Poor Relations (part 3 of 4)

Poor Relations (part 3 of 4)

"You owe all this to me, you old villain; now what will you do for me?"

"Whatever you want."

"Then you will not oppose my marrying your brother?"

"You! the Marechale Hulot, the Comtesse de Frozheim?" cried Hector, startled.

"Well, Adeline is a Baroness!" retorted Betty in a vicious and formidable tone. "Listen to me, you old libertine. You know how matters stand; your family may find itself starving in the gutter--"

"That is what I dread," said Hulot in dismay.

"And if your brother were to die, who would maintain your wife and daughter? The widow of a Marshal gets at least six thousand francs pension, doesn't she? Well, then, I wish to marry to secure bread for your wife and daughter--old dotard!"

"I had not seen it in that light!" said the Baron. "I will talk to my brother--for we are sure of you.--Tell my angel that my life is hers."

And the Baron, having seen Lisbeth go into the house in the Rue Vanneau, went back to his whist and stayed at home. The Baroness was at the height of happiness; her husband seemed to be returning to domestic habits; for about a fortnight he went to his office at nine every morning, he came in to dinner at six, and spent the evening with his family. He twice took Adeline and Hortense to the play. The mother and daughter paid for three thanksgiving masses, and prayed to God to suffer them to keep the husband and father He had restored to them.

One evening Victorin Hulot, seeing his father retire for the night, said to his mother:

"Well, we are at any rate so far happy that my father has come back to us. My wife and I shall never regret our capital if only this lasts--"

"Your father is nearly seventy," said the Baroness. "He still thinks of Madame Marneffe, that I can see; but he will forget her in time. A passion for women is not like gambling, or speculation, or avarice; there is an end to it."

But Adeline, still beautiful in spite of her fifty years and her sorrows, in this was mistaken. Profligates, men whom Nature has gifted with the precious power of loving beyond the limits ordinarily set to love, rarely are as old as their age.

During this relapse into virtue Baron Hulot had been three times to the Rue du Dauphin, and had certainly not been the man of seventy. His rekindled passion made him young again, and he would have sacrificed his honor to Valerie, his family, his all, without a regret. But Valerie, now completely altered, never mentioned money, not even the twelve hundred francs a year to be settled on their son; on the contrary, she offered him money, she loved Hulot as a woman of six-and-thirty loves a handsome law-student--a poor, poetical, ardent boy. And the hapless wife fancied she had reconquered her dear Hector!

The fourth meeting between this couple had been agreed upon at the end of the third, exactly as formerly in Italian theatres the play was announced for the next night. The hour fixed was nine in the morning. On the next day when the happiness was due for which the amorous old man had resigned himself to domestic rules, at about eight in the morning, Reine came and asked to see the Baron. Hulot, fearing some catastrophe, went out to speak with Reine, who would not come into the anteroom. The faithful waiting-maid gave him the following note:--

"DEAR OLD MAN,--Do not go to the Rue du Dauphin. Our incubus is ill, and I must nurse him; but be there this evening at nine. Crevel is at Corbeil with Monsieur Lebas; so I am sure he will bring no princess to his little palace. I have made arrangements here to be free for the night and get back before Marneffe is awake. Answer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did. I am told she is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a gay dog! Burn this note; I am suspicious of every one."

Hulot wrote this scrap in reply:

"MY LOVE,--As I have told you, my wife has not for five-and-twenty years interfered with my pleasures. For you I would give up a hundred Adelines.--I will be in the Crevel sanctum at nine this evening awaiting my divinity. Oh that your clerk might soon die! We should part no more. And this is the dearest wish of

"YOUR HECTOR."

That evening the Baron told his wife that he had business with the Minister at Saint-Cloud, that he would come home at about four or five in the morning; and he went to the Rue du Dauphin. It was towards the end of the month of June.

Few men have in the course of their life known really the dreadful sensation of going to their death; those who have returned from the foot of the scaffold may be easily counted. But some have had a vivid experience of it in dreams; they have gone through it all, to the sensation of the knife at their throat, at the moment when waking and daylight come to release them.--Well, the sensation to which the Councillor of State was a victim at five in the morning in Crevel's handsome and elegant bed, was immeasurably worse than that of feeling himself bound to the fatal block in the presence of ten thousand spectators looking at you with twenty thousand sparks of fire.

Valerie was asleep in a graceful attitude. She was lovely, as a woman is who is lovely enough to look so even in sleep. It is art invading nature; in short, a living picture.

In his horizontal position the Baron's eyes were but three feet above the floor. His gaze, wandering idly, as that of a man who is just awake and collecting his ideas, fell on a door painted with flowers by Jan, an artist disdainful of fame. The Baron did not indeed see twenty thousand flaming eyes, like the man condemned to death; he saw but one, of which the shaft was really more piercing than the thousands on the Public Square.

Now this sensation, far rarer in the midst of enjoyment even than that of a man condemned to death, was one for which many a splenetic Englishman would certainly pay a high price. The Baron lay there, horizontal still, and literally bathed in cold sweat. He tried to doubt the fact; but this murderous eye had a voice. A sound of whispering was heard through the door.

"So long as it is nobody but Crevel playing a trick on me!" said the Baron to himself, only too certain of an intruder in the temple.

The door was opened. The Majesty of the French Law, which in all documents follows next to the King, became visible in the person of a worthy little police-officer supported by a tall Justice of the Peace, both shown in by Monsieur Marneffe. The police functionary, rooted in shoes of which the straps were tied together with flapping bows, ended at top in a yellow skull almost bare of hair, and a face betraying him as a wide-awake, cheerful, and cunning dog, from whom Paris life had no secrets. His eyes, though garnished with spectacles, pierced the glasses with a keen mocking glance. The Justice of the Peace, a retired attorney, and an old admirer of the fair sex, envied the delinquent.

"Pray excuse the strong measures required by our office, Monsieur le Baron!" said the constable; "we are acting for the plaintiff. The Justice of the Peace is here to authorize the visitation of the premises.--I know who you are, and who the lady is who is accused."

Valerie opened her astonished eyes, gave such a shriek as actresses use to depict madness on the stage, writhed in convulsions on the bed, like a witch of the Middle Ages in her sulphur-colored frock on a bed of faggots.

"Death, and I am ready! my dear Hector--but a police court?--Oh! never."

With one bound she passed the three spectators and crouched under the little writing-table, hiding her face in her hands.

"Ruin! Death!" she cried.

"Monsieur," said Marneffe to Hulot, "if Madame Marneffe goes mad, you are worse than a profligate; you will be a murderer."

What can a man do, what can he say, when he is discovered in a bed which is not his, even on the score of hiring, with a woman who is no more his than the bed is?--Well, this:

"Monsieur the Justice of the Peace, Monsieur the Police Officer," said the Baron with some dignity, "be good enough to take proper care of that unhappy woman, whose reason seems to me to be in danger.--You can harangue me afterwards. The doors are locked, no doubt; you need not fear that she will get away, or I either, seeing the costume we wear."

The two functionaries bowed to the magnate's injunctions.

"You, come here, miserable cur!" said Hulot in a low voice to Marneffe, taking him by the arm and drawing him closer. "It is not I, but you, who will be the murderer! You want to be head-clerk of your room and officer of the Legion of Honor?"

"That in the first place, Chief!" replied Marneffe, with a bow.

"You shall be all that, only soothe your wife and dismiss these fellows."

"Nay, nay!" said Marneffe knowingly. "These gentlemen must draw up their report as eyewitnesses to the fact; without that, the chief evidence in my case, where should I be? The higher official ranks are chokeful of rascalities. You have done me out of my wife, and you have not promoted me, Monsieur le Baron; I give you only two days to get out of the scrape. Here are some letters--"

"Some letters!" interrupted Hulot.

"Yes; letters which prove that you are the father of the child my wife expects to give birth to.--You understand? And you ought to settle on my son a sum equal to what he will lose through this bastard. But I will be reasonable; this does not distress me, I have no mania for paternity myself. A hundred louis a year will satisfy me. By to-morrow I must be Monsieur Coquet's successor and see my name on the list for promotion in the Legion of Honor at the July fetes, or else--the documentary evidence and my charge against you will be laid before the Bench. I am not so hard to deal with after all, you see."

"Bless me, and such a pretty woman!" said the Justice of the Peace to the police constable. "What a loss to the world if she should go mad!"

"She is not mad," said the constable sententiously. The police is always the incarnation of scepticism.--"Monsieur le Baron Hulot has been caught by a trick," he added, loud enough for Valerie to hear him.

Valerie shot a flash from her eye which would have killed him on the spot if looks could effect the vengeance they express. The police-officer smiled; he had laid a snare, and the woman had fallen into it. Marneffe desired his wife to go into the other room and clothe herself decently, for he and the Baron had come to an agreement on all points, and Hulot fetched his dressing-gown and came out again.

"Gentlemen," said he to the two officials, "I need not impress on you to be secret."

The functionaries bowed.

The police-officer rapped twice on the door; his clerk came in, sat down at the "bonheur-du-jour," and wrote what the constable dictated to him in an undertone. Valerie still wept vehemently. When she was dressed, Hulot went into the other room and put on his clothes. Meanwhile the report was written.

Marneffe then wanted to take his wife home; but Hulot, believing that he saw her for the last time, begged the favor of being allowed to speak with her.

"Monsieur, your wife has cost me dear enough for me to be allowed to say good-bye to her--in the presence of you all, of course."

