hitherto strenuously out of sight. But 
 no one understood. The noble girl came in contact with 
 none but commonplace natures, with whom practical interests 
 came first ; the finer calculations of feeling were beyond their 
 comprehension. 
 
 She grew more and more suspicious as the critical period so 
 ingenuously called "second youth" drew nearer. Her fancy 
 for making the worst of herself with increasing success fright- 
 ened away the latest recruits ; they hesitated to unite their lot 
 with hers. The strategy of her game of blind-man's bluff (the 
 virtues to be revealed when the finder's eyes were opened) was 
 a complex study for which few men have inclination ; they 
 prefer perfection ready-made. An ever-present dread of being 
 married for her money made her unreasonably distrustful and 
 uneasy. She fell foul of the rich, and the rich could look 
 higher ; she was afraid of poor men, she would not believe 
 them capable of that disinterestedness on which she set such 
 store ; till at length her rejections and other circumstances let 
 in an unexpected light upon the minds of suitors thus pre- 
 sented for her selection like dried peas on a seedman's sieve. 
 Every time a marriage project came to nothing, the unfortu- 
 nate girl, being gradually led to despise mankind, saw the 
 other sex at last in a false light. Inevitably, in her inmost 
 soul, she grew misanthropic, a tinge of bitterness was infused 
 into her conversation, a certain harshness into her expression. 
 And her manners became more and more rigid under the 
 stress of enforced celibacy ; in her despair she sought to per- 
 fect herself. It was a characteristic and a noble vengeance.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 57 
 
 She would polish and cut for God the rough diamond rejected 
 by men. 
 
 Before long public opinion was against Mile. Cormon. 
 People accept the verdict which a woman passes upon herself 
 if, being free to marry, she fails to fulfill expectations, or is 
 known to have refused eligible suitors. Every one decides 
 that she has her own reasons for declining marriage, and those 
 reasons are always misinterpreted. There was some hidden 
 physical defect or deformity, they said ; but she, poor girl, 
 was pure as an angel, healthy as a child, and overflowing with 
 kindness. Nature had meant her to know all the joys, all the 
 happiness, all the burdens of motherhood. 
 
 Yet in her person Mile. Cormon did not find a natural 
 auxiliary to gain her heart's desire. She had no beauty, save 
 of the kind so improperly called " the devil's;" that full- 
 blown freshness of youth which, theologically speaking, the 
 devil never could have possessed ; unless, indeed, we are to 
 look for an explanation of the expression in the devil's con- 
 tinual desire of refreshing himself. The heiress' feet were 
 large and flat ; when, on rainy days, she crossed the wet 
 streets between her house and St. Leonard's, her raised skirt 
 displayed (without malice, be it said) a leg which scarcely 
 seemed to belong to a woman, so muscular was it, with a 
 small, firm, prominent calf like a sailor's. She had a figure 
 for a wet nurse. Her thick, honest waist, her strong, plump 
 arms, her red hands ; everything about her, in short, was in 
 keeping with the round, expansive contours and portly fairness 
 of the Norman style of beauty. Wide-open, prominent eyes 
 of no particular color, gave to a face, by no means distin- 
 guished in its round outlines, a sheepish, astonished expres- 
 sion not altogether inappropriate, however, in an old maid : 
 even if Rose had not been innocent, she must still have seemed 
 so. An aquiline nose was oddly assorted with a low fore- 
 head, for a feature of that type is almost invariably found in 
 company with a lofty brow. In spite of thick, red lips, the
 
 58 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 sign of great kindliness of nature, there were evidently so few 
 ideas behind that forehead, that Rose's heart could scarcely 
 have been directed by her brain. Kind she must certainly be, 
 but not gracious. And we are apt to judge the defects of 
 goodness very harshly, while we make the most of the redeem- 
 ing qualities of vice. 
 
 An extraordinary length of chestnut hair lent Rose Cormon 
 such beauty as belongs to vigor and luxuriance, her chief per- 
 sonal characteristics. In the time of her pretensions she had 
 a trick of turning her face in three-quarters profile to display 
 a very pretty ear, gracefully set between the azure-streaked 
 white throat and the temple, and thrown into relief by thick 
 masses of her hair. Dressed in a ball gown, with her head 
 poised at this angle, Rose might almost seem beautiful. With 
 her protuberant bust, her waist, her high health, she used to 
 draw exclamations of admiration from Imperial officers. 
 " What a fine girl ! " they used to say. 
 
 But, as years went on, the stoutness induced by a quiet, 
 regular life distributed itself so unfortunately over her person, 
 that its original porportions were destroyed. No known 
 variety of corset could have discovered the poor spinster's 
 hips at this period of her existence ; she might have been 
 cast in one uniform piece. The youthful proportions of her 
 figure were completely lost ; her dimensions had grown so ex- 
 cessive that no one could see her stoop without fearing that, 
 being so top-heavy, she would certainly overbalance herself; 
 but nature had provided a sufficient natural counterpoise, which 
 enabled her to dispense with all adventitious aid from " dress 
 improvers." Everything about Rose was very genuine. 
 
 Her chin developed a triple fold, which reduced the 
 apparent length of her throat, and made it no easy matter to 
 turn her head. She had no wrinkles, she had creases. Wags 
 used to assert that she powdered herself, as nurses powder 
 babies, to prevent chafing of the skin. To a young man, 
 consumed, like Athanase, with suppressed desires, this exces-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 59 
 
 sive corpulence offered just the kind of physical charm which 
 could not fail to attract youth. Youthful imaginations, essen- 
 tially intrepid, stimulated by appetite, are prone to dilate upon 
 the beauties of that living expanse. So does the plump par- 
 tridge allure the epicure's knife. And, indeed, any debt- 
 burdened young man of fashion in Paris would have resigned 
 himself readily enough to fulfilling his part of the contract and 
 making Mademoiselle Cormon happy. Still the unfortunate 
 spinster had already passed her fortieth year ! 
 
 At this period of enforced loneliness, after the long, vain 
 struggle to fill her life with those interests that are all in all 
 to woman, she was fortifying herself in virtue by the most 
 strict observance of religious duties; she had turned to the 
 great consolation of well-preserved virginity. A confessor, 
 endowed with no great wisdom, had directed Mademoiselle 
 Cormon in the paths of asceticism for some three years past, 
 recommending a system of self-scourging calculated, according 
 to modern doctors, to produce an effect the exact opposite of 
 that expected by the poor priest, whose knowledge of hygiene 
 was but limited. These absurd practices were beginning to 
 bring a certain monastic tinge to Rose Cormon's face ; with 
 frequent pangs of despair, she watched the sallow hues of 
 middle age creeping across its natural white and red ; while 
 the trace of down about the corners of her upper lip showed 
 a distinct tendency to darken and increase like smoke. Her 
 temples grew shiny. She had passed the turning-point, in 
 fact. It was known for certain in Alencon that Mademoiselle 
 Cormon suffered from heated blood. She inflicted her confi- 
 dence upon the Chevalier de Valois, reckoning up the number 
 of foot-baths that she took, and devising cooling treatment 
 with him. And that shrewd observer would end by taking 
 out his snuff-box, and gazing at the portrait of the Princess 
 Goritza as he remarked: "But the real sedative, my dear 
 young lady, would be a good and handsome husband." 
 
 " But whom could one trust ? " returned she.
 
 60 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 But the chevalier only flicked away the powdered snuff from 
 the creases of his paduasoy vest. To anybody else the pro- 
 ceeding would have seemed perfectly natural, but it always 
 made the poor old maid feel uncomfortable. 
 
 The violence of her objectless longings grew to such a height 
 that she shrank from looking a man in the face, so afraid was 
 she that the thoughts which pierced her heart might be read 
 in her eyes. It was one of her whims, possibly a later devel- 
 opment of her former tactics, to behave almost ungraciously 
 to the possible suitors toward whom she still felt herself 
 attracted, so afraid was she of being accused of folly. Most 
 people in her circle were utterly incapable of appreciating her 
 motives, so noble throughout ; they explained her manner to 
 her coevals in single blessedness by a theory of revenge for 
 some past slight. 
 
 With the beginning of the year 1815 Rose Cormon had 
 reached the fatal age, to which she did not confess. She was 
 forty-two. By this time her desire to be married had reached 
 a degree of intensity bordering on monomania. She saw her 
 chances of motherhood fast slipping away forever; and, in 
 her divine ignorance, she longed above all things for children 
 of her own. There was not a soul found in Alencon to im- 
 pute a single unchaste desire to the virtuous girl. She loved 
 love, taking all for granted, without realizing for herself what 
 love would be a devout Agnes, incapable of inventing one 
 of the little shifts of Moliere's heroine. 
 
 She had been counting upon chance of late. The dis- 
 banding of the Imperial troops and the reconstruction of the 
 King's army was sending a tide of military men back to their 
 native places, some of them on half-pay, some with pensions, 
 some without, and all of them anxious to find some way of 
 amending their bad fortune, and of finishing their days in a 
 fashion which would mean the beginning of happiness for 
 Mile. Cormon. It would be hard indeed if she could not 
 find a single brave and honorable man among all those who
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 61 
 
 were coming back to the neighborhood. He must have a 
 sound constitution in the first place, he must be of suitable 
 age, and a man whose personal character would serve as a 
 passport to his Bonapartist opinions ; perhaps he might even 
 be willing to turn Royalist for the sake of gaining a lost social 
 position. 
 
 Supported by these mental calculations, Mile. Cormon main- 
 tained the severity of her attitude for the first few months of 
 the year ; but the men that came back to the town were all 
 either too old or too young, or their characters were too bad, 
 or their opinions too Bonapartist, or their station in life was 
 incompatible with her position, fortune, and habits. The 
 case grew more and more desperate every day. Officers high 
 in the service had used their advantages under Napoleon to 
 marry, and these gentlemen now became Royalists for the 
 sake of their families. In vain had she put up prayers to 
 heaven to send her a husband that she might be happy in 
 Christian fashion ; it was written, no doubt, that she should 
 die virgin and martyr, for not a single likely-looking man 
 presented himself. 
 
 In the course of conversation in her drawing-room of an 
 evening, the frequenters of the house kept the police register 
 under tolerably strict supervision ; no one could arrive at 
 Alencon but they informed themselves at once as to the new- 
 comer's mode of life, quality, and fortune. But, at the same 
 time, Alencon is not a town to attract many strangers ; it is 
 not on the high road to any large city ; there are no chance 
 arrivals ; naval officers on their way to Brest do not so much 
 as stop i'n the place. 
 
 Poor Mile. Cormon at last comprehended that her choice 
 was reduced to the natives. At times her eyes took an almost 
 fierce expression, to which the chevalier would respond with a 
 keen glance at her as he drew out his snuff-box to gaze at the 
 Princess Goritza. M. de Valois knew that, in feminine juris- 
 prudence, fidelity to an old love is a guarantee for the new.
 
 62 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 But Mile. Cormon, it cannot be denied, was not very intelli- 
 gent. His snuff-box strategy was wasted upon her. 
 
 She redoubled her watchfulness, the better to combat the 
 "evil one," and with devout rigidness and the sternest prin- 
 ciples she consigned her cruel sufferings to the secret places of 
 her life. 
 
 At night, when she was alone, she thought of her lost 
 youth, of her faded bloom, of the thwarted instincts of her 
 nature ; and while she laid her passionate longings at the foot 
 of the cross, together with all the poetry doomed to remain 
 pent within her, she vowed inwardly to take the first man that 
 was willing to marry her, just as he was, without putting him 
 to any proof whatsoever. Sounding her own dispositions, 
 after a series of vigils, each more trying than the last, in her 
 own mind she went so far as to espouse a sub-lieutenant, a 
 tobacco-smoker to boot ; nay, he was even head over ears in 
 debt. Him she proposed to transform with care, submission, 
 and gentleness into a pattern for mankind. But only in the 
 silence of night could she plan these imaginary marriages, in 
 which she amused herself with playing the sublime part of 
 guardian angel ; with morning, if Josette found her mistress' 
 bed-clothes turned topsy-turvy, mademoiselle had recovered 
 her dignity ; with morning, after breakfast, she would have 
 nothing less than a solid landowner, a well-preserved man of 
 forty a young man as you may say. 
 
 The Abbe de Sponde was incapable of giving his niece 
 assistance of any sort in schemes for marriage. The good 
 man, aged seventy or thereabout, referred all the calamities 
 of the Revolution to the design of a providence prompt to 
 punish a dissolute church. For which reasons M. de Sponde 
 had long since entered upon a deserted path to heaven, the 
 way trodden by the hermits of old. He led an ascetic life, 
 simply, unobtrusively ; hiding his deeds of charity, his con- 
 stant prayer and fasting from all other eyes. Necessity was 
 laid upon all priests, he thought, to do as he did ; he preached
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 63 
 
 by example, turning a serene and smiling face upon the world, 
 while he completely cut himself off from worldly interests. 
 All his thoughts were given to the afflicted, to the needs of 
 the church, and the saving of his own soul. He left the man- 
 agement of his property to his niece. She paid over his 
 yearly income to him, and, after a slight deduction for his 
 maintenance, the whole of it went in private almsgiving or in 
 donations to the church. 
 
 All the abbe's affections were centred upon his niece, and 
 she looked upon him as a father. He was a somewhat absent- 
 minded father, however, without the remotest conception of 
 the rebellion of the flesh ; a father who gave thanks to God 
 for maintaining his beloved daughter in a state of virginity; 
 for from his youth up he had held, with St. John Chrysostom, 
 " that virginity is as much above the estate of marriage as the 
 angels are above man." 
 
 Mile. Cormon was accustomed to look up to her uncle; 
 she did not venture to confide her wishes for a change of con- 
 dition to him ; and he, good man, on his side was accustomed 
 to the ways of the house, and perhaps might not have relished 
 the introduction of a master into it. Absorbed in thoughts of 
 the distress which he relieved, or lost in fathomless inner 
 depths of prayer, he was often unconscious of what was going 
 on about him ; frequenters of the house set this down to absent- 
 mindedness ; but while he said little, his silence was neither 
 unsociable nor ungenial. A tall, spare, grave, and solemn 
 man, his face told of kindly feeling and a great inward peace. 
 His presence in the house seemed, as it were, to consecrate it. 
 The abbe entertained a strong liking for that elderly skeptic 
 the Chevalier de Valois. Far apart as their lives were, the 
 two grand wrecks of the eighteenth-century clergy and noblesse 
 recognized each other by generic signs and tokens ; and the 
 chevalier, for that matter, could converse with unction with 
 the abbe, just as he talked like a father with his grisettes. 
 
 Some may think that Mile. Cormon would leave no means
 
 64 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 untried to gain her end; that among other permissible feminine 
 artifices, for instance, she would turn to her toilettes, wear 
 low-cut bodices, use the passive coquetry of a display of the 
 splendid equipment with which she might take the field. On 
 the contrary, she was as heroic and steadfast in her high- 
 necked gown as a sentry in his sentry-box. All her dresses, 
 bonnets, and finery were made in Alencon by two hunch- 
 backed sisters, not wanting in taste. But in spite of the 
 entreaties of the two artists, Mile. Cormon utterly declined 
 the adventitious aid of elegance ; she must be substantial 
 throughout, body and plumage, and possibly her heavy-look- 
 ing dresses became her not amiss. Laugh who will at her, 
 poor thing. Generous natures, those who never trouble them- 
 selves about the form in which good feeling shows itself, but 
 admire it wherever they find it, will see something sublime in 
 this trait. Perhaps some slight-natured feminine critic may 
 begin to carp, and say that there is no woman in France so 
 simple but that she can angle for a husband, that Mile. Cormon 
 is one of those abnormal creatures which commonsense forbids 
 us to take for a type ; that the best or the most babyish un- 
 married woman that has a mind to hook a gudgeon can put 
 forward some physical charm wherewith to bait her line. But 
 when you begin to think that the sublime Apostolic Roman 
 Catholic is still a power in Brittany and the ancient duchy of 
 Alengon, these criticisms fall to the ground. Faith and piety 
 admit no such subtleties. Mile. Cormon kept to the straight 
 path, preferring the misfortune of a maidenhood infinitely 
 prolonged to the misery of untruthfulness, to the sin of small 
 deceit. Armed with self-discipline, such a girl cannot make 
 a sacrifice of a principle; and therefore love (or self-interest) 
 must make a very determined effort to find her out and win 
 her. 
 
 Let us have the courage to make a confession, painful in 
 these days when religion is nothing but a means of advance- 
 ment for some, a dream for others ; the devout are subject to
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 65 
 
 a kind of moral ophthalmia, which, by the especial grace of 
 providence, removes a host of small earthly concerns out of 
 the sight of the pilgrim of eternity. In a word, the devout 
 are apt to be dense in a good many ways. Their stupidity, at 
 the same time, is a measure of the force with which their 
 spirits turn heavenward; albeit the skeptical M. de Valois 
 maintained that it is a moot point whether stupid women 
 take naturally to piety or whether piety, on the other hand, 
 has a stupefying effect upon an intelligent girl. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that it is the purest orthodox good- 
 ness, ready to drink rapturously of every cup set before it, to 
 submit devoutly to the will of God, to see the print of the 
 divine finger everywhere in the clay of life that it is catholic 
 virtue stealing like hidden light into the innermost recesses of 
 this history that alone can bring everything into right relief, 
 and widen its significance for those who yet have faith. And, 
 again, if the stupidity is admitted, why should the misfortunes 
 of stupidity be less interesting than the woes of genius in a 
 world where fools so overwhelmingly preponderate ? 
 
 To resume: Mile. Cormon's divine girlish ignorance of life 
 was an offense in the eyes of the world. She was anything 
 but observant, as her treatment of her suitors sufficiently 
 showed. At this very moment, a girl of sixteen who had 
 never opened a novel in her life might have read a hundred 
 chapters of romance in Athanase's eyes. But Mile. Cormon 
 saw nothing all the while; she never knew that the young 
 man's voice was unsteady with emotion which he dared not 
 express, and the woman who could invent refinements of high 
 sentiment to her own undoing could not discern the same feel- 
 ings in Athanase. 
 
 Those who know that qualities of heart and brain are as in- 
 dependent of each other as genius and greatness of soul will 
 see nothing extraordinary in this psychological phenomenon. 
 A complete human being is so rare a prodigy that Socrates, 
 that pearl among mankind, agreed with a contemporary phre- 
 5
 
 66 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 nologist that he himself was born to be a very scurvy knave. 
 A great general may save his country at Zurich, and yet take 
 a commission from contractors; a banker's doubtful honesty 
 does not prevent him from being a statesman ; a great com- 
 poser may give the world divine music, and yet forge another 
 man's signature j and a woman of refined feeling may be 
 excessively weak-minded. In short, a devout woman may 
 have a very lofty soul, and yet have no ears to hear the voice 
 of another noble soul at her side. 
 
 The unaccountable freaks of physical infirmity find a par- 
 allel in the moral world. Here was a good creature making 
 her preserves and breaking her heart till she grew almost 
 ridiculous, because, forsooth, there was no one to eat them 
 but her uncle and herself. Those who sympathized with her 
 for the sake of her good qualities, or, in some cases, on account 
 of her defects, used to laugh over her disappointments. People 
 began to wonder what would become of so fine a property with 
 all Mile. Cormon's savings, and her uncle's to boot. 
 
 It was long since they began to suspect that at bottom, and 
 in spite of appearances, Mile. Cormon was "an original." 
 Originality is not allowed in the provinces ; originality means 
 that you have ideas which nobody else can understand, and m 
 a country town people's intellects, like their manner of life, 
 must all be on a level. Even in 1804 Rose's matrimonial 
 prospects were considered so problematical, that " to marry 
 like Mile. Cormon" was a current saying in Alencon, and 
 the most ironical way of suggesting Such-an-one would never 
 marry at all. 
 
 The necessity to laugh at some one must indeed be im- 
 perious in France, if any one could be found to raise a smile 
 at the expense of that excellent creature. Not merely did she 
 entertain the whole town, she was charitable, she was good ; 
 she was incapable of saying a spiteful word ; and more than 
 that, she was so much in unison with the whole spirit of the 
 place, its manners and its customs, that she was generally be-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 67 
 
 loved as the very incarnation of the life of the province ; she 
 had imbibed all its prejudices and made its interests hers ; she 
 had never gone beyond its limits, she adored it ; she was im- 
 bedded in provincial tradition. In spite of her eighteen thou- 
 sand livres per annum, a tolerably large income for the neigh- 
 borhood, she accommodated herself to the ways of her less 
 wealthy neighbors. When she went to her country house, 
 the Prebaudet, for instance, she drove over in an old-fashioned 
 wicker cariole hung with white leather straps, and fitted 
 with a couple of rusty weather-beaten leather curtains, which 
 scarcely closed it in. The equipage, drawn by a fat, broken- 
 winded mare, was known all over the town. Jacquelin, the 
 manservant, cleaned it as carefully as if it had been the finest 
 carriage from Paris. Mademoiselle was fond of it ; it had 
 lasted her a dozen years, a fact which she was wont to point 
 out with the triumphant joy of contented parsimony. Most 
 people were grateful to her for forbearing to humiliate them 
 by splendor which she might have flaunted before their eyes ; 
 it is even credible that if she had sent for a caleche from 
 Paris, it would have caused more talk than any of her " dis- 
 appointments." After all, the finest carriage in the world, 
 like the old-fashioned cariole, could only have taken her to 
 the Prebaudet ; and in the provinces they always keep the end 
 in view, and trouble themselves very little about the elegance 
 of the means, provided that they are sufficient. 
 
 To complete the picture of Mile. Cormon's household and 
 domestic life, several figures must be grouped round Mile. 
 Cormon and the Abbe de Sponde. Jacquelin, and Josette, 
 and Mariette, the cook, ministered to the comfort of uncle 
 and niece. 
 
 Jacquelin, a man of forty, short and stout, dark-haired and 
 ruddy, with a countenance of the Breton sailor type, had been 
 in service in the house for twenty-two years. He waited at 
 table, groomed the mare, worked in the garden, cleaned the 
 abb's shoes, ran errands, chopped firewood, drove the cariole,
 
 68 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOIVN. 
 
 went to the Prebaudet for corn, hay, and straw, and slept like 
 a dormouse in the antechamber of an evening. He was sup- 
 posed to be fond of Josette, and Josette was six-and-thirty. 
 But if she had married him, Mile. Cormon would have dis- 
 missed her, and so the poor lovers were fain to save up their 
 wages in silence, and to wait and hope for mademoiselle's 
 marriage, much as the Jews look for the advent of the Mes- 
 siah. 
 
 Josette came from the district between Alencon and Mor- 
 tagne ; she was a fat little woman. Her face, which reminded 
 you of a mud-bespattered apricot, was not wanting either in 
 character or intelligence. She was supposed to rule her mis- 
 tress. Josette and Jacquelin, feeling sure of the event, found 
 consolation, presumably, by discounting the future. Mariette, 
 the cook, had likewise been in the family for fifteen years ; 
 she was skilled in the cookery of the country and the prepara- 
 tion of the most esteemed provincial dishes. 
 
 Perhaps the fat, old bay mare, of the Normandy breed, 
 which Mile. Cormon used to drive to the Prebaudet, ought 
 to count for a good deal, for the affection which the five 
 inmates of the house bore the animal amounted to mania. 
 Penelope, for that was her name, had been with them for 
 eighteen years ; and so well was she cared for, so regularly 
 tended, that Jacquelin and mademoiselle hoped to get quite 
 another ten years of work out of her. Penelope was a stock 
 subject and source of interest in their lives. It seemed as if 
 poor Mile. Cormon, with no child of her own, lavished all her 
 maternal affection upon the lucky beast. Almost every human 
 being leading a solitary life in a crowded world will surround 
 himself with a make-believe family of some sort, and Penelope 
 took the place of dogs, cats, or canaries. 
 
 These four faithful servants for Penelope's intelligence had 
 been trained till it was very nearly on a par with the wits of the 
 other three, while they had sunk pretty much into the dumb, 
 submissive jog-trot life of the animal these four retainers
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 69 
 
 came and went and did the same things day after day, with 
 the unfailing regularity of clockwork. But, to use their own 
 expression, " they had first eaten their white bread." Mile. 
 Cormon suffered from a fixed idea upon the nerves ; and, after 
 the wont of such sufferers, she grew fidgety and hard to please, 
 not by force of nature, but because she had no outlet for her 
 energies. She had neither husband nor children to fill her 
 thoughts, so they fastened upon trifles. She would talk for 
 hours at a stretch of some inconceivably small matter, of a 
 dozen serviettes, for instance, lettered Z, which somehow or 
 other had been put before O. 
 
 "Why, what can Josette be thinking about?" she cried. 
 " Has she no notion what she is doing? " 
 
 Jacquelin chanced to be late in feeding Penelope one after- 
 noon, so every day for a whole week afterward mademoiselle 
 inquired whether the horse had been fed at two o'clock. Her 
 narrow imagination spent itself on small matters. A layer of 
 dust forgotten by the feather-duster, a slice of scorched toast, 
 an omission to close the blinds on Jacquelin's part when the 
 sun shone in upon furniture and carpets all these important 
 trifles produced serious trouble, mademoiselle lost her temper 
 over them. "Nothing was the same as it used to be. The 
 servants of old days were so changed that she did not know 
 them. They were spoilt. She was too good to them," and 
 so forth and so forth. One day Josette gave her mistress 
 the "Journee du Chretien"* instead of the "Quinzaine de 
 Paques."f The whole town heard of the mistake before night. 
 Mademoiselle had been obliged to get up and come out of 
 church, disturbing whole rows of chairs and raising the wild- 
 est conjectures, so that she was obliged afterward to give 
 all her friends a full account of the mishap. 
 
 "Josette," she said mildly, when she had come the whole 
 way home from St. Leonard's, " this must never happen 
 again." 
 
 * The Christian's Journey. f Fifteen Easters.
 
 70 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Mile. Cormon was far from suspecting that it was a very 
 fortunate thing for her that she could vent her spleen in petty 
 squabbles. The mind, like the body, requires exercise ; these 
 quarrels were a sort of mental gymnastics. Josette and Jac- 
 quelin took such unevennesses of temper as the agricultural 
 laborer takes the changes of the weather. The three good 
 souls could say among themselves that "It is a fine day," or 
 "It rains," without murmuring against the powers above. 
 Sometimes in the kitchen of a morning they would wonder in 
 what humor mademoiselle would wake, much as a farmer 
 studies the morning mists. And of necessity Mile. Cormon 
 ended by seeing herself in all the infinitely small details which 
 made up her life. Herself and God, her confessor and her 
 washing-days, the preserves to be made, the services of the 
 church to attend, and the uncle to take care of all these 
 things absorbed faculties that were none of the strongest. 
 For her the atoms of life were magnified by virtue of an 
 optical process peculiar to the selfish or the self-absorbed. 
 To so perfectly healthy a woman, the slightest symptom of 
 indigestion was a positively alarming portent. She lived, 
 moreover, under the ferule of the system of medicine prac- 
 ticed by our grandsires; a drastic purgative dose fit to kill 
 Penelope, taken four times a year, merely gave Mile. Cormon 
 a fillip. 
 
 What tremendous ransackings of the week's dietary if 
 Josette, assisting her mistress to dress, discovered a scarcely 
 visible pimple on shoulders that still boasted a satin skin ! 
 What triumph if the maid could bring a certain hare to her 
 mistress' recollection, and trace the accursed pimple to its 
 origin in that too heating article of food ! With what joy the 
 two women would cry : "It is the hare beyond a doubt ! " 
 
 " Mariette over-seasoned it," mademoiselle would add; 
 " I always tell her not to overdo it for my uncle and me, but 
 Mariette has no more memory than " 
 
 "Than the hare," suggested Josette.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 71 
 
 "It is the truth," returned mademoiselle; "she has no 
 more memory than the hare; you have just hit it." 
 
 Four times in a year, at the beginning of each season, Mile. 
 Cormon went to spend a certain number of days at the Pre- 
 baudet. It was now the middle of May, when she liked to see 
 how her apple trees had "snowed," as they say in the cider 
 country, an allusion to the white blossoms strewn in the or- 
 chards in the spring. When the circles of fallen petals look 
 like snowdrifts under the trees, the proprietor may hope to 
 have abundance of cider in the autumn. Mile. Cormon esti- 
 mated her barrels, and at the same time superintended any 
 necessary after-winter repairs, planning out work in the garden 
 and orchard, from which she drew no inconsiderable supplies. 
 Each time of year had its special business. 
 
 Mademoiselle used to give a farewell dinner to her faithful 
 inner circle before leaving, albeit she would see them again at 
 the end of three weeks. All Alencon knew when the journey 
 was to be undertaken. Any one that had fallen behindhand 
 immediately paid a call, her drawing-room was filled; every- 
 body wished her a prosperous journey, as if she had been start- 
 ing for Calcutta. Then, in the morning, all the tradespeople 
 were standing in their doorways ; every one, great and small, 
 watched the cariole go past, and it seemed as if everybody 
 learned a piece of fresh news when one repeated after another, 
 " So Mademoiselle Cormon is going to the Prebaudet." 
 
 One would remark : " She has bread ready baked, she has ! " 
 
 And his neighbor would return: "Eh! my lad, she is a 
 good woman ; if property always fell into such hands as hers, 
 there would not be a beggar to be seen in the countryside." 
 
 Or another would exclaim : " Halloo ! I should not wonder 
 if our oldest vines are in flower, for there is Mademoiselle 
 Cormon setting out for the Prebaudet. How comes it that 
 she is so little given to marrying?" 
 
 "I should be quite ready to marry her, all the same," a
 
 72 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 wag would answer. " The marriage is half made one side 
 is willing, but the other isn't. Pooh ! the oven is heating for 
 Monsieur du Bousquier." 
 
 " Monsieur du Bousquier? She has refused him." 
 At every house that evening people remarked solemnly : 
 " Mademoiselle Cormon has gone." 
 
 Or perhaps : " So you have let Mademoiselle Cormon go ! " 
 The Wednesday selected by Suzanne for making a scandal 
 chanced to be this very day of leave-taking, when Mile. Cor- 
 mon nearly drove Josette to distraction over the packing of 
 the parcels which she meant to take with her. A good deal 
 that was done and said in the town that morning was like to lend 
 additional interest to the farewell gathering at night. While 
 the old maid was busily making preparations for her journey ; 
 while the astute chevalier was playing his game of piquet in 
 the house of Mile. Armande de Gordes, sister of the aged 
 Marquis de Gordes and queen of the aristocratic salon, Mme. 
 Granson had sounded the alarm bell in half a score of houses. 
 There was not a soul but felt some curiosity to see what sort 
 of figure the seducer would cut that evening ; and to Mme. 
 Granson and the Chevalier de Valois it was an important 
 matter to know how Mile. Cormon would take the news, in 
 her double quality of marriageable spinster and lady presi- 
 dent of the Maternity Fund. As for the unsuspected du 
 Bousquier, he was taking the air on the parade. He was just 
 beginning to think that Suzanne had made a fool of him ; and 
 this suspicion only confirmed the rules which he had laid 
 down with regard to womankind. 
 
 On these high days the cloth was laid about half-past three 
 in the Cormon house. Four o'clock was the state dinner 
 hour in Alencon, on ordinary days they dined at two, as in 
 the time of the Empire ; but then, they supped ! 
 
 Mile. Cormon always felt an inexpressible sense of satis- 
 faction when she was dressed to receive her guests as mistress 
 of her house. It was one of the pleasures which she most
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 73 
 
 relished, be it said without malice, though egoism certainly 
 lay beneath the feeling. When thus arrayed for conquest, a 
 ray of hope slid across the darkness of her soul ; a voice 
 within her cried that nature had not endowed her so abund- 
 antly in vain, that surely some enterprising man was about to 
 appear for her. She felt the younger for the wish and the 
 fresher for her toilet ; she looked at her stout figure with a 
 certain elation ; and afterward, when she went downstairs to 
 submit salon, study, and boudoir to an awful scrutiny, this 
 sense of satisfaction still remained with her. To and fro she 
 went, with the naive contentment of the rich man who feels 
 conscious at every moment that he is rich and will lack for 
 nothing all his life long. She looked round upon her fur- 
 niture, the eternal furniture, the antiquities, the lacquered 
 panels, and told herself that such fine things ought to have 
 a master. 
 
 After admiring the dining-room, where the space was filled 
 by the long table with its snowy cloth, its score of covers 
 symmetrically laid ; after going through the roll-call of a 
 squadron of bottles ordered up from the cellar, and making 
 sure that each bore an honorable label ; and finally, after a most 
 minute verification of a score of little slips of paper on which 
 the abbe had written the names of the guests with a trembling 
 hand it was the sole occasion on which he took an active 
 part in the household, and the place of every guest always 
 gave rise to grave discussion after this review, Mile. Cor- 
 mon in her fine array went into the garden to join her uncle ; 
 for at this pleasantest hour of the day he used to walk up 
 and down the terrace beside the Brillante, listening to the 
 twittering of the birds, which, hidden closely among the 
 leaves in the lime-tree walk, knew no fear of boys or sports- 
 men. 
 
 Mile. Cormon never came out to the abbe during these 
 intervals of waiting without asking some hopelessly absurd 
 question, in the hope of drawing the good man into a discus-
 
 74 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 sion which might interest him. Her reasons for so doing 
 must be given, for this very characteristic trait adds the 
 finishing touch to her portrait. 
 
 Mile. Cormon considered it a duty to talk ; not that she 
 was naturally loquacious, for, unfortunately, with her dearth 
 of ideas and very limited stock of phrases, it was difficult to 
 hold forth at any length ; but she thought that in this way 
 she was fulfilling the social duties prescribed by religion, 
 which bids us be agreeable to our neighbor. It was a duty 
 which weighed so much upon her mind that she had submitted 
 this case of conscience out of the " Child's Guide to Manners " 
 to her director, the Abbe Couturier. Whereupon, so far from 
 being disarmed by the penitent's humble admission of the 
 violence of her mental struggles to find something to say, the 
 old ecclesiastic, being firm in matters of discipline, read her a 
 whole chapter out of St. Franois de Sales on the " Duties of 
 a Woman in the World ; " on the decent gayety of the pious 
 Christian female, and the duty of confining her austerities to 
 herself; a woman, according to this authority, ought to be 
 amiable in her home and to act in such sort that her neigh- 
 bor never feels dull in her company. After this, Mile. Cor- 
 mon, with a deep sense of duty, was anxious to obey her 
 director at any cost. He had bidden her to discourse agree- 
 ably, so every time the conversation languished she felt the 
 perspiration breaking out over her with the violence of her 
 exertions to find something to say which should stimulate the 
 flagging interest. She would come out with odd remarks at 
 such times. Once she revived, with some success, a discussion 
 on the ubiquity of the apostles (of which she understood not 
 a syllable) by the unexpected observation that "You cannot 
 be in two places at once unless you are a bird." With such 
 conversational cues as these, the lady had earned the title of 
 "dear, good Mademoiselle Cormon " in her set, which phrase, 
 in the mouth of local wits, might be taken to mean that she 
 was as ignorant as a carp, and a bit of a " natural ; " but there
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY 7 OWN. 75 
 
 were plenty of people of her own calibre to take the remark 
 literally, and reply: "Oh, yes, Mademoiselle Corraon is very 
 good." 
 
 Sometimes (always in her desire to be agreeable to hep 
 guests and fulfill her duties as a hostess) she asked such absurd 
 questions that everybody burst out laughing. She wanted to 
 know, for example, what the Government did with the taxes 
 which it had been receiving all these years ; or how it was 
 that the Bible had not been printed in the time of Christ, 
 seeing that it had been written by Moses. Altogether she was 
 on a par with the English country gentleman, a member of 
 the House of Commons, who made the famous speech in 
 which he said : " I am always hearing of Posterity; I should 
 very much like to know what Posterity has done for the 
 country." 
 
 On such occasions, the heroic Chevalier de Valois came to 
 the rescue, bringing up all the resources of his wit and tact at 
 the sight of the smiles exchanged by pitiless smatterers. He 
 loved to give to woman, did this elderly noble ; he lent his 
 wit to Mile. Cormon by coming to her assistance with a para- 
 dox, and covered her retreat so well, that sometimes it seemed 
 as if she had said nothing foolish. She once owned seriously 
 that she did not know the difference between an ox* and a 
 bull. The enchanting chevalier stopped the roars of laughter 
 by saying that oxen could never be more than uncles to the 
 bullocks. Another time, hearing much talk of cattle-breeding 
 and its difficulties a topic which often comes up in conversa- 
 tion in the neighborhood of the superb du Pin stud she so 
 far grasped the technicalities of horse-breeding as to ask : 
 "Why, if they wanted colts, they did not serve a mare twice 
 a year ?" The chevalier drew down the laughter upon himself. 
 
 "It is quite possible," said he. The company pricked up 
 its ears. 
 
 "The fault lies with the naturalists," he continued ; "they 
 * Draught oxen are emasculated.
 
 76 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 have not found out how to breed mares that are less than 
 eleven months in foal." 
 
 Poor Mile. Cormon no more understood the meaning of 
 the words than the difference between the ox and the bull. 
 The chevalier met with no gratitude for his pains ; his chival- 
 rous services were beyond the reach of the lady's compre- 
 hension. She saw that the conversation grew livelier ; she 
 was relieved to find that she was not so stupid as she imagined. 
 A day came at last when she settled down in her ignorance, 
 like the Due de Brancas; and the hero of " Le Distrait," it 
 may be remembered, made himself so comfortable in the ditch 
 after his fall that, when the people came to pull him out, he 
 asked what they wanted with him. Since a somewhat recent 
 period Mile. Cormon had lost her fears. She brought out her 
 conversational cues with a self-possession akin to that solemn 
 manner the very coxcombry of stupidity which accompanies 
 the fatuous utterances of British patriotism. 
 
 As she went with stately steps toward the terrace, therefore, 
 she was chewing the cud of reflection, seeking for some ques- 
 tion which should draw her uncle out of a silence which 
 always hurt her feelings ; she thought that he felt dull. 
 
 "Uncle," she began, hanging on his arm, and nestling 
 joyously close to him (for this was another of her make-believes, 
 "If I had a husband, I should do just so! " she thought); 
 "uncle, if everything on earth happens by the will of God, 
 there must be a reason for everything." 
 
 "Assuredly," the Abbe de Sponde answered gravely. He 
 loved his niece, and submitted with angelic patience to be 
 torn from his meditations. 
 
 "Then if I never marry at all, it will be because it is the 
 will of God?" 
 
 "Yes, my child." 
 
 " But still, as there is nothing to prevent me from marrying 
 to-morrow, my will perhaps might thwart the will of God?" 
 
 " That might be so, if we really knew God's will," returned
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 77 
 
 the sub-prior of the Sorbonne. " Remark, my dear, that you 
 insert an if." 
 
 Poor Rose was bewildered. She had hoped to lead her 
 uncle to the subject of marriage by way of an argument ad 
 omnipotentem. But the naturally obtuse are wont to adopt the 
 remorseless logic of childhood, which is to say, they proceed 
 from the answer to another question, a method frequently 
 found embarrassing. 
 
 "But, uncle," she persisted, "God cannot mean women 
 never to marry ; for if He did, all of them ought to be either 
 unmarried or married. Their lots are distributed unjustly." 
 
 "My child," said the good abbe, "you are finding fault 
 with the church, which teaches that celibacy is a more excel- 
 lent way to God." 
 
 "But if the church was right, and everybody was a good 
 Catholic, there would soon be no more people, uncle." 
 
 " You are too ingenious, Rose ; there is no need to be so 
 ingenious to be happy." 
 
 Such words brought a smile of satisfaction to poor Rose's 
 lips and confirmed her in the good opinion which she began 
 to conceive of herself. Behold how the world, like our 
 friends and enemies, contributes to strengthen our faults. At 
 this moment guests began to arrive, and the conversation was 
 interrupted. On these high festival occasions, the disposition 
 of the rooms brought about little, familiarities between the 
 servants and invited guests. Mariette saw the president of 
 the Tribunal, a triple expansion glutton, as he passed by her 
 kitchen. 
 
 "Oh, Monsieur du Ronceret, I have been making cauli- 
 flower au gratin on purpose for you, for mademoiselle knows 
 how fond you are of it. 'Mind you do not fail with it, 
 Mariette,' she said ; ' Monsieur le President is coming.' ' 
 
 "Good Mademoiselle Cormon," returned the man of law. 
 "Mariette, did you baste the cauliflowers with gravy instead 
 of stock? It is more savory." And the president did not
 
 78 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 disdain to enter the council-chamber where Mariette ruled the 
 roast, nor to cast an epicure's eye over her preparations, and 
 give his opinion as a master of the craft. 
 
 "Good-day, madame," said Josette, addressing Mme. 
 Granson, who sedulously cultivated the waiting-woman. 
 "Mademoiselle has not forgotten you;" you are to have a 
 dish of fish." 
 
 As for the Chevalier de Valois, he spoke to Mariette with 
 the jocularity of a great noble unbending to an inferior 
 
 " Well, dear cordon bleu, I would give you the cross of the 
 Legion of Honor if I could ; tell me, is there any dainty 
 morsel for which one ought to save one's self? " 
 
 " Yes, yes, Monsieur de Valois, a hare from the Pr6baudet ; 
 it weighed fourteen pounds ! " 
 
 " That's a good girl," said the chevalier, patting Josette on 
 the cheek with two fingers. "Ah! weighs fourteen pounds, 
 does it?" 
 
 Du Bousquier was not of the party. Mile. Cormon treated 
 him hardly, faithful to her system before described. In the 
 very bottom of her heart she felt an inexplicable drawing to- 
 ward this man of fifty, whom she had once refused. Some- 
 times she repented of that refusal, and yet she had a presenti- 
 ment that she should marry him after all, and a dread of him 
 which forbade her to wish for the marriage. These ideas 
 stimulated her interest in du Bousquier. The Republican's 
 herculean proportions produced an effect upon her which she 
 would not admit to herself; and the Chevalier de Valois and 
 Mme. Granson, while they could not explain Mile. Cormon's 
 inconsistencies, had detected naive, furtive glances, sufficiently 
 clear in their significance to set them both on the watch to 
 ruin the hopes which du Bousquier clearly entertained in spite 
 of a first check. 
 
 Two guests kept the others waiting, but their official du- 
 ties excused them both. One was M. du Coudrai, registrar 
 of mortgages; the other, M. Choisnel, had once acted as
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 79 
 
 land-steward to the Marquis de Gordes. Choisnel was the 
 notary of the old noblesse, and received everywhere among 
 them with the distinction which his merits deserved ; he had 
 beside a not inconsiderable private fortune. When the two 
 late-comers arrived, Jacquelin, the manservant, seeing them 
 turn to go into the drawing-room, came forward with : 
 "'They' are all in the garden." 
 
 The registrar of mortgages was one of the most amiable 
 men in the town. There were but two things against him 
 he had married an old woman for her money in the first 
 place, and in the second it was his habit to perpetrate out- 
 rageous puns, at which he was the first to laugh. But, doubt- 
 less, the stomachs of the guests were growing impatient, for 
 at first sight he was hailed with that faint sigh which usually 
 welcomes last-comers under such circumstances. Pending 
 the official announcement of dinner, the company strolled up 
 and down the terrace by the Brillante, looking out over the 
 stream with its bed of mosaic and its water-plants, at the so 
 picturesque details of the row of houses huddled together on 
 the opposite bank ; the old-fashioned wooden balconies, the 
 tumble-down window-sills, the balks of timber that shored up 
 a story projecting over the river, the cabinet-maker's work- 
 shop, the tiny gardens where odds and ends of clothing were 
 hanging out to dry. It was, in short, the poor quarter of a 
 country town, to which the near neighborhood of the water, a 
 weeping willow drooping over the bank, a rosebush or so, and 
 a few flowers had lent an indescribable charm, worthy of a 
 landscape painter's brush. 
 
 The chevalier meanwhile was narrowly watching the faces 
 of the guests. He knew that his firebrand had very success- 
 fully taken hold of the best coteries in the town ; but no one 
 spoke openly of Suzanne and du Bousquier and the great news 
 as yet. The art of distilling scandal is possessed by provin- 
 cials in a supreme degree. It was felt that the time was not 
 yet ripe for open discussion of the strange event, Every one
 
 80 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 was bound to go through a private rehearsal first. So it was 
 whispered 
 
 " Have you heard ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "DuBousquier?" 
 
 "And the fair Suzanne." 
 
 " Does Mademoiselle Cormon know anything? " 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 This was gossip piano, presently destined to swell into a 
 crescendo when they were ready to discuss the first dish of 
 scandal. 
 
 All of a sudden the chevalier confronted Mme. Granson. 
 That lady had sported her green bonnet, trimmed with au- 
 riculas ; her face was beaming. Was she simply longing to 
 begin the concert ? Such news is as good as a gold-mine to be 
 worked in the monotonous lives of these people ; but the ob- 
 servant and uneasy chevalier fancied that he read something 
 more in the good lady's expression to wit, the exultation of 
 self-interest ! At once he turned to look at Athanase, and 
 detected in his silence the signs of profound concentration of 
 some kind. In another moment the young man's glance at 
 Mile. Cormon's figure, which sufficiently resembled a pair of 
 regimental kettledrums, shot a sudden light across the cheva- 
 lier's brain. By that gleam he could read the whole past. 
 
 "Egad ! " he said to himself, " what a slap in the face I 
 have laid myself out to get ! " 
 
 He went across to offer his arm to Mile. Cormon, so that 
 he might afterward take her in to dinner. She regarded the 
 chevalier with respectful esteem ; for, in truth, with his name 
 and position in the aristocratic constellations of the province, 
 he was one of the most brilliant ornaments of her salon. In 
 her heart of hearts, she had longed to be Mme. de Valois at 
 any time during the past twelve years. The name was like a 
 branch for the swarming thoughts of her brain to cling about
 
 AT ONCE HE TURNED TO LOOK AT ATHANASE.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 81 
 
 he fulfilled all her ideals as to the birth, quality, and exter- 
 nals of an eligible man. But while the Chevalier de Valois 
 was the choice of heart and brain and social ambition, the 
 elderly ruin, curled though he was like a St. John of a pro- 
 cession-day, filled Mile. Cormon with dismay ; the heiress saw 
 nothing but the noble ; the woman could not think of him as 
 a husband. The chevalier's affectation of indifference to mar- 
 riage, and still more his unimpeachable character in a houseful 
 of workgirls, had seriously injured him, contrary to his own 
 expectations. The man of quality, so clear-sighted in the 
 matter of the annuity, miscalculated on this subject ; and Mile. 
 Cormon herself was not aware that her private reflections upon 
 the too well-conducted chevalier might have been translated 
 by the remark: "What a pity that he is not a little bit of a 
 rake ! " 
 
 Students of human nature have remarked these leanings of 
 the saint toward the sinner, and wondered at a taste so little 
 in accordance, as they imagine, with Christian virtue. But, 
 to go no further, what nobler destiny for a virtuous woman 
 than the task of cleansing, after the manner of charcoal, the 
 turbid waters of vice ? How is it that nobody has seen that 
 these generous creatures, confined by their principles to strict 
 conjugal fidelity, must naturally desire a mate of great practical 
 experience? A reformed rake makes the best husband. And 
 so it came to pass that the poor spinster must sigh over the 
 chosen vessel, offered her as it were in two pieces. Heaven 
 alone could weld the Chevalier du Valois and du Bousquier 
 in one. 
 
 If the significance of the few words exchanged between the 
 chevalier and Mile. Cormon is to be properly understood, it 
 is necessary to put other matters before the reader. Two very 
 serious questions were dividing Alencon into two camps, and, 
 moreover, du Bousquier was mixed up in both affairs in some 
 mysterious way. The first of these debates concerned the 
 cur6. He had taken the oath of allegiance in the time of the 
 6
 
 82 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Revolution, and now was living down orthodox prejudices 
 by setting an example of the loftiest goodness. He was a 
 Cheverus on a smaller scale, and so much was he appreciated, 
 that when he died the whole town wept for him. Mile. Cor- 
 mon and the Abbe de Sponde belonged, however, to the 
 minority, to the church sublime in its orthodoxy, a section 
 which was to the Court of Rome as the Ultras were shortly to 
 be to the Court of Louis XVIII. The abbe, in particular, 
 declined to recognize the church that had submitted to force 
 and made terms with the Constitutionnels. So the cure was 
 never seen in the salon of the Maison Cormon, and the sym- 
 pathies of its frequenters were with the officiating priest of 
 St. Leonard's, the aristocratic church in Alen9on. Du Bous- 
 quier, that rabid Liberal under a Royalist's skin, knew how 
 necessary it is to find standards to rally the discontented, who 
 form, as it were, the back-shop of every opposition, and there- 
 fore he had already enlisted the sympathies of the trading 
 classes for the cure. 
 
 Now for the second affair. The same blunt diplomatist was 
 the secret instigator of a scheme for building a theatre, an 
 idea which had only lately sprouted in Alencon. Du Bous- 
 quier's zealots knew not their Mahomet, but they were the 
 more ardent in their defense of what they believed to be their 
 own plan. Athanase was one of the very hottest of the parti- 
 sans in favor of the theatre ; in the mayor's office for several 
 days past he had been pleading for the cause which all the 
 younger men had taken up. 
 
 To return to the chevalier. He offered his arm to Mile. 
 Cormon, who thanked him with a radiant glance for this 
 attention. For all answer, the chevalier indicated Athanase 
 by a meaning look. 
 
 "Mademoiselle," he began, "as you have such well- 
 balanced judgment in matters of social convention, and as 
 that young man is related to you in some way " 
 
 "Very distantly," she broke in.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 83 
 
 "Ought you not to use the influence which you possess 
 with him and his mother to prevent him from going utterly 
 to the bad? He is not very religious as it is; he defends 
 that perjured priest ; but that is nothing. It is a much more 
 serious matter; is he not plunging thoughtlessly into opposi- 
 tion without realizing how his conduct may affect his pros- 
 pects ? He is scheming to build this theatre ; he is the dupe 
 of that Republican in disguise, du Bousquier " 
 
 " Dear me, Monsieur de Valois, his mother tells me that he 
 is so clever, and he has not a word to say for himself ; he al- 
 ways stands planted before you like a 'statute ' " 
 
 "Of limitations," cried the registrar. "I caught that fly- 
 ing. I present my devoars to the Chevalier de Valois," he 
 added, saluting the latter with the exaggeration of Henri 
 Monnier as "Joseph Prudhomme," an admirable type of the 
 class to which M. du Coudrai belonged. 
 
 M. de Valois, in return, gave him the abbreviated patroniz- 
 ing nod of a noble standing on his dignity ; then he drew 
 Mile. Cormon farther along the terrace by the distance of 
 several flower-pots, to make the registrar understand that he 
 did not wish to be overheard. 
 
 Then, lowering his voice, he bent to say in Mile. Cormon's 
 ear: "How can you expect that lads educated in these de- 
 testable Imperial Lyceums should have any ideas? Great 
 ideas and a lofty love can only come of right courses and 
 nobleness of life. It is not difficult to foresee, from the look 
 of the poor fellow, that he will be weak in his intellect and 
 come to a miserable end. See how pale and haggard he 
 looks!" 
 
 " His mother says that he works far too hard," she replied 
 innocently. " He spends his nights, think of it ! in reading 
 books and writing. What good can it possibly do a young 
 man's prospects to sit up writing at night? " 
 
 " Why, it exhausts him," said the chevalier, trying to bring 
 the lady's thoughts back to the point, which was to disgust
 
 84 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 her with Athanase. "The things that went on in those 
 Imperial Lyceums were something really shocking." 
 
 "Oh yes," said the simple lady. "Did they not make 
 them walk out with drums in front? The masters had no 
 more religion than heathens; and they put them in uniform, 
 poor boys, exactly as if they had been soldiers. What 
 notions ! " 
 
 "And see what comes of it," continued the chevalier, 
 indicating Athanase. "In my time, where was the young 
 man that could not look a pretty woman in the face ? Now, 
 he lowers his eyes as soon as he sees you. That young man 
 alarms me, because I am interested in him. Tell him not to 
 intrigue with Bonapartists, as he is doing, to build this the- 
 atre ; if these little youngsters do not raise an insurrection and 
 demand it (for insurrection and constitution, to my mind, 
 are two words for the same thing), the authorities will build 
 it. "And tell his mother to look after him." 
 
 " Oh, she will not allow him to see these half-pay people or 
 to keep low company, I am sure. I will speak to him about 
 it," said Mile. Cormon ; "he might lose his situation at the 
 mayor's office. And then what would they do, he and his 
 mother? It makes one shudder." 
 
 As M. de Talleyrand said of his wife, so said the chevalier 
 within himself at that moment, as he looked at the lady 
 
 "If there is a stupider woman, I should like to see her. 
 On the honor of a gentleman, if virtue makes a woman so 
 stupid as this, is it not a vice ? And yet, what an adorable 
 wife she would make for a man of my age ! What principle ! 
 What ignorance of life " 
 
 Please to bear in mind that these remarks were addressed to 
 the Princess Goritza during the manipulation of a pinch of 
 snuff. 
 
 Mme. Granson felt instinctively that the chevalier was 
 talking of Athanase. In her eagerness to know what he had 
 been saying, she followed Mile. Cormon, who walked up to
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 85 
 
 the young man in question, putting out six feet of dignity in 
 front ; but at that very moment Jacquelin announced that 
 "Mademoiselle was served," and the mistress of the house 
 shot an appealing glance at the chevalier. But the gallant 
 registrar of mortgages was beginning to see a something in 
 M. de Valois' manner, a glimpse of the barrier which the 
 noblesse were about to raise between themselves and the 
 bourgeoisie ; so, delighted with a chance to cut out the cheva- 
 lier, he crooked his arm, and Mile. Cormon was obliged to 
 take it. M. de Valois, from motives of policy, fastened upon 
 Mme. Granson. 
 
 " Mademoiselle Cormon takes the liveliest interest in your 
 dear Athanase, my dear lady," he said, as they slowly followed 
 in the wake of the other guests, "but that interest is falling 
 off through your son's fault. He is lax and Liberal in his 
 opinions ; he is agitating for this theatre ; he is mixed up with 
 the Bonapartists ; he takes the part of the Constitutionnel 
 cure. This line of conduct may cost him his situation. You 
 know how carefully his majesty's government is weeding the 
 service. If your dear Athanase is once cashiered, where will 
 he find employment ? He must not get into bad odor with 
 the authorities." 
 
 "Oh, Monsieur le Chevalier," cried the poor startled 
 mother, " what do I not owe you for telling me this ! You 
 are right ; my boy is a tool in the hands of a bad set ; I will 
 open his eyes to his position." 
 
 It was long since the chevalier had sounded Athanase's 
 character at a glance. He saw in the depths of the young 
 man's nature the scarcely malleable material of Republican 
 convictions ; a lad at that age will sacrifice everything for 
 such ideas if he is smitten with the word Liberty, that so 
 vague, so little comprehended word which is like a standard 
 of revolt for those at the bottom of the wheel for whom revolt 
 means revenge. Athanase was sure to stick to his opinions, 
 for he had woven them, with his artist's sorrows and his em-
 
 86 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 bittered views of the social framework, into his political 
 creed. He was ready to sacrifice his future at the outset for 
 these opinions, not knowing that he, like all men of real 
 ability, would have seen reason to modify them by the time 
 he reached the age of six-and-thirty, when a man has formed 
 his own conclusions of life, with its intricate relations and 
 interdependences. If Athanase was faithful to the opposition 
 in Alencon, he would fall into disgrace with Mile. Cormon. 
 Thus far the chevalier saw clearly. 
 
 And so this little town, so peaceful in appearance, was to 
 the full as much agitated internally as any congress of diplo- 
 mates, when craft and guile and passion and self-interest are 
 met to discuss the weightiest questions between empire and 
 empire. 
 
 Meanwhile the guests gathered about the table were eating 
 their way through the first course as people eat in the pro- 
 vinces, without a blush for an honest appetite; whereas, in 
 Paris, it would appear that our jaws are controlled by sump- 
 tuary edicts which deliberately set the laws of anatomy at 
 defiance. We eat with the tips of our teeth in Paris, we 
 filch the pleasures of the table, but in the provinces things 
 are taken more naturally; possibly existence centres a little 
 too much about the great and universal method of mainten- 
 ance to which God condemns all His creatures. It was at 
 the end of the first course that Mile. Cormon brought out the 
 most celebrated of all her conversational cues ; it was talked of 
 for two years afterward ; it is quoted even now, indeed, in 
 the lower bourgeois strata of Alencon whenever her marriage 
 is under discussion. Over the last entree but one, the con- 
 versation waxed lively and wordy, turning, as might have 
 been expected, upon the affair of the theatre and the cure. 
 In the first enthusiasm of royalism in 1816, those extremists, 
 who were afterward called les jesuites du pays, or country 
 Jesuits, were for expelling the Abbe Francois from his cure. 
 M. de Valois suspected du Bousquier of supporting the priest
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 87 
 
 and instigating the intrigues ; at any rate, the noble chevalier 
 piled the burdens on du Bousquier's back with his wonted 
 skill ; and du Bousquier, being unrepresented by counsel, was 
 condemned and put in the pillory. Among those present, 
 Athanase was the only person sufficiently frank to stand up for 
 the absent, and he felt that he was not in a position to bring out 
 his ideas before these Alengon magnates, of whose intellects 
 he had the meanest opinion. Only in the provinces nowa- 
 days will you find young men keeping a respectful counte- 
 nance before people of a certain age without daring to have a 
 a fling at their elders or to contradict them too flatly. To 
 resume : On the advent of some delicious canards aux olives, 
 the conversation first decidedly flagged, and then suddenly 
 dropped dead. Mile. Cormon, emulous of her own poultry, 
 invented another canard in her anxiety to defend du Bous- 
 quier, who had been represented as an arch-concoctor of 
 intrigue, and a man to set mountains fighting. 
 
 " For my own part," said she, "I thought that Monsieur 
 du Bousquier gave his whole attention to childish matters." 
 
 Under the circumstances, the epigram produced a tremen- 
 dous effect. Mile. Cormon had a great success ; she brought 
 the Princess Goritza face downward on the table. The cheva- 
 lier, by no means expecting his Dulcinea to say anything so 
 much to the purpose, could find no words to express his ad- 
 miration ; he applauded after the Italian fashion, noiselessly, 
 with the tips of his fingers. 
 
 " She is adorably witty," he said, turning to Mme. Granson. 
 " I have always said that she would unmask her batteries some 
 day." 
 
 "But when you know her very well, she is charming," 
 said the widow. 
 
 "All women, madame, have esprit when you know them 
 well." 
 
 When the Homeric laughter subsided, Mile. Cormon asked 
 for an explanation of her success. Then the chorus of scandal
 
 88 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 grew to a height. Du Bousquier was transformed into a 
 bachelor Father Gigogne ; it was he who filled fhe Foundling 
 Hospital; the immorality of his life was laid bare at last; it 
 was all of a piece with his Paris orgies, and so forth and so 
 forth. Led by the Chevalier de Valois, the cleverest of con- 
 ductors of this kind of orchestra, the overture was something 
 magnificent. 
 
 "I do not know," said he, with much indulgence, "what 
 there could possibly be to prevent a du Bousquier from marry- 
 ing Mademoiselle Suzanne whatever-it-is, what do you call 
 her ? Suzette ! I only know the children by sight, though I 
 lodge with Mme. Lardot. If this Suzon is a tall, fine-looking 
 forward sort of girl with gray eyes, a slender figure, and little 
 feet I have not paid much attention to these things, but she 
 seemed to me to be very insolent and very much du Bous- 
 quier's superior in the matter of manners. Beside, Suzanne 
 has the nobility of beauty ; from that point of view, she would 
 certainly make a marriage beneath her. The Emperor Joseph, 
 you know, had the curiosity to go to see the du Barry at Lu- 
 ciennes. He offered her his arm ; and when the poor cour- 
 tesan, overcome by such an honor, hesitated to take it : ' Beauty 
 is always a queen,' said the Emperor. Remark that the Em- 
 peror Joseph was an Austrian German," added the chevalier; 
 "but, believe me, that Germany, which we think of as a very 
 boorish country, is really a land of noble chivalry and fine 
 manners, especially toward Poland and Hungary, where there 
 
 are " Here the chevalier broke off, fearing to make an 
 
 allusion to his own happy fortune in the past ; he only took 
 up his snuff-box and confided the rest to the princess who had 
 smiled on him for thirty-six years. 
 
 "The speech was delicately considerate for Louis XV.," 
 said du Ronceret. 
 
 "But we are talking of the Emperor Joseph, I believe," 
 returned Mile. Cormon, with a knowing little air. 
 
 "Mademoiselle," said the chevalier, seeing the wicked
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 89 
 
 glances exchanged by the president, the registrar, and the 
 notary, " Madame du Barry was Louis Quinze's Suzanne, a 
 fact known well enough to us scapegraces, but which young 
 ladies are not expected to know. Your ignorance shows that 
 the diamond is flawless. The corruptions of history have not 
 so much as touched you." 
 
 At this the Abbe de Sponde looked graciously upon M. de 
 Valois and bent his head in laudatory approval. 
 
 "Do you not know history, mademoiselle?" asked the 
 registrar. 
 
 " If you muddle up Louis XV. and Suzanne, how can you 
 expect me to know your history? " was Mile. Cormon's angelic 
 reply. She was so pleased ! The dish was empty and the 
 conversation revived to such purpose that everybody was 
 laughing with their mouths full at her last simple but ingenu- 
 ous observation. 
 
 " Poor young thing ! " said the Abbe de Sponde. " When 
 once trouble comes, that love divine called charity is as blind 
 as the pagan love, and should see nothing of the causes of the 
 trouble. You are president of the Maternity Society, Rose ; 
 this child will need help ; it will not be easy for her to find a 
 husband." 
 
 " Poor child ! " said Mile. Cormon. 
 
 "Is du Bousquier going to marry her, do you suppose?" 
 asked the president of the Tribunal. 
 
 " It would be his duty to do so if he were a decent man," 
 said Mme. Granson ; " but, really, my dog has better notions 
 of decency " 
 
 "And yet Azor is a great forager," put in the registrar, 
 trying a joke this time as a change from a pun. 
 
 They were still talking of du Bousquier over the dessert. 
 He was the butt of uncounted playful jests, which grew more 
 and more thunder-charged under the influence of wine. Led 
 off" by the registrar, they followed up one pun with another. 
 Du Bousquier's character was now ap-parent; he was not a
 
 00 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 father of the church, nor a reverend father, nor yet a con- 
 script father, and so on and so on, till the Abbe de Sponde 
 said : " In any case, he is not a foster-father," with a gravity 
 that checked the laughter. 
 
 " Nor a heavy father," added the chevalier. 
 
 The church and the aristocracy had descended into the 
 arena of word-play without loss of dignity. 
 
 "Hush!" said the registrar, "I can hear du Bousquier's 
 boots creaking ; he is in over shoes over boots, and no mis- 
 take." 
 
 It nearly always happens that when a man's name is in 
 every one's mouth, he is the last to hear what is said of him ; 
 the whole town may be talking of him, slandering him or 
 crying him down, and if he has no friends to repeat what 
 other people say of him, he is not likely to hear it. So the 
 blameless du Bousquier, du Bousquier who would fain have 
 been guilty, who wished that Suzanne had not lied to him, 
 was supremely unconscious of all that was taking place. No- 
 body had spoken to him of Suzanne's revelations; for that 
 matter, everybody thought it indiscreet to ask questions about 
 the affair, when the man most concerned sometimes possesses 
 secrets which compel him to keep silence. So when the people 
 adjourned for coffee to the drawing-room, where several even- 
 ing visitors were already assembled, du Bousquier wore an 
 irresistible and slightly fatuous air. 
 
 Mile. Cormon, counseled by confusion, dared not look 
 toward the terrible seducer. She took possession of Athanase 
 and administered a lecture, bringing out the oddest assort- 
 ment of the commonplaces of Royalist doctrines and edifying 
 truisms. As the unlucky poet had no snuff-box with a portrait 
 of a princess on the lid to sustain him under the shower-bath 
 of foolish utterances, it was with a vacant expression that he 
 heard his adored lady. His eyes were fixed on that enormous 
 bust, which maintained the absolute repose characteristic of 
 great masses. Desire wrought a kind of intoxication in him.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 91 
 
 The old maid's thin, shrill voice became low music for his 
 ears ; her platitudes were fraught with ideas. 
 
 Love is an utterer of false coin ; he is always at work trans- 
 forming common copper into gold louis ; sometimes, also, he 
 makes his seeming douzains* of fine gold. 
 
 " Well, Athanase, will you promise me ?" 
 
 The final phrase struck on the young man's ear ; he woke 
 with a start from a blissful dream. 
 
 "What, mademoiselle?" returned he. 
 
 Mile. Cormon rose abruptly and glanced across at du Bous- 
 quier. At that moment he looked like the brawny fabulous 
 deity, whose likeness you behold upon Republican three-franc 
 pieces. She went over to Mme. Granson and said in a confi- 
 dential tone : 
 
 " Your son is weak in his intellect, my poor friend. That 
 lyceum has been the ruin of him," she added, recollecting 
 how the Chevalier de Valois had insisted on the bad educa- 
 tion given in those institutions. 
 
 Here was a thunderbolt ! Poor Athanase had had his 
 chance of flinging fire upon the dried stems heaped up in 
 the old maid's heart, and he had not known it ! If he had 
 but listened to her, he might have made her understand ; for 
 in Mile. Cormon's present highly wrought mood a word would 
 have been enough, but the very force of the stupefying crav- 
 ings of love-sick youth had spoiled his chances ; so sometimes 
 a child full of life kills himself through ignorance. 
 
 "What can you have been saying to Mademoiselle Cor- 
 mon ? " asked his mother. 
 
 "Nothing." 
 
 "Nothing? I will have this cleared up," she said, and 
 put off serious business to the morrow; du Bousquier was 
 hopelessly lost, she thought, and the speeck troubled her very 
 little. 
 
 Soon the four card-tables received their complement of 
 * Old French sou.
 
 92 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 players. Four persons sat down to piquet, the most expensive 
 amusement of the evening, over which a good deal of money 
 changed hands. M. Choisnel, the attorney for the crown, 
 and a couple of ladies went to the red-lacquered cabinet for a 
 game of tric-trac. The candles in the wall-sconces were 
 lighted, and then the flower of Mile. Cormon's set blossomed 
 out about the fire, on the settees, and about the tables. Each 
 new couple, on entering the room, made the same remark to 
 Mile. Cormon : "So you are going to the Prebaudet to- 
 morrow? " 
 
 "Yes, I really must," she said, in answer to each. 
 
 All through the evening the hostess wore a preoccupied air. 
 Mme. Granson was the first to see that she was not at all like 
 herself. Mile. Cormon was thinking. 
 
 "What are you thinking about, cousin?" Mme. Granson 
 asked at last, finding her sitting in the boudoir. 
 
 " I am thinking of that poor girl. Am I not patroness of 
 the Maternity Society? I will go now to find ten crowns for 
 you." 
 
 "Ten crowns!" exclaimed Mme. Granson. " Why, you 
 have never given so much to any one before ! " 
 
 " But, my dear, it is so natural to have a child." 
 
 This improper cry from the heart struck the treasurer of the 
 Maternity Society dumb from sheer astonishment. Du Bous- 
 quier had actually gone up in Mile. Cormon's opinion ! 
 
 "Really," began Mme. Granson, "du Bousquier is not 
 merely a monster he is a villain into the bargain. When a 
 man has spoiled somebody else's life, it is his duty surely to 
 make amends. It should be his part rather than ours to 
 rescue this young person ; and when all comes to all, she is a 
 bad girl, it seems to me, for there are better men in Alencon 
 than that cynic of a du Bousquier. A girl must be shameless 
 indeed to have anything to do with him." 
 
 "Cynic? Your son, dear, teaches you Latin words that 
 are quite beyond me. Certainly I do not want to make ex-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 93 
 
 cuses for Monsieur du Bousquier ; but explain to me why it is 
 immoral for a woman to prefer one man to another?" 
 
 " Dear cousin, suppose now that you were to marry my 
 Athanase ; there would be nothing but what was very natural 
 in that. He is young and good-looking ; he has a future be- 
 fore him ; Alencon will be proud of him some day. But 
 every one would think that you took such a young man as 
 your husband for the sake of greater conjugal felicity. Slan- 
 derous tongues would say that you were making a sufficient 
 provision of bliss for yourself. There would be jealous women 
 to bring charges of depravity against you. But what would 
 it matter to you? You would be dearly loved loved sin- 
 cerely. If Athanase seemed to you to be weak of intellect, 
 my dear, it is because he has too many ideas. Extremes 
 meet. He is as clean in his life as a girl of fifteen ; he has not 
 wallowed in the pollutions of Paris. Well, now, change the 
 terms, as my poor husband used to say. It is relatively just 
 the same situation as du Bousquier's and Suzanne's. But 
 what would be slander in your case is true in every way of du 
 Bousquier. Now do you understand ? " 
 
 "No more than if you were talking Greek," said Rose 
 Cormon, opening wide eyes and exerting all the powers of her 
 understanding. 
 
 " Well, then, cousin, since one must put dots on all the *"'s, 
 it is quite out of the question that Suzanne should love du 
 Bousquier. And when the heart counts for nothing in such 
 an affair " 
 
 "Why, really, cousin, how should people love if not with 
 their hearts?" 
 
 At this Mme. Granson thought within herself, as the cheva- 
 lier had thought 
 
 "The poor cousin is too innocent by far. This goes be- 
 yond the permissible Aloud she said : " Dear girl, it 
 seems to me that a child is not conceived of spirit alone." 
 
 "Why, yes, dear, for the Holy Virgin "
 
 94 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "But, my dear, good girl, du Bouequier is not the Holy 
 Ghost." 
 
 "That is true," returned the spinster; "he is a man a 
 man dangerous enough for his friends to recommend him 
 strongly to marry." 
 
 "You, cousin, might bring that about " 
 
 "Oh, how?" cried the spinster, with a glow of Christian 
 charity. 
 
 " Decline to receive him until he takes a wife. For the 
 sake of religion and morality, you ought to make an example 
 of him under the circumstances." 
 
 " We will talk of this again, dear Madame Granson, when I 
 come back from the Prebaudet. I will ask advice of my uncle 
 and the Abbe Couturier," and Mile. Cormon went back to 
 the large drawing-room. The liveliest hour of the evening 
 had begun. 
 
 The lights, the groups of well-dressed women, the serious 
 and magisterial air of the assembly, filled Mile. Cormon with 
 pride in the aristocratic appearance of the rooms, a pride in 
 which her guests all shared. There were plenty of people 
 who thought that the finest company of Paris itself was no 
 finer. At that moment du Bousquier, playing a rubber with 
 M. de Valois and two elderly ladies, Mme. du Coudrai and 
 Mme. du Ronceret, was the object of suppressed curiosity. 
 Several women came up on the pretext of watching the game, 
 and gave him such odd, albeit furtive, glances that the old 
 bachelor at last began to think that there must be something 
 amiss with his appearance. 
 
 "Can it be that my toupet is askew?" he asked himself. 
 And he felt that all-absorbing uneasiness to which the elderly 
 bachelor is peculiarly subject. A blunder gave him an excuse 
 for leaving the table at the end of the seventh rubber. 
 
 "I cannot touch a card but I lose," he said; "I am de- 
 cidedly too unlucky at cards." 
 
 "You are lucky in other respects," said the chevalier, with
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 95 
 
 a knowing look. Naturally, the joke made the round of the 
 room, and every one exclaimed over the exquisite breeding 
 shown by the Prince Talleyrand of Alengon. 
 
 " There is no one like Monsieur de Valois for saying such 
 things," said the niece of the cure of St. Leonacd's. 
 
 Du Bousquier went up to the narrow mirror above The 
 Deserter, but he could detect nothing unusual. 
 
 Toward ten o'clock, after innumerable repetitions of the 
 same phrase with every possible variation, the long ante- 
 chamber began to fill with visitors preparing to embark; Mile. 
 Cormon convoying a few favored guests as far as the steps for 
 a farewell embrace. Knots of guests took their departure, 
 some in the direction of the Brittany road and the chateau, 
 and others turning toward the quarter by the Sarthe. And 
 then began the exchange of remarks with which the streets 
 had echoed at the same hour for a score of years. There was 
 the inevitable : " Mademoiselle Cormon looked very well this 
 evening." 
 
 " Mademoiselle Cormon ? She looked strange, I thought." 
 
 "How the abbe stoops, poor man ! And how he goes to 
 sleep did you see ? He never knows where the cards are 
 now; his mind wanders." 
 
 " We shall be very sorry to lose him." 
 
 "It is a fine night. We shall have a fine day to-morrow." 
 
 " Fine weather for the apples to set." 
 
 "You beat us to-night; you always do when Monsieur de 
 Valois is your partner." 
 
 " Then how much did he win? " 
 
 " To-night ? Why, he won three or four francs. He never 
 loses. ' ' 
 
 " Faith, no. There are three hundred and sixty-five days 
 in the year, you know ; at that rate, whist is as good as a farm 
 for him." 
 
 " Oh ! what bad luck we had to-night ! " 
 
 ' ' You are very fortunate, monsieur and madame, here you
 
 96 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 are at your own doorstep, while we have half the town to 
 cross." 
 
 "I do not pity you; you could keep a gig if you liked, 
 you need not go afoot." 
 
 " Ah ! monsieur, we have a daughter to marry (that means 
 one wheel), and a son to keep in Paris, and that takes the 
 other." 
 
 "Are you still determined to make a magistrate of him?" 
 
 "What can one do? You must do something with a boy, 
 and beside, it is no disgrace to serve the King." 
 
 Sometimes a discussion on cider or flax was continued on 
 the way, the very same things being said at the same season 
 year after year. If any observer of human nature had lived 
 in that particular street, their conversation would have sup- 
 plied him with an almanac. At this moment, however, the 
 talk was of a decidedly Rabelaisian turn ; for du Bousquier, 
 walking on ahead by himself, was humming the well-known 
 tune "Femme sensible, ecouter-tu le ramage?" without a sus- 
 picion of its appropriateness. Some of the party held that du 
 Bousquier was uncommonly long-headed, and that people 
 judged him unjustly. President du Ronceret inclined toward 
 this view since he had been confirmed in his post by a new 
 royal decree. The rest regarded the forage-contractor as a 
 dangerous man of lax morals, of whom anything might be 
 expected. In the provinces, as in Paris, public men are very 
 much in the position of the statue in Addison's ingenious 
 fable. The statue was erected at a place where four roads 
 met; two cavaliers coming up on opposite sides declared, 
 the one that it was white, the other that it was black, until 
 they came to blows, and both of them lying on the ground 
 discovered that it was black on one side and white on the 
 other, while a third cavalier coming up to their assistance 
 affirmed that it was red. 
 
 When the Chevalier de Valois reached home, he said to 
 himself: "It is time to spread a report that I am going to
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 97 
 
 marry Mademoiselle Cormon. The news shall come from the 
 d'Esgrignon's salon ; it shall go straight to the bishop's palace 
 at Seez and come back through one of the vicars-general to 
 the cure of St. Leonard's. He will not fail to tell the Abb6 
 Couturier, and in this way Mademoiselle Cormon will receive 
 the shot well under the water-line. The old Marquis d'Es- 
 grignon is sure to ask the Abbe de Sponde to dinner to put a 
 stop to gossip which might injure Mademoiselle Cormon if I 
 fail to come forward ; or me, if she refuses me. The abbe 
 shall be well and duly entangled ; and after a call from Made- 
 moiselle de Gordes, in the course of which the grandeur and 
 the prospects of the alliance will be put before Mademoiselle 
 Cormon, she is not likely to hold out. The abbe will leave 
 her more than a hundred thousand crowns ; and as for her, 
 she must have put by more than a hundred thousand livres by 
 this time ; she has her house, the Prebaudet, and some fifteen 
 thousand livres per annum. One word to my friend the 
 Comte de Fontaine, and I am Mayor of Alenc.on, and deputy ; 
 then, once seated on the right-hand benches, the way to a 
 peerage is cleared by a well-timed cry of ' Cloture,' or 
 ' Order.' " 
 
 When Mme. Granson reached home, she had a warm ex- 
 planation with her son. He could not be made to under- 
 stand the connection between his political opinions and his 
 love. It was the first quarrel which had troubled the peace 
 of the poor little household. 
 
 Next morning, at nine o'clock, Mile. Cormon, packed into 
 the cariole with Josette by her side, drove up the Rue Saint- 
 Blaise on her way to the Prebaudet, looking like a pyramid 
 above an ocean of packages. And the event which was to 
 surprise her there and hasten on her marriage was unseen as 
 yet by Mme. Granson, or du Bousquier, or M. de Valois, or 
 by Mile. Cormon herself. Chance is the greatest artist of 
 all. 
 
 7
 
 98 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 On the morrow of mademoiselle's arrival at the Prebaudet, 
 she was very harmlessly engaged in taking her eight-o'clock 
 breakfast, while she listened to the reports of her bailiff and 
 gardener, when Jacquelin, in a great flurry, burst into the 
 dining-room. 
 
 " Mademoiselle," cried he, " Monsieur 1'Abbe has sent an 
 express messenger to you ; that boy of Mother Grosmort's has 
 come with a letter. The lad left Alencon before daybreak, 
 and yet here he is ! He came almost as fast as Penelope. 
 Ought he to have a glass of wine? " 
 
 "What can have happened, Josette? Can uncle be " 
 
 " He would not have written if he was," said the woman, 
 guessing her mistress' fears. 
 
 Mile. Cormon glanced over the first few lines. 
 
 "Quick! quick!" she cried. "Tell Jacquelin to put 
 Penelope in. Get ready, child, have everything packed in 
 half an hour, we are going back to town," she added, turning 
 to Josette. 
 
 "Jacquelin ! " called Josette, excited by the expression of 
 Mile. Cormon's face. Jacquelin on receiving his orders came 
 back to the house to expostulate. 
 
 "But, mademoiselle, Penelope has only just been fed." 
 
 " Eh ! what does that matter to me ? I want to start this 
 moment." 
 
 "But, mademoiselle, it is going to rain." 
 
 " Very well. We shall be wet through." 
 
 "The house is on fire," muttered Josette, vexed because 
 her mistress said nothing, but read her letter through to the 
 end, and then began again at the beginning. 
 
 "Just finish your coffee at any rate. Don't upset yourself! 
 See how red you are in the face." 
 
 " Red in the face, Josette ! " exclaimed Mile. Cormon, going 
 up to the mirror ; and as the quick-silvered sheet had come 
 away from the glass, she beheld her countenance doubly dis- 
 torted. " Oh, dear ! " she thought, " I shall look ugly !
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 99 
 
 Come, come, Josette, child, help me to dress. I want to be 
 ready before Jacquelin puts Penelope in. If you cannot put 
 all the things into the chaise, I would rather leave them here 
 than lose a minute." 
 
 If you have fully comprehended the degree of monomania 
 to which Mile. Cormon had been driven by her desire to 
 marry, you will share her excitement. Her worthy uncle in- 
 formed her that M. de Troisville, a retired soldier from the 
 Russian service, the grandson of one of his best friends, wish- 
 ing to settle down in Alencon, had asked for his hospitality 
 for the sake of the abbe's old friendship with the mayor, his 
 grandfather, the Vicomte de Troisville of the reign of Louis 
 XV. M. de Sponde, in alarm, begged his niece to come home 
 at once to help him to entertain the guest and to do the 
 honors of the house; for as there had been some delay in 
 forwarding the letter, M. de Troisville might be expected to 
 drop in upon him that very evening. 
 
 How was it possible after reading that letter to give any 
 attention to affairs at the Prebaudet? The tenant and the 
 bailiff, beholding their mistress' dismay, lay low and waited 
 for orders. When they stopped her passage to ask for instruc- 
 tions, Mile. Cormon, the despotic old maid, who saw to every- 
 thing herself at the Prebaudet, answered them with an "As 
 you please," which struck them dumb with amazement. This 
 was the mistress who carried administrative zeal to such 
 lengths that she counted the fruit and entered it under head- 
 ings, so that she could regulate the consumption by the quan- 
 tity of each sort ! 
 
 " I must be dreaming, I think," said Josette, when she saw 
 her mistress flying upstairs like some elephant on which God 
 should have bestowed wings. 
 
 In a little while, in spite of the pelting rain, mademoiselle 
 was driving away from the Prebaudet, leaving her people to 
 have things all their own way. Jacquelin dared not take it 
 upon himself to drive the placid Penelope any faster than her
 
 100 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 usual jog-trot pace ; and the old mare, something like the fair 
 queen after whom she was named, seemed to take a step back 
 for every step forward. Beholding this, mademoiselle bade 
 Jacquelin, in a vinegar voice, to urge the poor astonished 
 beast to a gallop, and to use the whip if necessary, so appalling 
 was the thought that M. de Troisville might arrive before the 
 house was ready for him. A grandson of an old friend of her 
 uncle's could not be much over forty, she thought ; a military 
 man must infallibly be a bachelor. She vowed inwardly that, 
 with her uncle's help, M. de Troisville should not depart in 
 the estate in which he entered the Maison Cormon. Pene- 
 lope galloped ; but mademoiselle, absorbed in dresses and 
 dreams of a wedding-night, told Jacquelin again and again 
 that he was standing still. She fidgeted in her seat, without 
 vouchsafing any answer to Josette's questions, and talked to 
 herself as if she was revolving mighty matters in her mind. 
 
 At last the cariole turned into the long street of Alen^on, 
 known as the Rue Saint-Blaise if you come in on the side of 
 Mortagne, the Rue de la Porte de Seez by the time you reach 
 the sign of the Three Moors, and lastly as the Rue du Bercail, 
 when it finally debouches into the highway into Brittany. If 
 Mile. Cormon's departure for the Prebaudet made a great 
 noise in Alengon, anybody can imagine the hubbub caused by 
 her return on the following day, with the driving rain lashing 
 her face. Everybody remarked Penelope's furious pace, Jac- 
 quelin's sly looks, the earliness of the hour, the bundles piled 
 up topsy-turvy, the lively conversation between mistress and 
 maid, and, more than all things, the impatience of the party. 
 
 The Troisville estates lay between Alen^on and Mortagne. 
 Josette, therefore, knew about the different branches of the 
 family. A word let fall by her mistress just as they reached 
 the paved street of Alen^on put Josette in possession of the 
 facts, and a discussion sprang up, in the course of which the 
 two women settled between themselves that the expected guest 
 must be a man of forty or forty-two, a bachelor, neither rich
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN. 101 
 
 nor poor. Mademoiselle saw herself Vicoratesse de Trois- 
 ville. 
 
 "And here is uncle telling me nothing, knowing nothing, 
 and wanting to know nothing ! Oh, so like uncle ! He 
 would forget his nose if it was not fastened to his face." 
 
 Have you not noticed how mature spinsters, under these 
 circumstances, grow as intelligent, fierce, bold, and full of 
 promises as a Richard III.? To them, as to clerics in liquor, 
 nothing is sacred. 
 
 In one moment, from the upper end of the Rue Saint-Blaise 
 to the Porte de Seez, the town of Alencon heard of Mile. 
 Cormon's return with aggravating circumstances, heard with 
 a mighty perturbation of its vitals and trouble of the organs 
 of life public and domestic. Cook-maids, storekeepers, and 
 passers-by carried the news from door to door, then, without 
 delay, it circulated in the upper spheres, and almost simul- 
 taneously the words: " Mademoiselle Cormon has come back," 
 exploded like a bomb in every house. 
 
 Meanwhile Jacquelin climbed down from his wooden bench 
 in front, polished by some process unknown to cabinet-makers, 
 and with his own hands opened the great gates with the 
 rounded tops. They were closed in Mile. Cormon's absence 
 as a sign of mourning ; for when she went away her house 
 was shut up, and the faithful took it in turn to show hospi- 
 tality to the Abbe de Sponde. (M. de Valois used to pay his 
 debt by an invitation to dine at the Marquis d'Esgrignon's.) 
 Jacquelin gave the familiar call to Penelope standing in the 
 middle of the road; and the animal, accustomed to this 
 manoeuvre, turned into the courtyard, steering clear of the 
 flower-bed, till Jacquelin took the bridle and walked round 
 with the chaise to the steps before the door. 
 
 "Mariette ! " called Mile. Cormon. 
 
 "Mademoiselle?" returned Mariette, engaged in shutting 
 the gates. 
 
 " Has the gentleman come ? "
 
 102 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "No, mademoiselle." 
 
 "And is my uncle here? " 
 
 " He is at the church, mademoiselle." 
 
 Jacquelin and Josette were standing on the lowest step of 
 the flight, holding out their hands to steady their mistress' 
 descent from the cariole ; she, meanwhile, had hoisted her- 
 self upon the shaft, and was clutching at the curtains, before 
 springing down into their arms. It was two years since she had 
 dared to trust herself upon the iron step of double strength, 
 secured to the shaft by a fearfully made contrivance with huge 
 bolts. 
 
 From the height of the steps, mademoiselle surveyed her 
 courtyard with an air of satisfaction. 
 
 "There, there, Mariette, let the great gate alone and come 
 here." 
 
 "There is something up," Jacquelin said to Mariette as 
 she came past the chaise. 
 
 "Let us see now, child, what is there in the house?" said 
 Mile. Connon, collapsing on the bench in the long ante- 
 chamber as if she were exhausted. 
 
 "Just nothing at all," replied Mariette, hands on hips. 
 " Mademoiselle knows quite well that Monsieur 1'Abbe always 
 dines out when she is not at home ; yesterday I went to bring 
 him back from Mademoiselle Armande's." 
 
 "Then where is he?" 
 
 " Monsieur 1'Abbe? He is gone to church ; he will not be 
 back till three o'clock." 
 
 "Uncle thinks of nothing! Why couldn't he have sent 
 you to market? Go down now, Mariette, and, without 
 throwing money away, spare for nothing, get the best, finest, 
 and daintiest of everything. Go to the coach office and ask 
 where people send orders for pates. And I want cray-fish 
 from the brooks along the Brillante. What time is it ? " 
 
 " Nine o'clock all but a quarter." 
 
 "Oh dear, oh dear; don't lose any time in chattering,
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 103 
 
 Mariette. The visitor my uncle is expecting may come at any 
 moment ; pretty figures we should cut if he comes to 
 breakfast." 
 
 Mariette, turning round, saw Penelope in a lather, and gave 
 Jacquelin a glance which said : " Mademoiselle means to put 
 her hand on a husband this time." 
 
 Mile. Cormon turned to her housemaid. "Now, it is our 
 turn, Josette ; we must make arrangements for Monsieur 
 de Troisville to sleep here to-night." 
 
 How gladly those words were uttered ! " We must arrange 
 for Monsieur de Troisville " (pronounced Treville) " to sleep 
 here to-night ! " How much lay in those few words ! Hope 
 poured like a flood through the old maid's soul. 
 
 " Will you put him in the green chamber?" 
 
 "The bishop's room? No," said mademoiselle, "it is 
 too near mine. It is very well for his lordship, a holy man." 
 
 " Give him your uncle's room." 
 
 " It looks so bare ; it would not do." 
 
 "Lord, mademoiselle, you could have a bed put up in 
 the boudoir in a brace of shakes ; there is a fireplace there. 
 Moreau will be sure to find a bedstead in his warehouse that 
 will match the hangings as nearly as possible." 
 
 " You are right, Josette. Very well ; run round to Moreau's 
 and ask his advice about everything necessary; I give you 
 authority. If the bed, Monsieur de Troisville's bed, can be 
 set up by this evening, so that Monsieur de Troisville shall 
 notice nothing, supposing that Monsieur de Troisville should 
 happen to come in while Moreau is here, I am quite willing. 
 If Moreau cannot promise that, Monsieur de Troisville shall 
 sleep in the green chamber, although Monsieur de Troisville 
 will be very near me." 
 
 Josette departed ; her mistress called her back. 
 
 "Tell Jacquelin all about it," she exclaimed in a stern and 
 awful voice ; " let him go to Moreau. How about my dress? 
 Suppose Monsieur de Troisville came and caught me like
 
 104 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 this, without uncle here to receive him ! Oh, uncle ! uncle ! 
 Come, Josette, you shall help me to dress." 
 
 "But how about Penelope?" the woman began impru- 
 dently. Mile. Cormon's eyes shot sparks for the first and 
 last time in her life. 
 
 "It is always Penelope ! Penelope this, Penelope that ! Is 
 Penelope mistress here ? " 
 
 " She is all of a lather, and she has not been fed." 
 
 "Eh! and if she dies, let her die " cried Mile. Cor- 
 
 mon "so long as I am married," she added in her own 
 mind. 
 
 Josette stood stockstill a moment in amazement, such a 
 remark was tantamount to murder; then, at a sign from 
 her mistress, she dashed headlong down the steps into the 
 yard. 
 
 "Mademoiselle is possessed, Jacquelin ! " were Josette's 
 first words. 
 
 And in this way, everything that occurred throughout the 
 day led up to the great climax which was to change the whole 
 course of Mile. Cormon's life. The town was already turned 
 upside down by five aggravating circumstances which attended 
 the lady's sudden return, to wit the pouring rain ; Pene- 
 lope's panting pace and sunk flanks covered with foam; the 
 earliness of the hour ; the untidy bundles ; and the spinster's 
 strange, scared looks. But when Mariette invaded the market 
 to carry off everything that she could lay her hands on ; when 
 Jacquelin went to inquire for a bedstead of the principal up- 
 holsterer in the Rue Porte de Seez, close by the church ; here, 
 indeed, was material on which to build the gravest conjecture ! 
 The strange event was discussed on the parade and the prom- 
 enade ; every one was full of it, not excepting Mile. Armande, 
 on whom the Chevalier de Valois happened to be calling at 
 the time. 
 
 Only two days ago Alen^on had been stirred to its depths 
 by occurrences of such capital importance that worthy matrons
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 105 
 
 were still exclaiming that it was like the end of the world ! 
 And now, this last news was summed up in all houses by the 
 inquiry : 
 
 <% " What can be happening at the Cormons' ? " 
 The Abbe de Sponde, skillfully questioned when he emerged 
 from St. Leonard's to take a walk with the Abbe Couturier 
 along the parade, made reply in the simplicity of his heart, 
 to the effect that he expected a visit from the Vicomte de 
 Troisville, who had been in the Russian service during the 
 Emigration, and now was coming back to settle in Alen^on. 
 A kind of labial telegraph, at work that afternoon between 
 two and five o'clock, informed all the inhabitants of Alencon 
 that Mile. Cormon at last had found herself a husband by 
 advertisement. She was going to marry the Vicomte de 
 Troisville. Some said that "Moreau was at work on a bed- 
 stead already." In some places the bed was six feet long. 
 It was only four feet at Mme. Granson's house in the Rue du 
 Bercail. At President du Ronceret's, where du Bousquier 
 was dining, it dwindled into a sofa. The tradespeople said 
 that it cost eleven hundred francs. It was generally thought 
 that this was like counting your chickens before they were 
 hatched. 
 
 Farther away, it was said that the price of carp had gone 
 up. Mariette had swooped down upon the market and created 
 a general scarcity. Penelope had dropped down at the upper 
 end of the Rue Saint-Blaise ; the death was called in question 
 at the receiver-general's ; nevertheless, at the prefecture it was 
 known for a fact that the animal fell dead just as she turned 
 in at the gate of the Hotel Cormon, so swiftly had the old 
 maid come down upon her prey. The saddler at the corner 
 of the Rue de Seez, in his anxiety to know the truth about 
 Penelope, was hardy enough to call in to ask if anything had 
 happened to Mile. Cormon's chaise. Then from the utmost 
 end of the Rue Saint-Blaise to the furthermost parts of the 
 Rue du Bercail, it was known that, thanks to Jacquelin's care,
 
 106 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Penelope, duuib victim of her mistress' intemperate haste, 
 was still alive, but she seemed to be in a bad way. 
 
 All along the Brittany road the Vicomte de Troisville was 
 a penniless younger son, for the domains of Perche belonged 
 to the marquis of that ilk, a peer of France with two children. 
 The match was a lucky thing for an impoverished emigre ; as 
 for the vicomte himself, that was Mile. Cormon's affair. 
 Altogether the match received the approval of the aristocratic 
 section on the Brittany road ; Mile. Cormon could not have 
 put her fortune to a better use. 
 
 Among the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, the Vicomte de 
 Troisville was a Russian general that had borne arms against 
 France. He was bringing back a large fortune made at the 
 court of St. Petersburg. He was a "foreigner," one of the 
 "Allies" detested by the Liberals. The Abbe de Sponde 
 had manoeuvred the match on the sly. Every person who 
 had any shadow of a right of entrance to Mile. Cormon's 
 drawing-room vowed to be there that night. 
 
 While the excitement went through the town, and all but 
 put Suzanne out of people's heads, Mile. Cormon herself was 
 not less excited ; she felt as she had never felt before. She 
 looked round the drawing-room, the boudoir, the cabinet, 
 the dining-room, and a dreadful apprehension seized upon her. 
 Some mocking demon seemed to show her the old-fashioned 
 splendor in a new light; the beautiful furniture, admired ever 
 since she was a child, was suspected, nay, convicted, of being 
 out of date. She was shaken, in fact, by the dread that 
 catches almost every author by the throat when he begins to 
 read his own work aloud to some exigent or jaded critic. 
 Before he began, it was perfect in his eyes ; now the novel 
 situations are stale ; the finest periods turned with such secret 
 relish are turgid or halting; the metaphors are mixed or 
 grotesque; his sins stare him in the face. Even so, poor 
 Mile. Cormon shivered to think of the smile on M. de Trois- 
 ville's lips when he looked round that salon, which looked
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 107 
 
 like a bishop's drawing-room, unchanged for one possessor 
 after another. She dreaded his cool survey of the ancient 
 dining-room ; in short, she was afraid that the picture might 
 look the older for the ancient frame. How if all, these old 
 things should tinge her with their age? The bare thought 
 of it made her flesh creep. At that moment she would have 
 given one-fourth of her savings for the power of renovating 
 her house at a stroke of a magic wand. Where is the general 
 so conceited that he will not shudder on the eve of an 
 action ? She, poor thing, was between an Austerlitz and a 
 Waterloo. 
 
 " Madame la Vicomtesse de Troisville," she said to herself, 
 " what a fine name ! Our estates will pass to a good house, 
 at any rate." 
 
 Her excitement fretted her. It sent a thrill through every 
 fibre of every nerve to the least of the ramifications and the 
 papillae so well wadded with flesh. Hope tingling in her 
 veins set all the blood in her body in circulation. She felt 
 capable, if need was, of conversing with M. de Troisville. 
 
 Of the activity with which Josette, Mariette, Jacquelin, 
 Moreau, and his assistants set about their work, it is needless 
 to speak. Ants rescuing their eggs could not have been 
 busier than they. Everything, kept so neat and clean with 
 daily care, was starched and ironed, scrubbed, washed, and 
 polished. The best china saw the light. Linen damask cloths 
 and serviettes docketed A B C D emerged from the depths 
 where they lay shrouded in triple wrappings and defended by 
 bristling rows of pins. The rarest shelves of that oak-bound 
 library were made to give account of their contents; and 
 finally, mademoiselle offered up three bottles of liqueurs to 
 the coming guest, three bottles bearing the label of the most 
 famous distiller of over-sea Mme. Amphoux, name dear to 
 connoisseurs. 
 
 Mile. Cormon was ready for battle, thanks to the devotion 
 of her lieutenants. The munitions of war, the heavy artillery
 
 108 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 of the kitchen, the batteries of the pantry, the victuals, pro- 
 visions for the attack, and body of (p)reserves, had all been 
 brought up in array. Orders were issued to Jacquelin, Mari- 
 ette, and Josette to wear their best clothes. The garden was 
 raked over. Mademoiselle only regretted that she could not 
 come to an understanding with the nightingales in the trees, 
 that they might warble their sweetest songs for the occasion. 
 At length, at four o'clock, just as the abbe came in, and 
 mademoiselle was beginning to think that she had brought 
 out her daintiest linen and china and made ready the most 
 exquisite of dinners in vain, the crack of a postillion's whip 
 sounded outside in the Val-Noble. 
 
 "It is he \ " she thought, and the lash of the whip struck 
 her in the heart. 
 
 And indeed, heralded by all this tittle-tattle, a certain post- 
 chaise, with a single gentleman inside it, had made such a 
 prodigious sensation as it drove down the Rue Saint-Blaise 
 and turned into the Rue du Cours, that several small urchins 
 and older persons gave chase to the vehicle, and now were 
 standing in a group about the gateway of the Hotel Cormon 
 to watch the postillion drive in. Jacquelin, feeling that his 
 own marriage was in the wind, had also heard the crack of 
 the whip, and was out in the yard to throw open the gates. 
 The postillion (an acquaintance) was on his mettle, he turned 
 the corner to admiration, and came to a stand before the 
 flight of steps. And, as you can understand, he did not go 
 until Jacquelin had duly and properly made him tipsy. 
 
 The abbe came out to meet his guest, and in a trice the 
 chaise was despoiled of its occupant, robbers in a hurry could 
 not have done their work more nimbly ; then the chaise was 
 put into the coach-house, the great door was closed, and in a 
 few minutes there was not a sign of M. de Troisville's arrival. 
 Never did two chemicals combine with a greater alacrity than 
 that displayed by the house of Cormon to absorb the Vicomte 
 de Troisville. As for mademoiselle, if she had been a lizard
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 109 
 
 caught by a shepherd, her heart could not have beat faster. 
 She sat heroically in her low chair by the fireside ; Josette 
 threw open the door, and the Vicomte de Troisville, followed 
 by the Abbe de Sponde, appeared before her. / 
 
 " This is Monsieur le Vicomte de Troisville, niece, a grand- 
 son of an old schoolfellow of mine. Monsieur de Troisville, 
 my niece, Mademoiselle Cormon." 
 
 " Dear uncle, how nicely he puts it," thought Rose-Marie- 
 Victoire. 
 
 The Vicomte de Troisville, to describe him in a few words, 
 was a du Bousquier of noble family. Between the two men 
 there was just that difference which separates the gentleman 
 from the ordinary man. If they had been standing side by 
 side, even the most furious Radical could not have denied the 
 signs of race about the vicomte. There was all the distinc- 
 tion of refinement about his strength, his figure had lost 
 nothing of its magnificent dignity. Blue-eyed, dark-haired, 
 and olive-skinned, he could not have been more than six-and- 
 forty. You might have thought him a handsome Spaniard 
 preserved in Russian ice. His manner, gait, and bearing, 
 and everything about him, suggested a diplomatist, and one 
 that has seen Europe. He looked like a gentleman in his 
 traveling .dress. 
 
 M. de Troisville seemed to be tired. The abbe rose to 
 conduct him to his room, and was overcome with astonish- 
 ment when Rose opened the door of the boudoir, now trans- 
 formed into a bedroom. Then uncle and niece left the noble 
 visitor leisure to attend to his toilet with the help of Jacquelin, 
 who brought him all the luggage which he needed. While 
 M. de Troisville was dressing, they walked on the terrace by 
 the Brillante. The abbe, by a strange chance, was more 
 absent-minded than usual, and Mile. Cormon no less preoccu- 
 pied, so they paced to and fro in silence. Never in her life 
 had Mile. Cormon seen so attractive a man as this Olympian 
 vicomte. She could not say to herself, like a German girl,
 
 110 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 " I hare found my Ideal ! " but she felt that she was in love 
 from head to foot. " The very thing for me," she thought. 
 On a sudden she fled to Mariette, to know whether dinner 
 could be put back a little without serious injury. 
 
 " Uncle, this Monsieur de Troisville is very pleasant," she 
 said when she came back again. 
 
 "Why, my girl, he has not said a word as yet," returned 
 the abbe, laughing. 
 
 "But one can tell by his general appearance. Is he a 
 bachelor?" 
 
 "I know nothing about it," replied her uncle, his thoughts 
 full of that afternoon's discussion with the Abbe Couturier on 
 Divine Grace. " Monsieur de Troisville said in his letter 
 that he wanted to buy a house here. If he were married, he 
 would not have come alone," he added carelessly. It never 
 entered his head that his niece could think of marriage for 
 herself. 
 
 "Is he rich?" 
 
 " He is the younger son of a younger branch. His grand- 
 father held a major's commission, but this young man's father 
 made a foolish marriage." 
 
 "Young man!" repeated his niece. "Why, he is quite 
 five-and-forty, uncle, it seems to me." She felt an uncon- 
 trollable desire to compare his age with hers. 
 
 " Yes," said the abb6. "But to a poor priest at seventy, 
 a man of forty seems young, Rose." 
 
 By this time all Alencon knew that M. le Vicomte de Trois- 
 villa had arrived at the Cormon house. 
 
 The visitor very soon rejoined his host and hostess, and 
 began to admire the Brillante, the garden, the house, and 
 surroundings. 
 
 " Monsieur 1'Abbe," he said, " to find such a place as this 
 would be the height of my ambition." 
 
 The old maid wished to read a declaration in the speech. 
 She lowered her eyes.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. Ill 
 
 "You must be very fond of it, mademoiselle," continued 
 the vicomte. 
 
 " How could I help being fond of it ? It has been in our 
 family since 1574, when one of our ancestors, an Intendant 
 of the Duchy of Alen^on, bought the ground and built the 
 house. It is laid on piles." 
 
 Jacquelin having announced that dinner was ready, M. de 
 Troisville offered his arm. The radiant spinster tried not to 
 lean too heavily upon him ; she was still afraid that he might 
 think her forward. 
 
 "Everything is quite in harmony here," remarked the 
 vicomte as they sat down to table. 
 
 "Yes, the trees in our garden are full of birds that give us 
 music for nothing. Nobody molests them ; the nightingales 
 sing there every night," said Mile. Cormon. 
 
 " I am speaking of the inside of the house," remarked the 
 vicomte ; he had not troubled himself to study his hostess 
 particularly, and was quite unaware of her vacuity. "Yes, 
 everything contributes to the general effect: the tones of 
 color, the furniture, the character of the house," added he, 
 addressing Mile. Cormon. 
 
 "It costs a great deal, though," replied that excellent 
 spinster, "the taxes are something enormous." The word 
 "contribute " had impressed ftself on her mind. 
 
 "Ah! then are the taxes high here?" asked Monsieur de 
 Troisville, too full of his own ideas to notice the absurd non 
 sequitur. 
 
 " I do not know," said the abbe. " My niece manages her 
 own property and mine." 
 
 "The taxes are a mere trifle if people are well to do," 
 struck in Mile. Cormon, anxious not to appear stingy. "As 
 to the furniture, I leave things as they are. I shall never 
 make any changes here ; at least I shall not, unless I marry, 
 and in that case everything in the house must be arranged to 
 suit the master's taste."
 
 112 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "You are for great principles, mademoiselle," smiled the 
 vicomte ; " somebody will be a lucky man." 
 
 " Nobody ever made me such a pretty speech before," 
 thought Mile. Cormon. 
 
 The vicomte complimented his hostess upon the appoint- 
 ments of the table and the housekeeping, admitting that he 
 had thought that the provinces were behind the times, and 
 found himself in most delectable quarters. 
 
 "Delectable, good Lord! what does it mean?" thought 
 she. " Where is the Chevalier de Valois to reply to him ? 
 De-lect-able ? Is it made up of several words ? There ! cour- 
 age ; perhaps it is Russian, and if so I am not obliged to say 
 anything." Then she added aloud, her tongue loosed by 
 an eloquence which almost every human creature can find in 
 a great crisis, " We have the most brilliant society here, 
 Monsieur le Vicomte. You will be able to judge for your- 
 self, for it assembles in this very house; on some of our 
 acquaintances we can always count ; they will have heard of 
 my return no doubt, and will be sure to come to see me. 
 There is the Chevalier de Valois, a gentleman of the old 
 court, a man of infinite wit and taste ; then there is Monsieur 
 le Marquis d'Esgrignon and Mademoiselle Armande, his 
 sister" she bit her lip and changed her mind "a a re- 
 markable woman in her way. ' She refused all offers of mar- 
 riage so as to leave her fortune to her brother and his son." 
 
 "Ah ! yes; the d'Esgrignons, I remember them," said the 
 vicomte. 
 
 "Alen^on is very gay," pursued mademoiselle, now that 
 she had fairly started off. " There is so much going on ; the 
 receiver-general gives dances ; the prefect is a very pleasant 
 man ; his lordship the bishop occasionally honors us with a 
 visit " 
 
 " Come ! " said the vicomte, smiling as he spoke, " I have 
 done well, it seems, to come creeping back like a hare (un 
 Ktvre) to die in my form."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 113 
 
 "It is the same with me," replied mademoiselle; "I am 
 like a creeper (le lierre), I must cling to something or die." 
 
 The vicomte took the saying thus twisted for a joke, and 
 smiled. 
 
 "Ah ! " thought his hostess, "that is all right, he under- 
 stands me." 
 
 The conversation was kept up upon generalities. Under 
 pressure of a strong desire to please, the strange, mysterious, 
 indefinable workings of consciousness brought all the Cheva- 
 lier de Valois' tricks of speech uppermost in Mile. Cormon's 
 brain. It fell out, as it sometimes does in a duel, when the 
 devil himself seems to take aim ; and never did duelist hit 
 his man more fairly and squarely than the old maid. The 
 Vicomte de Troisville was too well mannered to praise the 
 excellent dinner, but his silence was panegyric in itself! As 
 he drank the delicious wines with which Jacquelin plied him, 
 he seemed to be meeting old friends with the liveliest pleasure; 
 for your true amateur does not applaud, he enjoys. He in- 
 formed himself curiously of the prices of land, houses, and sites ; 
 he drew from mademoiselle a long description of the prop- 
 erty between the Brillante and the Sarthe. He was amazed 
 that the town and the river lay so far apart, and showed 
 the greatest interest in local topography. The abb6 sat silent, 
 leaving all the conversation to his niece. And, in truth, 
 mademoiselle considered that she interested M. de Troisville; 
 he smiled graciously at her, he made far more progress with 
 her in the course of a single dinner than the most ardent of 
 her former wooers in a whole fortnight. For which reasons, 
 you may be certain that never was guest so cosseted, so lap- 
 ped about with small attentions and observances. He might 
 have been a much-loved lover, newly come home to the house 
 of which he was the delight. 
 
 Mademoiselle forestalled his wants. She saw when he 
 needed bread, her eyes brooded over him; if he turned his 
 head, she adroitly supplemented his portion of any dish which 
 8
 
 114 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 he seemed to like ; if he had been a glutton, she would have 
 killed him. What a delicious earnest of all that she counted 
 upon doing for her lover ! She made no silly blunders of 
 self-depreciation this time ! She went gallantly forward, full 
 sail, and all flags flying; posed as the queen of Alencon, and 
 vaunted her preserves. Indeed, she fished for compliments, 
 talking about herself as if her trumpeter were dead. And she 
 saw that she pleased the vicomte, for her wish to please had so 
 transformed her that she grew almost feminine. It was not 
 without inward exultation that she heard footsteps while they 
 sat at dessert; sounds of going and coming in the antecham- 
 ber and noises in the salon ; and knew that the usual company 
 was arriving. She called the attention of her uncle and M. 
 de Troisville to this fact as a proof of the affection in which 
 she was held, whereas it really was a symptom of the paroxysm 
 of curiosity which convulsed the whole town. Impatient to 
 show herself in her glory, she ordered coffee and the liqueurs 
 to be taken to the salon, whither Jacquelin went to display to 
 the elite of Alencon the splendors of a Dresden china service, 
 which only left the cupboard twice in a twelvemonth. All 
 these circumstances were noted by people disposed to criticise 
 under their breath. 
 
 "Egad!" cried du Bousquier, "nothing but Madame 
 Amphoux's liqueurs, which only come out on the four great 
 festival days ! " 
 
 " Decidedly, this match must have been arranged by cor- 
 respondence for a year past," said M. le President du Ron- 
 ceret. "The postmaster here has been receiving letters with 
 an Odessa postmark for the last twelve months." 
 
 Mme. Granson shuddered. M. le Chevalier de Valois had 
 eaten a heavy dinner, but he felt the pallor spreading over his 
 left cheek; felt, too, that he was betraying his secret, and 
 said: "It is cold to-day, do you not think? I am freez- 
 ing." 
 
 " It is the neighborhood of Russia," suggested du Bousquier.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 115 
 
 And the chevalier looked at his rival as who should say : 
 "Well put in!" 
 
 Mile. Cormon was so radiant, so triumphant, that she 
 looked positively handsome, it was thought. Nor was this 
 unwonted brilliancy wholly due to sentiment ; ever since the 
 morning the blood had been surging through her veins ; the 
 presentiments of a great crisis at hand affected her nerves. It 
 needed a combination of circumstances to make her so little 
 like herself. With what joy did she not solemnly introduce 
 the vicomte to the chevalier, and the chevalier to the vicomte ; 
 all Alencon was presented to M. de Troisville, and M. de 
 Troisville made the acquaintance of all Alencon. It fell out, 
 naturally enough, that the vicomte and the chevalier, two 
 born aristocrats, were in sympathy at once ; they recognized 
 each other for inhabitants of the same social sphere. They 
 began to chat as they stood by the fire. A circle formed 
 about them listening devoutly to their conversation, though 
 it was carried on sotto voce. Fully to realize the scene, imagine 
 Mile. Cormon standing with her back to the chimney-piece, 
 busy preparing coffee for her supposed suitor. 
 
 M. DE VALOIS. " So Monsieur le Vicomte is coming to 
 settle here, people say." 
 
 M. DE TROISVILLE. " Yes, monsieur. I have come to look 
 for a house." {Mile. Cormon turns, cup in hand.} "And I 
 must have a large one " {Mile. Cormon offers the cup of coffee} 
 " to hold my family." {The room grouts dark before the old 
 maid's eyes.} 
 
 M. DE VALOIS. " Are you married ? " 
 
 M. DE TROISVILLE. "Yes, I have been married for sixteen 
 years. My wife is the daughter of the Princess Scherbelloff." 
 
 Mile. Cormon dropped like one thunderstruck. Du Bous- 
 quier, seeing her reel, sprang forward, and caught her in his 
 arms. Somebody opened the door to let him pass out with 
 his enormous burden. The melted Republican, counseled by 
 Josette, summoned up his strength, bore the old maid to her
 
 116 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 room, and deposited her upon the bed. Josette, armed with 
 a pair of scissors, cut the stay-laces, drawn outrageously tight. 
 Du Bousquier, rough and ready, dashed cold water over Mile. 
 Cormon's face and bust, which broke from its bounds like the 
 Loire in flood. The patient opened her eyes, saw du Bous- 
 quier, and gave a cry of alarmed modesty. Du Bousquier 
 withdrew, leaving half-a-dozen women in possession, with 
 Mme. Granson at their head, Mine. Granson beaming with 
 joy. 
 
 What had the Chevalier de Valois done ? True to his sys- 
 tem, he had been covering the retreat. 
 
 "Poor Mademoiselle Cormon ! " he said, addressing M. 
 de Troisville, but looking round the room, quelling the be- 
 ginnings of an outbreak of laughter with his haughty eyes. 
 " She is dreadfully troubled with heated blood. She would 
 not be bled before going to the Prebaudet (her country house), 
 and this is the result of the spring weather." 
 
 " She drove over in the rain this morning," said the Abbe 
 de Sponde. " She may have taken a little cold, and so 
 caused the slight derangement of the system to which she is 
 subject. But she will soon get over it." 
 
 " She was telling me the day before yesterday that she had 
 not had a recurrence of it for three months ; she added at the 
 time that it was sure to play her a bad turn," added the 
 chevalier. 
 
 "Ah ! so you are married ! " thought Jacquelin, watching 
 M. de Troisville, who was sipping his coffee. 
 
 The faithful manservant made his mistress' disappointment 
 his own. He guessed her feelings. He took away the liqueurs 
 brought out for a bachelor, and not for a Russian woman's 
 husband. All these little things were noticed with amusement. 
 
 The Abb6 de Sponde had known all along why M. de Trois- 
 ville had come to Alencon, but in his absent-mindedness he 
 had said nothing about it ; it had never entered his mind that 
 his niece could take the slightest interest in that gentleman.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 117 
 
 As for the vicomte, he was engrossed by the object of his 
 journey; like many other married men, he was in no great 
 hurry to introduce his wife into the conversation ; he had had 
 no opportunity of saying that he was married ; and beside, he 
 thought that Mile. Cormon knew his history. Du Bousquier re- 
 appeared, and was questioned without mercy. One of the six 
 women came down, and reported that Mile. Cormon was feel- 
 ing much better, and that her doctor had come ; but she was to 
 stay in bed, and it appeared that she ought to be bled at once. 
 The salon soon filled. In Mile. Cormon's absence, the ladies 
 were free to discuss the tragic-comic scene which had just 
 taken place ; and duly they enlarged, annotated, embellished, 
 colored, adorned, embroidered, and bedizened the tale which 
 was to set all Alencon thinking of the disappointed old maid on 
 the morrow. 
 
 Meanwhile, Josette upstairs was saying to her mistress, 
 " That good Monsieur du Bousquier ! How he carried you 
 upstairs ! What a fist ! Really, your illness made him quite 
 pale. He loves you still." 
 
 And with this final phrase, the solemn and terrible day 
 came to a close. 
 
 Next day, all morning long, the news of the comedy, with 
 full details, circulated over Alencon, raising laughter every- 
 where, to the shame of the town be it said. Next day, Mile. 
 Cormon, very much the better for the blood-letting, would 
 have seemed sublime to the most hardened of those who jeered 
 at her, if they could but have seen her noble dignity and the 
 Christian resignation in her soul, as she gave her hand to the 
 unconscious perpetrator of the hoax, and went in to breakfast. 
 Ah ! heartless wags, who were laughing at her expense, why 
 could you not hear her say to the vicomte 
 
 "Madame de Troisville will have some difficulty in rinding 
 a house to suit her. Do me the favor of using my house, 
 monsieur, until you have made all your arrangements."
 
 118 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "But I have two girls and two boys, mademoiselle. We 
 should put you to a great deal of inconvenience." 
 
 " Do not refuse me," said she, her eyes full of apprehension 
 and regret. 
 
 " I made the offer, however you might decide, in my letter ; 
 but you did not take it," remarked the abbe. 
 
 "What, uncle! did you know? " 
 
 Poor thing, she broke off. Josette heaved a sigh, and 
 neither M. de Troisville nor the uncle noticed anything. 
 
 After breakfast, the Abbe de Sponde, carrying out the plan 
 agreed upon over night, took the vicomte to see houses for 
 sale and suitable sites for building. Mile. Cormon was left 
 alone in the salon. 
 
 " I am the talk of the town, child, by this time," she said, 
 looking piteously at Josette. 
 
 "Well, mademoiselle, get married." 
 
 " But, my girl, I am not at all prepared to make a choice." 
 
 "Bah! I should take Monsieur du Bousquier if I were 
 you." 
 
 " Monsieur de Valois says that he is such a Republican, 
 Josette." 
 
 "Your gentlemen don't know what they are talking about ; 
 they say that he robbed the Republic, so he can't have been 
 at all fond of it," said Josette, and with that she went. 
 
 "That girl is amazingly shrewd," thought Mile. Cormon, 
 left alone to her gnawing perplexity. 
 
 She saw that the only way of silencing talk was to marry 
 at once. This last so patently humiliating check was enough 
 to drive her to extreme measures ; and it takes a great deal to 
 force a feeble-minded human being out of a groove, be it good 
 or bad. Both the old bachelors understood the position of 
 affairs, both made up their minds to call in the morning to 
 make inquiries, and (in their own language) to press the 
 point. 
 
 M. de Valois considered that the occasion demanded a
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 119 
 
 scrupulous toilet ; he took a bath, he groomed himself with 
 unusual care, and for the first time and the last Cesarine 
 saw him applying "a suspicion of rouge" with incredible 
 skill. 
 
 Du Bousquier, rough and ready Republican that he was, in- 
 spired by dogged purpose, paid no attention to his appearance, 
 he hurried round, and came in first. The fate of men, like 
 the destinies of empires, hangs on small things. History 
 records all such principal causes of great failure or success a 
 Kellermann's charge at Marengo, a Bliicher coming up at the 
 battle of Waterloo, a Prince Eugene slighted by Louis XIV., 
 a cure on the battlefield of Denain ; but nobody profits by 
 the lesson to be diligently attentive to the little trifles of his 
 own life. Behold the results. The Duchesse de Langeais in 
 "The Thirteen " entering a convent for want of ten minutes' 
 patience; Judge Popinot in "The Commission in Lunacy" 
 putting off his inquiries as to the Marquis d'Espard till to- 
 morrow ; Charles Grandet coming home by way of Bordeaux 
 instead of Nantes and these things are said to happen by 
 accident and mere chance! The few moments spent in 
 putting on that suspicion of rouge wrecked M. de Valois' 
 hopes. Only in such a way could the chevalier have suc- 
 cumbed. He had lived for the Graces, he was foredoomed 
 to die through them. Even as he gave a last look in the 
 mirror, the burly du Bousquier was entering the disconsolate 
 old maid's drawing-room. His entrance coincided with a 
 gleam of favor in the lady's mind, though in the course of 
 her deliberations the chevalier had decidedly had the 
 advantage. 
 
 "It is God's will," she said to herself when du Bousquier 
 appeared. 
 
 " Mademoiselle, I trust you will not take my importunity in 
 bad part ; I did not like to trust that great stupid of a Rene 
 to make inquiries, and came myself." 
 
 "I am perfectly well," she said nervously; then, after a
 
 120 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 pause, and in a very emphatic tone, "Thank you, Monsieur 
 du Bousquier, for the trouble that you took and that I gave 
 you yesterday " 
 
 She recollected how she had lain in du Bousquier's arms, 
 and the accident seemed to her to be a direct order from 
 heaven. For the first time in her life a man had seen her 
 with her belt wrenched apart, her stay-laces cut, the jewel 
 shaken violently out of its case. 
 
 " I was so heartily glad to carry you that I thought you a 
 light weight," said he. 
 
 At this Mile. Cormon looked at du Bousquier as she never 
 looked at any man in the world before ; and thus encouraged, 
 the ex-contractor for forage flung a side-glance that went 
 straight to the old maid's heart. 
 
 " It is a pity," added he, " that this has not given me the 
 right to keep you always." (She was listening with rapture in 
 her face.) "You looked dazzling as you lay swooning there 
 on the bed ; I never saw such a fine woman in my life, and I 
 have seen a good many. There is this about a stout woman, 
 she is superb to look at, she has only to show herself, she 
 triumphs." 
 
 " You mean to laugh at me," said the old maid; "that is 
 not kind of you, when the whole town is perhaps putting a 
 malicious and bad construction on things that happened here 
 yesterday." 
 
 "It is as true as that my name is du Bousquier, made- 
 moiselle. My feelings toward you have never changed ; your 
 first rejection did not discourage me." 
 
 The old maid lowered her eyes. There was a pause, a pain- 
 ful ordeal for du Bousquier. Then Mile. Cormon made up 
 her mind and raised her eyelids ; she looked up tenderly at 
 du Bousquier through her tears. 
 
 "Jf this is so, monsieur," she said, in a tremulous voice, 
 " I only ask you to allow me to lead a Christian life, do not ask 
 me to change any of my habits as to religion, leave me free to
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY tOWX. 121 
 
 choose my spiritual directors, and I will give you my hand," 
 holding it out to him as she spoke. 
 
 Du Bousquier caught the plump, honest hand that held so 
 many francs, and kissed it respectfully. 
 
 " But I have one thing more to ask," added Mile. Cormon, 
 suffering him to kiss her hand. 
 
 "It is granted, and if it is impossible, it shall be done" 
 (a reminiscence of Beaujon). 
 
 "Alas! " began the old maid, "for love of me you must 
 burden your soul with a sin which I know is heinous ; false- 
 hood is one of the seven deadly sins ; but still you can make 
 confession, can you not? We will both of us do penance." 
 They looked tenderly at each other at those words. 
 
 " Perhaps," continued Mile. Cormon, " after all, it is one 
 of those deceptions which the church calls venial " 
 
 "Is she going to tell me that she is in Suzanne's plight?" 
 
 thought du Bousquier. "What luck! " Aloud he said, 
 
 "Well, mademoiselle?" 
 
 "And you must take it upon you " 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " To say that this marriage was agreed upon between us six 
 months ago." 
 
 "Charming woman!" exclaimed the forage-contractor, 
 and by his manner he implied that he was prepared to make 
 even this sacrifice; "a man only does thus for the woman 
 he has worshiped for ten years." 
 
 "In spite of my severity? " asked she. 
 
 "Yes, in spite of your severity." 
 
 " Monsieur du Bousquier, I have misjudged you." Again 
 she held out her big, red hand, and again du Bousquier 
 kissed it. 
 
 At that very moment the door opened, and the betrothed 
 couple, turning their heads, perceived the charming but too 
 tardy chevalier. 
 
 "Ah ! fair queen," said he, "so you have risen?"
 
 122 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Mile. Cormon smiled at him, and .something clutched at 
 her heart. M. de Valois, grown remarkably young and irre- 
 sistible, looked like Lauzun entering La Grande Mademoi- 
 selle's apartments. 
 
 "Ah ! my dear du Bousquier ! " he continued, half laugh- 
 ingly, so sure was he of success. "Monsieur de Troisville 
 and the Abbe de Sponde are in front of your house, looking it 
 over like a pair of surveyors." 
 
 "On my word," said du Bousquier, "if the Vicomte de 
 Troisville wants it, he can have it for forty thousand francs. 
 It is of no use whatever to me. Always, if mademoiselle has 
 no objection, that must be ascertained first. Mademoiselle, 
 may I tell? Yes? Very well, my dear chevalier, you shall be 
 the first to hear" Mile. Cormon dropped her eyes "of the 
 honor and the favor that mademoiselle is doing me ; I have 
 kept it a secret for more than six months. We are going to be 
 married in a very few days, the contract is drawn up, we shall 
 sign it to-morrow. So, you see, that I have no further use for 
 my house in the Rue du Cygne. I am quietly on the lookout 
 for a purchaser ; and the Abbe de Sponde, who knew this, 
 naturally took Monsieur du Troisville to see it." 
 
 There was such a color of truth about this monstrous fib 
 that the chevalier was quite taken in by it. My dear chevalier 
 was a return for all preceding defeats; it was like the victory 
 won at Pultowa by Peter the Great over Charles XII. And 
 thus du Bousquier enjoyed a delicious revenge for hundreds of 
 pin-pricks endured in silence ; but in his triumph he forgot 
 that he was not a young man, he passed his fingers through 
 the false toupet, and it came off in his hand ! 
 
 " I congratulate you both," said the chevalier, with an 
 agreeable smile; "I wish that you may end like the fairy 
 stories, ' They lived very happily and had a fine /amity of 
 children\ ' " Here he shaped a cone of snuff in his palm 
 before adding mockingly, " But, monsieur, you forgot that 
 er you wear borrowed plumes."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 123 
 
 Du Bousquier reddened. The false toupet was ten inches 
 awry. Mile. Cormon raised her eyes to the face of her be- 
 trothed, saw the bare cranium, and bashfully looked down 
 again. Never toad looked more venomously at a victim than 
 du Bousquier at the chevalier. 
 
 " A pack of aristocrats that look down on me !" he thought. 
 "I will crush you all some of these days." 
 
 The Chevalier de Valois imagined that he had regained all 
 the lost ground. But Mile. Cormon was not the woman to 
 understand the connection between the chevalier's congratu- 
 lation and the allusion to the false toupet ; and, for that mat- 
 ter, even if she had understood, her hand had been given. 
 M. de Valois saw too clearly that all was lost. Meantime, as 
 the two men stood without speaking, Mile. Cormon innocently 
 studied how to amuse them. 
 
 "Play a game of reversis," suggested she, without any 
 malicious intention. 
 
 Du Bousquier smiled, and went as future master of the house 
 for the card-table. Whether the Chevalier de Valois had lost 
 his head, or whether he chose to remain to study the causes 
 of his defeat and to remedy it, certain it is that he allowed 
 himself to be led like a sheep to the slaughter. But he had 
 just received the heaviest of all bludgeon blows ; and a noble 
 might have been excused if he had been at any rate stunned 
 by it. Very soon the worthy Abbe de Sponde and M. de 
 Troisville returned, and at once Mile. Cormon hurried into 
 the antechamber, took her uncle aside, and told him in a 
 whisper of her decision. Then, hearing that the house in the 
 Rue du Cygne suited M. de Troisville, she begged her be- 
 trothed to do her the service of saying that her uncle knew 
 that the place was for sale. She dared not confide the fib to 
 the abbe, for fear that he should forget. The falsehood was 
 destined to prosper better than if it had been a virtuous action. 
 All Alenc.on heard the great news that night. For four days 
 the town had found as much to say as in the ominous days of
 
 124 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 1814 and 1815. Some laughed at the idea, others thought it 
 true ; some condemned, others approved the marriage. The 
 bourgeoisie of Alencon regarded it as a conquest, and they 
 were the best pleased. 
 
 The Chevalier de Valois, next day, among his own circle, 
 brought out this cruel epigram : " The Cormons are ending as 
 they began; stewards and contractors are all on a footing." 
 
 The news of Mile. Cormon's choice went to poor Athanase's 
 heart ; but he showed not a sign of the dreadful tumult surg- 
 ing within. He had heard of the marriage at President du 
 Ronceret's while his mother was playing a game of boston. 
 Mine. Granson, looking up, saw her son's face in the glass ; 
 he looked white, she thought, but then he had been pale ever 
 since vague rumors had reached him in the morning. Mile. 
 Cormon was the card on which Athanase staked his life, and 
 chill presentiments of impending catastrophe already wrapped 
 him about. When intellect and imagination have exaggerated 
 a calamity till it becomes a burden too heavy for shoulders 
 and brow to bear, when some long-cherished hope fails utterly, 
 and with it the visions which enable a man to forget the fierce 
 vulture-cares gnawing at his heart ; then, if that man has no 
 belief in himself, in spite of his powers; no belief in the 
 future, in spite of the Power Divine he is broken in pieces. 
 Athanase was a product of education under the Empire. 
 Fatalism, the Emperor's creed, spread downward to the lowest 
 ranks of the army, to the very schoolboys at their desks. 
 Athanase followed Mme. du Ronceret's play with a stolidity 
 which might so easily have been taken for indifference, that 
 Mme. Granson fancied she had been mistaken as to her son's 
 feelings. 
 
 Athanase's apparent carelessness explained his refusal to 
 sacrifice his so-called "Liberal" opinions. This word, then 
 recently coined for the Emperor Alexander, proceeded into 
 the language, I believe, by way of Mme. de Stae'l through 
 Benjamin Constant.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 125 
 
 After that fatal evening the unhappy young man took to 
 haunting one of the most picturesque walks along the Sarthe ; 
 every artist who comes to Alencon sketches it from that point 
 of view, for the sake of the water-mills, and the river gleaming 
 brightly out among the fields, between the shapely well-grown 
 trees on either side. Flat though the land may be, it lacks 
 none of the subdued peculiar charm of French landscape ; for 
 in France your eyes are never wearied by glaring Eastern sun- 
 light, nor saddened by too continual mist. It is a lonely spot. 
 Dwellers in the provinces care nothing for beautiful scenery, 
 perhaps because it is always about them, perhaps because there 
 is a sense lacking in them. If there is such a thing as a 
 promenade, a mall, or any spot from which you see a beautiful 
 view, it is sure to be the one unfrequented part of the town. 
 Athanase liked the loneliness, with the water like a living 
 presence in it, and the fields just turning green in the warmth 
 of the early spring sunlight. Occasionally some one who had 
 seen him sitting at a poplar foot, and received an intent gaze 
 from his eyes, would speak to Mme. Granson about him. 
 
 " There is something the matter with your son." 
 
 "I know what he is about," the mother would say with a 
 satisfied air; hinting that he was meditating some great work. 
 
 Athanase meddled no more in politics ; he had no opinions; 
 and yet, now and again, he was merry enough, merry at the 
 expense of others, after the wont of those who stand alone and 
 apart in contempt of public opinion. The young fellow lived 
 so entirely outside the horizon of provincial ideas and amuse- 
 ments that he was interesting to few people ; he did not so 
 much as rouse curiosity. Those who spoke of him to his 
 mother did so for her sake, not for his. Not a creature in 
 Alencon sympathized with Athanase; the Sarthe received the 
 tears which no friend, no loving woman dried. If the magnifi- 
 cent Suzanne had chanced to pass that way, how much misery 
 might have been prevented the two young creatures would 
 have fallen in love.
 
 126 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 And yet Suzanne certainly passed that way. Her ambition 
 had been first awakened by a sufficiently marvelous tale of 
 things which happened in 1799; an old story of adventures 
 begun at the sign of the Three Moors had turned her childish 
 brain. They used to tell how an adventuress, beautiful as an 
 angel, had come from Paris with a commission from Fouche 
 to ensnare the Marquis de Montauran, the Chouan leader sent 
 over by the Bourbons ; how she met him at that very inn of 
 the Three Moors as he came back from his Mortagne expe- 
 dition ; and how she won his love, and gave him up to his 
 enemies. The romantic figure of this woman, the power of 
 beauty, the whole story of Marie de Verneuil and the Marquis 
 de Montauran, dazzled Suzanne, till, as she grew older, she 
 too longed to play with men's lives. A few months after her 
 flight, she could not resist the desire to see her native place 
 again, on her way to Brittany with an artist. She wanted to 
 see Fougeres, where the Marquis de Montauran met his death ; 
 and thought of making a pilgrimage to the scenes of stories 
 told to her in childhood of that war in the West, so little 
 known even yet. She wished, beside, to revisit Alencon with 
 such splendor in her surroundings, and so completely meta- 
 morphosed, that nobody should know her again. She intended 
 to put her mother beyond the reach of want in one moment, 
 and, in some tactful way, to send a sum of money to poor 
 Athanase a sum which for genius in modern days is the 
 equivalent of a Rebecca's gift of horse and armor to an 
 Ivanhoe of the Middle Ages. 
 
 A month went by. Opinions as to Mile. Cormon's mar- 
 riage fluctuated in the strangest way. There was an incredulous 
 section which strenuously denied the truth of the report, and 
 a party of believers who persistently affirmed it. At the end 
 of fourteen days, the doubters received a severe check. Du 
 Bousquier's house was sold to M. de Troisville for forty-three- 
 thousand francs. M. de Troisville meant to live quite quietly 
 in Alencon ; he intended to return to Paris after the death of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 127 
 
 the Princess Scherbelloff, but until the inheritance fell in he 
 would spend his time in looking after his estates. This much 
 appeared to be fact. But the doubting faction declined to be 
 crushed. Their assertion was that, married or not, du Bous- 
 quier had done a capital stroke of business, for his house only 
 stood him in a matter of twenty-seven thousand francs. The 
 believers were taken aback by this peremptory decision on the 
 part of their opponents. "Choisnel, Mademoiselle Cormon's 
 notary, had not heard a word of marriage settlements," added 
 the incredulous. 
 
 But on the twentieth day the unshaken believers enjoyed a 
 signal victory over the doubters. M. Lepresseur, the Liberal 
 notary, went to Mile. Cormon's house, and the contract was 
 signed. This was the first of many sacrifices which Rose 
 made to her husband. The fact was that du Bousquier de- 
 tested Choisnel ; he blamed the notary for Mile. Armande's 
 refusal in the first place, as well as for his previous rejection 
 by Mile. Cormon, who, as he believed, had followed Mile. 
 Armande's example. He managed Mile. Cormon so well, 
 that she, noble-hearted woman, believing that she had mis- 
 judged her future husband, wished to make reparation for her 
 doubts, and sacrifice her notary to her love. Still she sub- 
 mitted the contract to Choisnel, and he a man worthy of 
 Plutarch defended Mile. Cormon's interests by letter. This 
 was the one cause of delay. 
 
 Mile. Cormon received a good many anonymous letters. 
 She was informed, to her no small astonishment, that Suzanne 
 was as honest a woman as she was herself; and that the 
 seducer in the false toupet could not possibly have played the 
 part assigned to him in such an adventure. Mile. Cormon 
 scorned anonymous letters; she wrote, however, to Suzanne 
 with a view to gaining light on the creeds of the Maternity 
 Society. Suzanne probably had heard of du Bousquier's ap- 
 proaching marriage; she confessed to her stratagem, sent a 
 thousand francs to the Fund, and damaged the forage-con-
 
 128 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 tractor's character very considerably. Mile. Cormon called 
 an extraordinary meeting of the Maternity Charity, and the 
 assembled matrons passed a resolution that hencefoward the 
 Fund should give help after and not before misfortunes be- 
 fell. 
 
 In spite of these proceedings, which supplied the town with 
 titbits of gossip to discuss, the banns were published at the 
 church and the mayor's office. It was Athanase's duty to 
 make out the needful documents. The betrothed bride had 
 gone to the Prebaudet, a measure taken partly by way of con- 
 ventional modesty, partly for general security. Thither du 
 Bousquier went every morning, fortified by atrocious and 
 sumptuous bouquets, returning in the evening to dinner. 
 
 At last, one gray rainy day in June, the wedding took 
 place ; and Mile. Cormon and the Sieur du Bousquier, as the 
 incredulous faction called him, were married at the parish 
 church in the sight of all Alenc.on. Bride and bridegroom 
 drove to the mayor's office, and afterward to the church, in a 
 caleche a splendid equipage for Alenc.on. Du Bousquier 
 had it sent privately from Paris. The loss of the old cariole 
 was a kind of calamity for the whole town. The saddler of 
 the Porte de Secz lost an income of fifty francs per annum for 
 repairs ; he lifted up his voice and wept. With dismay the 
 town of Alencon beheld the luxury introduced by the Maison 
 Cormon ; every one feared a rise of prices all round, an in- 
 crease of house rent, an invasion of Paris furniture. There 
 were some whose curiosity pricked them to the point of giving 
 Jacquelin ten sous for a nearer sight of so startling an innova- 
 tion in a thrifty province. A pair of Normandy horses like- 
 wise caused much concern. 
 
 " If we buy horses for ourselves in this way, we shall not 
 sell them long to those that come to buy of us," said du 
 Ronceret's set. 
 
 The reasoning seemed profound, stupid though it was, in 
 so far as it prevented the district from securing a monopoly of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 129 
 
 money from outside. In the political economy of the prov- 
 inces the wealth of nations consists not so much in a brisk 
 circulation of money as in hoards of unproductive coin. 
 
 At length the old maid's fatal wish was fulfilled. Penelope 
 sank under the attack of pleurisy contracted forty days before 
 the wedding. Nothing could save her. Mme. Granson, 
 Mariette, Mme. du Coudrai, Mme. du Ronceret the whole 
 town, in fact noticed that the bride came into church with 
 the left foot foremost, an omen all the more alarming because 
 the word Left even than had acquired a political significance. 
 
 The officiating priest chanced to open the mass-book at the 
 De profundis. And so the wedding passed off, amid presages 
 so ominous, so gloomy, so overwhelming, that nobody was 
 found to augur well of it. Things went from bad to worse. 
 There was no attempt at a wedding-party ; the bride and 
 bridegroom started out for the Prebaudet. Paris fashions 
 were to supplant old customs ! In the evening Alenc.on said 
 its say as to all these absurdities ; some persons had reckoned 
 upon one of the usual provincial jollifications, which they con- 
 sidered they had a right to expect, and these spoke their 
 minds pretty freely. But Mariette and Jacquelin had a merry 
 wedding, and they alone in all Alenc.on gainsaid the dismal 
 prophecies. 
 
 Du Bousquier wished to spend the profit made by the sale 
 of his house on restoring and modernizing the Cormon place. 
 He had quite made up his mind to stay for some months at the 
 Prebaudet, whither he brought his Uncle de Sponde. The 
 news spead dismay through Alenc.on ; every one felt that du 
 Bousquier was about to draw the country into the downward 
 path of domestic comfort. The foreboding grew to a fear 
 one morning when du Bousquier drove over from the Pre- 
 baudet to superintend his workmen at the Val-Noble ; and the 
 townspeople beheld a tilbury, harnessed to a new horse, and 
 Rend in livery by his master's side. Du Bousquier had in- 
 vested his wife's savings in the Funds which stood at sixty- 
 9
 
 130 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 seven francs fifty centimes. This was the first act of the new 
 administration. In the space of one year, by constantly 
 speculating for a rise, he made for himself a fortune almost as 
 considerable as his wife's. But something else happened in 
 connection with this marriage to make it seem yet more inaus- 
 picious, and put all previous overwhelming portents and alarm- 
 ing innovations into the background. 
 
 It was the evening of the wedding-day. Athanase and his 
 mother were sitting in the salon by the little fire of brush- 
 wood (or regalades, as they say in the patois), which the ser- 
 vant had lighted after dinner. 
 
 "Well," said Mme. Granson, "we will go to President 
 du Ronceret's to-night, now that we have no Mademoiselle 
 Cormon. Goodness me ! I shall never get used to calling her 
 Madame du Bousquier; that name makes my lips sore." 
 
 Athanase looked at his mother with a sad constraint ; he could 
 not smile, and he wanted to acknowledge, as it were, the art- 
 less thoughtfulness which soothed the wound it could not 
 heal. 
 
 "Mamma," he began it was several years since he had 
 used that word, and his tones were so gentle that they sounded 
 like his child's voice "mamma, dear, do not let us go out 
 just yet ; it is so nice hese by the fire ! " 
 
 It was a supreme cry of mortal anguish ; the mother heard 
 it but did not understand. 
 
 "Let us stay, child," she said. "I would certaintly 
 rather talk with you and listen to your plans than play at 
 boston and perhaps lose my money." 
 
 "You are beautiful to-night; I like to look at you. And 
 beside, the current of my thoughts is in harmony with this 
 poor little room, where we have been through so much trouble 
 you and I." 
 
 "And there is still more in store for us, poor Athanase, 
 until your work succeeds. For my own part, I am used to 
 poverty ; but, oh, my treasure, to look on and see your youth
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 131 
 
 go by while you have no joy of it ! Nothing but work in 
 your life ! That thought is like a disease for a mother. It 
 tortures me night and morning. I wake up to it. Ah, God 
 in heaven ! what have I done ? What sin of mine is punished 
 with this?" 
 
 She left her seat, took a little chair, and sat down beside 
 Athanase, nestling close up to his side, till she could lay her 
 head on her child's breast. Where a mother is truly a mother, 
 the grace of love never dies. Athanase kissed her on the eyes, 
 on the gray hair, on the forehead, with the reverent love that 
 fain would lay the soul where the lips are laid. 
 
 "I shall never succeed," he said, trying to hide the fatal 
 purpose which he was revolving in his mind. 
 
 " Pooh ! you are not going to be discouraged ? Mind can 
 do all things, as you say. With ten bottles of ink, ten reams 
 of paper, and a strong will, Luther turned Europe upside 
 down. Well, and you are going to make a great name for 
 yourself; you are going to use to good ends the powers which 
 he used for evil. Did you not say so ? Now / remember 
 what you say, you see ; I understand much more than you 
 think ; for you still lie so close under my heart, that your least 
 little thought thrills through it, as your slightest movement 
 did once." 
 
 " I shall not succeed here, you see, mamma, and I will not 
 have you looking on while I am struggling and heartsore and 
 in anguish. Mother, let me leave Alericon ; I want to go 
 through it all away from you." 
 
 "/want to be at your side always," she said proudly. 
 "Suffering alone! you without your mother! your poor 
 mother that would be your servant if need were, and keep 
 out of sight for fear of injuring you, if you wished it, and 
 never accuse you of pride ! No, no, Athanase, we will never 
 be parted ! " 
 
 Athanase put his arms about her and held her with a pas- 
 sionate, tight clasp, as a dying man might cling to life.
 
 132 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 " And yet I wish it," he said. " If we do not part, it is all 
 over with me. The double pain yours and mine would 
 kill me. It is better that I should live, is it not? " 
 
 Mme. Granson looked with haggard eyes into her son's 
 face. 
 
 " So this is what you have been brooding over ! They said 
 truth. Then are you going away?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " But you are not going until you have told me all about 
 it, and without giving me any warning? You must have some 
 things to take with you, and money. There are some louis 
 d'ors sewed into my petticoat; you must have them." 
 
 Athanase burst into tears. 
 
 "That was all that I wanted to tell you," he said after a 
 while. "Now, I will see you to the president's house." 
 
 Mother and son went out together. Athanase left Mme. 
 Granson at the door of the house where she was to spend the 
 evening. He looked long at the shafts of light that escaped 
 through chinks in the shutters. He stood there glued to the 
 spot, while a quarter of an hour went by, and it was with 
 almost delirious joy that he heard his mother say : " Grand 
 independence of hearts." 
 
 "Poor mother, I have deceived her!" he exclaimed to 
 himself as he reached the river. 
 
 He came down to the tall poplar on the bank where he had 
 been wont to sit and meditate during the last six weeks. Two 
 big stones lay there ; he had brought them himself for a seat. 
 And now, looking out over the fair landscape lying in the 
 moonlight, he passed in review all the so glorious future that 
 should have been his. He went through cities stirred to 
 enthusiasm by his name; he heard the cheers of crowded 
 streets, breathed the incense of banquets, looked with a great 
 yearning over that life of his dreams, rose uplifted and radiant 
 in glorious triumph, raised a statue to himself, summoned up 
 all his illusions to bid them farewell in a last Olympian carouse.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 133 
 
 The magic could only last for a little while; it fled, it had 
 vanished forever. In that supreme moment he clung to his 
 beautiful tree as if it had been a friend ; then he put the stones, 
 one in either pocket, and buttoned his overcoat. His hat he 
 had purposely left at home. He went down the bank to look 
 for a deep spot which he had had in view for some time ; and 
 slid in resolutely, trying to make as little noise as possible. 
 There was scarcely a sound. 
 
 When Mme. Granson came home about half-past nine that 
 night, the maid-of-all-work said nothing of Athanase, but 
 handed her a letter. Mme. Granson opened it and read 
 
 " I have gone away, my kind mother ; do not think hardly 
 of me." That was all. 
 
 "A pretty thing he has done!" cried she. "And how 
 about his linen and the money? But he will write, and I 
 shall find him. The poor children always think themselves 
 wiser than their fathers and mothers." And she went to bed 
 with a quiet mind. 
 
 The Sarthe had risen with yesterday's rain. Fishers and 
 anglers were prepared for this, for the swollen river washes 
 down the eels from the little streams on its course. It so 
 happened that an eel-catcher had set his lines over the very 
 spot where poor Athanase had chosen to drown himself, 
 thinking that he should never be heard of again ; and next 
 morning, about six o'clock, the man drew out the newly 
 dead body. 
 
 One or two women among Mme. Granson's few friends 
 went to prepare the poor widow with all possible care to 
 receive the dreadful yield of the river. The news of the 
 suicide, as might be expected, produced a tremendous sensa- 
 tion. Only last evening the poverty-stricken man of genius 
 had not a single friend ; the morning after his death scores of 
 voices cried : " I would so willingly have helped him ! " So 
 easy is it to play a charitable part when no outlay is involved. 
 The Chevalier de Valois, in the spirit of revenge, explained
 
 134 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the suicide. It was a boyish, sincere, and noble passion for 
 Mile. Cormon that drove Athanase to take his own life. And 
 when the chevalier had opened Mme. Granson's eyes, she saw 
 a multitude of little things to confirm thi? view. The story 
 grew touching ; women cried over it. 
 
 Even before Mme. du Bousquier came back to town, her 
 obliging friend, Mme. du Ronceret, went to fling a dead body 
 down among the roses of her new-wedded happiness, to let 
 her know what a love she had refused. Ever so gently Mme. 
 President squeezed a shower of drops of wormwood over the 
 honey of the first month of married life. And as Mme. du 
 Bousquier returned, it so happened that she met Mme. Gran- 
 son at the corner of the Val-Noble, and the look in the heart- 
 broken mother's eyes cut her to the quick. It was a look 
 from a woman dying of grief, a thousand curses gathered up 
 into one glance of malediction, a thousand sparks in one gleam 
 of hate. It frightened Mme. du Bousquier ; it boded ill and 
 invoked ill upon her. 
 
 Mme. Granson had belonged to the party most opposed 
 to the cure; she was a bitter partisan of the priest of St. 
 Leonard's ; but on the very evening of the tragedy she thought 
 of the rigid orthodoxy of her own party, and she shuddered. 
 She herself laid her son in his shroud, thinking all the while 
 of the Mother of the Saviour; then, with a soul quivering with 
 agony, she betook herself to the house of the perjured priest. 
 She found him busy, the humble good man, storing the hemp 
 and flax which he gave to poor women and girls to spin, so 
 that no worker should ever want work, a piece of wise charity 
 which had saved more than one family that could not endure 
 to beg. He left his hemp at once and brought his visitor 
 into the dining-room, where the stricken mother saw the 
 frugality of her own housekeeping in the supper that stood 
 waiting for the cure. 
 
 "Monsieur I'AbbS," she began. "I have come to entreat 
 you ' '
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 135 
 
 She burst into tears, and could not finish the sentence. 
 
 "I know why you have come," answered the holy man, 
 "and I trust to you, madame, and to your relative Madame 
 du Botisquier to make it right with his lordship at Seez. Yes, 
 I will pray for your unhappy boy ; yes, I will say masses ; but 
 we must avoid all scandal, we must give no occasion to ill- 
 disposed people to gather together in the church. I myself, 
 alone, and at night " 
 
 "Yes, yes, as you wish, if only he is laid in consecrated 
 ground!" she said, poor mother; and taking the priest's 
 hand in hers, she kissed it. 
 
 And so, just before midnight, a bier was smuggled into the 
 parish church. Four young men, Athanase's friends, carried 
 it. There were a few little groups of veiled and black-clad 
 women, Mme. Granson's friends, and some seven or eight 
 lads that had been intimate with the dead. The bier was 
 covered with a pall, torches were lit at the corners, and the 
 cure read the office for the dead, with the help of one little 
 choir boy whom he could trust. Then the suicide was buried, 
 noiselessly, in a corner of the churchyard, and a dark wooden 
 cross with no name upon it marked the grave for' the mother. 
 Athanase lived and died in the shadow. 
 
 Not a voice was raised against the cure ; his lordship at 
 Seez was silent ; the mother's piety redeemed her son's im- 
 pious deed. 
 
 Mme. Granson, by the river-side, whither she had gone to 
 see the place where her son had drowned himself, saw a woman 
 at some distance a woman who came nearer, till she reached 
 the fatal spot, and exclaimed 
 
 "Then this is the place!" 
 
 One other woman in the world wept there as the mother 
 was weeping, and that woman was Suzanne. She had heard 
 of the tragedy on her arrival that morning at the Three Moors. 
 If poor Athanase had been alive, she might have done what 
 poor and generous people dream of doing, and the rich never
 
 136 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 think of putting in practice ; she would have inclosed a thou- 
 sand francs with the words: " Money lent by your father to a 
 comrade who now repays you." During her journey Suzanne 
 had thought of this angelic way of giving. She looked up 
 and saw Mme. Granson. 
 
 " I loved him," she said ; then she hurried away. 
 
 Susanne, true to her nature, did not leave Alencon till she 
 had changed the bride's wreath of orange flowers to water- 
 lilies. She was the first to assert that Mme. du Bousquier 
 would be Mile. Cormon as long as she lived. And with that 
 one jibe she avenged both Athanase and the dear Chevalier 
 de Valois. 
 
 Alencon beheld another and more piteous suicide. Atha- 
 nase was promptly forgotten by a world that willingly, and 
 indeed of necessity, forgets its dead as soon as possible ; but 
 the poor chevalier's existence became a kind of death-in-life, 
 a suicide continued morning after morning during fourteen 
 years. Three months after du Bousquier's marriage, people 
 remarked, not without astonishment, that the chevalier's linen 
 was turning yellow, and his hair irregularly combed. M. 
 de Valois was no more, for a disheveled M. de Valois could 
 not be said to be himself. An ivory tooth here and there 
 deserted from the ranks, and no student of human nature 
 could discover to what corps they belonged, whether they were 
 native or foreign, animal or vegetable ; nor whether, finally, 
 they had been extracted by old age, or were merely lying out 
 of sight and out of mind in the chevalier's dressing-table 
 drawer. His cravat was wisped, careless of elegance, into a 
 cord. The negroes' heads grew pale for lack of soap and 
 water. The lines on the chevalier's face deepened into 
 wrinkles and darkened as his complexion grew more and more 
 like parchment ; his neglected nails were sometimes adorned 
 with an edge of black velvet. Grains of snuff lay scattered 
 like autumn leaves in the furrows of his vest. 
 
 Hitherto the chevalier's nose had made a peculiarly elegant
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 137 
 
 appearance in public ; never had it been seen to distill a drop 
 of amber, to let fall a dark wafer of moist rappee ; but now, 
 with a snuff-bedabbled border about the nostrils, and an un- 
 sightly stream taking advantage of the channel hollowed above 
 the upper lip, that nose, which no longer took pains to please, 
 revealed the immense trouble that the chevalier must have 
 formerly taken with himself. 
 
 Latterly the chevalier's witticisms had been few and far 
 between ; the anecdotes went the way of the teeth, but his 
 appetite continued as good as ever ; out of the great shipwreck 
 of his hopes he saved nothing but his digestion ; and while he 
 took his snuff feebly, he dispatched his dinner with an avidity 
 alarming to behold. You may mark the extent of the havoc 
 wrought in his ideas in the fact that his colloquies with the 
 Princess Goritza grew less and less frequent. He came to 
 Mile. Armande's one day with a false calf in front of his shins. 
 The bankruptcy of elegance was something painful, I protest ; 
 all Alencon was shocked by it. It scared society to see an 
 elderly young man drop suddenly into his dotage, and from 
 sheer depression of spirits pass from fifty to ninety years. 
 And beside, he had betrayed his secret. He had been waiting 
 and lying in wait for Mile. Cormon. For ten long years, 
 persevering sportsman that he was, he had been stalking the 
 game, and then he had missed his shot. 
 
 He became a man of the worst character. The Liberal 
 party laid all du Bousquier's foundlings on the chevalier's 
 doorstep, while the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Alencon 
 boastingly accepted them ; laughed and cried : " The dear 
 chevalier! What else could he do ?" Saint-Germain pitied 
 the chevalier, took him to its bosom, and smiled more than 
 ever upon him ; while an appalling amount of unpopularity 
 was drawn down upon du Bousquier's head. 
 
 But the especial result of the marriage was a more sharply 
 marked division of parties in Alencon. The Maison d'Es- 
 grignon represented undiluted aristocracy ; for the Troisvilles
 
 138 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 on their return joined the clique. The Maison Cormon, skill- 
 fully influenced by du Bousquier, was not exactly Liberal, nor 
 yet resolutely Royalist, but of that unlucky shade of opinion 
 which produced the 221 members, so soon as the political 
 struggle took a definite shape, and the greatest, most august, 
 and only real power of kingship came into collision with that 
 most false, fickle, and tyrannical power which, when wielded 
 by an elective body, is known as the power of Parliament. 
 
 The third salon, the salon du Ronceret, out-and-out Radical 
 in its politics, was firmly but secretly allied with the Maison 
 Cormon. 
 
 With the return from the Prebaudet, a life of continual 
 suffering began for the Abbe de Sponde. He kept all that he 
 endured locked within his soul, uttering not a word of com- 
 plaint to his niece ; but to Mile. Armande he opened his heart, 
 admitting that, taking one folly with another, he should have 
 preferred the chevalier. 
 
 "Mademoiselle," the old abbe said as the thin tears fell 
 from his faded old eyes, "the lime-tree walk, where I have 
 been used to meditate these fifty years, is gone. My dear 
 lime-trees have all been cut down ! Just as I am nearing the 
 end of my days the Republic has come back again in the 
 shape of a horrible revolution in the house." 
 
 "Your niece must be forgiven," said the Chevalier de 
 Valois. " Republicanism is a youthful error; youth goes out 
 to seek for liberty, and finds tyranny in its worst form the 
 tyranny of the impotent rabble. Your niece, poor thing, has 
 not been punished by the thing wherein she sinned." 
 
 " What is to become of me in a house with naked women 
 dancing all over the walls ? Where shall I find the lime-tree 
 walks where I used to read my breviary?" 
 
 Like Kant, who lost the thread of his ideas when somebody 
 cut down the fir-tree on which he fixed his eyes as he medi- 
 tated, the good abbe pacing up and down the shadowless
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 139 
 
 alleys could not say his prayers with the same uplifting of 
 soul. Du Bousquier had laid out an English garden ! 
 
 "It looked nicer," Mme. du Bousquier said. Not that she 
 really thought so, but the Abbe Couturier had authorized her 
 to say and do a good many things that she might please her 
 husband. 
 
 The Abbe de Sponde was the first to see the unhappiness 
 which lay beneath the surface of his dear child's married life. 
 The old dignified simplicity which ruled their way of living 
 was gone ; du Bousquier gave two balls every month in the 
 course of the first winter. The venerable house oh, to think 
 of it ! echoed with the sound of violins and worldly gayety. 
 The abbe, on his knees, prayed while the merriment lasted. 
 
 The politics of the sober salon underwent a gradual change 
 for the worse. The Abbe de Sponde, divined du Bousquier ; 
 he shuddered at his nephew's dictatorial tone. He saw tears 
 in his niece's eyes when the disposal of her fortune was taken 
 out of her hands ; her husband left her only the control of 
 the linen, the table, and such things as fall to a woman's lot. 
 
 Does any one know how much it costs to give up the deli- 
 cious exercise of authority ? If the triumph of will is one of 
 the most intoxicating of the great man's joys, to have one's 
 own way is the whole life of narrow natures. No one but a 
 cabinet minister fallen into disgrace can sympathize with 
 Mme. du Bousquier's bitter pain when she saw herself reduced 
 to a cipher in her own house. 
 
 But these beginnings were the roses of life. Every conces- 
 sion was counseled by poor Rose's love for her husband, and 
 at first du Bousquier behaved admirably to his wife. He was 
 very good to her ; he brought forward sufficient reasons for 
 every encroachment. The room, so long left empty, echoed 
 with the voices of husband and wife in fireside talk. And so, 
 for the first few years of married life, Mme. du Bousquier wore 
 a face of content, and that little air of emancipation and 
 mystery often seen in a young wife after a marriage of love.
 
 140 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 She had no more trouble with "heated blood." This coun- 
 tenance of hers routed scoffers, gave the lie to gossip concern- 
 ing du Bousquier's impotence, and put observers of human 
 nature at fault. 
 
 Rose-Marie- Victoire was so afraid lest she should lose her 
 husband's affection or drive him from her side by setting her 
 will against his, that she would have made any sacrifice, even 
 of her uncle if need be. And the Abbe de Sponde, deceived 
 by Mme. du Bousquier's poor foolish little joys, bore his own 
 discomforts the more easily for the thought that his niece was 
 happy. 
 
 At first Alencon shared this impression. But there was one 
 man less easy to deceive than all the rest of Alencon put 
 together. The Chevalier de Valois had taken refuge on the 
 sacred mount of the most aristocratic section, and spent his 
 time with the d'Esgrignons. The perpetrator of puns had 
 been already brought low, and he meant to stab du Bousquier 
 to the heart. 
 
 The poor abb6, knowing as he did the cowardliness of his 
 niece's first and last love, shuddered as he guessed his nephew's 
 hypocritical nature and the man's intrigues. Du Bousquier, 
 be it said, put some constraint upon himself; he had an eye 
 to the abbe's property, and had no wish to annoy his wife's 
 uncle in any way, yet he dealt the old man his death-blow. 
 
 If you can translate the word Intolerance by Firmness of 
 Principle ; if you can forbear to condemn in the old Roman 
 Catholic vicar-general that stoicism which Scott has taught us 
 to revere in Jeanie Deans' puritan father ; if, finally, you can 
 recognize in the Roman church the nobility of a Potius mori 
 quam fadari which you admire in a Republican then you 
 can understand the anguish that rent the great Abbe de Sponde 
 when he saw the apostate in his nephew's drawing-room ; 
 when he was compelled to meet the renegade, the backslider, 
 the enemy of the church, the aider and abettor of the Oath to 
 the Constitution. It was du Bousquier's private ambition to
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 141 
 
 lord it over the countryside ; and as a first proof of his power, 
 he determined to reconcile the officiating priest of St. Leonard's 
 with the cure of Alengon. He gained his object. His wife 
 imagined that peace had been made where the stern abbe saw 
 no peace, but surrender of principle. M. de Sponde was 
 left alone in the faith. The bishop came to du Bousquier's 
 house, and appeared satisfied with the cessation of hostilities. 
 The Abbe Francois* goodness had conquered every one every 
 one except the old Roman of the Roman church, who might 
 have cried with Cornelie : " Ah, God ! what virtues you make 
 me hate!" The Abbe de Sponde died when orthodoxy 
 expired in the diocese. . 
 
 In 1819 the Abbe de Sponde' s property raised Mme. du 
 Bousquier's income from land to twenty-five thousand livres 
 without counting the Prebaudet or the house in the Val-Noble. 
 About the same time du Bousquier returned the amount of his 
 wife's savings (which she had made over to him) and instructed 
 her to invest the money in purchases of land near the Pre- 
 baudet, so that the estate, including the Abbe de Sponde's 
 adjoining property, was one of the largest in the department. 
 As for du Bousquier, he invested his money with the Kellers, 
 and made a journey to Paris four times a year. Nobody 
 knew the exact amount of his private fortune, but at this time 
 he was supposed to be one of the wealthiest men in the 
 department of the Orne. A dexterous man, and the perma- 
 nent candidate of the Liberal party, he always lost his election 
 by seven or eight votes under the Restoration. Ostensibly he 
 repudiated his connection with the Liberals, offering himself as a 
 Ministerial-Royalist candidate ; but although he succeeded in 
 gaining the support of the Congregation and of the magistra- 
 ture, the repugnance of the administration was too strong to 
 be overcome. 
 
 Then the rabid Republican, frantic with ambition, con- 
 ceived the idea of beginning a struggle with the royalism and 
 aristocracy of the country, just as they were carrying all before
 
 142 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 them. He gained the support of the clergy by an appearance 
 of piety very skillfully kept up ; always going with his wife to 
 mass, giving money to the convents, and supporting the con- 
 fraternity of the Sacred Heart ; and whenever a dispute arose 
 between the clergy and the town, or the department, or the 
 State, he was very careful to take the clerical side. And so, 
 while secretly supported by the Liberals, he gained the influ- 
 ence of the church ; and as a Constitutional-Royalist kept 
 close beside the aristocratic section, the better to ruin it. 
 And rain it he did. He brought about an industrial revolu- 
 tion j and his detestation of certain families on the high road 
 to Brittany rapidly increased the material prosperity of the 
 province. 
 
 And so he paved the way for his revenge upon the gens a 
 ch&teaux in general, and the d'Esgrignons in particular ; some 
 day, not so very far distant, he would plunge a poisoned 
 blade into the very heart of the clique. He found capital to 
 revive the manufacture of point d'Alencon and to increase 
 the linen trade. Alencon began to spin its own flax by 
 machinery. And while his name was associated with all these 
 interests, and written in the hearts of the masses, while he did 
 all that Royalty left undone, du Bousquier risked not a cen- 
 time of his own. With his means, he could afford to wait 
 while enterprising men with little capital were obliged to give 
 up and leave the results of their labors to luckier successors. 
 He posed as a banker. A Laffitte on a small scale, he be- 
 came a sleeping partner in all new inventions, taking security 
 for his money. And as a public benefactor he did remarkably 
 well for himself. He was a promoter of insurance companies, 
 a patron of new public conveyances ; he got up memorials for 
 necessary roads and bridges. The authorities, being left 
 behind in this way, regarded this activity in the light of an 
 encroachment ; they blundered, and put themselves into the 
 wrong, for the prefecture was obliged to give way for the good 
 of the country.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 143 
 
 Du Bousquier embittered the provincial noblesse against the 
 court nobles and the peerage. He helped, in short, to bring 
 it to pass that a very large body of Constitutional-Royalists 
 supported the "Journal des Debats " and M. de Chateau- 
 briand in a contest with the throne. It was an ungrateful 
 opposition based on ignoble motives which contributed to 
 bring about the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the press in 
 1830. Wherefore du Bousquier, like those whom he repre- 
 sented, had the pleasure of watching a funeral procession of 
 Royalty* pass through their district without a single demon- 
 stration of sympathy for a population alienated from them in 
 ways so numerous that they cannot be indicated here. 
 
 Then the old Republican, with all that weight of masses on 
 his conscience, hauled down the white flag above the town- 
 hall amid the applause of the people. For fifteen years he 
 had acted a part to satisfy his vendetta, and no man in France 
 beholding the new throne raised in August, 1830, could feel 
 more intoxicated than he with the joy of revenge. For him, 
 the succession of the younger branch meant the triumph of 
 the Revolution ; for him, the hoisting of the tricolor flag 
 was the resurrection of the Mountain ; and this time the 
 nobles should be brought low by a surer method than the 
 guillotine, in that its action should be less violent. A peerage 
 for life only ; a National Guard which stretches the marquis 
 and the grocer from the corner-store on the same camp-bed ; 
 the abolition of entail demanded by a bourgeois barrister ; a 
 Catholic church deprived of its supremacy ; in short, all the 
 legislative inventions of August, 1830, simply meant for du 
 Bousquier the principles of 1793 carried out in a more ingen- 
 ious manner. 
 
 Du Bousquier has been receiver-general of taxes since 1830. 
 
 He relied for success upon his old connections with Egalit6 
 
 Orleans (father of Louis Philippe) and M. de Folmon, steward 
 
 of the dowager duchess. He is supposed to have an income 
 
 * Charles X. on his way to England.
 
 144 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 of eighty thousand livres. In the eyes of his fellow-country- 
 men, Monsieur du Bousquier is a man of substance, honorable, 
 upright, obliging, unswerving in his principles. To him, 
 Alencon owes her participation in the industrial movement 
 which makes her, as it were, the first link in a chain which 
 some day perhaps may bind Brittany to the state of things 
 which we nickname " modern civilization." In 1816 Alencon 
 boasted but two carriages, properly speaking ; ten years after- 
 ward, caleches, coupes, landaus, cabriolets, and tilburies were 
 rolling about the streets without causing any astonishment. 
 At first the townsmen and landowners were alarmed by the 
 rise of prices, afterward they discovered that the increased 
 expenditure produced a corresponding increase in their in- 
 comes. 
 
 Du Ronceret's prophetic words : " Du Bousquier is a very 
 strong man," were now taken up by the country. But, un- 
 fortunately for du Bousquier's wife, the remark is a shocking 
 misnomer. Du Bousquier, the husband, is a very different 
 person from du Bousquier the public man and politician. 
 The great citizen, so liberal in his opinions, so easy humored, 
 so full of love for his country, is a despot at home, and has 
 not a particle of love for his wife. The Cromwell of the Val- 
 Noble is profoundly astute, hypocritical, and crafty; he be- 
 haves to those of his own household as he behaved to the 
 aristocrats on whom he fawned, until he could cut their throats. 
 Like his friend Bernadotte, he has an iron hand in a velvet 
 glove. His wife gave him no children. Suzanne's epigram 
 and the Chevalier de Valois' insinuations were justified ; but 
 the Liberals and Constitutional-Royalists among the towns- 
 people, the little squires, the magistrature, and the "clericals " 
 (as the " Constitutionnel " used to say), all threw the blame 
 upon Mme. du Bousquier. M. du Bousquier had married 
 such an elderly wife, they said ; and beside, how lucky it was 
 for her, poor thing, for at her age bearing a child meant such 
 a risk. If, in periodically recurrent despair, Mme. du Bous-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 145 
 
 quier confided her troubles with tears to Mme. du Coudrai or 
 Mme. du Ronceret : 
 
 " Why you must be mad, dear ! " those ladies would reply. 
 " You do not know what you want ; a child would be the 
 death of you." 
 
 Men like M. du Coudrai, who followed du Bousquier's lead 
 because they fastened their hopes to his success, would prompt 
 their wives to sing du Bousquier's praises; and Rose must 
 listen to speeches that wounded like a stab. 
 
 "You are very fortunate, dear, to have such a capable hus- 
 band ; some men have no energy, and can neither manage 
 their own property nor bring up their children ; you are 
 spared these troubles." 
 
 Or, "Your husband is making you queen of the district, 
 fair lady. He will never leave you at a loss ; he does every- 
 thing in Alencon." 
 
 "But I should like him to take less trouble for the public 
 and rather " 
 
 " My dear Mme. du Bousquier, you are very hard to please ; 
 all the women envy you your husband." 
 
 Unjustly treated by a world which condemned her without 
 a hearing, she found ample scope for the exercise of Christian 
 virtues in her inner life. She who lived in tears always turned 
 a serene face upon the world. For her, pious soul, was there 
 not sin in the thought which was always pecking at her heart 
 " I. loved the Chevalier de Valois, and I am du Bousquier's 
 wife?" Athanase's love rose up like a remorse to haunt her 
 dreams. 
 
 The Chevalier de Valois was the malignant artificer of her 
 misfortune. He had it on his mind to snatch his opportunity 
 and undeceive Mme. du Bousquier as to one of her articles of 
 faith ; for the chevalier, a man of experience, saw through du 
 Bousquier the married man, as he had seen through du Bous- 
 quier the bachelor. But it was not easy to take the astute 
 Republican by surprise. His salon, naturally, was closed to 
 10
 
 146 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the Chevalier de Valois, as to all others who discontinued 
 their visits to the Maison Cormon at the time of his marriage. 
 And beside, du Bousquier was above the reach of ridicule; he 
 possessed an immense fortune, he was king of Alencon ; and 
 as for his wife, he cared about her much as Richard III. might 
 have cared for the loss of the horse with which he thought to 
 win the battle. To please her husband, Mme. du Bousquier 
 had broken with the Maison d'Esgrignon, but sometimes, 
 when he was away at Paris for a few days, she paid Mile. 
 Armande a visit. 
 
 Two years after Mme. du Bousquier' s marriage, just at the 
 time of the abbe's death, Mile. Armande went up to her as 
 she came out of church. Both women had been to St. Leon- 
 ard's to hear a messc noire (lit., black mass) said for M. de 
 Sponde ; and Mile. Armande, a generous natured woman, 
 thinking that she ought to try to comfort the weeping heiress, 
 walked with her as far as the parade. Prom the parade, still 
 talking of the beloved and lost, they came to the forbidden 
 Hotel d'Esgrignon, and Mile. Armande drew Mme. du Bous- 
 quier into the house by the charm of her talk. Perhaps the 
 poor broken-hearted woman loved to speak of her uncle with 
 some one whom her uncle had loved so well. And beside, 
 she wished to receive the old marquis' greetings after an in- 
 terval of nearly three years. It was half-past one o'clock ; 
 the Chevalier de Valois had come to dinner, and with a bow 
 he held out both hands. 
 
 "Ah! well, dear, good, and well-beloved lady," he said 
 tremulously, " we have lost our sainted friend. Your mourn- 
 ing is ours. Yes ; your loss is felt as deeply here as under 
 your own roof more deeply," he added, alluding to du Bous- 
 quier. 
 
 A funeral oration followed, to which every one contributed 
 his phrase; then the chevalier, gallantly taking the lady's 
 hand, drew it under his arm, pressed it in the most adorable 
 way, and led her aside into the embrasure of a window.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 147 
 
 "You are happy, at any rate?" he asked with a fatherly 
 tone in his voice. 
 
 "Yes," she said, lowering her eyes. 
 
 Hearing that " Yes," Mme. de Troisville (daughter of the 
 Princess Scherbelloff) and the old Marquise de Casteran 
 came up; Mile. Armande also joined them, and the group 
 took a turn in the garden till dinner should be ready. Mme. 
 du Bousquier was so stupid with grief that she did not notice 
 that a little conspiracy of curiosity was on foot among the 
 ladies. 
 
 "We have her here, let us find out the answer to the 
 riddle," the glances exchanged among them seemed to say. 
 
 " You should have children to make your happiness com- 
 plete," began Mile. Armande, "a fine boy like my nephew 
 now " 
 
 Tears came to Mme. du Bousquier 's eyes. 
 
 " I have heard it said that it was entirely your own fault if 
 you had none," said the chevalier, "that you were afraid of 
 the risk." 
 
 "//" she cried, innocently; " I would endure a hundred 
 years in hell to have a child." 
 
 The subject thus broached, Mme. la Vicomtesse de Trois- 
 ville and the dowager Marquise de Casteran steered the con- 
 versation with such exceeding tact that they entangled poor 
 Rose until, all unsuspectingly, she revealed the secrets of her 
 married life. Mile. Armande laid her hand on the chevalier's 
 arm, and they left the three matrons to talk confidentially. 
 Then Mme. du Bousquier's mind was disabused with regard 
 to the deception of her marriage; and as she was still "a 
 natural," she amused her confidantes with her irresistible 
 naivete. Before long the whole town was in the secret of du 
 Bousquier's manoeuvres, and knew that Mile. Cormon's mar- 
 riage was a mockery; but after the first burst of laughter, 
 Mme. du Bousquier gained the esteem and sympathy of every 
 woman in it. While Mile. Cormon rushed unsuccessfully at
 
 148 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 opportunities of establishing herself, every one had laughed ; 
 but people admired her when they knew the position in which 
 she was placed by the severity of her religious principles. 
 " Poor, dear Mademoiselle Cormon ! " was replaced by " poor 
 Madame du Bousquier ! " 
 
 In this way the chevalier made du Bousquier both ridicu- 
 lous and very unpopular for a while, but the ridicule died 
 down with time; the slander languished when everybody 
 had cut his joke ; and beside, it seemed to many persons that 
 the mute Republican had a right to retire at the age of fifty- 
 seven. But if du Bousquier previously hated the Maison 
 d'Esgrignon, this incident so increased his rancor that he was 
 pitiless afterward in the day of vengeance. Mme. du Bous- 
 quier received orders never to set foot in that house again ; 
 and by way of reprisals, he inserted the following paragraph 
 in the " Orne Courier, " his own new paper: 
 
 "A REWARD of Funds to bring in a thousand francs will be 
 paid to any person who shall prove that one M. de Pombreton 
 existed either before or after the Emigration." 
 
 Though Mme. du Bousquier's happiness was essentially 
 negative, she saw that her marriage had its advantages. Was 
 it not better to take an interest in the most remarkable man 
 in the place than to live alone ? After all, du Bousquier was 
 better than the dogs, cats, and canaries on which old maids 
 centre their affections ; and his feeling for his wife was some- 
 thing more genuine and disinterested than the attachment of 
 servants, confessors, and legacy-hunters. At a still later period 
 she looked upon her husband as an instrument in God's hands 
 to punish her for the innumerable sins which she discovered 
 in her desires for marriage ; she regarded herself as justly re- 
 warded for the misery which she had brought on Mme. Gran- 
 son, and for hastening her own uncle's end. She felt the 
 strongest aversion for the conduct and opinions of the man
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 149 
 
 she had married, and yet it was her duty to take a tender 
 interest in him ; and if, as often happened, du Bousquier ate 
 her preserves, or thought that the dinner was good, she was 
 in the seventh heaven. She saw that his comfort was secured 
 even in the smallest details. 
 
 Did du Bousquier go on a journey, she fidgeted over his 
 traveling cloak and his linen ; she took the most minute pre- 
 cautions for his material comfort. If he was going over to 
 the Prebaudet, she began to consult the weather-glass twenty- 
 four hours beforehand. A sleeping dog has eyes and ears for 
 his master, and so it was with Mme. du Bousquier ; she used 
 to watch the expression of her husband's face to read his 
 wishes. And if that burly personage, vanquished by duty- 
 prescribed love, caught her by the waist and kissed her on 
 the forehead, exclaiming: "You are a good woman ! " tears 
 of joy filled the poor creature's eyes. It is probable that du 
 Bousquier felt it incumbent upon him to make compensations 
 which won Rose-Marie- Victoire's respect ; for the church does 
 not require that an assumption of wifely devotion should be 
 carried quite so far as Mme. du Bousquier thought necessary. 
 And yet when she listened to the rancorous talk of men who 
 took Constitutional-Royalism as a cloak for their real opinions, 
 the woman of saintly life uttered not a word. She foresaw 
 the downfall of the church, and shuddered. Very occasion- 
 ally she would hazard some foolish remark, promptly cut in 
 two by a look from du Bousquier. The timid sheep walked 
 in the way marked out by the shepherd ; never leaving the 
 bosom of the church, practicing austerities, without a thought 
 of the devil, his pomps and works. And so, within herself, 
 she united the purest Christian virtues, and du Bousquier truly 
 was one of the luckiest men in the kingdom of France and 
 Navarre. 
 
 "She will be a simpleton till her last sigh," said the cruel 
 ex-registrar (now cashiered). But, all the same, he dined at 
 her table twice a week.
 
 150 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 The story would be singularly incomplete if it omitted to 
 mention a last coincidence : the Chevalier de Valois and Su- 
 zanne's mother died at the same time. 
 
 The chevalier died with the Monarchy in August, 1830. 
 He went to Nonancourt to join the funeral procession ; piously 
 making one of the King's escort to Cherbourg, with the Trois- 
 villes, Casterans, d'Esgrignons, Verneuil's, and the rest. He 
 had brought with him his little hoard of savings and the 
 principal which brought him in his annual income, some fifty 
 thousand francs in all, which he offered to a faithful friend of 
 the elder branch to convey to his majesty. His own death 
 was very near, he said ; the money had come to him through 
 the King's bounty; and, after all, the property of the last of 
 the Valois belonged to the Crown. History does not say 
 whether the chevalier's fervent zeal overcame the repugnance 
 of the Bourbon who left his fair kingdom of France without 
 taking one centime into exile ; but the King surely must have 
 been touched by the old noble's devotion ; and this much is 
 at least certain Cesarine, M. de Valois' universal legatee, 
 inherited scarcely six hundred livres of income at his death. 
 The chevalier came back to Alencon, broken-hearted and 
 spent with the fatigue of the journey, to die just as Charles X. 
 set foot on foreign soil. 
 
 Mme. du Val-Noble and her journalist protector, fearing 
 reprisals from, the Liberals, were glad of an excuse to return 
 incognito to the village where the old mother died. Suzanne 
 attended the sale of the chevalier's furniture to buy some relic 
 of her first good friend, and ran up the price of the snuff- 
 box to the enormous amount of a thousand francs. The 
 Princess Goritza's portrait alone was worth that sum. Two 
 years afterward, a young man of fashion, struck with its mar- 
 velous workmanship, obtained it of Suzanne for his collection 
 of fine eighteenth-century snuff-boxes ; and so the delicate 
 toy which had been the confidante of the most courtly of 
 love affairs, and the delight of an old age till its very end, is
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 151 
 
 now brought into the semi-publicity of a collection. If the 
 dead could know what is done after they are gone, there 
 would be a flush at this moment on the chevalier's left cheek. 
 
 If this history should inspire owners of sacred relics with a 
 holy fear, and set them drafting codicils to provide for the 
 fate of such precious souvenirs of a happiness now no more, 
 by giving them into sympathetic hands ; even so an enormous 
 service would have been rendered to the chivalrous and senti- 
 mental section of the public ; but it contains another and a 
 much more exalted moral. Does it not show that a new 
 branch of education is needed ? Is it not an appeal to the so 
 enlightened solicitude of Ministers of Public Instruction to 
 create chairs of anthropology, a science in which Germany 
 is outstripping us? 
 
 Modern myths are even less understood of the people than 
 ancient myths, eaten up with myths though we may be. 
 Fables crowd in upon us on every side, allegory is pressed 
 into service on all occasions to explain everything. If fables 
 are the torches of history, as the humanist school maintains, 
 they may be a means of securing empires from revolution, if 
 only professors of history will undertake that their inter- 
 pretations thereof shall permeate the masses in the depart- 
 ments. If Mile. Cormon had had some knowledge of litera- 
 ture ; if there had been a professor of anthropology in the 
 department of the Orne; if (a final if) she had read her 
 Ariosto, would the appalling misfortune of her marriage have 
 befallen her? She would, perhaps, have found out for herself 
 why the Italian poet makes his heroine Angelica prefer Me- 
 doro (a suave Chevalier de Valois) to Orlando, who had lost 
 his mare, and could do nothing but work himself into a fury.* 
 Might not Medoro be taken as an allegorical figure as the 
 courtier of woman's sovereignty, whereas Orlando is revolu- 
 tion personified, an undisciplined, furious, purely destructive 
 force, incapable of producing anything ? This is the opinion 
 * Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso."
 
 152 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 of one of M. Ballanche's pupils ; we publish it, declining all 
 responsibility. 
 
 As for the tiny negroes' heads, no information of any kind 
 concerning them is forthcoming. Mme. du Val-Noble you 
 may see any day at the opera. Thanks to the primary educa- 
 tion given to her by the Chevalier de Valois, she looks almost 
 like a woman who makes a necessity of virtue, while in truth 
 she only exists by virtue of necessity. 
 
 Mme. du Bousquier is still living, which is to say, is it not, 
 that her troubles are not yet over ? At sixty, when women 
 can permit themselves to make admissions, talking confiden- 
 tially to Mme. du Courdrai, whose husband was reinstated in 
 August, 1830, she said that the thought that she must die 
 without knowing what it was to be a wife and mother was 
 more then she could bear. 
 
 PARIS, October, 1836.
 
 THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES 
 
 (Le Cabinet des antiques). 
 
 TO BARON VON HAMMER-PURGSTALL, 
 
 Member of the Aulic Council, Author of the History of the 
 
 Ottoman Empire. 
 
 Dear Baron : You have taken so warm an interest 
 in my long, vast History of French Manners in the 
 Nineteenth Century, you have given me so much en- 
 couragement to persevere with my work, that you have 
 given me a right to associate your name with some 
 portion of it. Are you not one of the most important 
 representatives of conscientious, studious Germany? 
 Will not your approval win for me the approval of 
 others, and protect this attempt of mine ? So proud 
 am I to have gained your good opinion, that I have 
 striven to deserve it by continuing my labors with the 
 unflagging courage characteristic of your methods of 
 study, and of that exhaustive research among docu- 
 ments without which you could never have given your 
 monumental work to the world of letters. Your sym- 
 pathy with such labor as you yourself have bestowed 
 upon the most brilliant civilization of the East, has 
 often sustained my ardor through nights of toil given 
 to the details of our modern civilization. And will 
 not you, whose naive kindliness can only be compared 
 with that of our own La Fontaine, be glad to know 
 of this ? 
 
 May this token of my respect for you and your work 
 find you at Dobling, dear baron, and put you and 
 yours in mind of one of your most sincere admirers 
 and friends. DE BALZAC. 
 
 (153)
 
 154 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 THERE stands a house at a corner of a street, in the middle 
 of a town, in one of the least important prefectures in France, 
 but the name of the street and the name of the town must be 
 suppressed here. Every one will appreciate the motives of 
 this sage reticence demanded by convention ; for if a writer 
 takes upon himself the office of annalist of his own time, he is 
 bound to touch on many sore subjects. The house was called 
 the Hotel d'Esgrignon ; but let d'Esgrignon be considered a 
 mere fancy name, neither more nor less connected with real 
 people than the conventional Belval, Floricour, or Derville 
 of the stage, or the Adalberts and Monbreuses of romance. 
 After all, the names of the principal characters will be quite 
 as much disguised ; for though in this history the chronicler 
 would prefer to conceal the facts under a mass of contradic- 
 tions, anachronisms, improbabilities, and absurdities ; the 
 truth will out in spite of him. You uproot a vine-stock, as 
 you imagine, and the stem will send up lusty shoots after you 
 have ploughed your vineyard over. 
 
 The " Hotel d'Esgrignon " was nothing more nor less than 
 the house in which the old marquis lived ; or, in the style of 
 ancient documents, Charles-Marie-Victor-Ange-Carol, Marquis 
 d'Esgrignon. It was only an ordinary house, but the towns- 
 people and tradesmen had begun by calling it the Hotel 
 d'Esgrignon in jest, and ended after a score of years by giving 
 it that name in earnest. 
 
 The name of Carol, or Karawl, as the Thierrys would have 
 spelt it, was glorious among the names of the most powerful 
 chieftains of the Northmen who conquered Gaul and estab- 
 lished the feudal system there. Never had Carol bent his 
 head before King or communes, the church or finance. 
 Intrusted in the days of yore with the keeping of a French 
 March, the title of marquis in their family meant no shadow 
 of imaginary office ; it had been a post of honor with duties to 
 discharge. Their fief had always been their domain. Pro- 
 vincial nobles were they in every sense of the word ; they might
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 155 
 
 boast of an unbroken line of great descent ; they had been 
 neglected by the court for two hundred years ; they were lords 
 paramount in the estates of a province where the people looked 
 up to them with superstitious awe, as to the image of the Holy 
 Virgin that cures the toothache. The house of d'Esgrignon, 
 buried in its remote border country, was preserved as the 
 charred piles of one of Caesar's bridges are maintained intact 
 in a river-bed. For thirteen hundred years the daughters of 
 the house had been married without a dowry or taken the veil ; 
 the younger sons of every generation had been content with 
 their share of their mother's dower and gone forth to be cap- 
 tains or bishops ; some had made a marriage at Court ; one 
 cadet of the house became an admiral, a duke, and a peer of 
 France, and died without issue. Never would the Marquis 
 d'Esgrignon of the elder branch accept the title of duke. 
 
 " I hold my marquisate as his majesty holds the realm of 
 France, and on the same conditions," he told the Constable 
 de Luynes, a very paltry fellow in his eyes, at that time. 
 
 You may be sure that d'Esgrignons lost their heads on the 
 scaffold during the troubles. The old blood showed itself 
 proud and high even in 1789. The marquis on that day 
 would not emigrate ; he was answerable for his March. The 
 reverence in which he was held by the countryside saved his 
 head ; but the hatred of the genuine sans- culottes, the old 
 Jacobins, was strong enough to compel him to pretend to fly, 
 and for a while he lived in hiding. Then, in the name of the 
 Sovereign People, the d'Esgrignon lands were dishonored by 
 the District, and the woods sold by the Nation in spite of the 
 personal protest made by the marquis, then turned of forty. 
 Mile. d'Esgrignon, his half-sister, saved some portions of the 
 fief, thanks to the young steward of the family, who claimed 
 on her behalf the partage de presuccession, which is to say, the 
 right of a relative to a portion of an emigre s lands. To 
 Mile. d'Esgrignon, therefore, the Republic made over the 
 castle itself and a few farms. Chesnel, the faithful steward,
 
 156 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 was obliged to buy in his own name the church, the parsonage 
 house, the castle gardens, and other places to which his patron 
 was attached the marquis advancing the money. 
 
 The slow, swift years of the Terror went by, and the marquis, 
 whose character had won the respect of the whole country, 
 decided that he and his sister ought to return to the castle 
 and improve the property which Maitre Chesnel for he was 
 now a notary had contrived to save for them out of the 
 wreck. 
 