Valerie went up to Hulot, and he whispered in her ear:

"There is nothing left for us but to fly, but how can we correspond? We have been betrayed--"

"Through Reine," she answered. "But my dear friend, after this scandal we can never meet again. I am disgraced. Besides, you will hear dreadful things about me--you will believe them--"

The Baron made a gesture of denial.

"You will believe them, and I can thank God for that, for then perhaps you will not regret me."

"He will not die a second-class clerk!" said Marneffe to Hulot, as he led his wife away, saying roughly, "Come, madame; if I am foolish to you, I do not choose to be a fool to others."

Valerie left the house, Crevel's Eden, with a last glance at the Baron, so cunning that he thought she adored him. The Justice of the Peace gave Madame Marneffe his arm to the hackney coach with a flourish of gallantry. The Baron, who was required to witness the report, remained quite bewildered, alone with the police-officer. When the Baron had signed, the officer looked at him keenly, over his glasses.

"You are very sweet on the little lady, Monsieur le Baron?"

"To my sorrow, as you see."

"Suppose that she does not care for you?" the man went on, "that she is deceiving you?"

"I have long known that, monsieur--here, in this very spot, Monsieur Crevel and I told each other----"

"Oh! Then you knew that you were in Monsieur le Maire's private snuggery?"

"Perfectly."

The constable lightly touched his hat with a respectful gesture.

"You are very much in love," said he. "I say no more. I respect an inveterate passion, as a doctor respects an inveterate complaint.--I saw Monsieur de Nucingen, the banker, attacked in the same way--"

"He is a friend of mine," said the Baron. "Many a time have I supped with his handsome Esther. She was worth the two million francs she cost him."

"And more," said the officer. "That caprice of the old Baron's cost four persons their lives. Oh! such passions as these are like the cholera!"

"What had you to say to me?" asked the Baron, who took this indirect warning very ill.

"Oh! why should I deprive you of your illusions?" replied the officer. "Men rarely have any left at your age!"

"Rid me of them!" cried the Councillor.

"You will curse the physician later," replied the officer, smiling.

"I beg of you, monsieur."

"Well, then, that woman was in collusion with her husband."

"Oh!----"

"Yes, sir, and so it is in two cases out of every ten. Oh! we know it well."

"What proof have you of such a conspiracy?"

"In the first place, the husband!" said the other, with the calm acumen of a surgeon practised in unbinding wounds. "Mean speculation is stamped in every line of that villainous face. But you, no doubt, set great store by a certain letter written by that woman with regard to the child?"

"So much so, that I always have it about me," replied Hulot, feeling in his breast-pocket for the little pocketbook which he always kept there.

"Leave your pocketbook where it is," said the man, as crushing as a thunder-clap. "Here is the letter.--I now know all I want to know. Madame Marneffe, of course, was aware of what that pocketbook contained?"

"She alone in the world."

"So I supposed.--Now for the proof you asked for of her collusion with her husband."

"Let us hear!" said the Baron, still incredulous.

"When we came in here, Monsieur le Baron, that wretched creature Marneffe led the way, and he took up this letter, which his wife, no doubt, had placed on this writing-table," and he pointed to the bonheur-du-jour. "That evidently was the spot agreed upon by the couple, in case she should succeed in stealing the letter while you were asleep; for this letter, as written to you by the lady, is, combined with those you wrote to her, decisive evidence in a police-court."

He showed Hulot the note that Reine had delivered to him in his private room at the office.

"It is one of the documents in the case," said the police-agent; "return it to me, monsieur."

"Well, monsieur," replied Hulot with bitter expression, "that woman is profligacy itself in fixed ratios. I am certain at this moment that she has three lovers."

"That is perfectly evident," said the officer. "Oh, they are not all on the streets! When a woman follows that trade in a carriage and a drawing-room, and her own house, it is not a case for francs and centimes, Monsieur le Baron. Mademoiselle Esther, of whom you spoke, and who poisoned herself, made away with millions.--If you will take my advice, you will get out of it, monsieur. This last little game will have cost you dear. That scoundrel of a husband has the law on his side. And indeed, but for me, that little woman would have caught you again!"

"Thank you, monsieur," said the Baron, trying to maintain his dignity.

"Now we will lock up; the farce is played out, and you can send your key to Monsieur the Mayor."

Hulot went home in a state of dejection bordering on helplessness, and sunk in the gloomiest thoughts. He woke his noble and saintly wife, and poured into her heart the history of the past three years, sobbing like a child deprived of a toy. This confession from an old man young in feeling, this frightful and heart-rending narrative, while it filled Adeline with pity, also gave her the greatest joy; she thanked Heaven for this last catastrophe, for in fancy she saw the husband settled at last in the bosom of his family.

"Lisbeth was right," said Madame Hulot gently and without any useless recrimination, "she told us how it would be."

"Yes. If only I had listened to her, instead of flying into a rage, that day when I wanted poor Hortense to go home rather than compromise the reputation of that--Oh! my dear Adeline, we must save Wenceslas. He is up to his chin in that mire!"

"My poor old man, the respectable middle-classes have turned out no better than the actresses," said Adeline, with a smile.

The Baroness was alarmed at the change in her Hector; when she saw him so unhappy, ailing, crushed under his weight of woes, she was all heart, all pity, all love; she would have shed her blood to make Hulot happy.

"Stay with us, my dear Hector. Tell me what is it that such women do to attract you so powerfully. I too will try. Why have you not taught me to be what you want? Am I deficient in intelligence? Men still think me handsome enough to court my favor."

Many a married woman, attached to her duty and to her husband, may here pause to ask herself why strong and affectionate men, so tender-hearted to the Madame Marneffes, do not take their wives for the object of their fancies and passions, especially wives like the Baronne Adeline Hulot.

This is, indeed, one of the most recondite mysteries of human nature. Love, which is debauch of reason, the strong and austere joy of a lofty soul, and pleasure, the vulgar counterfeit sold in the market-place, are two aspects of the same thing. The woman who can satisfy both these devouring appetites is as rare in her sex as a great general, a great writer, a great artist, a great inventor in a nation. A man of superior intellect or an idiot--a Hulot or a Crevel--equally crave for the ideal and for enjoyment; all alike go in search of the mysterious compound, so rare that at last it is usually found to be a work in two volumes. This craving is a depraved impulse due to society.

Marriage, no doubt, must be accepted as a tie; it is life, with its duties and its stern sacrifices on both parts equally. Libertines, who seek for hidden treasure, are as guilty as other evil-doers who are more hardly dealt with than they. These reflections are not a mere veneer of moralizing; they show the reason of many unexplained misfortunes. But, indeed, this drama points its own moral--or morals, for they are of many kinds.

The Baron presently went to call on the Marshal Prince de Wissembourg, whose powerful patronage was now his only chance. Having dwelt under his protection for five-and-thirty years, he was a visitor at all hours, and would be admitted to his rooms as soon as he was up.

"Ah! How are you, my dear Hector?" said the great and worthy leader. "What is the matter? You look anxious. And yet the session is ended. One more over! I speak of that now as I used to speak of a campaign. And indeed I believe the newspapers nowadays speak of the sessions as parliamentary campaigns."

"We have been in difficulties, I must confess, Marshal; but the times are hard!" said Hulot. "It cannot be helped; the world was made so. Every phase has its own drawbacks. The worst misfortunes in the year 1841 is that neither the King nor the ministers are free to act as Napoleon was."

The Marshal gave Hulot one of those eagle flashes which in its pride, clearness, and perspicacity showed that, in spite of years, that lofty soul was still upright and vigorous.

"You want me to so something for you?" said he, in a hearty tone.

"I find myself under the necessity of applying to you for the promotion of one of my second clerks to the head of a room--as a personal favor to myself--and his advancement to be officer of the Legion of Honor."

"What is his name?" said the Marshal, with a look like a lightning flash.

"Marneffe."

"He has a pretty wife; I saw her on the occasion of your daughter's marriage.--If Roger--but Roger is away!--Hector, my boy, this is concerned with your pleasures. What, you still indulge--? Well, you are a credit to the old Guard. That is what comes of having been in the Commissariat; you have reserves!--But have nothing to do with this little job, my dear boy; it is too strong of the petticoat to be good business."

"No, Marshal; it is bad business, for the police courts have a finger in it. Would you like to see me go there?"

"The devil!" said the Prince uneasily. "Go on!"

"Well, I am in the predicament of a trapped fox. You have always been so kind to me, that you will, I am sure, condescend to help me out of the shameful position in which I am placed."

Hulot related his misadventures, as wittily and as lightly as he could.

"And you, Prince, will you allow my brother to die of grief, a man you love so well; or leave one of your staff in the War Office, a Councillor of State, to live in disgrace. This Marneffe is a wretched creature; he can be shelved in two or three years."

"How you talk of two or three years, my dear fellow!" said the Marshal.

"But, Prince, the Imperial Guard is immortal."

"I am the last of the first batch of Marshals," said the Prince. "Listen, Hector. You do not know the extent of my attachment to you; you shall see. On the day when I retire from office, we will go together. But you are not a Deputy, my friend. Many men want your place; but for me, you would be out of it by this time. Yes, I have fought many a pitched battle to keep you in it.--Well, I grant you your two requests; it would be too bad to see you riding the bar at your age and in the position you hold. But you stretch your credit a little too far. If this appointment gives rise to discussion, we shall not be held blameless. I can laugh at such things; but you will find it a thorn under your feet. And the next session will see your dismissal. Your place is held out as a bait to five or six influential men, and you have been enabled to keep it solely by the force of my arguments. I tell you, on the day when you retire, there will be five malcontents to one happy man; whereas, by keeping you hanging on by a thread for two or three years, we shall secure all six votes. There was a great laugh at the Council meeting; the Veteran of the Old Guard, as they say, was becoming desperately wide awake in parliamentary tactics! I am frank with you.--And you are growing gray; you are a happy man to be able to get into such difficulties as these! How long is it since I--Lieutenant Cottin--had a mistress?"