 It was in the month of October, 1800, that Chesnel brought 
 the marquis back to the old feudal castle, and saw with deep 
 emotion, almost beyond control, his patron standing in the 
 midst of the empty courtyard, gazing round upon the moat, 
 now filled up with rubbish, and the castle towers razed to the 
 level of the roof. The descendant of the Franks looked for 
 the missing Gothic turrets and the picturesque weather-vanes 
 which used to rise above them ; and his eyes turned to the sky, 
 as if asking of heaven the reason of this social upheaval. 
 No one but Chesnel could understand the profound anguish 
 of the great d'Esgrignon, now known as Citizen Carol. For 
 a long while the marquis stood in silence, drinking in the 
 influences of the place, the ancient home of his forefathers, 
 with the air that he breathed; then he flung out a most 
 melancholy exclamation : 
 
 "Chesnel," he said, "we will come back again some day 
 when the troubles are over ; I could not bring myself to live 
 here until the edict of pacification has been published ; they 
 will not allow me to set my escutcheon on the wall." 
 
 He waved his hand toward the castle, mounted his horse, 
 and rode back beside his sister, who had driven over in the 
 notary's shabby basket chaise. 
 
 The Hotel d'Esgrignon in the town had been demolished ; 
 a couple of factories now stood on the site of the aristocrat's 
 house. So Maitre Chesnel spent the marquis' last bag of louis 
 on the purchase of the old-fashioned building in the square,
 
 HE SAW WITH DEEP EMOTION, ALMOST BEYOND CONTROL, 
 
 HIS PATRON STANDING IN THE MIDST OF 
 
 THE EMPTY COURTYARD.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 157 
 
 with its gables, weather-vane, turret, and dovecot. Once it 
 had been the court-house of the bailiwick, and subsequently the 
 presidial ; it had belonged to the d'Esgrignons from genera- 
 tion to generation ; and now, in consideration of five hundred 
 louis d'or, the present owner made it over with the title given 
 by the Nation to its rightful lord. And so, half in jest, half 
 in earnest, the old house was christened the Hotel d'Esgrignon. 
 
 In 1800 little or no difficulty was made over erasing names 
 from the fatal list, and some few emigres began to return. 
 Among the very first nobles to come back to the old town 
 were the Baron de Nouastre and his daughter. They were 
 completely ruined. M. d'Esgrignon generously offered them 
 the shelter of his roof; and in his house, two months later, 
 the baron died, worn out with grief. The Nouastres came of 
 the best blood of the province ; Mile, de Nouastre was a girl 
 of two-and-twenty ; the Marquis d'Esgrignon married her to 
 continue his line. But she died in childbirth, a victim to the 
 unskillful ness of her physician, leaving, most fortunately, a son 
 to bear the name of the d'Esgrignons. The old marquis he 
 was but fifty-three, but adversity and sharp distress had added 
 months to every year the poor old marquis saw the death of 
 the loveliest of human creatures, a noble woman in whom the 
 charm of the feminine figures of the sixteenth century lived 
 again, a charm now lost save to men's imaginations. With 
 her death the joy died out of his old age. It was one of those 
 terrible shocks which reverberate through every moment of 
 the years that follow. For a few moments he stood beside 
 the bed where his wife lay, with her hands folded like a saint, 
 then he kissed her on the forehead, turned away, drew out his 
 watch, broke the mainspring, and hung it up beside the hearth. 
 It was eleven o'clock in the morning. 
 
 "Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon," he said, "let us pray God 
 that this hour may not prove fatal yet again to our house. 
 My uncle the archbishop was murdered at this hour ; at this 
 hour also my father died "
 
 158 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 He knelt down beside the bed and buried his face in the 
 coverlet ; his sister did the same. In another moment they 
 both rose to their feet. Mile. d'Esgrignon burst into tears; 
 but the old marquis looked with dry eyes at the child, round 
 the room, and again on his dead wife. To the stubbornness 
 of the Frank he united the fortitude of a Christian. 
 
 These things came to pass in the second year of the nine- 
 teenth century. Mile. d'Esgrignon was then twenty-seven 
 years of age. She was a beautiful woman. An ex-contractor 
 for forage to the armies of the Republic, a man of the district, 
 with an income of six thousand francs, persuaded Chesnel to 
 carry a proposal of marriage to the lady. The marquis and 
 his sister were alike indignant with such presumption in their 
 man of business, and Chesnel was almost heart-broken ; he 
 could not forgive himself for yielding to the Sieur du Croisier's 
 blandishments. The marquis' manner with his old servant 
 changed somewhat ; never again was there quite the old affec- 
 tionate kindliness, which might almost have been taken for 
 friendship. From that time forth the marquis was grateful, and 
 his magnanimous and sincere gratitude continually wounded 
 the poor notary's feelings. To some sublime natures gratitude 
 seems an excessive payment ; they would rather have that 
 sweet equality of feeling which springs from similar ways of 
 thought, and the blending of two spirits by their own choice 
 and will. And Mattre Chesnel had known the delights of 
 such high friendship ; the marquis had raised him to his own 
 level. The old noble looked on the good notary as something 
 more than a servant, something less than a child ; he was the 
 voluntary liege man .of the house, a serf bound to his lord by 
 all the ties of affection. There was no balancing of obliga- 
 tions ; the sincere affection on either side put that out of the 
 question. 
 
 In the eyes of the marquis, Chesnel's official dignity was as 
 nothing; his old servitor was merely disguised as a notary. 
 As for Chesnel, the marquis was now, as always, a being of a
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 159 
 
 divine race ; he believed in nobility ; he did not blush to 
 remember that his father had thrown open the doors of the 
 salon to announce that " My Lord Marquis is served." His 
 devotion to the fallen house was due not so much to his creed 
 as to egoism ; he looked on himself as one of the family. 
 So his vexation was intense. Once he had ventured to allude 
 to his mistake in spite of the marquis' prohibition, and the 
 old noble answered gravely " Chesnel, before the troubles 
 you would not have permitted yourself to entertain such in- 
 jurious suppositions. What can these new doctrines be if they 
 have spoiled you ?" 
 
 Maitre Chesnel had gained the confidence of the whole 
 town ; people looked up to him ; his high integrity and con- 
 siderable fortune contributed to make him a person of impor- 
 tance. From that time forth he felt a very decided aversion 
 for the Sieur du Croisier ; and though there was little rancor 
 in his composition, he set others against the sometime forage- 
 contractor. Du Croisier, on the other hand, was a man to 
 bear a grudge and nurse a vengeance for a score of years. 
 He hated Chesnel and the d'Esgrignon family with the smoth- 
 ered, all-absorbing hate only to be found in a country town. 
 His rebuff had simply ruined him with the malicious provin- 
 cials among whom he had come to live, thinking to rule over 
 them. It was so real a disaster that he was not long in feeling 
 the consequences of it. He betook himself in desperation to 
 a wealthy old maid, and met with a second refusal. Thus 
 failed the ambitious schemes with which he had started. He 
 had lost his hope of a marriage with Mile. d'Esgrignon, which 
 would have opened the Faubourg Saint-Germain of the province 
 to him ; and after the second rejection, his credit fell away to 
 such an extent that it was almost as much as he could do to 
 keep his position in the second rank. 
 
 In 1805, M. de la Roche-Guyon, the oldest son of an 
 ancient family which had previously intermarried with the 
 d'Esgrignons, made proposals in form through Maitre Chesnel
 
 160 THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 for Mile. Marie-Armande-Claire d'Esgrignon. She declined 
 to hear the notary. 
 
 "You must have guessed before now that I am a mother, 
 dear Chesnel," she said ; she had just put her nephew, a fine 
 little boy of five, to bed. 
 
 The old marquis rose and went up to his sister, but just 
 returned from the cradle ; he kissed her hand reverently, and 
 as he sat down again, found words to say 
 
 " My sister, you are a d'Esgrignon." 
 
 A quiver ran through the noble girl ; the tears stood in her 
 eyes. M. d'Esgrignon, the father of the present marquis, had 
 married a second wife, the daughter of a farmer-general* en- 
 nobled by Louis XIV. It was a shocking mesalliance in the 
 eyes of his family, but fortunately of no importance, since a 
 daughter was the one child of the marriage. Armande knew 
 this. Kind as her brother had always been, he looked on her 
 as a stranger in blood. And this speech of his had just recog- 
 nized her as one of the family. 
 
 And was not her answer the worthy crown of eleven years 
 of her noble life ? Her every action since she came of age 
 had borne the stamp of the purest devotion ; love for her 
 brother was a sort of religion with her. 
 
 "I shall die Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon," she said simply, 
 turning to the notary. 
 
 For you there could be no fairer title," returned Chesnel, 
 meaning to convey a compliment. Poor Mile. d'Esgrignon 
 reddened. 
 
 " You have blundered, Chesnel," said the marquis, flattered 
 by the steward's words, but vexed that his sister had been hurt. 
 " A d'Esgrignon may marry a Montmorency ; their descent is 
 not so pure as ours. The d'Esgrignons bear or, two bends, 
 gules," he continued, "and nothing during nine hundred 
 years has changed their escutcheon ; as it was at first, so it is 
 to-day. Hence our device, Cil est nostre, taken at a tourna? 
 * Private contractors who rented the tax collecting.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES Of A COUNTRY TOWN. 161 
 
 ment in the reign of Philip Augustus, with the supporters, a 
 knight in armor or on the right, and a lion gules on the left." 
 
 " I do not remember that any woman I have ever met has 
 struck my imagination as Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon did," 
 said Emile Blondet, to whom contemporary literature is 
 indebted for this history among other things. "Truth to 
 tell, I was a boy, a mere child at the time, and perhaps my 
 memory-pictures of her owe something of their vivid color to 
 a boy's natural turn for the marvelous. 
 
 "If I was playing with other children on the parade, and 
 she came to walk there with her nephew Victurnien, the sight 
 of her in the distance thrilled me with very much the effect 
 of galvanism on a dead body. Child as I was, I felt as though 
 new life had been given me. 
 
 "Mile. Armande had hair of tawny gold; there was a 
 delicate fine down on her cheek, with a silver gleam upon it 
 which I loved to catch, putting myself so that I could see the 
 outlines of her face lit up by the daylight, and feel the fascina- 
 tion of those dreamy emerald eyes, which sent a flash of fire 
 through me whenever they fell upon my face. I used to pre- 
 tend to roll on the grass before her in our games, only to try 
 to reach her little feet, and 'admire them on a closer view. 
 The soft whiteness of her skin, her delicate features, the 
 clearly cut lines of her forehead, the grace of her slender 
 figure, took me with a sense of surprise, while as yet I did not 
 know that her shape was graceful, nor her brows beautiful, 
 nor the outline of her face a perfect oval. I admired as 
 children pray at that age, without too clearly understanding 
 why they pray. When my piercing gaze attracted her notice, 
 when she asked me (in that musical voice of hers, with more 
 volume in it, as it seemed to me, than all other voices), 
 ' What are you doing, little one ? Why do you look at me ?' 
 I used to come nearer and wriggle and bite my finger-nails, 
 and redden and say : I do not know.' And if she chanced 
 11
 
 162 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 to stroke my hair with her white hand, and ask me how old I 
 was, I would run away and call from a distance : ' Eleven ! ' 
 
 "Every princess and fairy of my visions, as I read the 
 'Arabian Nights,' looked and walked like Mile. d'Esgrignon; 
 and afterward, when my drawing-master gave me heads from 
 the antique to copy, I noticed that their hair was braided like 
 Mile. d'Esgrignon's. Still later, when the foolish fancies had 
 vanished one by one, Mile. Armande remained vaguely in my 
 memory as a type ; that Mile. Armande for whom men made 
 way respectfully, following the tall brown-robed figure with 
 their eyes along the parade and out of sight. Her exquisitely 
 graceful form, the rounded curves sometimes revealed by a 
 chance gust of wind, and always visible to my eyes in spite 
 of the ample folds of stuff, revisited my young man's dreams. 
 Later yet, when I came to think seriously over certain 
 mysteries of human thought, it seemed to me that the feeling 
 of reverence was first inspired in me by something expressed 
 in Mile. d'Esgrignon's face and bearing. The wonderful 
 calm of her face, the surpressed passion in it, the dignity of 
 her movements, the saintly life of duties fulfilled all this 
 touched and awed me. Children are more susceptible than 
 people imagine to the subtle influences of ideas ; they never 
 make game of real dignity ; they feel the charm of real 
 graciousness, and beauty attracts them, for childhood itself is 
 beautiful, and there are mysterious ties between things of the 
 same nature. 
 
 " Mile. d'Esgrignon was one of my religions. To this day 
 I can never climb the staircase of some old manor-house but 
 my foolish imagination must needs picture Mile. Armande 
 standing there, like the spirit of feudalism. I can never read 
 old chronicles but she appears before my eyes in the shape 
 of some famous woman of old time; she is Agnes Sorel, 
 Marie Touchet, Gabrielle ; and I lend her all the love that 
 was lost in her heart, all the love that she never expressed. 
 The angel shape seen in glimpses through the haze.of.childr
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 163 
 
 ish fancies visits me now sometimes across the mists of 
 dreams. ' ' 
 
 Keep this portrait in mind, it is a faithful picture and 
 sketch of character. Mile. d'Esgrignon is one of the most 
 instructive figures in this story ; she affords an example of the 
 mischief that may be done by the purest goodness for lack of 
 intelligence. 
 
 Two-thirds of the emigres returned to France during 1804 
 and 1805, and almost every exile from the Marquis d'Esgrig- 
 non's province came back to the land of his fathers. There 
 were certainly defections. Men of good birth entered the 
 service of Napoleon, and went into the army or held places at 
 the Imperial court, and others made alliances with the upstart 
 families. All those who cast in their lots with the Empire 
 retrieved their fortunes and recovered their estates, thanks to 
 the Emperor's munificence ; and these for the most part went 
 to Paris and stayed there. But some eight or nine families 
 still remained true to the proscribed noblesse and loyal to the 
 fallen monarchy. The La Roche-Guyons, Nouastres, Ver- 
 neuils, Casterans, Troisvilles, and the rest were some of them 
 rich, some of them poor ; but money, more or less, scarcely 
 counted anything among them. They took an antiquarian view 
 of themselves ; for them the age and preservation of the 
 pedigree was the one all-important matter ; precisely as, for 
 an amateur, the weight of metal in a coin is a small matter in 
 comparison with clean lettering, a flawless stamp, and high 
 antiquity. Of these families, the Marquis d'Esgrignon was 
 the acknowledged head. His house became their inner 
 chamber. There his majesty, Emperor and King, was never 
 anything but "Monsieur de Buonaparte ; " there " the King " 
 meant Louis XVIII., then at Mittau ; there the Department 
 was still the Province, and the prefecture the intcndance. 
 
 The marquis was honored among them for his admirable 
 behavior, his loyalty as a noble, his undaunted courage ; even
 
 164 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 as he was respected throughout the town for his misfortunes, 
 his fortitude, his steadfast adherence to his political convic- 
 tions. All gently bred Imperialists and the authorities them- 
 selves showed as much indulgence for his prejudices as respect 
 for his personal character; but there was another and a large 
 section of the new society which was destined to be known 
 after the Restoration as the Liberal party ; and these, with du 
 Croisier as their unacknowledged head, laughed at an aristo- 
 cratic oasis which nobody might enter without proof of 
 irreproachable descent. Their animosity was all the more 
 bitter because honest country squires and the higher officials, 
 with a good many worthy folk in the town, were of the opinion 
 that all the best society thereof was to be found in the Mar- 
 quis d'Esgrignon's salon. The prefect himself, the Emperor's 
 chamberlain, made overtures to the d'Esgrignons, humbly 
 sending his wife (a Grandlieu) as ambassadress. 
 
 Wherefore, those excluded from 'the miniature provincial 
 Faubourg Saint-Germain nicknamed the salon "The Collec- 
 tion of Antiquities," and called the marquis himself "Mons- 
 Carol." The receiver of taxes, for instance, addressed his 
 applications to " M. Carol (ci-devant des Grignons)," mali- 
 ciously adopting the obsolete way of spelling. 
 
 "For my own part," said Emile Blondet, "if I try to call 
 up childish memories, I remember that the nickname of 
 ' Collection of Antiquities ' always made me laugh, in spite of 
 my respect my love, I ought to say for Mile. d'Esgrignon. 
 The Hotel d'Esgrignon stood at the angle of two of the busiest 
 thoroughfares in the town, and not five hundred paces away 
 from the market-place. Two of the drawing-room windows 
 looked upon the street and two upon the square ; the room 
 was like a glass cage, every one who came past could look 
 through it from side to side. I was only a boy of twelve 
 at the time, but I thought, even then, that the salon was one 
 of those rare curiosities which seem, when you come to think
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 165 
 
 of them afterward, to lie just on the borderland between 
 reality and dreams, so that you can scarcely tell to which side 
 they most belong. 
 
 "The room, the ancient Hall of Audience, stood above a 
 row of cellars with grated air-holes, once the prison-cells of 
 the old court-house, now converted into a kitchen. I do not 
 know that the magnificent lofty chimney-piece of the Louvre, 
 with its marvelous carving, seemed more wonderful to me 
 than the vast open hearth of the salon d'Esgrignon when I 
 saw it for the first time. It was covered like a melon with a 
 network of tracery. Over it stood an equestrian portrait of 
 Henry III., under whom the ancient duchy of appanage 
 reverted to the crown ; it was a great picture executed in low 
 relief, and set in a carved and gilded frame. The ceiling 
 spaces between the chestnut cross-beams in the fine old roof 
 were decorated with scroll-work patterns ; there was a little 
 faded gilding still left along the angles. The walls were cov- 
 ered with Flemish tapestry, six scenes from the Judgment of 
 Solomon, framed in golden garlands, with satyrs and cupids 
 playing among the leaves. The parquet floor had been laid 
 down by the present marquis, and Chesnel had picked up 
 the furniture at sales of the wreckage of old chateaux between 
 1793 an d 1795 5 so that there were Louis XIV. consoles, tables, 
 clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces and tapestry-covered 
 chairs, which marvelously completed a stately room, large 
 out of all proportion to the house. Luckily, however, there 
 was an equally lofty antechamber, the ancient Salle des Pas 
 Perdus of the presidial, which communicated likewise with the 
 magistrate's deliberating chamber, used by the d'Esgrignons 
 as a dining-room. 
 
 "Beneath the old paneling, amid the threadbare braveries 
 of a bygone day, some eight or ten dowagers were drawn up 
 in state in a quavering line ; some with palsied heads, others 
 dark and shriveled like mummies ; some erect and stiff, others 
 bowed and bent, but all of them tricked out in more or less
 
 166 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 fantastic costumes as far as possible removed from the fashion 
 of the day, with be-ribboned caps above their curled and 
 powdered 'heads,' and old discolored lace. No painter 
 however earnest, no caricature however wild, ever caught the 
 haunting fascination of those aged women ; they come back 
 to me in dreams ; their puckered faces shape themselves in my 
 memory whenever I meet an old woman who puts me in mind 
 of them by some faint resemblance of dress or feature. And 
 whether it is that misfortune has initiated me into the secrets 
 of irremediable and overwhelming disaster; whether that I have 
 come to understand the whole range of human feelings, and, 
 best of all, the thoughts of Old Age and Regret ; whatever the 
 reason, nowhere and never again have I seen among the living 
 or in the faces of the dying the wan look of certain gray eyes 
 that I remember, nor the dreadful brightness of others that 
 were black. 
 
 "Neither Hoffmann nor Maturin, the two weirdest imagi- 
 nations of our time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I 
 used to feel when I watched the automaton movements of those 
 bodies sheathed in whalebone. The paint on actors' faces 
 never caused me a shock; I could see below it the rouge in 
 grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a comrade at least as 
 malicious as I can be. Years had leveled those women's 
 faces, and at the same time furrowed them with wrinkles, till 
 they looked like the heads on wooden nutcrackers carved in 
 Germany. Peeping in through the window-panes, I gazed at 
 the battered bodies, and ill-jointed limbs (how they were 
 fastened together, and, indeed, their whole anatomy was a 
 mystery I never attempted to explain) ; I saw the lantern 
 jaws, the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of 
 the hips; and the movements of these figures as they came 
 and went seemed to me no whit less extraordinary than their 
 sepulchral immobility as they sat round the card-tables. 
 
 " The men looked gray and faded like the ancient tapestries 
 on the wall ; in dress they were much more like the men of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 167 
 
 the day, but even they were not altogether convincingly alive. 
 Their white hair, their withered waxen-hued faces, their de- 
 vastated foreheads and pale eyes, revealed their kinship to the 
 women, and neutralized any effects of reality borrowed from 
 their costume. 
 
 " The very certainty of finding all these people seated at or 
 among the tables every day at the same hours invested them 
 at length in my eyes with a sort of spectacular interest as it 
 were; there was something theatrical, something unearthly 
 about them. 
 
 " Whenever, in after times, I have gone through museums 
 of old furniture in Paris, London, Munich, or Vienna, with 
 the gray-headed custodian who shows you the splendors of 
 time past, I have peopled the rooms with figures from the 
 Collection of Antiquities. Often, as little schoolboys of eight 
 or ten we used to propose to go and take a look at the curiosi- 
 ties in their glass cage, for the fun of the thing. But as soon 
 as I caught sight of Mile. Armande's sweet face, I used to 
 tremble ; and there was a trace of jealousy in my admiration 
 for the lovely child Victurnien, who belonged, as we all in- 
 stinctively felt, to a different and higher order of being from 
 our own. It struck me as something indescribably strange that 
 the young fresh creature should be there in that cemetery 
 awakened before the time. We could not have explained 
 our thoughts to ourselves, yet we felt that we were bourgeois, 
 utterly insignificant, and of no account in the presence of that 
 proud court." 
 
 The disasters of 1813 and 1814, which brought about the 
 downfall of Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of 
 Antiquities, and what was more than life, the hope of recov- 
 ering their past importance; but the events of 1815, the 
 troubles of the foreign occupation, and the vacillating policy 
 of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all con- 
 tributed to defer the fulfillment of the expectations of the
 
 168 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, 
 therefore, only begins to shape itself in 1822. 
 
 In 1822 the Marquis d'Esgrignon's fortunes had not im- 
 proved in spite of the changes worked by the Restoration in 
 the condition of Emigres. Of all nobles hardly hit by Revo- 
 lutionary legislation, his case was the hardest. Like other 
 great families, the d'Esgrignons before 1789 derived the 
 greater part of their income from their rights as lords of the 
 manor in the shape of dues paid by those who held of them ; 
 and, naturally, the old seigneurs had reduced the size of the 
 holdings in order to swell the amounts paid in quit-rents and 
 heriots. Families in this position were hopelessly ruined. 
 They were not affected by the ordinance by which Louis 
 XVIII. put the emigres into possession of such of their lands 
 as had not been sold ; and at a later date it was impossible 
 that the law of indemnity should indemnify them. Their 
 suppressed rights, as everybody knows, were revived in the 
 shape of a land tax known by the very name of domaines, 
 but the money went into the coffers of the State. 
 
 The marquis by his position belonged to that small section 
 of the Royalist party which would hear of no kind of com- 
 promise with those whom they styled, not Revolutionaries, 
 but revolted subjects, or, in more parliamentary language, they 
 had no dealings with Liberals or Constitutionnels. Such 
 Royalists, nicknamed Ultras by the opposition, took for 
 leaders and heroes those courageous orators of the Right, 
 who from the very beginning attempted, with M. de Polignac, 
 to protest against the charter granted by Louis XVIII. This 
 they regarded as an ill-advised edict extorted from the Crown 
 by the necessity of the moment, only to be annulled later on. 
 And, therefore, so far from cooperating with the King to 
 bring about a new condition of things, the Marquis d'Esgrig- 
 non stood aloof, an upholder of the straitest sect of the Right 
 in politics, until such time as his vast fortune should be restored 
 to him.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 169 
 
 The miracles of the Restoration of 1814, the still greater 
 miracle of Napoleon's return in 1815, the portents of a second 
 flight of the Bourbons, and a second reinstatement (that 
 almost fabulous phase of contemporary history), all these 
 things took the marquis by surprise at the age of sixty-seven. 
 At that time of life, the most high-spirited men of their age 
 were not so much vanquished as worn out in the struggle with 
 the Revolution; their activity, in their remote provincial 
 retreats, had turned into a passionately held and immovable 
 conviction ; and almost all of them were shut in by the ener- 
 vating, easy round of daily life in the country. Could worse 
 luck befall a political party than this to be represented by 
 old men at a time when its ideas are already stigmatized as 
 old-fashioned ? 
 
 When the legitimate sovereign appeared to be firmly seated 
 on the throne again in 1818, the marquis asked himself what 
 a man of seventy should do at court ; and what duties, what 
 office, he could discharge there ? The noble and high-minded 
 d'Esgrignon was fain to be content with the triumph of the 
 Monarchy and religion, while he waited for the results of 
 that unhoped-for, indecisive victory, which proved to be 
 simply an armistice. He continued as before, lord-para- 
 mount of his salon, so felicitously named the Collection of 
 Antiquities. 
 
 But when the victors of 1793 became the vanquished in 
 their turn, the nickname given at first in jest began to be 
 used in bitter earnest. The town was no more free than other 
 country towns from the hatreds and jealousies bred of party 
 spirit. Du Croisier, contrary to all expectation, married the 
 rich old maid who had refused him at first ; carrying her off 
 from his rival, the darling of the aristocratic quarter, a certain 
 chevalier whose illustrious name will be sufficiently hidden by 
 suppressing it altogether, in accordance with the usage formerly 
 adopted in the place itself, where he was known by his title 
 only. He was " the chevalier " in the town, as the Comte
 
 170 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 d'Artois was " monsieur " at court. Now, not only had that 
 marriage produced a war after the provincial manner, in 
 which all weapons are fair ; it had hastened the separation of 
 the great and little noblesse, of the aristocratic and bourgeois 
 social elements, which had been united for a little space by 
 the heavy weight of Napoleonic rule. After the pressure was 
 removed, there followed that sudden revival of class divisions 
 which did so much harm to the country. 
 
 The most national of all sentiments in France is vanity. 
 The wounded vanity of the many induced a thirst for 
 Equality ; though, as the most ardent innovator will some day 
 discover, Equality is an impossibility. The Royalists pricked 
 the Liberals in the most sensitive spots, and this happened espe- 
 cially in the provinces, where either party accused the other 
 of unspeakable atrocities. In those days the blackest deeds 
 were done in politics, to secure public opinion on one side 
 or another, to catch the votes of that public of fools which 
 holds up hands for those that are clever enough to serve out 
 weapons to them. It is very difficult in a country town to 
 avoid a man-to-man conflict of this kind over interests or 
 questions which in Paris appear in a more general and 
 theoretical form, with the result that political combatants 
 also rise to a higher level ; M. Laffitte, for example, or M. 
 Casimir Perier can respect M. de Villele or M. de Peyronnet 
 as a man. M. Laffitte, who drew the fire on the ministry, 
 would have given them an asylum in his house if they had fled 
 thither on the 2pth of July, 1830. Benjamin Constant sent a 
 copy of his work on Religion to the Vicomte de Chateau- 
 briand, with a flattering letter acknowledging benefits received 
 from the former minister. 
 
 In such warfare as this, waged ceremoniously and without 
 rancor on the side of the Antiquities, while du Croisier's 
 faction went so far as to use the poisoned weapons of savages 
 in this warfare the advantages of wit and delicate irony lay 
 on the side of the nobles. But it should never_ be forgotten.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 171 
 
 that the wounds made by the tongue and the eyes, by gibe or 
 slight, are the last of all to heal. When the chevalier turned 
 his back on mixed society and intrenched himself on the 
 Mons Sacer of aristocracy, his witticisms thenceforward were 
 directed at du Croisier's salon ; he stirred up the fires of war, 
 not knowing how far the spirit of revenge was to urge the 
 rival faction. None but purists and loyal gentlemen and 
 women sure one of another entered the Hotel d'Esgrignon ; 
 they committed no indiscretions of any kind; they had 
 their ideas, true or false, good or bad, noble or trivial, but 
 there was nothing to laugh at in all this. If the Liberals 
 meant to make the nobles ridiculous, they were obliged to 
 fasten on the political actions of their opponents ; while the 
 intermediate party, composed of officials and others who 
 paid court to the higher powers, kept the nobles informed of 
 all that was done and said in the Liberal camp, and much of 
 it was abundantly laughable. Du Croisier's adherents smarted 
 under a sense of inferiority, which increased their thirst for 
 revenge. 
 
 In .1822, du Croisier put himself at the head of the manu- 
 facturing interest of the province, as the Marquis d'Esgrignon 
 headed the noblesse. Each represented his party. But du 
 Croisier, instead of giving himself out frankly for a man of the 
 extreme Left, ostensibly adopted the opinions formulated at 
 a later day by the 221 deputies. 
 
 By taking up this position, he could keep in touch with the 
 magistrates and local officials and the capitalists of the depart- 
 ment. Du Croisier's salon, a power at least equal to the salon 
 d'Esgrignon, larger numerically, as well as younger and more 
 energetic, made itself felt all over the countryside ; the Collec- 
 tion of Antiquities, on the other hand, remained inert, a passive 
 appendage, as it were, of a central authority which was often 
 embarrassed by its own partisans ; for not merely did they 
 encourage the Government in a mistaken policy, but some of 
 its most absurd and fatal blunders were made in consequence
 
 172 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 of the pressure brought to bear upon it by the Conservative 
 party. 
 
 The Liberals, so far, had never contrived to carry their 
 candidate. The department declined to obey their command, 
 knowing that du Croisier, if elected, would take his place on 
 the Left Centre benches, and as far as possible to the Left. 
 Du Croisier was in correspondence with the Brothers Keller, 
 the bankers, the oldest of whom shone conspicuous among 
 " the nineteen deputies of the Left," that phalanx made 
 famous by the efforts of the entire Liberal press. This same 
 M. Keller, moreover, was related by marriage to the Comte 
 de Gondreville, a Constitutional peer who remained in favor 
 with Louis XVIII. For these reasons, the Constitutional 
 Opposition (as distinct from the liberal party) was always pre- 
 pared to vote at the last moment, not for the candidate whom 
 they professed to support, but for du Croisier, if that worthy 
 could succeed in gaining a sufficient number of Royalist votes; 
 but at every election du Croisier was regularly thrown out by 
 the Royalists. The leaders of that party, taking their tone 
 from the Marquis d'Esgrignon, had pretty thoroughly fathomed 
 and gauged their man ; and with each defeat, du Croisier and 
 his party waxed more bitter. Nothing so effectually stirs up 
 strife as the failure of some snare set with elaborate pains. 
 
 In 1822 there seemed to be a lull in hostilities which had 
 been kept up with great spirit during the first four years of the 
 Restoration. The salon du Croisier and the salon d'Esgrignon, 
 having measured their strength and weakness, were in all 
 probability waiting for opportunity, that Providence of party 
 strife. Ordinary persons were content with the surface quiet 
 which deceived the Government ; but those who knew du 
 Croisier better were well aware that the passion of revenge in 
 him, as in all men whose whole life consists in mental activity, 
 is implacable, especially when political ambitions are involved. 
 About this time du Croisier, who used to turn white and red 
 at the bare mention of d'Esgrignon or the chevalier, and
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 173 
 
 shuddered at the name of the Collection of Antiquities, chose 
 to wear the impassive countenance of a savage. He smiled 
 upon his enemies, hating them but the more deeply, watching 
 them the more narrowly from hour to hour. One of his own 
 party, who seconded him in these calculations of cold wrath, 
 was the president of the Tribunal, M. du Ronceret, a little 
 country squire, who had vainly endeavored to gain admittance 
 among the Antiquities. 
 
 The d'Esgrignons' little fortune, carefully administered by 
 Maitre Chesnel, was barely sufficient for the worthy marquis' 
 needs ; for though he lived without the slightest ostentation, 
 he also lived like a noble. The governor found by his lord- 
 ship the bishop for the hope of the house, the young Comte 
 Victurnien d'Esgrignon, was an elderly Oratorian who must 
 be paid a certain salary, although he lived with the family. 
 The wages of a cook, a waiting-woman for Mile. Armande, 
 an old valet for M. le Marquis, and a couple of other servants, 
 together with the daily expenses of the household, and the 
 cost of an education for which nothing was spared, absorbed 
 the whole family income, in spite of Mile. Armande's econo- 
 mies, in spite of Chesnel's careful management, and the ser- 
 vants' affection. As yet, Chesnel had not been able to set 
 about repairs at the ruined castle ; he was waiting till the 
 leases fell in to raise the rent of the farms, for rents had been 
 rising lately, partly on account of improved methods of agri- 
 culture, partly by the fall in the value of money, of which the 
 landlord would get the benefit at the expiration of leases 
 granted in 1809. 
 
 The marquis himself knew nothing of the details of the 
 management of the house or of his property. He would have 
 been thunderstruck if he had been told of the excessive pre- 
 cautions needed " to make both ends of the year meet in 
 December," to use the housewife's saying, and he was so near 
 the end of his life that every one shrank from opening his 
 eyes. The marquis and his adherents believed that a House, to
 
 174 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN, 
 
 which no one at Court or in the Government gave a thought, 
 a House that was never heard of beyond the gates of the town, 
 save here and there in the same department, was about to 
 revive its ancient greatness, to shine forth in all its glory. 
 The d'Esgrignons' line should reappear with renewed lustre 
 in the person of Victurnien, just as the despoiled nobles came 
 into their own again, and the handsome heir to a great estate 
 would be in a position to go to Court, enter the King's ser- 
 vice, and marry (as other d'Esgrignons had done before him) 
 a Navarreins, a Cadignan, a d'Uxelles, a Beauseant, a Bla- 
 mont-Chauvry ; a wife, in short, who should unite all the dis- 
 tinctions of birth and beauty, wit and health, and character. 
 The intimates who came to play their game of cards of an 
 evening the Troisvilles (pronounced Treville), the La Roche- 
 Guyons, the Castdrans (pronounced Cateran), and the Due de 
 Verneuil had all so long been accustomed to look up to the 
 marquis as a person of immense consequence, that they en- 
 couraged him in such notions as these. They were perfectly 
 sincere in their belief; and, indeed, it would have been well 
 founded if they could have wiped out the history of the last 
 forty years. But the most honorable and undoubted sanctions 
 of right, such as Louis XVIII. had tried to set on record when 
 he dated the Charter from the one-and-twentieth year of his 
 reign, only exist when ratified by the general consent. The 
 d'Esgrignons not only lacked the very rudiments of the lan- 
 guage of latter-day politics, to wit, money, the great modern 
 relief, or sufficient rehabilitation of nobility; but, in their 
 case, too, "historical continuity" was lacking, and that is a 
 kind of renown which tells quite as much at Court as on the 
 battlefield, in diplomatic circles as in Parliament, with a book, 
 or in connection with an adventure ; it is, as it were, a sacred 
 ampulla poured upon the heads of each successive generation. 
 Whereas a noble family, inactive and forgotten, is very much 
 in the position of a hard-featured, poverty-stricken, simple- 
 minded, and virtuous maid, these qualifications being the four
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 175 
 
 cardinal points of misfortune. The marriage of a daughter of 
 the Troisvilles with General Montcornet, so far from opening 
 the eyes of the Antiquities, very nearly brought about a rup- 
 ture between the Troisvilles and the salon d'Esgrignon, the 
 latter declaring that the Troisvilles were mixing themselves 
 up with all sorts of people. 
 
 There was one, and one only, among all these people who 
 did not share their illusions. And that one, needless to say, 
 was Chesnel the notary. Although his devotion, sufficiently 
 proved already, was simply unbounded for the great house 
 now reduced to three persons ; although he accepted all their 
 ideas, and thought them nothing less than right, he had too 
 much commonsense, he was too good a man of business to 
 more than half the families in the department, to miss the 
 significance of the great changes that were taking place in 
 people's minds, or to be blind to the different conditions 
 brought about by industrial development and modern manners. 
 He had watched the Revolution pass through the violent 
 phase of 1793, when men, women, and children wore arms, 
 and heads fell on the scaffold, and victories were won in 
 pitched battles with Europe ; and now he saw the same forces 
 quietly at work in men's minds, in the shape of ideas which 
 sanctioned the issues. The soil had been cleared, the seed 
 sown, and now came the harvest. To his thinking, the Revolu- 
 tion had formed the mind of the younger generation ; he 
 touched the hard facts, and knew that although there were 
 countless unhealed wounds, what had been done was done past 
 recall. The death of a king on the scaffold, the protracted 
 agony of a queen, the division of the nobles' lands, in his 
 eyes were so many binding contracts ; and where so many vested 
 interests were involved, it was not likely that those concerned 
 would allow them to be attacked. Chesnel saw clearly. His 
 fanatical attachment to the d'Esgrignons was whole-hearted, 
 but it was not blind, and it was all the fairer for this. The 
 young monk's faith that sees heaven laid open and beholds the
 
 176 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 angels is something far below the power of the old monk who 
 points them out to him. The ex-steward was like the old monk ; 
 he would have given his life to defend a worm-eaten shrine. 
 
 He tried to explain the " innovations " to his old master, 
 using a thousand tactful precautions ; sometimes speaking jest- 
 ingly, sometimes affecting surprise or sorrow over this or that ; 
 but he always met the same prophetic smile on the marquis' 
 lips, the same fixed conviction in the marquis' mind, that 
 these follies would go by like others. Events contributed 
 in a way which has escaped attention to assist such noble 
 champions of forlorn hopes to cling to their superstitions. 
 What could Chesnel do when the old marquis said, with a 
 lordly gesture: " God swept away Bonaparte with his armies, 
 his new great vassals, his crowned kings, and his vast con- 
 ceptions ! God will deliver us from the rest." And Chesnel 
 hung his head sadly, and did not dare to answer: " It cannot 
 be God's will to sweep away France." Yet both of them 
 were grand figures ; the one, standing out against the torrent 
 of facts like an ancient block of lichen-covered granite, still 
 upright in the depths of an Alpine gorge ; the other, watching 
 the course of the flood to turn it to account. Then the good 
 gray-headed notary would groan over the irreparable havoc 
 which these superstitions were sure to work in the mind, the 
 habits, and ideas of the Comte Victurnien d'Esgrignon. 
 
 Idolized by his father, idolized by his aunt, the young heir 
 was a spoilt child in every sense of the word ; but still a spoilt 
 child who justified paternal and maternal illusions. Maternal, 
 be it said, for Victurnien' s aunt was truly a mother to him ; and 
 yet, however careful and tender she may be that never bore a 
 child, there is a something lacking in her motherhood. A 
 mother's second-sight cannot be acquired. An aunt, bound 
 to her nursing by ties of such a pure affection as united Mile. 
 Armande to Victurnien, may love as much as a mother might ; 
 may be as careful, as kind, as tender, as indulgent, but she 
 lacks the mother's instinctive knowledge when and how to be
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 177 
 
 severe ; she has no sudden warnings, none of the uneasy pre- 
 sentiments of the mother's heart ; for a mother, bound to her 
 child from the beginnings of life by all the fibres of her being, 
 is still conscious of the communication, still vibrates with the 
 shock of every trouble, and thrills with every joy in the child's 
 life as if it were her own. If Nature has made of woman, 
 physically speaking, a neutral ground, it has not been for- 
 bidden to her, under certain conditions, to identify herself 
 completely with her offspring. When she has not merely 
 given life, but given of her whole life, you behold that wonder- 
 ful, unexplained, and inexplicable thing the love of a woman 
 for one of her children above the others. The outcome of 
 this story is one more proof of a proven truth a mother's 
 place cannot be filled. A mother foresees danger long before 
 a Mile. Armande can admit the possibility of it, even if the 
 mischief is done. The one prevents the evil, the other 
 remedies it. And beside, in the maiden's motherhood there 
 is an element of blind adoration, she cannot bring herself to 
 scold a beautiful boy. 
 
 A practical knowledge of life and the experience of busi- 
 ness had taught the old notary a habit of distrustful, clear- 
 sighted observation something akin to the mother's instinct. 
 But Chesnel counted for so little in the house (especially since 
 he had fallen into something like disgrace over that unlucky 
 project of a marriage between a d'Esgrignon and a du Croisier), 
 that he had made up his mind to adhere blindly in future to 
 the family doctrines. He was a common soldier ; faithful to 
 his post, and ready to give his life ; it was never likely that 
 they would take his advice, even in the height of the storm ; 
 unless chance should bring him, like the King's bedesman in 
 "The Antiquary," to the edge of the sea, when the old 
 baronet and his daughter were caught by the high tide. 
 
 Du Croisier caught a glimpse of his revenge in the anomalous 
 education given to the lad. He hoped, to quote the expres- 
 sive words of the author quoted above, "to drown the lamb 
 12
 
 178 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 in its mother's milk." This was the hope which had produced 
 his taciturn resignation and brought that savage smile on his 
 lips. 
 
 The young Comte Victurnien was taught to believe in his 
 own supremacy so soon as an idea could enter his head. All 
 the great nobles of the realm were his peers, his one superior 
 was the King, and the rest of mankind were his inferiors, 
 people with whom he had nothing in common, toward whom 
 he had no duties. They were defeated and conquered enemies, 
 whom he need not take into account for a moment ; their 
 opinions could not affect a noble, and they all owed him 
 respect. Unluckily, with the rigorous logic of youth, which 
 leads children and young people to proceed to extremes 
 whether good or bad, Victurnien pushed these conclusions 
 to their utmost consequences. His own external advantages, 
 moreover, confirmed him in his beliefs. He had been extra- 
 ordinarily beautiful as a child ; he became as accomplished a 
 young man as any father could wish. 
 
 Personal beauty has this in common with noble birth, it 
 cannot be acquired afterward ; it is everywhere recognized, 
 and often is more valued than either money or brains ; beauty 
 has only to appear and triumph ; nobody asks more of beauty 
 than that it should simply exist. 
 
 Fate had endowed Victurnien, over and above the privileges 
 of good looks and noble birth, with a high spirit, a wonderful 
 aptitude of comprehension, and a good memory. His educa- 
 tion, therefore, had been complete. He knew a good deal 
 more than is usually known by young provincial nobles, who 
 develop into highly distinguished sportsmen, owners of land, 
 and consumers of tobacco ; and are put to treat art, sciences, 
 letters, poetry, or anything offensively above their intellects 
 cavalierly enough. Such gifts of nature and education surely 
 would one day realize the Marquis d'Esgrignon's ambitions ; he 
 already saw his son a Marshal of France if Victurnien's tastes 
 were for the army ; an ambassador if diplomacy held any at-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 179 
 
 tractions for him ; a cabinet minister if that career seemed good 
 in his eyes ; every place in the State belonged to Victurnien. 
 And, most gratifying thought of all for a father, the young 
 count would have made his way in the world by his own merits 
 even if he had not been a d'Esgrignon. 
 
 All through his happy childhood and golden youth, Victur- 
 nien had never met with opposition to his wishes. He had 
 been the king of the house ; no one curbed the little prince's 
 will ; and naturally he grew up insolent and audacious, selfish 
 as a prince, self-willed as the most high-spirited cardinal of 
 the Middle Ages defects of character which any one might 
 guess from his qualities, essentially those of the noble. 
 
 The chevalier was a man of the good old times when the 
 Gray Musketeers were the terror of the Paris theatres, when 
 they horsewhipped the watch and drubbed servers of writs, 
 and played a host of page's pranks, at which majesty was wont 
 to smile so long as they were amusing. This charming deceiver 
 and hero of the ruelles had no small share in bringing about 
 the disasters which afterward befell. The amiable old gentle- 
 man, with nobody to understand him, was not a little pleased 
 to find a budding Faublas, who looked the part to admiration, 
 and put him in mind of his own young days. So, making no 
 allowance for the difference of the times, he sowed the maxims 
 of a roue of the Encyclopaedic period broadcast in the boy's 
 mind. H~ told wicked anecdotes of the reign of his majesty 
 Louis XV.; he glorified the manners and customs of the year 
 1750 ; he told of the orgies in petites maisons (little houses 
 abodes of mistresses), the follies of courtesans, the capital 
 tricks played on creditors, the manners, in short, which fur- 
 nished forth Dancourt's comedies and Beaumarchais' epigrams. 
 And unfortunately, the corruption lurking beneath the utmost 
 polish tricked itself out in Voltairean wit. If the chevalier 
 went rather too far at times, he always added as a corrective 
 that a man must always behave himself like a gentleman. 
 
 Of all this discourse, Victurnien comprehended just so much
 
 180 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 as flattered his passions. From the first he saw his old father 
 laughing with the chevalier. The two elderly men considered 
 that the pride of a d'Esgrignon was a sufficient safeguard 
 against anything unbefitting ; as for a dishonorable action, no 
 one in the house imagined that a d'Esgrignon could be guilty 
 of it. HONOR, the great principle of Monarchy, was planted 
 firm like a beacon in the hearts of the family ; it lighted up 
 the least action, it kindled the least thought of a d'Esgrignon. 
 "A d'Esgrignon ought not to permit himself to do such and 
 such a thing, he bears a name, which pledges him to make the 
 future worthy of the past " a noble teaching which should 
 have been sufficient in itself to keep alive the tradition of 
 noblesse had been, as it were, the burden of Victurnien's 
 cradle song. He heard them from the old marquis, from 
 Mile. Armande, from Chesnel, from the intimates of the house. 
 And so it came to pass that good and evil met, and in equal 
 forces, in the boy's soul. 
 
 At the age of eighteen, Victurnien went into society. He 
 noticed some slight discrepancies between the outer world of 
 the town and the inner world of the Hotel d'Esgrignon, but 
 he in no wise tried to seek the causes of them. And, indeed, 
 the causes were to be found in Paris. He had yet to learn 
 that the men who spoke their minds out so boldly in evening 
 talk with his father were extremely careful of "what they said 
 in the presence of the hostile persons with whom their inter- 
 ests compelled them to mingle. His own father had won the 
 right of freedom of speech. Nobody dreamed of contradict- 
 ing an old man of seventy, and beside, every one was willing 
 to overlook fidelity to the old order of things in a man who 
 had been violently despoiled. 
 
 Victurnien was deceived by appearances, and his behavior 
 set up the backs of the townspeople. In his impetuous way 
 he tried to carry matters with too high a hand over some diffi- 
 culties in the way of sport, which ended in formidable law- 
 suits, hushed up by Chesnel for money paid down. Nobody
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 181 
 
 dared to tell the marquis of these things. You may judge of 
 his astonishment if he had heard that his son had been prose- 
 cuted for shooting over his lands, his domains, his covers, 
 under the reign of a son of St. Louis ! People were too much 
 afraid of the possible consequences to tell him about such 
 trifles, Chesnel said. 
 
 The young count indulged in other escapades in the town. 
 These the chevalier regarded as "amourettes" but they cost 
 Chesnel something considerable in portions for forsaken dam- 
 sels seduced under imprudent promises of marriage : yet other 
 cases there were which came under an article of the Code as 
 to the abduction of minors; and but for Chesnel's timely 
 intervention, the new law would have been allowed to take its 
 brutal course, and it is hard to say where the count might 
 have ended. Victurnien grew the bolder for these victories 
 over bourgeois justice. He was so accustomed to be pulled 
 out of scrapes, that he never thought twice before any prank. 
 Courts of law, in his opinion, were bugbears to frighten 
 people, but had no hold on him. Things which he would 
 have blamed in common people were for him only pardonable 
 amusements. His disposition to treat the new laws cavalierly 
 while obeying the maxims of a Code for aristocrats, his beha- 
 vior and character, were all pondered, analyzed, and tested 
 by a few adroit persons in du Croisier's interests. These 
 people supported each other in the effort to make the people 
 believe that Liberal slanders were revelations, and that the 
 Ministerial policy at bottom meant a return to the old order 
 of things. 
 
 What a bit of luck t find something by way of proof of 
 their assertions ! President du Ronceret, and the public 
 prosecutor likewise, lent themselves admirably, so far as was 
 compatible with their duty as magistrates, to the design of 
 letting off the offender as easily as possible ; indeed, they 
 went deliberately out of their way to do this, well pleased to 
 raise a Liberal clamor against their overlarge concessions.
 
 182 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 And so, while seeming to serve the interests of the d'Esgrig- 
 nons, they stirred up ill feeling against them. The treacher- 
 ous du Ronceret had it in his mind to pose as incorruptible at 
 the right moment over some serious charge, with public 
 opinion to back him up. The young count's worst tendencies, 
 moreover, were insidiously encouraged by two or three young 
 men who followed in his train, paid court to him, won his 
 favor, and flattered and obeyed him, with a view to confirm- 
 ing his belief in a noble's supremacy; and all this at a time 
 when a noble's one chance of preserving his power lay in 
 using it with the utmost discretion for half a century to come. 
 
 Du Croisier hoped to reduce the d'Esgrignons to the last 
 extremity of poverty ; he hoped to see their castle demolished, 
 and their lands sold piecemeal by auction, through the follies 
 which this hare-brained boy was pretty certain to commit. 
 This was as far as he went ; he did not think, with President 
 du Ronceret, that Victurnien was likely to give justice another 
 kind of hold upon him. Both men found an ally for their 
 schemes of revenge in Victurnien's overweening vanity and 
 love of pleasure. President du Ronceret's son, a lad of 
 seventeen, was admirably fitted for the part of instigator. 
 He was one of the count's companions, a new kind of spy in 
 du Croisier's pay ; du Croisier taught him his lesson, set him 
 to track down the noble and beautiful boy through his better 
 qualities, and sardonically prompted him to encourage his 
 victim in his worst faults. Fabien du Ronceret was a sophis- 
 ticated youth, to whom such a mystification was attractive ; he 
 had precisely the keen brain and envious nature which finds 
 in such a pursuit as this the absorbing amusement which a 
 man of an ingenious turn lacks in the provinces. 
 
 In three years, between the ages of eighteen and one-and- 
 twenty, Victurnien cost poor Chesnel nearly eighty thousand 
 francs ! And this without the knowledge of Mile. Armande 
 or the marquis. More than half of the money had been spent 
 in buying off lawsuits ; the lad's extravagance had squandered
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 183 
 
 the rest. Of the marquis' income of ten thousand livres, five 
 thousand were necessary for the housekeeping ; two thousand 
 more represented Mile. Armande's allowance (parsimonious 
 though she was) and the marquis' expenses. The handsome 
 young heir-presumptive, therefore, had not a hundred louis to 
 spend. And what sort of figure can a man make on two 
 thousand livres? Victurnien's tailor's bills alone absorbed 
 his whole allowance. He had his linen, his clothes, gloves, 
 and perfumery from Paris. He wanted a good English saddle- 
 horse, a tilbury, and a second horse. M. du Croisier had a 
 tilbury and a thoroughbred. Was the bourgeoisie to cut out 
 the noblesse ? Then, the young count must have a man in the 
 d'Esgrignon livery. He prided himself on setting the fashion 
 among young men in the town and the department; he entered 
 that world of luxuries and fancies which suit youth and good 
 looks and wit so well. Chesnel paid for it all, not without 
 using, like ancient parliaments, the right of protest, albeit he 
 spoke with angelic kindness. 
 
 " What a pity it is that so good a man should be so tire- 
 some ! " Victurnien would say to himself every time that the 
 notary stanched some wound in his purse. 
 
 Chesnel had been left a widower, and childless; he had 
 taken his old master's son to fill the void in his heart. It was 
 a pleasure to him to watch the lad driving up the High Street, 
 perched aloft on the box-seat of the tilbury, whip in hand, 
 and a rose in his button-hole, handsome, well turned out, 
 envied by every one. 
 
 Pressing need would bring Victurnien with uneasy eyes and 
 coaxing manner, but steady voice, to the modest house in the 
 Rue du Bercail ; there had been losses at cards at the Trois- 
 villes, or the Due de Verneuil's, or the prefecture, or the 
 receiver-general's, and the count had come to his providence, 
 the notary. He had only to show himself to carry the day. 
 
 "Well, what is it, Monsieur le Comte ? What has hap- 
 pened?" the old man would ask, with a tremor in his voice.
 
 184 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 On great occasions Victurnien would sit down, assume a 
 melancholy, pensive expression, and submit with little coquet- 
 ries of voice and gesture to be questioned. Then when he 
 had thoroughly roused the old man's fears (for Chesnel was 
 beginning to fear how such a course of extravagance would 
 end), he would own up to a peccadillo which a bill for a 
 thousand francs would absolve. Chesnel possessed a private 
 income of some twelve thousand livres, but the fund was not 
 inexhaustible. The eighty thousand francs thus squandered 
 represented his savings, accumulated for the day when the 
 marquis should send his son tp Paris, or open negotiations for 
 a wealthy marriage. 
 
 Chesnel was clear-sighted so long as Victurnien was not 
 there before him. One by one he lost the illusions which the 
 marquis and his sister still fondly cherished. He saw that 
 the young fellow could not be depended upon in the least, 
 and wished to see him married to some modest, sensible girl 
 of good birth, wondering within himself how a young man 
 could mean so well and do so ill, for he made promises one 
 day only to break them all on the next. 
 
 But there is never any good to be expected of young men 
 who confess their sins and repent, and straightway fall into 
 them again. A man of strong character only confesses his 
 faults to himself, and punishes himself for them ; as for the 
 weak, they drop back into the old ruts when they find that 
 the bank is too steep to climb. The springs of pride which 
 lie in a great man's secret soul had been slackened in Victur- 
 nien. .With such guardians as he had, such company as he 
 kept, such a life as he had led, he had suddenly become an 
 enervated voluptuary at that turning-point in his life when a 
 man most stands in need of the harsh discipline of misfortune 
 and poverty to bring out the strength that is in him, the pinch 
 of adversity which formed a Prince Eugene, a Frederick II., 
 a Napoleon. Chesnel saw that Victurnien possessed that un- 
 controllable appetite for enjoyments which should be the pre-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 185 
 
 rogative of men endowed with giant powers ; the men who 
 feel the need of counterbalancing their gigantic labors by 
 pleasures which bring one-sided mortals to the pit. 
 
 At times the good man stood aghast; then, again, some 
 profound sally, some sign of the lad's remarkable range of 
 intellect, would reassure him. He would say, as the marquis 
 said at the rumor of some escapade: "Boys will be boys." 
 Chesnel had spoken to the chevalier, lamenting the young 
 lord's propensity for getting into debt ; but the chevalier 
 manipulated his pinch of snuff, and listened with a smile of 
 amusement. 
 
 " My dear Chesnel, just explain to me what a national debt 
 is," he answered. "If France has debts, egad ! why should 
 not Victurnien have debts? At this time and at all times 
 princes have debts, every gentleman has debts. Perhaps you 
 would rather that Victurnien should bring you his savings? 
 Do you know what our great Richelieu (not the cardinal, a 
 pitiful fellow that put nobles to death, but the marechal), do 
 you know what he did once when his grandson the Prince de 
 Chinon, the last of the line, let him see that he had not spent 
 his pocket-money at the University?" 
 
 "No, Monsieur le Chevalier." 
 
 " Oh, well ; he flung the purse out of the window to a 
 sweeper in the courtyard, and said to his grandson: 'Then 
 they do not teach you to be a prince here? ' " 
 
 Chesnel bent his head and made no answer. But that 
 night, as he lay awake, he thought that such doctrines as 
 these were fatal in times when there was one law for every- 
 body, and foresaw the first beginnings of the ruin of the d'Es- 
 grignons. 
 
 But for these explanations which depict one side of provincial 
 life in the time of the Empire and the Restoration, it would not 
 be easy to understand the opening scene of this history, an 
 incident which took place in the great salon one evening toward
 
 186 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the end of October, 1822. The card-tables were forsaken, the 
 Collection of Antiquities elderly nobles, elderly countesses, 
 young marquises, and simple baronesses had settled their 
 losses and winnings. The master of the house was pacing up 
 and down the room, while Mile. Armande was putting out 
 the candles on the card-tables. He was not taking exercise 
 alone, the chevalier was with him, and the two wrecks of the 
 eighteenth century were talking of Victurnien. The chevalier 
 had undertaken to broach the subject with the marquis. 
 
 "Yes, marquis," he was saying, "your son is wasting his 
 time and his youth ; you ought to send him to Court." 
 
 "I have always thought," said the marquis, "that if my 
 great age prevents me from going to Court where,- between 
 ourselves, I do not know what I should do among all these 
 new people whom his majesty receives, and all that is going 
 on there that if I could not go myself, I could at least send 
 my son to present our homage to his majesty. The King 
 surely would do something for the count give him a company, 
 for instance, or a place in the Household, a chance, in short, 
 for the boy to win his spurs. My uncle the archbishop 
 suffered a cruel martyrdom ; I have fought for the cause with- 
 out deserting the camp with those who thought it their duty 
 to follow the princes. I held that while the King was in 
 France his nobles should rally round him. Ah ! well, no one 
 gives us a thought ; a Henri IV. would have written before 
 now to the d'Esgrignons, ' Come to me, my friends ; we have 
 won the day ! ' After all, we are something better than the 
 Troisvilles, yet here are two Troisvilles made peers of France ; 
 and another, I hear, represents the nobles in the Chamber." 
 (He took the upper electoral colleges for assemblies of his 
 own order.) "Really, they think no more of us than if we 
 did not exist. I was waiting for the princes' to make their 
 journey through this part of the world; but as the princes do 
 not come to us, we must go to the princes." 
 
 " I am enchanted to learn that you think of introducing our
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 187 
 
 dear Victurnien into society," the chevalier put in adroitly. 
 " He ought not to bury his talents in a hole like this town. 
 The best fortune that he can look for here is to come across 
 some Norman girl" (mimicking the accent), "country-bred, 
 stupid, and rich. What could he make of her? his wife? 
 Oh ! good Lord ! " 
 
 "I sincerly hope that he will defer his marriage until he 
 has obtained some great office or appointment under the 
 Crown," returned the gray-haired marquis. "Still, there are 
 serious difficulties in the way." 
 
 And these were the only difficulties which the marquis saw 
 at the outset of his son's career. 
 
 " My son, the Comte d'Esgrignon, cannot make his appear- 
 ance at court like a tatterdemalion," he continued after a 
 pause, marked by a sigh ; "he must be equipped. Alas ! for 
 these two hundred years we have had no retainers. Ah ! 
 chevalier, this demolition from top to bottom always brings 
 me back to the first hammer-stroke delivered by Monsieur de 
 Mirabeau. The one thing needful nowadays is money; that 
 is all that the Revolution has done that I can see. The King 
 does not ask you whether you are a descendant of the Valois 
 or a conqueror of Gaul ; he asks whether you pay a thousand 
 francs in failles which nobles never used to pay. So I can- 
 not well send the count to Court without a matter of twenty 
 thousand crowns " 
 
 "Yes," assented the chevalier, "with that trifling sum he 
 could cut a brave figure." 
 
 "Well," said Mile. Armande, "I have asked Chesnel to 
 come to-night. Would you believe it, chevalier, ever since 
 the day when Chesnel proposed that I should marry that 
 miserable du Croisier " 
 
 "Ah ! that was truly unworthy, mademoiselle ! " cried the 
 chevalier. 
 
 "Unpardonable ! " said the marquis. 
 
 " Well, since then my brother has never brought himself
 
 188 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 to ask anything whatsoever of Monsieur Chesnel," continued 
 Mile. Armande. 
 
 "Of your old household servant? Why, marquis, you 
 would do Chesnel honor an honor which he would grate- 
 fully remember till his latest breath." 
 
 " No," said the marquis, " the thing is beneath one's dig- 
 nity, it seems to me." 
 
 "There is not much question of dignity; it is a matter of 
 necessity," said the chevalier, with the trace of a shrug. 
 
 "Never," said the marquis, riposting with a gesture which 
 decided the chevalier to risk a great stroke to open his old 
 friend's eyes. 
 
 "Very well," he said, "since you do not know it, I will 
 tell you myself that Chesnel has let your son have something 
 already, something like " 
 
 " My son is incapable of accepting anything whatever from 
 Chesnel," the marquis broke in, drawing himself up as he 
 spoke. " He might have asked you for twenty-five louis " 
 
 "Something like a hundred thousand livres," said the 
 chevalier, finishing his sentence. 
 
 "The Comte d'Esgrignon owes a hundred thousand livres 
 to a Chesnel! " cried the marquis, with every sign of deep 
 pain. " Oh ! if he were not an only son, he should set out 
 to-night for Mexico with a captain's commission. A man 
 may be in debt to money-lenders, they charge a heavy interest, 
 and you are quits; that is right enough; but Chesnel! a man 
 to whom one is attached ! " 
 
 "Yes, our adorable Victurnien has run through a hundred 
 thousand livres, dear marquis," resumed the chevalier, flick- 
 ing a trace of snuff from his vest ; " it is not much, I know. 
 I myself at his age But, after all, let us leave old mem- 
 ories, marquis. The count is living in the provinces; all 
 things taken into consideration, it is not so much amiss. He 
 will go far ; these irregularities are common in men who do 
 great things afterward "
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 189 
 
 " And he is sleeping upstairs, without a word of this to his 
 father," exclaimed the marquis. 
 
 " Sleeping innocently as a child who has merely got five or 
 six little bourgeoises into trouble, and now must have duch- 
 esses," returned the chevalier. 
 
 " Why, he deserves a lettre de cachet ! " 
 
 " ' They ' have done away with lettres de cachet"* said the 
 chevalier. '"You know what a hubbub there was when they 
 tried to institute a law for special cases. We could not keep 
 the provost's courts, which Monsieur de Bonaparte used to 
 call commissions militaircs." 
 
 "Well, well; what are we to do if our boys are wild or 
 turn out scapegraces ? Is there no locking them up in these 
 days?" asked the marquis. 
 
 The chevalier looked at the heart-broken father and lacked 
 courage to answer: "We shall be obliged to bring them up 
 properly." 
 
 "And you have never said a word of this tome, Made- 
 moiselle d'Esgrignon," added the marquis, turning suddenly 
 round upon Mile. Armande. He never addressed her as 
 Mile. d'Esgrignon except when he was vexed ; usually she 
 was called " my sister." 
 
 " Why, monsieur, when a young man is full of life and 
 spirits, and leads an idle life in a town like this, what else 
 can you expect?" asked Mile. d'Esgrignon. She could not 
 understand her brother's anger. 
 
 "Debts! eh! why, hang it all!" added the chevalier. 
 " He plays cards, he has little adventures, he shoots all these 
 things are horribly expensive nowadays." 
 
 " Come," said the marquis, " it is time to send him to the 
 King. I will spend to-morrow morning in writing to our 
 kinsmen." 
 
 "I have some acquaintance with the Dues de Navarreins, 
 de Lenoncourt, de Maufrigneuse, and de Chaulieu," said the 
 * An arbitrary warrant of imprisonment sealed with the king's cachet seal.
 
 190 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 chevalier, though he knew, as he spoke, that he was pretty 
 thoroughly forgotten. 
 
 " My dear chevalier, there is no need of such formalities to 
 present a d'Esgrignon at Court," the marquis broke in. " A 
 hundred thousand livres," he muttered; " this Chesnel makes 
 very free. This is what comes of these accursed troubles. 
 Mons. Chesnel protects my son. And now I must ask him 
 No, sister, you must undertake this business. Chesnel shall 
 secure himself for the whole amount by a mortgage on our 
 lands. And just give this hare-brained boy a good scolding ; 
 he will end by ruining himself if he goes on like this." 
 
 The chevalier and Mile. d'Esgrignon thought these words 
 perfectly simple and natural, absurd as they would have 
 sounded to any other listener. So far from seeing anything 
 ridiculous in the speech, they were both very much touched 
 by a look of something like anguish in the old noble's face. 
 
 Just then the Marquis d'Esgrignon looked exactly as any 
 imagination with a touch of romance could wish. He was 
 almost bald, but a fringe of silken, white locks, curled at the 
 tips, covered the back of his head. All the pride of race 
 might be seen in a noble forehead, such as you may admire 
 in a Louis XV., a Beaumarchais, a Marechal de Richelieu ; it 
 was not the square, broad brow of the portraits of the Mare"chal 
 de Saxe; nor yet the small, hard circle of Voltaire, compact 
 to overfulness ; it was graciously rounded and finely moulded, 
 the temples were ivory-tinted and soft ; and mettle and spirit, 
 unquenched by age, flashed from the brilliant eyes. The 
 marquis had the Conde nose and the lovable Bourbon mouth, 
 from which, as they used to say of the Comte d'Artois, only 
 witty and urbane words proceed. His cheeks, sloping rather 
 than foolishly rounded to the chin, were in keeping with his 
 spare frame, thin legs, and plump hands. The strangulation 
 cravat at his throat was of the kind which every marquis wears 
 in all the portraits which adorn eighteenth-century literature ; 
 it is common alike to Saint-Preux and to Lovelace, to the
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 191 
 
 elegant Montesquieu's heroes and to Diderot's homespun 
 characters (see the first editions of those writers' works). 
 
 The marquis always wore a white, gold-embroidered, high 
 vest, with the red ribbon of a commander of the Order of St. 
 Louis blazing upon his breast ; and a blue coat with wide 
 skirts, and fleurs-de-lys on the flaps, which were turned back 
 an odd costume which the King had adopted. But the 
 marquis could not bring himself to give up the Frenchman's 
 knee-breeches nor yet the white silk stockings or the buckles 
 at the knees. After six o'clock in the evening he appeared 
 in full dress. 
 
 He read no newspapers but the " Quotidienne " and the 
 " Gazette de France," two journals accused by the Constitu- 
 tional press of obscurantist views and uncounted " monarchical 
 and religious" enormities; while the Marquis d'Esgrignon, 
 on the other hand, found heresies and revolutionary doctrines 
 in every issue. 
 
 The Marquis d'Esgrignon rested his elbows on his knees 
 and leaned his head on his hands. During his meditations 
 Mile. Armande and the chevalier looked at one another with- 
 out uttering the thoughts in their minds. Was he pained by 
 the discovery that his son's future must depend upon his some- 
 time land-steward? Was he doubtful of the reception await- 
 ing the young count ? Did he regret that he had made no 
 preparation for launching his heir into that brilliant world of 
 court ? Poverty had kept him in the depths of his province ; 
 how should he have appeared at Court ? He sighed heavily 
 as he raised his head. 
 
 That sigh, in those days, came from the real aristocracy all 
 over France ; from the loyal provincial noblesse, consigned to 
 neglect with most of those who had drawn sword and braved 
 the storm for the cause. 
 
 "What have the princes done for the du Guenics, or the 
 Fontaines, or the Bauvans, who never submitted?" he mut- 
 tered to himself. " They fling miserable pensions to the
 
 192 THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 men who fought most bravely, and give them a royal lieu- 
 tenancy in a fortress somewhere on the outskirts of the 
 kingdom." 
 
 Evidently the marquis doubted the reigning dynasty. 
 Mile. d'Esgrignon was trying to reassure her brother as to 
 the prospects of the journey, when a step outside on the dry, 
 narrow footway gave them notice of Chesnel's coming. In 
 another moment Chesnel appeared ; Josephin, the count's 
 gray-haired valet, admitted the notary without announcing 
 him. 
 
 "Chesnel, my boy " (Chesnel was a white-haired man 
 
 of sixty-nine, with a square-jawed, venerable countenance; 
 he wore knee-breeches, ample enough to fill several chapters 
 of dissertation in the manner of Sterne, ribbed stockings, 
 shoes with silver clasps, an ecclesiastical-looking coat and a 
 high vest of scholastic cut. 
 
 " Chesnel, my boy, it was very presumptuous of you to lend 
 money to the Comte d'Esgrignon ! If I repaid you at once 
 and we never saw each other again, it would be no more than 
 you deserve for giving wings to his vices." 
 
 There was a pause, a silence such as there falls at Court when 
 the King publicly reprimands a courtier. The old notary 
 looked humble and contrite. 
 
 "I am anxious about that boy, Chesnel," continued the 
 marquis in a kindly tone ; " I should like to send him to 
 Paris to serve his majesty. Make arrangements with my 
 sister for his suitable appearance at Court. And we will settle 
 accounts " 
 
 The marquis looked grave as he left the room with a friendly 
 gesture of farewell to Chesnel. 
 
 "I thank Monsieur le Marquis for all his goodness," 
 returned the old man, who still remained standing. 
 
 Mile. Armande rose to go to the door with her brother; 
 she had rung the bell, old Josephin was in readiness to light 
 his master to his room.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWA'. 193 
 
 ''Take a seat, Chesnel," said the lady, as she returned, 
 and with womanly tact she explained away and softened the 
 marquis' harshness. And yet beneath that harshness Chesnel 
 saw a great affection. The marquis' attachment for his old 
 servant was something of the same order as a man's affection 
 for his dog ; he will fight any one who kicks the animal, the 
 dog is like a part of his existence, a something which, if not 
 exactly himself, represents him in that which is nearest and 
 dearest his sensibilities. 
 
 " It is quite time that Monsieur le Comte should be sent 
 away from the town, mademoiselle'," he said sententiously. 
 
 "Yes," returned she. "Has he been indulging in some 
 new escapade? " 
 
 "No, mademoiselle." 
 
 " Well, why do you blame him? " 
 
 " I am not blaming him, mademoiselle. No, I am not 
 blaming him. I am very far from blaming him. I will even 
 say that I shall never blame him, whatever he may do." 
 
 There was a pause. The chevalier, nothing if not quick to 
 take in a situation, began to yawn like a sleep-ridden mortal. 
 Gracefully he made his excuses and went, with as little mind 
 to sleep as to go and drown himself. The imp Curiosity kept 
 the chevalier wide awake, and with airy fingers plucked away 
 the cotton-batting from his ears. 
 
 "Well, Chesnel, is it something new?" Mile. Armande 
 began anxiously. 
 
 " Yes, things that cannot be told to Monsieur le Marquis ; 
 he would drop down in an apoplectic fit." 
 
 " Speak out," she said. With her beautiful head leant on 
 the back of her low chair and her arms extended listlessly 
 by her side, she looked as if she were waiting passively for 
 her death-blow. 
 
 " Mademoiselle, Monsieur le Comte, with all his cleverness, 
 is a plaything in the hands of mean creatures, petty natures 
 on the lookout for a crushing revenge. They want to ruin us 
 13
 
 194 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 and bring us low ! There is the president of the Tribunal, 
 Monsieur du Ronceret ; he has, as you know, a very great 
 notion of his descent " 
 
 "His grandfather was an attorney," interposed Mile. 
 Armande. 
 
 " I know he was. And for that reason you have not re- 
 ceived him ; nor does he go to Monsieur de Troisville's, nor 
 to le Due de Verneuil's, nor to the Marquis de Casteran's ; 
 but he is one of the pillars of du Croisier's salon. Your 
 nephew may rub shoulders with young Fabien du Ronceret 
 without condescending too far, for he must have companions 
 of his own age. Well and good. That young fellow is at 
 the bottom of all Monsieur le Comte's follies ; he and two or 
 three of the rest of them belong to the other side, the side of 
 Monsieur le Chevalier's enemy, who does nothing but breathe 
 threats of vengeance against you and all the nobles together. 
 They all hope to ruin you through your nephew. The ring- 
 leader of the conspiracy is this sycophant of a du Croisier, 
 the pretended Royalist. Du Croisier's wife, poor thing, 
 knows nothing about it ; you know her, I should have heard 
 of it before this if she had ears to hear evil. For some time 
 these wild young fellows were not in the secret, nor was any- 
 body else ; but the ringleaders let something drop in jest, and 
 then the fools got to know about it, and after the count's re- 
 cent escapades they let fall some words while they were drunk. 
 And those words were carried to me by others who are sorry 
 to see such a fine, handsome, noble, charming lad ruining 
 himself with pleasure. So far people feel sorry for him ; be- 
 fore many days are over they will I am afraid to say what, 
 but " 
 
 "They will despise him; say it out, Chesnel ! " Mile. 
 Armande cried piteously. 
 
 " Ah ! How can you keep the best people in the town from 
 finding out faults in their neighbors? They do not know 
 what to do with themselves from morning to night. And so
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 195 
 
 Monsieur le Comte's losses at play are all reckoned up. Thirty 
 thousand francs have taken flight during these two months, 
 and everybody wonders where he gets the money. If they 
 mention it when I am present, I just call them to order. Ah ! 
 
 but ' Do you suppose ' (I told them this morning), 
 
 'do you suppose that if the d'Esgrignon family have lost 
 their manorial rights, that therefore they have been robbed of 
 their hoard of treasure ? The young count has a right to do 
 as he pleases ; and so long as he does not owe you a sol, you 
 have no right to say a word." ' 
 
 Mile. Armande held out her hand, and the notary kissed it 
 respectfully. 
 
 "Good Chesnel! But, my friend, how shall we find the 
 money for this journey ? Victurnien must appear as befits his 
 rank at Court." 
 
 "Oh ! I have borrowed money on Le Jard, mademoiselle." 
 
 "What? You had nothing left! Ah, heaven! what can 
 we do to reward you?" 
 
 "You can take the hundred thousand francs which I hold 
 at your disposal. You can understand that the loan was 
 negotiated in confidence, so that it might not reflect on you ; 
 for it is known in the town that I am closely connected with 
 the d'Esgrignon family." 
 
 Tears came into Mile. Armande's eyes. Chesnel saw 
 them, took a fold of the noble woman's dress in his hands, 
 and kissed it. 
 
 "Never mind," he said, "a lad must sow his wild oats. 
 In great salons in Paris his boyish ideas will take a new turn. 
 And, really, though our old friends here are the worthiest people 
 in the world, and no one could have nobler hearts than they, 
 they are not amusing. If Monsieur le Comte wants amuse- 
 ment, he is obliged to look below his rank, and he will end 
 by getting into low company." 
 
 Next day the old traveling coach saw the light, and was 
 sent to be put in repair. In a solemn interview after break-
 
 196 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 fast, the hope of the house was duly informed of his father's 
 intentions regarding him he was to go to Court and ask to 
 serve his majesty. He would have time during the journey to 
 make up his mind about his career. The' navy or the army, 
 the privy council, an embassy, or the royal household all 
 were open to a d'Esgrignon, a d'Esgrignon had only to choose. 
 The King would certainly look favorably upon the d'Esgrig- 
 nons, because they had asked nothing of him, and had sent 
 the youngest representative of their house to receive the recog- 
 nition of majesty. 
 
 But young d'Esgrignon, with all his wild pranks, had 
 guessed instinctively what society in Paris meant, and formed 
 his own opinions of life. So, when they talked of his leaving 
 the country and the paternal roof, he listened with a grave 
 countenance to his revered parent's lecture, and refrained 
 from giving him a good deal of information in reply. As, for 
 instance, that young men no longer went into the army or the 
 navy as they used to do ; that if a man had a mind to be a 
 second lieutenant in a cavalry regiment without passing 
 through a special training in the Ecoles, he must first serve in 
 the Cadets ; that sons of the greatest houses went exactly like 
 commoners to Saint-Cyr and the Polytechnic, and took their 
 chances of being beaten by base blood. If he had enlightened 
 his relatives on these points, funds might not have been forth- 
 coming for a stay in Paris ; so he allowed his father and Aunt 
 Armande to believe that he would be permitted a seat in the 
 King's carriages, that he must support his dignity at Court as 
 the d'Esgrignons of the time, and rub shoulders with great 
 lords of the realm. 
 
 It grieved the marquis that he could send but one servant 
 with his son ; but he gave him his own old valet Josephin, a man 
 who could be trusted to take care of his young master, and to 
 watch faith fully over his interests. The poor father must do 
 without Josephin, and hope to replace him with a young lad. 
 
 "Remember that you are a Carol, my boy," he said; "re-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 197 
 
 member that you come of an unalloyed descent, and that your 
 escutcheon bears the motto CU est nostre ; with such arms you 
 may hold your head high everywhere, and aspire to queens. 
 Render grace to your father, as I to mine. We owe it to the 
 honor of our ancestors, kept stainless until now, that we can 
 look all men in the face, and need bend the knee to none save 
 a mistress, the King, and God. This is the greatest of your 
 privileges." 
 
 Chesnel, good man, was breakfasting with the family. He 
 took no part in counsels based on heraldry, nor in the in- 
 diting of letters addressed to divers mighty personages of the 
 day ; but he had spent the night in writing to an old friend of 
 his, one of the oldest established notaries of Paris. Without 
 this letter it is not possible to understand Chesnel's real and 
 assumed fatherhood. It almost recalls Daedalus' address to 
 Icarus ; for where, save in old mythology, can you look for 
 comparisons worthy of this man of antique mould? 
 
 "My DEAR AND ESTIMABLE SORBIER: I remember with 
 no little pleasure that I made my first campaign in our 
 honorable profession under your father, and that you had a 
 liking for me, poor little clerk that I was. And now I appeal 
 to old memories of the days when we worked in the same 
 office, old pleasant memories for our hearts, to ask you to do 
 me the one service that I have ever asked of you in the course 
 of our long lives, crossed as they have been by political catas- 
 trophes, to which, perhaps, I owe it that I have the honor to 
 be your colleague. And now I ask this service of you, my 
 friend, and my white hairs will be brought with sorrow to the 
 grave if you should refuse my entreaty. It is no question of 
 myself or of mine, Sorbier, for I lost poor Mme. Chesnel, and 
 I have no child of my own. Something more to me than my 
 own family (if I had had one) is involved it is the Marquis 
 d'Esgrignon's only son. I have had the honor to be the 
 marquis' land-steward ever since I left the office to which his
 
 198 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 father sent me at his own expense, with the idea of providing 
 for me. The house which nurtured me has passed through all 
 the troubles of the Revolution. I have managed to save some 
 of their property; but what is it, after all, in comparison with 
 the wealth that they have lost ? I cannot tell you, Sorbier, 
 how deeply I am attached to the great house, which has been 
 all but swallowed up under my eyes by the abyss of time. 
 M. le Marquis was proscribed, and his lands confiscated, he 
 was getting on in years, he had no child. Misfortunes upon 
 misfortunes ! Then M. le Marquis married, and his wife died 
 when the young count was born, and to-day this noble, dear, 
 and precious child is all the life of the d'Esgrignon family ; 
 the fate of the house hangs upon him. He has got into debt 
 here with amusing himself. What else should he do in the 
 provinces with an allowance of a miserable hundred louis? 
 Yes, my friend, a hundred louis, the great house had come to 
 this. 
 
 "In this extremity his father thinks it necessary to send the 
 count to Paris to ask for the King's favor at Court. Paris is a 
 very dangerous place for a lad ; if he is to keep steady there 
 he must have the grain of sense which makes notaries of us. 
 Beside, I should be heart-broken to think of the poor boy 
 living amid such hardships as we have known. Do you 
 remember the pleasure with which you shared my roll in the 
 pit of the The&tre-Francais when we spent a day and a night 
 there waiting to see 'The Marriage of Figaro?' Oh, blind 
 that we were ! We were happy and poor, but a noble cannot 
 be happy in poverty. A noble in want it is a thing against 
 nature ! Ah ! Sorbier, when one has known the satisfaction 
 of propping one of the grandest genealogical trees in the kingdom 
 in its fall, it is so natural to interest one's self in it and to grow 
 fond of it, and love it and water it and look to see it blossom. 
 So you will not be surprised at so many precautions on my part ; 
 you will not wonder when I beg the help of your lights, so that 
 all may go well with our young man.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 199 
 
 " The family has allowed a hundred thousand francs for the 
 expenses of M. le Comte's journey. There is not a young 
 man in Paris fit to compare with him, as you will see ! You 
 will take an interest in him as if he were your only son ; and, 
 lastly, I am quite sure that Mme. Sorbier will not hesitate to 
 second you in the office of guardian. M. le Comte Victurnien's 
 monthly allowance is fixed at two thousand francs, but give 
 him ten thousand for his preliminary expenses. The family 
 has provided in this way for a stay of two years, unless he 
 takes a journey abroad, in which case we will see about making 
 other arrangements. Join me in this work, my old friend, 
 and keep the purse-strings fairly tight. Represent things to 
 M. le Comte without reproving him ; hold him in as far as 
 you can, and do not let him anticipate his monthly allowance 
 without sufficient reason, for he must not be driven to despera- 
 tion if honor is involved. 
 
 " Keep yourself informed of his movements and doings, of 
 the company which he keeps, and watch over his connections 
 with women. M. le Chevalier says that an opera-dancer often 
 costs less than a court lady. Obtain information on that point 
 and let me know. If you are too busy, perhaps Mme. Sorbier 
 might know what becomes of the young man, and where he 
 goes. The idea of playing the part of guardian angel to such 
 a noble and charming boy might have attractions for her. 
 God will remember her for accepting the sacred trust. Per- 
 haps when you see M. le Comte Victurnien, her heart may 
 tremble at the thought of all the dangers awaiting him in 
 Paris ; he is very young and very handsome, clever, and at 
 the same time disposed to trust others. If he forms a connec- 
 tion with some designing woman, Mme. Sorbier could counsel 
 him better than you yourself could do. The old manservant 
 who is with him can tell you many things ; sound Josephin, I 
 have told him to go to you in delicate matters. 
 
 "But why should I say more? We once were clerks 
 together, and a pair of scamps ; remember our escapades, and
 
 200 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 be a little bit young again, my old friend, in your dealings 
 with him. The sixty thousand francs will be remitted to you 
 in the shape of a bill on the Treasury by a gentleman who is 
 going to Paris," and so forth. 
 
 If the old couple to whom this epistle was addressed had 
 followed out Chesnel's instructions, they would have been 
 compelled to take three private detectives into their pay. 
 And yet there was ample wisdom shown in Chesnel's choice 
 of a depository. A banker pays money to any one accredited 
 to him so long as the money lasts ; whereas, Victurnien was 
 obliged, every time that he was in want of money, to make a 
 personal visit to the notary, who was quite sure to use the right 
 of remonstrance. 
 
 Victurnien heard that he was to be allowed two thousand 
 francs every month, and thought that he betrayed his joy. 
 He knew nothing of Paris. He fancied that he could keep 
 up princely state on such a sum. 
 
 Next day he started on his journey. The sudden departure 
 supplied material for conversation for several evenings ; and 
 what was more, it stirred the rancorous minds of the salon du 
 Croisier to the depths. The forage-contractor, the president, 
 and others who had vowed to ruin the d'Esgrignons, saw their 
 prey escaping out of their hands. They had based their 
 schemes of revenge on a young man's follies, and now he was 
 beyond their reach. 
 
 The tendency in human nature, which often gives a bigot a 
 rake for a daughter, and makes a frivolous woman the mother 
 of a narrow pietist; that rule of contraries, which, in all prob- 
 ability, is the "resultant" of the law of similarities, drew 
 Victurnien to Paris by a desire to which he must sooner or 
 later have yielded. Brought up as he had been in the old- 
 fashioned provincial house, among the quiet, gentle faces that 
 smiled upon him, among sober servants attached to the family, 
 and surroundings tinged with a general color of age, the bey
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 201 
 
 had only seen friends worthy of respect. All of those about 
 him, with the exception of the chevalier, that example of 
 venerable age, were elderly men and women, sedate of man- 
 ner, decorous and sententious of speech. He had been petted 
 by those women in the gray gowns and embroidered mittens 
 described by Blondet. The antiquated splendors of his father's 
 house were as little calculated as possible to suggest frivolous 
 thoughts; and, lastly, he had been educated by a sincerely 
 religious abbe, possessed of all the charm of an old age, which 
 has dwelt in two centuries, and brings to the Present its gifts 
 of the dried roses of experience, the faded flowers of the old 
 customs of its youth. 
 
 For him, his noble birth was a stepping-stone which raised 
 him above other men. He felt that the idol of Noblesse, 
 before which they burned incense at home, was hollow ; he 
 had come to be one of the commonest as well as one of the 
 worst types from a social point of view a consistent egoist. 
 The aristocratic cult of the Ego simply taught him to follow 
 his own fancies; he had been idolized by those who had 
 the care of him in childhood, and adored by the companions 
 who shared in his boyish escapades, and so he had formed a 
 habit of looking and judging everything as it affected his own 
 pleasure ; he took it as a matter of course when good souls 
 saved him from the consequences of his follies, a piece of 
 mistaken kindness which could only lead to his ruin. 
 
 Victurnien was quick-sighted, he saw clearly and without 
 illusion, but he acted on impulse, and unwisely. An indefin- 
 able flaw of character, often seen in young men, but impossible 
 to explain, led him to will one thing and do another. In spite 
 of an active mind, which showed itself in unexpected ways, 
 the senses had but to assert themselves, and the darkened brain 
 seemed to exist no longer. He might have astonished wise 
 men ; he was capable of setting fools agape. His desires, 
 like a sudden squall of bad weather, overclouded all the clear 
 and lucid spaces of his brain in a moment ; and then, after
 
 202 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the dissipations which he could not resist, he sank, utterly ex- 
 hausted in body, heart, and mind, into a collapsed condition 
 bordering upon imbecility. Such a character will drag a 
 man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him 
 to the highest heights of political power if he has some stern 
 friend to keep him in hand. Neither Chesnel, nor the lad's 
 father, nor Aunt Armande had fathomed the depths of a 
 nature so nearly akin on many sides to the poetic tempera- 
 ment, yet smitten with a terrible weakness at its core. 
 
 By the time the old town lay several miles away, Victurnien 
 felt not the slightest regret ; he thought no more about the 
 father, who had loved ten generations in his son ; nor of the 
 aunt, and her almost insane devotion. He was looking for- 
 ward to Paris with vehement ill-starred longings, in thought 
 he had lived in that fairyland, it had been the background of 
 his brightest dreams. He imagined that he would be first in 
 Paris, as he had been in the town and the department where 
 his father's name was potent ; but it was vanity, not pride, 
 that filled his soul, and in his dreams his pleasures were to be 
 magnified by all the greatness of Paris ; he hastened to take 
 possession of it as a famished horse rushes into a meadow. 
 
 He was not long in finding out the difference between 
 country and town, and was rather surprised than abashed by 
 the change. His mental quickness soon discovered how small 
 an entity he was in the midst of this all-comprehending 
 Babylon ; how insane it would be to attempt to stem the tor- 
 rent of new ideas and new ways. A single incident was 
 enough. He delivered his father's letter of introduction to 
 the Due de Lenoncourt, a noble who stood high in favor with 
 the King. He saw the duke in his splendid mansion, among 
 surroundings befitting his rank. Next day he met him again. 
 This time the Peer of France was lounging on foot along the 
 boulevard, just like any ordinary mortal, with an umbrella in 
 his hand ; he did not even wear the Blue Ribbon, without
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 203 
 
 which no knight of the order could have appeared in public 
 in other times. And, duke and peer and first gentleman of 
 the bedchamber though he was, M. de Lenoncourt, spite of 
 his high courtesy, could not repress a smile as he read his 
 relative's letter; and that smile told Victurnien that the 
 Collection of Antiquities and the Tuileries were separated by 
 more than sixty leagues of road the distance of several cen- 
 turies lay between them. 
 
 The names of the families grouped about the throne are 
 quite different in each successive reign, and the characters 
 change with the names. It would seem that, in the sphere of 
 Court, the same thing happens over and over again in each 
 generation ; but each time there is a quite different set of per- 
 sonages. If history did not prove that this is so, it would 
 seem incredible. The prominent men at the Court of Louis 
 XVIII., for instance, had scarcely any connection with the 
 Rivieres, Blacas, d'Avarays, Vitrolles, d'Autichamps, Pas- 
 quiers, Larochejaqueleins, Decazes, Dambrays, Laines, de 
 Villeles, La Bourdonnayes, and others who shone at the Court 
 of Louis XV. Compare the courtiers of Henri IV. with those 
 of Louis XIV.; you will hardly find five great families of the 
 former time still in existence. The nephew of the great 
 Richelieu was a very insignificant person at the Court of 
 Louis XIV.; while his majesty's favorite, Villeroi, was the 
 grandson of a secretary ennobled by Charles IX. And so it 
 befell that the d'Esgrignons, all but princes under the Valois, 
 and all-powerful in the time of Henri IV., had no fortune 
 whatever at the Court of Louis XVIII., which gave them not 
 so much as a thought. At this day there are names as famous 
 as those of royal houses the Foix-Graillys, for instance, or 
 the d'Herouvilles left to obscurity tantamount to extinction 
 for want of money, the one power of the time. 
 
 All which things Victurnien beheld entirely from his own 
 point of view ; he felt the equality that he saw in Paris as a 
 personal wrong. The monster Equality was swallowing down
 
 204 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the last fragments of social distinction in the Restoration. 
 Having made up his mind on this head, he immediately pro- 
 ceeded to try to win back his place with such dangerous, if 
 blunted, weapons as the age left to the noblesse. It is an 
 expensive matter to gain the attention of Paris. To this end, 
 Victurnien adopted some of the ways then in vogue. He felt 
 that it was a necessity to have horses and fine carriages, and 
 all the accessories of modern luxury; he felt, in short, " that 
 a man must keep abreast of the times," as de Marsay said 
 de Marsay, the first dandy that he came across in the first 
 drawing-room to which he was introduced. For his misfor- 
 tune, he fell in with a set of roues, with de Marsay, de Ron- 
 querolles, Maxime de Trailles, des Lupeaulx, Rastignac, Ajuda- 
 Pinto, Beaudenord, de la Roche-Hugon, de Manerville, and 
 the Vandenesses, whom he met wherever he went, and a great 
 many houses were open to a young man with his ancient name 
 and reputation for wealth. He went to the Marquise d'Es- 
 pard's, to the Duchesses de Grandlieu, de Carigliano, and de 
 Chaulieu, to the Marquises d'Aiglemont and de Listomere, to 
 Mme. de Serizy's, to the opera, to the embassies and else- 
 where. The Faubourg Saint-Germain has its provincial gene- 
 alogies at its fingers' ends; a great name once recognized and 
 adopted therein is a passport which opens many a door that 
 will scarcely turn on its hinges for unknown names or the 
 lions of a lower rank. 
 
 Victurnien found his relatives both amiable and ready to 
 welcome him so long as he did not appear as a suppliant ; he 
 saw at once that the surest way of obtaining nothing was to 
 ask for something. At Paris, if the first impulse moves people 
 to protect, second thoughts (which last a good deal longer) im- 
 pel them to despise the protege. Independence, vanity, and 
 pride, all the young count's better and worse feelings com- 
 bined, led him, on the contrary, to assume an aggressive atti- 
 tude. And therefore the Dues de Verneuil, de Lenoncourt, 
 de Chaulieu, de Navarreins, d'Herouville, de Grandlieu, -and
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 20o 
 
 de Maufrigneuse, the Princes de Cadignan and de Blamont- 
 Chauvry, were delighted to present the charming survivor of 
 the wreck of an ancient family at Court. 
 
 Victurnien went to the Tuileries in a splendid carriage with 
 his armorial bearings on the panels; but his presentation to 
 his majesty made it abundantly clear to him that the people 
 occupied the royal mind so much that his nobility was like to be 
 forgotten. The restored dynasty, moreover, was surrounded 
 by triple ranks of eligible old men and gray-headed courtiers; 
 the young noblesse was reduced to a cipher, and this Victur- 
 nien guessed at once. He saw that there was no suitable 
 place for him at Court, nor in the government, nor the army, 
 nor, indeed, anywhere else. So he launched out into the 
 world of pleasure. Introduced at the Elysee-Bourbon, at the 
 Duchesse d'Angoulgme's, at the Pavilion Marsan, he met on 
 all sides with the surface civilities due to the heir of an old 
 family, not so old but it could be called to mind by the sight 
 of a living member. And, after all, it was not a small thing 
 to be remembered. In the distinction with which Victurnien 
 was honored lay the way to the peerage and a splendid 
 marriage ; he had taken the field with a false appearance of 
 wealth, and his vanity would not allow him to declare his real 
 position. Beside, he had been so much complimented on the 
 figure that he made, he was so pleased with his first success, 
 that, like many other young men, he felt ashamed to draw 
 back. He took a suite of rooms in the Rue du Bac, with 
 stables and a complete equipment for the fashionable life to 
 which he had committed himself. These preliminaries cost 
 him fifty thousand francs, which money, moreover, the young 
 gentleman managed to draw in spite of all Chesnel's wise pre- 
 cautions, thanks to a series of unforeseen events. 
 