He rang the bell.

"That police report must be destroyed," he added.

"Monseigneur, you are as a father to me! I dared not mention my anxiety on that point."

"I still wish I had Roger here," cried the Prince, as Mitouflet, his groom of the chambers, came in. "I was just going to send for him! --You may go, Mitouflet.--Go you, my dear old fellow, go and have the nomination made out; I will sign it. At the same time, that low schemer will not long enjoy the fruit of his crimes. He will be sharply watched, and drummed out of the regiment for the smallest fault.--You are saved this time, my dear Hector; take care for the future. Do not exhaust your friends' patience. You shall have the nomination this morning, and your man shall get his promotion in the Legion of Honor.--How old are you now?"

"Within three months of seventy."

"What a scapegrace!" said the Prince, laughing. "It is you who deserve a promotion, but, by thunder! we are not under Louis XV.!"

Such is the sense of comradeship that binds the glorious survivors of the Napoleonic phalanx, that they always feel as if they were in camp together, and bound to stand together through thick and thin.

"One more favor such as this," Hulot reflected as he crossed the courtyard, "and I am done for!"

The luckless official went to Baron de Nucingen, to whom he now owed a mere trifle, and succeeded in borrowing forty thousand francs, on his salary pledged for two years more; the banker stipulated that in the event of Hulot's retirement on his pension, the whole of it should be devoted to the repayment of the sum borrowed till the capital and interest were all cleared off.

This new bargain, like the first, was made in the name of Vauvinet, to whom the Baron signed notes of hand to the amount of twelve thousand francs.

On the following day, the fateful police report, the husband's charge, the letters--all the papers--were destroyed. The scandalous promotion of Monsieur Marneffe, hardly heeded in the midst of the July fetes, was not commented on in any newspaper.

Lisbeth, to all appearance at war with Madame Marneffe, had taken up her abode with Marshal Hulot. Ten days after these events, the banns of marriage were published between the old maid and the distinguished old officer, to whom, to win his consent, Adeline had related the financial disaster that had befallen her Hector, begging him never to mention it to the Baron, who was, as she said, much saddened, quite depressed and crushed.

"Alas! he is as old as his years," she added.

So Lisbeth had triumphed. She was achieving the object of her ambition, she would see the success of her scheme, and her hatred gratified. She delighted in the anticipated joy of reigning supreme over the family who had so long looked down upon her. Yes, she would patronize her patrons, she would be the rescuing angel who would dole out a livelihood to the ruined family; she addressed herself as "Madame la Comtesse" and "Madame la Marechale," courtesying in front of a glass. Adeline and Hortense should end their days in struggling with poverty, while she, a visitor at the Tuileries, would lord it in the fashionable world.

A terrible disaster overthrew the old maid from the social heights where she so proudly enthroned herself.

On the very day when the banns were first published, the Baron received a second message from Africa. Another Alsatian arrived, handed him a letter, after assuring himself that he spoke to Baron Hulot, and after giving the Baron the address of his lodgings, bowed himself out, leaving the great man stricken by the opening lines of this letter:--

"DEAR NEPHEW,--You will receive this letter, by my calculations, on the 7th of August. Supposing it takes you three days to send us the help we need, and that it is a fortnight on the way here, that brings us to the 1st of September.

"If you can act decisively within that time, you will have saved the honor and the life of yours sincerely, Johann Fischer.

"This is what I am required to demand by the clerk you have made my accomplice; for I am amenable, it would seem, to the law, at the Assizes, or before a council of war. Of course, you understand that Johann Fischer will never be brought to the bar of any tribunal; he will go of his own act to appear at that of God.

"Your clerk seems to me a bad lot, quite capable of getting you into hot water; but he is as clever as any rogue. He says the line for you to take is to call out louder than any one, and to send out an inspector, a special commissioner, to discover who is really guilty, rake up abuses, and make a fuss, in short; but if we stir up the struggle, who will stand between us and the law?

"If your commissioner arrives here by the 1st of September, and you have given him your orders, sending by him two hundred thousand francs to place in our storehouses the supplies we profess to have secured in remote country places, we shall be absolutely solvent and regarded as blameless. You can trust the soldier who is the bearer of this letter with a draft in my name on a house in Algiers. He is a trustworthy fellow, a relation of mine, incapable of trying to find out what he is the bearer of. I have taken measures to guarantee the fellow's safe return. If you can do nothing, I am ready and willing to die for the man to whom we owe our Adeline's happiness!"

The anguish and raptures of passion and the catastrophe which had checked his career of profligacy had prevented Baron Hulot's ever thinking of poor Johann Fischer, though his first letter had given warning of the danger now become so pressing. The Baron went out of the dining-room in such agitation that he literally dropped on to a sofa in the drawing-room. He was stunned, sunk in the dull numbness of a heavy fall. He stared at a flower on the carpet, quite unconscious that he still held in his hand Johann's fatal letter.

Adeline, in her room, heard her husband throw himself on the sofa, like a lifeless mass; the noise was so peculiar that she fancied he had an apoplectic attack. She looked through the door at the mirror, in such dread as stops the breath and hinders motion, and she saw her Hector in the attitude of a man crushed. The Baroness stole in on tiptoe; Hector heard nothing; she went close up to him, saw the letter, took it, read it, trembling in every limb. She went through one of those violent nervous shocks that leave their traces for ever on the sufferer. Within a few days she became subject to a constant trembling, for after the first instant the need for action gave her such strength as can only be drawn from the very wellspring of the vital powers.

"Hector, come into my room," said she, in a voice that was no more than a breath. "Do not let your daughter see you in this state! Come, my dear, come!"

"Two hundred thousand francs? Where can I find them? I can get Claude Vignon sent out there as commissioner. He is a clever, intelligent fellow.--That is a matter of a couple of days.--But two hundred thousand francs! My son has not so much; his house is loaded with mortgages for three hundred thousand. My brother has saved thirty thousand francs at most. Nucingen would simply laugh at me!--Vauvinet? --he was not very ready to lend me the ten thousand francs I wanted to make up the sum for that villain Marneffe's boy. No, it is all up with me; I must throw myself at the Prince's feet, confess how matters stand, hear myself told that I am a low scoundrel, and take his broadside so as to go decently to the bottom."

"But, Hector, this is not merely ruin, it is disgrace," said Adeline. "My poor uncle will kill himself. Only kill us--yourself and me; you have a right to do that, but do not be a murderer! Come, take courage; there must be some way out of it."

"Not one," said Hulot. "No one in the Government could find two hundred thousand francs, not if it were to save an Administration! --Oh, Napoleon! where art thou?"

"My uncle! poor man! Hector, he must not be allowed to kill himself in disgrace."

"There is one more chance," said he, "but a very remote one.--Yes, Crevel is at daggers drawn with his daughter.--He has plenty of money, he alone could--"

"Listen, Hector it will be better for your wife to perish than to leave our uncle to perish--and your brother--the honor of the family!" cried the Baroness, struck by a flash of light. "Yes, I can save you all.--Good God! what a degrading thought! How could it have occurred to me?"

She clasped her hands, dropped on her knees, and put up a prayer. On rising, she saw such a crazy expression of joy on her husband's face, that the diabolical suggestion returned, and then Adeline sank into a sort of idiotic melancholy.

"Go, my dear, at once to the War Office," said she, rousing herself from this torpor; "try to send out a commission; it must be done. Get round the Marshal. And on your return, at five o'clock, you will find --perhaps--yes! you shall find two hundred thousand francs. Your family, your honor as a man, as a State official, a Councillor of State, your honesty--your son--all shall be saved;--but your Adeline will be lost, and you will see her no more. Hector, my dear," said she, kneeling before him, clasping and kissing his hand, "give me your blessing! Say farewell."

It was so heart-rending that Hulot put his arms round his wife, raised her and kissed her, saying:

"I do not understand."

"If you did," said she, "I should die of shame, or I should not have the strength to carry out this last sacrifice."

"Breakfast is served," said Mariette.

Hortense came in to wish her parents good-morning. They had to go to breakfast and assume a false face.

"Begin without me; I will join you," said the Baroness.

She sat down to her desk and wrote as follows:

"MY DEAR MONSIEUR CREVEL,--I have to ask a service of you; I shall expect you this morning, and I count on your gallantry, which is well known to me, to save me from having too long to wait for you. --Your faithful servant,

"ADELINE HULOT."

"Louise," said she to her daughter's maid, who waited on her, "take this note down to the porter and desire him to carry it at once to this address and wait for an answer."

The Baron, who was reading the news, held out a Republican paper to his wife, pointing to an article, and saying:

"Is there time?"

This was the paragraph, one of the terrible "notes" with which the papers spice their political bread and butter:--

"A correspondent in Algiers writes that such abuses have been discovered in the commissariate transactions of the province of Oran, that the Law is making inquiries. The peculation is self-evident, and the guilty persons are known. If severe measures are not taken, we shall continue to lose more men through the extortion that limits their rations than by Arab steel or the fierce heat of the climate. We await further information before enlarging on this deplorable business. We need no longer wonder at the terror caused by the establishment of the Press in Africa, as was contemplated by the Charter of 1830."