 Chesnel's letter certainly reached his friend's office, but 
 Maitre Sorbier was dead ; and Mme. Sorbier, a matter-of-fact 
 person, seeing that it was a business letter, handed it on to her 
 husband's successor. Maitre Cardot, the new notary, informed
 
 206 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the young count that a draft on the Treasury made payabla to 
 the deceased would be useless ; and by way of reply to the letter, 
 which had cost the old provincial notary so much thought, 
 Cardot dispatched four lines intended not to reach .Chesnel's 
 heart, but to produce the money. Chesnel made the 
 draft payable to Sorbier's young successor; and the latter, 
 feeling but little inclination to adopt his correspondent's senti- 
 mentality, was delighted to put himself at the count's orders, 
 and gave Victurnien as much money as he wanted. 
 
 Now those who know what life in Paris means, know that 
 fifty thousand francs will not go very far in furniture, horses, 
 carriages, and elegance generally ; but it must be borne in 
 mind that Victurnien immediately contracted some twenty 
 thousand francs' worth of debts beside, and his tradespeople 
 at first were not at all anxious to be paid, for our young 
 gentleman's fortune had been prodigiously increased, partly 
 by rumor, partly by Josephin, that Chesnel in livery. 
 
 Victurnien had not been in town a month before he was 
 obliged to repair to his man of business for ten thousand 
 francs; he had only been playing whist with the Dues de 
 Navarreins, de Chaulieu, and de Lenoncourt, and now and 
 again at his club. He had begun by winning some thousands 
 of francs, but pretty soon lost five or six thousand, which 
 brought home to him the necessity of a purse for play. A 
 man ought to renew his wealth perpetually, and as Nature 
 does below the surface and out of sight. People talk if 
 somebody comes to grief; they joke about a new-comer's for- 
 tune till their minds are set at rest, and at this they draw the 
 line. Victurnien d'Esgrignon, with all the Faubourg Saint- 
 Germain to back him, with all his protectors exaggerating the 
 amount of his fortune (were it only to rid themselves of re- 
 sponsibility), and magnifying his possessions in the most re- 
 fined and well-bred way, with a hint or a word ; with all these 
 advantages to repeat Victurnien was, in fact, an eligible 
 count. He was handsome, witty, sound in politics; his
 
 THE' JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 207 
 
 father still possessed the ancestral castle and the lands of the 
 marquisate. Such a young fellow is sure of an admirable 
 reception in houses where there are marriageable daugh- 
 ters, fair but portionless partners at dances, and young 
 married women who find that time hangs heavy on their 
 hands. So the world, smiling, beckoned him to the foremost 
 benches in its booth ; the seats reserved for marquises are still 
 in the same place in Paris ; and if the names are changed, the 
 things are the same as ever. 
 
 In the must exclusive circle of society in the Faubourg 
 Saint-Germain, Victurnien found the chevalier's double in 
 the person of the Vidame de Pamiers. The vidame was a 
 Chevalier de Valois raised to the tenth power, invested with 
 all the prestige of wealth, enjoying all the advantages of high 
 position. The dear vidame was a repository for everybody's 
 secrets, and the gazette of the Faubourg beside ; nevertheless, 
 he was discreet, and, like other gazettes, only said things that 
 might safely be published. Again Victurnien listened to the 
 chevalier's esoteric doctrines. The vidame told young d'Es- 
 grignon, without mincing matters, to make conquests among 
 women of quality, supplementing the advice with anecdotes 
 from his own experience. The Vicomte de Pamiers, it 
 seemed, had permitted himself much that it would serve no 
 purpose to relate here ; so remote was it from all our modern 
 manners, in which soul and passion play so large a part, that 
 nobody would believe it. But the excellent vidame did more 
 than this. 
 
 " Dine with me at a cafe to-morrow," said he, by way of 
 conclusion. " We will digest our dinner at the opera, and 
 afterward I will take you to a house where several people have 
 the greatest wish to meet you." 
 
 The vidame gave a delightful little dinner at the Rocher de 
 Cancale ; three guests only were asked to meet Victurnien 
 de Marsay, Rastignac, and Blondet. Emile Blondet, the 
 young count's fellow-towpsman, was a man of letters on the
 
 208 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 outskirts of society to which he had been introduced by a 
 charming woman from the same province. This was one of 
 the Vicomte de Troisville's daughters, now married to the 
 Comte de Montcornet, one of those of Napoleon's generals 
 who went over to the Bourbons. The vidame held that a 
 dinner-party of more than six persons was beneath contempt. 
 In that case, according to him, there was an end alike of 
 cookery and conversation, and a man could not sip his wine 
 in a proper frame of mind. 
 
 " I have not yet told you, my dear boy, where I mean to 
 take you to-night," he said, taking Victurnien's hands, and 
 tapping on them. "You are going to see Mademoiselle des 
 Touches ; all the pretty women with any pretensions to wit 
 will be at her house en petit comite* Literature, art, poetry, 
 any sort of genius, in short, is held in great esteem there. It 
 is one of our old-world bureaux (T esprit, with a veneer of 
 monarchical doctrine, the livery of this present age." 
 
 " It is sometimes as tiresome and tedious there as a pair of 
 new boots, but there are women with whom you cannot meet 
 anywhere else," said de Marsay. 
 
 " If all the poets who went there to rub up their muse were 
 like our friend here," said Rastignac, tapping Blondet famil- 
 iarly on the shoulder, " we should have some fun. But a 
 plague of odes, and ballads, and driveling meditations, and 
 novels with wide margins, pervades the sofas and the atmos- 
 phere." 
 
 "I don't dislike them," said de Marsay, "so long as they 
 corrupt girls' minds and don't spoil women." 
 
 "Gentlemen," smiled Blondet, "you are encroaching on 
 my field of literature." 
 
 "You need not talk. You have robbed us of the most 
 charming woman in the world, you lucky rogue ; we may be 
 allowed to steal your less brilliant ideas," cried Rastignac. 
 
 "Yes, he is a lucky rascal," said the vidame* and he 
 
 * Having a little meeting.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 200 
 
 twitched Blondet's ear. "But perhaps Victurnien here will 
 be luckier still this evening " 
 
 "Already /" exclaimed de Marsay. "Why, he only came 
 here a month ago ; he has scarcely had time to shake the dust 
 of his old manor-house off his feet, to wipe off the brine in 
 which his aunt kept him preserved ; he has only just set up a 
 decent horse, a tilbury in the latest style, a groom " 
 
 "No, no, not a groom," interrupted Rastignac ; "he has 
 some sort of an agricultural laborer that he brought with him 
 'from his place.' Buisson, who understands a livery as well 
 as most, declared that the man was physically incapable of 
 wearing a jacket." 
 
 "I will tell you what, you ought to have modeled yourself 
 on Beaudenord," the vidame said seriously. "He has this 
 advantage over all of you, my young friends, he has a genuine 
 specimen of the English tiger " 
 
 "Just see, gentlemen, what the noblesse have come to in 
 France! " cried Victurnien. "For them the one important 
 thing is to have a tiger, a thoroughbred, and baubles " 
 
 "Bless me!" said Blondet. "'This gentleman's good 
 sense at times appalls me.' Well, yes, young moralist, you 
 nobles have come to that. You have not even left to you 
 that lustre of lavish expenditure for which the dear vidame 
 was famous fifty years ago. We revel on a second floor in the 
 Rue Montorgueil. There are no more wars with the cardinal, 
 no Field of the Cloth of Gold. You, Comte d'Esgrignon, in 
 short, are supping in the company of one Blondet, younger 
 son of a miserable provincial magistrate, with whom you would 
 not shake hands down yonder ; and in ten years' time you 
 may sit beside him among peers of the realm. Believe in 
 yourself after that, if you can." 
 
 "Ah, well," said Rastignac, "we have passed from action 
 to thought, from brute force to force of intellect we are 
 talking " 
 
 "Let us not talk of our reverses," protested the vidame j 
 14
 
 210 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 " 1 have made up my mind to die merrily. If our friend here 
 has not a tiger as yet, he comes of a race of lions, and can 
 dispense with one." 
 
 "He cannot do without a tiger," said Blondet ; "he is 
 too newly come to town." 
 
 "His elegance maybe new as yet," returned de Marsay, 
 " but we are adopting it. He is worthy of us, he understands 
 his age, he has brains, he is nobly born and gently bred ; we 
 are going to like him, and serve him, and push him " 
 
 "Whither?" inquired Blondet. 
 
 " Inquisitive soul ! " said Rastignac. 
 
 "With whom will he take up to-night?" de Marsay asked. 
 
 "With a whole seraglio," said the vidame. 
 
 " Plague take it ! What can we have done that the dear 
 vidame is punishing us by keeping his word to the infanta ? 
 I should be pitiable indeed if I did not know her " 
 
 "And I was once a coxcomb even as he," said the vidame, 
 indicating de Marsay. 
 
 The conversation continued pitched in the same key, charm- 
 ingly scandalous and agreeably corrupt. The dinner went 
 off very pleasantly. Rastignac and de Marsay went to the 
 opera with the vidame and Victurnien, with a view to follow- 
 ing them afterward to Mile, des Touches' salon. And thither, 
 accordingly, this pair of rakes betook themselves, calculating 
 that by that time the tragedy would have been read ; for of 
 all things to be taken between eleven and twelve o'clock at 
 night, a tragedy in their opinion was the most unwholesome. 
 They went to keep a watch on Victurnien and to embarrass 
 him, a piece of schoolboy's mischief embittered by a jealous 
 dandy's spite. But Victurnien was gifted with that page's 
 effrontery which is a great help to ease of manner ; and Ras- 
 tignac, watching him as he made his entrance, was surprised 
 to see how quickly he caught the tone of the moment. 
 
 "That young d'Esgrignon will go far, will he not?" he 
 said, addressing his companion.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 211 
 
 " That is as may be," returned de Marsay, " but he is in a 
 fair way." 
 
 The vidame introduced his young friend to one of the most 
 amiable and frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose 
 adventures caused an explosion five years later. Just then, 
 however, she was in the full blaze of her glory ; she had been 
 suspected, it is true, of equivocal conduct ; but suspicion, 
 while it is still suspicion and not proof, marks a woman out 
 with the kind of distinction which slander gives to a man. 
 Nonentities are never slandered ; they chafe because they are 
 left in peace. This woman was, in fact, the Duchesse de 
 Maufrigneuse, a daughter of the d'Uxelles ; her father-in-law 
 was still alive she was not to be the Princesse de Cadignan 
 for some years to come. A friend of the Duchesse de Lan- 
 geais and the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, two glories departed, 
 she was likewise intimate with the Marquise d'Espard, with 
 whom she disputed her fragile sovereignty as queen of fashion. 
 Great relations lent her countenance for a long while, but 
 the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was one of those women who, 
 in some way, nobody knows how, or why, or where, will 
 spend the rents of all the lands of earth, and of the moon 
 likewise, if they were not out of reach. The general outline 
 of her character was scarcely known as yet ; de Marsay, and 
 de Marsay only, really had read her. That redoubtable dandy 
 now watched the Vidame de Farmer's introduction of his 
 young friend to that lovely woman, and bent over to say in 
 Rastignac's ear 
 
 " My dear fellow, he will go up whizz ! like a rocket, and 
 come down like a stick," an atrociously vulgar saying which 
 was remarkably fulfilled. 
 
 The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had lost her heart to Vic- 
 turnien after first giving her mind to a serious study of him. 
 Any lover who should have caught the glance by which she 
 expressed her gratitude to the vidame might well have been
 
 212 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 jealous of such friendship. Women are like horses let loose 
 on a prairie when they feel, as the duchess felt with the Vi- 
 darne de Pamiers, that the ground is safe; at such moments 
 they are themselves ; perhaps it pleases them to give, as it were, 
 samples of their tenderness in intimacy in this way. It was a 
 guarded glance, nothing was lost between eye and eye ; there 
 was no possibility of reflection in any mirror. Nobody inter- 
 cepted it. 
 
 " See how she has prepared herself," Rastignac said, turning 
 to de Marsay. "What a virginal toilette; what swan's grace 
 in that snow-white throat of hers ! How white her gown is, 
 and she is wearing a sash like a little girl ; she looks round 
 like a madonna inviolate. Who would think that you had 
 passed that way ? ' ' 
 
 "The very reason why she looks as she does," returned de 
 Marsay, with a triumphant air. 
 
 The two young men exchanged a smile. Mme. de Mau- 
 frigneuse saw the smile and guessed at their conversation, and 
 gave the pair a broadside of her eyes, an art acquired by 
 Frenchwomen since the Peace, when Englishwomen imported 
 it into this country, together with the shape of their silver, 
 their horses and harness, and the piles of insular ice which 
 impart a refreshing coolness to the atmosphere of any room in 
 which a certain number of British females are gathered to- 
 gether. The young men grew serious as a couple of clerks at 
 the end of a homily from headquarters before the receipt of 
 an unexpected bonus. 
 
 The duchess, when she lost her heart to Victurnien, had 
 made up her mind to play the part of romantic Innocence, a 
 role much understudied subsequently by other women, for the 
 misfortune of modern youth. Her grace of Maufrigneuse had 
 just come out as an angel at a moment's notice, precisely as 
 she meant to turn to literature and science somewhere about 
 her fortieth year instead of taking to devotion. She made a 
 point of being like nobody else. Her parts, her dresses, her
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 213 
 
 caps, opinions, toilettes, and manner of acting were all entirely 
 new and original. Soon after her marriage, when she was 
 scarcely more than a girl, she had played the part of a knowing 
 and almost depraved woman ; she ventured on risky repartees 
 with shallow people, and betrayed her ignorance to those who 
 knew better. As the date of that marriage made it impossible 
 to abstract one little year from her age without the knowledge 
 of Time, and as her grace had reached her twenty-sixth year, 
 she had taken it into her head to be immaculate. She scarcely 
 seemed to belong to earth ; she shook out her wide sleeves as 
 if they had been wings. Her eyes fled to heaven at too warm 
 a glance, or word, or thought. 
 
 There is a madonna painted by Piola, the great Genoese 
 painter, who bade fair to bring out a second edition of Ra- 
 phael till his career was cut short by jealousy and murder ; his 
 madonna, however, you may dimly discern through a pane of 
 glass in a little street in Genoa. 
 
 A more chaste-eyed madonna than Piola's does not exist ; 
 but, compared with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, that heavenly 
 creature was a Messalina. Women wondered among them- 
 selves how such a giddy young thing had been transformed by 
 a change of dress into the fair-veiled seraph who seemed (to 
 use an expression now in vogue) to have a soul as white as 
 new-fallen snow on the highest Alpine crests ? How had she 
 solved in such short space the Jesuitical problem how to 
 display a bosom whiter than her soul by hiding it in gauze ? 
 How could she look so ethereal while her eyes drooped so 
 murderously? Those almost wanton glances seemed to give 
 promise of untold languorous delight, while by an ascetic's 
 sigh of aspiration after a better life the mouth appeared to 
 add that none of those promises would be fulfilled. Ingenuous 
 youths (for there were a few to be found in the Guards of that 
 day) privately wondered whether, in the most intimate moments, 
 it were possible to speak familiarly to this White Lady, this 
 starry vapor slidden down from the Milky Way. This
 
 214 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 system, whick answered completely for some years at a stretch, 
 was turned to good account by women of fashion, whose 
 breasts were lined with a stout philosophy, for they could 
 cloak no inconsiderable exactions with these little airs from 
 the sacristy. Not one of the celestial creatures but was quite 
 well aware of the possibilities of less ethereal love which lay 
 in the longing of every well-conditioned male to recall such 
 beings to earth. It was a fashion which permitted them to 
 abide in a semi-religious, semi-Ossianic empyrean ; they could, 
 and did, ignore all the practical details of daily life, a short 
 and easy method of disposing of many questions. De Marsay, 
 foreseeing the future developments of the system, added a last 
 word, for he saw that Rastignac was jealous of Victurnien. 
 
 " My boy," said he, "stay as you are. Our Nucingen will 
 make your fortune, whereas the duchess would ruin you. She 
 is too expensive." 
 
 Rastignac allowed de Marsay to go without asking further 
 questions. He knew Paris. He knew that the most refined 
 and noble and disinterested of women a woman who cannot 
 be induced to accept anything but a bouquet can be as 
 dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl 
 of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an 
 almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, 
 dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of 
 the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the 
 morning in the character of respected and respectable mothers 
 of families, and act men's parts in tight-fitting garments at 
 night. 
 
 Worthy M. Chesnel, in his country notary's office, was 
 right ; he had foreseen one of the reefs on which the count 
 might make shipwreck. Victurnien was dazzled by the poetic 
 aureola which Mme. de Maufrigneuse chose to assume ; he 
 was chained and padlocked from the first hour in her com- 
 pany, bound captive by that girlish sash, and caught by the 
 curls twined round fairy fingers. Far corrupted the boy was
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 215 
 
 already, but he really believed in that farrago of maidenliness 
 and muslin, in sweet looks as much studied as an Act of Par- 
 liament. And if the one man, who is in duty bound to be- 
 lieve in feminine fibs, is deceived by them, is not that enough ? 
 
 The converse which Victurnien held with the duchess can 
 be kept up at his age without too great a strain. He was 
 young enough and ignorant enough of life in Paris to feel no 
 necessity to be upon his guard, no need to keep a watch 
 over his lightest words and glances. The religious senti- 
 mentalism, which finds a broadly humorous commentary in 
 the after-thoughts of either speaker, puts the old-world French 
 chat of men and women, with its pleasant familiarity, its 
 lively ease, quite out of the question j they make love in a 
 mist nowadays. 
 
 Victurnien was just sufficient of an unsophisticated provin- 
 cial to remain suspended in a highly appropriate and unfeigned 
 rapture which pleased the duchess ; for women are no more 
 to be deceived by the comedies which men play than by their 
 own. Mme. de Maufrigneuse calculated, not without dismay, 
 that the young count's infatuation was likely to hold good for 
 six whole months of disinterested love. She looked so lovely 
 in this dove's mood, quenching the light in her eyes by the 
 golden ^fringe of their lashes, that when the Marquise d'Espard 
 bade her friend good-night, she whispered : " Good ! very 
 good, dear! " And with these farewell words, the fair mar- 
 quise left her rival to make the tour of the modern pays du 
 Tendre ; which, by the way, is not so absurd a conception as 
 some appear to think. New maps of the country are engraved 
 for each generation ; and if the names of the routes are differ- 
 ent, they still lead to the same capital city. 
 
 In the course of an hour's Ute-d-tlte, on a corner sofa, under 
 the eyes of the world, the duchess brought young d'Esgrignon 
 as far as Scipio's Generosity, the Devotion of Amadis, and 
 Chivalrous Self-abnegation (for the Middle Ages were just 
 coming into fashion, with their daggers, machicolations, hau-
 
 216 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 berks, chain-mail, peaked shoes, and romantic, painted card- 
 board properties). She had an admirable turn, moreover, for 
 leaving things unsaid, for leaving ideas in a discreet, seem- 
 ingly careless way, to work their way down, one by one, into 
 Victurnien's heart, like needles into a cushion. She possessed 
 a marvelous skill in reticence ; she was charming in hypocrisy, 
 lavish of subtle promises, which revived hope and then melted 
 away like ice in the sun if you looked at them closely, and 
 most treacherous in the desire which she felt and inspired. 
 At the close of this charming encounter she produced the run- 
 ning noose of an invitation to call, and flung it over him with 
 a dainty demureness which the printed page can never set 
 forth. 
 
 "You will forget me," she said. " You will find so many 
 women eager to pay court to you instead of enlightening 
 
 you But you will come back to me undeceived. Are 
 
 you coming to me first? No. As you will. For my 
 
 own part, I tell you frankly that your visits will be a great 
 pleasure to me. People of soul are so rare, and I think that 
 you are one of them. Come, farewell ; people will begin to 
 talk about us if we talk together any longer." 
 
 She made good her words and took flight. Victurnien 
 went soon afterward, but not before others had guessed his 
 ecstatic condition ; his face wore the expression peculiar to 
 happy men, something between an Inquisitor's calm discre- 
 tion and the self-contained beatitude of a devotee, fresh from 
 the confessional and absolution. 
 
 " Madame de Maufrigneuse went pretty briskly to the point 
 this evening," said the Duchesse de Grandlieu, when only 
 half-a-dozen persons were left in Mile, des Touches' little 
 drawing-room to wit, des Lupeaulx, a master of requests, 
 who at that time stood very well at Court, Vandenesse, the 
 Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, Monsieur Canalis, and Madame de 
 Serizy. 
 
 "D'Esgrignon and Maufrigneuse are two names that are
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 217 
 
 sure to cling together," said Mme. de Serizy, who aspired to 
 epigram. 
 
 " For some days past she has been out at grass on Pla- 
 tonism," said des Lupeaulx. 
 
 "She will ruin that poor innocent," added Charles de 
 Vandenesse. 
 
 "What do you mean?" asked Mile, des Touches. 
 
 "Oh, morally and financially, beyond all doubt," said the 
 vicomtesse, rising. 
 
 The cruel words were cruelly true for young d'Esgrignon. 
 
 Next morning he wrote to his aunt describing his introduc- 
 tion into the high world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in 
 bright colors flung by the prism of love, explaining the recep- 
 tion which met him everywhere in a way which gratified his 
 father's family pride. The marquis would have the whole 
 long letter read to him twice ; he rubbed his hands when he 
 heard of the Vidame des Farmers' dinner the vidame was an 
 old acquaintance and of the subsequent introduction to the 
 duchess ; but at Blondet's name he lost himself in conjectures. 
 What could the younger son of a judge, a public prosecutor 
 during the Revolution, have been doing there ? 
 
 There was joy that evening among the Collection of An- 
 tiquities. They talked over the young count's success. So 
 discreet were they with regard to Mme. de Maufrigneuse, that 
 the one man who heard the secret was the chevalier. There 
 was no financial postscript at the end of the letter, no unpleas- 
 ant concluding reference to the sinews of war, which every 
 young man makes in such a case. Mile. Armande showed it 
 to Chesnel. Chesnel was pleased and raised not a single 
 objection. It was clear, as the marquis and the chevalier 
 agreed, that a young man in favor with the Duchesse de Mau- 
 frigneuse would shortly be a hero at Court, where in the old 
 days women were all-powerful. The count had not made a 
 bad choice. The dowagers told over all the gallant adven- 
 tures of the Maufrigneuses from Louis XIII. to Louis XVI.
 
 218 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 they spared to inquire into preceding reigns and when all 
 was done they were enchanted. Mme. de Maufrigneuse was 
 much praised for interesting herself in Victurnien. Any 
 writer of plays in search of a piece of pure comedy would 
 have found it well worth his while to listen to the Antiquities 
 in conclave. 
 
 Victurnien received charming letters from his father and 
 aunt, and also from the chevalier. That gentleman recalled 
 himself to the vidame's memory. He had been at Spa with 
 M. de Pamiers in 1778, after a certain journey made by a 
 celebrated Hungarian princess. And Chesnel also wrote. 
 The fond flattery to which the unhappy boy was only too well 
 accustomed shone out of every page ; and Mile. Armande 
 seemed to share half of Mme. de Maufrigneuse's happiness. 
 
 Thus happy in the approval of his family, the young count 
 made a spirited beginning in the perilous and costly ways of 
 dandyism. He had five horses he was moderate de Marsay 
 had fourteen ! He returned the vidame's hospitality, even 
 including Blondet in the invitation, as well as de Marsay and 
 Rastignac. The dinner cost five hundred francs, and the 
 noble provincial was filed on the same scale. Victurnien 
 played a good deal, and, for his misfortune, at the fashionable 
 game of whist. 
 
 He laid out his days in busy idleness. Every day between 
 twelve and three o'clock he was with the duchess ; afterward 
 he went to meet her in the Bois de .Boulogne and ride beside 
 her carriage. Sometimes the charming couple rode together, 
 but this was early on fine summer mornings. Society, balls, 
 the theatre, and gayety filled the count's evening hours. 
 Everywhere Victurnien made a brilliant figure ; everywhere 
 he flung the pearls of his wit broadcast. 
 
 The duchess, so white and fragile and angel-like, felt at- 
 tracted to the dissipations of bachelor life ; she enjoyed first 
 nights; she liked anything amusing, anything improvised.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 219 
 
 Bohemian restaurants lay outside her experience ; so d'Esgrig- 
 non got up a charming little party at the Rocher de Cancale 
 for her benefit, asked all the amiable scamps whom she culti- 
 vated and sermonized, and there was a vast amount of merri- 
 ment, wit, and gayety, and a corresponding bill to pay. That 
 supper party led to others. And through it all Victurnien 
 worshiped her as an angel. Mme. de Maufrigneuse for him 
 was still an angel, untouched by any taint of earth ; an angel 
 at the Varietes, where she sat out the half-obscene, vulgar 
 farces, which made her laugh ; an angel through the cross-fire 
 of highly flavored jests and scandalous anecdotes, which en- 
 livened a stolen frolic; a 'languishing angel in the latticed 
 box at the Vaudeville; an angel while she criticised the 
 postures of opera-dancers with the experience of an elderly 
 habitue of le coin de la reinc ; an angel at the Porte Saint- 
 Martin, at the little boulevard theatres, at the masked balls, 
 which she enjoyed like any schoolboy. She was an angel 
 who asked him for the love that lives by self-abnegation and 
 heroism and self-sacrifice ; an angel who would have her lover 
 live like an English lord, with an income of a million francs. 
 D'Esgrignon once exchanged a horse because the animal's 
 coat did not satisfy her notions. At play she was an angel, 
 and certainly no bourgeoise that ever lived could have bidden 
 d'Esgrignon "Stake for me! " in such an angelic way. She 
 was so divinely reckless in her folly that a man might well 
 have sold his soul to the devil lest this angel should lose her 
 taste for earthly pleasures. 
 
 The first winter went by. The count had drawn on M. 
 Cardot for the trifling sum of thirty thousand francs over and 
 above Chesnel's remittance. As Cardot very carefully re- 
 frained from using his right of remonstrance, Victurnien now 
 learned for the first time that he had overdrawn his account. 
 He was the more offended by an extremely polite refusal to 
 make any further advance, since it so happened that he had
 
 220 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 just lost six thousand francs at play at the club, and he could 
 not very well show himself there until they were paid. 
 
 After growing indignant with Maitre Cardot, who had 
 trusted him with thirty thousand francs (Cardot had written 
 to Chesnel, but to the fair duchess' favorite he made the most 
 of his so-called confidence in him), after all this, d'Esgrignon 
 was obliged to ask the lawyer to tell him how to set about 
 raising the money, since debts of honor were in question. 
 
 " Draw bills on your father's banker, and take them to his 
 correspondent ; he, no doubt, will discount them for you. 
 Then write to your family, and tell them to remit the amount 
 to the banker." 
 
 An inner voice seemed to suggest du Croisier's name in this 
 predicament. He had seen du Croisier on his knees to the 
 aristocracy, and of the man's real disposition he was entirely 
 ignorant. So to du Croisier he wrote a very off-hand letter, 
 informing him that he had drawn a bill of exchange on him 
 for ten thousand francs, adding that the amount would be 
 repaid on receipt of the letter either by M. Chesnel or by 
 Mile. Armande d'Esgrignon. Then he indited two touching 
 epistles one to Chesnel, another to his aunt. In the matter 
 of going headlong to ruin, a young man often shows singular 
 ingenuity and ability, and fortune favors him. In the morn- 
 ing Victurnien happened on the name of the Paris bankers in 
 correspondence with du Croisier, and de Marsay furnished him 
 with the Kellers' address. De Marsay knew everything in 
 Paris. The Kellers took the bill and gave him the sum with- 
 out a word, after deducting the discount. The balance of the 
 account was in du Croisier's favor. 
 
 But the gaming debt was as nothing in comparison with the 
 state of things at home. Invoices and accounts showered in 
 upon Victurnien. 
 
 " I say ! Do you trouble yourself about that sort of thing?" 
 Rastignac said, laughing. "Are you putting them in order, 
 my dear boy? I did not think you were so business-like."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 221 
 
 " My dear fellow, it is quite time I thought about it ; there 
 are twenty-odd thousand francs there." 
 
 De Marsay, coming in to lookup d'Esgrignon for a steeple- 
 chase, produced a dainty little pocket-book, took out twenty 
 thousand francs, and handed them to him. 
 
 " It is the best way of keeping the money safe," said he ; 
 " I am twice enchanted to have won it yesterday from my 
 honored father, Milord Dudley." 
 
 Such French grace completely fascinated d'Esgrignon ; he 
 took it for friendship ; and as to the money, punctually forgot 
 to pay his debts with it, and spent it on his pleasures. The 
 fact was that de Marsay was looking on with an unspeakable 
 pleasure while young d'Esgrignon " got out of his depth," in 
 dandy's idiom ; it pleased de Marsay in all sorts of fondling 
 ways to lay an arm on the lad's shoulder ; by-and-by he 
 should feel its weight, and disappear the sooner. For de 
 Marsay was jealous ; the duchess flaunted her love affair ; she 
 was not at home to other visitors when d'Esgrignon was with 
 her. And beside, de Marsay was one of those savage humor- 
 ists who delight in mischief, as Turkish women in the bath. 
 So, when he had carried off the prize, and bets were settled 
 at the tavern where they breakfasted, and a bottle or two of 
 good wine had appeared, de Marsay turned to d'Esgrignon 
 with a laugh 
 
 " Those bills that you are worrying over are not yours, I 
 am sure." 
 
 "Eh! if they weren't, why should he worry himself?" 
 asked Rastignac. 
 
 "And whose should they be?" d'Esgrignon inquired. 
 
 "Then you do not know the duchess' position?" queried 
 de Marsay, as he sprang into the saddle. 
 
 "No," said d'Esgrignon, his curiosity aroused. 
 
 "Well, dear fellow, it is like this," returned de Marsay 
 " thirty thousand francs to Victorine, eighteen thousand francs 
 to Houbigaut, lesser amounts to Herbault, Nattier, Nourtier,
 
 222 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 and those Latour people altogether a hundred thousand 
 francs." 
 
 "An angel!" cried d'Esgrignon, with eyes uplifted to 
 heaven. 
 
 "This is the bill for her wings,' Rastignac cried face- 
 tiously. 
 
 "She owes all that, my dear boy," continued de Marsay, 
 "precisely because she is an angel. But we have all seen 
 angels in this position," he added, glancing at Rastignac ; 
 " there is this about women that is sublime, they understand 
 nothing of money; they do not meddle with it, it is no affair 
 of theirs ; they are invited guests at the ' banquet of life,' as 
 some poet or other said that came to an end in the work- 
 house." 
 
 "How do you know this when I do not?" d'Esgrignon 
 artlessly returned. 
 
 " You are sure to be the last to know it, just as she is sure 
 to be the last to hear that you are in debt." 
 
 " I thought she had a hundred thousand livres a year," said 
 d'Esgrignon. 
 
 " Her husband," replied de Marsay, "lives apart from her. 
 He stays with his regiment and practices economy, for he has 
 one or two little debts of his own as well, has our dear duke. 
 Where do you come from ? Just learn to do as we do and 
 keep our friends' accounts for them. Mademoiselle Diane (I 
 fell in love with her for the name's sake), Mademoiselle Diane 
 d'Uxelles brought her husband sixty thousand livres of in- 
 come ; for the last eight years she has lived as if she had two 
 hundred thousand. It is perfectly plain that at this moment 
 her lands are mortgaged up to their full value ; some fine 
 morning the crash must come, and the angel will be put to 
 flight by must it be said ? by sheriff's officers that have the 
 effrontery to lay hands on an angel just as they might take 
 hold of one of us." 
 
 "Poor angel!"
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 223 
 
 " Lord ! it costs a great deal to dwell in a Parisian heaven ; 
 you must whiten your wings and your complexion every 
 morning," said Rastignac. 
 
 Now as the thought of confessing his debts to his beloved 
 Diane had passed through d'Esgrignon's mind, something like 
 a shudder ran through him when he remembered that he still 
 owed sixty thousand francs, to say nothing of bills to come 
 for another ten thousand. He went back melancholy enough. 
 His friends remarked his ill-disguised preoccupation, and 
 spoke of it among themselves at dinner. 
 
 " Young d'Esgrignon is getting out of his depth. He is 
 not up to Paris. He will blow his brains out. A little fool !" 
 and so on and so on. 
 
 D'Esgrignon, however, promptly took comfort. His ser- 
 vant brought him two letters. The first was from Chesnel. 
 A letter from Chesnel smacked of the stale grumbling faithful- 
 ness of honesty and its consecrated formulas. With all respect 
 he put it aside till the evening. But the second letter he read 
 with unspeakable pleasure. In Ciceronian phrases, du Croisier 
 groveled before him, like a Sganarelle before a Geronte, beg- 
 ging the young count in future to spare him the affront of 
 first depositing the amount of the bills which he should con- 
 descend to draw. The concluding phrase seemed meant to 
 convey the idea that here was an open cash-box full of coin 
 at the service of the noble d'Esgrignon family. So strong 
 was the impression that Victurnien, like Sganarelle or Mas- 
 carille in the play, like everybody else who feels a twinge of 
 conscience at his finger-tips, made an involuntary gesture. 
 
 Now that he was sure of unlimited credit with the Kellers, 
 he opened Chesnel's letter gaily. He had expected four full 
 pages, full of expostulation to the brim ; he glanced down the 
 sheet for the familiar words "prudence," "honor," "deter- 
 mination to do right," and the like, and saw something else 
 instead which made his head swim.
 
 224 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 " MONSIEUR LE COMTE : Of all my fortune I have now but 
 two hundred thousand francs left. I beg of you not to exceed 
 that amount, if you should do one of the most devoted ser- 
 vants of your family the honor of taking it. I present my 
 respects to you. CHESNEL." 
 
 " He is one of Plutarch's men," Victurnien said to himself, 
 as he tossed the letter on the table. He felt chagrined ; such 
 magnanimity made him feel very small. 
 
 "There! one must reform," he thought; and instead of 
 going to a restaurant and spending fifty or sixty francs over 
 his .dinner, he retrenched by dining with the Duchesse de 
 Maufrigneuse, and told her about the letter. 
 
 "I should like to see that man," she said, letting her eyes 
 shine like two fixed stars. 
 
 "What would you do?" 
 
 "Why, he should manage my affairs for me." 
 
 Diane de Maufrigneuse was divinely dressed ; she meant 
 her toilet to do honor to Victurnien. The levity with which 
 she treated his affairs, or, more properly speaking, his debts, 
 fascinated him. 
 
 The charming pair went to the Italiens. Never had that 
 beautiful and enchanting woman looked more seraphic, more 
 ethereal. Nobody in the house could have believed that she 
 had debts which reached the sum-total mentioned by de 
 Marsay that very morning. No single one of the cares of 
 earth had touched that sublime forehead of hers, full of 
 woman's pride of the highest kind. In her, a pensive air 
 seemed to be some gleam of an earthly love, nobly extin- 
 guished. The men for the most part were wagering that 
 Victurnien, with his handsome figure, laid her under contri- 
 bution ; while the women, sure of their rival's subterfuge, 
 admired her as Michael Angelo admired Raphael, in petto. 
 Victurnien loved Diane, according to one of these ladies, for 
 the sake of her hair she had the most beautiful fair hair in
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 225 
 
 France ; another maintained that Diane's pallor was her prin- 
 cipal merit, for she was not really well shaped, her dress made 
 the most of her figure ; yet others thought that Victurnien 
 loved her for her foot, her one good point, for she had a flat 
 figure. But (and this brings the present-day manner of Paris 
 before you in an astonishing manner) whereas all the men 
 said that the duchess was subsidizing Victurnien's splendor, 
 the women, on the other hand, gave people to understand 
 that it was Victurnien who paid for the angel's wing-bills, 
 as Rastignac said. 
 
 As they drove back again, Victurnien had it on the tip of 
 his tongue a score of times to open this chapter, for the 
 duchess' debts weighed more heavily upon his mind than his 
 own ; and a score of times his purpose died away before the 
 attitude of the divine creature beside him. He could see her 
 by the light of the carriage lamps ; she was bewitching in the 
 love-languor which always seemed to be extorted by the 
 violence of passion from her madonna's purity. The duchess 
 did not fall into the mistake of talking of her virtue, of her 
 angel's estate, as provincial women, her imitators, do. She 
 was far too clever. She made him, for whom she made such 
 great sacrifices, think these things for himself. At the end 
 of six months she could make him feel that a harmless kiss on 
 her hand was a deadly sin ; she contrived that every grace 
 should be extorted from her, and this with such consummate 
 art that it was impossible not to feel that she was more an 
 angel than ever when she yielded. 
 
 None but Parisian women are clever enough always to give 
 a new charm to the moon, to romanticize the stars, to roll 
 in the same sack of charcoal and emerge each time whiter than 
 ever. This is the highest refinement of intellectual and 
 Parisian civilization. Women beyond the Rhine or the 
 English Channel believe nonsense of this sort when they utter 
 it ; while your Parisienne makes her lover believe that she is 
 an angel, the better to add to his bliss by flattering hisvanity 
 15
 
 226 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 on both sides temporal and spiritual. Certain persons, de- 
 tractors of the duchess, maintain that she was the first dupe 
 of her own white magic. A wicked slander. The duchess 
 believed in nothing but herself. 
 
 By the end of the year 1823, the Kellers had supplied Vic- 
 turnien with two hundred thousand francs,- and neither Chesnel 
 nor Mile. Armande knew anything about it. He had had, 
 beside, two thousand crowns from Chesnel at one time and 
 another, the better to hide the sources on which he was draw- 
 ing. He wrote lying letters to his poor father and aunt, who 
 lived on, happy and deceived, like most happy people under 
 the sun. The insidious current of life in Paris was bringing 
 a dreadful catastrophe upon the great and noble house ; and 
 only one person was in the secret of it. This was du Croisier. 
 He rubbed his hands gleefully as he went past in the dark 
 and looked in at the Antiquities. He had good hope of 
 attaining his ends ; and his ends were not, as heretofore, the 
 simple ruin of the d'Esgrignons, but the dishonor of their 
 house. He felt instinctively at such times that his revenge 
 was at hand ; he scented it in the wind ! He had been sure 
 of it, indeed, from the day when he discovered that the young 
 count's burden of debt was growing too heavy for the boy to 
 bear. 
 
 Du Croisier's first step was to rid himself of his most hated 
 enemy, the venerable Chesnel. The good old man lived in 
 the Rue du Bercail, in a house with a steep-pitched roof. 
 There was a little paved courtyard in front, where the rose- 
 bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of the upper 
 story. Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged 
 borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls. The prim, 
 gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell 
 attached, announced quite as plainly as the official escutcheon 
 that " a notary lives here." 
 
 It was half-past five o'clock in the afternoon, at which hour 
 the old man usually sat digesting his dinner. He had drawn
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 227 
 
 his black leather-covered armchair before the fire, and put on 
 his armor, a painted pasteboard contrivance' shaped like a top 
 boot, which protected his stockinged legs from the heat of the 
 fire ; for it was one of the good man's habits to sit for a while 
 after dinner with his feet on the dogs and to stir up the glow- 
 ing coals. He always ate too much ; he was fond of good 
 living. Alas ! if it had not been for that little failing, would 
 he not have been fnore perfect than it is permitted to mortal 
 man to be ? Chesnel had finished his cup of coffee. His old 
 housekeeper had just taken away the tray which had been used 
 for this purpose for the last twenty years. He was waiting for 
 his clerks to go before he himself went out for his game at 
 cards, and meanwhile he was thinking no need to ask of 
 whom or what. A day seldom passed but he asked himself: 
 "Where is he? What is he doing?" He thought that the 
 count was in Italy with the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse. 
 
 When every franc of a man's fortune has come to him, not 
 by inheritance, but through his own earning and saving, it is 
 one of his sweetest pleasures to look back upon the pains that 
 have gone to the making of it, and then to plan out a future 
 for his crowns. This it is to conjugate the verb " to enjoy" 
 "in every tense. And the old lawyer, whose affections were 
 all bound up in a single attachment, was thinking that all the 
 carefully chosen, well-tilled land which he had pinched and 
 scraped to buy would one day go to round out the d'Esgrignon 
 estates, and the thought doubled his pleasure. His pride 
 swelled as he sat at his ease in the old armchair; and the 
 building of glowing coals, which he raised 'with the tongs, 
 sometimes seemed to him to be the old noble house built up 
 again, thanks to his care. He pictured the young count's 
 prosperity, and told himself that he had done well to live for 
 such an aim. Chesnel was not lacking in intelligence ; sheer 
 goodness was not the sole source of his great devotion ; he 
 had a pride of his own ; he was like the nobles who used to 
 rebuild a pillar in a cathedral to inscribe their name upon it ;
 
 228 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 he meant his name to be remembered by the great house which 
 he had restored. Future generations of d'Esgrignons should 
 speak of old Chesnel. Just at this point his old housekeeper 
 came in with signs of extreme alarm in her countenance. 
 
 "Is the house on fire, Brigitte?" 
 
 " Something of the sort," said she. " Here is Monsieur du 
 Croisier wanting to speak to you " 
 
 " Monsieur du Croisier," repeated the old lawyer. A stab 
 of cold misgiving gave him so sharp a pang at the heart that 
 he dropped the tongs. "Monsieur du Croisier here!" 
 thought he, " our chief enemy ! " 
 
 Du Croisier came in at that moment, like a cat that scents 
 milk in a dairy. He made a bow, seated himself quietly in 
 the easy-chair which the lawyer brought forward, and produced 
 a bill for two hundred and twenty-seven thousand francs, prin- 
 cipal and interest, the total amount of sums advanced to M. 
 Victurnien in bills of exchange drawn upon du Croisier, and 
 duly honored by him. Of these, he now demanded imme- 
 diate repayment, with a threat of proceeding to extremities with 
 the heir-presumptive of the house. Chesnel turned the un- 
 lucky letters over one by one, and asked the enemy to keep 
 the secret. This he engaged to do if he were paid within 
 forty-eight hours. He was pressed for money ; he had obliged 
 various manufacturers; and there followed a series of the 
 financial fictions by which neither notaries nor borrowers are 
 deceived. Chesnel's eyes were dim ; he could scarcely keep 
 back the tears. There was but one way of raising the money ; 
 he must mortgage his own lands up to their full value. But 
 when du Croisier learned the difficulty in the way of repay- 
 ment, he forgot that he was hard pressed ; he no longer wanted 
 ready money, and suddenly came out with a proposal to buy 
 the old lawyer's property. The sale was completed within 
 two days. Poor Chesnel could not bear the thought of the 
 son of the house undergoing a five years' imprisonment for 
 debt. So in a few days' time nothing remained to him but
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 229 
 
 his practice, the sums that were due to him, and the house in 
 which he lived. Chesnel, stripped of all his lands, paced to 
 and fro in his private office, paneled with dark oak, his eyes 
 fixed on the beveled edges of the chestnut cross-beams of the 
 ceiling, or on the trellised vines in the garden outside. He 
 was not thinking of his farms now, nor of Le Jard, his dear 
 house in the country ; not he. 
 
 " What will become of him ? He ought to come back ; 
 they must marry him to some rich heiress," he said to himself; 
 and his eyes were dim, his head heavy. 
 
 How to approach Mile. Armande, and in what words to 
 break the news to her, he did not know. The man who had 
 just paid the debts of the family quaked at the thought of con- 
 fessing these things. He went from the Rue du Bercail to the 
 Hotel d'Esgrignon with pulses throbbing like some girl's heart 
 when she leaves her father's roof by stealth, not to return 
 again till she is a mother and her heart is broken. 
 
 Mile. Armande had just received a charming letter, charm- 
 ing in its hypocrisy. Her nephew was the happiest man under 
 the sun. He had been to the baths, he had been traveling in 
 Italy with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, and now sent his journal to 
 his aunt. Every sentence was instinct with love. There were 
 enchanting descriptions of Venice and fascinating apprecia- 
 tions of the great works of Venetian art ; there were most 
 wonderful pages full of the Duomo at Milan, and again of 
 Florence ; he described the Apennines, and how they differed 
 from the Alps, and how in some village like Chiavari happi- 
 ness lay all around you, ready made. 
 
 The poor aunt was under the spell. She saw the far-off 
 country of love ; she saw, hovering above the land, the angel 
 whose tenderness gave to all that beauty a burning glow. She 
 was drinking in the letter at long draughts ; how should it have 
 been otherwise ! The girl who had put love from her was 
 now a woman ripened by repressed and pent-up passion, by all 
 the longings continually and gladly offered up as a sacrifice on
 
 230 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the altar of the hearth. Mile. Armande was not like the 
 duchess. She did not look like an angel. She was rather 
 like the little, straight, slim and slender, ivory-tinted statues, 
 which those wonderful sculptors, the builders of cathedrals, 
 placed here and thereabout the buildings. Wild plants some- 
 times find a hold in the damp niches, and weave a crown of 
 beautiful bluebell flowers about the carved stone. At this 
 moment the blue buds were unfolding in the fair saint's eyes. 
 Mile. Armande loved the charming couple as if they stood 
 apart from real life ; she saw nothing wrong in the married 
 woman's love for Victurnieh ; any other woman she would 
 have judged harshly ; but, in this case, not to have loved her 
 nephew would have been the unpardonable sin. Aunts, 
 mothers, and sisters have a code of their own for nephews and 
 sons and brothers. 
 
 Mile. Armande was in Venice ; she saw the lines of fairy 
 palaces that stand on either side of the Grand Canal ; she was 
 sitting in Victurnien's gondola; he was telling her what hap- 
 piness it had been to feel that the duchess' beautiful hand lay 
 in his own, to know that she loved him as they floated together 
 on the breast of the amorous Queen of Italian seas. But even 
 in that moment of bliss, such as angels know, some one ap- 
 peared on the garden walk. It was Chesnel ! Alas ! the 
 sound of his tread on the gravel might have been the sound of 
 the sands running from Death's hour-glass to be trodden under 
 his unshod feet. The sound, the sight of a dreadful hopeless- 
 ness in Chesnel's face, gave her that painful shock which fol- 
 lows a sudden recall of the senses when the soul has sent them 
 forth into the world of dreams. 
 
 "What is it?" she cried, as if some stab had pierced to 
 her heart. 
 
 "All is lost!" said Chesnel. "Monsieur le Comte will 
 bring dishonor upon the house if we do not set it in order." 
 He held out the bills, and described the agony of the last few 
 days in a few simple but vigorous and touching words.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 231 
 
 " He is deceiving us ! The miserable boy ! " cried Mile. 
 Armande, her heart swelling as the blood surged back to it in 
 heavy throbs. 
 
 " Let us each say mea culpa,* mademoiselle," the old lawyer 
 said stoutly ; " we have always allowed him to have his own 
 way ; he needed stern guidance ; he could not have it from 
 you with your inexperience of life ; nor from me, for he would 
 not listen to me. He has had no mother.'! 
 
 " Fate sometimes deals terribly with a noble house in de- 
 cay," said Mile. Armande, with tears in her eyes. 
 
 The marquis came up as she spoke. He had been walking 
 up and down the garden while he read the letter sent by his 
 son after his return. Victurnien gave his itinerary from an 
 aristocrat's point of view ; telling how he had been welcomed 
 by the greatest Italian families of Genoa, Turin, Milan, Flor- 
 ence, Venice, Rome, and Naples. This flattering reception 
 he owed to his name, he said, and partly, perhaps, to the 
 duchess as well. In short, he had made his appearance mag- 
 nificently and as befitted a d'Esgrignon. 
 
 " Have you been at your old tricks, Chesnel?" asked the 
 marquis. 
 
 Mile. Armande made Chesnel an eager sign, dreadful to 
 see. They understood each other. The poor father, the 
 flower of feudal honor, must die with all his illusions. A 
 compact of silence and devotion was ratified between the two 
 noble hearts by a simple inclination of the head. 
 
 "Ah! Chesnel, it was not exactly in this way that the 
 d'Esgrignons went into Italy at the end of the fourteenth 
 century, when Marshal Trivulzio, in the service of the King 
 of France, served under a d'Esgrignon, who had a Bayard too 
 under his orders. Other times, other pleasures. And, for 
 that matter, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse is at least the equal 
 of a Marchesa di Spinola." 
 
 And, on the strength of his genealogical tree, the old man 
 * I am the culprit.
 
 232 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 swung himself off with a coxcomb's air, as if he himself had 
 once made a conquest of the Marchesa di Spinola, and still 
 possessed the duchess of to-day. 
 
 The two companions in unhappiness were left together on 
 the garden bench, with the same thought for a bond of union. 
 They sat for a long time, saying little save vague, unmeaning 
 words, watching the father walk away in his happiness, ges- 
 ticulating as if he were talking to himself. 
 
 "What will become of him now?" Mile. Armande asked 
 after a while. 
 
 " Du Croisier has sent instructions to the Kellers; he is 
 not to be allowed to draw any more without authorization." 
 
 "And there are debts?" continued Mile. Armande. 
 
 "I am afraid so." 
 
 " If he is left without resources, what will he do ? " 
 
 " I dare not answer that question to myself." 
 
 " But he must be drawn out of that life, he must come back 
 to us, or he will have nothing left." 
 
 "And nothing else left to him," Chesnel said gloomily. 
 But Mile. Armande as yet did not and could not understand 
 the full force of those words. 
 
 " Is there any hope of getting him away from that woman, 
 that duchess? Perhaps she leads him on." 
 
 " He would not stick at a crime to be with her," said 
 Chesnel, trying to pave the way to an intolerable thought by 
 others less intolerable. 
 
 "Crime," repeated Mile. Armande. "Oh, Chesnel, no 
 one but you would think of such a thing ! " she added, with 
 a withering look ; before such a look from a woman's eyes 
 no mortal can stand. " There is but one crime that a noble 
 can commit the crime of high treason ; and when he is be- 
 headed, the block is covered with a black cloth, as it is for 
 kings." 
 
 "The times have changed very much," said Chesnel, 
 shaking his head. Victurnien had thinned his last thin, white
 
 THE JEALOUSIES Of A COUNTRY TOWN. 233 
 
 hairs. " Our Martyr-King did not die like the English King 
 Charles." 
 
 That thought soothed Mile. Armande's splendid indignation ; 
 a shudder ran through her ; but still she did not realize what 
 Chesnel meant. 
 
 "To-morrow we will decide what we must do," she said; 
 " it needs thought. At the worst, we have our lands." 
 
 "Yes," said Chesnel. "You and Monsieur le Marquis 
 own the estate conjointly ; but the larger part of it is yours. 
 You can raise money upon it without saying a word to him." 
 
 The players at whist, reversis, boston, and backgammon 
 noticed that evening that Mile. Armande's features, usually so 
 serene and pure, showed signs of agitation. 
 
 "That poor heroic child!" said the old Marquise de 
 Casteran, "she must be suffering still. A woman never 
 knows what her sacrifices to her family may cost her." 
 
 Next day it was arranged with Chesnel that Mile. Armande 
 should go to Paris to snatch her nephew from perdition. If 
 any one could carry off Victurnien, was it not the woman 
 whose mother's heart yearned over him ? Mile. Armande 
 made up her mind that she would go to the Duchesse de 
 Maufrigneuse and tell her all. Still, some sort of pretext was 
 necessary to explain the journey to the marquis and the whole 
 town. At some cost to her maidenly delicacy, Mile. Armande 
 allowed it to be thought that she was suffering from a com- 
 plaint which called for a consultation of skilled and celebrated 
 physicians. Goodness knows whether the town talked of this 
 or not ! But Mile. Armande saw that something far more to 
 her than her own reputation was at stake. She set out. 
 Chesnel brought her his last bag of louis ; she took it, without 
 paying any attention to it, as she took her white capuchine 
 and thread mittens. 
 
 " Generous girl ! What grace ! " he said, as he put her 
 into the carriage with her maid, a woman who looked like a 
 gray sister.
 
 234 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Du Croisier had thought out his revenge, as provincials 
 think out everything. For studying out a question in all its 
 bearings, there are no people in this world like savages, peas- 
 ants, and provincials ; and this is how, when they proceed 
 from thought to action, you find every contingency provided 
 for from beginning to end. Diplomatists are children com- 
 pared with these classes of mammals ; they have time before 
 them, an element which is lacking to those people who are 
 obliged to think about a great many things, to superintend 
 the progress of all kinds of schemes, to look forward for all 
 sorts of contingencies in the wider interests of human affairs. 
 Had du Croisier sounded poor Victurnien's nature so well 
 that he foresaw how easily the youmg count would lend him- 
 self to his schemes of revenge ? Or was he merely profiting by 
 an opportunity for which he had been on the watch for years? 
 One circumstance there was, to be sure, in his manner of pre- 
 paring his stroke, which shows a certain skill. Who was it 
 that gave du Croisier warning of the moment? Was it the 
 Kellers? Or could it have been President du Ronceret's son, 
 then finishing his law studies in Paris ? 
 
 Du Croisier wrote to Victurnien, telling him that the Kellers 
 had been instructed to advance no more money ; and that 
 letter was timed to arrive just as the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse 
 was in the utmost perplexity, and the Comte d'Esgrignon 
 consumed by the sense of a poverty as dreadful as it was cun- 
 ningly hidden. The wretched young man was exerting all 
 his ingenuity to seem as if he were wealthy ! 
 
 Now in the letter which informed the victim that in future 
 the Kellers would make no further advances without security, 
 there was a tolerably wide space left between the forms of an 
 exaggerated respect and the signature. It was quite easy to 
 tear off the best part of the letter and convert it into a bill of 
 exchange for any amount. The diabolical missive had even 
 been inclosed in an envelope, so that the other side of the 
 sheet was blank. When it arrived, Victurnien was writhing
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 235 
 
 in the lowest depths of despair. After two years of the most 
 prosperous, sensual, thoughtless, and luxurious life, he found 
 himself face to face with the most inexorable poverty ; it was 
 an absolute impossibility to procure money. There had been 
 some throes of crisis before the journey came to an end. 
 With the duchess' help he had managed to extort various sums 
 from bankers; but it had been with the greatest difficulty, 
 and, moreover, those very amounts were about to start up 
 again before him as overdue bills of exchange in all their rigor, 
 with a stern summons to pay from the Bank of France and 
 the commercial court. All through the enjoyments of those 
 last weeks the unhappy boy had felt the point of the com- 
 mander's sword; at every supper-party he heard, like Don 
 Juan, the heavy tread of the statue outside upon the stairs. 
 He felt an unaccountable creeping of the flesh, a warning that 
 the sirocco of debt is nigh at hand. He reckoned on chance. 
 For five years he had never turned up a blank in the lottery ; 
 his purse had always been replenished. After Chesnel had 
 come du Croisier (he told himself) ; after du Crosier surely 
 another gold mine would pour out its wealth. And beside, 
 he was winning great sums at play ; his luck at play had saved 
 him several unpleasant steps already ; and often a wild hope 
 sent him to the Salon des Etrangers only to lose his winnings 
 afterward at whist at the club. His life for the past two 
 months had been like the immortal finale of Mozart's " Don 
 Giovanni ; " and of a truth, if a young man has come to such 
 a plight as Victurnien's, that finale is enough to make him 
 shudder. Can anything better prove the enormous power of 
 music than that sublime rendering of the disorder and con- 
 fusion arising out of a life wholly given up to sensual indul- 
 gence ? that fearful picture of a deliberate effort to shut out 
 the thought of debts and duels, deceit and evil luck ? In that 
 music Mozart disputes the palm with Moliere. The terrific 
 finale, with its glow, its power, its despair and laughter, its 
 grisly spectres and elfish women, centres about the prodigal's
 
 236 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 last effort made in the after-supper heat of wine, the frantic 
 struggle which ends the drama. Victurnien was living through 
 this infernal poem, and alone. He saw visions of himself a 
 friendless, solitary outcast, reading the words carved on the 
 stone, the last words on the last page of the book that had 
 held him spellbound THE END ! 
 
 Yes; for him all would be at an end, and that soon. Al- 
 ready he saw the cold, ironical eyes which his associates would 
 turn upon him, and their amusement over his downfall. Some 
 of them he knew were playing high on that gambling-table 
 kept open all day long at the Bourse, or in private houses, at 
 the clubs, and anywhere and everywhere in Paris ; but not 
 one of these men could spare a banknote to save an intimate. 
 There was no help for it Chesnel must be ruined. He had 
 devoured Chesnel' s living. 
 
 He sat with the duchess in their box at the Italiens, the whole 
 house envying them their happiness ; and while he smiled at her, 
 all the Furies were tearing at his heart. Indeed, to give some 
 idea of the depths of doubt, despair, and incredulity in which 
 the boy was groveling; he who so clung to life the life 
 which the angel had made so fair who so loved it that he 
 would have stooped to baseness merely to live ; he, the pleas- 
 ure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d'Esgrignon, had even 
 taken out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide. He 
 who would never have brooked the appearance of an insult 
 was abusing himself in language which no man is likely to 
 hear except from himself. 
 
 He left du Croisier's letter laying open on the bed. 
 Josephin had brought it in at nine o'clock. Victurnien's 
 furniture had been seized, but he slept none the less. After 
 he came back from the opera, he and the duchess had gone to 
 a voluptuous retreat, where they often spent a few hours to- 
 gether after the most brilliant court balls and evening parties 
 and gayeties. Appearances were very cleverly saved. Their 
 love-nest was a garret like any other to all appearance ; Mme,
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 237 
 
 de Maufrigneuse was obliged to bow her head with its court 
 feathers or the wreath of flowers to enter the doorway ; but 
 within all the peris of the East had made the chamber fair. 
 And now that the count was on the brink of ruin, he had 
 longed to bid farewell to the dainty nest, which he had built 
 to realize a day-dream worthy of his angel. Presently adver- 
 sity would break the enchanted eggs; there would be no 
 brood of white doves, no brilliant tropical birds, no more of 
 the thousand bright-winged fancies which hover above our 
 heads even to the last days of our lives. Alas ! alas ! jn three 
 days he must be gone ; his bills had fallen into the hands of 
 the money-lenders, the law proceedings had reached the last 
 stage. 
 
 An evil thought crossed his brain. He would fly with the 
 duchess ; they would live in some undiscovered nook in the 
 wilds of North or South America ; but he would fly with a 
 fortune, and leave his creditors to confront their bills. To 
 carry out the plan, he had only to cut off the lower portion 
 of that letter with du Croisier's signature, and to fill in the 
 figures to turn it into a bill, and present it to the Kellers. 
 There was a dreadful struggle with temptation ; tears were 
 shed, but the honor of the family triumphed, subject to one 
 condition. Victurnien wanted to be sure of his beautiful 
 Diane ; he would do nothing unless she should consent to 
 their flight. So he went to the duchess in the Rue Faubourg 
 Saint -Honors, and found her in coquettish morning dress, 
 which cost as much in thought as in money, a fit dress in 
 which to begin to play the part of Angel at eleven o'clock in 
 the morning. 
 
 Mme. de Maufrigneuse was somewhat pensive. Cares of a 
 similar kind were gnawing her mind; but she took them 
 gallantly. Of all the various feminine organizations classified 
 by physiologists, there is one that has something indescribably 
 terrible about it. Such women combine strength of soul and 
 clear insight, with a faculty for prompt decision, and a reck-
 
 238 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 lessness, or rather resolution, in a crisis which would shake a 
 man's nerves. And these powers lie out of sight beneath an 
 appearance of the most graceful helplessness. Such women 
 only among womankind afford examples of a phenomenon which 
 Buffon recognized in men alone, to wit, the union, or rather 
 the disunion, of two different natures in one human being. 
 Other women are wholly women ; wholly tender, wholly de- 
 voted, wholly mothers, completely null and completely tire- 
 some; nerves and brain and blood are all in harmony; 
 but the duchess, and others like her, are capable of rising 
 to the highest heights of feeling, or of showing the most 
 selfish insensibility. It is one of the glories of Moliere that 
 he has given us a wonderful portrait of such a woman, from 
 one point of view only, in that greatest of his full-length 
 figures Celimene; Celimene is the typical aristocratic 
 woman, as Figaro, the second edition of Panurge, represents 
 the people. 
 
 So the duchess, being overwhelmed with debt, laid it upon 
 herself to give no more than a moment's thought to the ava- 
 lanche of cares, and to take her resolution once and for all ; 
 Napoleon could take up or lay down the burden of his 
 thoughts in precisely the same way. The duchess possessed 
 the faculty of standing aloof from herself; she could look on 
 as a spectator at the crash when it came, instead of submitting 
 to be buried beneath. This was certainly great, but repulsive 
 in a woman. When she awoke in the morning she collected 
 her thoughts ; and by the time she had begun to dress she had 
 looked at the danger in its fullest extent and faced the possi- 
 bilities of terrific downfall. She pondered. Should she take 
 refuge in a foreign country? Or should she go to the King 
 and declare her debts to him? Or again, should she fascinate 
 a du Tillet or a Nucingen, and gamble on the Stock Exchange 
 to pay her creditors ? The city man would find the money ; 
 he would be intelligent enough to bring her nothing but the 
 profits, without so much as mentioning the losses, a piece of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 239 
 
 delicacy which would gloss all over. The catastrophe, and 
 these various ways of averting it, had all been reviewed quite 
 coolly, calmly, and without trepidation. 
 
 As a naturalist takes up some king of butterflies and fastens 
 him down on cotton-wool with a pin, so Mme. de Maufrig- 
 neuse had plucked love out of her heart while she pondered 
 the necessity of the moment, and was quite ready to replace 
 the beautiful passion on its immaculate setting so soon as her 
 duchess' coronet was safe. She knew none of the hesitation 
 which Cardinal Richelieu hid from all the world but Pere 
 Joseph ; none of the doubts that Napoleon kept at first en- 
 tirely to himself. "Either the one or the other," she told 
 herself. 
 
 She was sitting by the fire, giving orders for her toilet for 
 a drive in the Bois if the weather should be fine, when Vic- 
 turnien came in. 
 
 The Comte d'Esgrignon, with all his stifled capacity, his so 
 keen intellect, was in exactly the state which might have been 
 looked for in the woman. His heart was beating violently, 
 the perspiration broke out over him as he stood in his dandy's 
 trappings ; he was afraid as yet to lay a hand on the corner- 
 stone which upheld the pyramid of his life with Diane. So 
 much it cost him to know the truth. The cleverest men are 
 fain to deceive themselves on one or two points if the truth 
 once known is likely to humiliate them in their own eyes, 
 and damage themselves with themselves. Victurnien forced 
 his own irresolution into the field by committing himself. 
 
 "What is the matter with you?" Diane de Maufrigneuse 
 had said at once, at the sight of her beloved Victurnien's 
 face. 
 
 " Why, dear Diane, I am in such utter perplexity ; a man 
 gone to the bottom and at his last gasp is happy in compari- 
 son." 
 
 " Pshaw ! it is nothing," said she ; " you are a child. Let 
 us see now; tell me about it."
 
 240 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "I am hopelessly in debt. I have come to the end of my 
 tether." 
 
 " Is that all ? " said she, smiling at him. " Money matters 
 can always be arranged somehow or other ; nothing is irre- 
 trievable except disasters in love." 
 
 Victurnien's mind being set at rest by this swift compre- 
 hension of his position, he unrolled the bright-colored web of 
 his life for the last two years and a half; but it was the seamy 
 side of it which he displayed with something of genius, and 
 still more of wit, to his Diane. He told his tale with the 
 inspiration of the moment, which fails no one in great crises ; 
 he had sufficient artistic skill to set it off by a varnish of deli- 
 cate scorn for men and things. It was an aristocrat who 
 spoke. And the duchess listened as she could listen. 
 
 One knee was raised, for she sat with her foot on a stool. 
 She rested her elbow on her knee and leaned her face on her 
 hand so that her fingers closed daintily over her shapely chin. 
 Her eyes never left his ; but thoughts by myriads flitted under 
 the blue surface, like gleams of stormy light between two 
 clouds. Her forehead was calm, her mouth gravely intent; 
 grave with love ; her lips were knotted fast by Victurnien's 
 lips. To have her listening thus was to believe that a divine 
 love flowed from her heart. Wherefore, when the count had 
 proposed flight to this soul, so closely knit to his own, he 
 could not help crying: 
 
 " You are an angel ! " 
 
 The fair Maufrigneuse made silent answer ; but she had 
 not spoken as yet. 
 
 "Good, very good," she said at last. (She had not given 
 herself up to the love expressed in her face ; her mind had 
 b.een entirely absorbed by deep-laid schemes which she kept 
 to herself.) "But that is not the question, dear." (The 
 " angel" was only " that " by this time.) "Let us think of 
 your affairs. Yes, we will go, and the sooner the better. 
 Arrange it all ; I will follow you. It is glorious to leave Paris
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 241 
 
 and the world behind. I will set about ray preparations in 
 such a way that no one can suspect anything." 
 
 / will follow you ! Just so Mile. Mars might have spoken 
 those words to send a thrill through two thousand listening 
 men and women. When a Duchesse de Maufrigneuse offers, 
 in such words, to make such a sacrifice to love, she has paid 
 her debt. How should Victurnien speak of sordid details after 
 that ? He could so much the better hide his schemes, because 
 Diane was particularly careful not to inquire into them. She 
 was now, and always, as De Marsay said, an invited guest at 
 a banquet wreathed with roses, a banquet which mankind, as 
 in duty bound, made ready for her. 
 
 Victurnien would not go till the promise had been sealed. 
 He must draw courage from his happiness before he could 
 bring himself to do a deed on which, as he inwardly told him- 
 self, people would be certain to put a bad construction. Still 
 (and this was the thought that decided him) he counted on 
 his aunt and father to hush up the affair ; he even counted on 
 Chesnel. Chesnel would think of one more compromise. 
 Beside, "this business," as he called it in his thoughts, was 
 the only way of raising money on the family estate. With 
 three hundred thousand francs, he and Diane would lead a 
 happy life hidden in some palace in Venice ; and there they 
 would forget the world. They went through their romance in 
 advance. 
 
 Next day Victurnien made out a bill for three hundred 
 thousand francs, and took it to the Kellers. The Kellers 
 advanced the money, for du Croisier happened to have a 
 balance at the time ; but they wrote to let him know that he 
 must not draw again on them without giving them notice. 
 Du Croisier, much astonished, asked for a statement of ac- 
 counts. It was sent. Everything was explained. The day 
 of his vengeance had arrived. 
 
 When Victurnien had drawn "his" money, he took it to 
 16
 
 242 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Mme. de Maufrigneuse. She locked up the banknotes in 
 her desk, and proposed to bid the world farewell by going to 
 the opera to see it for the last time. Victurnien was thoughtful, 
 absent, and uneasy. He was beginning to reflect. He thought 
 that his seat in the duchess' box might cost him dear; that 
 perhaps, when he had put the three hundred thousand francs 
 in safety, it would be better to travel post, to fall at Chesnel's 
 feet, and tell him all. But, before they left the opera-house, 
 the duchess, in spite of herself, gave Victurnien an adorable 
 glance, her eyes were shining with the desire to go back once 
 more to bid farewell to the nest which she loved so much. 
 And boy that he was, he lost a night. 
 
 The next day, at three o'clock, he was back again at the 
 Hotel de Maufrigneuse ; he had come to take the duchess' 
 orders for that night's escape. And, " Why should we go? " 
 asked she; "I have thought it all out. The Vicomtesse de 
 Beauseant and the Duchesse de Langeais disappeared. If I go 
 too, it will be something quite commonplace. We will brave 
 the storm. It will be a far finer thing to do. I am sure of 
 success." Victurnien's eyes dazzled; he felt as if his skin 
 were dissolving and the blood oozing out all over him. 
 
 "What is the matter with you?" cried the fair Diane, 
 noticing a hesitation which a woman never forgives. Your 
 truly adroit lover will hasten to agree with any fancy that 
 Woman may take into her head, and suggest reasons for doing 
 otherwise, while leaving her free exercise of her right to 
 change her mind, her intentions, and sentiments generally as 
 often as she pleases. Victurnien was angry for the first time, 
 angry with the wrath of a weak man of poetic temperament; 
 it was a storm of rain and lightning flashes, but no thunder 
 followed. The angel on whose faith he had risked more than 
 his life, the honor of his ancient house, was being very roughly 
 handled. 
 
 "So," said she, "we have come to this after eighteen 
 months of tenderness ! You are unkind, very unkind. Go
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 243 
 
 away ! I do not want to see you again. I thought that you 
 loved me. You do not." 
 
 "/ do not love you?" repeated he, thunderstruck by the 
 reproach. 
 
 " No, monsieur." 
 
 "And yet " he cried. "Ah ! if you but knew what I 
 
 have just done for your sake ! " 
 
 "And how have you done so much for me, monsieur? As 
 if a man ought not to do anything for a woman that has done 
 so much for him." 
 
 "You are not worthy to know it! " Victurnien cried in a 
 passion of anger. 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 After that sublime " Oh ! " Diane bowed her head on her 
 hand and sat, still, cold, and implacable as angels naturally 
 may be expected to do, seeing that they share none of the 
 passions of humanity. At the sight of the woman he loved 
 in this terrible attitude^ Victurnien forgot his danger. Had 
 he not just that moment wronged the most angelic creature 
 on earth ? He longed for forgiveness, he threw himself before 
 her, he kissed her feet, he pleaded, he wept. Two whole 
 hours the unhappy young man spent in all kinds of follies, 
 only to meet the same cold face, while the great silent tears, 
 dropping one by one, were dried as soon -as they fell lest the 
 unworthy lover should try to wipe them away. The duchess, 
 was acting a great agony, one of those hours which stamp the 
 woman who passes through them as something august and 
 sacred. 
 
 Two more hours went by. By this time the count had 
 gained possession of Diane's hand ; it felt cold and spiritless. 
 The beautiful hand, with all the treasures in its grasp, might 
 have been supple wood ; there was nothing of Diane in it; he 
 had taken it, it had not been given to him. As for Victurnien, 
 the spirit had ebbed out of his frame, he had ceased to think. 
 He would not have seen the sun in heaven. What was to be
 
 244 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 done ? What course should he take ? What resolution should 
 he make ? The man who can keep his head in such circum- 
 stances must be made of the same stuff as the convict who 
 spent the night in robbing the Bibliotheque Royale of its gold 
 medals, and repaired to his honest brother in the morning 
 with a request to melt down the plunder. " What is to be 
 done?" cried the brother. " Make me some coffee," replied 
 the thief. Victurnien sank into a bewildered stupor, darkness 
 settled down over his brain. Visions of past rapture flitted 
 across the misty gloom like the figures that Raphael painted 
 against a black background ; to these he must bid farewell. 
 Inexorable and disdainful, the duchess played with the tip of 
 her scarf. She looked in irritation at Victurnien from time 
 to time ; she coquetted with memories, she spoke to her lover 
 of his rivals as if anger had finally decided her to prefer one 
 of them to a man who could so change in one moment after 
 twenty-eight months of love. 
 
 "Ah ! that charming young Felix de Vandenesse, so faith- 
 ful as he was to Madame de Mortsauf, would never have per- 
 mitted himself such a scene ! He can love, can de Vande- 
 nesse ! De Marsay, that terrible de Marsay, such a tiger as 
 every one thought him, was rough with other men ; but, like 
 all strong men, he kept his gentleness for women. Montriveau 
 trampled the Duchesse de Langeais under foot, as Othello 
 killed Desdemona, in a burst of fury which at any rate proved 
 the extravagance of his love. It was not like a paltry squabble. 
 There was rapture in being so crushed. Little, fair-haired, 
 slim, and slender men loved to torment women; they could 
 only reign over poor, weak creatures ; it pleased them to have 
 some ground for believing that they were men. The tyranny 
 of love was their one chance of asserting their power. She 
 did not know why she had put herself at the mercy of fair 
 hair. Such men as de Marsay, Montriveau, and Vandenesse, 
 dark-haired and well grown, had a ray of sunlight in their 
 eyes."
 
 THE JEA L O USIES OF A CO UNTR Y TO WN. 245 
 
 It was a storm of epigrams. Her speeches, like bullets, 
 came hissing past his ears. Every word that Diane hurled at 
 him was triple-barbed ; she humiliated, stung, and wounded 
 him with an art that was all her own, as half a score of savages 
 can torture an enemy bound to a stake. 
 
 "You are mad ! " he cried at last, at the end of his pa- 
 tience, and out he went in God knows what mood. He drove 
 as if he had never handled the reins before, locked his wheels 
 in the wheels of other vehicles, collided with the curb-stone 
 in the Place Louis-Quinze, went he knew not whither. The 
 horse, left to its own devices, made a bolt for the stable along 
 the Quai d'Orsay ; but as he turned into the Rue de 1'Univer- 
 site, Josephin appeared to stop the runaway. 
 
 " You cannot go home, sir," the old man said, with a scared 
 look on his honest face; " they have come with a warrant to 
 arrest you." 
 
 Victurnien thought that he was to be arrested on the crim- 
 inal charge, albeit there had not been time for the public 
 prosecutor to receive his instructions. He had forgotten the 
 matter of the bills of exchange, which had been stirred up 
 again for some days past in the form of orders to pay, brought 
 by the officers of the court with accompaniments in the shape 
 of bailiffs, men in possession, magistrates, commissaries, police- 
 men, and other representatives of social order. Like most 
 guilty creatures, Victurnien had forgotten everything but his 
 crime. 
 
 "It is all over with me," he cried. 
 
 "No, Monsieur le Comte, drive as fast as you can to the 
 Hotel du Bon la Fontaine, in the Rue de Crenelle. Made- 
 moiselle Armande is waiting there for ) r ou, the horses have 
 been put in, she will take you with her." 
 
 Victurnien, in his trouble, caught like a drowning man at 
 the branch that came to his hand ; he rushed off to the inn, 
 reached the place, and flung his arms about his aunt. Mile. 
 Armande cried as if her heart would break ; any one might
 
 246 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 have thought that she had a share in her nephew's guilt. They 
 stepped into the carriage. A few minutes later they were on 
 the road to Brest, and Paris lay behind them. Victurnien 
 uttered not a sound ; he was paralyzed. And when aunt and 
 nephew began to speak, they talked at cross purposes ; Vic- 
 turnien, still laboring under the unlucky misapprehension 
 which flung him into Mile. Armande's arms, was thinking of 
 his forgery ; his aunt had the debts and the bills on her 
 mind. 
 
 "You know all, aunt," he had said. 
 
 " Poor boy, yes, but we are here. I am not going to scold 
 you just yet. Take heart." 
 
 " I must hide somewhere." 
 
 " Perhaps Yes, it is a very good idea." 
 
 "Perhaps I might get into Chesnel's house without being 
 seen if we timed ourselves to arrive in the middle of the 
 night?" 
 
 "That will be best. We shall be better able to hide this 
 from my brother. Poor angel! how unhappy he is!" said 
 she, petting the unworthy child. 
 
 "Ah! now I begin to know what dishonor means; it has 
 chilled my love." 
 
 "Unhappy boy; what bliss and what misery!" And 
 Mile. Armande drew his fevered face to her breast and kissed 
 his forehead, cold and damp though it was, as the holy women 
 might have kissed the brow of the dead Christ when they laid 
 Him in His grave-clothes. Following out the excellent 
 scheme suggested by the prodigal son, he was brought by 
 night to the quiet house in the Rue du Bercail ; but chance 
 ordered it that by so doing he ran straight into the wolf's 
 jaws, as the saying goes. That evening Chesnel had been 
 making arrangements to sell his connection to M. Lepressoir's 
 head-clerk. M. Lepressoir was the notary employed by the 
 Liberals, just as Chesnel's practice lay among the aristocratic 
 families. The young fellow's relatives were rich enough to
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 247 
 
 pay Chesnel the considerable sum of a hundred thousand 
 francs in cash. 
 
 Chesnel was rubbing his hands. "A hundred thousand 
 francs will go a long way in buying up debts," he thought. 
 " The young man is paying a high rate of interest on his loans. 
 We will lock him up down here. I will go yonder myself 
 and bring those curs to terms." 
 
 Chesnel, honest Chesnel, upright, worthy Chesnel, called 
 his darling Comte Victurnien's creditors ''curs." 
 
 Meanwhile his successor was making his way along the Rue 
 du Bercail just as Mile. Armande's traveling carriage turned 
 into it. Any young man might be expected to feel some 
 curiosity if he saw a traveling carriage stop at a notary's door 
 in such a town and at such an hour of the night ; the young 
 man in question was sufficiently inquisitive to stand in a door- 
 way and watch. He saw Mile. Armande alight. 
 
 "Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon at this time of night ! " said 
 he to himself. "What can be going forward at the d'Es- 
 grignons?" 
 
 At the sight of mademoiselle, Chesnel opened the door 
 circumspectly and set down the light which he was carrying ; 
 but when he looked out and saw Victurnien, Mile. Armande's 
 first whispered word made the whole thing plain to him. He 
 looked up and down the street ; it seemed quite deserted ; he 
 beckoned, and the young count sprang out of the carriage and 
 entered the courtyard. All was lost. Chesnel's successor 
 had discovered Victurnien's hiding-place. 
 
 Victurnien was hurried into the house and installed in a 
 room beyond Chesnel's private office. No one could enter it 
 except across the old man's dead body. 
 
 "Ah! Monsieur le Comte!" exclaimed Chesnel, notary 
 no longer. 
 
 "Yes, monsieur," the count answered, understanding his 
 old friend's exclamation. "I did not listen to you; and now 
 I. have fallen into the depths, and I must perish."
 
 248 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN: 
 
 "No, no," the good man answered, looking triumphantly 
 from Mile. Armande to the count. " I have sold my con- 
 nection. I have been working for a very long time now, and 
 am thinking of retiring. By noon to-morrow I shall have a 
 hundred thousand francs; many things can be settled with 
 that. Mademoiselle, you are tired," he added; "go back 
 to the carriage and go home and sleep. Business to-morrow." 
 
 " Is he safe ? " returned she, looking at Victurnien. 
 
 "Yes," 
 
 She kissed her nephew ; a few tears fell on his forehead. 
 Then she went. 
 
 " My good Chesnel," said the count, when they began to 
 talk of business, " what are your hundred thousand francs in 
 such a position as mine ? You do not know the full extent 
 of my troubles, I think." 
 
 Victurnien explained the situation. Chesnel was thunder- 
 struck. But for the strength of his devotion, he would have 
 succumbed to this blow. Tears streamed from the eyes that 
 might well have had no tears left to shed. For a few moments 
 he was a child again, for a few moments he was bereft of his 
 senses ; he stood like a man who should find his own house 
 on fire, and through a window see the cradle ablaze and 
 hear the hiss of the flames on his children's curls. He rose 
 to his full height il se dressa en pied, as Amyot would have 
 said ; he seemed to grow taller ; he raised his withered hands 
 and wrung them despairingly and wildly. 
 
 " If only your father may die and never know this, young 
 man ! To be a forger is enough ; a parricide you must not 
 be. Fly, you say? No. They would condemn you for con- 
 tempt of court ! Oh, wretched boy ! Why did you not forge 
 my signature? /would have paid. I should not have taken 
 the bill to the public prosecutor. Now I can do nothing. 
 
 You have brought me to a stand in the lowest pit in hell ! 
 
 Du Croisier ! What will come of it ? What is to be done ? 
 If you had killed a man, there might be some help for it.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN, 249 
 
 But forgery -forgery.' And time the time is flying," he 
 went on, shaking his fist toward the old clock. " You will 
 want a sham passport now. One crime leads to another. 
 First," he added, after a pause, " first of all we must save the 
 house of d'Esgrignon." 
 
 " But the money is still in Madame de Maufrigneuse's 
 keeping," exclaimed Victurnien. 
 
 "Ah!" exclaimed Chesnel. "Well, there is some hope 
 left a faint hope. Could we soften du Croisier, I wonder, 
 or buy him over ? He shall have all the lands if he likes. I 
 will go to him; I will wake him and offer him all we have. 
 Beside, it was not you who forged that bill : it was I. I will 
 go to jail ; I am too old for the hulks, they can only put me 
 in prison." 
 
 "But the body of the bill is in my handwriting," objected 
 Victurnien, without a sign of surprise at this reckless devotion. 
 
 " Idiot ! that is, pardon, Monsieur le Comte. Josephin 
 
 should have been made to write it," the old notary cried 
 wrathfully. " He is a good creature ; he would have taken it 
 all on his shoulders. But there is an end of it ; the world 
 is falling to pieces," the old man continued, sinking ex- 
 hausted into a chair. " Du Croisier is a tiger; we must be 
 careful not to rouse him. What time is it ? Where is the 
 draft? If it is at Paris, it might be bought back from the 
 Kellers ; they might accommodate us. Ah ! but there are 
 dangers on all sides ; a single false step means ruin. Money 
 is wanted in any case. But, there ! nobody knows you are 
 here, you must live buried away in the cellar if needs must. 
 I will go at once to Paris as fast as I can ; I can hear the mail- 
 coach from Brest." 
 
 In a moment the old man recovered the faculties of his 
 youth his agility and vigor. He packed up clothes for the 
 journey, took money, brought a six-pound loaf to the little 
 room beyond the office, and turned the. key on his child by 
 adoption.
 
 250 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 " Not a sound in here," he said ; " no light at night ; and 
 stop here till I come back, or you will go to the hulks. Do 
 you understand, Monsieur le Comte ? Yes, to the hulks ! if 
 anybody in a town like this knows that you are here." 
 
 With that Chesnel went out, first telling his housekeeper 
 to give out that he was ill, to allow no one to come into the 
 house, to send everybody away, and to postpone business of 
 every kind for three days. He wheedled the manager of the 
 coach-office, made up a tale for his benefit he had the makings 
 of an ingenious novelist in him and obtained a promise that 
 if there should be a place, he should have it, passport or no 
 passport, as well as a further promise to keep the hurried 
 departure a secret. Luckily, the coach was empty when it 
 arrived. 
 
 In the middle of the following night Chesnel was set down 
 in Paris. At nine o'clock in the morning he waited on the 
 Kellers, and learned that the fatal draft had returned to du 
 Croisier three days since ; but while obtaining this information, 
 he in no way committed himself. Before he went away he 
 inquired whether the draft could be recovered if the amount 
 were refunded. Francois Keller's answer was to the effect 
 that the document was du Croisier's property, and that it was 
 entirely in his power to keep or return it. Then, in despera- 
 tion, the old man went to the duchess. 
 
 Mme. de Maufrigneuse was not at home to any visitor at 
 that hour. Chesnel, feeling that every moment was precious, 
 sat down in the hall, wrote a few lines, and succeeded in 
 sending them to the lady by dint of wheedling, fascinating, 
 bribing, and commanding the most insolent and inaccessible 
 servants in the world. The duchess was still in bed ; but, to 
 the great astonishment of her household, the old man in black 
 knee-breeches, ribbed stockings, and shoes with buckles to 
 tham was shown into her room. 
 
 "What is it, monsieur?" she asked, posing in her dis- 
 order. " What does he want of me, ungrateful that he is ? 'j
 
 "WHAT is IT, MONSIEUR?" SHE ASKED, POSING 
 
 IN HER DISORDER.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 251 
 
 "It is this, Madame la Duchesse," the good man ex- 
 claimed, "you have a hundred thousand crowns belonging 
 to us." 
 
 " Yes," began she. " What does it signify ? " 
 
 " The money was gained by a forgery, for which we are going 
 to the hulks, a forgery which we committed for love of you," 
 Chesnel said quickly. " How is it that you did not guess it, 
 so clever as you are? Instead of scolding the boy, you ought 
 to have had the truth out of him, and stopped him while there 
 was time, and saved him." 
 
 At the first words the duchess understood ; she felt ashamed 
 of her behavior to so impassioned a lover, and afraid beside 
 that she might be suspected of complicity. In her wish to 
 prove that she had not touched the money left in her keeping, 
 she lost all regard for appearances ; and beside, it did not 
 occur to her that a notary was a man. She flung off the 
 eider-down quilt, sprang to her desk (flitting past the lawyer 
 like an angel out of one of the vignettes which illustrate La- 
 martine's books), held out the notes, and went back in con- 
 fusion to bed. 
 
 " You are an angel, madame." (She was to be an angel 
 for all the world, it seemed.) "But this will not be the end 
 of it. I count upon your influence to save us." 
 
 "To save you! I will do it or die ! Love that will not 
 shrink from a crime must be love, indeed. Is there a woman 
 in the world for whom such a thing has been done? Poor 
 boy ! Come, do not lose time, dear Monsieur Chesnel ; and 
 count upon me as upon yourself." 
 
 "Madame la Duchesse! Madame la Duchesse!" It was 
 all that he could say, so overcome was he. He cried, he 
 could have danced ; but he was afraid of losing his senses, and 
 refrained. 
 
 "Between us, we will save him," she said, as he left the 
 room. 
 
 Chesnel went straight to Josephin. Josephin unlocked the
 
 252 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 young count's desk and writing-table. Very luckily, the 
 notary found letters which might be useful, letters from du 
 Croisier and the Kellers. Then he took a place in a diligence 
 which was just about to start; and, by dint of fees to the 
 postillions, the lumbering vehicle went as quickly as the 
 coach. His two fellow-passengers on the journey happened 
 to be in as great a hurry as he himself, and readily agreed to 
 take their meals in the carriage. Thus swept over the road, 
 the notary reached the Rue du Bercail, after three days of 
 absence, an hour before midnight. And yet he was too late. 
 He saw the gendarmes at the gate, crossed the threshold, and 
 met the young count in the courtyard. Victurnien had been 
 arrested. If Chesnel had had the power, he would, beyond a 
 doubt, have killed the officers and men ; as it was, he could 
 only fall on Victurnien's neck. 
 
 " If I cannot hush this matter up, you must kill yourself be- 
 fore the indictment is made out," he whispered. But Vic- 
 turnien had sunk into such stupor that he stared back uncom- 
 prehendingly. 
 
 "Kill' myself?" he repeated. 
 
 "Yes. If your courage should fail, my boy, count upon 
 me," said Chesnel, squeezing Victurnien's hand. 
 
 In spite of his anguish of mind and tottering limbs, he 
 stood firmly planted, to watch the son of his heart, the Comte 
 d'Esgrignon, go out of the courtyard between two gendarmes, 
 with the commissary, the justice of the peace, and the clerk 
 of the court ; and not until the figures had disappeared, and 
 the sound of footsteps had died away into silence, did he re- 
 cover his firmness and presence of mind. 
 
 "You will catch cold, sir," Brigitte remonstrated. 
 
 "The devil take you ! " cried her aroused and exasperated 
 master. 
 
 Never in the nine-and-twenty years that Brigitte had been 
 in his service had she heard such words from him ! Her 
 candle fell out of her hands ; but Chesnel neither heeded his
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 253 
 
 housekeeper's alarm nor heard her exclaim. He hurried off 
 toward the Val-Noble. 
 
 "He is out of his mind," said she; "after all, it is no 
 wonder. But where is he off to ? I cannot possibly go after 
 him. What will become of him? Suppose that he should 
 drown himself! " 
 
 And Brigitte went to waken the head-clerk and send him to 
 look along the river-bank ; the river had a gloomy reputation 
 just then, for there had lately been two cases of suicide one 
 a young man full of promise, and the other a girl, a victim of 
 seduction. Chesnel went straight to the Hotel du Croisier. 
 There lay his only hope. The law requires that a charge of 
 forgery must be brought by a private individual. It was still 
 possible to withdraw if du Croisier chose to admit that there 
 had been a misapprehension ; and Chesnel had hopes, even 
 then, of buying the man over. 
 
 M. and Mme. du Croisier had much more company than 
 usual that evening. Only a few persons were in the secret. 
 M. du Ronceret, president of the Tribunal ; M. Sauvager, 
 deputy public prosecutor; and M. du Coudrai, a registrar of 
 mortgages, who had lost his post by voting on the wrong side, 
 were the only persons who were supposed to know about it ; 
 but Mesdames du Ronceret and du Coudrai had told the news, 
 in strict confidence, to one or two intimate friends, so that it 
 had spread half over the semi-noble, semi-bourgeois assembly 
 at M. du Croisier's. Everybody felt the gravity of the situa- 
 tion, but no one ventured to speak of it openly ; and, more- 
 over, Mme. du Croisier's attachment to the upper sphere was 
 so well known that people scarcely dared to mention the dis- 
 aster which had befallen the d'Esgrignons or to ask for par- 
 ticulars. The persons most interested were waiting till good 
 Mme. du Croisier retired, for that lady always retreated to her 
 room at the same hour to perform her religious exercises as 
 far as possible out of her husband's sight. 
 
 Du Croisier's adherents, knowing the secret and the plans
 
 254 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 of the great commercial power, looked round when the lady 
 of the house disappeared; but there were still several persons 
 present whose opinions or interests marked them out as untrust- 
 worthy, so they continued to play. About half-past eleven 
 all had gone save intimates : M. Sauvager, M. Camusot, the 
 examining magistrate, and his wife, M. and Mme. du Ron- 
 ceret and their son Fabien, M. and Mme. du Coudrai, and 
 Joseph Blondet, the eldest son of an old judge ; ten persons 
 in all. 
 
 It is told of Talleyrand that one fatal day, three hours after 
 midnight, he suddenly interrupted a game of cards in the 
 Duchesse de Luynes' house by laying down his watch on the 
 table and asking the players whether the Prince de Conde had 
 any child but the Due d'Enghien. 
 
 " Why do you ask ? " returned Mme. de Luynes, " when you 
 know so well that he has not." 
 
 '"Because if the prince has no other son, the House of 
 Conde is now at an end." 
 
 There was a moment's pause, and they finished the game. 
 President du Ronceret now did something very similar. Per- 
 haps he had heard the anecdote ; perhaps, in political life, 
 little minds and great minds are apt to hit upon the same 
 expression. He looked at his watch, and interrupted the game 
 of boston with 
 
 "At this moment Monsieur le Comte d'Esgrignon is ar- 
 rested, and that house which has held its head so high is dis- 
 honored for ever." 
 
 " Then have you got hold of the boy? " du Coudrai cried 
 gleefully. 
 
 Every one in the room, with the exception of the president, 
 the deputy, and du Croisier, looked startled. 
 
 " He has just been arrested in Chesnel's house, where he 
 was hiding," said the deputy public prosecutor, with the air 
 of a capable but unappreciated public servant, who ought by 
 rights to be minister of police. M. Sauvager, the deputy, was
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 255 
 
 a thin, tall young man of five-and-twenty, with a lengthy 
 olive-hued countenance, black frizzled hair, and deep-set 
 eyes ; the wide, dark rings beneath them were completed by 
 the wrinkled purple eyelids above. With a nose like the 
 beak of some bird of prey, a pinched mouth, and cheeks worn 
 lean with study and hollowed by ambition, he was the very 
 type of a second-rate personage on the lookout for something 
 to turn up, and ready to do anything if so he might get on 
 in the world, while keeping within the limitations of the pos- 
 sible and the forms of law. His pompous expression was an 
 admirable indication of the time-serving eloquence to be ex- 
 pected of him. Chesnel's successor had discovered the young 
 count's hiding-place to him, and he took great credit to him- 
 self for his penetration. 
 
 The news seemed to come as a shock to the examining 
 magistrate, M. Camusot, who had granted the warrant of 
 arrest on Sauvager's application, with no idea that it was to 
 be executed so promptly. Camusot was short, fair, and fat 
 already, though he was only thirty years old or thereabout ; he 
 had the flabby, livid look peculiar to officials who live shut 
 up in their private study or in a court of justice ; and his little, 
 pale, yellow eyes were full of the suspicion which is often 
 mistaken for shrewdness. 
 
 Mme. Camusot looked at her spouse, as who should say: 
 "Was I not right?" 
 
 " Then the case will come on ? " was Camusot's comment. 
 
 "Could you doubt it?" asked du Coudrai. " Now they 
 have got the count, all is over." 
 
 "There is the jury," said Camusot. "In this case, Mon- 
 sieur le Prefet is sure to take care that, after the challenges 
 from the prosecution and the defense, the jury to a man will 
 be for an acquittal. My advice would be to come to a com- 
 promise," he added, turning to du Croisier. 
 
 "Compromise!" echoed the president; "why, he is in 
 the hands of justice."
 
 266 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "Acquitted or convicted, the Comte d'Esgrignon will be 
 dishonored all the same," put in Sauvager. 
 
 "I am bringing an action,"* said du Croisier. "I shall 
 have Dupin senior. We shall see how the d'Esgrignon family 
 will escape out of his clutches." 
 
 "The d'Esgrignons will defend the case and have counsel 
 from Paris; they will have Berryer," said Mme. Camusot. 
 " You will have a Roland for your Oliver." 
 
 Du Croisier, M. Sauvager, and the President du Ronceret 
 looked at Camusot, and one thought troubled their minds. 
 The lady's tone, the way in which she flung her proverb in 
 the faces of the eight conspirators against the house d'Es- 
 grignon, caused them inward perturbation, which they dis- 
 sembled as provincials can dissemble, by dint of lifelong 
 practice in the shifts of a monastic existence. Little Mme. 
 Camusot saw their change of countenance and subsequent 
 composure when they scented opposition on the part of the 
 examining magistrate. When her husband unveiled the 
 thoughts in the back of his own mind, she had tried to plumb 
 the depths of hate in du Croisier's adherents. She wanted to 
 find out how du Croisier had gained over this deputy public 
 prosecutor, who had acted so promptly and so directly in 
 opposition to the views of the central power. 
 
 "In any case," continued she, " if celebrated counsel come 
 down from Paris, there is a prospect of a very interesting 
 session in the Court of Assize ; but the matter will be snuffed 
 out between the Tribunal and the Court of Appeal. It is only 
 to be expected that the Government should do all that can be 
 done, below the surface, to save a young man who comes of a 
 great family, and has the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse for friend. 
 So I do not think that we shall have ' a sensation at Lan- 
 dernau.' " 
 
 * A trial for an offense of this kind in France is an action brought by a 
 private person (partie civile) to recover damages, and at the same time a 
 criminal prosecution conducted on behalf of the Government. TR.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 257 
 
 "How you go on, madame ! " the president said sternly. 
 " Can you suppose that the Court of First Instance will be 
 influenced by considerations which have nothing to do with 
 justice?" 
 
 "The event proves the contrary," she said meaningly, 
 looking full at Sauvager and the president, who glanced coldly 
 at her. 
 
 "Explain yourself, madame," said Sauvager. "You speak 
 as if we had not done our duty." 
 
 "Madame Camusot meant nothing," interposed her hus- 
 band. 
 
 "But has not Monsieur le President just said something 
 prejudicing a case which depends on the examination of the 
 prisoner? " said she. "And the evidence is still to be taken, 
 and the court has not given its decision ? " 
 
 "We are not at the law-courts," the deputy public prose- 
 cutor replied tartly; "and beside, we know all that." 
 
 " But the public prosecutor knows nothing at all about it 
 yet," returned she, with an ironical glance. " He will come 
 back from the Chamber of Deputies in all haste. You have 
 cut out his work for him, and he, no doubt, will speak for 
 himself." 
 
 The deputy prosecutor knitted his thick bushy brows. 
 Those interested read tardy scruples in his countenance. A 
 great silence followed, broken by no sound but the dealing 
 of the cards. M. and Mme. Camusot, sensible of a decided 
 chill in the atmosphere, took their departure to leave the con- 
 spirators to talk at their ease. 
 
 "Camusot," the lady began in the street, "you went too 
 far. Why lead those people to suspect that you will have no 
 part in their schemes? They will play you some ugly trick." 
 
 "What can they do? I am the only examining magis- 
 trate." 
 
 " Cannot they slander you in whispers, and procure your 
 dismissal?" 
 17
 
 258 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 At that very moment Chesnel ran up against the couple. 
 The old notary recognized the examining magistrate; and 
 with the lucidity which comes of an experience of business, 
 he saw that the fate of the d'Esgrignons lay in the hands of 
 the young man before him. 
 
 " Ah, sir ! " he exclaimed, "we shall soon need you badly. 
 Just a word with you. Your pardon, madame," he added, 
 as he drew Camusot aside. 
 
 Mme. Camusot, as a good conspirator, looked toward du 
 Croisier's house, ready to break up the conversation if any- 
 body appeared ; but she thought, and thought rightly, that 
 their enemies were busy discussing this unexpected turn 
 which she had given to the affair. Chesnel meanwhile drew 
 the magistrate into a dark corner under the wall, and lowered 
 his voice for his companion's ear. 
 
 "If, sir, you are for the house d'Esgrignon," he said, 
 " Madame la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Prince de Cadig- 
 nan, the Dues de Navarreins and de Lenoncourt, the keeper 
 of the seals, the chancellor, the King himself, will interest 
 themselves in you. I have just come from Paris ; I knew all 
 about this; I went post-haste to explain everything at Court. 
 We are counting on you, and I will keep your secret. If you 
 are hostile, I shall go back to Paris to-morrow and lodge a 
 complaint with the keeper of the seals that there is a suspicion 
 of corruption. Several functionaries were at du Croisier's 
 house to-night, and, no doubt, ate and drank there, contrary 
 to law; and beside, they are friends of his." 
 
 Chesnel would have brought the Almighty to intervene if 
 he had had the power. He did not wait for an answer ; he 
 left Camusot and fled like a deer toward du Croisier's house. 
 Camusot, meanwhile, bidden to reveal the notary's confi- 
 dences, was at once assailed with : " Was I not right, dear? " 
 a wifely formula used on all occasions, but rather more 
 vehemently when the fair speaker is in the wrong. By the 
 time they reached home Camusot had admitted the superiority
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 259 
 
 of his partner in life, and appreciated his good fortune in 
 belonging to her ; which confession, doubtless, was the prelude 
 of a blissful night. 
 
 Chesnel met his foes in a body as they left du Croisier's 
 house, and began to fear that du Croisier had gone to bed. 
 In his position he was compelled to act quickly, and any 
 delay was a misfortune. 
 
 "In the King's name ! " he cried, as the manservant was 
 closing the hall door. He had just brought the King on the 
 scene for the benefit of an ambitious little official, and the 
 word was still on his lips. He fretted and chafed while the 
 door was unbarred ; then, swift as a thunderbolt, dashed into 
 the antechamber, and spoke to the servant 
 
 " A hundred crowns to you, young man, if you can wake 
 Madame du Croisier and send her to me this instant. Tell 
 her anything you like." 
 
 Chesnel grew cool and composed as he opened the door of 
 the brightly lighted drawing-room, where du Croisier was 
 striding up and down. For a moment the two men scanned 
 each other, with hatred and enmity, twenty years' deep, in 
 their eyes. One of the two had his foot on the heart of the 
 house d'Esgrignon ; the other, with a lion's strength, came 
 forward to pluck it away. 
 
 "Your humble servant, sir," said Chesnel. "Have you 
 made the charge ? " 
 
 " Yes, sir." 
 
 " When was it made ? " 
 
 "Yesterday." 
 
 " Have any steps been taken since the warrant of arrest 
 was issued ? ' ' 
 
 " I believe so." 
 
 " I have come to treat with you." 
 
 " Justice must take its course, nothing can stop it, the arrest 
 has been made." 
 
 " Never mind that, I am at your orders, at your feet."
 
 260 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 The old man knelt before du Croisier, and stretched out his 
 hands entreatingly. 
 
 " What do you want ? Our lands, our castle ? Take all ; 
 withdraw the charge ; leave us nothing but life and honor. 
 And over and beside all this, I will be your servant ; command, 
 and I will obey." 
 
 Du Croisier sat down in an easy-chair and left the old man 
 to kneel. 
 
 "You are not vindictive," pleaded Chesnel ; "you are 
 good-hearted, you do not bear us such a grudge that you will 
 not listen to terms. Before daylight the young man ought to 
 be at liberty." 
 
 "The whole town knows that he has been arrested," re- 
 turned du Croisier, enjoying his revenge. 
 
 " It is a great misfortune ; but as there will neither be 
 proofs nor trial, we can easily manage that." 
 
 Du Croisier reflected. He seemed to be struggling with 
 self-interest ; Chesnel thought that he had gained a hold on 
 his enemy through the great motive of human action. At 
 that supreme moment Mmc. du Croisier appeared. 
 
 " Come here and help me to soften your dear husband, 
 madame," said Chesnel, still on his knees. Mme. du Croisier 
 made him rise with every sign of profound astonishment. 
 Chesnel explained his errand ; and when she knew it, the 
 generous daughter of the stewards of the Dues d'Alencon 
 turned to du Croisier with tears :./ her eyes. 
 
 "Ah ! monsieur, can you hesitate? The d'Esgrignons, the 
 honor of the province ! " she said. 
 
 "There is more in it than that ! " exclaimed du Croisier, 
 rising to begin his restless walk again. 
 
 "More? What more?" asked Maitre Chesnel in sheer 
 amazement. 
 
 " France is involved, Monsieur Chesnel. It is a question 
 of the country, of the people, of giving my lords your nobles 
 a lesson, and teaching them that there is such a thing as jus-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 261 
 
 tice, and law, and a bourgeoisie a lesser nobility as good as 
 they, and a match for them ! There shall be no more tram- 
 pling down half a score of wheat-fields for a single hare ; no 
 bringing shame on families by seducing unprotected girls ; 
 they shall not look down on others as good as they are, and 
 mock at them for ten whole years, without finding out at last 
 that these things swell into avalanches, and those avalanches 
 will fall and crush and bury my lords the nobles. You want 
 to go back to the old order of things. You want to tear up 
 the social compact, the Charter, in which our rights are set 
 forth " 
 
 "And so?" 
 
 "Is it not a sacred mission to open the people's eyes?" 
 cried du Croisier. " Their eyes will be opened to the moral- 
 ity of your party when they see nobles going to be tried at the 
 Assize Court like Pierre and Jacques. They will say, then, 
 that small folk who keep their self-respect are as good as great 
 folk that bring shame on themselves. The Assize Court is a 
 light for all the world. Here, I am the champion of the peo- 
 ple, the friend of law. You yourselves twice flung me on the 
 side of the people once when you refused an alliance, twice 
 when you put me under the ban of your society. You are 
 reaping as you have sown." 
 
 If Chesnel was startled by this outburst, so no less was 
 Mme. du Croisier. To her this was a terrible revelation of 
 her husband's character, a new light not merely on the past 
 but on the future as well. Any capitulation on the part of 
 the colossus was apparently out of the question ; but Chesnel 
 in nowise retreated before the impossible. 
 
 "What, monsieur?" said Mme. du Croisier. "Would 
 you not forgive? Then you are not a Christian." 
 
 " I forgive as God forgives, madame, on certain condi- 
 tions." 
 
 "And what are they?" asked Chesnel, thinking that he 
 saw a ray of hope.
 
 262 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 " The elections are coming on ; I want the votes at your 
 disposal." 
 
 "You shall have them." 
 
 " I wish that we, my wife and I, should be received famil- 
 iarly every evening, with an appearance of friendliness at any 
 rate, by Monsieur le Marquis d'Esgrignon and his circle," 
 continued du Croisier. 
 
 " I do not know how we are going to compass it, but you 
 shall be received." 
 
 " I wish to have the family bound over by a surety of four 
 hundred thousand francs, and by a written document stating 
 the nature of the compromise, so as to keep a loaded cannon 
 pointed at its heart." 
 
 "We agree," said Chesnel, without admitting that the 
 three hundred thousand francs was in his possession ; " but the 
 amount must be deposited with a third party and returned to 
 the family after your election and repayment." 
 
 " No; after the marriage of my grand-niece, Mademoiselle 
 Duval. She will very likely have four million francs some 
 day ; the reversion of our property (mine and my wife's) shall 
 be settled upon her by her marriage-contract, and you shall 
 arrange a match between her and the young count." 
 
 " Never ! " 
 
 "JVever/" repeated du Croisier, quite intoxicated with 
 triumph. " Good-night ! " 
 
 "Idiot that I am," thought Chesnel, "why did I shrink 
 from a lie to such a man ? " 
 
 Du Croisier took himself off; he was pleased with himself; 
 he had enjoyed Chesnel's humiliation ; he had held the des- 
 tinies of a proud house, the representative of the aristocracy of 
 the province, suspended in his hand ; he had set the print of 
 his heel on the very heart of the d'Esgrignons ; and, finally, 
 he had broken off the whole negotiation on the score of his 
 wounded pride. He went up to his room, leaving his wife 
 alone with Chesnel. In his intoxication, he saw his victory
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 263 
 
 clear before him. He firmly believed that the three hundred 
 thousand francs had been squandered; the d'Esgrignons must 
 sell or mortgage all that they had to raise the money ; the 
 Assize Court was inevitable to his mind. 
 
 An affair of forgery can always be settled out of court in 
 France if the missing amount is returned. The losers by the 
 crime are usually well-to-do, and have no wish to blight an 
 imprudent man's character. But du Croisier had no mind to 
 slacken his hold until he knew what he was about. He medi- 
 tated until he fell asleep on the magnificent manner in 
 which his hopes would be fulfilled by way of the Assize 
 Court or by marriage. The murmur of voices below, the 
 lamentations of Chesnel and Mme. du Croisier, sounded 
 sweet in his ears. 
 
 Mme. du Croisier shared Chesnel's views of the d'Esgrig- 
 nons. She was a deeply religious woman, a Royalist at- 
 tached to the noblesse ; the interview had been in every way 
 a cruel shock to her feelings. She, a stanch Royalist, had 
 heard the roaring of that Liberalism which, in her director's 
 opinion, wished to crush the church. The Left benches for 
 her meant the popular upheaval and the scaffolds of 1793. 
 
 "What would your uncle, that sainted man who hears us, 
 say to this? " exclaimed Chesnel. Mme. du Croisier made no 
 reply, but the great tears rolled down her cheeks. 
 
 " You have already been the cause of one poor boy's death ; 
 his mother will go mourning all her days," continued Chesnel 
 (he saw how his words told, but he would have struck harder 
 and even broken this woman's heart to save Victurnien). 
 " Do you want to kill Mademoiselle Armande, for she would 
 not survive the dishonor of the house for a week ? Do you 
 wish to be the death of poor Chesnel, your old notary? For 
 I shall kill the count in prison before they shall bring the 
 charge against him, and take my own life afterward, before 
 they shall try me for murder in an Assize Court." 
 
 "That is enough ! that is enough, my friend? I would do
 
 264 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN, 
 
 anything to put a stop to such an affair ; but I never knew 
 Monsieur du Croisier's real character until a few minutes ago. 
 To you I can make the admission : there is nothing to be 
 done." 
 
 "But what if there is?" 
 
 " I would give half the blood in my veins that it were so," 
 said she, finishing her sentence by a wistful shake of the 
 head. 
 
 As the First Consul, beaten on the field of Marengo till five 
 o'clock in the evening, by six o'clock saw the tide of battle 
 turned by Desaix's desperate attack and Kellermann's terrific 
 charge, so Chesnel in the midst of defeat saw the beginnings 
 of victory. No one but a Chesnel, an old notary, an ex- 
 steward of the manor, old Maitre Sorbier's junior clerk, in the 
 sudden flash of lucidity which comes with despair, could rise 
 thus, high as a Napoleon ; nay, higher. This was not Marengo, 
 it was Waterloo, and the Prussians had come up ; Chesnel saw 
 this, and was determined to beat them off the field. 
 
 "Madame," he said, "remember that I have been your 
 man of business for twenty years; remember that if the 
 d'Esgrignons mean the honor of the province, you represent 
 the honor of the bourgeoisie ; it rests with you, and you alone, 
 to save the ancient house. Now, answer me; are you going 
 to allow dishonor to fall on the shade of your dead uncle, on 
 the d'Esgrignons, on poor Chesnel? Do you want to kill 
 Mademoiselle Armande weeping yonder ? Or do you wish tot 
 expiate wrongs done to others by a deed which will rejoice 
 your ancestors, the stewards of the dukes of Alencon, and 
 bring comfort to the soul of our dear abbe. If he could rise 
 from his grave, he would command you to do this thing that 
 I beg of you upon my knees." 
 
 "What is it?" asked Mme. du Croisier. 
 
 "Well. Here are the hundred thousand crowns," said 
 Chesnel, drawing the bundles of notes from his pocket. 
 " Take them, and there will be an end of it."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 265 
 
 "If that is all," she began, "and if no harm can come of 
 it to my husband " 
 
 "Nothing but good," Chesnel replied. "You are saving 
 him from eternal punishment in hell, at the cost of a slight 
 disappointment here below." 
 
 "He will not be compromised, will he?" she asked, look- 
 ing into Chesnel's face. 
 
 Then Chesnel read the depths of the poor wife's mind. 
 Mme. du Croisier was hesitating between her two creeds ; be- 
 tween wifely obedience to her husband as laid down by the 
 church, and obedience to the altar and the throne. Her 
 husband, in her eyes, was acting wrongly, but she dared not 
 blame him ; she would fain save the d'Esgrignons, but she 
 was loyal to her husband's interests. 
 
 "Not in the least," Chesnel answered; "your old notary 
 swears it by the Holy Gospels " 
 
 He had nothing left to lose for the d'Esgrignons but his 
 soul ; he risked it now by this horrible perjury, but Mme. du 
 Croisier must be deceived, there was no other choice but 
 death. Without losing a moment, he dictated a form of re- 
 ceipt by which Mme. du Croisier acknowledged payment of a 
 hundred thousand crowns five days before the fatal letter of 
 exchange appeared ; for he recollected that du Croisier was 
 away from home, superintending improvements on his wife's 
 property at the time. 
 
 " Now swear to me that you will declare before the examin- 
 ing magistrate that you received the money on that date," he 
 said, when Mme. du Croisier had taken the notes and he held 
 the receipt in his hand. 
 
 " It will be a lie, will it not ? " 
 
 " Venial sin," said Chesnel. 
 
 " I could not do it without consulting my director, Monsieur 
 1'AbbS Couturier." 
 
 "Very well," said Chesnel, "will you be guided entirely 
 by his advice in this affair? "
 
 26(> THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "I promise that." 
 
 " And you must not give the money to Monsieur du Croisier 
 until you have been before the magistrate." 
 
 "No. Ah ! God give me strength to appear in a court of 
 justice and maintain a lie before men ! " 
 
 Chesnel kissed Mme. du Croisier's hand, then stood upright 
 and majestic as one of the prophets that Raphael painted in 
 the Vatican. 
 
 "Your uncle's soul is thrilled with joy," he said; "you 
 have wiped out for ever the wrong that you did by marrying 
 an enemy of altar and throne" words that made a lively 
 impression on Mme. du Croisier's timorous mind. 
 
 Then Chesnel all at once bethought himself that he must 
 make sure of the lady's director, the Abbe du Couturier. He 
 knew how obstinately devout souls can work for the triumph 
 of their views when once they come forward for their side, 
 and wished to secure the concurrence of the church as early 
 as possible. So he went to the Hotel d'Esgrignon, roused up 
 Mile. Armande, gave her an account of that night's work, and 
 sped her to fetch the bishop himself into the forefront of the 
 battle. 
 
 "Ah, God in heaven! Thou must save the house d'Es- 
 grignon! " he exclaimed, as he went slowly home again. 
 " The affair is developing now into a fight in a court of law. 
 We are face to face with men that have passions and interests 
 of their own ; we cannot get anything out of them. This du 
 Croisier has taken advantage of the public prosecutor's ab- 
 sence ; the public prosecutor is devoted to us, but since the 
 opening of the Chambers he has gone to Paris. Now, what 
 can they have done to get round his deputy ? They have in- 
 duced him to take up the charge without consulting his chief. 
 This mystery must be looked into, and the ground surveyed 
 to-morrow; and then, perhaps, when I have unraveled this 
 web of theirs, I will go back to Paris to set great powers at 
 work through Madame de Maufrigneuse."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 267 
 
 So he reasoned, poor, aged, clear-sighted wrestler, before 
 he lay down half dead with bearing the weight of so much 
 emotion and fatigue. And yet, before he fell asleep, he ran 
 a searching eye over the list of magistrates, taking all their 
 secret ambitions into account, casting about for ways of influ- 
 encing them, calculating his chances in the coming struggle. 
 Chesnel's prolonged scrutiny of consciences, given in a con- 
 densed form, will perhaps serve as a picture of the judicial 
 world in a country town. 
 
 Magistrates and officials generally are obliged to begin 
 their career in the provinces; judicial ambition there fer- 
 ments. At the outset every man looks toward Paris; they 
 all aspire to shine in the vast theatre where great political 
 causes come before the courts, and the higher branches of the 
 legal profession are closely connected with the palpitating 
 interests of society. 
 
 At this time the younger men were full of Royalist zeal 
 against the enemies of the Bourbons. The most insignificant 
 deputy official was dreaming of conducting a prosecution, and 
 praying with all his might for one of those political cases which 
 bring a man's zeal into prominence, draw the attention of the 
 higher powers, and mean advancement for King's men. Was 
 there a member of any official staff of prosecuting counsel 
 who could hear of a Bonapartist conspiracy breaking out 
 somewhere else without a feeling of envy? Where was the 
 man that did not burn to discover a Caron, or a Berton, or a 
 revolt of some sort ? With reasons of State, and the necessity 
 of diffusing the monarchical spirit throughout France as their 
 basis, and a fierce ambition stirred up whenever party spirit 
 ran high, these ardent politicians on their promotion were 
 lucid, clear-sighted, and perspicacious. They kept up a vigor- 
 ous detective system throughout the kingdom ; they did the 
 work of spies, and urged the nation along a pathway of obe- 
 dience, from which it had no business to swerve. 
 
 Justice, thus informed with monarchical enthusiasm, atoned
 
 268 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 for the errors of the ancient parliaments, and walked, perhaps, 
 too ostentatiously hand in hand with religion. There was 
 more zeal than discretion shown ; but justice sinned not so 
 much in the direction of Machiavellism as by giving too candid 
 expression to its views, when those views appeared to be op- 
 posed to the general interests of a country which must be put 
 safely out of reach of revolutions. 
 
 Officials of both complexions were to be found in the court 
 in which young d'Esgrignon's fate depended. M. le Presi- 
 dent du Ronceret and an elderly judge, Blondet by name, 
 represented the section of functionaries shelved for good, and 
 resigned to stay where they were ; while the young and ambi- 
 tious party comprised the examining magistrate, M. Camusot, 
 and his deputy, M. Michu, appointed thrdugh the interest of 
 the Cinq-Cygnes, and certain of promotion to the Court of 
 Appeals of Paris at the first opportunity. 
 
 President du Ronceret held a permanent post ; it was im- 
 possible to turn him out. The aristocratic party declined to 
 give him what he considered to be his due, socially speaking; 
 so he declared for the bourgeoisie, glossed over his disappoint- 
 ment with the name of independence, and failed to realize 
 that his opinions condemned him to remain a president of a 
 court of first instance for the rest of his life. Once started 
 on this track, the sequence of events led du Ronceret to plaps 
 his hopes of advancement on the triumph of du Croisier and 
 the Left. He was in no better odor at the prefecture than at 
 the Court-Royal. He was compelled to keep on good terms 
 with the authorities ; the Liberals distrusted him, consequently 
 he belonged to neither party. He was obliged to resign his 
 chances of election to du Croisier, he exercised no influence, 
 and played a secondary part. The false position reacted on 
 his character ; he was soured and discontented ; he was tired 
 of political ambiguity, and privately had made up his mind to 
 come forward openly as leader of the Liberal party, and so to 
 strike ahead of du Croisier. His behavior in the d'Essrisnon
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 269 
 
 affair was the first step in this direction. To begin with, he 
 was an admirable representative of that section of the middle- 
 classes which allows its petty passions to obscure the wider 
 interests of the country ; a class of crotchety politicians, up- 
 holding the government one day and opposing it the next, 
 compromising every cause and helping none; helpless after 
 they have done the. mischief till they set about brewing more; 
 unwilling to face their own incompetence, thwarting authority 
 while professing to serve it. With a compound of arrogance 
 and humility they demand of the people more submission than 
 kings expect, and fret their souls because those above them 
 are not brought down to their level, as if greatness could be 
 little, as if power existed without force. 
 
 President du Ronceret was a tall, spare man with a reced- 
 ing forehead and scanty, auburn hair. He was wall-eyed, his 
 complexion was blotched, his lips thin and hard, his scarcely 
 audible voice came out like the husky wheezings of asthma. 
 He had for a wife a great, solemn, clumsy creature, tricked 
 out in the most ridiculous fashion, and outrageously over- 
 dressed. Mme. la Presidente gave herself the airs of a queen ; 
 she wore vivid colors, and always appeared at balls adorned 
 with the turban, dear to the British female, and lovingly cul- 
 tivated in out-of-the-way districts in France. Each of the 
 pair had an income of four or five thousand francs, which, 
 with the president's salary, reached a total of some twelve 
 thousand. In spite of a decided tendency to parsimony, 
 vanity required that they should receive one evening in the 
 week. Du Croisier might import modern luxury into the 
 town, M. and Mme. du Ronceret were faithful to the old 
 traditions. They had always lived in the old-fashioned house 
 belonging to Mme. du Ronceret, and had made no changes in 
 it since their marriage. The house stood between a garden 
 and a courtyard. The gray old gable end, with one window- 
 in each story, gave upon the road. High walls inclosed the 
 garden and the yard, but the space taken up beneath them in
 
 270 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 the garden by a walk shaded with chestnut trees was filled in 
 the yard by a row of outbuildings. An old rust-devoured 
 iron gate in the garden wall balanced the yard gateway, a 
 huge, double-leaved carriage entrance with a buttress on 
 either side, and a mighty shell on the top. The same shell 
 was repeated over the house-door. 
 
 The whole place was gloomy, close, and airless. The row 
 of iron-grated openings in the opposite wall, as you entered, 
 reminded you of prison windows. Every passer-by could 
 look in through the railings to see how the garden grew ; the 
 flowers in the little square borders never seemed to thrive 
 there. 
 
 The drawing-room on the first floor was lighted by a single 
 window on the side of the street and a French window above 
 a flight of steps, which gave upon the garden. The dining- 
 room on the other side of the great antechamber, with its 
 windows also looking out into the garden, was exactly the 
 same size as the drawing-room, and all three apartments were 
 in harmony with the general air of gloom. It wearied your 
 eyes to look at the ceilings all divided up by huge painted 
 cross-beams and adorned with a feeble lozenge pattern or a 
 rosette in the middle. The paint was old, startling in tint, 
 and begrimed with smoke. The sun had faded the heavy 
 silk curtains in the drawing-room ; the old-fashioned B^u- 
 vais tapestry which covered the white-painted furniture had 
 lost all its color with wear. A Louis Quinze clock on the 
 mantel stood between two extravagant, branched sconces 
 filled with yellow wax candles, which the presidente only 
 lighted on occasions when the old-fashioned rock-crystal 
 chandelier emerged from its green wrapper. Three card- 
 tables, covered with threadbare baize, and a backgammon 
 box, sufficed for the recreations of the company ; and Mme. 
 du Ronceret treated them to such refreshments as cider, 
 chestnuts, pastry puffs, glasses of eau sucree, and home-made 
 orangeade. For some time past she had made a practice of
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 271 
 
 giving a party once a fortnight, when tea and some pitiable 
 attempts at pastry appeared to grace the occasion. 
 
 Once a quarter the du Roncerets gave a grand three-course 
 dinner, which made a great sensation in the town, a dinner 
 served up on execrable ware, but prepared with the science 
 for which the provincial cook is remarkable. It was a Gar- 
 gantuan repast, which lasted for six whole hours, and by abund- 
 ance the president tried to vie with du Croisier's elegance. 
 
 And so du Ronceret's life and its accessories were just what 
 might have been expected from his character and his false 
 position. He felt dissatisfied at home without precisely 
 knowing what was the matter ; but he dared not go to any 
 expense to change existing conditions, and was only too glad 
 to put by seven or eight thousand francs every year, so as to 
 leave his son Fabien a handsome private fortune. Fabien du 
 Ronceret had no mind for the magistracy, the bar, or the 
 civil service, and his pronounced turn for doing nothing drove 
 his parent to despair. 
 
 On this head there was rivalry between the president and 
 the vice-president, old M. Blondet. M. Blondet, for a long 
 time past, had been sedulously cultivating an acquaintance 
 between his son and the Blandureau family. The Blandureaus 
 were well-to-do linen manufacturers, with an only daughter, 
 and it was on this daughter that the president had fixed his 
 choice of a wife for Fabien. Now, Joseph Blondet's marriage 
 with Mile. Blandureau depended on his nomination to the 
 post which his father, old Blondet, hoped to obtain for him 
 when he himself should retire. But President du Ronceret, 
 in underhand ways, was thwarting the old man's plans, and 
 working indirectly upon the Blandureaus. Indeed, if it had 
 not been for this affair of young d'Esgrignon's, the astute 
 president might have cut them out, father and son, for their 
 rivals were very much richer. 
 
 Before the Revolution broke out, Blondet senior had been 
 a barrister j afterward he became the public accuser, and one
 
 272 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 of the mildest of those formidable functionaries. Goodman 
 Blondet, as they used to call him, deadened the force of the 
 new doctrines by acquiescing in them all, and putting none 
 of them in practice. He had been obliged to send one or 
 two nobles to prison ; but his further proceedings were marked 
 with such deliberation, that he brought them through to the 
 9th Thermidor with a dexterity which won respect for him on 
 all sides. As a matter of fact, Goodman Blondet ought to 
 have been president of the Tribunal, but when the courts of 
 law were reorganized he had been set aside ; Napoleon's aver- 
 sion from Republicans was apt to reappear in the smallest 
 appointments under his government. The qualification of 
 ex-public accuser, written in the margin of the list against 
 Blondet's name, set the Emperor inquiring of Cambaceres 
 whether there might not be some scion of an ancient parlia- 
 mentary stock to appoint instead. The consequence was that 
 du Ronceret, whose father had been a councilor of parliament, 
 was nominated to the presidency ; but, the Emperor's repug- 
 nance notwithstanding, Cambaceres allowed Blondet to remain 
 on the bench, saying that the old barrister was one of the best 
 juri-consuls in France. 
 
 Blondet's talents, his knowledge of the old law of the land 
 and subsequent legislation, should by rights have brought him 
 far in his profession ; but he had this much in common with 
 some few great spirits : he entertained a prodigious contempt 
 for his own special knowledge, and reserved all his preten- 
 tions, leisure, and capacity for a second pursuit unconnected 
 with the law. To this pursuit he gave his almost exclusive 
 attention. The good man was passionately fond of garden- 
 ing. He was in correspondence with some of the most cele- 
 brated amateurs ; it was his ambition to create new species ; 
 he took an interest in botanical discoveries, and lived, in 
 short, in the world of flowers. Like all florists, he had a 
 predilection for one particular plant; the pelargonium was his 
 especial favorite. The court, the cases that came before it,
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 273 
 
 and his outward life were as nothing to him compared with 
 the inward life of fancies and abundant emotions which the 
 old man led. He fell more and more in love with his flower- 
 seraglio; and the pains which he bestowed on his garden, the 
 sweet round of the labors of the months, held Goodman Blon- 
 det fast in his greenhouse. But for that hobby he would have 
 been a deputy under the Empire, and shone conspicuous 
 beyond a doubt in the Corps Legislatif. 
 
 His marriage was the second cause of his obscurity. As a 
 man of forty, he was rash enough to marry a girl of eighteen, 
 by whom he had a son named Joseph in the first year of their 
 marriage. Three years afterward Mme. Blondet, then the 
 prettiest woman in the town, inspired in the prefect of the 
 department a passion which ended only with her death. The 
 prefect was the father of her second son, Emile ; the whole 
 town knew this, old Blondet himself knew it. The wife who 
 might have roused her husband's ambition, who might have 
 won him away from his flowers, positively encouraged the 
 judge in his botanical tastes. She no more cared to leave the 
 place than the prefect cared to leave his prefecture so long as 
 his mistress lived. 
 
 Blondet felt himself unequal at his age to a contest with a 
 young wife. He sought consolation in his greenhouse, and 
 engaged a very pretty servant-maid to assist him to tend his 
 ever-changing bevy of beauties. So while the judge potted, 
 pricked out, watered, layered, slipped, blended, and induced 
 his flowers to break, Mme. Blondet spent his substance on the 
 dress and finery in which she shone at the prefecture. One 
 interest alone had power to draw her away from the tender 
 care of a romantic affection which the town came to admire 
 in the end ; and this interest was Emile's education. The 
 child of love was a bright and pretty boy, while Joseph was 
 no less heavy and plain -featured. The old judge, blinded by 
 paternal affection, loved Joseph as his wife loved Emile. 
 
 For a dozen years M. Blondet bore his lot with perfect 
 18
 
 274 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 resignation. He shut his eyes to his wife's intrigue with a 
 dignified, well-bred composure, quite in the style of an eigh- 
 teenth-century great lord ; but, like all men with a taste for a 
 quiet life, he could cherish a profound dislike, and he hated 
 the younger son. When his wife died, therefore, in 1818, he 
 turned the intruder out of the house, and packed him off to 
 Paris to study law on an allowance of twelve hundred francs 
 for all resource, nor could any cry of distress extract another 
 penny from his purse. Emile Blondet would have gone 
 under if it had not been for his real father. 
 
 M. Blondet's house was one of the prettiest in the town. It 
 stood almost opposite the prefecture, with a neat little court 
 in front. A row of old-fashioned iron railings between two 
 brickwork piers inclosed it from the street ; and a low wall, 
 also of brick, with a second row of railings along the top, con- 
 nected the piers with the neighboring house. The little court, 
 a space about sixty feet in width by one hundred and twenty 
 in length, was cut in two by a brick pathway which ran from 
 the gate to the house door between a border on either side. 
 Those borders were always renewed ; at every season of the 
 year they exhibited a successful show of blossom, to the 
 admiration of the public. All along the back of the garden- 
 beds a quantity of climbing plants grew up and covered the 
 walls of the neighboring houses with a magnificent mantle; 
 the brickwork piers were hidden in clusters of honeysuckle; 
 and, to crown all, in a couple of terra-cotta vases at the sum- 
 mit, a pair of acclimatized cacti displayed to the astonished 
 eyes of the ignorant those thick leaves bristling with spiny 
 defenses which seem to be due to some plant disease. 
 
 It was a plain-looking house, built of brick, with brickwork 
 arches above the windows, and bright green Venetian blinds 
 to make it gay. Through the glass door you could look 
 straight across the house to the opposite glass door, at the end 
 of a long passage, and down the central alley in the garden 
 beyond ; while through the windows of the dining-room and
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 275 
 
 drawing-room, which extended, like the hall, from back to 
 front of the house, you could often catch further glimpses of 
 the flower-beds in a garden of about two acres in extent. Seen 
 from the road, the brickwork harmonized with the fresh 
 flowers and shrubs, for two centuries had overlaid it with 
 mosses, and green and russet tints. No one could pass through 
 the town without falling in love with a house with such charm- 
 ing surroundings, so covered with flowers and mosses to the 
 roof-ridge, where two pigeons of glazed crockery-ware were 
 perched by way of ornament. 
 
 M. Blondet possessed an income of about four thousand 
 livres derived from land, beside the old house in the town. 
 He meant to avenge his wrongs legitimately enough. He 
 would leave his house, his lands, his seat on the bench to his 
 son Joseph, and the whole town knew what he meant to do. 
 He had made a will in that son's favor ; he had gone as far as 
 the Code will permit a man to go in the way of disinheriting 
 one child to benefit another ; and what was more, he had been 
 putting by money for the past fifteen years to enable his lout 
 of a son to buy back from Emile that portion of his father's 
 estate which could not legally be taken away from him. 
 
 Emile Blondet, thus turned adrift, had contrived to gain 
 distinction in Paris, but so far it was rather a name than a 
 practical result. Emile's indolence, recklessnness, and happy- 
 go-lucky ways drove his real father to despair ; and when that 
 father died, a half-ruined man, turned out of office by one of 
 the political reactions so frequent under the Restoration, it 
 was with a mind uneasy as to the future of a man endowed 
 with the most brilliant qualities. 
 
 Emile Blondet found support in a friendship with a Mile. 
 de Troisville, whom he had known before her marriage with 
 the Comte de Montcornet. His mother was living when the 
 Troisvilles came back after the emigration ; she was related to 
 the family, distantly it is true, but the connection was close 
 enough to allow her to introduce Emile to the house. She,
 
 276 fHE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 poor woman, foresaw the future. She knew that when she 
 died her son would lose both mother and father, a thought 
 which made death doubly bitter, so she tried to interest others 
 in him. She encouraged the liking that sprang up between 
 Emile and the eldest daughter of the house of Troisville ; but 
 while the liking was exceedingly strong on the young lady's 
 part, a marriage was out of the question. It was a romance 
 on the pattern of "Paul and Virginia." Mme. Blondet did 
 what she could to teach her son to look to the Troisvilles, to 
 found a lasting attachment on a children's game of " make-be- 
 lieve" love, which was bound to end as boy-and-girl romances 
 usually do. When Mile, de Troisville's marriage with Gen- 
 eral Montcornet was announced, Mme. Blondet, a dying 
 woman, went to the bride and solemnly implored her never 
 to abandon Emile, and to use her influence for him in 
 society in Paris, whither the general's fortune summoned her 
 to shine. 
 
 Luckily for Emile, he was able to make his own way. He 
 made his appearance, at the age of twenty, as one of the 
 masters of modern literature ; and met with no less success in 
 the society into which he was launched by the father who at 
 first could afford to bear the expense of the young man's 
 extravagance. Perhaps Emile's precocious celebrity and the 
 good figure that he made strengthened the bonds of his friend- 
 ship with the countess. Perhaps Mme. de Montcornet, with 
 the Russian blood in her veins (her mother was the daughter 
 of the Princess Scherbelloff), might have cast off the friend 
 of her childhood if he had been a poor man struggling with 
 all his might among the difficulties which beset a man of 
 letters in Paris ; but by the time that the real strain of Emile's 
 adventurous life began, their attachment was unalterable on 
 either side. He was looked upon as one of the leading lights 
 of journalism when young d'Esgrignon met him at his first 
 supper-party in Paris ; his acknowledged position in the world 
 of letters was very high, and he towered above his reputation.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 277 
 
 Goodman Blondet had not the faintest conception of the 
 power which the Constitutional Government had given to the 
 press ; nobody ventured to talk in his presence of the son of 
 whom he refused to hear. And so it came to pass that he 
 knew nothing of Emile whom he had cursed and Emile's 
 greatness. 
 
 Old Blondet's integrity was as deeply rooted in him as his 
 passion for flowers ; he knew nothing but law and botany. 
 He would have interviews with litigants, listen to them, chat 
 with them, and show them his flowers ; he would accept rare 
 seeds from them ; but once on the bench, no judge on earth 
 was more impartial. Indeed, his manner of proceeding was 
 so well known that litigants never went near him except to 
 hand over some document which might enlighten him in the 
 performance of his duty, and nobody tried to throw dust in 
 his eyes. With his learning, his lights, and his way of hold- 
 ing his real talents cheap, he was so indispensable to President 
 du Ronceret, that, matrimonial schemes apart, that functionary 
 would have done all that he could, in an underhand way, to 
 prevent the vice-president from retiring in favor of his son. 
 If the learned old man left the bench, the president would be 
 utterly unable to do without him. 
 
 Goodman Blondet did not know that it was in Emile's 
 power to fulfill all his wishes in a few hours. The simplicity 
 of his life was worthy of one of Plutarch's men. In the evening 
 he looked over his cases ; next morning he worked among his 
 flowers; and all day long he gave decisions on the bench. 
 The pretty maid-servant, now of ripe age and wrinkled like an 
 Easter pippin, looked after the house, and they lived accord- 
 ing to the established customs of the strictest parsimony. 
 Mile. Cadot always carried the keys of her cupboards and 
 fruit-loft about with her. She was indefatigable. She went 
 to market herself, she cooked and dusted and swept, and 
 never missed mass of a morning. To give some idea of the 
 domestic life of the household, it will be enough to remark
 
 278 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 that the father and son never ate fruit till it was beginning to 
 spoil, because Mile. Cadot always brought out anything that 
 would not keep. No one in the house ever tasted the luxury 
 of new bread, and all the fast days in the kalendar were punc- 
 tually observed. The gardener was put on rations like a 
 soldier; the elderly Valideh always kept an eye upon him. 
 And she, for her part, was so deferentially treated, that she 
 took her meals with the family, and in consequence was con- 
 tinually trotting to and fro between the kitchen and the parlor 
 at breakfast and dinner time. 
 
 Mile. Blandureau's parents had consented to her marriage 
 with Joseph Blondet upon one condition the penniless and 
 briefless barrister must be an assistant judge. So, with the 
 desire of fitting his son to fill the position, old M. Blondet 
 racked his brains to hammer the law into his son's head by 
 dint of lessons, so as to make a cut-and-dried lawyer of him. 
 As for Blondet junior, he spent almost every evening at the 
 Blandureaus' house, to which also young Fabien du Ronceret 
 had been admitted since his return, without raising the 
 slightest suspicion in the minds of father or son. 
 
 Everything in this life of theirs was measured by an accuracy 
 worthy of Gerard Dow's "Money Changer; " not a grain of 
 salt too much, not a single profit foregone; but the economical 
 principles by which it was regulated were relaxed in favor of 
 the greenhouse and garden. " The garden was the master's 
 craze," Mile. Cadot used to say. The master's blind fond- 
 ness for Joseph was not a craze in her eyes ; she shared the 
 father's predilection ; she pampered Joseph ; she darned his 
 stockings ; and would have been better pleased if the money 
 spent on the garden had been put by for Joseph's benefit. 
 
 That garden was kept in marvelous order by a single man ; 
 the paths, covered with river-sand, continually turned over 
 with the rake, meandered among the borders full of the rarest 
 flowers. Here were all kinds of color and scent, here were 
 lizards on the walls, legions of little flower-pots standing out
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 279 
 
 in the sun, regiments of forks and hoes, and a host of innocent 
 things, a combination of pleasant results to justify the gar- 
 dener's charming hobby. 
 
 At the end of the greenhouse the judge had set up a grand 
 stand, an amphitheatre of benches to hold some five or six 
 thousand pelargoniums in pots a splendid and famous show. 
 People came to see his geraniums in flower, not only from the 
 neighborhood, but even from the departments round about. 
 The Empress Marie Louise, passing through the town, had 
 honored the curiously kept greenhouse with a visit ; so much 
 was she impressed with the sight that she spoke of it to Napo- 
 leon, and the old judge received the cross of the Legion of 
 Honor. But as the learned gardener never mingled in society 
 at all, and went nowhere except to the Blandureaus, he had 
 no suspicion of the president's underhand manoeuvres ; and 
 others who could see the president's intentions were far too 
 much afraid of him to interfere or to warn the inoffensive 
 Blondets. 
 
 As for Michu, that young man with his powerful connections 
 gave much more thought to making himself agreeable to the 
 women in the upper social circles to which he was introduced 
 by the Cinq-Cygnes, than to the extremely simple business of 
 a provincial Tribunal. With his independent means (he had 
 an income of twelve thousand livres), he was courted by 
 mothers of daughters, and led a frivolous life. He did just 
 enough at the Tribunal to satisfy his conscience, much as a 
 schoolboy does his exercises, saying ditto on all occasions, 
 with a "Yes, dear president." But underneath the appear- 
 ance of indifference lurked the unusual powers of the Paris law 
 student who had distinguished himself as one of the staff of 
 prosecuting counsel before he came to the provinces. He 
 was accustomed to taking broad views of things ; he could do 
 rapidly what the president and Blondet could only do after 
 much thinking, and very often solved knotty points for them. 
 In delicate conjunctures the president and vice-president took
 
 280 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 counsel with their junior, confided thorny questions to him, 
 and never failed to wonder at the readiness with which he 
 brought back a task in which old Blondet found nothing to 
 criticise. Michu was sure of the influence of the most crabbed 
 aristocrats, and he was young and rich ; he lived, therefore, 
 above the level of departmental intrigues and pettinesses. He 
 was an indispensable man at picnics, he frisked with young 
 ladies and paid court to their mothers, he danced at balls, he 
 gambled like a capitalist. In short, he played his part of 
 young lawyer of fashion to admiration ; without, at the same 
 time, compromising his dignity, which he knew how to assert 
 at the right moment like a man of spirit. He won golden 
 opinions by the manner in which he threw himself into pro- 
 vincial ways, without criticising them ; and for these reasons, 
 every one endeavored to make his time of exile endurable. 
 
 The public prosecutor was a lawyer of the highest ability ; 
 he had taken the plunge into political life, and was one of the 
 most distinguished speakers on the ministerialist benches. 
 The president stood in awe of him ; if he had not been away 
 in Paris at the time, no steps would have been taken against 
 Victurnien ; his dexterity, his experience of business, would 
 have prevented the whole affair. At that moment, however, 
 he was in the Chamber of Deputies, and the president and du 
 Croisier had taken advantage of his absence to weave their 
 plot, calculating, with a certain ingenuity, that if once the 
 law stepped in, and the matter was noised abroad, things 
 would have gone too far to be remedied. 
 
 As a matter of fact, no staff of prosecuting counsel in any 
 Tribunal, at that particular time, would have taken up a 
 charge of forgery against the eldest son of one of the noblest 
 houses in France without going into the case at great length, 
 and a special reference, in all probability, .to the attorney- 
 general. In such a case as this, the authorities and the 
 Government would have tried endless ways of compromising 
 and hushing up an affair which might send an imprudent
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 281 
 
 young man to the hulks. They would very likely have done 
 the same for a Liberal family in a prominent position, so long 
 as the Liberals were not too openly hostile to the throne and 
 the altar. So du Croisier's charge and the young count's 
 arrest had not been very easy to manage. The president and 
 du Croisier had compassed their ends in the following manner: 
 
 M. Sauvager, a young Royalist barrister, had reached the 
 position of deputy public prosecutor by dint of subservience 
 to the Ministry. In the absence of his chief he was head of 
 the staff of counsel for prosecution, and, consequently, it fell 
 to him to take up the charge made by du Croisier. Sauvager 
 was a self-made man ; he had nothing but his stipend ; and 
 for that reason the authorities reckoned upon some one who 
 had everything to gain by devotion. The president now ex- 
 ploited the position. No sooner was the document with the 
 alleged forgery in du Croisier's hands, than Mme. la Presi- 
 dente du Ronceret, prompted by her spouse, had a long con- 
 versation with M. Sauvager. In the course of it she pointed 
 out the uncertainties of a career in the magistrature dcbout 
 compared with the magistrature assist, and the advantages of 
 the bench over the bar ; she showed how a freak on the part 
 of some official, or a single false step, might ruin a man's 
 career. 
 
 " If you are conscientious and give your conclusions 
 against the powers that be, you are lost," continued she. 
 " Now, at this moment, you might turn your position to 
 account to make a fine match that would put you above un- 
 lucky chances for the rest of your life ; you may marry a wife 
 with fortune sufficient to land you on the bench, in the 
 magistrature assist. There is a fine chance for you. Mon- 
 sieur du Croisier will never have any children ; everybody 
 knows why. His money, and his wife's as well, will go to his 
 niece, Mademoiselle Duval. Monsieur Duval is an iron- 
 master, his purse is tolerably filled, to begin with, and his 
 father is still alive, and has a little property beside. The
 
 282 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRV TOWN. 
 
 father and son have a million of francs between them ; they 
 will double it with du Croisier's help, for du Croisier has 
 business connections among great capitalists and manufac- 
 turers in Paris. Monsieur and Madame Duval the younger 
 would be certain to give their daughter to a suitor brought 
 forward by du Croisier, for he is sure to leave two fortunes to 
 his niece ; and, in all probability, he will settle the reversion 
 of his wife's property upon Mademoiselle Duval in the 
 marriage-contract, for Madame du Croisier has no kin. You 
 know how du Croisier hates the d'Esgrignons. Do him a 
 service, be his man, take up this charge of forgery which he is 
 going to make against young d'Esgrignon, and follow up the 
 proceedings at once without consulting the public prosecutor 
 at Paris. And, then, pray heaven that the Ministry dis- 
 misses you for doing your office impartially, in spite of the 
 powers that be ; for if they do, your fortune is made ! You 
 will have a charming wife and thirty thousand francs a year 
 with her, to say nothing of four millions of expectations in 
 ten years' time." 
 
 In two evenings Sauvager was talked over. Both he and 
 the president kept the affair a secret from old Blondet, from 
 Michu, and from the second member of the staff of prosecuting 
 counsel. Feeling sure of Blondet's impartiality on a question 
 of fact, the president made certain of a majority without 
 counting Camusot. And now Camusot's unexpected defec- 
 tion had thrown everything out. What the president wanted 
 was a committal for trial before the public prosecutor got warn- 
 ing. How if Camusot or the second counsel for the prosecu- 
 tion should send word to Paris ? 
 
 And here some portion of Camusot's private history may 
 perhaps explain how it came to pass that Chesnel took it for 
 granted that the examining magistrate would be on the d'Es- 
 grignons' side, and how he had the boldness to tamper in the 
 open street with that representative of justice. 
 
 Camusot's father, a well-known silk mercer in the Rue des
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 283 
 
 Bourdonnais, was ambitious for the only son of his first mar- 
 riage, and brought him up to the law. When Camusot junior 
 took a wife, he gained with her the influence of an usher of 
 the royal cabinet, back-stairs influence, it is true, but still 
 sufficient, since it had brought him his first appointment as 
 justice of the peace, and the second as examining magistrate. 
 At the time of his marriage, his father only settled an income 
 of six thousand francs upon him (the amount of his mother's 
 fortune, which he could legally claim), and as Mile. Thirion 
 brought him no more than twenty thousand francs as her 
 portion, the young couple knew the hardships of hidden pov- 
 erty. The salary of a provincial justice of the peace does not 
 exceed fifteen hundred francs, while an examining magistrate's 
 stipend is augmented by something like a thousand francs, be- 
 cause his position entails expenses and extra work. The post, 
 therefore, is much coveted, though it is not permanent, and 
 the work is heavy, and that was why Mme. Camusot had just 
 scolded her husband for allowing the president to read his 
 thoughts. 
 
 Marie-Cecile-Amelie Thirion, after three years of marriage, 
 perceived the blessing of heaven upon it in the regularity of 
 two auspicious events the births of a girl and a boy ; but she 
 prayed to be less blessed in future. A few more of such bless- 
 ings would turn straitened means into distress. M. Camusot's 
 father's money was not likely to come to them for a long 
 time ; and, rich as he was, he would scarcely leave more than 
 eight or ten thousand francs a year to each of his children, 
 four in number, for he had been married twice. And beside, 
 by the time that all ' expectations," as matchmakers call 
 them, were realized, would not the magistrate have children 
 of his own to settle in life ? Any one can imagine the situa- 
 tion for a little woman with plenty of sense and determination, 
 and Mme. Camusot was such a woman. She did not refrain 
 from meddling in matters judicial. She had far too strong a 
 sense of the gravity of a false step in her husband's career.
 
 284 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 She was the only child of an old servant of Louis XVIII., 
 a valet who had followed his master in his wanderings in 
 Italy, Courland, and England, till after the Restoration the 
 King rewarded him with the one place that he could fill at 
 Court, and made him usher by rotation to the royal cabinet. 
 So in Amelie's home there had been, as it were, a sort of re- 
 flection of the Court. Thirion used to tell her about the 
 lords, and ministers, and great men whom he announced and 
 introduced and saw passing to and fro. The girl, brought up 
 at the gates of the Tuileries, had caught some tincture of the 
 maxims practiced there, and adopted the dogma of passive 
 obedience to authority. She had sagely judged that her hus- 
 band, by ranging himself on the side of the d'Esgrignons, 
 would find favor with Mme. la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, 
 and with two powerful families on whose influence with the 
 King the Sieur Thirion could depend at an opportune moment. 
 Camusot might get an appointment at the first opportunity 
 within the jurisdiction of Paris, and afterward at Paris itself. 
 That promotion, dreamed of and longed for at every moment, 
 was certain to have a salary of six thousand francs attached to 
 it, as well as the alleviation of living in her own father's 
 house, or under the Camusots' roof, and all the advantages of 
 a father's fortune on either side. If the adage : " Out of sight 
 is out of mind," holds good of most women, it is particularly 
 true where family feeling or royal or ministerial patronage is 
 concerned. The personal attendants of kings prosper at all 
 times; you take an interest in a man, be it only a man in 
 livery, if you see him every day. 
 
 Mme. Camusot, regarding herself as a bird of passage, had 
 taken a little house in the Rue du Cygne. Furnished lodg- 
 ings there were none ; the town was not enough of a thorough- 
 fare, and the Camusots could not afford to live at an inn, like 
 M. Michu. So the fair Parisian had no choice for it but to 
 take such furniture as she could find ; and as she paid a very 
 moderate rent, the house was remarkably ugly, albeit a certain
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 285 
 
 quaintness of detail was not wanting. It was built against a 
 neighboring house in such a fashion that the side, with only 
 one window in each story, gave upon the street, and the front 
 looked out upon a yard where rose-bushes and buckthorn were 
 growing along the wall on either side. On the farther side, 
 opposite the house, stood a shed, a roof over two brick arches. 
 A little wicket-gate gave entrance into the gloomy place 
 (made gloomier still by the great walnut tree which grew in 
 the yard), and a double flight of steps, with an elaborately 
 wrought but rust-eaten handrail, led to the house-door. In- 
 side the house there were two rooms on each floor. The 
 dining-room occupied that part of the first floor nearest the 
 street, and the kitchen lay on the other side of a narrow pas- 
 sage almost wholly taken up by the wooden staircase. Of the 
 two second-floor rooms, one did duty as the magistrate's 
 study, the other as a bedroom, while the nursery and the 
 servants' bedroom stood above in the attics. There were no 
 ceilings in the house ; the cross-beams were simply white- 
 washed and the spaces plastered over. Both rooms on the 
 second floor and the dining-room below were wainscoted and 
 adorned with the labyrinthine designs which taxed the pa- 
 tience of the eighteenth-century carpenter ; but the carving 
 had been painted a dingy gray most depressing to behold. 
 
 The magistrate's study looked as though it belonged to a 
 provincial lawyer ; it contained a big desk, a mahogany arm- 
 chair, a law student's books, and shabby belongings trans- 
 ported from Paris. Mme. Camusot's room was more of a 
 native product ; it boasted a blue-and-white scheme of decora- 
 tion, a carpet, and that anomalous kind of furniture which 
 appears to be in the fashion, while it is simply some style that 
 has failed in Paris. As to the dining-room, it was nothing 
 but an ordinary provincial dining-room, bare and chilly, with 
 a damp, faded paper on the walls. 
 
 In this shabby room, with nothing to see but the walnut 
 tree, the dark leaves growing against the walls, and the almost
 
 286 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 deserted road beyond them, a somewhat lively and frivolous 
 woman, accustomed to the amusements and stir of Paris, used 
 to sit all day long, day after day, and for the most part of the 
 time alone, though she received tiresome and inane visits 
 which led her to think her loneliness preferable to empty 
 tittle-tattle. If she permitted herself the slightest gleam of 
 intelligence, it gave rise to interminable comment and embit- 
 tered her condition. She occupied herself a good deal with 
 her children, not so much from taste as for the sake of an in- 
 terest in her almost solitary life, and exercised her mind on 
 the only subjects which she could find ; to wit, the intrigues 
 which went on around her, the ways of provincials, and the 
 ambitions shut in by their narrow horizons. So she very soon 
 fathomed mysteries of which her husband had no idea. As 
 she sat at her window with a piece of intermittent embroidery 
 work in her fingers, she did not see her wood-shed full of 
 faggots nor the servant busy at the wash-tub; she was looking 
 out upon Paris, Paris where everything is pleasure, everything 
 is full of life. She dreamed of Paris gayeties, and shed tears 
 because she must abide in this dull prison of a country town. 
 She was disconsolate because she lived in a peaceful district, 
 where no conspiracy, no great affair would ever occur. She 
 saw herself doomed to sit under the shadow of the walnut tree 
 for some time to come. 
 
 Mme. Camusot was a little, plump, fresh, fair-haired woman, 
 with a very prominent forehead, a mouth which receded, and a 
 turned-up chin, a type of countenance which is passable in 
 youth, but looks old before the time. Her bright, quick eyes 
 expressed her innocent desire to get on in the world, and the 
 envy born of her present inferior position, with rather too 
 much candor ; but still they lighted up her commonplace face 
 and set it off with a certain energy of feeling, which success 
 was certain to extinguish in later life. At that time she used 
 to give a good deal of time and thought to her dresses, invent- 
 ing trimmings and embroidering them ; she planned out her
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN, 287 
 
 costumes with the maid whom she had brought with her from 
 Paris, and so maintained the reputation of Parisiennes in the 
 provinces. Her caustic tongue was dreaded ; she was not be- 
 loved. In that keen, investigating spirit peculiar to unoc- 
 cupied women who are driven to find some occupation for 
 empty days, she had pondered the president's private opinions, 
 until at length she discovered what he meant to do, and for 
 some time past she had advised Camusot to declare war. The 
 young count's affair was an excellent opportunity. Was it not 
 obviously Camusot's part to make a stepping-stone of this 
 criminal case by favoring the d'Esgrignons, a family with 
 power of a very different kind from the power of the du Croisier 
 party. 
 
 " Sauvager will never marry Mademoiselle Duval. They 
 are dangling her before him, but he will be the dupe of those 
 Machiavels in the Val-Noble to whom he is going to sacrifice 
 his position. Camusot, this affair, so unfortunate as it is for 
 the d'Esgrignons, so insidiously brought on by the president 
 for du Croisier's benefit, will turn out well for nobody but 
 you," she had said, as they went in. 
 
 The shrewd Parisienne had likewise guessed the president's 
 underhand manoeuvres with the Blandureaus, and his object in 
 baffling old Blondet's efforts, but she saw nothing to be gained 
 by opening the eyes of father or son to the perils of the situ- 
 ation ; she was enjoying the beginning of the comedy ; she 
 knew about the proposals made by Chesnel's successor on 
 behalf of Fabien du Ronceret, but she did not suspect how 
 important that secret might be to her. If she or her husband 
 were threatened by the president, Mme. Camusot could 
 threaten too, in her turn, to call the amateur gardener's atten- 
 tion to a scheme for carrying off the flower which he meant to 
 transplant into his home. 
 
 Chesnel had not penetrated, like Mme. Camusot, into the 
 means by which Sauvager had been won over ; but by dint of 
 looking into the various lives and interests of the men grouped
 
 288 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 about the lilies of the Tribunal, he knew that he could count 
 upon the public prosecutor, upon Camusot, and M. Michu. 
 Two judges for the d'Esgrignons would paralyze the rest. 
 And, finally, Chesnel knew old Blondet well enough to feel 
 sure that if he ever swerved from impartiality, it would be for 
 the sake of the work of his whole lifetime to secure his son's 
 appointment. So Chesnel slept, full of confidence, on the 
 resolve to go to M. Blondet and offer to realize his so long- 
 cherished hopes, while he opened his eyes to President du 
 Ronceret's treachery. Blondet won over, he would take a 
 peremptory tone with the examining magistrate, to whom he 
 hoped to prove that, if Victurnien was not blameless, he had 
 been merely imprudent ; the whole thing should be shown in 
 the light of a boy's thoughtless escapade. 
 
 But Chesnel slept neither soundly nor for long. Before 
 dawn he was awakened by his housekeeper. The most be- 
 witching person in this history, the most adorable youth on 
 the face of the globe, Mme. la Duchesse de Maufrigneuse her- 
 self, in man's attire, had driven alone from Paris in a caleche, 
 and was waiting to see him. 
 
 "I have come to save him or to die with him," said she, 
 addressing the notary, who thought that he was dreaming. 
 " I have brought a hundred thousand francs, giveo me by his 
 majesty out of his private purse, to buy Victurnien's innocence, 
 if his adversary can be bribed. If we fail utterly, I have 
 brought poison to snatch him away before anything takes 
 place, before even the indictment is drawn up. But we shall 
 not fail. I have sent word to the public prosecutor ; he is on 
 the road behind me ; he could not travel in my caleche, be- 
 cause he wished to take the instructions of the keeper of the 
 seals." 
 
 Chesnel rose to the occasion and played up to the duchess ; 
 he wrapped himself in his dressing-gown, fell at her feet and 
 kissed them, not without asking her pardon for forgetting him- 
 self in his joy.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 289 
 
 " We are saved ! " cried he ; and gave orders to Brigitte to 
 see that Mme. la Duchesse had all that she needed after travel- 
 ing post all night. He appealed to the fair Diane's spirit, by 
 making her see that it was absolutely necessary that she should 
 visit the examining magistrate before daylight, lest any one 
 should discover the secret, or so much as imagine that the 
 Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had come. 
 
 " And have I not a passport in due form? " quoth she, dis- 
 playing a sheet of paper, wherein she was described as M. le 
 Vicomte Felix de Vandenesse, master of requests, and his 
 majesty's private secretary. "And do I not play my man's 
 part well ? ' ' she added, running her fingers through her wig 
 a la Titus, and twirling her riding switch. 
 
 "Oh! Madame la Duchesse, you are an angel!" cried 
 Chesnel, with tears in his eyes. (She was destined always to 
 be an angel, even in man's attire.) " Button up your great- 
 coat, muffle yourself up to the eyes in your traveling cloak, 
 take my arm, and let us go as quickly as possible to Camusot's 
 house before anybody can meet us." 
 
 "Then am I going to see a man called Camusot?" she 
 asked. 
 
 "With a nose to match his name,"* assented old Maitre 
 Chesnel. 
 
 The old notary felt his heart dead within him, but he 
 thought it none the less necessary to humor the duchess, to 
 laugh when she laughed, and shed tears when she wept ; 
 groaning in spirit, all the same, over the feminine frivolity 
 which could find matter for a jest while setting about a matter 
 so serious. What would he not have done to save the count ? 
 While Chesnel dressed, Mme. de Maufrigneuse sipped the cup 
 of coffee and cream which Brigitte brought her, and agreed 
 with herself that provincial women cooks are superior to the 
 Parisian chefs, who despise the little details which make all 
 the difference to an epicure. Thanks to Chesnel's taste for 
 
 * Camus, flat-nosed. 
 19
 
 290 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 delicate fare, Brigitte was found prepared to set an excellent 
 meal before the duchess. 
 
 Chesnel and his charming companion set out for M. and 
 Mme. Camusot's house. 
 
 " Ah ! so there is a Madame Camusot ?" said the duchess. 
 "Then the affair may be managed." 
 
 " And so much the more readily, because the lady is visibly 
 enough tired of living among us provincials ; she comes from 
 Paris," said Chesnel. 
 
 "Then we must have no secrets from her?" 
 
 "You will judge how much to tell or to conceal," Chesnel 
 replied humbly. " I am sure that she will be greatly flattered 
 to be the Duchesse dc Maufrigneuse's hostess; you will be 
 obliged to stay in her house until nightfall, I expect, unless 
 you find it inconvenient to remain." 
 
 " Is this Madame Camusot a good-looking woman ? " asked 
 the duchess, with a coxcomb's air. 
 
 "She is certainly a bit of a queen in her own house," he 
 made reply. 
 
 "Then she is sure to meddle in court-house affairs," re- 
 turned the duchess. " Nowhere but in France, my dear 
 Monsieur Chesnel, do you see women so much wedded to 
 their husbands that they are wedded to their husbands' pro- 
 fessions, work, or business as well. In Italy, England, and 
 Germany, women make it a point of honor to leave men to 
 fight their own battles ; they shut their eyes to their husbands' 
 work as perseveringly as our French citizens' wives do all that 
 in them lies to understand the position of their joint-stock 
 partnership ; is not that what you call it in your legal lan- 
 guage ? Frenchwomen are so incredibly jealous in the con- 
 duct of their married life that they insist on knowing every- 
 thing ; and that is how, in the least difficulty, you feel the 
 wife's hand in the business ; the Frenchwoman advises, guides, 
 and warns her husband. And, truth to tell, the man is none 
 the worse off. In England, if a married man is put in prison
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 291 
 
 for debt for twenty-four hours, his wife will be jealous and 
 make a scene when he comes back." 
 
 " Here we are, without meeting a soul on the way," said 
 Chesnel. "You are the more sure of complete ascendency 
 here, Madame la Duchesse, since Madame Camusot's father is 
 one Thirion, usher of the royal cabinet." 
 
 "And the King never thought of that!" exclaimed the 
 duchess. " He thinks of nothing ! Thirion introduced us, 
 the Prince de Cadignan, Monsieur de Vandenesse, and me ! 
 We shall have it all our own way in this house. Settle every- 
 thing with Monsieur Camusot while I talk to his wife." 
 
 The maid, who was washing and dressing the children, 
 showed the visitors into the little fireless dining-room. 
 
 " Take that card to your mistress," said the duchess, lower- 
 ing her voice for the woman's ear ; " nobody else is to see it. 
 If you are discreet, child, you shall not lose by it." 
 . At the sound of a woman's voice, and the sight of the 
 handsome young man's face, the maid looked thunderstruck. 
 
 "Wake Monsieur Camusot," said Chesnel, "and tell him 
 that I am waiting to see him on important business," and she 
 departed upstairs forthwith. 
 
 A few minutes later, Mme. Camusot, in her dressing-gown, 
 sprang downstairs and brought the handsome stranger into her 
 room. She had pushed Camusot out of bed and into his study 
 with all his clothes, bidding him dress himself at once and 
 wait there. The transformation scene had been brought about 
 by a bit of pasteboard with the words MADAME LA DUCHESSE 
 DE MAUFRIGNEUSE engraved upon it. A daughter of the 
 usher of the royal cabinet took in the whole situation at once. 
 
 " Well ! " exclaimed the maidservant, left with Chesnel in 
 the dining-room, "would not any one think that a thunder- 
 bolt had dropped in among us? The master is dressing in 
 his study; you may go upstairs." 
 
 " Not a word of all this, mind," said Chesnel. 
 
 Now that he was conscious of the support of a great lady
 
 292 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 who had the King's consent (by word of mouth) to the meas- 
 ures about to be taken for rescuing the Comte d'Esgrignon, 
 he spoke with an air of authority which served his cause much 
 better with Camusot than the humility with which he would 
 otherwise have approached him. 
 
 "Sir," said he, " the words let fall last evening may have 
 surprised you, but they are serious. The house d'Esgrignon 
 counts upon you for the proper conduct of investigations 
 from which it must issue without a spot." 
 
 " I shall pass over anything in your remarks, sir, which must 
 be offensive to me personally and obnoxious to justice ; for 
 your position with regard to the d'Esgrignons excuses you up 
 to a certain point, but " 
 
 "Pardon me, sir, if I interrupt you," said Chesnel. "I 
 have just spoken aloud the things which your superiors are 
 thinking and dare not avow ; though what those things are any 
 intelligent man can guess, and you are an intelligent man. 
 Grant that the young man had acted imprudently, can you 
 suppose that the sight of a d'Esgrignon dragged into an Assize 
 Court can be gratifying to the King, the Court, or the Min- 
 istry ? Is it to the interest of the kingdom, or of the country, 
 that historic houses should fall? Is not the existence of a 
 great aristocracy, consecrated by time, a guarantee of that 
 Equality which is the catchword of the Opposition at this 
 moment ? Well and good ; now not only has there not been 
 the slightest imprudence, but we are innocent victims caught 
 in a trap." 
 
 "I am curious to know how," said the examining magis- 
 trate. 
 
 " For the last two years, the Sieur du Croisier has regularly 
 allowed Monsieur le Comte d'Esgrignon to draw upon him for 
 very large sums," said Chesnel. "We are going to produce 
 drafts for more than a hundred thousand crowns, which he 
 continually met ; the amounts being remitted by me bear 
 that well in mind either before or after the bills fell due.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 293 
 
 Monsieur le Comte d'Esgrignon is in a position to produce a 
 receipt for the sum paid by him, before this bill, this alleged 
 forgery, was drawn. Can you fail to see in that case that this 
 charge is a piece of spite and party feeling? And a charge 
 brought against the heir of a great house by one of the most 
 dangerous enemies of the throne and altar, what is it but an 
 odious slander? There has been no more forgery in this 
 affair than there has been in my office. Summon Madame du 
 Croisier, who knows nothing as yet of the charge of forgery ; 
 she will declare to you that I brought the money and paid it 
 over to her, so that in her husband's absence she might remit 
 the amount for which he has not asked her. Examine du 
 Croisier on the point ; he will tell you that he knows nothing 
 of my payment to Madame du Croisier." 
 
 "You may make such assertions as these, sir, in Monsieur 
 d'Esgrignon's salon, or in any other house where people know 
 nothing of business, and they may be believed ; but no ex- 
 amining magistrate, unless he is a driveling idiot, can imagine 
 that a woman like Madame du Croisier, so submissive as she is 
 to her husband, has a hundred thousand crowns lying in her 
 desk at this moment, without saying a word to him ; nor yet 
 that an old notary would not have advised Monsieur du Croisier 
 of the deposit on his return to town." 
 
 " The old notary, sir, had gone to Paris to put a stop to 
 the young man's extravagance." 
 
 " I have not yet examined the Comte d'Esgrignon," Cam- 
 usot began ; " his answers will point out my duty." 
 
 " Is he in close custody ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Sir," said Chesnel, seeing danger ahead, "the examina- 
 tion can be made in our interests or against them. But there 
 are two courses open to you : you can establish the fact on 
 Madame du Croisier's deposition that the amount was depos- 
 ited with her before the bill was drawn ; or you can examine 
 the unfortunate young man implicated in this affair, and he ir^
 
 294 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 his confusion may remember nothing and commit himself. 
 You will decide which is the more credible a slip of memory 
 on the part of a woman in her ignorance of business, or a 
 forgery committed by a d'Esgrignon." 
 
 "All this is beside the point," began Camusot; "the 
 question is, whether Monsieur le Comte d'Esgrignon has or 
 has not used the lower half of a letter addressed to him by du 
 Croisier as a bill of exchange." 
 
 " Eh! and so he might," a voice cried suddenly, as Madame 
 Camusot broke in, followed by the handsome stranger, "so he 
 might, when Monsieur Chesnel had advanced the money to 
 meet the bill " 
 
 She leaned over her husband. 
 
 " You will have the first vacant appointment as assistant 
 judge at Paris, you are serving the King himself in this 
 affair; I have proof of it; you will not be forgotten," she 
 said, lowering her voice for his ear. " This young man that 
 you see here is the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse ; you must 
 never have seen her, and do all that you can for the young 
 count boldly." 
 
 " Gentlemen," said Camusot, " even if the preliminary 
 examination is conducted to prove the young count's inno- 
 cence, can I answer for the view the court may take ? Mon- 
 sieur Chesnel, and you also, my sweet, know what Monsieur 
 le President wants." 
 
 "Tut, tut, tut!" said Mme. Camusot, "go yourself to 
 Monsieur Michu this morning, and tell him that the count has 
 been arrested ; you will be two against two in that case, I 
 will be bound. Michu comes from Paris, and you know that 
 he is devoted to the noblesse. Good blood cannot lie." 
 
 At that very moment Mile. Cadot's voice was heard in the 
 doorway. She had brought a note, and was waiting for an 
 answer. Camusot went out, and came back again to read the 
 note aloud :
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 295 
 
 " M. le Vice-President begs M. Camusct to sit in audience 
 to-day and for the next few days, so that there may be a 
 quorum during M. le President's absence." 
 
 " Then there is an end of the preliminary examination ! " 
 cried Mme. Camusot. " Did I not tell you, dear, that they 
 would play you some ugly trick ? The president has gone off 
 to slander you to the public prosecutor and the president of 
 the Court-Royal. You will be changed before you can make 
 the examination. Is that clear ? " 
 
 "You will stay, monsieur," said the duchess. "The 
 public prosecutor is coming, I hope, in time." 
 
 "When the public prosecutor arrives," little Mme. Camu- 
 sot said, with some heat, " he must find all over. Yes, my 
 dear, yes," she added, looking full at her amazed husband. 
 " Ah ! old hypocrite of a president, you are setting your wits 
 against us ; you shall remember it ! You have a mind to 
 help us to a dish of your own making, you shall have two 
 served up to you by your humble servant Cecile-Amelie 
 Thirion ! Poor old Blondet ! It is lucky for him that the 
 president has taken this journey to turn us out, for now that 
 great oaf of a Joseph Blondet will marry Mademoiselle Blan- 
 dureau. I will let Father Blondet have some seeds in return. 
 As for you, Camusot, go to Monsieur Michu's, while Madame 
 la Duchesse and I will go to find old Blondet. You must 
 expect to hear it said all over the town to-morrow that I took 
 a walk with a lover this morning." 
 
 Mme. Camusot took the duchess' arm, and they went 
 through the town by deserted streets to avoid any unpleasant 
 adventure on the way to the old vice-president's house. 
 Chesnel meanwhile conferred with the young count in prison; 
 Camusot had arranged a stolen interview. Cook-maids, ser- 
 vants, and the other early risers of a country town, seeing 
 Mme. Camusot and the duchess taking their way through the 
 back streets, took the young gentleman for an adorer from
 
 296 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 Paris. That evening, as Cecile-Amelie had said, the news of 
 her behavior was circulated about the town, and more than 
 one scandalous rumor was occasioned thereby. Mme. Camu- 
 sot and her supposed lover found old Blondet in his green- 
 house. He greeted his colleague's wife and her companion, 
 and gave the charming young man a keen, uneasy glance. 
 
 "I have the honor to introduce one of my husband's 
 cousins," said Mme. Camusot, bringing forward the duchess; 
 " he is one of the most distinguished horticulturists in Paris ; 
 and as he cannot spend more than the one day with us, on 
 his way back from Brittany, and has heard of your flowers 
 and plants, I have taken the liberty of coming early." 
 
 "Oh, the gentleman is a horticulturist, is he?" said old 
 Blondet. 
 
 The duchess bowed. 
 
 "This is my coffee-plant," said Blondet, "and here is a 
 tea-plant." 
 
 " What can have taken Monsieur le President away from 
 home?" put in Mme. Camusot. "I will wager that his 
 absence concerns Monsieur Camusot." 
 
 " Exactly. This, monsieur, is the queerest of all cacti," 
 he continued, producing a flower-pot which appeared to con- 
 tain a piece of mildewed rattan ; "it comes from Australia. 
 You are very young, sir, to be a horticulturist." 
 
 " Dear Monsieur Blondet, never mind your flowers," said 
 Mme. Camusot. " You are concerned, you and your hopes, 
 and your son's marriage with Mademoiselle Blandureau. You 
 are duped by the president." 
 
 "Bah ! " said old Blondet, with an incredulous air. 
 
 "Yes," retorted she. "If you cultivated people a little 
 more and your flowers a little less, you would know that the 
 dowry and the hopes that you have sown, and watered, and 
 tilled, and weeded are on the point of being gathered now by 
 cunning hands." 
 
 " Madame ! "
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 297 
 
 " Oh, nobody in the town will have the courage to fly in 
 the president's face and warn you. I, however, do not belong 
 to the town, and, thanks to this obliging young man, I shall 
 soon be going back to Paris ; so I can inform you that Ches- 
 nel's successor has made formal proposals for Mademoiselle 
 Claire Blandureau's hand on behalf of young du Ronceret, who 
 is to have fifty thousand crowns from his parents. As for 
 Fabien, he has made up his mind to receive a call to the bar, 
 so as to gain an appointment as judge." 
 
 Old Blondet dropped the flower-pot which he had brought 
 out for the duchess to see. 
 
 " Oh, my cactus ! Oh, my son ! and Mademoiselle Blan- 
 dureau ! Look here ! the cactus flower is broken to pieces." 
 
 "No," Mme. Camusot answered, laughing; "everything 
 can be put right. If you have a mind to see your son a judge 
 in another month, we will tell you how you must set to work 
 and " 
 
 "Step this way, sir, and you will see my pelargoniums, an 
 
 enchanting sight while they are in flower " Then he 
 
 added to Mme. Camusot, " Why did you speak of these mat- 
 ters while your cousin was present ? " 
 
 "All depends upon him," replied Mme. Camusot. "Your 
 son's appointment is lost for ever if vou let fall a word about 
 this young man." 
 
 "Bah!" 
 
 ' The young man is a flower " 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 "He is the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, sent here by his 
 majesty to save young d'Esgrignon, whom they arrested yes- 
 terday on a charge of forgery brought against him by du 
 Croisier. Madame la Duchesse has authority from the keeper 
 of the seals ; he will ratify any promises that she makes to 
 each of " 
 
 " My cactus is all right ! " exclaimed Blondet, peering at 
 his precious plant. " Go on ; I am listening."
 
 298 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "Take counsel with Camusot and Michu to hush up the 
 affair as soon as possible, and your son will get the appoint- 
 ment. It will come in time enough to baffle du Ronceret's 
 underhand dealings with the Blandureaus. Your son will be 
 something better than assistant judge ; he will have Monsieur 
 Camusot's post within the year. The public prosecutor will 
 be here to-day. Monsieur Sauvager will be obliged to resign, 
 I expect, after his conduct in this affair. At the court my 
 husband will show you documents which completely exonerate 
 the count and prove that the forgery was a trap of du Croisicr's 
 own setting." 
 
 Old Blondet went into the Olympic circus where his six 
 thousand pelargoniums stood, and made his bow to the 
 duchesse. 
 
 "Monsieur," said he, "if your wishes do not exceed the 
 law, this thing may be done." 
 
 "Monsieur," returned the duchesse, "send in your resig- 
 nation to Monsieur Chesnel to-morrow, and I will promise 
 you that your son shall be appointed within the week ; but 
 you must not resign until you have had confirmation of my 
 promise from the public prosecutor. You men of law will 
 come to a better understanding among yourselves. Only let 
 him know that the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse has pledged her 
 word to you. And not a word as to my journey hither," she 
 added. 
 
 The old judge kissed her hand and began recklessly to 
 gather his best flowers for her. 
 
 "Can you think of it? Give them to madame," said the 
 duchesse. "A young man would not have flowers about him 
 when he had a pretty woman on his arm." 
 
 " Before you go down to the court," added Mme. Camusot, 
 " ask Chesnel's successor about those proposals that he made 
 in the name of Monsieur and Madame du Ronceret." 
 
 Old Blondet, quite overcome by this revelation of the 
 president's duplicity, stood planted on his feet by the wicket-
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 299 
 
 gate, looking after the two women as they hurried away 
 through by-streets home again. The edifice raised so pain- 
 fully during ten years for his beloved son was crumbling 
 visibly before his eyes. Was it possible ? He suspected some 
 trick, and hurried away to Chesnel's successor. 
 
 At half-past nine, before the court was sitting, Vice-Presi- 
 dent Blondet, Camusot, and Michu met with remarkable 
 punctuality in the council chamber. Blondet locked the door 
 with some precautions when Camusot and Michu came in 
 together. 
 
 "Well, M'sieur Vice-President, " began Michu, "Monsieur 
 Sauvager, without consulting the public prosecutor, has issued 
 a warrant for the apprehension of one Comte d'Esgrignon, in 
 order- to serve a grudge borne against him by one du Croisier, 
 an enemy of the King's government. It is a regular topsy- 
 turvy affair. The president, for his part, goes away, and 
 thereby puts a stop to the preliminary examination ! And we 
 know nothing of the matter. Do they, by any chance, mean 
 to force our hand ? " 
 
 " This is the first word I have heard of it," said the vice- 
 president. He was furious with the president for stealing a 
 march on him with the Blandureaus. Chesnel's successor, the 
 du Roncerets' man, had just fallen into a snare set by the old 
 judge ; the truth was out, he knew the secret. 
 
 "It is lucky that we spoke to you about that matter, my 
 dear master," said Camusot, " or you might have given up all 
 hope of seating your son on the bench or of marrying him to 
 Mademoiselle Blandureau." 
 
 " But it is no question of my son, nor of his marriage," said 
 the vice-president ; " we are talking of young Comte d'Esgrig- 
 non. Is he or is he not guilty? " 
 
 "It seems that Chesnel deposited the amount to meet the 
 bill with Madame du Croisier," said Michu, "and a crime 
 has been made of a mere irregularity. According to the 
 charge, the count made use of the lower half of a letter bear-
 
 300 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 ing du Croisier's signature as a draft which he cashed at the 
 Kellers'." 
 
 "An imprudent thing to do," was Camusot's comment. 
 
 " But why is du Croisier proceeding against him if the 
 amount was paid in beforehand?" asked Vice-President 
 Blondet. 
 
 " He does not know that the money was deposited with his 
 wife; or he pretends that he does not know," said Camusot. 
 
 " It is a piece of provincial spite," said Michu. 
 
 " Still it looks like a forgery to me," said old Blondet. 
 
 No passion could obscure judicial clear-sightedness in him. 
 
 "Do you think so?" returned Camusot. "But, at the 
 outset, supposing that the count had no business to draw upon 
 du Croisier, there would still be no forgery of the signature ; 
 and the count believed that he had a right to draw on Croisier 
 when Chesnel advised him that the money had been placed to 
 his credit." 
 
 "Well, then, where is the forgery?" asked Blondet. " It 
 is the intent to defraud which constitutes forgery in a civil 
 action." 
 
 "Oh, it is clear, if you take du Croisier's version for truth, 
 that the signature was diverted from its purpose to obtain a 
 sum of money in spite of du Croisier's contrary injunction to 
 his bankers," Camusot answered. 
 
 "Gentlemen," said Blondet, "this seems to me to be a 
 mere trifle, a quibble. Suppose you had the money, I ought 
 perhaps to have waited until I had your authorization ; but I, 
 Comte d'Esgrignon, was pressed for money, so I Come, 
 come, your prosecution is a piece of revengeful spite. For- 
 gery is defined by the law as an attempt to obtain any advan- 
 tage which rightfully belongs to another. There is no forgery 
 here, according to the letter of the Roman law, nor according 
 to the spirit of modern jurisprudence (always from the point 
 of view of a civil action, for we are not here concerned with 
 the falsification of public or authentic documents). Between
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 301 
 
 private individuals the essence of a forgery is the intent to 
 defraud ; where is it in this case ? In what times are we liv- 
 ing, gentlemen ? Here is the president going away to balk a 
 preliminary examination which ought to be over by this time ! 
 Until to-day I did not know Monsieur le President, but he shall 
 have the benefit of arrears ; from this time forth he' shall draft 
 his decisions himself. You must set about this affair with 
 all possible speed, Monsieur Camusot." 
 
 "Yes," said Michu. "In my opinion, instead of letting 
 the young man out on bail, we ought to pull him out of this 
 mess at once. Everything turns on the examination of du 
 Croisier and his wife. You might summon them to appear 
 while the court is sitting, Monsieur Camusot ; take down their 
 depositions before four o'clock, send in your report to-night, 
 and we will give our decision in the morning before the court 
 sits." 
 
 " We will settle what course to pursue while the barristers are 
 pleading," said Vice-President Blondet, addressing Camusot. 
 
 And with that the three judges put on their robes and went 
 into court. 
 
 At noon Mile. Armande and the bishop reached the Hotel 
 d'Esgrignon ; Chesnel and M. Couturier were there to meet 
 them. There was a sufficiently short conference between the 
 prelate and Mme. du Croisier's director, and the latter set 
 out at once to visit his charge. 
 
 At eleven o'clock that morning du Croisier received a sum- 
 mons to appear in the examining magistrate's office between 
 one and two in the afternoon. Thither he betook himself, 
 consumed by well-founded suspicions. It was impossible that 
 the president should have foreseen the arrival of the Duchesse 
 de Maufrigneuse upon the scene, the return of the public prose- 
 cutor, and the hasty confabulation of his learned brethren ; so 
 he had omitted to trace out a plan for du Croisier's guidance 
 in the event of the preliminary examination taking place. 
 Neither of the pair imagined that the proceedings would be
 
 302 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 hurried on in this way. Du Croisier obeyed the summons at 
 once ; he wanted to know how M. Camusot was disposed to 
 act. So he was compelled to answer the questions put to him. 
 Camusot addressed him in summary fashion with the six fol- 
 lowing inquiries: 
 
 "Was the signature on the bill alleged to be a forgery in 
 your handwriting? Had you previously done business with 
 Monsieur le Comte d'Esgrignon ? Was not Monsieur le 
 Comte d'Esgrignon in the habit of drawing upon you, with 
 or without advice? Did you not write a letter authorizing 
 Monsieur d'Esgrignon to rely upon you at anytime? Had 
 not Chesnel squared the account not once, but many times 
 already? Were you not away from home when this took 
 place?" 
 
 All these questions the banker answered in the affirmative. 
 In spite of wordy explanations, the magistrate always brought 
 him back to a "Yes" or "No." When the questions and 
 answers had been alike resumed in the proc'es-verbal, the exam- 
 ining magistrate brought out a final thunderbolt. 
 
 "Was du Croisier aware that the money destined to meet 
 the bill had been deposited with him, du Croisier, according 
 to Chesnel's declaration, and a letter of advice sent by the 
 said Chesnel to the Comte d'Esgrignon, five days before the 
 date of the bill?" 
 
 That last question frightened du Croisier. He asked what 
 was meant by it, and whether he was supposed to be the 
 defendant and M. le Comte d'Esgrignon the plaintiff? He 
 called the magistrate's attention to the fact that if the money 
 had been deposited with him, there was no ground for the 
 action. 
 
 "Justice is seeking information," said the magistrate, as he 
 dismissed the witness, but not before he had taken down du 
 .Croisier's last observation. 
 
 "But the money, sir " 
 
 " The money is at your house."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 303 
 
 Chesnel, likewise summoned, came forward to explain the 
 matter. The truth of his assertions was borne out by Mme. 
 du Croisier's deposition. The count had already been exam- 
 ined. Prompted by Chesnel, he produced du Croisier's first 
 letter, in which he begged the count to draw upon him with- 
 out the insulting formality of depositing the amount before- 
 hand. The Comte d'Esgrignon next brought out a letter in 
 Chesnel's handwriting, by which the notary advised him of 
 the deposit of a hundred thousand crowns with M. du Croisier. 
 With such primary facts as these to bring forward as evidence, 
 the young count's innocence was bound to emerge triumph- 
 antly from a court of law. 
 
 Du Croisier went home from the court, his face white with 
 rage, and the foam of repressed fury on his lips. His wife 
 was sitting by the fireside in the drawing-room at work upon 
 a pair of slippers for him. She trembled when she looked 
 into his face, but her mind was made up. 
 
 "Madame," he stammered out, "what deposition is this 
 that you made before the magistrate ? You have dishonored, 
 ruined, and betrayed me ! " 
 
 "I have saved you, monsieur," answered she. "If some 
 day you will have the honor of connecting yourself with the 
 d'Esgrignons by marrying your niece to the count, it will be 
 entirely owing to my conduct to-day." 
 
 "A miracle!" cried he. "Balaam's ass has spoken. 
 Nothing will astonish me after this. And where are the hun- 
 dred thousand crowns which (so Monsieur Camusot tells me) 
 are here in my house? " 
 
 "Here they are," said she, pulling out a bundle of bank- 
 notes from beneath the cushions of her settee. "I have not 
 committed mortal sin by declaring that Monsieur Chesnel 
 gave them into my keeping." 
 
 " While I was away? " 
 
 "You were not here." 
 
 "Will you swear that to me on your salvation?"
 
 304 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "I swear it," she said composedly. 
 
 "Then why did you say nothing to me about it?" de- 
 manded he. 
 
 "I was wrong there," said his wife; "but my mistake was 
 all for your good. Your niece will be Marquise d'Esgrignon 
 some of these days, and you will perhaps be a deputy, if you 
 behave well in this deplorable business. You have gone too 
 far; you must find out how to get back again." 
 
 Du Croisier, under stress of painful agitation, strode up and 
 down his drawing-room ; while his wife, in no less agitation, 
 awaited the result of this exercise. Du Croisier at length 
 rang the bell. 
 
 " I am not at home to any one to-night," he said, when the 
 man appeared; "shut the gates; and if any one calls, tell 
 them that your mistress and I have gone into the country. 
 We shall start directly after dinner, and dinner must be half 
 an hour earlier than usual." 
 
 The great news was discussed that evening in every draw- 
 ing-room; little storekeepers, working people, beggars, the 
 noblesse, the merchant class the whole town, in short, was 
 talking of the Comte d'Esgrignon's arrest on a charge of 
 forgery. The Comte d'Esgrignon would be tried in the As- 
 size Court ; he would be condemned and branded. Most of 
 those who cared for the honor of the family denied the fact. 
 At nightfall Chesnel went to Mme. Camusot and escorted the 
 stranger to the Hotel d'Esgrignon. Poor Mile. Armande was 
 expecting him ; she led the fair duchess to her own room, 
 which she had given up to her, for his lordship the bishop 
 occupied Victurnien's chamber ; and, left alone with her guest, 
 the noble woman glanced at the duchess with most piteous 
 eyes. 
 
 "You owed help, indeed, madame, to the poor boy who 
 ruined himself for your sake," she said ; "the boy to whom 
 we are all of us sacrificing ourselves."
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 305 
 
 The duchess had already made a woman's survey of Mile. 
 d'Esgrignon's room; the cold, bare, comfortless chamber, 
 that might have been a nun's cell, was like a picture of the 
 life of the heroic woman before her. The duchess saw it all 
 past, present, and future with rising emotion, felt the in- 
 congruity of her presence, and could not keep back the falling 
 tears that made answer for her. 
 
 But in Mile. Armande the Christian overcame Victurnien's 
 aunt. "Ah, I was wrong; forgive me, Madame la Duchesse; 
 you did not know how poor we were, and my nephew was in- 
 capable of the admission. And beside, now that I see you, I 
 can understand all even the crime ! " 
 
 And Mile. Armande, withered and thin and white, but 
 beautiful as those tall, austere slender figures which German 
 art alone can paint, had tears, too, in her eyes. 
 
 " Do not fear, dear angel? " the duchess said at last ; " he 
 is safe." 
 
 " Yes, but honor ? and his career? Chesnel told me ; the 
 King knows the truth." 
 
 "We will think of a way of repairing the evil," said the 
 duchess. 
 
 Mile. Armande went downstairs to the salon, and found the 
 Collection of Antiquities complete to a man. Every one of 
 them had come, partly to do honor to the bishop, partly to 
 rally round the marquis ; but Chesnel, posted in the ante- 
 chamber, warned each new arrival to say no word of the affair, 
 that the aged marquis might never know that such a thing had 
 been. The loyal Frank was quite capable of killing his son 
 or du Croisier ; for either the one or the other must have been 
 guilty of death in his eyes. It chanced, strangely enough, 
 that he talked more of Victurnien than usual ; he was glad 
 that his son had gone back to Paris. The King would give 
 Victurnien a place before very long ; the King was interesting 
 himself at last in the d'Esgrignons. And his friends, their 
 hearts dead within them, praised Victurnien's conduct to the 
 20
 
 306 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 skies. Mile. Armande prepared the way for her nephew's 
 sudden appearance among them by remarking to her brother 
 that Victurnien would be sure to come to see them, and that 
 he must be even then on his way. 
 