"I will dress and go to the Minister," said the Baron, as they rose from table. "Time is precious; a man's life hangs on every minute."

"Oh, mamma, there is no hope for me!" cried Hortense. And unable to check her tears, she handed to her mother a number of the Revue des Beaux Arts.

Madame Hulot's eye fell on a print of the group of "Delilah" by Count Steinbock, under which were the words, "The property of Madame Marneffe."

The very first lines of the article, signed V., showed the talent and friendliness of Claude Vignon.

"Poor child!" said the Baroness.

Alarmed by her mother's tone of indifference, Hortense looked up, saw the expression of a sorrow before which her own paled, and rose to kiss her mother, saying:

"What is the matter, mamma? What is happening? Can we be more wretched than we are already?"

"My child, it seems to me that in what I am going through to-day my past dreadful sorrows are as nothing. When shall I have ceased to suffer?"

"In heaven, mother," said Hortense solemnly.

"Come, my angel, help me to dress.--No, no; I will not have you help me in this! Send me Louise."

Adeline, in her room, went to study herself in the glass. She looked at herself closely and sadly, wondering to herself:

"Am I still handsome? Can I still be desirable? Am I not wrinkled?"

She lifted up her fine golden hair, uncovering her temples; they were as fresh as a girl's. She went further; she uncovered her shoulders, and was satisfied; nay, she had a little feeling of pride. The beauty of really handsome shoulders is one of the last charms a woman loses, especially if she has lived chastely.

Adeline chose her dress carefully, but the pious and blameless woman is decent to the end, in spite of her little coquettish graces. Of what use were brand-new gray silk stockings and high heeled satin shoes when she was absolutely ignorant of the art of displaying a pretty foot at a critical moment, by obtruding it an inch or two beyond a half-lifted skirt, opening horizons to desire? She put on, indeed, her prettiest flowered muslin dress, with a low body and short sleeves; but horrified at so much bareness, she covered her fine arms with clear gauze sleeves and hid her shoulders under an embroidered cape. Her curls, a l'Anglaise, struck her as too fly-away; she subdued their airy lightness by putting on a very pretty cap; but, with or without the cap, would she have known how to twist the golden ringlets so as to show off her taper fingers to admiration?

As to rouge--the consciousness of guilt, the preparations for a deliberate fall, threw this saintly woman into a state of high fever, which, for the time, revived the brilliant coloring of youth. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks glowed. Instead of assuming a seductive air, she saw in herself a look of barefaced audacity which shocked her.

Lisbeth, at Adeline's request, had told her all the circumstances of Wenceslas' infidelity; and the Baroness had learned to her utter amazement, that in one evening in one moment, Madame Marneffe had made herself the mistress of the bewitched artist.

"How do these women do it?" the Baroness had asked Lisbeth.

There is no curiosity so great as that of virtuous women on such subjects; they would like to know the arts of vice and remain immaculate.

"Why, they are seductive; it is their business," said Cousin Betty. "Valerie that evening, my dear, was, I declare, enough to bring an angel to perdition."

"But tell me how she set to work."

"There is no principle, only practice in that walk of life," said Lisbeth ironically.

The Baroness, recalling this conversation, would have liked to consult Cousin Betty; but there was no time for that. Poor Adeline, incapable of imagining a patch, of pinning a rosebud in the very middle of her bosom, of devising the tricks of the toilet intended to resuscitate the ardors of exhausted nature, was merely well dressed. A woman is not a courtesan for the wishing!

"Woman is soup for man," as Moliere says by the mouth of the judicious Gros-Rene. This comparison suggests a sort of culinary art in love. Then the virtuous wife would be a Homeric meal, flesh laid on hot cinders. The courtesan, on the contrary, is a dish by Careme, with its condiments, spices, and elegant arrangement. The Baroness could not --did not know how to serve up her fair bosom in a lordly dish of lace, after the manner of Madame Marneffe. She knew nothing of the secrets of certain attitudes. This high-souled woman might have turned round and round a hundred times, and she would have betrayed nothing to the keen glance of a profligate.

To be a good woman and a prude to all the world, and a courtesan to her husband, is the gift of a woman of genius, and they are few. This is the secret of long fidelity, inexplicable to the women who are not blessed with the double and splendid faculty. Imagine Madame Marneffe virtuous, and you have the Marchesa di Pescara. But such lofty and illustrious women, beautiful as Diane de Poitiers, but virtuous, may be easily counted.

So the scene with which this serious and terrible drama of Paris manners opened was about to be repeated, with this singular difference --that the calamities prophesied then by the captain of the municipal Militia had reversed the parts. Madame Hulot was awaiting Crevel with the same intentions as had brought him to her, smiling down at the Paris crowd from his milord, three years ago. And, strangest thing of all, the Baroness was true to herself and to her love, while preparing to yield to the grossest infidelity, such as the storm of passion even does not justify in the eyes of some judges.

"What can I do to become a Madame Marneffe?" she asked herself as she heard the door-bell.

She restrained her tears, fever gave brilliancy to her face, and she meant to be quite the courtesan, poor, noble soul.

"What the devil can that worthy Baronne Hulot want of me?" Crevel wondered as he mounted the stairs. "She is going to discuss my quarrel with Celestine and Victorin, no doubt; but I will not give way!"

As he went into the drawing-room, shown in by Louise, he said to himself as he noted the bareness of the place (Crevel's word):

"Poor woman! She lives here like some fine picture stowed in a loft by a man who knows nothing of painting."

Crevel, seeing Comte Popinot, the Minister of Commerce, buy pictures and statues, wanted also to figure as a Maecenas of Paris, whose love of Art consists in making good investments.

Adeline smiled graciously at Crevel, pointing to a chair facing her.

"Here I am, fair lady, at your command," said Crevel.

Monsieur the Mayor, a political personage, now wore black broadcloth. His face, at the top of this solemn suit, shone like a full moon rising above a mass of dark clouds. His shirt, buttoned with three large pearls worth five hundred francs apiece, gave a great idea of his thoracic capacity, and he was apt to say, "In me you see the coming athlete of the tribune!" His enormous vulgar hands were encased in yellow gloves even in the morning; his patent leather boots spoke of the chocolate-colored coupe with one horse in which he drove.

In the course of three years ambition had altered Crevel's pretensions. Like all great artists, he had come to his second manner. In the great world, when he went to the Prince de Wissembourg's, to the Prefecture, to Comte Popinot's, and the like, he held his hat in his hand in an airy manner taught him by Valerie, and he inserted the thumb of the other hand in the armhole of his waistcoat with a knowing air, and a simpering face and expression. This new grace of attitude was due to the satirical inventiveness of Valerie, who, under pretence of rejuvenating her mayor, had given him an added touch of the ridiculous.

"I begged you to come, my dear kind Monsieur Crevel," said the Baroness in a husky voice, "on a matter of the greatest importance--"

"I can guess what it is, madame," said Crevel, with a knowing air, "but what you would ask is impossible.--Oh, I am not a brutal father, a man--to use Napoleon's words--set hard and fast on sheer avarice. Listen to me, fair lady. If my children were ruining themselves for their own benefit, I would help them out of the scrape; but as for backing your husband, madame? It is like trying to fill the vat of the Danaides! Their house is mortgaged for three hundred thousand francs for an incorrigible father! Why, they have nothing left, poor wretches! And they have no fun for their money. All they have to live upon is what Victorin may make in Court. He must wag his tongue more, must monsieur your son! And he was to have been a Minister, that learned youth! Our hope and pride. A pretty pilot, who runs aground like a land-lubber; for if he had borrowed to enable him to get on, if he had run into debt for feasting Deputies, winning votes, and increasing his influence, I should be the first to say, 'Here is my purse--dip your hand in, my friend!' But when it comes of paying for papa's folly--folly I warned you of!--Ah! his father has deprived him of every chance of power.--It is I who shall be Minister!"

"Alas, my dear Crevel, it has nothing to do with the children, poor devoted souls!--If your heart is closed to Victorin and Celestine, I shall love them so much that perhaps I may soften the bitterness of their souls caused by your anger. You are punishing your children for a good action!"

"Yes, for a good action badly done! That is half a crime," said Crevel, much pleased with his epigram.

"Doing good, my dear Crevel, does not mean sparing money out of a purse that is bursting with it; it means enduring privations to be generous, suffering for liberality! It is being prepared for ingratitude! Heaven does not see the charity that costs us nothing--"

"Saints, madame, may if they please go to the workhouse; they know that it is for them the door of heaven. For my part, I am worldly-minded; I fear God, but yet more I fear the hell of poverty. To be destitute is the last depth of misfortune in society as now constituted. I am a man of my time; I respect money."

"And you are right," said Adeline, "from the worldly point of view."

She was a thousand miles from her point, and she felt herself on a gridiron, like Saint Laurence, as she thought of her uncle, for she could see him blowing his brains out.

She looked down; then she raised her eyes to gaze at Crevel with angelic sweetness--not with the inviting suggestiveness which was part of Valerie's wit. Three years ago she could have bewitched Crevel by that beautiful look.

"I have known the time," said she, "when you were more generous--you used to talk of three hundred thousand francs like a grand gentleman--"

Crevel looked at Madame Hulot; he beheld her like a lily in the last of its bloom, vague sensations rose within him, but he felt such respect for this saintly creature that he spurned all suspicions and buried them in the most profligate corner of his heart.

"I, madame, am still the same; but a retired merchant, if he is a grand gentleman, plays, and must play, the part with method and economy; he carries his ideas of order into everything. He opens an account for his little amusements, and devotes certain profits to that head of expenditure; but as to touching his capital! it would be folly. My children will have their fortune intact, mine and my wife's; but I do not suppose that they wish their father to be dull, a monk and a mummy! My life is a very jolly one; I float gaily down the stream. I fulfil all the duties imposed on me by law, by my affections, and by family ties, just as I always used to be punctual in paying my bills when they fell due. If only my children conduct themselves in their domestic life as I do, I shall be satisfied; and for the present, so long as my follies--for I have committed follies --are no loss to any one but the gulls--excuse me, you do not perhaps understand the slang word--they will have nothing to blame me for, and will find a tidy little sum still left when I die. Your children cannot say as much of their father, who is ruining his son and my daughter by his pranks--"

The Baroness was getting further from her object as he went on.

"You are very unkind about my husband, my dear Crevel--and yet, if you had found his wife obliging, you would have been his best friend----"

She shot a burning glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?--Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? Women are strange creatures!"

And he assumed the position of his second manner, looking at the Baroness with his Regency leer.

"I could almost fancy," she went on, "that you want to visit on him your resentment against the virtue that resisted you--in a woman whom you loved well enough--to--to buy her," she added in a low voice.

"In a divine woman," Crevel replied, with a meaning smile at the Baroness, who looked down while tears rose to her eyes. "For you have swallowed not a few bitter pills!--in these three years--hey, my beauty?"

"Do not talk of my troubles, dear Crevel; they are too much for the endurance of a mere human being. Ah! if you still love me, you may drag me out of the pit in which I lie. Yes, I am in hell torment! The regicides who were racked and nipped and torn into quarters by four horses were on roses compared with me, for their bodies only were dismembered, and my heart is torn in quarters----"

Crevel's thumb moved from his armhole, he placed his hand on the work-table, he abandoned his attitude, he smiled! The smile was so vacuous that it misled the Baroness; she took it for an expression of kindness.

"You see a woman, not indeed in despair, but with her honor at the point of death, and prepared for everything, my dear friend, to hinder a crime."

Fearing that Hortense might come in, she bolted the door; then with equal impetuosity she fell at Crevel's feet, took his hand and kissed it.

"Be my deliverer!" she cried.

She thought there was some generous fibre in this mercantile soul, and full of sudden hope that she might get the two hundred thousand francs without degrading herself:

"Buy a soul--you were once ready to buy virtue!" she went on, with a frenzied gaze. "Trust to my honesty as a woman, to my honor, of which you know the worth! Be my friend! Save a whole family from ruin, shame, despair; keep it from falling into a bog where the quicksands are mingled with blood! Oh! ask for no explanations," she exclaimed, at a movement on Crevel's part, who was about to speak. "Above all, do not say to me, 'I told you so!' like a friend who is glad at a misfortune. Come now, yield to her whom you used to love, to the woman whose humiliation at your feet is perhaps the crowning moment of her glory; ask nothing of her, expect what you will from her gratitude! --No, no. Give me nothing, but lend--lend to me whom you used to call Adeline----"

At this point her tears flowed so fast, Adeline was sobbing so passionately, that Crevel's gloves were wet. The words, "I need two hundred thousand francs," were scarcely articulate in the torrent of weeping, as stones, however large, are invisible in Alpine cataracts swollen by the melting of the snows.

This is the inexperience of virtue. Vice asks for nothing, as we have seen in Madame Marneffe; it gets everything offered to it. Women of that stamp are never exacting till they have made themselves indispensable, or when a man has to be worked as a quarry is worked where the lime is rather scarce--going to ruin, as the quarry-men say.

On hearing these words, "Two hundred thousand francs," Crevel understood all. He cheerfully raised the Baroness, saying insolently:

"Come, come, bear up, mother," which Adeline, in her distraction, failed to hear. The scene was changing its character. Crevel was becoming "master of the situation," to use his own words. The vastness of the sum startled Crevel so greatly that his emotion at seeing this handsome woman in tears at his feet was forgotten. Besides, however angelical and saintly a woman may be, when she is crying bitterly her beauty disappears. A Madame Marneffe, as has been seen, whimpers now and then, a tear trickles down her cheek; but as to melting into tears and making her eyes and nose red!--never would she commit such a blunder.

"Come, child, compose yourself.--Deuce take it!" Crevel went on, taking Madame Hulot's hands in his own and patting them. "Why do you apply to me for two hundred thousand francs? What do you want with them? Whom are they for?"

"Do not," said she, "insist on any explanations. Give me the money! --You will save three lives and the honor of our children."

"And do you suppose, my good mother, that in all Paris you will find a man who at a word from a half-crazy woman will go off hic et nunc, and bring out of some drawer, Heaven knows where, two hundred thousand francs that have been lying simmering there till she is pleased to scoop them up? Is that all you know of life and of business, my beauty? Your folks are in a bad way; you may send them the last sacraments; for no one in Paris but her Divine Highness Madame la Banque, or the great Nucingen, or some miserable miser who is in love with gold as we other folks are with a woman, could produce such a miracle! The civil list, civil as it may be, would beg you to call again tomorrow. Every one invests his money, and turns it over to the best of his powers.

"You are quite mistaken, my angel, if you suppose that King Louis-Philippe rules us; he himself knows better than that. He knows as well as we do that supreme above the Charter reigns the holy, venerated, substantial, delightful, obliging, beautiful, noble, ever-youthful, and all-powerful five-franc piece! But money, my beauty, insists on interest, and is always engaged in seeking it! 'God of the Jews, thou art supreme!' says Racine. The perennial parable of the golden calf, you see!--In the days of Moses there was stock-jobbing in the desert!

"We have reverted to Biblical traditions; the Golden Calf was the first State ledger," he went on. "You, my Adeline, have not gone beyond the Rue Plumet. The Egyptians had lent enormous sums to the Hebrews, and what they ran after was not God's people, but their capital."

He looked at the Baroness with an expression which said, "How clever I am!"

"You know nothing of the devotion of every city man to his sacred hoard!" he went on, after a pause. "Excuse me. Listen to me. Get this well into your head.--You want two hundred thousand francs? No one can produce the sum without selling some security. Now consider! To have two hundred thousand francs in hard cash it would be needful to sell about seven hundred thousand francs' worth of stock at three per cent. Well; and then you would only get the money on the third day. That is the quickest way. To persuade a man to part with a fortune--for two hundred thousand francs is the whole fortune of many a man--he ought at least to know where it is all going to, and for what purpose--"

"It is going, my dear kind Crevel, to save the lives of two men, one of whom will die of grief and the other will kill himself! And to save me too from going mad! Am I not a little mad already?"

"Not so mad!" said he, taking Madame Hulot round the knees; "old Crevel has his price, since you thought of applying to him, my angel."

"They submit to have a man's arms round their knees, it would seem!" thought the saintly woman, covering her face with her hands.

"Once you offered me a fortune!" said she, turning red.

"Ay, mother! but that was three years ago!" replied Crevel. "Well, you are handsomer now than ever I saw you!" he went on, taking the Baroness' arm and pressing it to his heart. "You have a good memory, my dear, by Jove!--And now you see how wrong you were to be so prudish, for those three hundred thousand francs that you refused so magnanimously are in another woman's pocket. I loved you then, I love you still; but just look back these three years.

"When I said to you, 'You shall be mine,' what object had I in view? I meant to be revenged on that rascal Hulot. But your husband, my beauty, found himself a mistress--a jewel of a woman, a pearl, a cunning hussy then aged three-and-twenty, for she is six-and-twenty now. It struck me as more amusing, more complete, more Louis XV., more Marechal de Richelieu, more first-class altogether, to filch away that charmer, who, in point of fact, never cared for Hulot, and who for these three years has been madly in love with your humble servant."

As he spoke, Crevel, from whose hands the Baroness had released her own, had resumed his favorite attitude; both thumbs were stuck into his armholes, and he was patting his ribs with his fingers, like two flapping wings, fancying that he was thus making himself very attractive and charming. It was as much as to say, "And this is the man you would have nothing to say to!"

"There you are my dear; I had my revenge, and your husband knows it. I proved to him clearly that he was basketed--just where he was before, as we say. Madame Marneffe is my mistress, and when her precious Marneffe kicks the bucket, she will be my wife."

Madame Hulot stared at Crevel with a fixed and almost dazed look.

"Hector knew it?" she said.

"And went back to her," replied Crevel. "And I allowed it, because Valerie wished to be the wife of a head-clerk; but she promised me that she would manage things so that our Baron should be so effectually bowled over that he can never interfere any more. And my little duchess--for that woman is a born duchess, on my soul!--kept her word. She restores you your Hector, madame, virtuous in perpetuity, as she says--she is so witty! He has had a good lesson, I can tell you! The Baron has had some hard knocks; he will help no more actresses or fine ladies; he is radically cured; cleaned out like a beer-glass.

"If you had listened to Crevel in the first instance, instead of scorning him and turning him out of the house, you might have had four hundred thousand francs, for my revenge has cost me all of that.--But I shall get my change back, I hope, when Marneffe dies--I have invested in a wife, you see; that is the secret of my extravagance. I have solved the problem of playing the lord on easy terms."

"Would you give your daughter such a mother-in-law? cried Madame Hulot.

"You do not know Valerie, madame," replied Crevel gravely, striking the attitude of his first manner. "She is a woman with good blood in her veins, a lady, and a woman who enjoys the highest consideration. Why, only yesterday the vicar of the parish was dining with her. She is pious, and we have presented a splendid monstrance to the church.