 "Bah!" said the marquis, standing with his back to the 
 hearth, "if he is doing well where he is, he ought to stay 
 there, and not to be thinking of the joy it would give his old 
 father to see him again. The King's service has the first 
 claim." 
 
 Scarcely one of those present heard the words without a 
 shudder. Justice might give over a d'Esgrignon to the execu- 
 tioner's branding-iron. There was a dreadful pause. The 
 old Marquise de Casteran could not keep back a tear that stole 
 down over her rouge, and turned her half-palsied head away 
 to hide it. 
 
 Next day at noon, in the sunny weather, a whole excited 
 population was dispersed in groups along the high street, which 
 ran through the heart of the town, and nothing was talked of 
 but the great affair. Was the count in prison or was he not ? 
 All at once the Comte d'Esgrignon's well-known tilbury was 
 seen driving down the Rue Saint-Blaise ; it had evidently come 
 from the prefecture, the count himself was on the box-seat, 
 and by his side sat a charming young man, whom nobody 
 recognized. The pair were laughing and talking and in 
 great spirits. They wore Bengal roses in their button-holes. 
 Altogether, it was a theatrical surprise which words would 
 fail to describe. 
 
 At ten o'clock the court had decided to dismiss the charge, 
 stating their very sufficient reasons for setting the count at 
 liberty, in a document which contained a thunderbolt for du 
 Croisier, in the shape of an " Inasmuch " that gave the count 
 the right to institute proceedings for libel. Old Chesnel was 
 walking up the Grande Rue, as if by accident, telling all who 
 cared to hear him that du Croisier had set the most shameful 
 snares for the d'Esgrignons' honor, and that it was entirely
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 307 
 
 owing to the forbearance and magnanimity of the family that 
 he was not prosecuted for slander. 
 
 On the evening of that famous day, after the Marquis d'Es- 
 grignon had gone to bed, the count, Mile. Armande, and the 
 chevalier were left with the handsome young page, now about 
 to return to Paris. The charming cavalier's sex could not be 
 hidden from the chevalier, and he alone, beside the three offi- 
 cials and Mme. Camusot, knew that the duchess had been 
 among them. 
 
 " The house is saved," began Chesnel, " but after this shock 
 it will take a hundred years to rise again. The debts must be 
 paid now ; you must marry an heiress, Monsieur le Comte, 
 there is nothing else left for you to do." 
 
 " And take her where you can find her," said the duchess. 
 
 "A second mesalliance /" exclaimed Mile. Armande. 
 
 The duchess began to laugh. 
 
 "It is better to marry than to die," said she. As she 
 spoke she drew from her waistcoat pocket a tiny crystal phial 
 that came from the court apothecary. 
 
 Mile. Armande shrank away in horror. Old Chesnel took 
 the fair Maufrigneuse's hand, and kissed it without permission. 
 
 "Are you all out of your minds here?" continued the 
 duchess. " Do you really expect to live in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury when the rest of the world has reached the nineteenth ? 
 My dear children, there is no noblesse nowadays ; there is no 
 aristocracy left ! Napoleon's Code Civil made an end of the 
 parchments, exactly as cannon made an end of feudal castles. 
 When you have some money, you will be very much more of 
 nobles than you are now. Marry anybody you please, Vic- 
 turnien, you will raise your wife to your rank ; that is the 
 most substantial privilege left to the French noblesse. Did 
 not Monsieur de Talleyrand marry Madame Grandt without 
 compromising his position ? Remember that Louis XIV. took 
 the Widow Scarron for his wife."
 
 308 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "He did not marry her for her money," interposed Mile. 
 Armande. 
 
 " If the Comtesse d'Esgrignon were one du Croisier's 
 niece, for instance, would you receive her?" asked Chesnel. 
 
 "Perhaps," replied the duchess; "but the King, beyond 
 all doubt, would be very glad to see her. So you do not 
 know what is going on in the world ? " continued she, seeing 
 the amazement in their faces. "Victurnien has been in 
 Paris ; he knows how things go there. We had more influ- 
 ence under Napoleon. Marry Mademoiselle Duval, Victur- 
 nien; she will be just as much Marquise d.'Esgrignon as I am 
 Duchesse de Maufrigneuse." 
 
 " All is lost even honor ! " said the chevalier, with a wave 
 of the hand. 
 
 " Farewell, Victurnien," said the duchess, kissing her lover 
 on the forehead; "we shall not see each other again. Live 
 on your lands ; that is the best thing for you to do ; the air 
 of Paris is not at all good for you." 
 
 " Diane ! " the young count cried despairingly. 
 
 "Monsieur, you forget yourself strangely," the duchess 
 retorted coolly, as she laid aside her role of man and mistress, 
 and became not merely an angel again, but a duchess, and not 
 only a duchess, but Moliere's Celimene. 
 
 The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse made a stately bow to these 
 four personages, and drew from the chevalier his last tear of 
 admiration at the service of le beau sexe. 
 
 " How like she is to the Princess Goritza ! " he exclaimed 
 in a low voice. 
 
 Diane had disappeared. The crack of the postillion's whip 
 told Victurnien that the fair romance of his first love was 
 over. While the peril lasted, Diane could still see her lover 
 in the young count ; but out of danger, she despised him for 
 the weakling that he was. 
 
 Six months afterward, Camusot received the appointment
 
 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 309 
 
 of assistant judge at Paris, and later he became an examining 
 magistrate. Goodman Blondet was made a councilor to the 
 Court-Royal ; he held the post just long enough to secure a 
 retiring pension, and then went back to live in his pretty 
 little house. Joseph Blondet sat in his father's seat at the 
 court till the end of his days; there was not the faintest 
 chance of promotion for him, but he became Mile. Blan- 
 dureau's husband ; and she, no doubt, is leading to-day, in 
 the little flower-covered brick house, as dull a life as any carp 
 in a marble basin. Michu and Camusot also received the 
 cross of the Legion of Honor, while Blondet became an 
 officer. As for M. Sauvager, deputy public prosecutor, he 
 was sent to Corsica, to du Croisier's great relief; he had 
 decidedly no mind to bestow his niece upon that functionary. 
 
 Du Croisier himself, urged by President du Ronceret, ap- 
 pealed from the finding of the Tribunal to the Court-Royal, 
 and lost his cause. The Liberals throughout the department 
 held that little d'Esgrignon was guilty; while the Royalists, 
 on the other hand, told frightful stories of plots woven by 
 "that abominable du Croisier " to compass his revenge. A 
 duel was fought indeed ; the hazard of arms favored du 
 Croisier, the young count was dangerously wounded, and his 
 antagonist maintained his words. This affair embittered the 
 strife between the two parties; the Liberals brought it for- 
 ward on all occasions. Meanwhile du Croisier never coufd 
 carry his election, and saw no hope of marrying his niece to 
 the count, especially after the duel. 
 
 A month after the decision of the Tribunal was confirmed 
 in the Court-Royal, Chesnel died, exhausted by the dreadful 
 strain, which had weakened and shaken him mentally and 
 physically. He died in the hour of victory, like some old 
 faithful hound that has brought the boar to bay, and gets his 
 death on the tusks. He died as happily as might be, seeing 
 that he left the great House all but ruined, and the heir in 
 penury, bored to death by an idle life, and without a hope of
 
 310 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 establishing himself. That bitter thought and his own ex- 
 haustion, no doubt, hastened the old man's end. One great 
 comfort came to him as he lay amid the wreck of so many 
 hopes, sinking under the burden of so many cares the old 
 marquis, at his sister's entreaty, gave him back all the old 
 friendship. The great lord came to the little house in the 
 Rue du Bercail, and sat by his old servant's bedside, all un- 
 aware how much that servant had done and sacrificed for him. 
 Chesnel sat upright and repeated Simeon's cry nunc dimittis. 
 The marquis allowed them to bury Chesnel in the castle 
 chapel ; they laid him crosswise at the foot of the tomb which 
 was waiting for the marquis himself, the last, in a sense, of 
 the d'Esgrignons. 
 
 And so died one of the last representatives of that great 
 and beautiful thing, Service ; giving to that often discredited 
 word its original meaning, the relation between feudal lord 
 and servitor. That relation, only to be found in some out-of- 
 the-way province or among a few old servants of the King, did 
 honor alike to a noblesse that could call forth such affection, 
 and to a bourgeoisie that could conceive it. Such noble and 
 magnificent devotion is no longer possible among us. Noble 
 houses have no servitors left ; even as France has no longer a 
 King, nor an hereditary peerage, nor lands that are bound 
 irrevocably to a historic house, that the glorious names of a 
 nation may be perpetuated. Chesnel was not merely one of 
 the obscure great men of private life ; he was something more 
 he was a great fact. In his sustained self-devotion is there 
 not something indefinably solemn and sublime, something 
 that rises above the one beneficent deed, or the heroic height 
 which is reached by a moment's supreme effort ? Chesnel's 
 virtues belong essentially to the classes which stand between 
 the poverty of the people on the one hand, and the greatness 
 of the aristocracy on the other ; for these can combine homely 
 burgher virtues with the heroic ideals of the noble, enlighten- 
 ing both by a solid education.
 
 THE JEALOUSIES Of A COUNTRY TOWN. 311 
 
 Victurnien was not well looked upon at Court ; there was 
 no more chance of a great match for him, nor a place. His 
 majesty steadily refused to raise the d'Esgrignons to the peer- 
 age, the one royal favor which could rescue Victurnien from 
 his wretched position. It was impossible that he should marry 
 a bourgeoise heiress in his father's lifetime, so he was bound 
 to live on shabbily under the paternal roof with memories of 
 his two years of splendor in Paris, and the lost love of a great 
 lady to bear him company. He grew moody and depressed, 
 vegetating at home with a careworn aunt and a half broken- 
 hearted father, who attributed his son's condition to a wasting 
 malady. Chesnel was no longer there. 
 
 The marquis died in 1830. The great d'Esgrignon, with a 
 following of all the less infirm noblesse from the Collection 
 of Antiquities, went to wait upon Charles X. at Nonancourt ; 
 he paid his respects to his sovereign, and swelled the meagre 
 train of the fallen king. It was an act of courage which seems 
 simple enough to-day, but, in that time of enthusiastic revolt, 
 it was heroism. 
 
 "The Gaul has conquered!" These were the marquis' 
 last words. 
 
 By that time du Croisier's victory was complete. The new 
 Marquis d'Esgrignon accepted Mile. Duval as his wife a week 
 after his old father's death. His bride brought him three 
 millions of francs, for du Croisier and his wife settled the 
 reversion of their fortunes upon her in the marriage-contract. 
 Du Croisier took occasion to say during the ceremony that 
 the d'Esgrignon family was the most honorable of all the 
 ancient houses in France. 
 
 Some day the present Marquis d'Esgrignon will have an 
 income of more than a hundred thousand crowns. You may 
 see him in Paris, for he comes to town every winter and leads 
 a jolly bachelor life, while he treats his wife with something 
 more than the indifference of the grand seigneur of olden 
 times; he takes no thought whatever for her.
 
 312 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN. 
 
 "As for Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon," said Emile Blondet, 
 to whom all the detail of the story is due, " if she is no longer 
 like the divinely fair woman whom I saw by glimpses in my 
 childhood, she is decidedly, at the age of sixty-seven, the most 
 pathetic and interesting figure in the Collection of Antiquities. 
 She queens it among them still. I saw her when I made my 
 last journey to my native place in search of the necessary 
 papers for my marriage. When my father knew whom it was 
 that I had married, he was struck dumb with amazement ; he 
 had not a word to say until I told him that I was a prefect. 
 
 " 'You were born to it,' he said, with a smile. 
 
 "As I took a walk round the town, I met Mademoiselle 
 Armande. She looked taller than ever. I looked at her, and 
 thought of Marius among the ruins of Carthage. Had she 
 not outlived her creed, and the beliefs that had been de- 
 stroyed? She is a sad and silent woman, with nothing of her 
 old beauty left except the eyes, that shine with an unearthly 
 light. I watched her on her way to mass, with her book in 
 her hand, and could not help thinking that she prayed God 
 to take her out of the world." 
 
 LES JARDIES, July, 1837.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT 
 
 (Lc Contrat de Manage). 
 
 TRANSLATED BY CLARA BELL. 
 
 To G. Rossini. 
 
 MONSIEUR DE MANERVILLE the elder was a worthy gentle- 
 man of Normandy, well known to the Marechal de Richelieu, 
 who arranged his marriage with one of the richest heiresses of 
 Bordeaux at the time when the old duke held court in that 
 city as governor of Guienne. The Norman gentleman sold 
 the lands he owned in Bessin, and established himself as 
 a Gascon, tempted to this step by the beauty of the estate 
 of Lanstrac, a delightful residence belonging to his wife. 
 Toward the end of Louis XV.'s reign, he purchased the post 
 of major of the King's bodyguard, and lived till 1813, having 
 happily survived the Revolution. 
 
 This was how: In the winter of 1790 he made a voyage to 
 Martinique, where his wife had property, leaving the manage- 
 ment of his estates in Gascony to a worthy notary's clerk 
 named Mathias, who had some taint of the new ideas. On 
 his return, the Comte de Manerville found his possessions safe 
 and profitably managed. This shrewdness was the fruit of a 
 graft of the Gascon on the Norman. 
 
 Madame de Manerville died in 1810. Her husband, having 
 learned by the dissipations of his youth the importance of 
 money, and, like many old men, ascribing to it a greater 
 power in life than it possesses, became progressively thrifty, 
 avaricious, and mean. Forgetting that stingy fathers make 
 spendthrift sons, he allowed scarcely anything to his son, 
 though he was an only child. 
 
 Paul de Manerville came home from college at Vendome 
 
 (313)
 
 314 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 toward the end of 1810, and for three years lived under his 
 father's rule. The tyranny exercised by the old man of sixty- 
 nine over his sole heir could not fail to affect a heart and 
 character as yet unformed. Though he did not lack the 
 physical courage which would seem to be in the air of Gas- 
 cony, Paul dared not contend with his father, and lost the 
 elasticity of resistance that gives rise to moral courage. His 
 suppressed feelings were pent at the bottom of his heart, where 
 he kept them long in reserve without daring to express them ; 
 thus, at a later time, when he felt that they were not in accord- 
 ance with the maxims of the world, though he could think 
 rightly, he could act wrongly. He would have fought at a 
 word, while he quaked at the thought of sending away a ser- 
 vant ; for his shyness found a field in any struggle which de- 
 manded persistent determination. 
 
 He was a prisoner in his father's old house, for he had not 
 money enough to disport himself with the young men of the 
 town ; he envied them their amusements, but could not share 
 them. The old gentleman took him out every evening in an 
 antique vehicle, drawn by a pair of shabbily harnessed horses, 
 attended by two antique and shabbily dressed menservants, 
 into the society of a Royalist clique, consisting of the waifs of 
 the nobility of the old Parlement and of the sword. These 
 two bodies of magnates, uniting after the Revolution to resist 
 Imperial influence, had by degrees become an aristocracy of 
 landowners. Overpowered by the wealth and the shifting 
 fortunes of a great seaport, this " Saint-Germain " suburb of 
 Bordeaux responded with scorn to the magnificence of com- 
 merce and of the civil and military authorities. 
 
 His so monotonous existence might have killed the young 
 man, but that his father's death delivered him from this 
 tyranny at the time when it was becoming unendurable. Paul 
 found that his father's avarice had accumulated a considerable 
 fortune, and left him an estate in the most splendid possible 
 order; but he had a horror of Bordeaux, and no love for
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 315 
 
 Lanstrac, where his father had always spent the summer and 
 kept him out shooting from morning till night. 
 
 As soon as the legal business was completed, the young 
 heir, eager for pleasure, invested his capital in securities, left 
 the management of the land to old Mathias, his father's agent, 
 and spent six years away from Bordeaux. Attache at first to 
 the embassy at Naples, he subsequently went as secretary to 
 Madrid and London, thus making the tour of Europe. After 
 gaining knowledge of the world, and dissipating a great many 
 illusions, after spending all the money his father had saved, a 
 moment came when Paul, to continue this dashing existence, 
 had to draw on the revenues from his estate which the notary 
 had saved for him. So, at this critical moment, struck by. 
 one of those impulses which are regarded as wisdom, he re- 
 solved to leave Paris, to return to Bordeaux, to manage his 
 own affairs, to lead the life of a country gentleman, settling 
 at Lanstrac and improving his estate to marry, and one day 
 to be elected deputy. 
 
 Paul was a count ; titles were recovering their value in the 
 matrimonial market; he could, and ought to marry well. 
 Though many women wish to marry for a title, a great many 
 more look for a husband who has an intimate acquaintance 
 with life. And Paul at a cost of seven hundred thousand 
 francs, consumed in six years had acquired this official 
 knowledge, a qualification which cannot be sold, and which 
 is worth more than a stockbroker's license ; which, indeed, 
 demands long studies, an apprenticeship, examinations, ac- 
 quaintances, friends, and enemies, a certain elegance of appear- 
 ance, good manners, and a handsome, tripping name ; which 
 brings with it success with women, duels, betting at races, 
 many disappointments, dull hours, tiresome tasks, and indi- 
 gestible pleasures. 
 
 In spite of lavish outlay, he had never been the fashion. In 
 the burlesque army of the gay world, the man who is the 
 fashion is the field-marshal of the forces, the merely elegant
 
 316 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 man is the lieutenant-general. Still, Paul enjoyed his little 
 reputation for elegance, and lived up to it. His servants 
 were well drilled, his carriages were approved, his suppers had 
 some success, and his bachelor's den was one of the seven or 
 eight which were a match in luxury for the finest houses in 
 Paris. But he had not broken a woman's heart ; he played 
 without losing, nor had he extraordinarily brilliant luck ; he 
 was too honest to be false to any one, even a girl of the streets; 
 he did not leave his love-letters about, nor keep a boxful for 
 his friends to dip into while he was shaving or putting a collar 
 on ; but, not wishing to damage his estates in Guienne, he 
 had not the audacity that prompts a young man into startling 
 speculations and attracts all eyes to watch him ; he borrowed 
 of no one, and was so wrong-headed as to lend to friends, who 
 cut him and never mentioned him again, either for good or 
 evil. He seemed to have worked out the sum of his extrava- 
 gance. The secret of his character lay in his father's tyranny, 
 which had made him a sort of social hybrid. 
 
 One morning Paul de Manerville said to a friend of his 
 named de Marsay, who has since become famous 
 
 " My dear fellow, life has a meaning." 
 
 "You must be seven-and-twenty before you understand it," 
 said de Marsay, laughing at him. 
 
 "Yes, I am seven-and-twenty, and for that very reason I 
 mean to go and live at Lanstrac as a country gentleman. At 
 Bordeaux I shall have my father's old house, whither I shall 
 send my Paris furniture, and I shall spend three months of 
 every winter here in my rooms, which I shall not give up." 
 
 "And you will marry?" 
 
 "I shall marry." 
 
 "I am your friend, my worthy Paul, as you know," said 
 de Marsay, after a moment's silence; " well, be a good father 
 and a good husband and ridiculous for the rest of your days. 
 If you could be happy being ridiculous, the matter would de-
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT, 317 
 
 serve consideration ; but you would not be happy. You have 
 not a strong enough hand to rule a household. I do you 
 every justice : you are a perfect horseman ; no one holds the 
 ribbons better, makes a horse plunge, or keeps his seat more 
 immovably. But, my dear boy, the paces of matrimony are 
 quite another thing. Why, I can see you led at a round pace 
 by Madame la Comtesse de Manerville, galloping, more often 
 than not much against your will, and presently thrown thrown 
 into the ditch, and left there with both legs broken ! 
 
 " Listen to me. You have still forty-odd thousand francs 
 a year in land in the Department of the Gironde. Take your 
 horses and your servants, and furnish your house in Bordeaux; 
 you will be King in Bordeaux, you will promulgate there the 
 decrees we pronounce in Paris, you will be the corresponding 
 agent of our follies. Well and good. Commit follies in your 
 provincial capital nay, even absurdities. So much the bet- 
 ter ; they may make you famous. But do not marry. 
 
 ' ' Who are the men who marry nowadays ? Tradesmen, to 
 increase their capital or to have a second hand at the plough ; 
 peasants, who, by having large families, manufacture their 
 own laborers ; stockbrokers or notaries, to get money to pay 
 for their licenses ; the miserable kings, to perpetuate their 
 miserable dynasties. We alone are free from the pack-saddle ; 
 why insist on loading yourself? In short, what do you marry 
 for ? You must account for such a step to your best friend. 
 
 " In the first place, if you should find an heiress as rich as 
 yourself, eighty thousand francs a year for two are not the 
 same thing as forty thousand for one, because you very soon 
 are three and four if you have a child. Do you really feel 
 any affection for the foolish propagation of Manervilles, who 
 will never give you anything but trouble ? Do you not know 
 what the duties are of a father and mother ? Marriage, my 
 dear Paul, is the most foolish of social sacrifices ; our children 
 alone profit by it, and even they do not know its cost till their 
 horses are cropping the weeds that grow over our graves.
 
 318 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " Do you, for instance, regret your father, the tyrant who 
 wrecked your young life ? How do you propose to make your 
 children love you? Your plans for their education, your care 
 for their advantage, your severity, however necessary, will 
 alienate their affection. Children love a lavish or weak father, 
 but later they will despise him. You are stranded between 
 aversion and contempt. You cannot be a good father for the 
 wishing. 
 
 " Look round on our friends, and name one you would like 
 for a son. We have known some who were a disgrace to 
 their name. Children, my dear boy, are a commodity very 
 difficult to keep sweet. Yours will be angels ! No doubt ! 
 
 "But have you ever measured the gulf that separates the 
 life of a single man from that of a married one? Listen. 
 As you are, you can say : ' I will never be ridiculous beyond 
 a certain point ; the public shall never think of me excepting 
 as I choose that it should think.' Married, you will fall into 
 depths of the ridiculous ! Unmarried, you make your own 
 happiness ; you want it to-day, you do without it to-morrow : 
 married, you take it as it comes, and the day you seek it you 
 have to do without it. Married, you are an ass ; you calcu- 
 late marriage-portions, you talk about public and religious 
 morality, you look upon young men as immoral and danger- 
 ous ; in short, you are socially Academical. I have nothing 
 but pity for you ! An old bachelor, whose relations are wait- 
 ing for his money, and who struggles with his latest breath to 
 make an old nurse give him something to drink, is in paradise 
 compared with a married man. I say nothing of all the 
 annoying, irritating, provoking, aggravating, stultifying, wor- 
 rying things that may come to hypnotize and paralyze your 
 mind and tyrannize over your life, in the course of the petty 
 warfare of two human beings always together, united for ever, 
 who have bound themselves, vainly believing that they will 
 agree; no, that would be to repeat Boileau's ' Satire,' and we 
 know it by heart.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 319 
 
 " I would forgive you the absurd notion if you would 
 promise to marry like a grandee, to settle your fortune on your 
 eldest son, to take advantage of the honeymoon stage to have 
 two legitimate children, to give your wife a completely separate 
 establishment, to meet her only in society, and never come 
 home from a journey without announcing your return. Two 
 hundred thousand francs a year are enough to do it on, and 
 your antecedents allow of your achieving this by finding some 
 rich Englishwoman hungering for a title. That aristocratic 
 way of life is the only one that seems to me truly French ; 
 the only handsome one, commanding a wife's respect and 
 regard ; the only life that distinguishes us from the common 
 herd ; in short, the only one for which a young man should 
 ever give up his single blessedness. In such an attitude the 
 Comte de Manerville is an example to his age, he is superior 
 to the general, and must be nothing less than a minister or an 
 ambassador. He can never be ridiculous; he conquers the 
 social advantages of a married man, and preserves the privi- 
 leges of a bachelor." 
 
 " But, my good friend, I am not a de Marsay; I am, as 
 you yourself do me the honor to express it, Paul de Maner- 
 ville, neither more nor less, a good husband and father, 
 deputy of the Centre, and perhaps some day a peer of the 
 Upper House altogether a very humble destiny. But I am 
 diffident and resigned." 
 
 " And your wife," said the merciless de Marsay, " will she 
 be resigned ? " 
 
 " My wife, my dear fellow, will do what I wish." 
 
 " Oh ! my poor friend, have you not got beyond that 
 point? Farewell, Paul. Henceforth you have forfeited my 
 esteem. Still, one word more, for I cannot subscribe to your 
 abdication in cold blood. Consider what is the strength of 
 our position. If a single man had no more than six thousand 
 francs a year, if his whole fortune lay in his reputation for 
 elegance and the memory of his successes, well, even this
 
 320 A MARRTAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 fantastic ghost has considerable value. Life still affords some 
 chances for the bachelor ' off color. ' Yes, he may still 
 aspire to anything. But marriage ! Paul, it is the ' Thus far 
 and no further ' of social existence. Once married, you can 
 never more be anything but what you are unless your wife 
 condescends to take you in hand." 
 
 " But you are always crushing me under your exceptional 
 theories ! " cried Paul. " I am tired of living for the benefit 
 of others of keeping horses for display, of doing everything 
 with a view to 'what people will say,' of ruining myself for 
 fear that idiots should remark : ' Why, Paul has the same old 
 carriage ! What has he done with his money ? Does he 
 squander it ? Gamble on the Bourse ? Not at all ; he is a 
 millionaire. Madame So-and-so is madly in love with him. 
 He has just had a team of horses from England, the hand- 
 somest in Paris. At Longchamps, every one remarked the 
 four-horse chaises of Monsieur de Marsay and Monsieur de 
 Manerville; the cattle were magnificent.' In short, the thou- 
 sand idiotic remarks by which the mob of fools drives us. 
 
 "I am beginning to see that this life, in which we are 
 simply rolled along by others instead of walking on our feet, 
 wears us out and makes us old. Believe me, my dear Henri, 
 I admire your powers, but I do not envy you. You are capa- 
 ble of judging everything ; you can act and think as a states- 
 man, you stand above general laws, received ideas, recognized 
 prejudices, accepted conventionalities; in fact, you get all 
 the benefits of a position in which I, for my part, should find 
 nothing but disaster. Ygur cold and systematic deductions, 
 which are perhaps quite true, are, in the eyes of the vulgar, 
 appallingly immoral. I belong to the vulgar. 
 
 " I must play the game by the rules of the society in which I 
 am compelled to live. You can stand on the summit of human 
 things, on ice-peaks, and still have feelings; I should freeze 
 there. The life of the greatest number, of which I am very 
 frankly one, is made up of emotions such as I feel at present
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 321 
 
 in need of. The most popular lady's man often flirts with 
 ten women at once, and wins the favor of none ; and then, 
 whatever his gifts, his practice, his knowledge of the world, a 
 crisis may arise when he finds himself, as it were, jammed 
 between two doors. For my part, I like the quiet and faith- 
 ful intercourse of home ; I want the life where a man always 
 finds a woman at his side." 
 
 " Marriage is a little free and easy ! " cried de Marsay. 
 
 Paul was not to be dashed, and went on 
 
 "Laugh if you please; I shall be the happiest man in the 
 world when my servant comes to say : ' Madame is waiting 
 breakfast ' when, on coming home in the afternoon, I may 
 find a heart " 
 
 " You are still too frivolous, Paul ! You are not moral 
 enough yet for married life ! " 
 
 " A heart to which I may confide my business and tell my 
 secrets. I want to live with some being on terms of such 
 intimacy that our affection may not depend on a YES or No, 
 or on situations where the most engaging man may disappoint 
 passion. In short, I am bold enough to become, as you say, 
 a good husband and a good father ! I am suited to domestic 
 happiness, and prepared to submit to the conditions insisted 
 on by society to set up a wife, a family ' ' 
 
 "You suggest the idea of a beehive. Go ahead, then. 
 You will be a dupe all your days. You mean to marry, to 
 have a wife to yourself? In other words, you want to solve, 
 to your own advantage, the most difficult social problem pre- 
 sented in our day by town life as the French Revolution has 
 left it, so you begin by isolation ! And do you suppose that 
 your wife will be content to forego the life you contemn? Will 
 she, like you, be disgusted with it ? If you do not want to 
 endure the conjugal joys described by your sincere friend de 
 Marsay, listen to my last advice. Remain unmarried for 
 thirteen years longer, and enjoy yourself to the top of your 
 bent ; then, at forty, with your first fit of the gout, marry a 
 21
 
 322 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 widow of six-and-thirty ; thus you may be happy. If you 
 take a maid to wife, you will die a madman ! " 
 
 "Indeed! And tell me why?" cried Paul, somewhat 
 nettled. 
 
 "My dear fellow," replied de Marsay, "Boileau's 'Satire 
 on Women ' is no more than a series of commonplace observa- 
 tions in verse. Why should women be faultless ? Why deny 
 them the heritage of the most obvious possession of human 
 nature ? In my opinion, the problem of marriage no longer 
 lies in the form in which that critic discerned it. Do you 
 really suppose that, to command affection in marriage, as in 
 love, it is enough for a husband to be a man? You who 
 haunt boudoirs, have you none but fortunate experiences ? 
 
 " Everything in our bachelor existence prepares a disastrous 
 mistake for the man who .marries without having deeply 
 studied the human heart. In the golden days of youth, by a 
 singular fact in our manners, a man always bestows pleasure, 
 he triumphs over fascinated woman, and she submits to his 
 wishes. The obstacles set up by law and feeling, and the 
 natural coyness of woman, give rise to a common impulse on 
 both sides, which deludes superficial men as to their future 
 position in the married state where there are no obstacles to 
 be overcome, where women endure rather than allow a man's 
 advances, and repel them rather than invite them. The whole 
 aspect of life is altered for us. The unmarried man, free from 
 care and always the leader, has nothing to fear from a defeat. 
 In married life a repulse is irreparable. Though a lover may 
 make a mistress change her mind in his favor, such a rout, my 
 dear boy, is Waterloo to a husband. A husband, like Na- 
 poleon, is bound to gain the victory ; however often he may 
 have won, the first defeat is his overthrow. The woman who 
 is flattered by a lover's persistency, and proud of his wrath, 
 calls them brutal in a husband. The lover may choose his 
 ground and do what he will, the master has no such license, 
 and his battlefield is always the same.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 323 
 
 " Again, the struggle is the other way about. A 'wife is 
 naturally inclined to refuse what she ought ; a mistress is ready 
 to give what she ought not. 
 
 "You who wish to marry (and who will do it), have you 
 ever duly meditated on the Civil Code ? I have never soiled 
 my feet in that cave of commentary, that cockloft of gabble 
 called the Law Schools; I never looked into the Code, but I 
 see how it works in the living organism of the world. I am a 
 lawyer, as a clinical professor is a doctor. The malady is not 
 in books, it is in the patient. The Code, my friend, provides 
 women with guardians, treats them as minors, as children. 
 And how do we manage children ? By fear. In that word, 
 my dear Paul, you have the bit for the steed. Feel your pulse, 
 and say : Can you disguise yourself as a tyrant ; you who are 
 so gentle, so friendly, so trusting ; you whom at first I used 
 to laugh at, and whom I now love well enough to initiate you 
 into my science. Yes, this is part of a science to which the 
 Germans have already given the name of anthropology. 
 
 " Oh ! if I had not solved life by a measure of pleasure, if I 
 had not an excessive antipathy for men who think instead of 
 acting, if I did not despise the idiots who are so stupid as to 
 believe that a book may live, when the sands of African deserts 
 are composed of the ashes of I know not how many unknown 
 Londons, Venices, Parises, and Romes now in dust, I would 
 write a book on modern marriages and the influence of the 
 Christian system ; I would erect a beacon on the heap of sharp 
 stones on which the votaries lie who devote themselves to the 
 social multiplicamini. And yet is the human face worth a 
 quarter of an hour of my time ? Is not the sole rational use 
 of pen and ink to ensnare hearts by the writing of seductive 
 love-letters ! 
 
 " So you will introduce us to the Comtesse de Manerville? " 
 
 "Perhaps," said Paul. 
 
 " We shall still be friends," said de Marsay. 
 
 "Sure?" replied Paul.
 
 324 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "Be quite easy; we will be very polite to you, as the 
 Maison Rouge were to the English at Fontenoy." 
 
 Though this conversation shook him, the Comte ae Maner- 
 ville set to work to carry out his plans, and returned to Bor- 
 deaux for the winter of 1821. The cost at which he restored 
 and furnished his house did credit to the reputation for 
 elegance that had preceded him. His old connections secured 
 him an introduction to the Royalist circle of Bordeaux, to 
 which, indeed, he belonged, alike by opinion, name, and for- 
 tune, and he soon became the leader of its fashion. His 
 knowledge of life, good manners, and Parisian training en- 
 chanted the Saint-Germain suburb of Bordeaux. An old 
 marquise applied to him an expression formerly current at 
 Court to designate the flower of handsome youth, of the 
 dandies of a past day, whose speech and style were law ; she 
 called him la flcur dcs pois as who should say Sweet-pea. 
 The Liberal faction took up the nickname, which they used 
 in irony, and the Royalists as a compliment. 
 
 Paul de Manerville fulfilled with glory the requirements of 
 the name. He was in the position of many a second-rate 
 actor; as soon as the public vouchsafes some approval, they 
 become almost good. Paul, quite at his ease, displayed the 
 qualities of his defects. His banter was neither harsh nor 
 bitter, his manners were not haughty ; in his conversation 
 with women, he expressed the respect they value without too 
 much deference or too much familiarity. His dandyism was 
 no more than an engaging care for his person ; he was con- 
 siderate of rank ; he allowed a freedom to younger men which 
 his Paris experience kept within due limits ; though a master 
 with the sword and pistol, he was liked for his feminine gentle- 
 ness. He was one of those men who are made to accept 
 rather than give happiness, to whom woman is a great factor 
 in life, who need understanding and encouraging, and to whom 
 a wife's love should play the part of Providence.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 325 
 
 Though such a character as this gives rise to trouble in 
 domestic life, it is charming and attractive in society. Paul 
 was a success in the narrow provincial circle, where his char- 
 acter, in no respect strongly marked, was better appreciated 
 than in Paris. 
 
 The decoration of his town-house, and the necessary restora- 
 tion of the Lanstrac Castle, which he fitted up with English 
 comfort and luxury, absorbed the capital his agent had saved 
 during the past six years. Reduced, therefore, to his exact 
 income of forty-odd thousand francs in stocks, he thought it 
 wise to arrange his housekeeping so as to spend no more than 
 this. By the time he had duly displayed his carriages and 
 horses, and entertained the young men of position in the 
 town, he perceived that provincial life necessitated marriage. 
 Still too young to devote himself to the avaricious cares or 
 speculative improvements in which provincial folk ultimately 
 find employment, as required by the need for providing for 
 their children, he ere long felt the want of the various amuse- 
 ments which become the vital habit of a Parisian. 
 
 At the same time, it was not a name to be perpetuated, an 
 heir to whom to transmit his possessions, the position to be 
 gained by having a house where the principal families of the 
 neighborhood might meet, nor weariness of illicit connections, 
 that proved to be the determining cause. He had on arriving 
 fallen in love with the queen of Bordeaux society, the much- 
 talked -of Mademoiselle Evangelista. 
 
 Early in the century a rich Spaniard named Evangelista had 
 settled at Bordeaux, where good introductions, added to a fine 
 fortune, had won him a footing in the drawing-rooms of the 
 nobility. His wife had done much to preserve him in good 
 odor amid this aristocracy, which would not, perhaps, have 
 been so ready to receive him but that it could thus annoy the 
 society next below it. Madame Evangelista, descended from 
 the illustrious house of Casa-Real, connected with the Spanish 
 monarchs, was a Creole, and, like all women accustomed to
 
 326 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 be served by slaves, she was a very fine lady, knew nothing of 
 the value of money, and indulged even her most extravagant 
 fancies, finding them always supplied by a husband who was 
 in love with her, and who was so generous as to conceal from 
 her all the machinery of money-making. The Spaniard, de- 
 lighted to find that she could be happy at Bordeaux, where 
 his business required him to reside, bought a fine house, kept 
 it in good style, entertained splendidly, and showed excellent 
 taste in every respect. So, from 1800 till 1812, no one was 
 talked of in Bordeaux but Monsieur and Madame Evangelista. 
 
 The Spaniard died in 1813, leaving a widow of two-and- 
 thirty with an enormous fortune and the prettiest little 
 daughter in the world, at that time eleven years old, prom- 
 ising to become, as indeed she became, a very accomplished 
 person. Clever as Madame Evangelista might be, the Restor- 
 ation altered her position ; the Royalist party sifted itself, 
 and several families left Bordeaux. Still, though her hus- 
 band's head and hand were lacking to the management of the 
 business, for which she showed the inaptitude of a woman of 
 fashion and the indifference of the creole, she made no change 
 in her mode of living. 
 
 By the time when Paul de Manerville had made up his 
 mind to return to his native place, Mademoiselle Natalie 
 Evangelista was a remarkably beautiful girl, and apparently 
 the richest match in Bordeaux, where no one knew of the 
 gradual diminution of her mother's wealth ; for, to prolong 
 her reign, Madame Evangelista had spent vast sums of money. 
 Splendid entertainments and almost royal display had kept 
 up the public belief in the wealth of the house. 
 
 Natalie was nearly nineteen, no offer of marriage had as 
 yet come to her mother's ear. Accustomed to indulge all her 
 girlish fancies, Mademoiselle Evangelista had Indian shawls 
 and jewels, and lived amid such luxury as frightened the 
 speculative, in a land and at a time when the young are as 
 calculating as their parents. The fatal verdict: "Only a
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 327 
 
 prince could afford to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista," was 
 a watchword in every drawing-room and boudoir. Mothers 
 of families, dowagers with granddaughters to marry, and dam- 
 sels jealous of the fair Natalie, whose unfailing elegance and 
 tyrannous beauty were an annoyance to them, took care to 
 add venom to this opinion by perfidious insinuations. When 
 an eligible youth was heard to exclaim with rapturous admira- 
 tion on Natalie's arrival at a ball "Good heavens, what a 
 beautiful creature!" "Yes," the mammas would reply, 
 "but very expensive ! " If some new-comer spoke of Made- 
 moiselle Evangelista as charming, and opined that a man 
 wanting a wife could not make a better choice " Who would 
 be bold enough," some one would ask, "to marry a girl to 
 whom her mother allows a thousand francs a month for dress, 
 who keeps horses and a lady's-maid, and wears lace ? She 
 has Mechlin lace on her dressing-gowns. What she pays for 
 washing would keep a clerk in comfort. She has morning 
 capes that cost six francs apiece to clean ! " 
 
 Such speeches as these, constantly repeated by way of eulo- 
 gium, extinguished the keenest desire a youth might feel to 
 wed Mademoiselle Evangelista. The queen of every ball, 
 surfeited with flattery, sure of smiles and admiration wherever 
 she went, Natalie knew nothing of life. She lived as birds 
 fly, as flowers bloom, finding every one about her ready to 
 fulfill her least wish. She knew nothing of the price of things, 
 nor of how money is acquired or kept. She very likely sup- 
 posed that every house was furnished with cooks and coach- 
 men, maids and menservants, just as a field produces fodder 
 and trees yield fruit. To her the beggar, the pauper, the 
 fallen tree, and the barren field were all the same thing. 
 Cherished like a hope by her mother, fatigue never marred 
 her pleasure ; she pranced through the world like a courser on 
 the steppes, a courser without either bridle or shoes. 
 
 Six months after Paul's arrival the upper circles of the town 
 had brought about a meeting between "Sweet-pea" and the
 
 328 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 queen of the ballroom. The two flowers looked at each other 
 with apparent coldness, and thought each other charming. 
 Madame Evangelista, as being interested in this not unforeseen 
 meeting, read Paul's sentiments in his eyes, and said to herself: 
 "He will be my son-in-law ; " while Paul said to himself, as 
 he looked at Natalie : " She will be my wife ! " The wealth of 
 the Evangelistas, proverbial in Bordeaux, remained in Paul's 
 memory as a tradition of his boyhood, the most indelible of 
 all such impressions. And so pecuniary suitability was a fore- 
 gone conclusion, without all the discussion and inquiry, which 
 are as horrible to shy as to proud natures. 
 
 When some persons tried to express to Paul the praise which 
 it was impossible to refuse to Natalie's manner and beauty and 
 wit, always ending with some of the bitterly mercenary reflec- 
 tions as to the future to which the expensive style of the house- 
 hold naturally gave rise, Pease-blossom replied with the disdain 
 that such provincialism deserves. And this way of treating 
 the matter, which soon became known, silenced these re- 
 marks ; for it was Paul who set the ton in ideas and speech 
 as much as in manners and appearance. He had imported the 
 French development of the British stamp and its ice-bound 
 barriers, its Byronic irony, discontent with life, contempt for 
 sacred bonds, English plate and English wit, the scorn of old 
 provincial customs and old property; cigars, patent leather, 
 the pony, lemon-covered gloves, and the trot. So that befell 
 Paul which had happened to no one before no old dowager 
 or young maid tried to discourage him. 
 
 Madame Evangelista began by inviting him to several grand 
 dinners. Could Sweet-pea remain absent from the entertain- 
 ments to which the most fashionable young men of the town 
 were bidden? In spite of Paul's affected coldness, which did 
 not deceive either the mother or the daughter, he found him- 
 self taking the first steps on the road to marriage. When 
 Manerville passed in his tilbury or riding a good horse, other 
 young men would stop to watch him, and he could hear their
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 329 
 
 comments: "There's a lucky fellow; he is rich, he is hand- 
 some, and they say he is to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista. 
 There are some people for whom the world seems to have been 
 made ! " If he happened to meet Madame Evangelista's car- 
 riage, he was proud of the peculiar graciousness with which the 
 mother and daughter bowed to him. 
 
 Even if Paul had not been in love with Mademoiselle 
 Natalie, the world would have married them whether or not. 
 The world, which is the cause of no good thing, is implicated 
 in many disasters; then, when it sees the evil hatching out 
 that it has so maternally brooded, it denies it and avenges it. 
 The upper society of Bordeaux, supposing Mademoiselle Evan- 
 gelista to have a fortune of a million francs, handed her over 
 to Paul without awaiting the consent of the parties concerned 
 as it often does. 
 
 So the affair was settled ; the magnates of the tiptop 
 Royalist circle, when the marriage was mentioned in their 
 presence, made such civil speeches to Paul as flattered his 
 vanity: 
 
 " Every one says you are to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista. 
 You will do well to marry her; you will not find so handsome 
 a wife anywhere, not even in Paris ; she is elegant, pleasing, 
 and allied through her mother with the Casa-Reals. You will 
 be the most charming couple ; you have the same tastes, the 
 same views of life, and will keep the most agreeable house in 
 Bordeaux. Your wife will only have to pack up her clothes 
 and move in. In a case like yours a house ready to live in is 
 as good as a settlement. And you are lucky to meet with a 
 mother-in-law like Madame Evangelista. She is a clever 
 woman, very attractive, and will be an important aid to you 
 in the political career to which you ought now to aspire. She 
 has sacrificed everything for her daughter, whom she worships ; 
 and Natalie will no doubt be a good wife, for she is loving to 
 her mother. And then, everything must have an end." 
 
 "That is all very fine," was Paul's reply; for, in love
 
 330 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 though he was, he wished to be free to choose, "but it must 
 have a happy end." 
 
 Paul soon became a frequent visitor to Madame Evangelista, 
 led there by the need to find employment for his idle hours, 
 which he, more than other men, found it difficult to fill. 
 There only in the town did he find the magnificence and 
 luxury to which he had accustomed himself. 
 
 Madame Evangelista, at the age of forty, was handsome 
 still, with the beauty of a grand sunset, which in summer 
 crowns the close of a cloudless day. Her blameless reputation 
 was an endless subject of discussion in the "sets" of Bor- 
 deaux society, and the curiosity of women was all the more 
 alert, because the widow's appearance suggested the sort of 
 temperament which makes Spanish and Creole women notori- 
 ous. She had black eyes and hair, the foot and figure of a 
 Spaniard the slender serpentine figure for which the Spaniards 
 have a name. Her face, still beautiful, had the fascinating 
 Creole complexion, which can only be described by compar- 
 ing it with white lawn over warm blood-color, so equably 
 tinted is its fairness. Her forms were round, and attractive 
 in the grace which combines the ease of indolence with 
 vivacity, strength with extreme freedom. She was attractive, 
 but imposing ; she fascinated, but made no promises. Being 
 tall, she could at will assume the port and dignity of a queen. 
 
 Men were ensnared by her conversation, as birds are by 
 bird-lime, for she had by nature the spirit which necessity 
 bestows on intriguers ; she would go on from concession to 
 concession, arming herself with what she gained to ask for 
 something more, but always able to withdraw a thousand yards 
 at a bound if she were asked for anything in return. She 
 was ignorant of facts, but she had known the Courts of Spain 
 and of Naples, the most famous persons of the two Americas, 
 and various illustrious families of England and of the Con- 
 tinent, which gave her an amount of information superficially 
 so wide that it seemed immense.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 331 
 
 The mother and daughter were truly friends, apart from 
 filial and maternal feeling. They suited each other, and their 
 perpetual contact had never resulted in a jar. Thus many 
 persons accounted for Madame Evangelista's self-sacrifice by 
 her love for her daughter. However, though Natalie may 
 have consoled her mother for her unalleviated widowhood, she 
 was not perhaps its only motive. Madame Evangelista was 
 said to have fallen in love with a man whom the second Res- 
 toration had reinstated in his title and peerage. This man, 
 who would willingly have married her in 1814, had very 
 decently thrown her over in 1816. 
 
 Now Madame Evangelista, apparently the best-hearted crea- 
 ture living, had in her nature one terrible quality which can 
 be best expressed in Catherine de' Medici's motto, Odiate e 
 aspettatc Hate and wait. Used always to be first, always to 
 be obeyed, she resembled royal personages in being amiable, 
 gentle, perfectly sweet and easy-going in daily life ; but ter- 
 rible, implacable, when offended in her pride as a woman, a 
 Spaniard, and a Casa-Real. She never forgave. This woman 
 believed in the power of her own hatred ; she regarded it as 
 an evil spell which hung over her enemies. This fateful in- 
 fluence she had cast over the man who had been false to her. 
 Events which seemed to prove the efficacy of her jettatura 
 confirmed her in her superstitious belief in it. Though he 
 was a minister and a member of the Upper Chamber, ruin 
 stole upon him, and he was utterly undone. His estate, his 
 political and personal position -all was lost. One day Ma- 
 dame Evangelista was able to drive past him in her handsome 
 carriage while he stood in the Champs Elysees, and to blight 
 him with a look sparkling with the fires of triumph. 
 
 Madame Evangelista quickly read Paul's character and con- 
 cealed her own. He was the very man she hoped for as a son- 
 in-law, as the responsible editor of her influence and authority. 
 He was related through his mother to the Maulincours ; and 
 the old Baronne de Maulincour, the friend of the Vidame de
 
 332 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 Pamiers, lived in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. 
 The grandson of the baronne, Auguste de Maulincour, had a 
 brilliant position in society. Thus Paul would advantageously 
 introduce the Evangelistas to the World of Paris. The widow 
 had at rare intervals visited Paris under the Empire; she 
 longed to shine in Paris under the Restoration. There only 
 were the elements to be found of political success, the only 
 form of fortune-making in which a woman of fashion can 
 allow herself to cooperate. 
 
 Madame Evangelista, obliged by her husband's business to 
 live in Bordeaux, had never liked it ; she had a house there, 
 and every one knows how many obligations fetter a woman's 
 life under such circumstances ; but she was tired of Bordeaux, 
 she had exhausted its resources. She wished for a wider stage, 
 as gamblers go where the play is highest. So, for her own 
 benefit, she dreamed of high destinies for Paul. She intended 
 to use her own cleverness and knowledge of life for her son- 
 in-law's advancement, so as to enjoy the pleasures of power 
 in his name. Many men are thus the screen of covert femi- 
 nine ambitions. And, indeed, Madame Evangelista had more 
 than one motive for wishing to govern her daughter's hus- 
 band. 
 
 Paul was, of course, captivated by the lady, all the more 
 certainly because she seemed not to wish to influence him in 
 any way. She used her ascendency to magnify herself, to 
 magnify her daughter, and to give enhanced value to every- 
 thing about her, so as to have the upper hand from the first 
 with the man in whom she saw the means of continuing her 
 aristocratic connection. 
 
 And Paul valued himself the more highly for this apprecia- 
 tion of the mother and daughter. He fancied himself wittier 
 than he was, when he found that his remarks and his slightest 
 jests were responded to by Mademoiselle Evangelista, who 
 smiled or looked up intelligently, and by her mother, whose 
 flattery always seemed to be involuntary. The two women
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 333 
 
 were so frankly kind, he felt so sure of pleasing them, they 
 drove him so cleverly by the guiding thread of his conceit, 
 that, before long, he spent most of his time at their house. 
 
 Within a year of his arrival Count Paul, without having 
 declared his intentions, was so attentive to Natalie that he 
 was universally understood to be courting her. Neither mother 
 nor daughter seemed to think of marriage. Mademoiselle 
 Evangelista did not depart from the reserve of a fine lady who 
 knows how to be charming and converse agreeably without 
 allowing the slightest advance toward intimacy. This self- 
 respect, rare among provincial folk, attracted Paul greatly. 
 Shy men are often touchy, unexpected suggestions alarm them. 
 They flee even from happiness if it comes with much display, 
 and are ready to accept unhappiness if it comes in a modest 
 form, surrounded by gentle shades. Hence Paul, seeing that 
 Madame Evangelista made no effort to entrap him, ensnared 
 himself. The Spanish lady captivated him finally one even- 
 ing by saying that at a certain age a superior woman, like a 
 man, found that ambition took the place of the feelings of 
 earlier years. 
 
 "That woman," thought Paul, as he went away, "would 
 be capable of getting me some good embassy before I could 
 even be elected deputy." 
 
 The man who, under any circumstances, fails to look at 
 everything or at every idea from all sides, to examine them 
 under all aspects, is inefficient and weak, and consequently in 
 danger. Paul at this moment was an optimist ; he saw ad- 
 vantages in every contingency, and never remembered that 
 an ambitious mother-in-law may become a tyrant. So every 
 evening as he went home he pictured himself as married, he 
 bewitched himself, and unconsciously shod himself with the 
 slippers of matrimony. He had enjoyed his liberty too long 
 to regret it ; he was tired of single life, which could show him 
 nothing new, and of which he now saw only the discomforts ; 
 whereas, though the difficulties of marriage sometimes occurred
 
 334 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 to him, he far more often contemplated its pleasures; the 
 prospect was new to him. 
 
 " Married life," said he to himself, " is hard only on the 
 poorer classes. Half its troubles vanish before wealth." 
 
 So every day some hopeful suggestion added to the list of 
 advantages which he saw in this union. 
 
 " However high I may rise in life, Natalie will always be 
 equal to her position," he would say to himself, " and that is 
 no small merit in a wife. How many men of the Empire 
 have I seen suffering torment from their wives ! Is it not an 
 important element of happiness never to feel one's pride or 
 vanity rubbed the wrong way by the companion one has 
 chosen ? A man can never be utterly wretched with a well- 
 bred woman ; she never makes him contemptible, and she 
 may be of use. Natalie will be a perfect mistress of a drawing- 
 room." 
 
 He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista in 
 a way that would not compromise his ultimate decision in his 
 own eyes, for his friend de Marsay's terrible speech rang in 
 his ears now and again. But, in the first place, those who 
 are accustomed to luxury have a tone of simplicity that is very 
 deceptive. They scorn it, they use it habitually, it is the 
 means and not the object of their lives. Paul, as he saw that 
 these ladies' lives were so similar to his own, never for an 
 instant imagined that they concealed any conceivable source 
 of ruin. And then, though there are a few general rules for 
 mitigating the worries of married life, there are none to enable 
 us to guess or foresee them. 
 
 When troubles arise between two beings who have under- 
 taken to make life happy and easy each for the other, they are 
 based on the friction produced by an incessant intimacy which 
 does not arise between two persons before marriage, and never 
 can arise till the laws and habits of French life are changed. 
 Two beings on the eve of joining their lives always deceive 
 each other; but the deception is innocent and involuntary.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 335 
 
 Each, of course, stands in the best light ; they are rivals as to 
 which makes the most promising show, and at that time form 
 a favorable idea of themselves up to which they cannot after- 
 ward come. Real life, like a changeable day, consists more 
 often of the gray, dull hours when Nature is overcast than of 
 the brilliant intervals when the sun gives glory and joy to the 
 fields. Young people look only at the fine days. Subse- 
 quently they ascribe the inevitable troubles of life to matri- 
 mony, for there is in man a tendency to seek the cause of his 
 griefs in things or persons immediately at hand. 
 
 To discover in Mademoiselle Evangelista's demeanor or 
 countenance, in her words or her gestures, any indication that 
 might reveal the quota of imperfection inherent in her charac- 
 ter, Paul would have needed not merely the science of Lavater 
 and of Gall, but another kind of knowledge for which no 
 code of formulas exists, the personal intuition of the observer, 
 which requires almost universal knowledge. Like all girls, 
 Natalie's countenance was impenetrable. The deep, serene 
 peace given by sculptors to the virgin heads intended to per- 
 sonify Justice, Innocence, all the divinities who dwell above 
 earthly agitations this perfect calm is the greatest charm ot 
 a girlish face, it is the sign-manual of her purity ; nothing has 
 stirred her, no repressed passion, no betrayed affection has 
 cast a shade on the placidity of her features ; and if it is 
 assumed, the girl has ceased to exist. Living always insep- 
 arable from her mother, Natalie, like every Spanish woman, 
 had had none but religious teaching, and some few lessons of 
 a mother to her daughter which might be useful for her part 
 in life. Hence her calm expression was natural ; but it was a 
 veil, in which the woman was shrouded as a butterfly is in the 
 chrysalis. 
 
 At the same time, a man skilled in the use of the scalpel of 
 analysis might have discerned in Natalie some revelation of 
 the difficulties her character might present in the conflict of 
 married or social life. Her really wonderful beauty was
 
 336 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 marked by excessive regularity of features, in perfect harmony 
 with the proportions of her head and figure. Such perfection 
 does not promise well for the intellect, and there are few ex- 
 ceptions to this rule. Superior qualities show in some slight 
 imperfections of form which become exquisitely attractive, 
 points of light where antagonistic feelings sparkle and rivet 
 the eye. Perfect harmony indicates the coldness of a com- 
 pound nature. 
 
 Natalie had a round figure, a sign of strength, but also an 
 infallible evidence of self-will often reaching the pitch of ob- 
 stinacy in women whose mind is neither keen nor broad. Her 
 hands, like those of a Greek statue, confirmed the forecast 
 of her face and form by showing a love of unreasoning do- 
 minion. Will for will's sake. Her eyebrows met in the mid- 
 dle, which, according to observers, indicates a jealous dispo- 
 sition. The jealousy of noble souls becomes emulation and 
 leads to great things ; that of mean minds turns to hatred. 
 Her mother's motto, Odiate e aspctiate, was hers in all its 
 strength. Her eyes looked black, but were in fact dark hazel- 
 brown, and contrasted with her hair of that russet hue, so 
 highly prized by the Romans, and known in English as au- 
 burn, the usual color of the hair in the children of two black- 
 haired parents like Monsieur and Madame Evangelista. Her 
 delicately white skin added infinitely to the charm of this 
 contrast of colors in hair and eyes, but this refinement was 
 purely superficial ; for whenever the lines of a face have not a 
 peculiar soft roundness, whatever the refinement and delicacy 
 of the details, do not look for any especial charms of mind. 
 These flowers of delusive youth presently fade, and you are 
 surprised after the lapse of a few years to detect hardness, 
 sternness, where you once admired the elegance of lofty qual- 
 ities. 
 
 There was something august in Natalie's features ; still, her 
 chin was rather heavy a painter would have said thick in 
 impasto, an expression descriptive of a type that shows pre-
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 337 
 
 existing sentiments of which the violence does not declare 
 itself till middle life. Her mouth, a little sunk in her face, 
 showed the arrogance no less expressed in her hand, her chin, 
 her eyebrows, and her stately shape. Finally, a last sign 
 which alone might have warned the judgment of a connoisseur, 
 Natalie's pure and fascinating voice had a metallic ring. 
 However gently the brazen instrument was handled, however 
 tenderly the vibrations were sent through the curves of the 
 horn, that voice proclaimed a nature like that of the Duke of 
 Alva, from whom the Casa-Reals were collaterally descended. 
 All these indications pointed to passions, violent but not 
 tender, to sudden infatuations, irreconcilable hatred, a certain 
 wit without intellect, and the craving to rule, inherent in 
 persons who feel themselves below the pretensions. 
 
 These faults, the outcome of race and constitution, some- 
 times compensated for by the impulsions of generous blood, 
 were hidden in Natalie as ore is hidden in the mine, and 
 would only be brought to the surface by the rough treatment 
 and shocks to which character is subjected in the world. At 
 present the sweetness and freshness of youth, the elegance of 
 her manners, her saintly ignorance, and the grace of girl- 
 hood, tinged her features with the delicate veneer that ever 
 deceives superficial observers. 
 
 How should Paul, who loved as a man does when love is 
 seconded by desire, foresee in a girl of this temper, whose 
 beauty dazzled him, the woman as she would be at thirty, when 
 shrewder observers might have been deceived by appearances? 
 If happiness were difficult to find in married life, with this 
 girl it would not be impossible. Some fine qualities shone 
 through her defects. In the hand of a skillful master any 
 good quality may be made to stifle faults, especially in a girl 
 who can love. 
 
 But to make so stern a metal ductile, the iron fist of which 
 de Marsay had spoken was needed. The Paris dandy was 
 right. Fear, inspired by love, is an infallible tool for dealing 
 22
 
 333 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 with a woman's spirit. Those who fear, love ; and fear is more 
 nearly akin to love than to hatred. Would Paul have the 
 coolness, the judgment, the firmness needed in the contest of 
 which no wife should be allowed to have a suspicion ? And, 
 again, did Natalie love Paul? 
 
 Natalie, like most girls, mistook for love the first impulses 
 of instinct and liking that Paul's appearance stirred in her, 
 knowing nothing of the meaning of marriage or of house- 
 wifery. To her the Comte de Manerville, who had seen 
 diplomatic service at every court in Europe, one of the most 
 fashionable men of Paris, could not be an ordinary man de- 
 void of moral strength, with a mixture of bravery and shyness, 
 energetic perhaps in adversity, but defenseless against the foes 
 that poison happiness. Would she develop tact enough to 
 discern Paul's good qualities among his superficial defects? 
 Would she not magnify these and forget those, after the 
 manner of young wives who know nothing of life? 
 
 At a certain age a woman will overlook vice in the man 
 who spares her petty annoyances, while she regards such an- 
 noyances as misfortunes. What conciliatory influence and 
 what experience would cement and enlighten this young 
 couple ? Would not Paul and his wife imagine that love was 
 all-in-all, when they were only at the stage of affectionate 
 grimacing in which young wives indulge at the beginning of 
 their life, and of the compliments a husband pays on their 
 return from a ball while he still has the courtesy of admi- 
 ration ? 
 
 In such a situation would not Paul succumb to his wife's 
 tyranny instead of asserting his authority ? Would he be 
 able to say " No ? " All was danger for a weak man in cir- 
 cumstances where a strong one might perhaps have run some 
 risk. 
 
 The subject of this study is not the transition of an unmar- 
 ried to a married man a picture which, broadly treated,
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 33f 
 
 would not lack the interest which the innermost storm of our 
 feelings must lend to the commonest facts of life. The event? 
 and ideas which culminated in Paul's marriage to Made- 
 moiselle Evangelista are an introduction to the work, and only 
 intended as a study to the great comedy which is the prologue 
 to every married life. Hitherto this passage has been neg- 
 lected by dramatic writers, though it offers fresh resources 
 to their wit. 
 
 This prologue, which decided Paul's future life, and to 
 which Madame Evangelista looked forward with terror, was 
 the discussion to which the marriage-settlements give rise in 
 every family, whether of the nobility or of the middle-class ; 
 for human passions are quite as strongly agitated by small 
 interests as by great ones. These dramas, played out in the 
 presence of the notary, are all more or less like this one, and 
 its real interest will be less in these pages than in the memory 
 of most married people. 
 
 Early in the winter of 1822 Paul de Manerville, through 
 the intervention of his grand-aunt, Madame la Baronne de 
 Maulincour, asked the hand of Mademoiselle Evangelista. 
 Though the baroness usually spent no more than two months 
 in Medoc, she remained on this occasion till the end of Oc- 
 tober to be of use to her grand-nephew in this matter, and 
 play the part of a mother. After laying the overtures before 
 Madame Evangelista, the experienced old lady came to report 
 to Paul on the results of this step. 
 
 "My boy," said she, "I have settled the matter. In dis- 
 cussing money matters I discovered that Madame Evangelista 
 gives her daughter nothing. Mademoiselle Natalie marries 
 with but her barest rights. Marry, my dear ; men who have 
 a name and estates to transmit must sooner or later end by 
 marriage. I should like to see my dear Auguste do the same. 
 
 " You can get married without me, I have nothing to be- 
 stow on you but my blessing, and old women of my age have 
 no business at weddings. I shall return to Paris to-morrow.
 
 340 A MAKRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 When you introduce your wife to society, I shall see her much 
 more comfortably than I can here. If you had not your house 
 in Paris, you would have found a home with me. I should 
 have been delighted to arrange my third-floor rooms to suit 
 you." 
 
 "Dear aunt," said Paul, "I thank you very warmly. But 
 what do you mean by saying her mother gives her nothing, 
 and that she marries only with her bare rights? " 
 
 " Her mother, my dear boy, is a very knowing hand, who is 
 taking advantage of the girl's beauty to make terms and give 
 you no more than what she cannot keep back the father's 
 fortune. We old folk, you know, think a deal deal of ' How 
 much has he ? How much has she ? ' I advise you to give 
 strict instructions to your notary. The marriage-contract, 
 my child, is a sacred duty. If your father and mother had 
 not made their bed well, you might now be without sheets. 
 You will have children they are the usual result of marriage 
 so you are bound to think of this. Call in Maitre Mathias, 
 our old notary." 
 
 Madame de Maulincour left Paul plunged in perplexity. 
 His mother-in-law was a knowing hand ! He must discuss 
 and defend his interests in the marriage-contract ! Who, 
 then, proposed to attack them ? So he took his aunt's advice 
 and intrusted the matter of settlements to Maitre Mathias. 
 
 Still, he could not help thinking of the anticipated dis- 
 cussion. And it was not without much trepidation that he 
 went to see Madame Evangelista with a view to announcing 
 his intentions. Like all timid people, he was afraid lest he 
 should betray the distrust suggested by his aunt, which he 
 thought nothing less than insulting. To avoid the slightest 
 friction with so imposing a personage as his future mother- 
 in-law seemed, he fell back on the circumlocutions natural to 
 those who dare not face a difficulty. 
 
 "Madame, you know what an old family notary is like," 
 said he, when Natalie was absent for a minute. "Mine is a
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT 341 
 
 worthy old man, who would be deeply aggrieved if I did not 
 place my marriage-contract in his hands " 
 
 "But, my dear fellow," said Madame Evangelista, inter- 
 rupting him, "are not marriage-contracts always settled 
 through the notaries on each side?" 
 
 During the interval while Paul sat pondering, not daring to 
 open the matter, Madame Evangelista had been wondering, 
 " What is he thinking about ? " for women have a great power 
 of reading thought from the play of feature. And she could 
 guess at the great-aunt's hints from the embarrassed gaze and 
 agitated tone which betrayed Paul's mental disturbance. 
 
 "At last," thought she, "the decisive moment has come; 
 the crisis is at hand ; what will be the end of it ? My notary, ' ' 
 she went on, after a pause, " is Maitre Solonet, and yours is 
 Maitre Mathias ; I will ask them both to dinner to-morrow, 
 and they can settle the matter between them. Is it not their 
 business to conciliate our interests without our meddling, as 
 it is that of the cook to feed us well ? " 
 
 "Why, of course," said he, with a little sigh of relief. 
 
 By a strange inversion of parts, Paul, who was blameless, 
 quaked, while Madame Evangelista, though dreadfully anxious, 
 appeared calm. The widow owed her daughter the third 
 of the fortune left by Monsieur Evangelista, twelve hundred 
 thousand francs, and was quite unable to pay it, even if she 
 stripped herself of all her possessions. She would be at her 
 son-in-law's mercy. Though she might override Paul alone, 
 would Paul, enlightened by his lawyer, agree to any compro- 
 mise as to the account of her stewardship ? If he withdrew, 
 all Bordeaux would know the reason, and it would be impos- 
 sible for Natalie to marry. The mother who wished to secure 
 her daughter's happiness, the woman who from the hour of 
 her birth had lived in honor, foresaw the day when she must 
 be dishonored. 
 
 Like those great generals who would fain wipe out of their 
 lives the moment when they were cowards at heart, she wished
 
 342 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 she could score out that day from the days of her life. And 
 certainly some of her hairs turned white in the course of the 
 night when, face to face with this difficulty, she bitterly 
 blamed herself for her want of care. 
 
 In the first place, she was obliged to confide in her lawyer, 
 whom she sent for to attend her as soon as she was up. She 
 had to confess a secret vexation which she had never admitted 
 even to herself, for she had walked on to the verge of the 
 precipice, trusting to one of those chances that never happen. 
 And a feeling was born in her soul, a little animus against 
 Paul that was not yet hatred, nor aversion, nor in any way 
 evil but, was not he the antagonistic party in this family 
 suit ? Was he not, unwittingly, an innocent enemy who 
 must be defeated ? And who could ever love any one he had 
 duped ? 
 
 Compelled to deceive, the Spanish woman resolved, like 
 any woman, to show her superiority in a contest of which the 
 entire success could alone wipe out the discredit. In the 
 silence of the night she excused herself by a line of argument 
 in which her pride had the upper hand. Had not Natalie 
 benefited by her lavishness? Had her conduct ever been 
 actuated by one of the base and ignoble motives that degrade 
 the soul? She could not keep accounts well, was that a sin, 
 a crime ? Was not a man only too lucky to win such a wife 
 as Natalie ? Was not the treasure she had preserved for him 
 worth a discharge in full ? Did not many a man pay for the 
 woman he loved by making great sacrifices? And why should 
 he do more for a courtesan than for a wife ? Beside, Paul was 
 a commonplace, incapable being; she would support him by 
 the resources of her own cleverness ; she would help him to 
 make his way in the world ; he would owe his position to her; 
 would not this amply pay the debt ? He would be a fool to 
 hesitate? And for a few thousand francs more or less? It 
 would be disgraceful ! 
 
 "If I am not at once successful," said she to herself, "I
 
 THE YOUNG MAN ARRIVED NEXT MORNING.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 343 
 
 leave Bordeaux. I can still secure a good match for Natalie 
 by realizing all that is left the house, my diamonds, and the 
 furniture, giving her all but an annuity for myself." 
 
 When a strongly tempered spirit plans a retreat, as Riche- 
 lieu did at Brouage, and schemes for a splendid finale, this 
 alternative becomes a fulcrum which helps the schemer to 
 triumph. This escape, in case of failure, reassured Madame 
 Evangelista, who went to sleep, indeed, full of confidence in 
 her second in this duel. She trusted greatly to the aid of the 
 cleverest notary in Bordeaux, Maitre Solonet, a young man of 
 seven-and-twenty, a member of the Legion of Honor as the 
 reward of having contributed actively to the restoration of the 
 Bourbons. Proud and delighted to be admitted to an ac- 
 quaintance with Madame Evangelista, less as a lawyer than as 
 belonging to the Royalist party in Bordeaux, Solonet cherished 
 for her sunset beauty one of those passions which such women 
 as Madame Evangelista ignore while they are flattered by them, 
 and which even the prudish allow to float in their wake. Sol- 
 onet lived in an attitude of vanity full of respect and seemly 
 attentions. This young man arrived next morning with the 
 zeal of a slave, and was admitted to the widow's bedroom, 
 where he found her coquettishly dressed in a most becoming 
 wrapper. 
 
 " Now," said she, " can I trust to your reticence and entire 
 devotion in the discussion which is to take place this evening ? 
 Of course, you can guess that my daughter's marriage-contract 
 is in question." 
 
 The young lawyer was profuse in protestations. 
 
 " For the facts, then," said she. 
 
 " I am all attention," he replied, with a look of concentra- 
 tion. 
 
 Madame Evangelista stated the case without any finesse. 
 
 "My dear madame, all this matters not," said Maitre Sol- 
 onet, assuming an important air when his client had laid the 
 exact figures before him. "How have you dealt with Mon-
 
 344 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 sieur de Manerville ? The moral attitude is of greater conse- 
 quence than any questions of law or finance." 
 
 Madame Evangelista robed herself in dignity; the young 
 notary was delighted to learn that to this day his client, in 
 her treatment of Paul, had preserved the strictest distance ; 
 half out of real pride and half out of unconscious self-interest, 
 she had always behaved to the Comte de Manerville as though 
 he were her inferior, and it would be an honor for him to 
 marry Mademoiselle Evangelista. Neither she nor her daughter 
 could be suspected of interested motives ; their feelings were 
 evidently free from meanness ; if Paul should raise the least 
 difficulty on the money question, they had every right to 
 withdraw to an immeasurable distance in fact, she had a 
 complete ascendency over her would-be son-in-law. 
 
 "This being the case," said Solonet, "what is the utmost 
 concession you are inclined to make?" 
 
 "The least possible," said she, laughing. 
 
 "A woman's answer!" replied Solonet. "Madame, do 
 you really wish to see Mademoiselle Natalie married ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And you want a discharge for the eleven hundred and 
 fifty-six thousand francs you will owe her in accordance with 
 the account rendered of your guardianship ? " 
 
 "Exactly!" 
 
 " How much do you wish to reserve? " 
 
 " At least thirty thousand francs a year." 
 
 "So we must conquer or perish ? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 *' Well, I will consider the ways and means of achieving 
 that end, for we must be very dexterous and husband our 
 resources. I will give you a few hints on arriving ; act on 
 them exactly, and I can confidently predict complete success. 
 Is Count Paul in love with Mademoiselle Natalie?" he asked 
 as he rose. 
 - f * He worships her,"
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 345 
 
 "That is not enough. Is. he so anxious to have her as 
 his wife that he will pass over any little pecuniary difficul- 
 ties?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " That is what I call having personal property in a daugh- 
 ter ! " exclaimed the notary. " Make her look her best this 
 evening," he added, with a cunning twinkle. 
 
 " We have a perfect dress for her." 
 
 " The dress for the contract, in my opinion, is half the set- 
 tlements," said Solonet. 
 
 This last argument struck Madame Evangelista as so cogent 
 that she insisted on helping her daughter to dress, partly to 
 superintend the toilet, but also to secure her as an innocent 
 accomplice in her financial plot. And her daughter, with her 
 hair like la Sevigne's, and a white cashmere dress with rose- 
 colored bows, seemed to her handsome enough to assure the 
 victory. 
 
 When the maid had left them, and Madame Evangelista 
 was sure that nobody was within hearing, she arranged her 
 daughter's curls as a preliminary. 
 
 " My dear child, are you sincerely attached to Monsieur de 
 Manerville? " said she in a steady voice. 
 
 The mother and daughter exchanged a strangely meaning 
 glance. 
 
 " Why, my little mother, should you ask to-day rather than 
 yesterday? Why have you allowed me to imagine a doubt?" 
 
 " If it were to part you from me for ever, would you marry 
 him all the same?" 
 
 " I could give him up without dying of grief." 
 
 "Then you do not love him, my dear," said the mother, 
 kissing her daughter's forehead. 
 
 "But why, my dear mamma, are you playing the grand 
 inquisitor?" 
 
 " I wanted to see if you cared to be married without being 
 madly in love with your husband."
 
 346 A. MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "I like him." 
 
 " You are right ; he is a count, and, between us, he shall be 
 made peer of France. But there will be difficulties." 
 
 " Difficulties between people who care for each other ? No ! 
 This Sweet-pea, my mother, is too well planted there," and 
 she pointed to her heart with a pretty gesture, " to make the 
 smallest objection; I am sure of that." 
 
 " But if it were not so ? " 
 
 " I should utterly forget him." 
 
 " Well said ! You are a Casa-Real. But though he is 
 madly in love with you, if certain matters were discussed 
 which do not immediately concern him, but which he would 
 have to make the best of for your sake and mine, Natalie, eh ? 
 If, without proceeding in the least too far, a little graciousncss 
 of manner might turn the scale? A mere nothing, you know, 
 a word ? Men are like that they can resist sound argument 
 and yield to a glance." 
 
 " I understand ! A little touch just to make Favorite leap 
 the gate," said Natalie with a flourish as if she were whipping 
 a horse. 
 
 " My darling, I do not wish, you to do anything approach- 
 ing to invitation. We have traditions of old Castilian pride 
 which will never allow us to go too far. The count will be 
 informed of my situation." 
 
 " What situation?" 
 
 "You would not understand if I told you. Well, if after 
 peeing you in all your beauty his eye should betray the slightest 
 hesitancy and I shall watch him at that instant I should 
 break the whole thing off; I should turn everything into 
 money, leave Bordeaux, and go to Douai, to the Claes, who, 
 after all, are related to us through the Temnincks. Then I 
 would find a French peer for your husband, even if I had to 
 take refuge in a convent and give you my whole fortune." 
 
 "My dear mother, what can I do to hinder such misfor- 
 tunes? " said Natalie.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 347 
 
 " I never saw you lovelier, my child ! Be a little purposely 
 attractive, and all will be well." 
 
 Madame Evangelista left Natalie pensive, and went to 
 achieve a toilet which allowed her to stand a comparison with 
 her daughter. If Natalie was to fascinate Paul, must not she 
 herself fire the enthusiasm of her champion Solonet? 
 
 The mother and daughter were armed for conquest when 
 Paul arrived with the bouquet which for some months past had 
 been his daily offering to Natalie. Then they sat chatting 
 while awaiting the lawyers. 
 
 This day was to Paul the first skirmish in the long and 
 weary warfare of married life. It is necessary, therefore, to 
 review the forces on either side, to place the belligerents, and 
 to define the field on which they are to do battle. 
 
 To second him in a struggle of which he did not in the 
 least appreciate the consequences, Paul had nobody but his 
 old lawyer Mathias. They were each to be surprised unarmed 
 by an unexpected manoeuvre, driven by an enemy whose plans 
 were laid, and compelled to act without having time - for 
 reflection. What man but would have failed even with Cujas 
 and Barthole to back him ? How should he fear perfidy when 
 everything seemed so simple and natural? 
 
 What could Mathias do single-handed against Madame 
 Evangelista, Solonet, and Natalie, especially when his client 
 was a lover who would go over to the enemy as soon as his 
 happiness should seem to be imperiled ? Paul was already 
 entangling himself by making the pretty speeches customary 
 with lovers, to which his passion gave an emphasis of immense 
 value in the eyes of Madame Evangelista, who was leading 
 him on to commit himself. 
 
 The matrimonial condottieri (mercenary soldiers), who were 
 about to do battle for their clients, and whose personal prowess 
 would prove decisive in this solemn contest the two notaries 
 represented the old and the new schools, the old and the 
 ntw style of notary.
 
 348 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 Maitre Mathias was a worthy old man of sixty-nine, proud 
 of twenty years' practice in his office. His broad, gouty feet 
 were shod in shoes with silver buckles, and were an absurd 
 finish to legs so thin, with such prominent knee-bones, that 
 when he crossed his feet they looked like the cross-bones on a 
 tombstone. His lean thighs, lost in baggy, black knee- 
 breeches with silver buckles, seemed to bend under the weight 
 of a burly stomach and the round shoulders characteristic of 
 men who live in an office ; a huge ball, always clothed in a 
 green coat with square-cut skirts, which no one remembered 
 ever to have seen new. His hair, tightly combed back and 
 powdered, was tied in a rat's-tail that always tucked itself 
 away between the collar of his coat and that of his flowered 
 white vest. With his bullet head, his face as red as a 
 vine-leaf, his blue eyes, trumpet-nose, thick lips, and double- 
 chin, the dear little man, wherever he went, aroused the 
 laughter so liberally bestowed by the French on the grotesque 
 creations which Nature sometimes allows herself and Art 
 thinks it funny to exaggerate, calling them caricatures. 
 
 But in Maitre Mathias the mind had triumped over the body, 
 the qualities of the soul had vanquished the eccentricity of 
 his appearance. Most of the townsfolk treated him with 
 friendly respect and deference full of esteem. The notary's 
 voice won all hearts by the eloquent ring of honesty. His 
 only cunning consisted in going straight to the point, over- 
 setting every evil thought by the directness of his questions. 
 His sharply observant eye, and his long experience of busi- 
 I ness, gave him that spirit of divination which allowed him to 
 read consciences and discern the most secret thoughts. 
 Though grave and quiet in business, this patriarch had the 
 cheerfulness of our ancestors. He might, one felt, risk a 
 song at table, accept and keep up family customs, celebrate 
 anniversaries and birthdays, whether of grandparents or 
 children, and burn the Christmas log with due ceremony ; he 
 loved to give New Year's gifts, to invent surprises, and bring
 
 A MA K K 1 'AGE SETTLEMENT. 349 
 
 out Easter eggs ; he believed, no doubt, in the duties of a 
 godfather, and would never neglect any old-time custom that 
 gave color to life of yore. 
 
 Maitre Mathias was a noble and a respectable survival of 
 the notaries, obscure men of honor, of whom no receipt was 
 asked for millions, and who returned them in the same bags, 
 tied with the same string ; who fulfilled every trust to the 
 letter, drew up inventories for probate with decent feeling, 
 took a paternal interest in their clients' affairs, put a bar 
 sometimes in the way of a spendthrift, and were the deposi- 
 tories of family secrets ; in short, one of those notaries who 
 considered themselves responsible for blunders in their deeds, 
 and who gave time and thought to them. Never, in the whole 
 of his career as a notary, had one of his clients to complain of 
 a bad investment, of a mortgage ill-chosen or carelessly man- 
 aged. His wealth, slowly but honestly acquired, had been 
 accumulated through thirty years of industry and economy. 
 He had found places for fourteen of his clerks. Religious and 
 generous in secret, Mathias was always to be found where 
 good was to be done without reward. He was an acting 
 member of the Board of Asylums and the Charitable Com- 
 mittee, and the largest subscriber to the voluntary taxes for 
 relief of unexpected disaster, or the establishment of some 
 useful institution. Thus, neither he nor his wife had a car- 
 riage ; his word was sacred ; he had as much money deposited 
 in his cellar as lay at the bank; he was known as "Good 
 Monsieur Mathias;" and when he died, three thousand per- 
 sons followed him to the grave. 
 
 Solonet was the youthful notary who comes in humming a 
 tune, who affects an airy manner, and declares that business 
 may be done quite as efficiently with a laugh as with a serious 
 countenance ; the notary who is a captain in the National 
 Guard, who does not like to be known for a lawyer, and aims 
 at the cross of the Legion of Honor, who keeps his carriage 
 and leaves the correcting of his deeds to his clerks ; the notary
 
 350 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 who goes to balls and to the play, who buys pictures and plays 
 ecarte, who has a cash drawer into which he pours deposit- 
 money, repaying in notes what he receives in gold ; the notary 
 who keeps pace with the times and risks his capital in doubtful 
 investments, who speculates, hoping to retire with an income 
 of thirty thousand francs after ten years in his office ; the 
 notary whose acumen is the outcome of duplicity, and who is 
 feared by many as an accomplice in possession of their secrets ; 
 the notary who regards his official position as a means of mar- 
 rying some blue-stocking heiress. 
 
 When the fair and elegant Solonet all curled and scented, 
 booted like a lover of the Vaudeville, and dressed like a 
 dandy whose most important business is a duel entered the 
 room before his older colleague, who walked slowly from a 
 touch of the gout, the two were the living representatives of 
 one of the caricatures entitled "Then and Now," which had 
 great success under the Empire. 
 
 Though Madame and Mademoiselle Evangelista, to whom 
 " Good Monsieur Mathias " was a stranger, at first felt a slight 
 inclination to laugh, they were at once touched by the perfect 
 grace of his greeting. The worthy man's speech was full of 
 the amenity that an amiable old man can infuse both into 
 what he says and the manner of saying it. 
 
 The younger man, with his frothy sparkle, was at once 
 thrown into the shade. Mathias showed his superior breed- 
 ing by the measured respect of his address to Paul. Without 
 humiliating his white hairs, he recognized the young man's 
 ( rank, while appreciating the fact that certain honors are due 
 to old age, and that all such social rights are interdependent. 
 Solonet's bow and "How d'ye do?" were, on the contrary, 
 the utterance of perfect equality, which could not fail to offend 
 the susceptibilities of a man of the world, and to make him- 
 self ridiculous in the eyes of a man of rank. 
 
 The young notary, by a somewhat familiar gesture, invited 
 Madame Evangelista to speak with him in a window-recess.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 351 
 
 For some few minutes they spoke in whispers, laughing now 
 and then, no doubt to mislead the others as to the importance 
 of the conversation, in which Maitre Solonet communicated 
 the plan of battle to the lady in command. 
 
 "And could you really," said he in conclusion, "make up 
 your mind to sell your house?" 
 
 "Undoubtedly ! " said she. 
 
 Madame Evangelista did not choose to tell her lawyer her 
 reasons for such heroism, as he thought it, for Solonet's zeal 
 might have cooled if he had known that his client meant to 
 leave Bordeaux. She had not even said so to Paul, not wish- 
 ing to alarm him prematurely by the extent of the circumval- 
 lations needed for the first outworks of a political position. 
 
 After dinner the plenipotentiaries left the lovers with 
 Madame Evangelista, and went into an adjoining room to 
 discuss business. Thus two dramas were being enacted : by 
 the chimney-corner in the drawing-room a love scene in which 
 life smiled bright and happy ; in the study a serious duologue, 
 in which interest was laid bare, and already played the part 
 it always fills under the most flowery, cloudless, and summer- 
 like aspects of life. 
 
 "My dear sir, the deed will be in your hands; I know 
 what I owe to my senior." Mathias bowed gravely. "But," 
 Solonet went on, unfolding a rough draft, of no use whatever, 
 that a clerk had written out, " as we are the weaker party, as 
 we are the spinster, I have drafted the articles to save you the 
 trouble. We propose to marry with all our rights on a foot- 
 ing of possession in common, an unqualified settlement of all 
 estate, real and personal, each on the other in case of decease 
 without issue; or, if issue survive them, a settlement of one- 
 quarter on the surviving parent, and a life-interest in one- 
 quarter more. The sum thrown into common stock to be 
 one-quarter of the estate of each contracting party, the survivor 
 to have all furniture and movables without exception and 
 duty free. It is all as plain as day."
 
 352 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "Ta, ta, ta, ta," said Mathias, " I do not do business as 
 you would sing a ballad. What have you to show?" 
 
 " What on your side ? " asked Solonet. 
 
 " We have to settle," said Mathias, " the estate of Lanstrac, 
 producing twenty-three thousand francs a year in rents, to say 
 nothing of produce in kind : Item : the farms of le Grassol and 
 le Guadet, each let for three thousand six hundred francs. 
 Item : the vineyards of Bellerose, yielding on an average six- 
 teen thousand together forty-six thousand two hundred francs 
 a year. Item : a family mansion at Bordeaux, assessed at nine 
 hundred. Item: a fine house in Paris, with a forecourt and 
 garden, Rue de la Pepiniere, assessed at fifteen hundred. 
 These properties, of which I hold the title-deeds, we inherit 
 from our parents, excepting the house in Paris acquired by 
 purchase. We have also to include the furniture of the two 
 houses and of the castle at Lanstrac, valued at four hundred 
 and fifty thousand francs. There you have the table, the 
 cloth, and the first course. Now what have you for the second 
 course and the dessert ? " 
 
 " Our rights and expectations," said Solonet. 
 
 " Specify, my dear sir," replied Mathias. "What have you 
 to show ? Where is the valuation made at Monsieur Evange- 
 lista's death ? Show me your valuations, and the investments 
 you hold. Where is your capital if you have any? Where 
 is your land if you have land ? Show me your guardian's 
 accounts, and tell us what your mother gives or promises to 
 give you." 
 
 "*Is Monsieur le Comte de Manerville in love with Made- 
 moiselle Evangelista?" 
 
 " He means to marry her if everything proves suitable," 
 said the old notary. "I am not a child; this is a matter of 
 business and not of sentiment." 
 
 "The business will fall through if you have no sentiment 
 and generous sentiment; and this is why," said Solonet. 
 "We had no valuation made after our husband's death.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 353 
 
 Spanish, and a Creole, we knew nothing of French law. And 
 we were too deeply grieved to think of the petty formalities 
 which absorb colder hearts. It is a matter of public notoriety 
 that the deceased gentleman adored his wife, and that we were 
 plunged in woe. Though we had a probate and a kind of 
 valuation on a general estimate, you may thank the surrogate 
 guardian for that, who called upon us to make a statement and 
 settle a sum upon our daughter as best we might just at a time 
 when we were obliged to sell out of the English Funds to an 
 enormous amount which we wished to reinvest in Paris at 
 double the interest." 
 
 "Come, do not talk nonsense to me. There are means of 
 checking these amounts. How much did you pay in succes- 
 sion duties? The figure will be enough to verify the amounts. 
 Go to the facts. Tell us plainly how much you had, and what 
 is left. And then, if we are too desperately in love, we shall 
 see." 
 
 " Well, if you are marrying for money, you may make your 
 bow at once. We may lay claim to more than a million 
 francs ; but our mother has nothing of it left but this house 
 and furniture and four hundred odd thousand francs, invested 
 in 1817 in five per cents., and bringing in forty thousand 
 francs a year." t 
 
 " How then do you keep up a style costing a hundred thou- 
 sand? " cried Mathias in dismay. 
 
 " Our daughter has cost us vast sums. Beside, we like dis- 
 play. And, finally, all your jeremiads will not bring back 
 two sous of it." 
 
 " Mademoiselle Natalie might have been very handsomely 
 brought up on the fifty thousand francs a year that belonged 
 to her without rushing into ruin. And if you ate with such 
 an appetite as a girl, what will you not devour when you be- 
 come a wife? " 
 
 "Let us go then," said Solonet. "The handsomest girl 
 alive is bound to spend more than she has." 
 23
 
 354 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 'I will go and speak two words to my client," said the 
 older lawyer. 
 
 "Go, go," thought Maitre Solonet. "Go, old Father 
 Cassandra, and tell your client we have not a centime." For, 
 in the silence of his private office, he had strategically dis- 
 posed of his masses, formed his arguments in columns, fixed 
 the turning-points of the discussion, and prepared the critical 
 moment when the antagonistic parties, thinking all was lost, 
 would jump at a compromise which would be the triumph of 
 his client. 
 
 The flowing dress with pink ribbons, the ringlets a la Se- 
 vigne, Natalie's small foot, her insinuating looks, her slender 
 hand, constantly engaged in rearranging the curls which did 
 not need it all the tricks of a girl showing off, as a peacock 
 spreads its tail in the sun had brought Paul to the point at 
 which her mother wished to see him. He was crazy with 
 admiration, as crazy as a schoolboy for a courtesan ; his looks* 
 an unfailing thermometer of the mind, marked the frenzy of 
 passion which leads a man to commit a thousand follies. 
 
 "Natalie is so beautiful," he whispered to Madame Evan- 
 gelista, "that I can understand the madness which drives us 
 to pay for pleasure by death." 
 
 The lady tossed her head. 
 
 "A lover's words!" she replied. "My husband never 
 made me such fine speeches ; but he married me penniless, 
 and never in thirteen years gave me an instant's pain." 
 I " Is that a hint for me ? " said Paul, smiling. 
 
 "You know how truly I care for you, dear boy," said she, 
 pressing his hand. " Beside, do you not think I must love 
 you well to be willing to give you my Natalie ? " 
 
 "To give me! To give me!" cried the girl, laughing 
 and waving a fan of Indian feathers. " What are you whis- 
 pering about?" 
 
 "I," said Paul, "was saying how well I love you since 
 the proprieties forbid my expressing my hopes to you. ' '
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 355 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " I am afraid of myself." 
 
 " Oh ! you are too clever not to know how to set the gems 
 of flattery. Would you like me to tell you what I think of 
 you ? Well, you seem to me to have more wit than a man in 
 love should show. To be Sweet-pea and at the same time 
 very clever," said she, looking down, "seems to me an 
 unfair advantage. A man ought to choose between the two. 
 I, too, am afraid." 
 
 "Of what?" 
 
 "We will not talk like this. Do not you think, mother, 
 that there is danger in such a conversation when the contract 
 is not yet signed ?" 
 
 "But it will be," said Paul. 
 
 " I should very much like to know what Achilles and Nestor 
 are saying to each other," said Natalie, with a glance of child- 
 like curiosity at the door of the adjoining room. 
 
 "They are discussing our children, our death, and I know 
 not what trifles beside," said Paul. " They are counting out 
 our crown-pieces, to tell us whether we may have five horses 
 in the stable. And they are considering certain deeds of gift, 
 but I have forestalled them there." 
 
 "How?" said Natalie. 
 
 "Have I not given you myself wholly and all I have?" 
 said he, looking at the girl, who was handsomer than ever as 
 the blush brought up by her pleasure at this reply mounted to 
 her cheeks. 
 
 " Mother, how am I to repay such generosity?" 
 
 " My dear child, is not your life before you ? If you make 
 him happy every day, is not that a gift of inexhaustible treas- 
 ures ? I had no other fortune." 
 
 " Do you like Lanstrac ? " asked Paul. 
 
 " How can I fail to like anything that is yours? " said she. 
 "And I should like to see your house." 
 
 " Our house," said Paul. " You want to see whether I
 
 356 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 have anticipated your tastes, if you can be happy there ? Your 
 mother has made your husband's task a hard one : you have 
 always been so happy ; but when love is infinite, nothing is 
 impossible." 
 
 " Dear children," said Madame Evangelista, " do you think 
 you can remain in Bordeaux during the early days of your 
 marriage ? If you feel bold enough to face the world that 
 knows you, watches you, criticises you well and good ! But- 
 if you both have that coyness which dwells in the soul and 
 finds no utterance, we will go to Paris, where the life of a 
 young couple is lost in the torrent. There only can you live 
 like lovers without fear of ridicule." 
 
 "You are right, mother; I had not thought of it. But I 
 shall hardly have time to get the house ready. I will write 
 this evening to de Marsay, a friend on whom I can rely, to 
 hurry on the workmen." 
 
 At the very moment when, like all young men who are 
 accustomed to gratify their wishes without any preliminary 
 reflection, Paul was recklessly pledging himself to the expenses 
 of a residence in Paris, Maitre Mathias came into the room 
 and signed to his client to come and speak with him. 
 
 "What is it, my good friend?" said Paul, allowing him- 
 self to be led aside. 
 
 "Monsieur le Comte," said the worthy man, "the lady has 
 pot a sou. My advice is to put off this discussion till another 
 day to give you the opportunity of acting with propriety." 
 
 "Monsieur Paul," said Natalie, "I also should like a 
 private word with you." 
 
 Though Madame- Evangelista's face was calm, no Jew in 
 the Dark Ages ever suffered greater martyrdom in his caldron 
 of boiling oil than she in her violet velvet dress. Solonet 
 had pledged himself to the marriage, but she knew not by 
 what means and conditions he meant to succeed, and she en- 
 dured the most dreadful anguish of alternative courses. She
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 357 
 
 really owed her triumph, perhaps, to her daughter's disobedi- 
 ence. 
 