"Oh! she is clever, she is witty, she is delightful, well informed --she has everything in her favor. For my part, my dear Adeline, I owe everything to that charming woman; she has opened my mind, polished my speech, as you may have noticed; she corrects my impetuosity, and gives me words and ideas. I never say anything now that I ought not. I have greatly improved; you must have noticed it. And then she has encouraged my ambition. I shall be a Deputy; and I shall make no blunders, for I shall consult my Egeria. Every great politician, from Numa to our present Prime Minister, has had his Sibyl of the fountain. A score of deputies visit Valerie; she is acquiring considerable influence; and now that she is about to be established in a charming house, with a carriage, she will be one of the occult rulers of Paris.

"A fine locomotive! That is what such a woman is. Oh, I have blessed you many a time for your stern virtue."

"It is enough to make one doubt the goodness of God!" cried Adeline, whose indignation had dried her tears. "But, no! Divine justice must be hanging over her head."

"You know nothing of the world, my beauty," said the great politician, deeply offended. "The world, my Adeline, loves success! Say, now, has it come to seek out your sublime virtue, priced at two hundred thousand francs?"

The words made Madame Hulot shudder; the nervous trembling attacked her once more. She saw that the ex-perfumer was taking a mean revenge on her as he had on Hulot; she felt sick with disgust, and a spasm rose to her throat, hindering speech.

"Money!" she said at last. "Always money!"

"You touched me deeply," said Crevel, reminded by these words of the woman's humiliation, "when I beheld you there, weeping at my feet! --You perhaps will not believe me, but if I had my pocket-book about me, it would have been yours.--Come, do you really want such a sum?"

As she heard this question, big with two hundred thousand francs, Adeline forgot the odious insults heaped on her by this cheap-jack fine gentleman, before the tempting picture of success described by Machiavelli-Crevel, who only wanted to find out her secrets and laugh over them with Valerie.

"Oh! I will do anything, everything," cried the unhappy woman. "Monsieur, I will sell myself--I will be a Valerie, if I must."

"You will find that difficult," replied Crevel. "Valerie is a masterpiece in her way. My good mother, twenty-five years of virtue are always repellent, like a badly treated disease. And your virtue has grown very mouldy, my dear child. But you shall see how much I love you. I will manage to get you your two hundred thousand francs."

Adeline, incapable of uttering a word, seized his hand and laid it on her heart; a tear of joy trembled in her eyes.

"Oh! don't be in a hurry; there will be some hard pulling. I am a jolly good fellow, a good soul with no prejudices, and I will put things plainly to you. You want to do as Valerie does--very good. But that is not all; you must have a gull, a stockholder, a Hulot.--Well, I know a retired tradesman--in fact, a hosier. He is heavy, dull, has not an idea, I am licking him into shape, but I don't know when he will do me credit. My man is a deputy, stupid and conceited; the tyranny of a turbaned wife, in the depths of the country, has preserved him in a state of utter virginity as to the luxury and pleasures of Paris life. But Beauvisage--his name is Beauvisage--is a millionaire, and, like me, my dear, three years ago, he will give a hundred thousand crowns to be the lover of a real lady.--Yes, you see," he went on, misunderstanding a gesture on Adeline's part, "he is jealous of me, you understand; jealous of my happiness with Madame Marneffe, and he is a fellow quite capable of selling an estate to purchase a--"

"Enough, Monsieur Crevel!" said Madame Hulot, no longer controlling her disgust, and showing all her shame in her face. "I am punished beyond my deserts. My conscience, so sternly repressed by the iron hand of necessity, tells me, at this final insult, that such sacrifices are impossible.--My pride is gone; I do not say now, as I did the first time, 'Go!' after receiving this mortal thrust. I have lost the right to do so. I have flung myself before you like a prostitute.

"Yes," she went on, in reply to a negative on Crevel's part, "I have fouled my life, till now so pure, by a degrading thought; and I am inexcusable!--I know it!--I deserve every insult you can offer me! God's will be done! If, indeed, He desires the death of two creatures worthy to appear before Him, they must die! I shall mourn them, and pray for them! If it is His will that my family should be humbled to the dust, we must bow to His avenging sword, nay, and kiss it, since we are Christians.--I know how to expiate this disgrace, which will be the torment of all my remaining days.

"I who speak to you, monsieur, am not Madame Hulot, but a wretched, humble sinner, a Christian whose heart henceforth will know but one feeling, and that is repentance, all my time given up to prayer and charity. With such a sin on my soul, I am the last of women, the first only of penitents.--You have been the means of bringing me to a right mind; I can hear the Voice of God speaking within me, and I can thank you!"

She was shaking with the nervous trembling which from that hour never left her. Her low, sweet tones were quite unlike the fevered accents of the woman who was ready for dishonor to save her family. The blood faded from her cheeks, her face was colorless, and her eyes were dry.

"And I played my part very badly, did I not?" she went on, looking at Crevel with the sweetness that martyrs must have shown in their eyes as they looked up at the Proconsul. "True love, the sacred love of a devoted woman, gives other pleasures, no doubt, than those that are bought in the open market!--But why so many words?" said she, suddenly bethinking herself, and advancing a step further in the way to perfection. "They sound like irony, but I am not ironical! Forgive me. Besides, monsieur, I did not want to hurt any one but myself--"

The dignity of virtue and its holy flame had expelled the transient impurity of the woman who, splendid in her own peculiar beauty, looked taller in Crevel's eyes. Adeline had, at this moment, the majesty of the figures of Religion clinging to the Cross, as painted by the old Venetians; but she expressed, too, the immensity of her love and the grandeur of the Catholic Church, to which she flew like a wounded dove.

Crevel was dazzled, astounded.

"Madame, I am your slave, without conditions," said he, in an inspiration of generosity. "We will look into this matter--and --whatever you want--the impossible even--I will do. I will pledge my securities at the Bank, and in two hours you shall have the money."

"Good God! a miracle!" said poor Adeline, falling on her knees.

She prayed to Heaven with such fervor as touched Crevel deeply; Madame Hulot saw that he had tears in his eyes when, having ended her prayer, she rose to her feet.

"Be a friend to me, monsieur," said she. "Your heart is better than your words and conduct. God gave you your soul; your passions and the world have given you your ideas. Oh, I will love you truly," she exclaimed, with an angelic tenderness in strange contrast with her attempts at coquettish trickery.

"But cease to tremble so," said Crevel.

"Am I trembling?" said the Baroness, unconscious of the infirmity that had so suddenly come upon her.

"Yes; why, look," said Crevel, taking Adeline by the arm and showing her that she was shaking with nervousness. "Come, madame," he added respectfully, "compose yourself; I am going to the Bank at once."

"And come back quickly! Remember," she added, betraying all her secrets, "that the first point is to prevent the suicide of our poor Uncle Fischer involved by my husband--for I trust you now, and I am telling you everything. Oh, if we should not be on time, I know my brother-in-law, the Marshal, and he has such a delicate soul, that he would die of it in a few days."

"I am off, then," said Crevel, kissing the Baroness' hand. "But what has that unhappy Hulot done?"

"He has swindled the Government."

"Good Heavens! I fly, madame; I understand, I admire you!"

Crevel bent one knee, kissed Madame Hulot's skirt, and vanished, saying, "You will see me soon."

Unluckily, on his way from the Rue Plumet to his own house, to fetch the securities, Crevel went along the Rue Vanneau, and he could not resist going in to see his little Duchess. His face still bore an agitated expression.

He went straight into Valerie's room, who was having her hair dressed. She looked at Crevel in her glass, and, like every woman of that sort, was annoyed, before she knew anything about it, to see that he was moved by some strong feeling of which she was not the cause.

"What is the matter, my dear?" said she. "Is that a face to bring in to your little Duchess? I will not be your Duchess any more, monsieur, no more than I will be your 'little duck,' you old monster."

Crevel replied by a melancholy smile and a glance at the maid.

"Reine, child, that will do for to-day; I can finish my hair myself. Give me my Chinese wrapper; my gentleman seems to me out of sorts."

Reine, whose face was pitted like a colander, and who seemed to have been made on purpose to wait on Valerie, smiled meaningly in reply, and brought the dressing-gown. Valerie took off her combing-wrapper; she was in her shift, and she wriggled into the dressing-gown like a snake into a clump of grass.

"Madame is not at home?"

"What a question!" said Valerie.--"Come, tell me, my big puss, have Rives Gauches gone down?"

"No."

"They have raised the price of the house?"

"No."

"You fancy that you are not the father of our little Crevel?"

"What nonsense!" replied he, sure of his paternity.

"On my honor, I give it up!" said Madame Marneffe. "If I am expected to extract my friend's woes as you pull the cork out of a bottle of Bordeaux, I let it alone.--Go away, you bore me."

"It is nothing," said Crevel. "I must find two hundred thousand francs in two hours."

"Oh, you can easily get them.--I have not spent the fifty thousand francs we got out of Hulot for that report, and I can ask Henri for fifty thousand--"

"Henri--it is always Henri!" exclaimed Crevel.

"And do you suppose, you great baby of a Machiavelli, that I will cast off Henri? Would France disarm her fleet?--Henri! why, he is a dagger in a sheath hanging on a nail. That boy serves as a weather-glass to show me if you love me--and you don't love me this morning."

"I don't love you, Valerie?" cried Crevel. "I love you as much as a million."

"That is not nearly enough!" cried she, jumping on to Crevel's knee, and throwing both arms round his neck as if it were a peg to hang on by. "I want to be loved as much as ten millions, as much as all the gold in the world, and more to that. Henri would never wait a minute before telling me all he had on his mind. What is it, my great pet? Have it out. Make a clean breast of it to your own little duck!"

And she swept her hair over Crevel's face, while she jestingly pulled his nose.

"Can a man with a nose like that," she went on, "have any secrets from his Vava--lele--ririe?"

And at the Vava she tweaked his nose to the right; at lele it went to the left; at ririe she nipped it straight again.

"Well, I have just seen--" Crevel stopped and looked at Madame Marneffe.

"Valerie, my treasure, promise me on your honor--ours, you know?--not to repeat a single word of what I tell you."

"Of course, Mayor, we know all about that. One hand up--so--and one foot--so!" And she put herself in an attitude which, to use Rabelais' phrase, stripped Crevel bare from his brain to his heels, so quaint and delicious was the nudity revealed through the light film of lawn.

"I have just seen virtue in despair."

"Can despair possess virtue?" said she, nodding gravely and crossing her arms like Napoleon.

"It is poor Madame Hulot. She wants two hundred thousand francs, or else Marshal Hulot and old Johann Fischer will blow their brains out; and as you, my little Duchess, are partly at the bottom of the mischief, I am going to patch matters up. She is a saintly creature, I know her well; she will repay you every penny."

At the name of Hulot, at the words two hundred thousand francs, a gleam from Valerie's eyes flashed from between her long eyelids like the flame of a cannon through the smoke.

"What did the old thing do to move you to compassion? Did she show you --what?--her--her religion?"

"Do not make game of her, sweetheart; she is a very saintly, a very noble and pious woman, worthy of all respect."

"Am I not worthy of respect then, heh?" answered Valerie, with a threatening gaze at Crevel.

"I never said so," replied he, understanding that the praise of virtue might not be gratifying to Madame Marneffe.

"I am pious too," Valerie went on, taking her seat in an armchair; "but I do not make a trade of my religion. I go to church in secret."

She sat in silence, and paid no further heed to Crevel. He, extremely ill at ease, came to stand in front of the chair into which Valerie had thrown herself, and saw her lost in the reflections he had been so foolish as to suggest.

"Valerie, my little Angel!"

Utter silence. A highly problematical tear was furtively dashed away.

"One word, my little duck?"

"Monsieur!"

"What are you thinking of, my darling?"

"Oh, Monsieur Crevel, I was thinking of the day of my first communion! How pretty I was! How pure, how saintly!--immaculate!--Oh! if any one had come to my mother and said, 'Your daughter will be a hussy, and unfaithful to her husband; one day a police-officer will find her in a disreputable house; she will sell herself to a Crevel to cheat a Hulot --two horrible old men--' Poof! horrible--she would have died before the end of the sentence, she was so fond of me, poor dear!--"

"Nay, be calm."

"You cannot think how well a woman must love a man before she can silence the remorse that gnaws at the heart of an adulterous wife. I am quite sorry that Reine is not here; she would have told you that she found me this morning praying with tears in my eyes. I, Monsieur Crevel, for my part, do not make a mockery of religion. Have you ever heard me say a word I ought not on such a subject?"

Crevel shook his head in negation.

"I will never allow it to be mentioned in my presence. I can make fun of anything under the sun: Kings, politics, finance, everything that is sacred in the eyes of the world--judges, matrimony, and love--old men and maidens. But the Church and God!--There I draw the line.--I know I am wicked; I am sacrificing my future life to you. And you have no conception of the immensity of my love."

Crevel clasped his hands.

"No, unless you could see into my heart, and fathom the depth of my conviction so as to know the extent of my sacrifice! I feel in me the making of a Magdalen.--And see how respectfully I treat the priests; think of the gifts I make to the Church! My mother brought me up in the Catholic Faith, and I know what is meant by God! It is to sinners like us that His voice is most awful."

Valerie wiped away two tears that trickled down her cheeks. Crevel was in dismay. Madame Marneffe stood up in her excitement.

"Be calm, my darling--you alarm me!"

Madame Marneffe fell on her knees.

"Dear Heaven! I am not bad all through!" she cried, clasping her hands. "Vouchsafe to rescue Thy wandering lamb, strike her, crush her, snatch her from foul and adulterous hands, and how gladly she will nestle on Thy shoulder! How willingly she will return to the fold!"

She got up and looked at Crevel; her colorless eyes frightened him.

"Yes, Crevel, and, do you know? I, too, am frightened sometimes. The justice of God is exerted in this nether world as well as in the next. What mercy can I expect at God's hands? His vengeance overtakes the guilty in many ways; it assumes every aspect of disaster. That is what my mother told me on her death-bed, speaking of her own old age.--But if I should lose you," she added, hugging Crevel with a sort of savage frenzy--"oh! I should die!"

Madame Marneffe released Crevel, knelt down again at the armchair, folded her hands--and in what a bewitching attitude!--and with incredible fervor poured out the following prayer:--

"And thou, Saint Valerie, my patron saint, why dost thou so rarely visit the pillow of her who was intrusted to thy care? Oh, come this evening, as thou didst this morning, to inspire me with holy thoughts, and I will quit the path of sin; like the Magdalen, I will give up deluding joys and the false glitter of the world, even the man I love so well--"

"My precious duck!"

"No more of the 'precious duck,' monsieur!" said she, turning round like a virtuous wife, her eyes full of tears, but dignified, cold, and indifferent.

"Leave me," she went on, pushing him from her. "What is my duty? To belong wholly to my husband.--He is a dying man, and what am I doing? Deceiving him on the edge of the grave. He believes your child to be his. I will tell him the truth, and begin by securing his pardon before I ask for God's.--We must part. Good-bye, Monsieur Crevel," and she stood up to offer him an icy cold hand. "Good-bye, my friend; we shall meet no more till we meet in a better world.--You have to thank me for some enjoyment, criminal indeed; now I want--oh yes, I shall have your esteem."

Crevel was weeping bitter tears.

"You great pumpkin!" she exclaimed, with an infernal peal of laughter. "That is how your pious women go about it to drag from you a plum of two hundred thousand francs. And you, who talk of the Marechal de Richelieu, the prototype of Lovelace, you could be taken in by such a stale trick as that! I could get hundreds of thousands of francs out of you any day, if I chose, you old ninny!--Keep your money! If you have more than you know what to do with, it is mine. If you give two sous to that 'respectable' woman, who is pious forsooth, because she is fifty-six years of age, we shall never meet again, and you may take her for your mistress! You could come back to me next day bruised all over from her bony caresses and sodden with her tears, and sick of her little barmaid's caps and her whimpering, which must turn her favors into showers--"

"In point of fact," said Crevel, "two hundred thousand francs is a round sum of money."

"They have fine appetites, have the goody sort! By the poker! they sell their sermons dearer than we sell the rarest and realest thing on earth--pleasure.--And they can spin a yarn! There, I know them. I have seen plenty in my mother's house. They think everything is allowable for the Church and for--Really, my dear love, you ought to be ashamed of yourself--for you are not so open-handed! You have not given me two hundred thousand francs all told!"

"Oh yes," said Crevel, "your little house will cost as much as that."

"Then you have four hundred thousand francs?" said she thoughtfully.

"No."

"Then, sir, you meant to lend that old horror the two hundred thousand francs due for my hotel? What a crime, what high treason!"

"Only listen to me."

"If you were giving the money to some idiotic philanthropic scheme, you would be regarded as a coming man," she went on, with increasing eagerness, "and I should be the first to advise it; for you are too simple to write a big political book that might make you famous; as for style, you have not enough to butter a pamphlet; but you might do as other men do who are in your predicament, and who get a halo of glory about their name by putting it at the top of some social, or moral, or general, or national enterprise. Benevolence is out of date, quite vulgar. Providing for old offenders, and making them more comfortable than the poor devils who are honest, is played out. What I should like to see is some invention of your own with an endowment of two hundred thousand francs--something difficult and really useful. Then you would be talked about as a man of mark, a Montyon, and I should be very proud of you!

"But as to throwing two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water shell, or lending them to a bigot--cast off by her husband, and who knows why? there is always some reason: does any one cast me off, I ask you?--is a piece of idiocy which in our days could only come into the head of a retired perfumer. It reeks of the counter. You would not dare look at yourself in the glass two days after.

"Go and pay the money in where it will be safe--run, fly; I will not admit you again without the receipt in your hand. Go, as fast and soon as you can!"

She pushed Crevel out of the room by the shoulders, seeing avarice blossoming in his face once more. When she heard the outer door shut, she exclaimed:

"Then Lisbeth is revenged over and over again! What a pity that she is at her old Marshal's now! We would have had a good laugh! So that old woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth. I will startle her a little!"

Marshal Hulot, being obliged to live in a style suited to the highest military rank, had taken a handsome house in the Rue du Mont-Parnasse, where there are three or four princely residences. Though he rented the whole house, he inhabited only the ground floor. When Lisbeth went to keep house for him, she at once wished to let the first floor, which, as she said, would pay the whole rent, so that the Count would live almost rent-free; but the old soldier would not hear of it.