 Natalie had put her own interpretation on her mother's 
 words, for she could not fail to see her uneasiness. When she 
 perceived the effect of her advances, her mind was torn by a 
 thousand contradictory thoughts. Without criticising her 
 mother, she felt half ashamed of this manoeuvring, of which 
 the result was obviously to be some definite advantage. Then 
 she was seized by a very intelligible sort of jealous curiosity. 
 She wanted to ascertain whether Paul loved her well enough 
 to overlook the difficulties her mother had alluded to, and of 
 which the existence was proved by Maitre Mathias' cloudy 
 brow. These feelings prompted her to an impulse of honesty 
 which, in fact, became her well. The blackest perfidy would 
 have been less dangerous than her innocence was. 
 
 " Paul," said she in an undertone, and it was the first time 
 she had addressed him by his name, " if some difficulties of 
 money matters could divide us, understand that I release you 
 from every pledge, and give you leave to ascribe to me all the 
 blame that could arise from such a separation." 
 
 She spoke with such perfect dignity in the expression of her 
 generosity that Paul believed in her disinterestedness and 
 her ignorance of the fact which the notary had just com- 
 municated to him ; he pressed the girl's hand, kissing it like 
 a man to whom love is far dearer than money. 
 
 Natalie left the room. 
 
 "Bless me ! Monsieur le Comte, you are committing great 
 follies," growled the old notary, rejoining his client. 
 
 But Paul stood pensive ; he had expected to have an income 
 of about a hundred thousand francs by uniting his fortune 
 and Natalie's; and however blindly in love a man may be, 
 he does not drop without a pang from a hundred thousand to 
 forty-six thousand francs a year when he marries a woman 
 accustomed to every luxury. 
 
 " My daughter then is gone," said Madame Evangelista,
 
 358 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 advancing with royal dignity to where Paul and the notary 
 were standing. " Can you not tell me what is going on ! " 
 
 "Madame," said Mathias, dismayed by Paul's silence, and 
 forced to break the ice, " an impediment a delay " 
 
 On this, Maitre Solonet came out of the inner room and 
 interrupted his senior with a speech that restored Paul to life. 
 Overwhelmed by the recollection of his own devoted speeches 
 and lover-like attitude, Paul knew not how to withdraw or to 
 modify them ; he only longed to fling himself into some 
 yawning gulf. 
 
 " There is a way of releasing Madame Evangelista from her 
 debt to her daughter," said the young lawyer with airy ease. 
 " Madame Evangelista holds securities for forty thousand 
 francs yearly in five per cents.; the capital will soon be at 
 par, if not higher ; we may call it eight hundred thousand 
 francs. This house and garden are worth certainly two 
 hundred thousand. Granting this, madame may, under the 
 marriage-contract, transfer the securities and title-deeds to 
 her daughter, reserving only the life-interest, for I cannot 
 suppose that the count wishes to leave his mother-in-law 
 penniless. Though madame has spent her own fortune, she 
 will thus restore her daughter's, all but a trifling sum." 
 
 "Women are most unfortunate when they do not under- 
 stand business," said Madame Evangelista. "I have securi- 
 ties and title-deeds? What in the world are they?" 
 
 Paul was enraptured as he heard this proposal. The old 
 lawyer, seeing the snare spread and his client with one foot 
 already caught in it, stood petrified, saying to himself 
 
 " I believe we are being tricked ! " 
 
 " If madame takes my advice, she will at least secure peace," 
 the younger man went on. "If she sacrifices herself, at least 
 she will not be worried by the young people. Who can fore- 
 see who will live or die ? Monsieur le Comte will then sign 
 a release for the whole sum due to Mademoiselle Evangelista 
 out of her father's fortune."
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 359 
 
 Mathias could not conceal the wrath that sparkled in his 
 eyes and crimsoned his face. 
 
 "A sum of ? " he asked, trembling with indignation. 
 
 " Of one million one hundred and fifty-six thousand francs, 
 according to the deed " 
 
 " Why do you not ask Monsieur le Comte hie et nunc (here 
 and now) to renounce all claims on his wife's fortune?" said 
 Mathias. " It would be more straightforward. Well, Mon- 
 sieur le Comte de Manerville's ruin shall not be accomplished 
 under my eyes. I beg to withdraw." 
 
 He went a step toward the door, to show his client that the 
 matter was really serious. But he turned back, and, addressing 
 Madame Evangelista, he said 
 
 " Do not suppose, madame, that I imagine you to be in col- 
 lusion with my colleague in his ideas. I believe you to be an 
 honest woman a fine lady, who knows nothing of business." 
 
 " Thank you, my dear sir ! " retorted Solonet. 
 
 " You know that there is no question of offense among 
 lawyers," said Mathias. "But at least, madame, let me ex- 
 plain to you the upshot of this bargain. You are still young 
 enough and handsome enough to marry again. Oh, dear 
 me ! " he went on, in reply to a gesture of the lady's, "who 
 can answer for the future?" 
 
 "I never thought, monsieur," said she, "that after seven 
 years of widowhood in the prime of life, and after refusing 
 some splendid offers for my daughter's sake, I should, at nine- 
 and-thirty, be thought capable of such madness. If we were 
 not discussing business, I should regard such a speech as an 
 impertinence." 
 
 "Would it not be a greater impertinence to assume that 
 you could not remarry? " 
 
 "Can and will are very different words," said Solonet, 
 with a gallant flourish. 
 
 "Well," said Mathias, "we need not talk about your mar- 
 rying. You may and we all hope you will live for five-and-
 
 360 A MARRIAGE^SETTLEMENT. 
 
 forty years yet. Now, since you are to retain your life-interest 
 in the income left by Monsieur Evangelista as long as you 
 live, must your children dine with Duke Humphrey? "* 
 
 " What is the meaning of it all? " said the widow. " Who 
 is Duke Humphrey, and what is life-interest?" 
 
 Solonet, a speaker of elegance and taste, began to laugh. 
 
 "I will translate," said the old man: "If your children 
 wish to be prudent, they will think of the future. To think 
 of the future means to save half one's income, supposing there 
 are no more than two children, who must first have a good 
 education, and then a handsome marriage-portion. Thus, your 
 daughter and her husband will be reduced to living on twenty 
 thousand francs a year when they have each been accustomed 
 to spend fifty thousand while unmarried. And even that is 
 nothing. My client will be expected to hand over to his 
 children in due course eleven hundred thousand francs as 
 their share of their mother's fortune, and he will never have 
 received any of it if his wife should die and madame survive 
 her which is quite possible. In all conscience, is not this to 
 throw himself into the Gironde, tied hand and foot ? You 
 wish to see Mademoiselle Natalie made happy ? If she loves 
 her husband which no lawyer allows himself to doubt she 
 will share his troubles. Madame, I foresee enough to make 
 her die of grief, for she will be miserably poor. Yes, madame, 
 miserably poor ; for it is poverty to those who require a hun- 
 dred thousand francs a year to be reduced to twenty thousand. 
 If love should lead Monsieur le Comte into extravagance, his 
 wife would reduce him to beggary by claiming her share in 
 the event of any disaster. 
 
 "I am arguing for your sake, for theirs, for that of their 
 children for all parties." 
 
 "The good man has certainly delivered a broadside," 
 thought Solonet, with a glance at his client, as much as to 
 say: " Come on ! " 
 
 * To go hungry.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 361 
 
 "There is a way of reconciling all these interests," replied 
 Madame Evangelista calmly. "I may reserve only such a 
 small allowance as may enable me to go into a convent, and 
 you will become at once possessed of all my property. I will 
 renounce the world if my death to it will secure my daughter's 
 happiness." 
 
 " Madame," said the old man, " let us take time for mature 
 consideration of the steps that may smooth away all difficul- 
 ties." 
 
 "Bless me, my dear sir," cried Madame Evangelista, who 
 foresaw that by delay she would be lost, " all has been con- 
 sidered. I did not know what marriage meant in France ; I 
 am a Spanish creole. I did not know that before I could see 
 my daughter married I had to make sure how many days 
 longer God would grant me to live, that my child would be 
 wronged by my living, that I have no business to be alive or 
 ever to have lived ! 
 
 "When my husband married me I had nothing but my 
 name and myself. My name was to him a treasure beside 
 which his wealth paled. What fortune can compare with a 
 great name? My fortune was my beauty, virtue, happy 
 temper, birth, and breeding. Can money buy these gifts? 
 If Natalie's father could hear this discussion, his magnanimous 
 spirit would be grieved forever and his happiness would be 
 marred in paradise. I spent millions of francs, foolishly I 
 daresay, without his ever frowning even. Since his death I 
 have been economical and thrifty by comparison with the 
 life he liked me to lead. Let this end it ! Monsieur de 
 Manerville is so dejected that I " 
 
 No words can represent the confusion and excitement pro- 
 duced by this exclamation "end it!" It is enough to say 
 that these four well-bred persons all talked at once. 
 
 " In Spain you marry Spanish fashion, as you will ; but in 
 France you marry French fashion rationally, and as you 
 can," said Mathias.
 
 362 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "Ah, madame," Paul began, rousing himself from his 
 stupor, " you are mistaken in my feelings 
 
 "This is not a question of feelings," said the old man, 
 anxious to stop his client; "this is business affecting three 
 generations. Was it we who made away with the missing 
 millions we, who merely ask to clear up the difficulties of 
 which we are innocent?" 
 
 "Let us marry without further haggling," said the wily 
 Maitre Solonet. 
 
 " Haggling ! Haggling ! Do you call it haggling to defend 
 the interests of the children and of their father and mother? " 
 cried Mathias. 
 
 "Yes," Paul went on, addressing his mother-in-law, "I 
 deplore the recklessness of my youth, which now hinders my 
 closing this discussion with a word, as much as you deplore 
 your ignorance of business matters and involuntary extrava- 
 gance. God be my witness that at this moment I am not 
 thinking of myself; a quiet life at Lanstrac has no terrors for 
 me ; but Mademoiselle Natalie would have to give up her 
 tastes and habits. That would alter our whole existence." 
 
 "But where did Evangelista find his millions ?" said the 
 widow. 
 
 " Monsieur Evangelista was a man of business, he played 
 the great game of commerce, he loaded ships and made con- 
 siderable sums ; we are a landed proprietor, our capital is 
 sunk, and our income more or less fixed," the old lawyer 
 replied. 
 
 "Still, there is a way out of the difficulty," said Solonet, 
 speaking in a high-pitched key, and silencing the other three 
 by attracting their attention and their eyes. 
 
 The young man was like a dexterous coachman who, holding 
 the reins of a four-in-hand, amuses himself by lashing and, at 
 the same time, holding in the team. He spurred their pas- 
 sions and soothed, them by turns, making Paul foam in his 
 harness, for to him life and happiness were in the balance ;
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 363 
 
 and his client as well, for she did not see her way through the 
 intricacies of the dispute. 
 
 " Madame Evangelista may, this very day, hand over the 
 securities in the five per cents., and sell this house. Sold in 
 lots, it will fetch three hundred thousand francs. Madame 
 will pay you one hundred and fifty thousand francs. Thus, 
 madame will pay down nine hundred and fifty thousand francs 
 at once. Though this is not all she owes her daughter, can 
 you find many fortunes to match it in France?" 
 
 "Well and good," said Mathias ; " but what is madame to 
 live on? " 
 
 At this question, which implied assent, Solonet said within 
 himself 
 
 " Oh, ho ! old fox, so you are caught." 
 
 " Madame ? " he said aloud. " Madame will keep the fifty 
 thousand crowns left of the price of the house. That sum, 
 added to the sale of her furniture, can be invested in an an- 
 nuity, and will give her twenty thousand francs a year. Mon- 
 sieur le Comte will arrange for her to live with him. Lanstrac 
 is a large place. You have a good house in Paris," he went 
 on, addressing Paul, "so madame your mother-in-law can live 
 with you wherever you are. A widow who, having no house 
 to keep up, has twenty thousand francs a year, is better off 
 than madame was when she was mistress of all her fortune. 
 Madame Evangelista has no one to care for but her daughter ; 
 Monsieur le Comte also stands alone ; your heirs are in the 
 distant future, there is no fear of conflicting interests. 
 
 "A son-in-law and a mother-in-law under such circum- 
 stances always join to form one household. Madame Evan- 
 gelista will make up for the deficit of capital by paying a quota 
 out of her annuity which will help toward the housekeeping. 
 We know her to be too generous, too large-minded, to live as 
 a charge on her children. 
 
 " Thus, you may live happy and united with a hundred 
 thousand francs a year to spend a sufficient income, surely,
 
 364 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 Monsieur le Comte, to afford you, in any country, all the 
 comforts of life and the indulgence of your fancies. And, 
 believe me, young married people often feel the need of a 
 third in the household. Now, I ask you, what third can be 
 more suitable than an affectionate, good mother? " 
 
 Paul, as he listened to Solonet, thought he heard the voice 
 of an angel. He looked at Mathias to see if he did not share 
 his admiration for Solonet's fervid eloquence : for he did not 
 know that, under the assumed enthusiasm of impassioned 
 words, notaries, like attorneys, hide the cold and unremitting 
 alertness of the diplomatist. 
 
 "A pretty paradise ! " said the old man. 
 
 Bewildered by his client's delight, Mathias sat down on an 
 ottoman, resting his head on one hand, lost in evidently 
 grieved meditations. He knew too well the ponderous phrases 
 in which men of business purposely shroud their tricks, and 
 he was not the man to be duped by them. He stole a glance 
 at his fellow-notary and at Madame Evangelista, who went 
 on talking to Paul, and he tried to detect some indications of 
 the plot of which the elaborate design was beginning to be 
 perceptible. 
 
 "Monsieur," said Paul to Solonet, "I have to thank you 
 for the care you have devoted to the conciliation of our inter- 
 ests. This arrangement solves all difficulties more happily 
 than I had dared to hope that is to say, if it suits you, 
 madame," he added, turning to Madame Evangelista, "for I 
 will have nothing to say to any plan that is not equally satis- 
 factory to you." 
 
 " I ? " said she. " Whatever will make my children happy 
 will delight me. Do not consider me at all." 
 
 "But that must not be," said Paul eagerly. "If your 
 comfort and dignity were not secured, Natalie and I would 
 be more distressed about it than you yourself could be." 
 
 " Do not be uneasy on that score, Monsieur le Comte," 
 said Solonet.
 
 A MAKKIAGE SETTLEMENT. 365 
 
 " Ah ! " thought Maitre Mathias, " they mean to make him 
 kiss the rod before they scourge him." 
 
 " Be quite easy," Solonet went on ; " there is such a spirit 
 of speculation in Bordeaux just now that investments for an- 
 nuities are to be made on very advantageous terms. After 
 handing over to you the fifty thousand crowns due to you on 
 the sale of the house and furniture, I believe I may guarantee 
 to madame a residue of two hundred thousand francs. This 
 I undertake to invest in an annuity on a first mortgage on an 
 estate worth a million, and to get ten per cent., twenty-five 
 thousand francs a year. Thus we should unite two very nearly 
 equal fortunes. Mademoiselle Natalie will bring forty thou- 
 sand francs a year in five per cents, and a hundred and fifty 
 thousand francs in money, which will yield seven thousand 
 francs a year: total, forty-seven as against your forty-six 
 thousand." 
 
 " That is quite plain," said Paul. 
 
 As he ended his speech, Solonet had cast a side-long glance 
 at his client, not unseen by Mathias, and which was as much 
 as to say : 
 
 " Bring up your reserves." 
 
 "Why ! " cried Madame Evangelista in a tone of joy that 
 seemed quite genuine, " I can give Natalie my diamonds ; 
 they must be worth at least a hundred thousand francs." 
 
 "We can have them valued," said Solonet, " and this en- 
 tirely alters the case. Nothing, then, can hinder Monsieur 
 le Comte from giving a discharge in full for the sums due to 
 Mademoiselle Natalie as her share of her father's fortune, or 
 the betrothed couple from taking the guardian's accounts as 
 passed, at the reading of the contract. If madame. with truly 
 Spanish magnificence, despoils herself to fulfill her obligations 
 within a hundred thousand francs of the sum-total, it is but 
 fair to release her." 
 
 " Nothing could be fairer," said Paul. " I am only over- 
 powered by so much generosity."
 
 366 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "Is not my daughter my second self?" said Madame 
 Evangelista. 
 
 Maitre Mathias detected an expression of joy on Madame 
 Evangelista' s face when she saw the difficulties so nearly set 
 aside ; and this, and the sudden recollection of the diamonds, 
 brought out like fresh troops, confirmed all his suspicions. 
 
 "The scene was planned between them," thought he, " as 
 gamblers pack the cards when some pigeon is to be rooked. 
 So the poor boy I have known from his cradle is to be plucked 
 alive by a mother-in-law, done brown by love, and ruined by 
 his wife ? After taking such care of his fine estate, am I to 
 see it gobbled up in a single evening ? Three and a half mil- 
 lions mortgaged, in fact, to guarantee eleven hundred thou- 
 sand francs of her portion, which these two women will make 
 him throw away." 
 
 As he thus discerned in Madame Evangelista's soul a scheme 
 which was not dishonest or criminal which was not thieving, 
 or cheating, or swindling which was not based on any evil 
 or blamable feeling, but yet contained the germ of every 
 crime, Maitre Mathias was neither shocked nor generously 
 indignant. He was not a misanthrope ; he was an old lawyer, 
 inured by his business to the keen self-interest of men of the 
 world, to their ingenious treachery, more deadly than a bold 
 highway murder committed by some poor devil who is guil- 
 lotined with due solemnity. In the higher ranks these passages 
 of arms, these diplomatic discussions, are like the little dark 
 corners into which every kind of filth is shot. 
 
 Maitre Mathias, very sorry for his client, cast a long look 
 into the future, and saw no hope of good. 
 
 "Well, we must take the field with the same weapons," 
 said he to himself, "and beat them on their own ground." 
 
 At this juncture Paul, Solonet, and Madame Evangelista, 
 dismayed by the old man's silence, were feeling the necessity 
 of this stern censor's approbation to sanction these arrange- 
 ments, and all three looked at him.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 367 
 
 " Well, my dear sir, and what do you think of this ? " asked 
 Paul. 
 
 "This is what I think," replied the uncompromising and 
 conscientious old man, "you are not rich enough to commit 
 such princely follies. The estate of Lanstrac, valued at three 
 per cent., is worth one million of francs, including the furni- 
 ture ; the farms of le Grassol and le Guadet, with the vine- 
 yards of Bellerose, are worth another million ; your two 
 residences and furniture a third million. To meet these three 
 millions, yielding an income of forty-seven thousand two 
 hundred francs, Mademoiselle Natalie shows eight hundred 
 thousand francs in the Funds, and let us say one hundred thou- 
 sand francs' worth of diamonds at a hypothetical valuation ! 
 Also, one hundred and fifty thousand francs in cash one 
 million and fifty thousand francs in all. Then, in the face of 
 these facts, my friend here triumphantly asserts that we are 
 uniting equal fortunes ! He requires us to stand indebted in 
 a hundred thousand francs to our children, since we are to 
 give the lady a discharge in full, by taking the guardian's 
 accounts as passed, for a sum of eleven hundred and fifty-six 
 thousand francs, while receiving only one million and fifty 
 thousand ! 
 
 "You can listen to this nonsense with a lover's rapture; 
 and do you suppose that old Mathias, who is not in love, will 
 forget his arithmetic and fail to appreciate the difference 
 between landed estate of enormous value as capital, and of 
 increasing value, and the income derivable from money in 
 securities which are liable to fluctuations in value and diminu- 
 tion of interest ? I am old enough to have seen land improve 
 and funds fall. You called me in, Monsieur le Comte, to 
 stipulate for your interests ; allow me to protect them or dis- 
 miss me." 
 
 " If monsieur looks for a fortune of which the capital is a 
 match for his own," said Solonet, "we have nothing like 
 three millions and a half; that is self-evident. If you can
 
 368 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 show these overpowering millions, we have but our one poor 
 little million to offer a mere trifle ! three times as much as 
 the dower of an archduchess of Austria. Bonaparte received 
 two hundred and fifty thousand francs when he married Marie 
 Louise." 
 
 "Marie Louise ruined Napoleon," said Maitre Mathias in 
 a growl. 
 
 Natalie's mother understood the bearing of this speech. 
 
 "If my sacrifices are in vain, "she exclaimed, "I decline 
 to carry such a discussion any further ; I trust to the count's 
 discretion, and renounce the honor of his proposals for my 
 daughter." 
 
 After the manoeuvres planned by the young notary this 
 battle of conflicting interests had reached the point where the 
 victory ought to have rested with Madame Evangelista. The 
 mother-in-law had opened her heart, abandoned her posses- 
 sions, and was almost released. The intending husband was 
 bound to accept the conditions laid down beforehand by the 
 collusion of Maitre Solonet and his client, or sin against every 
 law of generosity, and be false to his love. 
 
 Like the hand of a clock moved by the works, Paul came 
 duly to the point. 
 
 "What, madame," cried he, "you could undo in one mo- 
 ment " 
 
 "Why, monsieur, to whom do I owe my duty? To my 
 daughter. When she is one-and-twenty she will pass my 
 accounts and release me. She will have a million francs, and 
 can, if she pleases, choose among the sons of the peers of 
 France. Is she not the daughter of a Casa-Real ? " 
 
 " Madame is quite justified. Why should she be worse off 
 to-day than she will be fourteen months hence ? Do not rob 
 her of the benefits of her position," said Solonet. 
 
 "Mathias," said Paul, with deep grief, "there are two 
 ways of being ruined and at this moment you have undone 
 me!"
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 369 
 
 He went toward the old lawyer, no doubt intending to 
 order that the contract should be at once drawn up. Mathias 
 forefended this disaster by a glance which seemed to say, 
 "Wait!" He saw tears in Paul's eyes tears of shame at 
 the tenor of this debate, and at the peremptory tone in which 
 Madame Evangelista had thrown him over and he checked 
 them by a start, the start of Archimedes, successful in his 
 search, crying EUREKA ! 
 
 The words " Peer of France " had flashed light on his mind 
 like a torch in a cavern. 
 
 At this instant Natalie reappeared, as lovely as the dawn, 
 and said with an innocent air : 
 
 "Am I in the way?" 
 
 " Strangely in the way, my child ! " replied her mother, 
 with cruel bitterness. 
 
 " Come, dear Natalie," said Paul, taking her hand and 
 leading her to a chair by the fire, "everything is settled ! " 
 for he could not endure to think that his hopes were over- 
 thrown. 
 
 And Mathias eagerly put in : 
 
 "Yes, everything can yet be settled." 
 
 Like a general who in one move baffles the tactics of the 
 enemy, the old lawyer had had a vision of the Genius that 
 watches over notaries, unfolding before him in legal script a 
 conception that might save the future prospects of Paul and 
 of his children. Maitre Solonet knew of no other issue from 
 these irreconcilable difficulties than the determination to which 
 the young count had been led by love, and by this storm of 
 contending feelings and interests ; so he was excessively sur- 
 prised by his senior's remark. 
 
 Curious to know what remedy Maitre Mathias had to sug- 
 gest for a state of things which must have seemed to him past 
 all hope, he asked him : 
 
 "What have you to propose?" 
 24
 
 370 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "Natalie, my dear child, leave us," said Madame Evan- 
 gelista. 
 
 "Mademoiselle is not de trop" replied Maitre Mathias, 
 with a smile. "I speak as much for her as for Monsieur le 
 Comte." 
 
 There was a solemn silence, each one in great excitement 
 awaiting the old man's speech with the utmost curiosity. 
 
 " In our day," Mathias went on after a pause, " the notary's 
 profession has changed in many ways. In our day political 
 revolutions affect the future prospects of families, and this used 
 not to be the case. Formerly life ran in fixed grooves, ranks 
 were clearly defined " 
 
 "We are not here to listen to a lecture on political economy, 
 but to arrange a marriage-contract," said Solonet, with a flip- 
 pant impatience, and interrupting the old man. 
 
 " I beg you to allow me to speak in my turn," said 
 Mathias. 
 
 Solonet took his seat on the ottoman, saying to Madame 
 Evangelista in an undertone 
 
 " Now you will learn what we lawyers mean by rigma- 
 role." 
 
 " Notaries are consequently obliged to watch the course of 
 politics, since they now are intimately concerned with private 
 affairs. To give you an instance : Formerly noble families 
 had inalienable fortunes, but the Revolution overthrew them ; 
 the present system tends to reconstructing such fortunes," 
 said the old man, indulging somewhat in the twaddle of the 
 tabellionaris boa constrictor. "Now, Monsieur le Comte, in 
 virtue of his name, his talents, and his wealth, is evidently 
 destined to sit some day in the lower Chamber ; destiny may 
 perhaps lead him to the upper and hereditary Chamber ; and, 
 as we know, he has every qualification that may justify our 
 prognostics". Are you not of my opinion, madame?" said he 
 to the widow. 
 
 "You have anticipated my dearest hope," said she.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 371 
 
 " Manerville must be a peer of France, or I shall die of 
 grief." 
 
 "All that may tend to that end ? " said Maitre Mathias, 
 
 appealing to the mother-in-law with a look of frank good- 
 humor. 
 
 "Answers to my dearest wish," she put in. 
 
 " Well, then," said Mathias, " is not this marriage a fitting 
 opportunity for creating an entail ? Such a foundation will 
 most certainly be an argument in the eyes of the present gov- 
 ernment for the nomination of my client when a batch of 
 peers is created. Monsieur le Comte will, of course, dedicate 
 to this purpose the estate of Lanstrac, worth about a million. 
 I do not ask that mademoiselle should contribute an equal 
 sum ; that would not be fair ; but we may take eight hundred 
 thousand francs of her money for the purpose. I know of two 
 estates for sale at this moment, bordering on the lands of Lan- 
 strac, in which those eight hundred thousand francs, to be 
 sunk in real estate, may be invested at four and a half percent. 
 The Paris house ought also to be included in the entail. The 
 surplus of the two fortunes, wisely managed, will amply suffice 
 to provide for the younger children. If the contracting par- 
 ties can agree as to these details, Monsieur de Manerville may 
 then pass your guardian's accounts and be chargeable for the 
 balance. I will consent." 
 
 "Questa coda non e di qucsto gatto ! " (this tail does not fit 
 that cat) exclaimed Madame Evangelista, looking at her 
 sponsor, Solonet, and pointing to Maitre Mathias. 
 
 "There is something behind all this," said Solonet in an 
 undertone. 
 
 "And what is all this muddle for? " Paul asked of Mathias, 
 going with him into the adjoining room. 
 
 "To save you from ruin," said the old notary in a whisper. 
 " You are quite bent on marrying a girl and her mother 
 who have made away with two millions of francs in seven 
 years ; you are accepting a debt of more than a hundred thou-
 
 372 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 sand francs to your children, to whom you will some day have 
 to hand over eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand francs on 
 their mother's behalf, when you are receiving hardly a million. 
 You run the risk of seeing your whole fortune melt away in 
 five years, leaving you as bare as St. John the Baptist, while 
 you will remain the debtor in enormous sums to your wife and 
 her representatives. If you choose to embark in that boat, go 
 on, Monsieur le Comte ; but at least allow your old friend to 
 save the house of Manerville." 
 
 " But how will this save it? " asked Paul. 
 
 " Listen, Monsieur le Comte ; you are very much in love ? " 
 
 "Yes," replied Paul. 
 
 "A man in love is about as secret as a cannon-shot; I will 
 tell you nothing ! If you were to repeat things, your mar- 
 riage might come to nothing, so I place your love under the 
 protection of my silence. You trust to my fidelity? " 
 
 "What a question ! " 
 
 "Well, then, let me tell you that Madame Evangelista, 
 her notary, and her daughter were playing a trick on us all 
 through, and are more than clever. By heaven, what sharp 
 practice ! " 
 
 "Natalie?" cried Paul. 
 
 " Well, I will not swear to that," said the old man. " You 
 want her take her ! But I wish this marriage might fall 
 through without the smallest blame to you ! " 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "That girl would beggar Peru. Beside, she rides like a 
 circus-rider ; she is what you may call emancipated. Women 
 of that sort make bad wives." 
 
 Paul pressed his old friend's hand and replied with a little 
 fatuous smile. 
 
 " Don't be alarmed. And for the moment, what must 
 I do?" 
 
 " Stand firm to these conditions ; they will consent, for the 
 bargain does not damage their interests. And beside, all
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 373 
 
 Madame Evangelista wants is to get her daughter married ; I 
 have seen her hand; do not trust her." 
 
 Paul returned to the drawing-room, where he found the 
 widow talking in low tones to Solonet, just as he had been 
 talking to Mathias. Natalie, left out of this mysterious con- 
 ference, was playing with a screen. Somewhat out of coun- 
 tenance, she was wondering : " What absurdity keeps me from 
 all knowledge of my own concerns?" 
 
 The younger lawyer was taking in the general outlines and 
 remote effects of a stipulation based on the personal pride of 
 the parties concerned, into which his client had blindly rushed. 
 But though Mathias was now nothing else but a notary, Solo- 
 net was still to some degree a man, and carried some juvenile 
 conceit into his dealings. It often happens that personal 
 vanity makes a young lawyer forgetful of his client's interests. 
 Under these circumstances, Maitre Solonet, who would not 
 allow the widow to think that Nestor was beating Achilles, 
 was advising her to conclude the matter at once on these lines. 
 Little did he care for the ultimate fulfillment of the contract ; 
 to him victory meant the release of Madame Evangelista with 
 an assured income, and the marriage of Natalie. 
 
 " All Bordeaux will know that you have settled about eleven 
 hundred thousand francs on your daughter, and that you still 
 have twenty-five thousand francs a year," said Solonet in the 
 lady's ear. " I had not hoped for such a brilliant result." 
 
 "But," said she, "explain to me why the creation of an 
 entail should so immediately have stilled the storm." 
 
 "Distrust of you and your daughter. An entailed estate is 
 inalienable : neither husband nor wife can touch it." 
 
 "That is a positive insult." 
 
 " Oh, no. We call that foresight. The good man caught 
 you in a snare. If you refuse the entail, he will say : ' Then 
 you want to squander my client's fortune ; ' whereas, if he 
 creates an entail, it is out of all risk, just as if the couple were 
 married under the provisions of the trust."
 
 374 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 Solonet silenced his own scruples by reflecting 
 
 "These stipulations will only take effect in the remote 
 future, and by that time Madame Evangelista will be dead 
 and buried." 
 
 She, for her part, was satisfied with Solonet's explanation ; 
 she had entire confidence in him. She was perfectly ignorant 
 of the law ; she saw her daughter married, and that was all 
 she asked for the nonce ; she was delighted at their success. 
 And so, as Mathias suspected, neither Solonet nor Madame 
 Evangelista as yet understood the full extent of his plan, 
 which had incontrovertible reasons to support it. 
 
 "Well, then, Monsieur Mathias," said the widow, "every- 
 thing is satisfactory." 
 
 " Madame, if you and Monsieur le Comte agree to these 
 conditions, you should exchange pledges. It is fully under- 
 stood by you both, is it not," he went on, " that the marriage 
 takes place only on condition of the creation of an entail, 
 including the estate of Lanstrac and the house in the Rue de 
 la Pepiniere, both belonging to the intending husband; item : 
 eight hundred thousand francs deducted in money from the 
 portion of the intending wife to be invested in land ? Forgive 
 me, madame, for repeating this ; a solemn and positive pledge 
 is necessary in such a case. The formation of an entail re- 
 quires many formalities it must be registered in Chancery 
 and receive the royal signature ; and we ought to proceed at 
 once to the purchase of the lands, so as to include them in the 
 schedule of property which the royal patent renders inalien- 
 able. In many families a document would be required ; but, 
 as between you, verbal consent will no doubt be sufficient. 
 Do you both consent?" 
 
 "Yes," said Madame Evangelista. 
 
 "Yes," said Paul. 
 
 "And how about me?" asked Natalie, laughing. 
 
 "You, mademoiselle, are a minor," replied Solonet, "and 
 that need not distress you ! "
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 375 
 
 It was then agreed that Maitre Mathias should draw up the 
 contract, and Maitre Solonet audit the guardian's accounts, 
 and that all the papers should be signed, in agreement with 
 the law, a day or two before the wedding. 
 
 After a few civilities the lawyers rose. 
 
 "It is raining, Mathias; shall I take you home? I have 
 my cab here," said Solonet. 
 
 "My carriage is at your service," said Paul, preparing to 
 accompany the good man. 
 
 "I will not rob you of a minute," said the old man; "I 
 will accept my friend's offer." 
 
 " Well," said Achilles to Nestor, as the carriage rolled on its 
 way, " you have been truly patriarchal. Those young people 
 would, no doubt, have ruined themselves." 
 
 "I was uneasy about the future," said Mathias, not betray- 
 ing the real motive of his proposal. 
 
 At this moment the two lawyers were like two actors who 
 shake hands behind the scenes after playing on the stage a 
 scene of hatred and provocation. 
 
 " But is it not my business," said Solonet, who was think- 
 ing of technicalities, "to purchase the lands of which you 
 speak ? Is it not our money that is to be invested ? " 
 
 " How can you include Mademoiselle Evangelista's land 
 in an entail created by the Comte de Manerville?" asked 
 Mathias. 
 
 "That difficulty can be settled in Chancery," said Solonet. 
 
 "But I am the seller's notary as well as the buyer's," 
 replied Mathias. " Beside, Monsieur de Manerville can pur- 
 chase in his own name. When it comes to paying, we can 
 state the use of the wife's portion." 
 
 "You have an answer for everything, my worthy senior," 
 said Solonet, laughing. "You have been grand this evening, 
 and you have beaten us." 
 
 "Well, for an old fellow unprepared for your batteries 
 loaded with grape-shot, it was not so bad, eh?"
 
 376 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "Ah, ha! " laughed Solonst. 
 
 The odious contest in which the happiness of a family had 
 been so narrowly risked was to them no more than a matter 
 of legal polemics. "We have not gone through forty years 
 of chicanery for nothing," said Mathias. "Solonet," he 
 added, "I am a good-natured fellow; you may be present at 
 the sale and purchase of the lands to be added to the estate." 
 
 "Thank you, my good friend ! You will find me at your 
 service in case of need." 
 
 While the two notaries were thus peaceably going on their 
 way, with no emotion beyond a little dryness of the throat, 
 Paul and Madame Evangelista were suffering from the nervous 
 trepidation, the fluttering about the heart, the spasm of brain 
 and spine, to which persons of strong passions are prone after 
 a scene when their interests or their feelings have been severely 
 attacked. In Madame Evangelista these mutterings of the 
 dispersing storm were aggravated by a terrible thought, a lurid 
 gleam that needed explanation. 
 
 " Has not Maitre Mathias overthrown my six months' 
 labors?" she wondered. "Has he not destroyed my influ- 
 ence over Paul by filling him with base suspicions during their 
 conference in the inner room ? " 
 
 She stood in front of the fireplace, her elbow resting on the 
 corner of the mantelpiece, lost in thought. 
 
 When the outer gate closed behind the notary's carriage, 
 she turned to her son-in-law, eager to settle her doubts. 
 
 "This has been the most terrible day of my life," cried 
 Paul, really glad to see the end of all these difficulties. " I 
 know no tougher customer than old Mathias. God grant his 
 wishes and make me peer of France ! Dear Natalie, I desire 
 it more for your sake than for my own. You are my sole 
 ambition. I live in and for you." 
 
 On hearing these words spoken from the heart, and espe- 
 cially as she looked into Paul's clear eyes, whose look was as
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 377 
 
 free from any concealment as his open brow, Madame Evan- 
 gelista's joy was complete. She blamed herself for the some- 
 what sharp terms in which she had tried to spur her son-in- 
 law, and in the triumph of success determined to make all 
 smooth for the future. Her face was calm again, and her 
 eyes expressed the sweet friendliness that made her so attrac- 
 tive as she replied 
 
 " I may truly say the same. And perhaps, my dear boy, 
 my Spanish temper carried me further than my heart intended. 
 Be always what you are as good as gold ! And owe me no 
 grudge for a few ill-considered words. Give me your hand, 
 let " 
 
 Paul was overwhelmed ; he blamed himself in a thousand 
 things, and embraced Madame Evangelista. 
 
 " Dear Paul," said she with emotion, " why could not those 
 two scriveners arrange matters without us, since it has all 
 come right in the end ? " 
 
 "But then," said Paul, "I should not have known how 
 noble and generous you could be." 
 
 "Well said, Paul ! " cried Natalie, taking his hand. 
 
 " We have several little matters to settle yet, my dear boy," 
 said Madame Evangelista. " My daughter and I are superior 
 to the follies of which some people think so much. For in- 
 stance, Natalie will need no diamonds I give her mine." 
 
 " Oh ! my dear mother, do you suppose I should accept 
 them ? " cried Natalie. 
 
 "Yes, my child, they are a condition of the contract." 
 
 " I will not have them ! I will never marry ! " said Natalie 
 vehemently. " Keep what my father gave you with so much 
 pleasure. How can Monsieur Paul demand ?" 
 
 "Be silent, dear child," said her mother, her eyes filling 
 with tears ; " my ignorance of business requires far more than 
 that." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " I must sell this house to pay you what I owe you."
 
 373 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "What can you owe to me," said the girl " to me, who 
 owe my life to you ? Can I ever repay you ? On the contrary, 
 if my marriage is to cost you the smallest sacrifice, I will never 
 marry ! " 
 
 "You are but a child !" 
 
 " My dear Natalie," said Paul, " you must understand that 
 it is neither I, nor you, nor your mother who insists on these 
 sacrifices, but the children " 
 
 "But if I do not marry," she interrupted. 
 
 " Then you do not love me ? " said Paul. 
 
 "Come, silly child," said her mother; "do you suppose 
 that a marriage-contract is a house of cards to be blown down 
 at your pleasure ? Poor ignorant darling, you do not know 
 what trouble we have been at to create an entailed estate for 
 your eldest son. Do not throw us back into the troubles 
 from which we have escaped." 
 
 "But why ruin my mother?" said Natalie to Paul. 
 
 " Why are you so rich ? " he said, with a smile. 
 
 "Do not discuss the matter too far, my children ; you are 
 not married yet," said Madame Evangelista. "Paul," she 
 went on, "Natalie needs no wedding-gifts, no jewels, no 
 trousseau ; she has everything in profusion. Save the money 
 you would have spent in presents to secure to yourselves some 
 permanent home luxuries. There is nothing to my mind so 
 foolishly vulgar as the expenditure of a hundred thousand 
 francs in a corbeille,* of which nothing is left at last but an 
 pld white satin-covered trunk. Five thousand francs a year, 
 on the other hand, as pin-money, save a young wife many 
 small cares, and are hers for life. And indeed you will want 
 the money of the corbeille to refurnish your house in Paris 
 this winter. We will come back to Lanstrac in the spring ; 
 Solonet will have settled all our affairs in the course of the 
 winter." 
 
 * The bridegroom's presents of lace, jewels, and apparel constitute the 
 corbeille or " basket."
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 379 
 
 " Then all is^r/ell," said Paul, at the height of happiness. 
 
 ''And I shall see Paris!" cried Natalie, in a tone that 
 might indeed have alarmed a de Marsay. 
 
 "If that is quite settled, I will write to de Marsay to 
 secure a box for the winter season at the Italian opera." 
 
 "You are most nice! I dared not ask it of you," said 
 Natalie. " Marriage is a delightful institution if it gives hus- 
 bands the power of guessing their wives' wishes." 
 
 "That is precisely what it is," said Paul. "But it is mid- 
 night I must go." 
 
 "Why so early this evening? " said Madame Evangelista, 
 who was lavish of the attentions to which men are so keenly 
 alive. 
 
 Though the whole business had been conducted on terms 
 of the most refined politeness, the effect of this clashing of 
 interests had sown a germ of distrust and hostility between 
 the lady and her son-in-law, ready to develop at the first 
 spark of anger, or under the heat of a too strong display of 
 feeling. 
 
 In most families the question of settlements and allowances 
 under the marriage-contract is prone to give rise to these 
 primitive conflicts, stirred up by wounded pride or injured 
 feelings, by some reluctance to make any sacrifice, or the de- 
 sire to minimize it. When a difficulty arises, must there not 
 be a conqueror and a conquered ? The parents of the plighted 
 couple try to bring the affair to a happy issue ; in their eyes it 
 is a purely commercial transaction, allowing all the tricks, the 
 profits, and the deceptions of trade. As a rule, the husband 
 only is initiated into the secret of the transaction, and the 
 young wife remains, as did Natalie, ignorant of the stipula- 
 tions which make her rich or poor. 
 
 Paul, as he went home, reflected that, thanks to his lawyer's 
 ingenuity, his fortune was almost certainly secured against 
 ruin. If Madame Evangelista lived with her daughter, the 
 household would have more than a hundred thousand francs
 
 380 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 a. year for ordinary expenses. Thus his hopes of a happy life 
 would be realized. 
 
 " My mother-in-law seems to me a very good sort of 
 woman," he reflected, still under the influence of the wheed- 
 ling ways by which Madame Evangelista had succeeded in 
 dissipating the clouds raised by the discussion. "Mathias is 
 mistaken. These lawyers are strange beings; they poison 
 everything. The mischief was made by that contentious little 
 Solonet, who wanted to be clever." 
 
 While Paul, as he went to bed, was recapitulating the ad- 
 vantages he had won in the course of the evening, Madame 
 Evangelista was no less confident of having gained the victory. 
 
 "Well, darling mother, are you satisfied?" said Natalie, 
 following her mother into her bedroom. 
 
 " Yes, my love, everything has succeeded as I wished, and 
 I feel a weight taken off my shoulders, which crushed me this 
 morning. Paul is really an excellent fellow. Dear boy ! 
 Yes, we can certainly give him a delightful life. You will 
 make him happy, and I will take care of his political pros- 
 pects. The Spanish ambassador is an old friend of mine. I 
 will renew my acquaintance with him and with several other 
 persons. We shall soon be in the heart of politics, and all 
 will be well with us. The pleasure for you, dear children ; 
 for me the later and more serious occupations of life the 
 game of ambition. 
 
 " Do not be alarmed at my selling this house ; do you sup- 
 pose we should ever return to Bordeaux? To Lanstrac yes. 
 But we shall spend every winter in Paris, where our true in- 
 terests now lie. Well, Natalie, was what I asked you so diffi- 
 cult to do?" 
 
 " My dear mother, I was ashamed at moments." 
 
 " Solonet advises me to buy an annuity with the price of 
 the house," said Madame Evangelista, "but I must make 
 some other arrangement. I will not deprive you of one sou 
 of my capital."
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 381 
 
 "You were al! very angry, I saw," said Natalie. "How 
 was the storm appeased?" 
 
 "By the offer of my diamonds," replied her mother. 
 "Solonet was in the right. How cleverly he managed the 
 business ! But fetch my jewel-box, Natalie. I never seriously 
 inquired what those diamonds were worth. When I said a 
 hundred thousand francs, it was absurd. Did not Madame 
 de Gyas declare that the necklace and earrings your father 
 gave me on the day of our wedding were alone worth as much ? 
 My poor husband was so lavish ! And then the family 
 diamond given by Philip II. to the Duke of Alva, and left to 
 me by my aunt the Discrete was, I believe, valued then at 
 four thousand quadruples." 
 
 Natalie brought out and laid on her mother's dressing-table 
 pearl necklaces, sets of jewels, gold bracelets, gems of every 
 kind, piling them up with the inexpressible satisfaction that 
 rejoices the heart of some women at the sight of these valu- 
 ables, with which, according to the Talmud, the fallen angels 
 tempted the daughters of men, bringing up from the bowels 
 of the earth these blossoms of celestial fires. 
 
 "Certainly," said Madame Evangelista, " although I know 
 nothing of precious stones but how to accept them and wear 
 them, it seems to me that these must be worth a great deal of 
 money. And then, if we all live together, I can sell my plate, 
 which is worth thirty thousand francs at the mere value of the 
 silver. I remember when we brought it from Lima that was 
 the valuation at the Custom House here. Solonet is right. 
 I will send for Elie Magus. The Jew will tell me the value of 
 these stones. I may perhaps escape sinking the rest of my 
 capital in an annuity." 
 
 "What a beautiful string of pearls?" said Natalie, admir- 
 ingly. 
 
 " I hope he will give you that if he loves you. Indeed, he 
 ought to have all the stones reset and make them a present to 
 you. The diamonds are yours by settlement. Well, good-
 
 382 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 night, my darling. After such a fatiguing day, we both need 
 sleep." 
 
 The woman of fashion, the creole, the fine lady, incapable 
 of understanding the conditions of a contract that was not 
 yet drawn up, fell asleep in full content at seeing her daughter 
 the wife of a man she could so easily manage, who would 
 leave them to be on equal terms the mistresses of his house, 
 and whose fortune, combined with their own, would allow of 
 their living in the way to which they were accustomed. Even 
 after paying up her daughter, for whose whole fortune she was 
 to receive a discharge, Madame Evangelista would still have 
 enough to live upon. 
 
 " How absurd I was to be so worried ! " said she to her- 
 self. " I wish the marriage was over and done with." 
 
 So Madame Evangelista, Paul, Natalie, and the two lawyers 
 were all delighted with the results of this first meeting. The 
 Te Deum was sung in both camps a perilous state of things ! 
 The moment must come when the vanquished would no longer 
 be deluded. To Madame Evangelista her son-in-law was 
 conquered. 
 
 Next morning Elie Magus came to the widow's house, sup- 
 posing, from the rumors current as to Mademoiselle Natalie's 
 approaching marriage to Count Paul, that they wanted to 
 purchase diamonds. What, then, was his surprise on learning 
 that he was wanted to make a more or less official valuation 
 of the mother-in-law's jewels. The Jewish instinct, added to 
 a few insidious questions, led him to conclude that the value 
 was to be included in the property under the marriage- 
 contract. 
 
 As the stones were not for sale, he priced them as a mer- 
 chant selling to a private purchaser. Experts alone know 
 Indian diamonds from those of Brazil. The stones from 
 Golconda and Vizapur are distinguishable by a whiteness and 
 clear brilliancy which the others have not, their hue being
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 383 
 
 yellower, and this depreciates their selling value. Madame 
 Evangelista's necklace and earrings, being entirely composed 
 of Asiatic stones, were valued by Elie Magus at two hundred 
 and fifty thousand francs. As to the Discrete, it was, he said, 
 one of the finest diamonds extant in .private hands, and was 
 worth a hundred thousand francs. 
 
 On hearing these figures, which showed her how liberal her 
 husband had been, Madame Evangelista asked whether she 
 could have that sum at once." 
 
 "If you wish to sell them, madame," said the Jew, "I 
 can only give you seventy thousand francs for the single stone, 
 and a hundred and sixty thousand for the necklace and 
 earrings." 
 
 " And why such a reduction ? " asked Madame Evangelista 
 in surprise. 
 
 "Madame," said he, " the finer the jewels, the longer we 
 have to keep them. The opportunities for sale are rare in 
 proportion to the greater value of the diamonds. As the 
 dealer cannot afford to lose the interest on his money, the 
 recoupment for that interest, added to the risks of rise and 
 fall in the market, accounts for the difference between the 
 selling and purchasing value. For twenty years you have 
 been losing the interest of three hundred thousand francs. 
 If you have worn your diamonds ten times a year, it has cost 
 you a thousand crowns each time. How many handsome 
 dresses you might have had for a thousand crowns ! Persons 
 who keep their diamonds are fools ; however, happily for us, 
 ladies do not understand these calculations." 
 
 " I am much obliged to you for having explained them to 
 me; I will profit by the lesson." 
 
 " Then you want to sell ? " cried the Jew eagerly. 
 
 "What are the rest worth?" said Madame Evangelista. 
 
 The Jew examined the gold of the settings, held the pearls 
 to the light, turned over the rubies, the tiaras, brooches, brace- 
 lets, clasps, and chains, and mumbled out
 
 384 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " There are several Portuguese diamonds brought from 
 Brazil. I cannot give more than a hundred thousand francs 
 for the lot. But sold to a customer," he added, " they would 
 fetch more than fifty thousand crowns." 
 
 "We will keep them," said the lady. 
 
 " You are wrong," replied Elie Magus. " With the income 
 of the sum now sunk in them, in five years you could buy 
 others just as fine, and still have the capital." 
 
 This rather singular interview was soon known, and con- 
 firmed the rumors to which the discussion of the contract had 
 given rise. In a provincial town everything is known. The 
 servants of the house, having heard loud voices, supposed the 
 dispute to have been warmer than it was ; their gossip with 
 other people's servants spread far and wide, and from the 
 lower depths came up to the masters. The attention of the 
 upper and citizen circles was concentrated on the marriage of 
 two persons of equal wealth. Everybody, great and small, 
 talked the matter over, and within a week the strangest reports 
 were afloat in Bordeaux. Madame Evangelista was selling 
 her house, so she must be ruined. She had offered her dia- 
 monds to Elie Magus. Nothing was yet final between her 
 and the Comte de Manerville. Would the marriage ever 
 come off? Some said Yes; others said No. The two law- 
 yers, on being questioned, denied these calumnies, and said 
 that the difficulties were purely technical, arising from the 
 formalities of creating an entail. 
 
 But when public opinion has rushed down an incline, it is 
 very difficult to get it up again. Though Paul went every 
 day to Madame Evangelista's, and in spite of the assertions of 
 the two notaries, the insinuated slander held its own. Several 
 young ladies, and their mothers or their aunts, aggrieved by 
 a match of which they or their families had dreamed for them- 
 selves, could no more forgive Madame Evangelista for her 
 good-luck than an author forgives his friend for a success. 
 Some were only too glad to be avenged for the twenty years
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 385 
 
 of luxury and splendor by which the Spaniards had crushed 
 their vanities. A bigwig at the prefecture declared that the 
 two notaries and the two parties concerned could say no 
 more, nor behave otherwise, if the rupture were complete. 
 The time it took to settle the entail confirmed the suspicions 
 of the citizens of Bordeaux. 
 
 " They will sit by the chimney-corner all the winter; then, 
 in the spring, they will go to some watering-place ; and in the 
 course of the year we shall hear that the match is broken off." 
 
 "You will see," said one set, "in order to save the credit 
 of both parties, the obstacles will not have arisen on either 
 side ; there will be some demur in Chancery, some hitch dis- 
 covered by the lawyers to hinder the entail." 
 
 "Madame Evangelista," said the others, "has been living 
 at a rate that would have exhausted the mines of Valenciana. 
 Then, when pay-day came round there was nothing to be 
 found." 
 
 What a capital opportunity for calculating the handsome 
 widow's expenditure, so as to prove her ruin to a demonstra- 
 tion ! Rumor ran so high that bets were laid for and against 
 the marriage. And, in accordance with the accepted rules of 
 society, this tittle-tattle remained unknown to the interested 
 parties. No one was sufficiently inimical to Paul or Madame 
 Evangelista to attack them on the subject. 
 
 Paul had some business at Lanstrac and took advantage of 
 it to make up a shooting-party, inviting some of the young 
 men of the town as a sort of farewell to his bachelor life. 
 This shooting-party was regarded by society as a flagrant con- 
 firmation of its suspicions. 
 
 At this juncture Madame de Gyas, who had a daughter to 
 marry, thought it well to sound her way, and to rejoice sadly 
 over the checkmate offered to Madame Evangelista. Natalie 
 and her mother were not a little astonished to see the mar- 
 quise's badly assumed distress, and asked her if anything had 
 annoyed her. 
 25
 
 386 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " Why," said she, " can you be ignorant of the reports cur- 
 rent in Bordeaux? Though I feel sure that they are false, I 
 have come to ascertain the truth and put a stop to them, at 
 any rate in my own circle of friends. To be the dupe or the 
 accomplice of such a misapprehension is to be in a false posi- 
 tion, in which no true friend can endure to remain." 
 
 "But what in the world is happening?" asked the mother 
 and daughter. 
 
 Madame de Gyas then had the pleasure of repeating every- 
 body's comments, not sparing her intimate friends a single 
 dagger-thrust. Natalie and her mother looked at each other 
 and laughed ; but they quite understood the purpose and mo- 
 tives of their friend's revelation. The Spanish lady revenged 
 herself much as Celimene did on Arsinoe. 
 
 " My dear you who know what provincial life is you 
 must know of what a mother is capable when she has a 
 daughter on her hands who does not marry, for lack of a for- 
 tune and a lover, of beauty and talent for lack of everything 
 sometimes ! She would rob a diligence, she would commit 
 murder, waylay a man at a street corner, and give herself away 
 a hundred times, if she were worth giving. There are plenty 
 such in Bordeaux, who are ready, no doubt, to attribute to us 
 their thoughts and actions. Naturalists have described the 
 manners and customs of many fierce animals, but they have 
 overlooked the mother and daughter in quest of a husband. 
 They are hyaenas who, as the Psalmist has it, seek whom they 
 may devour, and who add to the nature of the wild beast 
 the intelligence of man and the genius of woman. 
 
 "That such little Bordeaux spiders as Mademoiselle de 
 Belor, Mademoiselle de Trans, and their like, who have spread 
 their nets for so long without seeing a fly, or hearing the least 
 hum of wings near them that they should be furious I under- 
 stand, and I forgive them their venomous tattle. But that 
 you, who have a title and money, who are not in the least 
 provincial, who have a clever and accomplished daughter,
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 387 
 
 pretty and free to pick and choose that you, so far above 
 everybody here by your Parisian elegance, should have taken 
 such a tone, is really a matter of astonishment. Am I ex- 
 pected to account to the public for the matrimonial stipula- 
 tions which our men of business have considered necessary 
 under the political conditions which will govern my son-in- 
 law's existence? Is the mania for public discussion to invade 
 the privacy of family life? Ought I to have invited the 
 fathers and mothers of your province, under sealed covers, to 
 come and vote on the articles of our marriage-contract?" 
 
 A torrent of epigrams was poured out on Bordeaux. 
 
 Madame Evangelista was about to leave the town ; she could 
 afford to criticise her friends and enemies, to caricature them, 
 and lash them at will, having nothing to fear from them. So 
 she gave vent to all the remarks she had stored up, the re- 
 venges she had postponed, and her surprise that any one should 
 deny the existence of the sun at noonday. 
 
 " Really, my dear," said the Marquise de Gyas, " Monsieur 
 de Manerville's visit to Lanstrac, these parties to young men 
 under such circumstances " 
 
 " Really, my dear," retorted the fine lady, interrupting her, 
 " can you suppose that we care for the trumpery proprieties of 
 a middle-class marriage ? Am I to keep Count Paul in lead- 
 ing-strings, as if he would run away? Do you think he needs 
 watching by the police? Need we fear his being spirited 
 away by some Bordeaux conspiracy?" 
 
 " Believe me, my dear friend, you give me infinite pleas- 
 ure " 
 
 The marquise was cut short in her speech by the man- 
 servant announcing Paul. Like all lovers, Paul had thought 
 it delightful to ride eight leagues in order to spend an hour 
 with Natalie. He had left his friends to their sport, and 
 came in, booted and spurred, his whip in his hand. 
 
 " Dear Paul," said Natalie, " you have no idea how effectu- 
 ally you are answering madame at this moment,"
 
 388 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 When Paul heard the calumnies that were rife in Bordeaux, 
 he laughed instead of being angry. 
 
 "The good people have heard, no doubt, that there will 
 be none of the gay and uproarious doings usual in the country, 
 no midday ceremony in church, and they are furious. Well, 
 dear mother," said he, kissing Madame Evangelista's hand, 
 "we will fling a ball at their heads on the day when the con- 
 tract is signed, as a f&te is thrown to the mob in the square of 
 the Champs Elysees, and give our good friends the painful 
 pleasure of such a signing as is rarely seen in a provincial 
 city!" 
 
 This incident was of great importance. 'Madame Evan- 
 gelista invited all Bordeaux on the occasion, and expressed 
 her intention of displaying in this final entertainment a mag- 
 nificence that should give the lie unmistakably to silly and 
 false reports. She was thus solemnly pledged to the world to 
 carry through this marriage. 
 
 The preparations for this ball went on for forty days, and it 
 was known as the " evening of the camellias," there were such 
 immense numbers of these flowers on the stairs, in the ante- 
 room, and in the great supper-room. The time agreed with 
 the necessary delay for the preliminary formalities of the mar- 
 riage, and the steps taken in Paris for the settlement of the 
 entail. The lands adjoining Lanstrac were purchased, the 
 banns were published, and doubts were dispelled. Friends 
 and foes had nothing left to think about but the preparation 
 of their dresses for the great occasion. 
 
 The time taken up by these details overlaid the difficulties 
 raised at the first meeting, and carried away into oblivion the 
 words and retorts of the stormy altercation that had arisen 
 over the question of the settlements. Neither Paul nor his 
 mother-in-law thought any more of the matter. Was it not, 
 as Madame Evangelista had said, the lawyers' business ? But 
 who is there that has not known, in the rush of a busy phase
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 389 
 
 of life, what it is to be suddenly startled by the voice of 
 memory, speaking too late, and recalling some important 
 fact, some imminent danger? 
 
 On the morning of the day when the contract was to be 
 signed, one of these will-o'-the-wisps of the brain flashed 
 upon Madame Evangelista between sleeping and waking. 
 The phrase spoken by herself at the moment when Mathias 
 agreed to Solonet's proposal was, as it were, shouted in her 
 ear : Questa coda non e di questo gatto. In spite of her igno- 
 rance of business, Madame Evangelista said to herself: "If 
 that sharp old lawyer is satisfied, it is at the expense of one or 
 other of the parties." And the damaged interest was certainly 
 not on Paul's side, as she had hoped. Was it her daughter's 
 fortune, then, that was to pay the costs of the war? She re- 
 solved to make full inquiries as to the tenor of the bargain, 
 though she did not consider what she could do in the event of 
 finding her own interests too seriously compromised. 
 
 The events of this day had so serious an influence on Paul's 
 married life that it is necessary to give some account of the 
 external details which have their effect on every mind. 
 
 As the house was forthwith to be sold, the Comte de 
 Manerville's mother-in-law had hesitated at no expense. The 
 forecourt was graveled, covered in with a tent, and filled with 
 shrubs, though it was winter. The camellias, which were 
 talked of from Dax to Angoul&me, decked the stairs and vesti- 
 bules. A wall had been removed to enlarge the supper-room 
 and ballroom. Bordeaux, splendid with the luxury of many 
 a colonial fortune, eagerly anticipated a fairy scene. By eight 
 o'clock, when the business was drawing to a close, the popu- 
 lace, curious to see the ladies' dresses, formed a hedge on each 
 side of the gateway. Thus the heady atmosphere of a great 
 festivity excited all concerned at the moment of signing the 
 contract. At the very crisis the little lamps fixed on yew- 
 trees were already lighted, and the rumbling of the first car- 
 riages came up from the forecourt.
 
 390 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 The two lawyers had dined with the bride and bridegroom 
 and the mother-in-law. Mathias' head-clerk, who was to see 
 the contract signed by certain of the guests in the course of 
 the evening, and to take care that it was not read, was also 
 one of the party. 
 
 The reader will rack his memory in vain no dress, no 
 woman was ever to compare with Natalie's beauty in her satin 
 and lace, her hair beautifully dressed in a mass of curls falling 
 about her neck ; she was like a flower in its natural setting of 
 foliage. . 
 
 Madame Evangelista, in a cherry-colored velvet, cleverly 
 designed to set off the brilliancy of her eyes, her complexion, 
 and her hair, with all the beauty of a woman of forty, wore her 
 pearl necklace clasped with the famous Discrete, to give the 
 lie to slander. 
 
 Fully to understand the scene, it is necessary to remark 
 that Paul and Natalie sat by the fire on a little sofa, and never 
 listened to one word of the guardian's accounts. One as 
 much a child as the other, both equally happy, he in his 
 hopes, she in her expectant curiosity, seeing life one calm blue 
 heaven, rich, young, and in love, they never ceased whispering 
 in each other's ears. Paul, already regarding his passion as 
 legalized, amused himself with kissing the tips of Natalie's 
 fingers, or just touching her snowy shoulders or her hair, hid- 
 ing the raptures of these illicit joys from every eye. Natalie 
 was playing with a fan of peacock feathers, a gift from Paul 
 a luckless omen in love, if we may accept the superstitious 
 belief of some countries, as fatal as that of scissors, or any 
 other cutting instrument, which is based, no doubt, on some 
 association with the mythological Fates. 
 
 Madame Evangelista, sitting by the notaries, paid the closest 
 attention to the reading of the two documents. After hearing 
 the schedule of her accounts, very learnedly drawn out by 
 Solonet, which showed a reduction of the three millions and 
 some hundred thousand francs left by Monsieur Evangelista,
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 391 
 
 to the famous eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand francs 
 constituting Natalie's portion, she called out to the young 
 couple 
 
 "Come, listen, children; this is your marriage-contract." 
 
 The clerk drank a glass of eau de sucre sugared water ; 
 Solonet and Mathias blew their noses ; Paul and Natalie looked 
 at the four personages, listened to the preamble, and then 
 began to talk together again. The statements of revenues ; 
 the settlement of the whole estate on either party in the event 
 of the other's death without issue ; the bequest, according to 
 law, of one-quarter of the whole property absolutely to the 
 wife, and of the interest of one-quarter more, however many 
 children should survive ; the schedule of the property held in 
 common ; the gift of the diamonds on the wife's part, and of 
 the books and horses on the husband's all passed without 
 remark. Then came the settlement for the entail. And when 
 .everything had been read, and there was nothing to be done 
 but to sign, Madame Evangelista asked what would be the 
 effect of the entail. 
 
 "The entailed estate, madame, is inalienable; it is prop- 
 erty separated from the general estate of the married pair, and 
 reserved for the eldest son of the house from generation to 
 generation, without his being thereby deprived of his share of 
 the rest of the property." 
 
 "And what are the consequences to my daughter?" she 
 asked. Maitre Mathias, incapable of disguising the truth, 
 made reply 
 
 " Madame, the entail being an inheritance derived from 
 both fortunes, if the wife should be the first to die, and leaves 
 one or several children, one of them a boy, Monsieur le Comte 
 de Manerville will account to them for no more than three 
 hundred and fifty-six thousand francs, from which he will 
 deduct his one absolute fourth, and the fourth part of the 
 interest of the residue. Thus their claim on him is reduced to 
 about a hundred and sixty thousand francs independently of
 
 392 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 his share of profits on the common stock, the sums he could 
 claim, etc. In the contrary case, if he should die first, leav- 
 ing a son or sons, Madame de Manerville would be entitled 
 to no more than three hundred and fifty-six thousand francs, 
 to her share of all of Monsieur de Manerville's estate that is 
 not included in the entail, to the restitution of her diamonds, 
 and her portion of the common stock." 
 
 The results of Maitre Mathias' profound policy were now 
 amply evident. 
 
 "My daughter is ruined," said Evangelista in a low voice. 
 
 The lawyers both heard her exclamation. 
 
 "Is it ruin," said Maitre Mathias in an undertone, "to es- 
 tablish an indestructible fortune for her family in the future? " 
 
 As he saw the expression of his client's face, the younger 
 notary thought it necessary to state the sum of the disaster in 
 figures. 
 
 " We wanted to get three hundred thousand francs out of 
 them, and they have evidently succeeded in getting eight 
 hundred thousand out of us; the balance to their advantage 
 on the contract is a loss of four hundred thousand francs to us 
 fqr x the benefit of the children. We must break it off or go 
 on," he added to Madame Evangelista. 
 
 No words could describe the silence, though brief, that 
 ensued. Mathias triumphantly awaited the signature of the 
 two persons who had hoped to plunder his client. Natalie, 
 incapable of understanding that she was bereft of half of her 
 fortune, and Paul, not knowing that the house of Manerville 
 was acquiring it, sat laughing and talking as before. Solonet 
 and Madame Evangelista looked at each other, he concealing 
 his indifference, she disguising a myriad angry feelings. 
 
 After suffering from terrible remorse, and regarding Paul as 
 the cause of her dishonesty, the widow had made up her mind 
 to certain discreditable manoeuvres to cast the blunders of her 
 guardianship on his shoulders, making him her victim. And 
 now, in an instant, she had discovered that, instead of tri-
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 393 
 
 umphing, she was overthrown, and that the real victim was 
 her daughter. Thus guilty to no purpose, she was the dupe 
 of an honest old man, whose esteem she had doubtless sacri- 
 ficed. Was it not her own secret conduct that had inspired 
 the stipulations insisted on by Mathias? 
 
 Hideous thought ! Mathias had, doubtless, told Paul. 
 
 If he had not yet spoken, as soon as the contract should be 
 signed that old wolf would warn his client ef the dangers he 
 had run and escaped, if it were only to gather the praises to 
 which everybody is open. Would he not put him on his 
 guard against a woman so astute as to have joined such an 
 ignoble conspiracy? Would he not undermine the influence 
 she had acquired over her son-in-law? And weak natures, 
 once warned, turn obstinate, and never reconsider the cir- 
 cumstances. 
 
 So all was lost ! 
 
 On the day when the discussion was opened, she had trusted 
 to Paul's feebleness and the impossibility of his retreating after 
 advancing so far. And now it was she who had tied her own 
 hands. Paul, three months since, would not have had many 
 obstacles to surmount to break off the marriage; now, all Bor- 
 deaux knew that the lawyers had, two months ago, smoothed 
 away every difficulty. The banns were published ; the wed- 
 ding was fixed for the next day but one. The friends of both 
 families, all the town were arriving, dressed for the ball how 
 could she announce a postponement? The cause of the rup- 
 ture would become known, the unblemished honesty of Maltre 
 Mathias would gain credence, his story would be believed in 
 preference to hers. The laugh would be against the Evange- 
 listas, of whom so many were envious. She must yield ! 
 
 These painfully accurate reflections fell on Madame Evange- 
 lista like a waterspout and crushed her brain. Though she 
 maintained a diplomatic impassibility, her chin showed the 
 nervous jerking by which Catherine II. betrayed her fury one 
 day when, sitting on her throne and surrounded by her Court,
 
 394 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 she was defied by the young King of Sweden under almost 
 similar circumstances. Solonet noted the spasmodic movement 
 of the muscles that proclaimed a mortal hatred, a storm with- 
 out a sound or a lightning-flash ; and in fact, at that moment, 
 the widow had sworn such hatred of her son-in-law, such an 
 implacable feud as the Arabs have left the germs of in the 
 atmosphere of Spain. 
 
 "Monsieur," said she to her notary, "you called this a 
 rigmarole it seems to me that nothing can be clearer." 
 
 " Madame, allow me " 
 
 " Monsieur," she went on, without listening to Solonet, " if 
 you did not understand the upshot of this bargain at the time 
 of our former discussion, it is at least extraordinary that you 
 should not have perceived it in the retirement of your study. 
 It cannot be from incapacity." 
 
 The young man led her into the adjoining room, saying to 
 himself 
 
 " More than a thousand crowns are due to me for the 
 schedule of accounts, and a thousand more for the contract ; 
 six thousand francs I can make over the sale of the house 
 fifteen thousand francs in all. We must keep our temper." 
 
 He shut the door, gave Madame Evangelista the cold look 
 of a man of business, guessing the feelings that agitated her, 
 and said 
 
 " Madame, how, when I have perhaps overstepped in your 
 behalf the due limits of finesse, can you repay my devotion by 
 such a speech? " 
 
 "But, monsieur " 
 
 " Madame, I did not, it is true, fully estimate the amount 
 of our surrender; but if you do not care to have Count Paul 
 for your son-in-law, are you obliged to agree? The contract 
 is not signed. Give your ball and postpone the signing. It 
 is better to take in all Bordeaux than to be taken in yourself." 
 
 "And what excuse can I make to all the world already 
 prejudiced against us to account for this delay ? ' '
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 395 
 
 "A blunder in Paris, a document missing," said Solonet. 
 
 " But the land that has been purchased? " 
 
 "Monsieur de Manerville will find plenty of matches with 
 money." 
 
 " He ! Oh, he will lose nothing ; we are losing everything 
 on our side." 
 
 " You," said Solonet, " may have a count, a better bargain, 
 if the title is the great point of this match in your eyes." 
 
 "No, no; we cannot throw our honor overboard in that 
 fashion ! I am caught in a trap, monsieur. All Bordeaux 
 would ring with it to-morrow. We have solemnly pledged 
 ourselves." 
 
 "You wish Mademoiselle Natalie to be happy?" asked 
 Solonet. 
 
 "That is the chief thing." 
 
 " In France," said the lawyer, " does not being happy 
 mean being mistress of the hearth ? She will lead that nin- 
 compoop Manerville by the nose. He is so stupid that he 
 has seen nothing. Even if he should distrust you, he will 
 still believe in his wife. And are not you and his wife one? 
 Count Paul's fate still lies in your hands." 
 
 " If you should be speaking truly, I do not know what I 
 could refuse you ! " she exclaimed, with delight that glowed 
 in her eyes. 
 
 "Come in again, then, madame," said Solonet, under- 
 standing his client. "But, above all, listen to what I say; 
 you may regard me as incapable afterward if you please." 
 
 "My dear friend," said the young lawyer to Mathias, as he 
 re-entered the room, " for all your skill you have failed to 
 foresee the contingency of Monsieur de Manerville's death 
 without issue, or, again, that of his leaving none but daughters. 
 In either of those cases the entail would give rise to lawsuits 
 with other Manervilles, for plently would crop up, do not 
 doubt it for a moment. It strikes me, therefore, as desirable 
 to stipulate that in the former case the entailed property should
 
 396 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 be included in the general estate settled by each on either, 
 and in the second that the entail should be canceled as null 
 and void. It is an agreement solely affecting the intending 
 wife." 
 
 "The clause seems to me perfectly fair," said Mathias. 
 "As to its ratification, Monsieur le Comte will make the 
 necessary arrangements with the Court of Chancery, no 
 doubt, if requisite." 
 
 The younger notary took a pen and wrote in on the margin 
 this ominous clause, to which Paul and Natalie paid no atten- 
 tion. Madame Evangelista sat with downcast eyes while it 
 was read by Maitre Mathias. 
 
 " Now to sign," said the mother. 
 
 The strong voice which she controlled betrayed vehement 
 excitement. She had just said to herself 
 
 " No, my daughter shall not be ruined but he shall ! My 
 daughter shall have his name, title, and fortune. If Natalie 
 should ever discover that she does not love her husband, if 
 some day she should love another man more passionately 
 Paul will be exiled from France, and my daughter will be free, 
 happy, and rich." 
 
 Though Maitre Mathias was expert in the analysis of 
 interests, he had no skill in analyzing human passions. He 
 accepted the lady's speech as an honorable surrender, instead 
 of seeing that it was a declaration of war. While Solonet 
 and his clerk took care that Natalie signed in full at the foot 
 of every document a business that required some time 
 Mathias took Paul aside and explained to him the bearing of 
 the clauses which he had introduced to save him from inevit- 
 able ruin. 
 
 " You have a mortgage on this house for a hundred and 
 fifty thousand francs," he said in conclusion, "and we fore- 
 close to-morrow. I have at my office the securities in the 
 Funds, which I have taken care to place in your wife's name. 
 Everything is quite regular. But the contract includes a
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 397 
 
 receipt for the sum, represented by the diamonds; ask for 
 them. Business is business. Diamonds are just now going 
 up in the market; they may go down again. Your purchase 
 of the lands of Auzac and Saint-Froult justifies you in turning 
 everything into money so as not to touch your wife's income. 
 So, no false pride, Monsieur le Comte. The first payment is 
 to be made after the formalities are concluded ; use the 
 diamonds for that purpose ; it amounts to two hundred thou- 
 sand francs. You will have the mortgage value of this house 
 for the second call, and the income on the entailed property 
 will help you to pay off the remainder. If only you are firm 
 enough to spend no more than fifty thousand francs for the 
 first three years, you will recoup the two hundred thousand 
 francs you now owe. If you plant vines on the hill-slopes of 
 Saint-Froult, you may raise the returns to twenty-six thousand 
 francs. Thus the entailed property, without including your 
 house in Paris, will some day be worth fifty thousand francs a 
 year one of the finest estates I know of. And so you will 
 have married very handsomely." 
 
 Paul pressed his old friend's hands with warm affection. 
 The gesture did not escape Madame Evangelista, who came 
 to hand the pen to Paul. Her suspicion was now certainty ; 
 she was convinced that Paul and Mathias had an understand- 
 ing. Surges of blood, hot with rage and hatred, choked her 
 heart. Paul was warned ! 
 
 After ascertaining that every clause was duly signed, that 
 the three contracting parties had initialed the bottom of every 
 page with their usual sign-manual, Maitre Mathias looked first 
 at his client and then at Madame Evangelista, and observing 
 that Paul did not ask for the diamonds, he said 
 
 " I suppose there will be no question as to the delivery of 
 the diamonds now that you are but one family?" 
 
 " It would, no doubt, be in order that Madame Evangelista 
 should surrender them. Monsieur de Manerville has given 
 his discharge for the balance of the trust values, and no one
 
 398 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 can tell who may die or live," said Maitre Solonet, who 
 thought this an opportunity for inciting his client against her 
 son-in-law. 
 
 "Oh, my dear mother, it would be an affront to us if you 
 did so!" cried Paul. "Summum Jus, summa tnjuria, mon- 
 sieur," said he to Solonet. 
 
 "And I, on my part," said she, her hostile temper regard- 
 ing Mathias 1 indirect demand as an insult, " if you do not 
 accept the jewels, will tear up the contract." 
 
 She went out of the room in one of those bloodthirsty furies 
 which only long for the chance of wrecking everything, and 
 which, when that is impossible, rise to the pitch of frenzy. 
 
 "In heaven's name, take them," whispered Natalie. "My 
 mother is angry ; I will find out why this evening, and will 
 tell you; we will pacify her." 
 
 Madame Evangelista, quite pleased at this first stroke of 
 policy, kept on her necklace and earrings. She brought the 
 rest of the jewels, valued by Elie Magus at a hundred and fifty 
 thousand francs. Maitre Mathias and Solonet, though accus- 
 tomed to handling family diamonds, exclaimed at the beauty 
 of these jewels as they examined the contents of the cases. 
 
 "You will lose nothing of mademoiselle's fortune, Mon- 
 sieur le Comte," said Solonet, and Paul reddened. 
 
 "Ay," said Mathias, " these jewels will certainly pay the 
 first installment of the newly purchased land." 
 
 "And the expenses of the contract," said Solonet. 
 
 Hatred, like love, is fed on the merest trifles. Everything 
 adds to it. Just as the one we love can do no wrong, the one 
 we hate can do nothing right. Madame Evangelista scorned 
 the hesitancy to which a natural reluctance gave rise in Paul 
 as affected airs ; while he, not knowing what to do with the 
 jewel-cases, would have been glad to throw them out of the 
 window. Madame Evangelista, seeing his embarrassment, 
 fixed her eyes on him in a way which seemed to say : " Take 
 them out of ray sight ! "
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 399 
 
 "My dear Natalie," said Paul to his fiancee, "put the 
 jewels away yourself; they are yours; I make them a present 
 to you." 
 
 Natalie put them into the drawers of a cabinet. At this 
 instant the clatter of carriages and the voices of the guests 
 waiting in the adjoining rooms required Natalie and her 
 mother to appear among them. The rooms were immediately 
 rilled, and the ball began. 
 
 " Take advantage of the honeymoon to sell your diamonds," 
 said the old notary to Paul, as he withdrew. 
 
 While waiting for the dancing to begin, everybody was 
 discussing the marriage in lowered tones, some of the com- 
 pany expressing doubts as to the future prospects of the en- 
 gaged couple. 
 
 "Is it quite settled?" said one of the magnates of the 
 town to Madame Evangelista. 
 
 " We have had so many papers to read and hear read that 
 we are late ; but we may be excused," replied she. 
 
 " For my part, I heard nothing," said Natalie, taking Paul's 
 hand to open the ball. 
 
 "Both those yo'ung people like extravagance, and it will 
 not be the mother that will check them," said a dowager. 
 
 " But they have created an eatail, I hear, of fifty thousand 
 francs a year." 
 
 "Pooh!" 
 
 "I see that our good Maitre Mathias has had a finger in 
 the pie. And certainly, if that is the case, the worthy man 
 will have done his best to save the future fortunes of the 
 family." 
 
 "Natalie is too handsome not to be a desperate flirt. By 
 the time she has been married two years, I will not answer for 
 it that Manerville will not be miserable in his home," re- 
 marked a young wife. 
 
 "What, the peas will be 'snicked,' you think?" replied 
 Maitre Solonet.
 
 400 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "He needed no more than that tall pole," said a young 
 lady. 
 
 "Does it not strike you that Madame Evangelista is not 
 best pleased?" 
 
 " Well, my dear, I have just been told that she has hardly 
 twenty-five thousand francs a year, and what is that for 
 her?" 
 
 "Beggary, my dear." 
 
 " Yes, she has stripped herself for her daughter. Monsieur 
 has been exacting " 
 
 "Beyond conception!" said Solonet. "But he is to be 
 a peer of France. The Maulincours and the Vidame de 
 Pamiers* will help him on ; he belongs to the Faubourg 
 Saint-Germain." 
 
 "Oh, he visits there, that is all," said a lady, who had 
 wanted him for her son-in-law. " Mademoiselle Evangelista, a 
 merchant's daughter, will certainly not open the doors of the 
 Chapter of Cologne to him." 
 
 " She is grand-niece to the Due de Casa-Real." 
 
 " On the female side ! " 
 
 All this tittle-tattle was soon exhausted-. The gamblers sat 
 down to cards, the young people danced, supper was served, 
 and the turmoil of festivity was not silenced till morning, 
 when the first streaks of dawn shone pale through the win- 
 dows. 
 
 After taking leave of Paul, who was the last to leave, Ma- 
 dame Evangelista went up to her daughter's room, for her own 
 had been demolished by the builder to enlarge the ballroom. 
 Though Natalie and her mother were dying for sleep, they 
 spoke a few words. 
 
 "Tell me, darling mother, what is the matter?" 
 
 " My dear, I discovered this evening how far a mother's 
 love may carry her. You know nothing of affairs, and you 
 have no idea to what suspicions my honesty lies exposed. 
 * See "The Thirteen."
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 401 
 
 However, I have trodden my pride underfoot ; your happi- 
 ness and our honor were at stake." 
 
 "As concerned the diamonds, you mean? He wept over 
 it, poor boy ! He would not take them ; I have them." 
 
 "Well, go to sleep, dearest child. We will talk business 
 when we wake; for we have business and now there is a 
 third to come between us," and she sighed. 
 
 " Indeed, dear mother, Paul will never stand in the way of 
 our happiness," said Natalie, and she went to sleep. 
 
 " Poor child, she does not know that the man has ruined 
 her!" 
 
 Madame Evangelista was now seized in the grip of the first 
 promptings of that avarice to which old folk at last fall a 
 prey. She was determined to replace, for her daughter's 
 benefit, the whole of the fortune left by her husband. She 
 regarded her honor as pledged to this restitution. Her affec- 
 tion for Natalie made her in an instant as close a calculator in 
 money matters as she had hitherto been a reckless spendthrift. 
 She proposed to invest her capital in land after placing part 
 of it in the State Funds, purchasable at that time for about 
 eighty francs. 
 
 A passion not infrequently produces a complete change of 
 character ; the tattler turns diplomatic, the coward is suddenly 
 brave. Hatred made the prodigal Madame Evangelista turn 
 parsimonious. Money might help her in the schemes of re- 
 venge, as yet vague and ill-defined, which she proposed to 
 elaborate. She went to sleep, saying to herself 
 
 "To-morrow!" and by an unexplained phenomenon, of 
 which the effects are well known to philosophers, her brain 
 during sleep worked out her idea, threw light on her plans, 
 organized them, and hit on a way of ruling over Paul's life, 
 devising a scheme which she began to work out on the very 
 next day. 
 
 Though the excitement of the evening had driven away 
 certain anxious thoughts which had now and again invaded 
 26
 
 402 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 Paul, when he was alone once more and in bed they returned 
 to torment him. 
 
 " It would seem," said he to himself, " that, but for that 
 worthy Mathias, my mother-in-law would have taken me in. 
 Is it credible ? What interest could she have had in cheating 
 me ? Are we not to unite our incomes and live together ? 
 After all, what is there to be anxious about ? In a few days 
 Natalie will be my wife, our interests are clearly defined, 
 nothing can sever us. On we go ! At the same time, I will 
 be on my guard. If Mathias should prove to be right well, 
 I am not obliged to marry my mother-in-law," and so think- 
 ing fell asleep. 
 
 In this second contest, Paul's future prospects had been 
 entirely altered without his being aware of it. Of the two 
 women he was marrying, far the cleverer had become his 
 mortal enemy, and was bent on separating her own interests" 
 from his. Being incapable of appreciating the difference that 
 the fact of her creole birth made between his mother-in-law's 
 character and that of other women, he was still less able to 
 measure her immense cleverness. 
 
 The creole woman is a being apart, deriving her intellect 
 from Europe, and from the Tropics her vehemently illogical 
 passions, while she is Indian in the apathetic indifference with 
 which she accepts good or evil as it comes ; a gracious nature 
 too, but dangerous, as a child is when it is not kept in order. 
 Like a child, this woman must have everything she wishes for, 
 and at once ; like a child, she would set a house on fire to 
 boil an egg. In her flaccid every-day mood she thinks of 
 nothing ; when she is in a passion she thinks of everything. 
 There is in her nature some touch of the perfidy caught from 
 the negroes among whom she has lived from the cradle, but 
 she is artless too, as they are. Like them, and like children, 
 she can wish persistently for one thing with ever-growing in- 
 tensity of desire, and brood over an idea till it hatches out. 
 It is a nature strangely compounded of good and evil qualities ;
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 403 
 
 and in Madame Evangelista it was strengthened by the Spanish 
 temper, over which French manners had laid the polish of their 
 veneer. 
 
 This nature, which had lain dormant in happiness for six- 
 teen years, and had since found occupation in the frivolities 
 of fashion, had discovered its own force under the first impulse 
 of hatred, and flared up like a conflagration ; it had broken 
 out at a stage in her life when a woman, bereft of what is 
 dearest to her, craves some new material to feed the energies 
 that are consuming her. 
 
 For three days longer Natalie would remain under her 
 mother's influence. So Madame Evangelista, though van- 
 quished, had still a day before her, the last her child would 
 spend with her mother. By a single word the Creole might 
 color the lives of these two beings whose fate it was to walk 
 hand in hand through the thickets and highways of Paris 
 society for Natalie had a blind belief in her mother. What 
 far-reaching importance would a hint of advice have on a 
 mind thus prepared ! The whole future might be modified by 
 a sentence. No code, no human constitution, can forefend the 
 moral crime of killing by a word. That is the weak point of 
 social forms of justice. That is where the difference lies 
 between the world of fashion and the people ; these are out- 
 spoken, those are hypocrites; these snatch the knife, those 
 use the poison of words and suggestions ; these are punished 
 with death, those sin with impunity. 
 
 At about noon next day, Madame Evangelista was half 
 sitting, half reclining on Natalie's bed. At this waking hour 
 they were playing and petting each other with fond caresses, 
 recalling the happy memories of their life together, during 
 which no discord had troubled the harmony of their feelings, 
 the agreement of their ideas, or the perfect union of their 
 pleasures. 
 
 "Poor dear child," said the mother, shedding genuine 
 tears, " I cannot bear to think that, after having had your own
 
 404 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 way all your life, to-morrow evening you will be bound to a 
 man whom you must obey ! " 
 
 "Oh, my dear mother, as to obeying him ! " said Natalie, 
 with a little willful nod expressive of pretty rebellion. " You 
 laugh ! " she went on, " but my father always indulged your 
 fancies. And why ? Because he loved you. Shall not I be 
 loved?" 
 
 " Yes, Paul is in love with you. But if a married woman 
 is not careful, nothing evaporates so quickly as conjugal affec- 
 tion. The influence a wife may preserve over her husband 
 depends on the first steps in married life, and you will want 
 good advice." 
 
 " But you will be with us." 
 
 "Perhaps, my dear child. Last evening, during the ball, 
 I very seriously considered the risks of our being together'. 
 If my presence were to be disadvantageous to you, if the 
 little details by which you must gradually confirm your authority 
 as a wife should be ascribed to my influence, your home would 
 become a hell. At the first frown on your husband's brow, 
 should not I, so proud as I am, instantly quit the house? If 
 I am to leave it sooner or later, in my opinion, I had better 
 never enter it. I could not forgive your husband if he dis- 
 united us. 
 
 " On the other hand, when you are the mistress, when your 
 husband is to you what your father was to me, there will be 
 less fear of any such misfortune. Although such a policy 
 must be painful to a heart so young and tender as yours, it is 
 indispensable for your happiness that you should be the abso- 
 lute sovereign of your home." 
 
 " Why, then, dear mother, did you say I was to obey 
 him?" 
 
 " Dear little girl, to enable a woman to command, she 
 must seem always to do what her husband wishes. If you 
 did not know that, you might wreck your future life by an 
 untimely rebellion. Paul is a weak man ; he might come
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 405 
 
 under the influence of a friend, nay, he might fall under the 
 control of a woman, and you would feel the effects of their 
 influence. Forefend such misfortunes by being mistress your- 
 self. Will it not be better that you should govern him than 
 that any one else should? " 
 
 "No doubt," said Natalie. "I could only aim at his 
 happiness." 
 
 "And it certainly is my part, dear child, to think only of 
 yours, and to endeavor that, in so serious a matter, you 
 should not find yourself without a compass in the midst of 
 the shoals you must navigate." 
 
 " But, my darling mother, are we not both of us firm 
 enough to remain together under his roof without provoking 
 the frowns you seem so much to dread ? Paul is fond of you, 
 mamma." 
 
 "Oh, he fears me more than he loves me. Watch him 
 narrowly to-day when I tell him that I shall leave you to go 
 to Paris without me, and, however carefully he may try to 
 conceal his feelings, you will see his secret satisfaction in his 
 face." 
 
 "But why?" said Natalie. 
 
 "Why, my child? I am like Saint-John-Chrysostom I 
 will tell him why, and before you." 
 
 " But since I am marrying him on the express condition 
 that you and I are not to part? " said Natalie. 
 
 "Our separation has become necessary," Madame Evange- 
 lista replied. "Several considerations affect my future pros- 
 pects. I am very poor. You will have a splendid life in 
 Paris; I could not live with you suitably without exhausting 
 the little possessions that remain to me ; whereas, by living at 
 Lanstrac, I can take care of your interests and reconstitute my 
 own fortune by economy." 
 
 "You, mother ! you economize?" cried Natalie, laughing. 
 " Come, do not be a grandmother yet. What, would you part 
 from me for such a reason as that ? Dear mother, Paul may
 
 406 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 seem to you just a little stupid, but at least he is perfectly dis- 
 interested " 
 
 "Well," replied Madame Evangelista, in a tone big with 
 comment, which made Natalie's heart beat, "the discussion 
 of the contract had made me suspicious and suggested some 
 doubts to my mind. But do not be uneasy, dearest child," 
 she went on, putting her arm round the girl's neck and clasp- 
 ing her closely, " I will not leave you alone for long. When 
 my return to you can give him no umbrage, when Paul has 
 learned to judge me truly, we will go back to our snug little 
 life again, our evening chats " 
 
 "Why, mother, can you live without your Ninie?" she 
 asked, caressingly. 
 
 " Yes, my darling, because I shall be living for you. Will 
 not my motherly heart be constantly rejoiced by the idea that 
 I am contributing, as I ought, to your fortune and your hus- 
 band's?" 
 
 " But, my dear, adorable mother, am I to be alone there 
 with Paul ? At once ? Quite alone ? What will become of 
 me? What will happen? What ought I to do or not to 
 do?" 
 
 " Poor child, do you think I mean to desert you forthwith 
 at the first battle ? We will write to each other three times a 
 week, like two lovers, and thus we shall always live in each 
 other's heart. Nothing can happen to you that I shall not 
 know, and I will protect you against all evil. And beside, 
 it would be too ridiculous that I should not go to visit you ; 
 that would cast a reflection on your husband ; I shall always 
 spend a month or two with you in Paris " 
 
 "Alone alone with him, and at once!" cried Natalie in 
 terror, interrupting her mother. 
 
 "Are you not to be his wife?" 
 
 " Yes, and I am quite content ; but tell me at least how to 
 behave. You, who did what you would with my father, know 
 all about it, and I will obey you blindly."
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 407 
 
 Madame Evangelista kissed her daughter's forehead ; she 
 had been hoping and waiting for this request. 
 
 " My child, my advice must be adapted to the circum- 
 stances. Men are not all alike. The lion and the frog are less 
 dissimilar than one man as compared with another, morally 
 speaking. Do I know what will happen to you to-morrow ? 
 I can only give you general instructions as to your usual plan 
 of conduct." 
 
 " Dearest mother, tell me at once all you know." 
 
 "In the first place, my dear child, the cause of ruin to 
 married women who would gladly retain their husband's heart 
 and," she added, as a parenthesis, " to retain their affection 
 and to rule the man are one and the same thing well, the 
 chief cause of matrimonial differences lies in the unbroken 
 companionship, which did not -subsist in former days, and 
 which was introduced into this country with the mania for 
 family life. Ever since the Revolution vulgar notions have 
 invaded aristocratic households. This misfortune is attribu- 
 table to one of their writers, Rousseau, a base heretic, who 
 had none but reactionary ideas, and who how I know 
 not argued out the most irrational conclusions. He asserted 
 that all women have the same rights and the same faculties; 
 that under the conditions of social life the laws of Nature 
 must be obeyed as if the wife of a Spanish Grandee as if 
 you or I had anything in common with a woman of the 
 people. And since then women of rank have nursed their 
 own children, have brought up their daughters, and lived at 
 home. 
 
 " Life has thus been made so complicated that happiness is 
 almost impossible ; for such an agreement of two characters 
 as has enabled you and me to live together as friends is a rare 
 exception. And perpetual friction is not less to be avoided 
 between parents and children than between husband and wife. 
 There are few natures in which love can survive in spite of 
 omnipresence ; that miracle is the prerogative of God.
 
 408 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "So place the barriers of society between you and Paul; 
 go to balls, to the opera, drive out in the morning, dine out 
 in the evening, pay visits ; do not give Paul more than a few 
 minutes of your time. By this system you will never lose 
 your value in his eyes. When two beings have nothing but 
 sentiment to go through life on, they soon exhaust its re- 
 sources, and ere long satiety and disgust ensue. Then, when 
 once the sentiment is blighted, what is to be done ? Make no 
 mistake ; when love is extinct, only indifference or contempt 
 ever fills its place. So be always fresh and new to him. If 
 he bores you that may occur at any rate, never bore him. 
 To submit to boredom on occasion is one of the conditions of 
 every form of power. You will have no occasion to vary your 
 happiness either by thrift in money matters or the manage- 
 ment of a household ; hence, if you do not lead your husband 
 to share your outside pleasures, if you do not amuse him, in 
 short, you will sink into the most crushing lethargy. Then 
 begins the spleen of love. But we always love those who 
 amuse us or make us happy. To give and to receive happi- 
 ness are two systems of wifely conduct between which a gulf 
 lies." 
 
 "Dear mother, I am listening, but I do not understand." 
 
 "If you love Paul so blindly as to do everything he desires, 
 and if he makes you really happy, there is an end of it ; you 
 will never be the mistress, and the wisest precepts in the world 
 will be of no use." 
 
 " That is rather clearer ; but I learn the rule without know- 
 ing how to apply it," said Natalie, laughing. " Well, I have 
 the theory, and practice will follow." 
 
 "My poor Ninie," said her mother, dropping a sincere 
 tear as she thought of her daughter's marriage and pressed her 
 to her heart, " events will strengthen your memory. In short, 
 my Natalie," said she after a pause, during which they sat 
 clasped in a sympathetic embrace, "you will learn that each 
 of us, as a woman, has her destiny, just as every man has his
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 409 
 
 vocation. A woman is born to be a woman of fashion, the 
 charming mistress of her house, just as a man is born to be 
 a general or a poet. Your calling in life is to attract. And 
 your education has fitted you for the world. In these days a 
 woman ought to be brought up to grace a drawing-room, as 
 of old she was brought up for the Gynseceum. You, child, 
 were never made to be the mother of a family or a notable 
 housekeeper. 
 
 " If you have children, I hope they will not come to spoil 
 your figure as soon as you are married. Nothing can be more 
 vulgar and beside, it casts reflections on your husband's love 
 for you. Well, if you have children two or three years hence, 
 you will have nurses and tutors to bring them up. You must 
 always be the great lady, representing the wealth and pleasures 
 of the house ; but only show your superiority in such things 
 as flatter men's vanity, and hide any superiority you may 
 acquire in serious matters." 
 
 "You frighten me, mamma!" cried Natalie. "How am 
 I ever to remember all your instructions ? How am I, heed- 
 less and childish as I know I am, to reckon on results and 
 always reflect before acting ? " 
 
 " My darling child, I am only telling you now what you 
 would learn for yourself later, paying for experience by 
 wretched mistakes, by misguided conduct, which would cause 
 you many regrets and hamper your life." 
 
 "But how, then, am I to begin?" asked the handsome 
 Natalie artlessly. 
 
 "Instinct will guide you," said her mother. "What Paul 
 feels for you at this moment is far more desire than love ; for 
 the love to which desire gives rise is hope, and that which 
 follows its gratification is realization. There, my dear, lies 
 your power, there is the heart of the question. What woman 
 is not loved the day before marriage ? Be still loved the day 
 after, and you will be loved for life. Paul is weak ; he will 
 be easily formed by habit ; if he yields once, he will yield al-
 
 410 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 ways. A woman not yet won may insist on anything. Do 
 not commit the folly I have seen in so many wives, who, not 
 knowing the importance of the first hours of their sovereignty, 
 waste them in folly, in aimless absurdities. Make use of the 
 dominion given you by your husband's first passion to ac- 
 custom him to obey you. And to break him in, choose the 
 most unreasonable thing possible, so as to gauge the extent of 
 your power by the extent of his concession. What merit 
 would there be in making him agree to what is reasonable ? 
 Would that be obeying you? 'Always take a bull by the 
 horns,' says a Castilian proverb. When once he sees the use- 
 lessness of his weapons and his strength, he is conquered. If 
 your husband commits a folly for your sake, you will master 
 him." 
 
 " Good heavens ! But why ? " 
 
 "Because, my child, marriage is for life, and a husband is 
 not like any other man. So never be so foolish as to give 
 way in anything whatever. Always be strictly reserved in 
 your speech and actions ; you may even go to the point of 
 coldness, for that may be modified at pleasure, while there is 
 nothing beyond the most vehement expressions of love. A 
 husband, my dear, is the only man to whom a woman must 
 grant no license. 
 
 " And, after all, nothing is easier than to preserve your 
 dignity. The simple words, ' Your wife must not or cannot 
 do this thing or that,' is the great talisman. A woman's 
 whole life is wrapped up in ' I will not ! I cannot ! ' 'I 
 cannot ' is the irresistible appeal of weakness which succumbs, 
 weeps, and wins. ' I will not ' is the last resort. It is the 
 crowning effort of feminine strength ; it should never be used 
 but on great occasions. Success depends entirely on the way 
 in which a woman uses these two words, works on them, and 
 varies them. 
 
 "But there is a better method of rule than these, which 
 sometimes involve a contest. I, my child, governed by faith.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 411 
 
 If your husband believes in you, you may do anything. To 
 inspire him with this religion, you must convince him that 
 you understand him. And do not think that this is such an 
 easy matter. A woman can always prove that she loves a 
 man, but it is more difficult to get him to confess that she has 
 understood him. I must tell you everything, my child ; for, 
 to you, life with all its complications, a life in which two wills 
 are to be reconciled and harmonized, will begin to-morrow. 
 Do you realize the difficulty? The best way to bring two 
 wills into agreement is to take care that there is but one in 
 the house. People often say that a woman makes trouble for 
 herself by this inversion of the parts ; but, my dear, the wife 
 is thus in a position to command events instead of submitting 
 to them, and that single advantage counterbalances every pos- 
 sible disadvantage." 
 
 Natalie kissed her mother's hands, on which she left her 
 tears of gratitude. Like all women in whom physical passion 
 does not fire the passion of the soul, she suddenly took in all 
 the bearings of this lofty feminine policy. Still, like spoilt 
 children who will never admit that they are beaten even by 
 the soundest reasoning, but who reiterate their obstinate de- 
 mands, she returned to the charge with one of those personal 
 arguments that are suggested by the logical rectitude of chil- 
 dren. 
 
 " My dear mother, a few days ago you said so much about 
 the necessary arrangements for Paul's fortune, which you alone 
 could manage; why have you changed 'your views in thus 
 leaving us to ourselves?" 
 
 "I did not then know the extent of my indebtedness to 
 you, nor how much I owed," replied her mother, who would 
 not confess her secret. " Beside, in a year or two I can give 
 you my answer. 
 
 " Now, Paul will be here directly. We must dress. Be as 
 coaxing and sweet, you know, as you were that evening when 
 we discussed that ill-starred contract, for to-day I am bent on
 
 412 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 saving a relic of the family, and on giving you a thing to 
 which I am superstitiously attached." 
 
 "What is that?" 
 
 "The Discrete." 
 
 Paul appeared at about four o'clock. Though, when 
 addressing his mother, he did his utmost to seem gracious, 
 Madame Evangelista saw on his brow the clouds which his 
 cogitations of the night and reflections on waking had gathered 
 there. 
 
 " Mathias has told him," thought she, vowing that she 
 would undo the old lawyer's work. 
 
 "My dear boy," she said, "you have left your diamonds 
 in the cabinet drawer, and I honestly confess that I never 
 want to see the things again which so nearly raised a storm 
 between us. Beside, as Mathias remarked, they must be sold 
 to provide for the first installment of payment on the lands 
 you have purchased." 
 
 "The diamonds are not mine," rejoined Paul. "I gave 
 them to Natalie, so that when you see her wear them you may 
 never more remember the trouble they have caused you." 
 
 Madame Evangelista took Paul's hand and pressed it cor- 
 dially, while restraining a sentimental tear. 
 
 "Listen, my dear, good children," said she, looking at 
 Natalie and Paul. "If this is so, I will propose to make a 
 bargain with you. I am obliged to sell my pearl necklace and 
 earrings. Yes, Paul ; I will not invest a centime in an annuity; 
 I do not forget my duties to you. Well, I confess my weak- 
 ness, but to sell the Discrete seems to me to portend disaster. 
 To part with a diamond known to have belonged to Philip II., 
 to have graced his royal hand a historical gem which the 
 Duke of Alva played with for ten years on the hilt of his 
 sword no, it shall never be. Elie Magus valued my necklace 
 and earrings at a hundred-odd thousand francs; let us ex- 
 change them for the jewels I have handed over to you to can-
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 413 
 
 eel my debts to my daughter ; you will gain a little, but what 
 do I care ; I am not grasping. And then, Paul, out of your 
 savings you can have the pleasure of procuring a diadem or 
 hairpins for Natalie, a diamond at a time. Instead of having 
 one of those fancy sets, trinkets which are in fashion only 
 among second-rate people, your wife will thus have magnifi- 
 cent stones that will give her real pleasure. If something 
 must be sold, is it not better to get rid of these old-fashioned 
 jewels, and keep the really fine things in the family?" 
 
 " But you, my dear mother," said Paul. 
 
 " I," replied Madame Evangelista, " I want nothing now. 
 No, I am going to be your farm-bailiff at Lanstrac. Would it 
 not be sheer folly to go to Paris just when I have to wind up 
 my affairs here ? I am going to be avaricious for my grand- 
 children." 
 
 "Dear mother," said Paul, much touched, "ought I to 
 accept this exchange without compensation?" 
 
 " Dear heaven ! are you not my nearest and dearest? Do 
 you think that I shall find no happiness when I sit by my fire 
 and say to myself: ' Natalie is gone in splendor to-night to the 
 Duchesse de Berri's ball. When she sees herself with my 
 diamond at her throat, my earrings in her ears, she will have 
 those little pleasures of self-satisfaction which add so much to 
 a woman's enjoyment, and make her gay and attractive.' 
 Nothing crushes a woman so much as the chafing of her vanity. 
 I never saw a badly dressed woman look amiable and pleasant. 
 Be honest, Paul ! we enjoy much more through the one we 
 love than in any pleasure of our own." 
 
 "What on earth was Mathias driving at ?" thought Paul. 
 "Well, mother," said he, in a low voice, " I accept." 
 
 " I am quite overpowered," said Natalie. 
 
 Just now Solonet came in with good news for his client. 
 He had found two speculators of his acquaintance, builders, 
 who were much tempted by the house, as the extent of the 
 grounds afforded good building land.
 
 414 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " They are prepared to pay two hundred and fifty thousand 
 francs," said he ; " but if you are ready to sell, I could bring 
 them up to three hundred thousand. You have two acres of 
 garden." 
 
 " My husband paid two hundred thousand for the whole 
 thing," said she, "so I agree; but you will not include the 
 furniture or the mirrors." 
 
 "Ah, ha!" said Solonet, with a laugh, "you understand 
 business." 
 
 " Alas ! needs must," said she, with a sigh. 
 
 " I hear that a great many persons are coming to your mid- 
 night ceremony," said Solonet, who, finding himself in the 
 way, bowed himself out. 
 
 Madame Evangelista went with him as far as the door of 
 the outer drawing-room, and, seeing there was no fear of 
 being overheard, said to him privately 
 
 " I have now property representing two hundred and fifty 
 thousand francs ; if I get two hundred thousand francs for 
 myself out of the price of the house, I can command a capital 
 of four hundred and fifty thousand francs. I want to invest 
 it to the best advantage, and I trust to you to do it. I shall 
 most likely remain at Lanstrac." 
 
 The young lawyer kissed his client's hand with a bow of 
 gratitude, for the widow's tone led him to believe that this 
 alliance, strengthened by interest, might even go a little 
 further. 
 
 "You may depend on me," said he. "I will find you 
 trade investments, in which you will risk nothing, and make 
 large profits." 
 
 " Well till to-morrow," said she ; " for you and Monsieur 
 le Marquis de Gyas are going to sign for us." 
 
 "Why, dear mother, do you refuse to come with us to 
 Paris?" asked Paul. " Natalie is as much vexed with me as 
 if I were the cause of your determination." 
 
 " I have thought it well over, my children, and I should
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 415 
 
 be in your way. You would think yourselves obliged to in- 
 clude me as a third in everything you might do, and young 
 people have notions of their own which I might involuntarily 
 oppose. Go to Paris by yourselves. I do not propose to 
 exercise over the Comtesse de Manerville the mild dominion 
 I held over Natalie. I must leave her entirely to you. There 
 are habits which she and I share, you see, Paul, and which 
 must be broken. My influence must give way to yours. I 
 wish you to be attached to me ; believe me, I have your in- 
 terests at heart more than you think perhaps. Young hus- 
 bands, sooner or later, are jealous of a wife's affection for her 
 mother. Perhaps they are right. When you are entirely 
 united, when love has amalgamated your souls into one then, 
 my dear boy, you will have no fears of an adverse influence 
 when you see me under your roof. 
 
 " I know the world, men and things ; I have seen many a 
 household rendered unhappy by the blind affection of a 
 mother who made herself intolerable, as much to her daughter 
 as to her son-in-law. The affection of old people is often 
 petty and vexatious ; perhaps I should not succeed in effacing 
 myself. I am weak enough to think myself handsome still ; 
 some flatterers try to persuade me that I am lovable, and I 
 might assume an inconvenient prominence. Let me make one 
 more sacrifice to your happiness. I have given you my for- 
 tune ; well, now I surrender my last womanly vanities. Your 
 good father Mathias is growing old ; he cannot look after 
 your estates. I will constitute myself your bailiff. I shall 
 make such occupation for myself as old folk must sooner or 
 later fall back on ; then, when you need me, I will go to Paris 
 and help in your plans of ambition. 
 
 "Come, Paul, be honest; this arrangement is to your 
 mind? Answer." 
 
 Paul would not admit it, but he was very glad to be free. 
 The suspicions as to his mother-in-law's character, implanted 
 in his mind by the old notary, were dispelled by this conver-
 
 416 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 sation, which Madame Evangelista continued to the same 
 effect. 
 
 " My mother was right," thought Natalie, who was watch- 
 ing Paul's expression. " He is really glad to see me parted 
 from her. But why?" 
 
 Was not this Why ? the first query of suspicion, and did it 
 not add considerable weight to her mother's instructions? 
 
 There are some natures who, on the strength of a single 
 proof, can believe in friendship. In such folk as these the 
 North wind blows away clouds as fast as the West wind brings 
 them up ; they are content with effects, and do not look for 
 the causes. Paul's was one of these essentially confiding 
 characters, devoid of ill-feeling, and no less devoid of fore- 
 sight. His weakness was the outcome of kindness and a 
 belief in goodness in others, far more than of want of strength 
 of mind. 
 
 Natalie was pensive and sad ; she did not know how to do 
 without her mother. Paul, with the sort of fatuity that love 
 can produce, laughed at his bride's melancholy mood, prom- 
 ising himself that the pleasures of married life and the ex- 
 citement of Paris would dissipate it. It was with marked sat- 
 isfaction that Madame Evangelista encouraged Paul in his 
 confidence, for the first condition of revenge is dissimulation. 
 Overt hatred is powerless. 
 
 The creole lady had made two long strides already. Her 
 daughter had possession of splendid jewels which had cost 
 Paul two hundred thousand francs, and to which he would, 
 no doubt, add more. Then, she was leaving the two young 
 people to themselves, with no guidance but unregulated love. 
 Thus she had laid the foundations of revenge of which her 
 daughter knew nothing, though sooner or later she would be 
 accessory to it. 
 
 Now, would Natalie love Paul? This was as yet an un- 
 answered question, of which the issue would modify Madame 
 Evangelista's schemes ; for she was too sincerely fond of her
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 417 
 
 daughter not to be tender of her happiness. Thus Paul's 
 future life depended on himself. If he could make his wife 
 love him, he would be saved. 
 
 Finally, on the following night, after an evening spent with 
 the four witnesses whom Madame Evangelista had invited to 
 the lengthy dinner which followed the legal ceremony, at mid- 
 night the young couple and their friends attended mass by 
 the light of blazing tapers in the presence of above a hundred 
 curious spectators. 
 
 A wedding celebrated at night always seems of ill-omen ; 
 daylight is a symbol of life and enjoyment, and its happy 
 augury is lacking. Ask the stanchest spirit the cause of this 
 chill, why the dark vault depresses the nerves, why the sound 
 of footsteps is so startling, why the cry of owls and bats is so 
 strangely audible. Though there is no reason for alarm, every 
 one quakes ; darkness, the forecast of death, is crushing to the 
 spirit. 
 
 Natalie, torn from her mother, was weeping. The girl was 
 tormented by all the doubts which clutch the heart on the 
 threshold of anew life, where, in spite of every promise of 
 happiness, there are a thousand pitfalls for a woman's feet. 
 She shivered with cold, and had to put on a cloak. 
 
 Madame Evangelista's manner and that of the young couple 
 gave rise to comments among the elegant crowd that stood 
 round the altar. 
 
 " Solonet tells me that the young people go off to Paris to- 
 morrow morning alone." 
 
 " Madame Evangelista was to have gone to live with them." 
 
 " Count Paul has got rid of her ? " 
 
 "What a mistake!" said the Marquise de Gyas. "The 
 man who shuts his door on his mother-in-law opens it to a 
 lover. Does he not know all that a mother is? " 
 
 "He has been very hard on Madame Evangelista. The 
 poor woman has had to sell her house, and is going to live at 
 Lanstrac." 
 27
 
 418 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " Natalie is very unhappy." 
 
 " Well, would you like to spend the day after your wedding 
 on the highway?" 
 
 "It is very uncomfortable." 
 
 " I am glad I came," said another lady, " to convince my- 
 self of the necessity of surrounding a wedding with all the 
 usual ceremonies and festivities, for this seems to me very 
 cold and dismal. Indeed, if I were to tell the whole truth," 
 she whispered, leaning over to her neighbor, "it strikes me 
 as altogether uncanny." 
 
 Madame Evangelista took Natalie in her own carriage to 
 Count Paul's house. 
 
 " Well, mother, it is all over " 
 
 " Remember my advice, and you will be happy. Always 
 be his wife, and not his mistress." 
 
 When Natalie had gone to her room, Madame Evangelista 
 went through the little farce of throwing herself into her son- 
 in-law's arms, and weeping on his shoulder. It was the only 
 provincial detail Madame Evangelista had allowed herself; 
 but she had her reasons. In the midst of her apparently wild 
 and desperate tears and speeches, she extracted from Paul 
 such concessions as a husband will always make. 
 
 The next day she saw the young people into their chaise, 
 and accompanied them across the ferry over the Gironde. 
 Natalie, in a word, had made her mother understand that 
 if Paul had won in the game concerning the contract, her 
 revenge was beginning. Natalie had already reduced her 
 husband to perfect obedience. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Five years after this, one afternoon in November, the Comte 
 Paul de Manerville, wrapped in a cloak, with a bowed head, 
 mysteriously arrived at the house of Monsieur Mathias at 
 Bordeaux. The worthy man, too old now to attend business,
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 419 
 
 had sold his connection, and was peacefully ending his days 
 in one of his houses. % 
 
 Important business had taken him out at the time when his 
 visitor called ; but his old housekeeper, warned of Paul's ad- 
 vent, showed him into the room that had belonged to Ma- 
 dame Mathias, who had died a year since. 
 
 Paul, tired out by a hurried journey, slept till late. The 
 old man, on his return, came to look at his erstwhile client, 
 and was satisfied to look at him lying asleep, as a mother looks 
 at her child. Josette, the housekeeper, came in with her 
 master and stood by the bedside, her hands on her hips. 
 
 "This day twelvemonth, Josette, when my dear wife 
 breathed her last in this bed, I little thought of seeing Mon- 
 sieur le Comte here looking like death." 
 
 " Poor gentleman ! he groans in his sleep," said Josette. 
 
 The old lawyer made no reply but "Sat a papier!" an 
 innocent oath, which, from him, always represented the de- 
 spair of a man of business in the face of some insuperable 
 dilemma. 
 
 "At any rate," thought he, "I have saved the freehold of 
 Lanstrac, Auzac, Saint-Froult, and his town-house here." 
 
 Mathias counted on his fingers and exclaimed : " Five 
 years ! Yes, it is five years this very month since his old 
 aunt, now deceased, the venerable Madame de Maulincour, 
 asked on his behalf for the hand of that little crocodile in 
 woman's skirts who has managed to ruin him as I knew she 
 would!" 
 
 After looking at the young man for some time, the good 
 old man, now very gouty, went away, leaning on his stick, to 
 walk slowly up and down his little garden. At nine o'clock 
 supper was served, for the old man supped ; and he was not a 
 little surprised to see Paul come in with a calm brow and an 
 unruffled expression, though perceptibly altered. Though at 
 three-and-thirty the Comte de Manerville looked forty, the 
 change was due solely to mental shocks ; physically he was in
 
 420 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 good health. He went up to his old friend, took his hands, 
 and pressed them affectionately, saying : 
 
 " Dear, good Maitre Mathias ! And you have had your 
 troubles ! " 
 
 " Mine were in the course of nature, Monsieur le Comte, 
 but yours " 
 
 "We will talk over mine presently at supper," replied de 
 Manerville. 
 
 "If I had not a son high up in the law, and a married 
 'daughter," said the worthy man, "believe me, Monsieur le 
 Comte, you would have found something more than bare 
 hospitality from old Mathias. How is it that you have come 
 to Bordeaux just at the time when you may read on every wall 
 bills announcing the seizure and sale of the farms of le Grassol 
 and le Guadet, of the vine-land of Bellerose and your house 
 here ? I cannot possibly express my grief on seeing those huge 
 posters I, who for forty years took as much care of your 
 estates as if they were my own ; I, who, when I was third 
 clerk under Monsieur Chesneau, my predecessor, transacted 
 the purchase for your mother, and in my young clerk's hand 
 engrossed the deed of sale on parchment ; I, who have the 
 title-deeds safe in my successor's office ; I, who made out all 
 the accounts. Why, I remember you when so high " and 
 the old man held his hand two feet from the floor. 
 
 " After being a notary for more than forty years, to see my 
 name printed as large as life in the face of Israel, in the 
 announcement of the seizure and the disposal of the property 
 you cannot imagine the pain it gives me. As I go along 
 the street and see the folk all reading those horrible yellow 
 bills, I am as much ashamed as if my own ruin and honor 
 were involved. And there are a pack of idiots who spell it 
 all out at the top of their voices on purpose to attract idlers, 
 and they add the most ridiculous comments. 
 
 "Are you not master of your own? Your father ran 
 through two fortunes before making the one he left you, and
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 421 
 
 you would not be a Manerville if you did not tread in his 
 steps. 
 
 "And beside, the seizure of real property is foreseen in the 
 Code, and provided for under a special capitulum ; you are in 
 a position recognized by law. If I were not a white-headed 
 old man, only waiting for a nudge to push me into the grave, 
 I would thrash the men who stand staring at such abomina- 
 tions 'At the suit of Madame Natalie Evangelista, wife of 
 Paul Francois Joseph Comte de Manerville, of separate estate 
 by the ruling of the lower Court of the Department of the 
 Seine,' and so forth." 
 
 "Yes," said Paul, "and now separate in bed and 
 board " 
 
 " Indeed ! " said the old man. 
 
 " Oh ! against Natalie's will," said the count quickly. " I 
 had to deceive her. She does not know that I am going 
 away." 
 
 " Going away?" 
 
 " My passage is taken ; I sail on the Belle- Amelie for Cal- 
 cutta." 
 
 " In two days ! " said Mathias. " Then we meet no more, 
 Monsieur le Comte." 
 
 " You are but seventy-three, my dear Mathias, and you have 
 the gout, an assurance of old age. When I come back I shall find 
 you just where you are. Your sound brain and heart will be 
 as good as ever ; you will help me to rebuild the ruined home. 
 I mean to make a fine fortune in seven years. On my return 
 I shall only be forty. At that age everything is still pos- 
 sible." 
 
 "You, Monsieur le Comte! " exclaimed Mathias, with a 
 gesture of amazement. " You are going into trade ! What 
 are you thinking of?" 
 
 " I am no longer Monsieur le Comte, dear Mathias. I have 
 taken my passage in the name of Camille, a Christian name of 
 my mother's. And I have some connections which may
 
 422 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 enable me to make a fortune in other ways. Trade will be my 
 last resource. Also, I am starting with a large enough 
 sum of money to allow of my tempting fortune on a grand 
 scale." 
 
 "Where is that money?" 
 
 "A friend will send it to me." 
 
 The old man dropped his fork at the sound of the word 
 friend, not out of irony or surprise ; his face expressed his 
 grief at finding Paul under the influence of a delusion, for 
 his eye saw a void where the count perceived a solid plank. 
 
 "I have been in a notary's office more than fifty years," 
 said he, "and I never knew a ruined man who had friends 
 willing to lend him money." 
 
 " You do not know de Marsay. At this minute, while I 
 speak to you, I am perfectly certain that he has sold out of the 
 Funds if it was necessary, and to-morrow you will receive a bill 
 of exchange for fifty thousand crowns." 
 
 " I only hope so. But then could not this friend have set 
 your affairs straight ? You could have lived quietly at Lan- 
 strac for five or six years on Madame la Comtesse's income." 
 
 "And would an assignment have paid fifteen hundred thou- 
 sand francs of debts, of which my wife's share was five hundred 
 and fifty thousand?" 
 
 "And how, in four years, have you managed to owe fourteen 
 hundred and fifty thousand francs?" 
 
 " Nothing can be plainer, my good friend. Did I not make 
 the diamonds a present to my wife ? Did I not spend the 
 hundred and fifty thousand francs that came to us from the 
 sale of Madame Evangelista's house in redecorating my house 
 in Paris? Had I not to pay the price of the land we pur- 
 chased, and of the legal business of my marriage-contract? 
 Finally, had I not to sell Natalie's forty thousand francs a year 
 in the Funds to pay for d' Auzac and Saint-Froult ? We sold 
 at 87, so I was in debt about two hundred thousand francs 
 within a month of my marriage.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 423 
 
 "An income was left of sixty-seven thousand francs, and 
 we have regularly spent two hundred thousand francs a year 
 beyond it. To these nine hundred thousand francs add cer- 
 tain money-lenders' interest, and you will easily find it a 
 million." 
 
 " Brrrr," said the old lawyer. " And then ? " 
 
 "Well, I wished at once to make up the set of jewels for 
 my wife, of which she already had the pearl necklace and the 
 Discrete clasp a family jewel and her mother's earrings. I 
 paid a hundred thousand francs for a diadem of wheat-ears. 
 There you see eleven hundred thousand francs. Then I owe 
 my wife the whole of her fortune, amounting to three hundred 
 and fifty-six thousand francs settled on her." 
 
 "But then," said Mathias, "if Madame la Comtesse had 
 pledged her diamonds and you your securities, you would 
 have, by my calculations, three hundred thousand with which 
 to pacify your creditors " 
 
 "When a man is down, Mathias; when his estates are 
 loaded with mortgages ; when his wife is the first creditor for 
 her settlement ; when, to crown all, he is exposed to having 
 writs against him for notes of hand to the tune of a hundred 
 thousand francs to be paid off, I hope, by good prices at the 
 sales nothing can be done. And the cost of conveyancing ! " 
 
 " Frightful ! " said the lawyer. 
 
 "The distraint has happily taken the form of a voluntary 
 sale, which will mitigate the flare." 
 
 "And you are selling Bellerose with the wines of 1825 in 
 the cellars?" 
 
 " I cannot help myself." 
 
 "Bellerose is worth six hundred thousand francs." 
 
 "Natalie will buy it in by my advice." 
 
 " Sixteen thousand francs in ordinary years and such a 
 season as 1825 ! I will run Bellerose up to seven hundred 
 thousand francs myself, and each of the farms up to a hundred 
 and twenty thousand."
 
 424 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " So much the better; then I can clear myself if my house 
 in the town fetches two hundred thousand." 
 
 " Solonet will pay a little more for it ; he has a fancy for it. 
 He is retiring on a hundred-odd thousand a year, which he 
 has made in gambling in trois-six. He has sold his business 
 for three hundred thousand francs, and is marrying a rich 
 mulatto. Gods knows where she got her money, but they 
 say she has millions. A notary gambling in trois-six ! A 
 notary marrying a mulatto ! What times these are ! It was 
 he, they say, who looked after your mother-in-law's invest- 
 ments." 
 
 " She has greatly improved Lanstrac, and taken good care 
 of the land ; she has regularly paid her rent." 
 
 " I should never have believed her capable of behaving so." 
 
 "She is so kind and devoted. She always paid Natalie's 
 debts when she came to spend three months in Paris." 
 
 "So she very well might, she lives on Lanstrac," said 
 Mathias. "She! Turned thrifty ! What a miracle ! She has 
 just bought the estate of Grainrouge, lying between Lanstrac 
 and Grassol, so that if she prolongs the avenue from Lanstrac 
 down to the high road you can drive a league and a half 
 through your own grounds. She paid a hundred thousand 
 francs down for Grainrouge, which is worth a thousand crowns 
 a year in cash rents." 
 
 "She is still handsome," said Paul. " Country life keeps 
 her young. I will not go to take leave of her ; she would 
 bleed herself for me." 
 
 "You would waste your time; she has gone to Paris. She 
 probably arrived just as you left." 
 
 " She has, of course, heard of the sale of the land, and has 
 rushed to my assistance. I have no right to complain of life. 
 I am loved as well as any man can be in this world, loved by 
 two women who vie with each other in their devotion to me. 
 They were jealous of each other ; the daughter reproached her 
 mother for being too fond of me, and the mother found fault
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 425 
 
 with her daughter for her extravagance. This affection has 
 been my ruin. How can a man help gratifying the lightest 
 wish of the woman he loves? How can he protect himself? 
 And, on the other hand, how can he accept self-sacrifice? 
 We could, to be sure, pay up with my fortune and come to 
 live at Lanstrac but I would rather go to India and make 
 my fortune than tear Natalie from the life she loVes. It was 
 I myself who proposed to her a separation of goods. Women 
 are angels who ought never to be mixed up with the business 
 of life." 
 
 Old Mathias listened to Paul with an expression of surprise 
 and doubt. 
 
 " You have no children ? " said he. 
 
 " Happily ! " replied Paul. 
 
 "Well, I view marriage in a different light," replied the 
 old notary quite simply. " In my opinion, a wife ought to 
 share her husband's lot for good or ill. I have heard that 
 young married people who are too much like lovers have no 
 families. Is pleasure then the only end of marriage ? Is it 
 not rather the happiness of family life ? Still, you were but 
 eight-and-twenty and the countess no more than twenty; it 
 was excusable that you should think only of love-making. At 
 the same time, the terms of your marriage-contract, and your 
 name you will think me grossly lawyer-like required you 
 to begin by having a fine handsome boy. Yes, Monsieur le 
 Comte, and if you had daughters, you ought not to have 
 stopped till you had a male heir to succeed you in the en- 
 tail. 
 
 " Was Mademoiselle Evangelista delicate ? Was there any- 
 thing to fear for her in motherhood ? You will say that is 
 very old-fashioned and antiquated; but in noble families, 
 Monsieur le Comte, a legitimate wife ought to have children 
 and bring them up well. As the Duchesse de Sully said the 
 wife of the great Sully a wife is not a means of pleasure, but 
 the honor and virtue of the household."
 
 426 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 "You do not know what women are, my dear Mathias," 
 said Paul. " To be happy, a man must love his wife as she 
 chooses to be loved. And is it not rather brutal to deprive a 
 woman so early of her charms and spoil her beauty before she 
 has really enjoyed it?" 
 
 " If you had had a family, the mother would have checked 
 the wife's dissipation ; she would more than likely have stayed 
 
 at home " 
 
 / "If you were in the right, my good friend," said Paul, 
 with a frown, " I should be still more unhappy. Do not 
 aggravate my misery by moralizing over my ruin ; let me de- 
 part without any after bitterness." 
 
 Next day Mathias received a bill payable at sight for a 
 hundred and fifty thousand francs, signed by de Marsay. 
 
 "You see," said Paul, "he does not write me a word. 
 Henri's is the most perfectly imperfect, the most unconven- 
 tionally noble nature I have ever met with. If you could but 
 know how superior this man who is still young rises above 
 feeling and interest, and what a great politician he is, you, 
 like me, would be amazed to find what a warm heart he 
 has." 
 
 Mathias tried to reason Paul out of his purpose, but it 
 was irrevocable, and justified by so many practical reasons, 
 that the old notary made no further attempt to detain his 
 client. 
 
 Rarely enough does a vessel in cargo sail punctually to the 
 day ; but by an accident disastrous to Paul, the wind being 
 favorable, the Belle-Amelie was to sail on the morrow. At 
 the moment of departure the landing-stage is always crowded 
 with relations, friends, and idlers. Among these, as it hap- 
 pened, were several personally acquainted with Manerville. 
 His ruin had made him as famous now as he had once been 
 for his fortune, so there was a stir of curiosity. Every one 
 had some remark to make.
 
 A -MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 427 
 
 The old man had escorted Paul to the wharf, and he must 
 have suffered keenly as he heard some of the comments. 
 
 "Who would recognize in the man you see there with old 
 Mathias the dandy who used to be called Sweet-pea, and 
 who was the oracle of fashion here at Bordeaux five years 
 since?" 
 
 " What, can that fat little man in an alpaca overcoat, look- 
 ing like a coachman, be the Comte Paul de Manerville?" 
 
 " Yes, my dear, the man who married Mademoiselle Evange- 
 lista. There he is ruined, without a sou to his name, going 
 to the Indies to look for the roc's egg." 
 
 " But how was he ruined? He was so rich ! " 
 
 " Paris women the Bourse gambling display " 
 
 " And beside," said another, " Manerville is a poor creature ; 
 he has no sense, as limp as wet-paper, allowing himself to be 
 fleeced, and incapable of any decisive action. He was born 
 to be ruined." 
 
 Paul shook his old friend's hand and took refuge on board. 
 Mathias stood on the quay, looking at his old client, who 
 leaned over the netting, defying the crowd with a look of 
 scorn. 
 
 Just as the anchor was weighed, Paul saw that Mathias was 
 signaling to him by waving his handkerchief. The old 
 housekeeper had come in hot haste, and was standing by her 
 master, who seemed greatly excited by some matter of im- 
 portance. Paul persuaded the captain to wait a few minutes 
 and send a boat to land, that he might know what the old 
 lawyer wanted ; he was signaling vigorously, evidently de- 
 siring him to disembark. Mathias, too infirm to go to the 
 ship, gave two letters to one of the sailors who were in the 
 boat. 
 
 " My good fellow," said the old notary, showing one of the 
 letters to the sailor, " this letter, mark it well, make no mis- 
 take this packet has just been delivered by a messenger who 
 has ridden from Paris in thirty-five hours. Explain this clearly
 
 428 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 to Monsieur le Corate, do not forget. It might make him 
 change his plans." 
 
 " And we should have to land him ? " 
 
 "Yes," said the lawyer rashly. 
 
 The sailor in most parts of the world is a creature apart, 
 professing the deepest contempt for all landlubbers. As to 
 townsfolk, he cannot understand them ; he knows nothing 
 about them ; he laughs them to scorn ; he cheats them if he 
 can without direct dishonesty. This one, as it happened, was 
 a man of Lower Brittany, who saw worthy old Mathias' in- 
 structions in only one light. 
 
 "Just so," he muttered, as he took his oar, "land him 
 again ! The captain is to lose a passenger ! If we listened 
 to these landlubbers, we should spend our lives in pulling 
 them between the ship and shore. Is he afraid his son will 
 take cold?" 
 
 So the sailor gave Paul the letters without any message. 
 On recognizing his wife's writing and de Marsay's, Paul 
 imagined all that either of them could have to say to him ; 
 and being determined not to risk being influenced by the 
 offers that might be inspired by their regard, he put the letters 
 in his pocket with apparent indifference. 
 
 "And that is the rubbish we are kept waiting for ! What 
 nonsense ! " said the sailor to the captain, in his broad 
 Breton. "If the matter were as important as that old guy 
 declared, would Monsieur le Comte drop the papers into his 
 scuppers ? ' ' 
 
 Paul, lost in the dismal reflections that come over the 
 strongest man in such circumstances, gave himself up to 
 melancholy, while he waved his hand to his old friend, and 
 bade farewell to France, watching the fast-disappearing build- 
 ings of Bordeaux. 
 
 He presently sat down on a coil of rope, and there night 
 found him, lost in meditation. Doubt came upon him as 
 twilight fell ; he gazed anxiously into the future ; he could see
 
 A MARRIAGE S&TTLEMENT. 429 
 
 nothing before him but perils and uncertainty, and wondered 
 whether his courage might not fail him. He felt some vague 
 alarm as he thought of Natalie left to herself; he repented of 
 his decision, regretting Paris and his past life. 
 
 Then he fell a victim to sea-sickness. Every one knows 
 the miseries of this condition, and one of the worst features 
 of its sufferings is the total effacement of will that accompa- 
 nies it. An inexplicable incapacity loosens all the bonds of 
 vitality at the core ; the mind refuses to act, and everything 
 is a matter of total indifference a mother can forget her 
 child, a lover his mistress; the strongest man becomes a mere 
 inert mass. Paul was carried to his berth, where he remained 
 for three days, alternately violently ill, and plied with grog 
 by the sailors, thinking of nothing or sleeping ; then he went 
 through a sort of convalescence and recovered his ordinary 
 health. 
 
 On the trorning when, finding himself better, he went for a 
 walk on deck to breathe the sea-air of a more southern climate, 
 on putting his hands in his pockets he felt his letters. He at 
 once took them out to read them, and began by Natalie's. In 
 order that the Comtesse de Manerville's letter may be fully 
 understood, it is necessary first to give that written by Paul 
 to his wife on leaving Paris. 
 
 PAUL DE MANERVILLE TO HIS WIFE. 
 
 " MY BEST BELOVED : When you read this letter I shall be 
 far from you, probably on the vessel that is to carry me to 
 India, where I am going to repair my shattered fortune. I 
 did not feel that I had the courage to tell you of my departure. 
 I have deceived you ; but was it not necessary ? You would 
 have pinched yourself to no purpose, you would have wished 
 to sacrifice your own fortune. Dear Natalie, feel no remorse ; 
 I shall know no repentance. When I return with millions, I 
 will imitate your father ; I will lay them at your feet as he laid 
 his at your mother's, and will say, ' It is all yours.'
 
 430 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 " I love you to distraction, Natalie ; and I can say so with- 
 out fearing that you will make my avowal a pretext for exerting 
 a power which only weak men dread. Yours was unlimited 
 from the first day I ever saw you. My love alone has led me 
 to disaster ; my gradual ruin has brought me the delirious joys 
 of the gambler. As my money diminished my happiness grew 
 greater ; each fraction of my wealth converted into some little 
 gratification to you caused me heavenly rapture. I could have 
 wished you to have more caprices than you ever had. 
 
 " I knew that I was marching to an abyss, but I went, my 
 brow wreathed with joys and feelings unknown to vulgar souls. 
 I acted like the lovers who shut themselves up for a year or 
 two in a cottage by a lake, vowing to kill themselves after 
 plunging into the ocean of happiness, dying in all the glory 
 of their illusions and their passion. I have always thought 
 such persons eminently rational. You have never known any- 
 thing of my pleasures or of my sacrifices. And is there not 
 exquisite enjoyment in concealing from the one we love the 
 cost of the things she wishes for? 
 
 " I may tell you these secrets now. I shall be far indeed 
 away when you hold this sheet loaded with my love. Though 
 I forego the pleasure of your gratitude, I do not feel that 
 clutch at my heart which would seize me if I tried to talk of 
 these things. Alas, my dearest, there is deep self-interest in 
 thus revealing the past. Is it not to add to the volume of our 
 love in the future ? Could it indeed ever need such a stimu- 
 lus? Do we not feel that pure affection to which proof is 
 needless, which scorns time and distance, and lives in its own 
 strength ? 
 
 "Ah ! Natalie, I just now left the table where I am writing 
 by the fire, and looked at you asleep, calm and trustful, in the 
 attitude of a guileless child, your hand lying where I could 
 take it. I left a tear on the pillow that has been the witness 
 of our happiness. I leave you without a fear on the promise 
 of that attitude; I leave you to win peace by winning a fortune
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 431 
 
 so large that no anxiety may ever disturb our joys, and that 
 you may satisfy your every wish. Neither you nor I could 
 ever dispense with the luxuries of the life we lead. I am a 
 man, and I have courage ; mine alone be the task of amassing 
 the fortune we require. 
 
 " You might perhaps think of following me ! I will not tell 
 you the name of the ship, nor the port I sail from, nor the day 
 I leave. A friend will tell you when it is too late. 
 
 " Natalie, my devotion to you is boundless ; I love you as a 
 mother loves her child, as a lover worships his mistress, with 
 perfect disinterestedness. The work be mine, the enjoyment 
 yours ; mine the sufferings, yours the life of happiness. Amuse 
 yourself; keep up all your habits of luxury ; go to the Italiens, 
 to the French opera, into society and to balls ; I absolve you 
 beforehand. But, dear angel, each time you come home to 
 the nest where we have enjoyed the fruits that have ripened 
 during our five years of love, remember your lover, think of 
 me for a moment, and sleep in my heart. That is all I ask. 
 
 " I my one, dear, constant thought when, under scorch- 
 ing skies, working for our future, I find some obstacle to over- 
 come, or when, tired out, I rest in the hope of my return I 
 shall think of you who are the beauty of my life. Yes, I shall 
 try to live in you, telling myself that you have neither cares 
 nor uneasiness. Just as life is divided into day and night, 
 waking and sleeping, so I shall have my life of enchantment 
 in Paris, my life of labors in India a dream of anguish, a 
 reality of delight ; I shall live so completely in what is real to 
 you that my days will be the dream. I have my memories ; 
 canto by canto I shall recall the lovely poem of five years ; I 
 shall remember the days when you chose to be dazzling, when 
 by some perfection of evening-dress or morning-wrapper you 
 made yourself new in my eyes. I shall taste on my lips the 
 flavor of our little feasts. 
 
 " Yes, dear angel, I am going like a man pledged to some 
 high emprise when by success he is to win his mistress ! To
 
 432 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 me the past will be like the dreams of desire which anticipate 
 realization, and which realization often disappoints. But you 
 have always more than fulfilled them. And I shall return to 
 find a new wife, for will not absence lend you fresh charms? 
 Oh, my dear love, my Natalie, let me be a religion to you. 
 Be always the child I have seen sleeping ! If you were to be- 
 tray my blind confidence Natalie, you would not have to 
 fear my anger, of that you may be sure ; I should die without 
 a word. But a woman does not deceive the husband who 
 leaves her free, for women are never mean. She may cheat a 
 tyrant ; but she does not care for the easy treason which would 
 deal a death-blow. No, I cannot imagine such a thing for- 
 give me for this cry, natural to a man. 
 
 " My dearest, you will see de Marsay ; he is now the tenant 
 holding our house, and he will leave you in it. This lease to 
 him was necessary to avoid useless loss. My creditors, not 
 understanding that payment is merely a question of time, 
 might have seized the furniture and the amount of the rent of 
 the house. Be good to de Marsay ; I have the most perfect 
 confidence in his abilities and in his honor. Make him your 
 advocate and your adviser, your familiar. Whatever his en- 
 gagements may be, he will always be at your service. I have 
 instructed him to keep an eye on the liquidation of my debts ; 
 if he should advance a sum of which he presently needed the 
 use, I trust to you to pay him. Remember I am not leaving 
 you to de Marsay's guidance, but to your own ; when I men- 
 tion him, I do not force him upon you. 
 
 "Alas, I cannot begin to write on business matters; only 
 an hour remains to me under the same roof with you. I 
 count your breathing ; I try to picture your thoughts from the 
 occasional changes in your sleep, your breathing revives the 
 flowery hours of our early love. At every throb of your heart 
 mine goes forth to you with all its wealth, and I scatter over 
 you the petals of the roses of my soul, as children strew them 
 in front of the altars on Corpus Christi Day. I commend
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 433 
 
 you to the memories I am pouring out on you ; I would, if I 
 could, pour my life-blood into your veins that you might 
 indeed be mine, that your heart might be my heart, your 
 thoughts my thoughts, that I might be wholly in you ! And 
 you utter a little murmur as if in reply ! 
 
 " Be ever as calm and lovely as you are at this moment. I 
 would I had the fabled power of which we hear in fairy tales, 
 and could leave you thus to sleep during my absence, to wake 
 you on my return with a kiss. What energy, what love, must 
 I feel to leave you when I behold you thus. You are Spanish 
 and religious ; you will observe an oath taken even in your 
 sleep when your unspoken word was believed in beyond a 
 doubt. 
 
 " Farewell, my dearest. Your hapless Sweet-pea is swept 
 away by the storm-wind ; but it will come back to you for 
 ever on the wings of Fortune. Nay, dear Ninie, I will not 
 say farewell, for you will always be with me. Will you not 
 be the soul of my actions ? Will not the hope of bringing 
 you such happiness as cannot be wrecked give spirit to my 
 enterprise and guide all my steps ? Will you not always be 
 present to me ? No, it will not be the tropical sun, but the 
 fire of your eyes, that will light me on my way. 
 
 " Be as happy as a woman can be, bereft of her lover. I 
 should have been glad to .have a parting kiss, in which you 
 were not merely passive ; but, my Ninie, my adored darling, 
 I would not awaken you. When you awake you will find a 
 tear on your brow; let it be a talisman. Think, oh, think of 
 him who is perhaps to die for you, far away from you ; think 
 of him less as your husband than as a lover who worships you 
 and leaves you in God's keeping." 
 
 REPLY FROM THE COMTESSE DE MANERVILLE TO 
 HER HUSBAND. 
 
 " MY DEAREST : What grief your letter has brought me ! 
 Had you any right to form a decision which concerns us 
 28
 
 434 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 equally without consulting me? Are you free? Do you not 
 belong to me ? And am I not half a creole ? Why should I 
 not follow you ? You have shown me that I am no longer 
 indispensable to you. What have I done, Paul, that you 
 should rob me of my rights? What is to become of me alone 
 in Paris ? Poor dear, you assume the blame for any ill I may 
 have done. But am I not partly to blame for this ruin ? 
 Has not my finery weighed heavily in the wrong scale ? 
 You are making me curse the happy, heedless life we have led 
 these four years. To think of you as exiled for six years ! Is 
 it not enough to kill me ? How can you make a fortune in 
 six years ? Will you ever come back ? I was wiser than I 
 knew when I so strenuously opposed the separate maintenance 
 on which you and my mother so absolutely insisted. What 
 did I tell you ? That it would expose you to discredit, that 
 it would ruin your credit ! You had to be quite angry before 
 I would give in. 
 
 " My dear Paul, you have never been so noble in my eyes 
 as you are at this moment. Without a hint of despair, to set 
 out to make a fortune ! Only such a character, such energy 
 as yours could take such a step. I kneel at your feet. A man 
 who confesses to weakness in such perfect good faith, who re- 
 stores his fortune from the same motive that has led him to waste 
 it for love, for an irresistible passion oh, Paul, such a man 
 is sublime ! Go without fear, trample down every obstacle, 
 and never doubt your Natalie, for it would be doubting your- 
 self. My poor dear, you say you want to live in me ? And 
 shall not I always live in you ? I shall not be here, but with 
 you wherever you may be. 
 
 "Though your letter brought me cruel anguish, it filled me 
 too with joy; in one minute I went through both extremes; 
 for, seeing how much you love me, I was proud, too, to find 
 that my love was appreciated. Sometimes I have fancied that I 
 loved you more than you loved me ; now I confess myself 
 outdone; you may add that delightful superiority to the
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 435 
 
 others you possess; but have I not many more reasons for 
 loving ? Your letter, the precious letter in which your whole 
 soul is revealed, and which so plainly tells me that between 
 you and me nothing is lost, will dwell on my heart during 
 your absence, for your whole soul is in it ; that letter is my 
 glory ! 
 
 "I am going to live with my mother at Lanstrac ; I shall 
 there be dead to the world, and shall save out of my income 
 to pay off your debts. From this day forth, Paul, I am an- 
 other woman ; I take leave for ever of the world ; I will not 
 have a pleasure that you do not share. 
 
 " Beside, Paul, I am obliged to leave Paris and live in 
 solitude. Dear boy, you have a twofold reason for making a 
 fortune. If your courage needed a spur, you may now find 
 another heart dwelling in your own. My dear, cannot you 
 guess ? We shall have a child. Your dearest hopes will be 
 crowned, monsieur. I would not give you the deceptive joys 
 which are heart-breaking ; we have already had so much dis- 
 appointment on that score, and I was afraid of having to with- 
 draw the glad announcement. But now I am sure of what I 
 am saying, and happy to cast a gleam of joy over your sorrow. 
 This morning, suspecting no evil, I had gone to the Church 
 of the Assumption to return thanks to God. How could I 
 foresee disaster ? Everything seemed to smile on me. As I 
 came out of church, I met my mother ; she had heard of 
 your distress, and had come by post with all her savings, 
 thirty thousand francs, hoping to be able to arrange matters. 
 What a heart, Paul ! I was quite happy ; I came home to 
 tell you the two pieces of good news while we breakfasted 
 under the awning in the conservatory, and I had ordered all 
 the dainties you like best. 
 
 " Augustine gave me your letter. A letter from you, when 
 we had slept together ! It was a tragedy in itself. I was 
 seized with a shivering fit then I read it I read it in tears, 
 and my mother too melted into tears. And a woman must
 
 436 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 love a man very much to cry over him, crying makes us so 
 ugly. I was half-dead. So much love and so much courage ! 
 So much happiness and such great grief! To be unable to 
 clasp you to my heart, my beloved, at the very moment when 
 my admiration for your magnanimity most constrained me ! 
 What woman could withstand such a whirlwind of emotions ? 
 To think that you were far away when your hand on my heart 
 would have comforted me ; that you were not there to give 
 me the look I love so well, to rejoice with me over the realiza- 
 tion of our hopes ; and I was not with you to soften your 
 sorrow by the affection which made your loving Natalie so 
 dear to you, and which can make you forget every annoyance, 
 every grief! 
 
 " I wanted to be off to fly to your feet ; but my mother 
 pointed out that the Belle-Amelie is to sail to-morrow, that 
 only the post could go fast enough to overtake you, and that 
 it would be the height of folly to risk all our future happiness 
 on a jolt. Though a mother already, I ordered horses, and 
 my mother cheated me into the belief that they would be 
 brought round. She acted wisely, for I was already unfit to 
 move. I could not bear such a combination of violent agita- 
 tions, and I fainted away. I am writing in bed, for I am 
 ordered perfect rest for some months. Hitherto I have been 
 a frivolous woman, now I mean to be the mother of a family. 
 Providence is good to me, for a child to nurse and bring up 
 can alone alleviate the sorrows of your absence. In it I shall 
 find a second Paul to make much of. I shall thus publicly 
 flaunt the love we have so carefully kept to ourselves. I shall 
 tell the truth. 
 
 " My mother has already had occasion to contradict certain 
 calumnies which are current as to your conduct. The two 
 Vandenesses, Charles and Felix, had defended you stoutly, 
 but your friend de Marsay makes game of everything; he 
 laughs at your detractors instead of answering them. I do 
 not like such levity in response to serious attacks. Are you
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 437 
 
 not mistaken in him? However, I will obey and make a 
 friend of him. 
 
 " Be quite easy, my dearest, with regard to anything that 
 may affect your honor. Is it not mine ? 
 
 "I am about to pledge my diamonds. My mother and I 
 will strain every resource to pay off your debts and try to buy 
 in the vine-land of Bellerose. My mother, who is as good a 
 man of business as a regular accountant, blames you for not 
 having been open with her. She would not then have pur- 
 chased thinking to give you pleasure the estate of Grfun- 
 rouge, which cut in on your lands ; and then she could have 
 lent you a hundred and thirty thousand francs. She is in 
 despair at the step you have taken, and is afraid you will suffer 
 from the life in India. She entreats you to be temperate, and 
 not to be led astray by the women ! I laughed in her face. 
 I am as sure of you as of myself. You will come back to me 
 wealthy and faithful. I alone in the world know your womanly 
 refinement and those secret feelings which make you an ex- 
 quisite human flower, worthy of heaven. The Bordeaux folk 
 had every reason to give you your pretty nickname. And 
 who will take care of my delicate flower ? My heart is racked 
 by dreadful ideas. I, his wife, his Natalie, am here, when 
 already perhaps he is suffering ! I, so entirely one with you, 
 may not share your troubles, your annoyances, your dangers ? 
 In whom can you confide? How can you live without the 
 ear into which you whisper everything ? Dear, sensitive plant, 
 swept away by the gale, why should you be transplanted from 
 the only soil in which your fragrance could ever be developed ? 
 I feel as if I had been alone for two centuries, and I am cold 
 in Paris ! And I have cried so long 
 
 "The cause of your ruin ! What a text for the meditations 
 of a woman full of love ! You have treated me like a child, 
 to whom nothing is refused that it asks for ; like a courtesan, 
 for whom a spendthrift throws away his fortune. Your deli- 
 cacy, as you style it, is an insult. Do you suppose that I can-
 
 438 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 not live without fine clothes, balls, operas, successes ? Am I 
 such a frivolous woman ? Do you think me incapable of a 
 serious thought, of contributing to your fortune as much as I 
 ever contributed to your pleasures? If you were not so far 
 away and ill at ease, you would here find a good scolding for 
 your impertinence. Can you disparage your wife to such an 
 extent ? Bless me ! What did I go out into society for ? To 
 flatter your vanity ; it was for you I dressed, and you know 
 it. If I had been wrong, I should be too cruelly punished ; 
 your absence is a bitter expiation for our domestic happiness. 
 That happiness was too complete ; it could not fail to be paid 
 for by some great sorrow ; and here it is ! After such delights, 
 so carefully screened from the eyes of the curious ; after these 
 constant festivities, varied only by the secret madness of our 
 affection, there is no alternative but solitude. Solitude, my 
 dear one, feeds great passions, and I long for it. What can 
 I do in the world of fashion ; to whom should I report my 
 triumphs ? 
 
 "Ah, to live at Lanstrac, on the estate laid out by your 
 father, in the house you restored so luxuriously to live there 
 with your child, waiting for you, and sending forth to you 
 night and morning the prayers of the mother and child, of the 
 woman and the angel will not that be half-happiness ? Can- 
 not you see the little hands folded in mine ? Will you still 
 remember, as I shall remember every evening, the happiness 
 of which your dear letter reminds me ? Oh, yes, for we love 
 each other equally. I can no more doubt you than you could 
 doubt me. 
 
 "What consolations can I offer you here, I, who am left 
 desolate, crushed ; I, who look forward to the next six years 
 as a desert to be crossed ? Well, I am not the most to be 
 pitied, for will not that desert be cheered by our little one ? 
 Yes a boy I must give you a boy, must I not ? So farewell, 
 dearly beloved one, our thoughts and our love will ever fol- 
 Jpw you. The tears on my paper will tell you much that I
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 439 
 
 cannot express, and take the kisses you will find left here, 
 below my name, by your own 
 
 "NATALIE." 
 
 This letter threw Paul into a day-dream, caused no less by 
 the rapture into which he was thrown by these expressions of 
 love than by the reminiscences of happiness thus intentionally 
 called up ; and he went over them all, one by one, to account 
 for this promise of a child. 
 
 The happier a man is, the greater are his fears. In souls 
 that are exclusively tender and a tender nature is generally 
 a little weak jealousy and disquietude are usually in direct 
 proportion to happiness and to its greatness. Strong souls are 
 neither jealous nor easily frightened : jealousy is doubt, and 
 fear is small-minded. Belief without limits is the leading 
 attribute of a high-minded man ; if he is deceived and 
 strength as well as weakness may make him a dupe his scorn 
 serves him as a hatchet, and he cuts through everything. 
 Such greatness is exceptional. Which of us has not known 
 what it is to be deserted by the spirit that upholds this frail 
 machine, and to hear only the unknown voice that denies 
 everything ? 
 
 Paul, caught as it were in the toils of certain undeniable 
 facts, doubted and believed both at once. Lost in thought, a 
 prey to terrible but involuntary questionings, and yet strug- 
 gling with the proofs of true affection and his belief in Natalie, 
 he read this discursive epistle through twice, unable to come 
 to any conclusion for or against his wife. Love may be as 
 great in wordiness as in brevity of expression. 
 
 Thoroughly to understand Paul's frame of mind, he must 
 be seen floating on the ocean as on the wide expanse of the 
 past ; looking back on his life as on a cloudless sky, and 
 coming back at last after whirlwinds of doubt to the pure, 
 entire, and untarnished faith of a believer, of a Christian, of 
 a lover convinced by the voice of his heart.
 
 440 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 It is now not less necessary to give the letter to which 
 Henri de Marsay's was a reply. 
 
 COMTE PAUL DE MANERVILLE TO MONSIEUR LE MARQUIS 
 . HENRI DE MARSAY. 
 
 " HENRI : I am going to tell you one of the greatest things 
 a man can tell a friend : I am ruined. When you read this 
 I shall be starting from Bordeaux for Calcutta on board the 
 good ship Belle-Amelie. You will find in your notary's hands 
 a deed which only needs your signature to ratify it, in- which 
 I let my house to you for six years on a hypothetical lease ; 
 you will write a letter counteracting it to my wife. I am 
 obliged to take this precaution in order that Natalie may re- 
 main in her own house without any fear of being turned out 
 of it. 'I also empower you to draw the income of the entailed 
 property for four years, as against a sum of a hundred and 
 fifty thousand francs that I will beg you to send by a bill, 
 drawn on some house in Bordeaux, to the order of Mathias. 
 My wife will give you her guarantee to enable you to draw 
 the income. If the revenue from the entail should repay you 
 sooner than I imagine, we can settle accounts on my return. 
 The sum I ask of you is indispensable to enable me to set out 
 to seek my fortune ; and, if I am not mistaken in you, I shall 
 receive it without delay at Bordeaux the day before I sail. I 
 have acted exactly as you would have acted in my place. I 
 have held out to the last moment without allowing any one to 
 suspect my position. Then, when the news of the seizure of 
 my saleable estates reached Paris, I had raised money by notes 
 of hand to the sum of a hundred thousand francs, to try 
 gambling. Some stroke of luck might reinstate me. I lost. 
 
 "How did I ruin myself? Voluntarily, my dear Henri. 
 From the very first day I saw that I could not go on in the 
 way I started. I knew what the consequence would be; I 
 persisted in shutting my eyes, for I could not bear to say to 
 my wife: 'Let us leave Paris and go to live at Lanstrac.' I
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 441 
 
 have ruined myself for her, as a man ruins himself for a mis- 
 tress, but knowing it. 
 
 " Between you and me, I am neither a simpleton nor weak. 
 A simpleton does not allow himself to be governed, with his 
 eyes open, by an absorbing passion ; and a man who sets out 
 to reconstitute his fortune in the Indies, instead of blowing 
 his brains out, is a man of spirit. And so, my dear friend, 
 as I care for wealth only for her sake, as I do not wish to be 
 any man's dupe, and as I shall be absent six years, I place my 
 wife in your keeping. You are enough the favorite of women 
 to respect Natalie, and to give me the benefit of the honest 
 friendship that binds us. I know of no better protector than 
 you will be. I am leaving my wife childless ; a lover would 
 be a danger. You must know, my dear de Marsay, I love 
 Natalie desperately, cringingly, and am not ashamed of it. I 
 could, I believe, forgive her if she were unfaithful, not because 
 I am certain that I could be revenged, if I were to die for it ! 
 but because I would kill myself to leave her happy if I myself 
 could not make her happy. 
 
 "But what have I to fear? Natalie has for me that true 
 regard, independent of love, which preserves love. I have 
 treated her like a spoiled child. I found such perfect happi- 
 ness in my sacrifices, one led so naturally to the other, that 
 she would be a monster to betray me. Love deserves love. 
 
 "Alas! must I tell you the whole truth, my dear Henri? 
 I have just written her a letter in which I have led her to be- 
 lieve that I am setting out full of hope, with a calm face ; that 
 I have not a doubt, no jealousy, no fears ; such a letter as sons 
 write to deceive a mother when they go forth to die. Good 
 God ! de Marsay, I had hell within me, I am the most miser- 
 able man on earth. You must hear my cries, my gnashings of 
 the teeth. To you I confess the tears of a despairing lover. 
 Sooner would I sweep the gutter under her window for six 
 years, if it were possible, than return with millions after six 
 years' absence. I suffer the utmost anguish ; I shall go on
 
 442 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 from sorrow to sorrow till you shall have written me a line to 
 say that you accept a charge which you alone in the world 
 can fulfill and carry out. 
 
 - "My dear de Marsay, I cannot live without that woman; 
 she is air and sunshine to me. Take her under your aegis, 
 keep her faithful to me even against her will. Yes, I can 
 still be happy with such half-happiness. Be her protector ; I 
 have no fear of you. Show her how vulgar it would be to 
 deceive me ; that it would make her like every other woman ; 
 that the really brilliant thing will be to remain faithful. 
 
 "She must still have money enough to carry on her easy 
 and undisturbed life ; but if she should want anything, if she 
 should have a whim, be her banker do not be afraid, I shall 
 come home rich. 
 
 "After all, my alarms are vain, no doubt ; Natalie is an 
 angel of virtue. When Felix de Vandenesse fell desperately 
 in love with her and allowed himself to pay her some atten- 
 tions, I only had to point out the danger to Natalie, and she 
 thanked me so affectionately that I was moved to tears. She 
 said that it would be awkward for her reputation if a man sud- 
 denly disappeared from her house, but that she would find 
 means to dismiss him ; and she did, in fact, receive him very 
 coldly, so that everything ended well. In four years we have 
 never had any other subject of discussion, if a conversation as 
 between friends can be called a discussion. 
 
 " Well, my dear Henri, I must say farewell like a man. 
 The disaster has come. From whatever cause, there it is ; I 
 can but bow to it. Poverty and Natalie are two irreconcilable 
 terms. And the balance of my debts and assets will be very 
 nearly exact ; no one will have anything of which to complain. 
 Still, should some unforeseen circumstance threaten my honor, 
 I trust in you. 
 
 " Finally, if any serious event should occur, you can write 
 me under cover to the governor-general at Calcutta. I have 
 friends in his household, and some one will take charge of any
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 443 
 
 letters for me that may arrive from Europe. My dear friend, 
 I hope to find you still the same on my return a man who 
 can make fun of everything, and who is, nevertheless, alive to 
 the feelings of others when they are in harmony with the noble 
 nature you feel in yourself. 
 
 "You can stay in Paris! At the moment when you read 
 this I shall be crying, ' To Carthage ! '" 
 
 THE MARQUIS HENRI DE MARSAY IN REPLY TO THE COMTE 
 PAUL DE MANERVILLE. 
 
 "And so, Monsieur le Comte, you have collapsed ! Mon- 
 sieur the Ambassador has turned turtle ! Are these the fine 
 things you were doing ? Why, Paul, did you keep any secret 
 from me ? If you had said but one word, my dear old fellow, 
 I could have thrown light on the matter. 
 
 "Your wife refuses her guarantee. That should be enough 
 to unseal your eyes. And, if not, I would have you to know 
 that your notes of hand have been protested at the suit of 
 one Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to one Solonet, a notary at 
 Bordeaux. This sucking money-lender, having come from 
 Gascony to try his hand at stock-jobbing, lends his name to 
 screen your very honorable mother-in-law, the real creditor to 
 whom you owe the hundred thousand francs, for which, it is 
 said, she gave you seventy thousand. Compared to Madame 
 Evangelista, Daddy Gobseck is soft flannel velvet, a soothing 
 draught, a meringue a la vanillc (a vanilla-cake), a fifth-act 
 uncle. Your vineyard of Bellerose will be your wife's booty ; 
 her mother is to pay her the difference between the price it 
 sells for and the sum-total of her claims. Madame Evange- 
 lista is to acquire le Gaudet and le Grassol, and the mortgages 
 on your house at Bordeaux are all in her hands under the 
 names of men of straw, found for her by that fellow Solonet. 
 And in this way these two worthy women will secure an in- 
 come of a hundred and twenty thousand francs, the amount 
 derivable from your estates, added to thirty-odd thousand
 
 444 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 francs a year in the Funds which the dear, delightful hussies 
 have secured. 
 
 " Your wife's guarantee was unnecessary. The aforenamed 
 Lecuyer came this morning to offer me repayment of the 
 money I have sent you in exchange for a formal transfer of 
 my claims. The vintage of 1825, which your mother-in-law 
 has safe in the cellars at Lanstrac, is enough to pay me off. 
 So the two women have calculated that you would be at sea 
 by this time ; but I am writing by special messenger that this 
 may reach you in time for you to follow the advice I proceed 
 to give you. 
 
 " I made this Lecuyer talk ; and from his lies, his state- 
 ments, and his concealments, I have culled the clues that I 
 needed to reconstruct the whole web of domestic conspiracy 
 that has been working against you. This evening at the 
 Spanish Embassy I shall pay my admiring compliments to 
 your wife and her mother. I shall be most attentive to 
 Madame Evangelista, I shall throw you over in the meanest 
 way, I shall abuse you, but with extreme subtlety ; anything 
 strong would at once put this Mascarille in petticoats on the 
 scent. What did you do that set her against you? That is 
 what I mean to find out. If only you had had wit enough to 
 make love to the mother before marrying the daughter, you 
 would at this moment be a peer of France, Due de Manerville, 
 and ambassador to Madrid. If only you had sent for me at 
 the time of your marriage ! I could have taught you to know, 
 to analyze, the two women you would have to fight, and by 
 comparing our observations we should have hit on some good 
 counsel. Was not I the only friend you had who would cer- 
 tainly honor your wife ? Was I a man to be afraid of? But 
 after these women had learned to judge me, they took fright 
 and divided us. If you had not been so silly as to sulk with 
 me, they could not have eaten you out of house and home. 
 
 "Your wife contributed largely to our coolness. She was 
 talked over by her mother, to whom she wrote twice a week,
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 445 
 
 and you never heeded it. I recognized my friend Paul as I 
 heard this detail. 
 
 " Within a month I will be on such terms with your mother- 
 in-law that she herself will tell me the reason for the Hispano- 
 Italian vendetta she has evidently vowed on you you, the 
 best fellow in the world. Did she hate you before her daugh- 
 ter was in love with Felix de Vandenesse ? or has she driven 
 you to the Indies that her daughter may be free, as a woman 
 is in France when completely separated from her husband ? 
 That is the problem. 
 
 "I can see you leaping and howling when you read that 
 your wife is madly in love with Felix de Vandenesse. If I 
 had not taken it into my head to make a tour in the East with 
 Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and certain other jolly fellows of 
 your acquaintance, I could have told you more about this 
 intrigue, which was incipient when I left. I could then see 
 the first sprouting seed of your catastrophe. What gentleman 
 could be scurvy enough to open such a subject without some 
 invitation, or dare to blow on a woman ? Who could bear to 
 break the witch's mirror in which a friend loves to contem- 
 plate the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Are not such 
 illusions the wealth of the heart? And was not your wife, 
 my dear boy, in the widest sense of the word, a woman of the 
 world ? She thought of nothing but her success, her dress ; 
 she frequented the Bouffons, the opera, and balls; rose late, 
 drove in the Bois, dined out or gave dinner-parties. Such a 
 life seems to me to be to women what war is to men; the 
 public sees only the victorious, and forgets the dead. Some 
 delicate women die of this exhausting round ; those who 
 survive must have iron constitutions, and consequently very 
 little heart and very strong stomachs. Herein lies the reason 
 of the want of feeling, the cold atmosphere of drawing-room 
 society. Nobler souls dwell in solitude ; the tender and weak 
 succumb. What are left are the boulders which keep the 
 social ocean within bounds by enduring to be beaten and
 
 446 . A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 rolled by the breakers without wearing out. Your wife was 
 made to withstand this life ; she seemed inured to it ; she was 
 always fresh and beautiful. To me the inference was obvious 
 she did not love you, while you loved her to distraction. 
 To strike the spark of love in this flinty nature a man of iron 
 was required. 
 
 " After being caught by Lady Dudley, who could not keep 
 him (she is the wife of my real father), Felix was obviously 
 the man for Natalie. Nor was there any great difficulty in 
 guessing that your wife did not care for you. From indiffer- 
 ence to aversion is but a step ; and sooner or later, a discus- 
 sion, a word, an act of authority on your part, a mere trifle, 
 would make your wife overleap it. 
 
 "I myself could have rehearsed the scene that took place 
 between you every night in her room. You have no child, 
 my boy. Does not that fact account for many things to an 
 observer? You, who were in love, could hardly discern the 
 coldness natural to a young woman whom you have trained to 
 the very point for Felix de Vandenesse. If you had dis- 
 covered that your wife was cold-hearted, the stupid policy of 
 married life would have prompted you to regard it as the 
 reserve of innocence. Like all husbands, you fancied you 
 could preserve her virtue in a world where women whisper to 
 each other things that men dare not say, where all that a hus- 
 band would never tell his wife is spoken and commented on 
 behind a fan, with laughter and banter, a propos to a trial or 
 an adventure. Though your wife liked the advantages of a 
 married life, she found the price a little heavy ; the price, the 
 tax, was yourself! 
 
 "You, seeing none of these things, went on digging pits 
 and covering them with flowers, to use the time-honored 
 rhetorical figure. You calmly submitted to the rule which 
 governs the common run of men, and from which I had 
 wished to protect you. 
 
 " My dear boy, nothing was wanting to make you as great
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 447 
 
 an ass as any tradesman who is surprised when his wife deceives 
 him ; nothing but this outcry to me about your sacrifices and 
 your love for Natalie : ' How ungrateful she would be to be- 
 tray me ; I have done this and that and the other, and I will 
 
 do more yet, I will go to India for her sake ' etc., etc. 
 
 My dear Paul, you have lived in Paris, and you have had the 
 honor of the most intimate friendship of one Henri de Marsay, 
 and you do not know the commonest things, the first princi- 
 ples of the working of the female mechanism, the alphabet of 
 a woman's heart ! You may slave yourself to death, you may 
 go to Sainte-Pelagie, you may kill two-and-twenty men, give 
 up seven mistresses, serve Laban, cross the desert, narrowly 
 escape the hulks, cover yourself with disgrace ; like Nelson, 
 refuse to give battle because you must kiss Lady Hamilton's 
 shoulder, or, like Bonaparte, fight old Wurmser, get yourself 
 cut up on the bridge of Arcole, rave like Rolando, break a 
 leg in splints to dance with a woman for five minutes ! But, 
 my dear boy, what has any of these things to do with her 
 loving you ? If love were taken as proven by such evidence, 
 men would be too happy ; a few such demonstrations at the 
 moment when he wanted her would win the woman of his 
 heart. 
 
 " Love, you stupid old Paul, is a belief like that in the im- 
 maculate conception of the Virgin. You have it, or you have 
 it not. Of what avail are rivers of blood, or the mines of 
 Potosi, or the greatest glory, to produce an involuntary and 
 inexplicable feeling? Young men like you, who look for love 
 to balance their outlay, seem to me base usurers. Our legal 
 wives owe us children and virtue ; but they do not owe love. 
 Love is the consciousness of happiness given and received, 
 and the certainty of giving and getting it ; it is an ever-living 
 attraction, constantly satisfied, and yet insatiable. On the 
 day when Vandenesse stirred in your wife's heart the chord 
 you had left untouched and virginal, your amorous flourishes, 
 your outpourings of soul, and of money, ceased even to be
 
 448 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 remembered. Your nights of happiness strewn with roses 
 fudge ! Your devotion an offering of remorse ! Yourself a 
 victim to be slain on the altar ! Your previous life a blank ! 
 One impulse of love annihilated your treasures of passion, 
 which were now but old iron. He, Felix, has had her beauty, 
 her devotion for no return perhaps; but, in love, belief is 
 as good as reality. 
 
 "Your mother-in-law was naturally on the side of the lover 
 against the husband ; secretly or confessedly she shut her eyes 
 or she opened them j I do not know what she did, but she 
 took her daughter's part against you. For fifteen years I have 
 observed society, and I never knew a mother who, under such 
 circumstances, deserted her daughter. Such indulgence is 
 hereditary, from woman to woman. And what man can 
 blame them ? Some lawyer, perhaps, responsible for the 
 Civil Code, which saw only formulas where feelings were at 
 stake. The extravagance into which you were dragged by the 
 career of a fashionable wife, the tendencies of an easy nature, 
 and your vanity too, perhaps, supplied her with the oppor- 
 tunity of getting rid of you by an ingenious scheme of ruin. 
 
 " From all this you will conclude, my good friend, that the 
 charge you put upon me, and which I should have fulfilled all 
 the more gloriously because it would have amused me, is, so 
 to speak, null and void. The evil I was to have hindered is 
 done consummatum est. Forgive me for writing a la de Mar- 
 say, as you say, on matters which to you are so serious. Far 
 be it from me to cut capers on a friend's grave, as heirs do on 
 that of an uncle. But you write to me that you mean hence- 
 forth to be a man, and I take you at your word ; I treat you 
 as a statesman, and not as a lover. 
 
 " Has not this mishap been to you like the brand on his 
 shoulder that determines a convict on a systematic antagonism 
 to society, and a revolt against it ? You are hereby released 
 from one care marriage was your master, now it is your 
 servant. Paul, I am your friend in the fullest meaning of the
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 449 
 
 word. If your brain had been bound in a circlet of brass, if 
 you had earlier had the energy that has come to you too late, 
 I could have proved my friendship by telling you things that 
 would have enabled you to walk over human beings as on a 
 carpet. But whenever we talked over the combinations to 
 which I owed the faculty of amusing myself with a few friends 
 in the heart of Parisian civilization, like a bull in a china 
 shop ; whenever I told you, under romantic disguises, some 
 true adventure of my youth, you always regarded them as 
 romances, and did not see their bearing. Hence, I could 
 only think of you as a case of unrequited passion. Well, on 
 my word of honor, in the existing circumstances, you have 
 played the nobler part, and you have lost nothing, as you 
 might imagine, in my opinion. Though I admire a great 
 scoundrel, I esteem and like those who are taken in. 
 
 "A propos to the doctor who came to such a bad end, 
 brought to the scaffold by his love for his mistress, I remember 
 telling you the far more beautiful story of the unhappy lawyer 
 who is 'still living on the hulks, I know not where, branded 
 as a forger because he wanted to give his wife again, an 
 adored wife thirty thousand francs a year, and the wife gave 
 him up to justice in order to get rid of him and live with an- 
 other gentleman. You cried shame, you and some others too 
 who were supping with us. Well, my dear fellow, you are 
 that lawyer minus the hulks. 
 
 "Your friends do not spare you the discredit which, in 
 our sphere of life, is equivalent to a sentence pronounced 
 by the Bench. The Marquise de Listomere, the sister of the 
 two Vandenesses, and all her following, in which little Ras- 
 tignac is now enlisted a young rascal who is coming to the 
 front ; Madame d'Aiglemont and all her set, among whom 
 Charles de Vandenesse is regnant ; the Lenoncourts, the Com- 
 tesse Feraud, Madame d'Espard, the Nucingens, the Spanish 
 Embassy ; in short, a whole section of the fashionable world, 
 very cleverly prompted, heap mud upon your name. 'You 
 29
 
 450 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 are a dissipated wretch, a gambler, a debauchee, and have 
 made away with your money in the stupidest way. Your wife 
 an angel of virtue ! after paying your debts several times, 
 has just paid off a hundred thousand francs to redeem bills 
 you had drawn, though her fortune is apart from yours. 
 Happily, you have pronounced sentence on yourself by getting 
 out of the way. If you had gone on so, you would have re- 
 duced her to beggary, and she would have been a martyr to 
 conjugal devotion ! ' When a man rises to power, he has as 
 many virtues as will furnish an epitaph ; if he falls into pov- 
 erty, he has more vices than the prodigal son ; you could never 
 imagine how many Don Juan vices are attributed to you now. 
 You gambled on the Bourse, you had licentious tastes, which 
 it cost you vast sums to indulge, and which are mentioned 
 with comments and jests that mystify the women. You paid 
 enormous interest to the money-lenders. The two Vandenesses 
 laugh as they tell a story of Gigonnet's selling you an ivory 
 man-of-war for six thousand francs, and buying it of your 
 manservant for five crowns only to sell it to you again, till you 
 solemnly smashed it on discovering that you might have a real 
 ship for the money it was costing you. The adventure oc- 
 curred nine years ago, and Maxime de Trailles was the hero 
 of it ; but it is thought to fit you so well, that Maxime has 
 lost the command of his frigate for good. In short, I cannot 
 tell you everything, for you have furnished forth a perfect 
 encyclopaedia of tittle-tattle, to which every woman tries to 
 add. In this state of affairs, the most prudish are ready to 
 legitimize any consolation bestowed by Comte Felix de Van- 
 denesse for their father is dead at last, yesterday. 
 
 " Your wife is the great success of the hour. Yesterday 
 Madame de Camps was repeating all these stories to me at 
 the Italian opera. 'Don't talk to me,' said I, 'you none of 
 you know half the facts. Paul had robbed the Bank and 
 swindled the Treasury. He murdered Ezzelino, and caused 
 the death of three Medoras of the Rue Saint-Denis, and, be-
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 451 
 
 tween you and me, I believe him to be implicated in the 
 doings of the Ten Thousand. His agent is the notorious 
 Jacques Collin, whom the police have never been able to find 
 since his last escape from the hulks ; Paul harbored him in 
 his house. As you see, he is capable of any crime ; he is de- 
 ceiving the Government. Now they have gone off together 
 to see what they can do in India, and rob the Great Mogul.' 
 Madame de Camps understood that a woman of such distinc- 
 tion as herself ought not to use her pretty lips as a Venetian 
 lion's maw. 
 
 "Many persons, on hearing these tragi-comedies, refuse to 
 believe them ; they defend human nature and noble sentiments, 
 and insist that these arc fictions. My dear fellow, Talleyrand 
 made this clever remark : ' Everything happens. ' Certainly 
 even stranger things than this domestic conspiracy happen 
 under our eyes ; but the world is so deeply interested in de- 
 nying them, and in declaring that it is slandered, and beside, 
 these great dramas are played so naturally, with a veneer of 
 such perfect good taste, that I often have to wipe my eyeglass 
 before I can see to the bottom of things. But I say once more, 
 when a man is my friend with whom I have received the bap- 
 tism of Champagne, and communion at the altar of Venus 
 Commoda, when we have together been confirmed by the 
 clawing fingers of the croupier, and when then my friend is 
 in a false position, I would uproot twenty families to set him 
 straight again. 
 
 " You must see that I have a real affection for you ; have I 
 ever to your knowledge written so long a letter as this is? 
 So read with care all that follows. 
 
 " Alack ! Paul ; I must take to writing, I must get into the 
 habit of jotting down the minutes for dispatches ; I am start- 
 ing on a political career. Within five years I mean to have a 
 minister's portfolio, or find myself an ambassador where I can 
 stir public affairs round in my own way. There is an age 
 when a man's fairest mistress is his country. I am joining
 
 452 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 the ranks of those who mean to overthrow not merely the ex- 
 isting Ministry, but their whole system. In fact, I am swim- 
 ming in the wake of a prince who halts only on one foot, and 
 whom I regard as a man of political genius, whose name is 
 growing great in history; as complete a prince as a great 
 artist may be. We are Ronquerolles, Montriveau, the Grand- 
 lieus, the Roche-Hugons, Serizy, Feraud, and Granville,* all 
 united against the priestly party, as the silly party that is 
 represented by the ' Constitutionnel ' ingeniously calls it. We 
 mean to upset the two Vandenesses, the Dues de Lenoncourt, 
 de Navarreins, de Langeais, and de la Grande-Aumonerie. 
 To gain our end, we may go so far as to form a coalition with 
 Lafayette, the Orleanists, the Left all men who must be got 
 rid of as soon as we have won the day, for to govern on their 
 principles is impossible ; and we are capable of anything for 
 the good of the country and our own. 
 
 " Personal questions as to the King's person are mere senti- 
 mental folly in these days ; they must be cleared away. From 
 that point of view, the English, with their sort of Doge, are 
 more advanced than we are. Politics have nothing to do with 
 that, my dear fellow. Politics consist in giving the nation an 
 impetus by creating an oligarchy embodying a fixed theory 
 of government, and able to direct public affairs along a 
 straight path, instead of allowing the country to be pulled in 
 a thousand different directions, which is what has been 
 happening for the last forty years in our beautiful France at 
 once so intelligent and so sottish, so wise and so foolish ; it 
 needs a system indeed, much more than men. What are 
 individuals in this great question ? If the end is a great one, if 
 the country may live happy and free from trouble, what do 
 the masses care for the profits of our stewardship, our fortune, 
 privileges, and pleasures ? 
 
 " I am now standing firm on my feet. I have at the present 
 moment a hundred and fifty thousand francs a year in the 
 * See " The Thirteen."
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 453 
 
 Three per Cents., and a reserve of two hundred thousand 
 francs to repair damages. Even this does not seem to me 
 very much ballast in the pocket of a man starting left foot 
 foremost to scale the heights of power. 
 
 " A fortunate accident settled the question of my setting 
 out on this career, which did not particularly smile on me, 
 for you know my predilection for the life of the East. After 
 thirty-five years of slumber, my highly respected mother woke 
 up to the recollection that she had a son who might do her 
 honor. Often when a vine-stock is eradicated, some years 
 after shoots come up to the surface of the ground ; well, my 
 dear boy, my mother had almost torn me up by the roots 
 from her heart, and I sprouted again in her head. At the 
 age of fifty-eight, she thinks herself old enough to think no 
 more of any men but her son. At this juncture she has met 
 in some hot-water caldron, at I know not what baths, a de- 
 lightful old maid English, with two hundred and forty thou- 
 sand francs a year ; and, like a good mother, she has inspired 
 her with an audacious ambition to become my wife. A maid 
 of six-and-thirty, my word ! Brought up in the strictest puri- 
 tanical principles, a steady sitting hen, who maintains that 
 unfaithful wives should be publicly burnt. ' Where will you 
 find wood enough ? ' I asked her. I could have sent her to 
 the devil, for two hundred and forty thousand francs a year 
 are no equivalent for liberty, nor a fair price for my physical 
 and moral worth and my prospects. But she is the sole 
 heiress of a gouty old fellow, some London brewer, who within 
 a calculable time will leave her a fortune equal at least to 
 what the sweet creature has already. Added to these advan- 
 tages, she has a red nose, the eyes of a dead goat, a waist that 
 makes one fear lest she should break into three pieces if she 
 falls down, and the coloring of a badly painted doll. But 
 she is delightfully economical ; but she will adore her hus- 
 band, do what he will ; but she has the English gift : she will 
 manage my house, my stables, my servants, my estates better
 
 454 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 than any steward. She has all the dignity of virtue ; she 
 holds herself as erect as a confidante on the stage of the 
 Francais ; nothing will persuade me that she has not been 
 impaled and the shaft broken off in her body. Miss Stevens 
 is, however, fair enough to be not too unpleasing if I must 
 positively marry her. But and this to me is truly pathetic 
 she has the hands of a woman as immaculate as the sacred 
 ark ; they are so red that I have not yet hit on any way to 
 whiten them that will not be too costly, and I have no idea 
 how to fine down her fingers, which arc like sausages. Yes ; 
 she evidently belongs to the brewhouse by her hands, and to 
 the aristocracy by her money; but she is apt to affect the 
 great lady a little too much, as do rich Englishwomen who 
 want to be mistaken for them, and she displays her lobster- 
 claws too freely. 
 
 " She has, however, as little intelligence as I could wish 
 in a woman. If there were a stupider one to be found, I 
 would set out to seek her. This girl, whose name is Dinah, 
 will never criticise me ; she will never contradict me ; I shall 
 be her Upper Chamber, her Lords and Commons. In short, 
 Paul, she is indefeasible evidence of the English genius; she 
 is a product of English mechanics brought to their highest 
 pitch of perfection ; she was undoubtedly made at Manchester, 
 between the manufactory of Perry's pens and the workshops 
 for steam-engines. It eats, it drinks, it walks, it may have 
 children, take good care of them, and bring them up admir- 
 ably, and it apes a woman so well that you would believe it 
 real. 
 
 " When my mother introduced us, she had set up the 
 machine so cleverly, had so carefully fitted the pegs, and oiled 
 the wheels so thoroughly, that nothing jarred ; then, when she 
 saw I did not make a very wry face, she set the springs in 
 motion, and the woman spoke. Finally, my mother uttered 
 the decisive words : ' Miss Dinah Stevens spends no more than 
 thirty thousand francs a year, and has been traveling for seven
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 455 
 
 years in order to economize.' So there is another image, and 
 that one is silver. 
 
 " Matters are so far advanced that the banns are to be pub- 
 lished. We have got as far as 'My dear love.' Miss makes 
 eyes at me that might floor a porter. The settlements are 
 prepared. My fortune is not inquired into; Miss Stevens 
 devotes a portion of hers to creating an entail in landed estate, 
 bearing an income of two hundred and forty thousand francs, 
 and to the purchase of a house, likewise entailed. The settle- 
 ment credited to me is of a million francs. She has nothing 
 to complain of. I leave her uncle's money untouched. 
 
 "The worthy brewer, who has helped to found the entail, 
 was near to bursting with joy when he heard that his niece was 
 to be a marquise. He would be capable of doing something 
 handsome for my eldest boy. 
 
 " I shall sell out of the Funds as soon as they are up to 
 eighty, and invest in land. Thus, in two years I may look to 
 get six hundred thousand francs a year out of real estate. So, 
 you see, Paul, I do not give my friends advice that I am not 
 ready to act upon. 
 
 " If you had but listened to me, you would have an English 
 wife, some nabob's daughter, who would leave you the free- 
 dom of a bachelor and the independence necessary for playing 
 the whist of ambition. I would concede my future wife to 
 you if you were not married already. But that cannot be 
 helped, and I am not the man to bid you chew the cud of the 
 past. 
 
 " All this preamble was needful to explain to you that for 
 the future my position in life will be such as a man needs if 
 he wants to play the great game of pitch-and-toss. I cannot 
 do without you, my friend. Instead of going to pickle in the 
 Indies, you will find it much simpler to swim in my convoy 
 in the waters of the Seine. Believe me, Paris is still the spot 
 where fortune crops up most freely. Potosi is situated in the 
 Rue Vivienne or the Rue de la Paix, the Place Vendome, or
 
 456 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 the Rue de la Rivoli. In every other country, manual labor, 
 the sweat of the perspiring agent, marches and counter- 
 marches, are indispensable to the accumulation of a fortune ; 
 here intelligence is sufficient. Here a man, even of modern 
 talent, may discover a gold-mine as he puts on his slippers or 
 picks his teeth after dinner, as he goes to bed or gets up in 
 the morning. Find me a spot on earth where a good com- 
 monplace idea brings in more money or is more immediately 
 understood than it is here? If I climb to the top of the tree, 
 am I the man to refuse you a hand, a word, a signature? Do 
 not we young scamps need a friend we can rely on, if it were 
 only to compromise him in our place and stead, to send him 
 forth to die as a private, so as to save the general ? Politics 
 are impossible without a man of honor at hand, to whom 
 everything may be said and done. 
 
 " This, then, is my advice to you. Let the Belle-Amelie 
 sail without you; return here like a lightning flash, and I will 
 arrange a duel for you with Felix de Vandenesse, in which you 
 must fire first, and down with your man as dead as a pigeon. 
 In France an outraged husband 'who kills his man is at once 
 respectable and respected. No one ever makes game of him ! 
 Fear, my dear boy, is an element of social life, and a means 
 of success for those whose eyes never fall before the gaze of 
 any other man. I, who care no more for life than for a cup 
 of ass* milk, and who never felt a qualm of fear, have observed 
 the strange effects of that form of emotion on modern manners. 
 Some dread the idea of losing the enjoyments to which they 
 are fettered, others that of parting from some woman. The 
 adventurous temper of past times, when a man threw away his 
 life like a slipper, has ceased to exist. In many men courage 
 is merely a clever speculation on the fear that may seize their 
 adversary. None but the Poles now, in Europe, ever fight for 
 the pleasure of it ; they still cultivate the art for art's sake, 
 and not as a matter of calculation. Kill Vandenesse, and 
 your wife will tremble, your mother-in-law will tremble, the
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 457 
 
 public will tremble ; you will be rehabilitated, you will pro- 
 claim your frantic passion for your wife, every one will believe 
 you, and you will be a hero. Such is France. 
 
 "I shall not stickle over a hundred thousand francs with 
 you. You can pay your principal debts, and can prevent 
 utter ruin by pledging your property on a time bargain with 
 option of repurchase, for you will soon be in position that will 
 allow you to pay off the mortgage before the time is up. 
 Also, knowing your wife's character, you can henceforth rule 
 her with a word. While you loved her you could not hold 
 your own ; now, having ceased to love her, your power will 
 be irresistible. I shall have made your mother-in-law as 
 supple as a glove ; for what you have to do is to reinstate 
 yourself with the hundred and fifty thousand francs those 
 women have saved for themselves. 
 
 "So give up your self-exile, which always seems to me the 
 charcoal-brasier of men of brains. If you run away, you 
 leave slander mistress of the field. The gambler who goes 
 home to fetch his money and comes back to the tables loses 
 all. You must have your funds in your pocket. You appear 
 to me to be seeking fresh reinforcements in the Indies. No 
 good at all ! We are two gamblers at the green table of 
 politics ; between you and me loans are a matter of course. 
 So take post-horses, come to Paris, and begin a new game ; 
 with Henri de Marsay for a partner you will win, for Henri 
 de Marsay knows what he wants and when to strike. 
 
 "This, you see, is where we stand. My real father is in 
 the English Ministry. We shall have connections with Spain 
 through the Evangelistas ; for as soon as your mother-in-law 
 and I have measured claws, we shall perceive that when devil 
 meets devil there is nothing to be gained on either side. 
 Montriveau is a lieutenant-general ; he will certainly be war 
 minister sooner or later, for his eloquence gives him much 
 power in the Chamber. Ronquerolles is in the Ministry and 
 on the Privy Council. Martial de la Roche-Hugon is ap-
 
 458 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 
 
 pointed minister to Germany and made a peer of France, 
 and' he has brought us as an addition Marshal the Due de 
 Carigliano and all the ' rump ' of the Empire, which so 
 stupidly held on to the rear of the Restoration. Serizy is 
 leader of the State Council ; he is indispensable there. Gran- 
 ville is master of the legal party; he has two sons on the 
 Bench. The Grandlieus are in high favor at Court. Feraud 
 is the soul of the Gondreville set, low intriguers who, I know 
 not why, are always at the top. Thus supported, what have 
 we to fear ? We have a foot in every capital, an eye in every 
 cabinet ; we hem in the whole administration without their 
 suspecting it. 
 
 "Is not the money question a mere trifle, nothing at all, 
 when all this machinery is ready. And, above all, what is a 
 woman ? Will you never be anything but a schoolboy ? What 
 is life, my dear fellow, when it is wrapped up in a woman ? A 
 ship over which we have no command, which obeys a wild 
 compass though it has indeed a lode-stone ; which runs before 
 every wind that blows, and in which the man really is a 
 galley-slave, obedient not only to the law, but to every rule 
 improvised by his driver, without the possibility of retaliation. 
 Phaugh ! 
 
 "I can understand that from passion, or the pleasure to be 
 found in placing our power in a pair of white hands, a man 
 should obey his wife but when it comes to obeying M&ior 
 then away with Angelica ! The great secret of social alchemy, 
 my dear sir, is to get the best of everything out of each stage 
 of our life, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in 
 summer, all its fruits in autumn. Now we I and some boon 
 companions have enjoyed ourselves for twelve years, like 
 musketeers, black, white, and red, refusing ourselves nothing, 
 not even a filibustering expedition now and again ; hence- 
 forth we mean to shake ripe plums off the tree, at an age when 
 experience has ripened the harvest. Come, join us ; you shall 
 have a share of the pudding we mean to stir.
 
 A MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT. 459 
 
 " Come, and you will find a friend wholly yours in the 
 skin of HENRI DE M." 
 
 At the moment when Paul de Manerville finished reading 
 this letter, of which every sentence fell like a sledge-hammer 
 on the tower of his hopes, his illusions, and his love, he was 
 already beyond the Azores. In the midst of this ruin, rage 
 surged up in him cold and impotent rage. 
 
 "What had I done to them?" he asked himself. 
 
 This question is the impulse of the simpleton, of the weak 
 natures, which, as they see nothing, can foresee nothing. 
 
 "Henri, Henri!" he cried aloud. "The one true 
 friend ! " 
 
 Many men would have gone mad. Paul went to bed and 
 slept the deep sleep which supervenes on immeasurable dis- 
 aster ; as Napoleon slept after the battle of Waterloo. 
 
 PARIS, September- October, 1835.
 
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