For some months past the Marshal had had many sad thoughts. He had guessed how miserably poor his sister-in-law was, and suspected her griefs without understanding their cause. The old man, so cheerful in his deafness, became taciturn; he could not help thinking that his house would one day be a refuge for the Baroness and her daughter; and it was for them that he kept the first floor. The smallness of his fortune was so well known at headquarters, that the War Minister, the Prince de Wissembourg, begged his old comrade to accept a sum of money for his household expenses. This sum the Marshal spent in furnishing the ground floor, which was in every way suitable; for, as he said, he would not accept the Marshal's baton to walk the streets with.

The house had belonged to a senator under the Empire, and the ground floor drawing-rooms had been very magnificently fitted with carved wood, white-and-gold, still in very good preservation. The Marshal had found some good old furniture in the same style; in the coach-house he had a carriage with two batons in saltire on the panels; and when he was expected to appear in full fig, at the Minister's, at the Tuileries, for some ceremony or high festival, he hired horses for the job.

His servant for more than thirty years was an old soldier of sixty, whose sister was the cook, so he had saved ten thousand francs, adding it by degrees to a little hoard he intended for Hortense. Every day the old man walked along the boulevard, from the Rue du Mont-Parnasse to the Rue Plumet; and every pensioner as he passed stood at attention, without fail, to salute him: then the Marshal rewarded the veteran with a smile.

"Who is the man you always stand at attention to salute?" said a young workman one day to an old captain and pensioner.

"I will tell you, boy," replied the officer.

The "boy" stood resigned, as a man does to listen to an old gossip.

"In 1809," said the captain, "we were covering the flank of the main army, marching on Vienna under the Emperor's command. We came to a bridge defended by three batteries of cannon, one above another, on a sort of cliff; three redoubts like three shelves, and commanding the bridge. We were under Marshal Massena. That man whom you see there was Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, and I was one of them. Our columns held one bank of the river, the batteries were on the other. Three times they tried for the bridge, and three times they were driven back. 'Go and find Hulot!' said the Marshal; 'nobody but he and his men can bolt that morsel.' So we came. The General, who was just retiring from the bridge, stopped Hulot under fire, to tell him how to do it, and he was in the way. 'I don't want advice, but room to pass,' said our General coolly, marching across at the head of his men. And then, rattle, thirty guns raking us at once."

"By Heaven!" cried the workman, "that accounts for some of these crutches!"

"And if you, like me, my boy, had heard those words so quietly spoken, you would bow before that man down to the ground! It is not so famous as Arcole, but perhaps it was finer. We followed Hulot at the double, right up to those batteries. All honor to those we left there!" and the old man lifted his hat. "The Austrians were amazed at the dash of it.--The Emperor made the man you saw a Count; he honored us all by honoring our leader; and the King of to-day was very right to make him a Marshal."

"Hurrah for the Marshal!" cried the workman.

"Oh, you may shout--shout away! The Marshal is as deaf as a post from the roar of cannon."

This anecdote may give some idea of the respect with which the Invalides regarded Marshal Hulot, whose Republican proclivities secured him the popular sympathy of the whole quarter of the town.

Sorrow taking hold on a spirit so calm and strict and noble, was a heart-breaking spectacle. The Baroness could only tell lies, with a woman's ingenuity, to conceal the whole dreadful truth from her brother-in-law.

In the course of this miserable morning, the Marshal, who, like all old men, slept but little, had extracted from Lisbeth full particulars as to his brother's situation, promising to marry her as the reward of her revelations. Any one can imagine with what glee the old maid allowed the secrets to be dragged from her which she had been dying to tell ever since she had come into the house; for by this means she made her marriage more certain.

"Your brother is incorrigible!" Lisbeth shouted into the Marshal's best ear.

Her strong, clear tones enabled her to talk to him, but she wore out her lungs, so anxious was she to prove to her future husband that to her he would never be deaf.

"He has had three mistresses," said the old man, "and his wife was an Adeline! Poor Adeline!"

"If you will take my advice," shrieked Lisbeth, "you will use your influence with the Prince de Wissembourg to secure her some suitable appointment. She will need it, for the Baron's pay is pledged for three years."

"I will go to the War Office," said he, "and see the Prince, to find out what he thinks of my brother, and ask for his interest to help my sister. Think of some place that is fit for her."

"The charitable ladies of Paris, in concert with the Archbishop, have formed various beneficent associations; they employ superintendents, very decently paid, whose business it is to seek out cases of real want. Such an occupation would exactly suit dear Adeline; it would be work after her own heart."

"Send to order the horses," said the Marshal. "I will go and dress. I will drive to Neuilly if necessary."

"How fond he is of her! She will always cross my path wherever I turn!" said Lisbeth to herself.

Lisbeth was already supreme in the house, but not with the Marshal's cognizance. She had struck terror into the three servants--for she had allowed herself a housemaid, and she exerted her old-maidish energy in taking stock of everything, examining everything, and arranging in every respect for the comfort of her dear Marshal. Lisbeth, quite as Republican as he could be, pleased him by her democratic opinions, and she flattered him with amazing dexterity; for the last fortnight the old man, whose house was better kept, and who was cared for as a child by its mother, had begun to regard Lisbeth as a part of what he had dreamed of.

"My dear Marshal," she shouted, following him out on to the steps, "pull up the windows, do not sit in a draught, to oblige me!"

The Marshal, who had never been so cosseted in his life, went off smiling at Lisbeth, though his heart was aching.

At the same hour Baron Hulot was quitting the War Office to call on his chief, Marshal the Prince de Wissembourg, who had sent for him. Though there was nothing extraordinary in one of the Generals on the Board being sent for, Hulot's conscience was so uneasy that he fancied he saw a cold and sinister expression in Mitouflet's face.

"Mitouflet, how is the Prince?" he asked, locking the door of his private room and following the messenger who led the way.

"He must have a crow to pluck with you, Monsieur le Baron," replied the man, "for his face is set at stormy."

Hulot turned pale, and said no more; he crossed the anteroom and reception rooms, and, with a violently beating heart, found himself at the door of the Prince's private study.

The chief, at this time seventy years old, with perfectly white hair, and the tanned complexion of a soldier of that age, commanded attention by a brow so vast that imagination saw in it a field of battle. Under this dome, crowned with snow, sparkled a pair of eyes, of the Napoleon blue, usually sad-looking and full of bitter thoughts and regrets, their fire overshadowed by the penthouse of the strongly projecting brow. This man, Bernadotte's rival, had hoped to find his seat on a throne. But those eyes could flash formidable lightnings when they expressed strong feelings.

Then, his voice, always somewhat hollow, rang with strident tones. When he was angry, the Prince was a soldier once more; he spoke the language of Lieutenant Cottin; he spared nothing--nobody. Hulot d'Ervy found the old lion, his hair shaggy like a mane, standing by the fireplace, his brows knit, his back against the mantel-shelf, and his eyes apparently fixed on vacancy.

"Here! At your orders, Prince!" said Hulot, affecting a graceful ease of manner.

The Marshal looked hard at the Baron, without saying a word, during the time it took him to come from the door to within a few steps of where the chief stood. This leaden stare was like the eye of God; Hulot could not meet it; he looked down in confusion.

"He knows everything!" said he to himself.

"Does your conscience tell you nothing?" asked the Marshal, in his deep, hollow tones.

"It tells me, sir, that I have been wrong, no doubt, in ordering razzias in Algeria without referring the matter to you. At my age, and with my tastes, after forty-five years of service, I have no fortune.--You know the principles of the four hundred elect representatives of France. Those gentlemen are envious of every distinction; they have pared down even the Ministers' pay--that says everything! Ask them for money for an old servant!--What can you expect of men who pay a whole class so badly as they pay the Government legal officials?--who give thirty sous a day to the laborers on the works at Toulon, when it is a physical impossibility to live there and keep a family on less than forty sous?--who never think of the atrocity of giving salaries of six hundred francs, up to a thousand or twelve hundred perhaps, to clerks living in Paris; and who want to secure our places for themselves as soon as the pay rises to forty thousand?--who, finally, refuse to restore to the Crown a piece of Crown property confiscated from the Crown in 1830--property acquired, too, by Louis XVI. out of his privy purse!--If you had no private fortune, Prince, you would be left high and dry, like my brother, with your pay and not another sou, and no thought of your having saved the army, and me with it, in the boggy plains of Poland."

"You have robbed the State! You have made yourself liable to be brought before the bench at Assizes," said the Marshal, "like that clerk of the Treasury! And you take this, monsieur, with such levity."

"But there is a great difference, monseigneur!" cried the baron. "Have I dipped my hands into a cash box intrusted to my care?"

"When a man of your rank commits such an infamous crime," said the Marshal, "he is doubly guilty if he does it clumsily. You have compromised the honor of our official administration, which hitherto has been the purest in Europe!--And all for two hundred thousand francs and a hussy!" said the Marshal, in a terrible voice. "You are a Councillor of State--and a private soldier who sells anything belonging to his regiment is punished with death! Here is a story told to me one day by Colonel Pourin of the Second Lancers. At Saverne, one of his men fell in love with a little Alsatian girl who had a fancy for a shawl. The jade teased this poor devil of a lancer so effectually, that though he could show twenty years' service, and was about to be promoted to be quartermaster--the pride of the regiment --to buy this shawl he sold some of his company's kit.--Do you know what this lancer did, Baron d'Ervy? He swallowed some window-glass after pounding it down, and died in eleven hours, of an illness, in hospital.--Try, if you please, to die of apoplexy, that we may not see you dishonored."

Hulot looked with haggard eyes at the old warrior; and the Prince, reading the look which betrayed the coward, felt a flush rise to his cheeks; his eyes flamed.

"Will you, sir, abandon me?" Hulot stammered.

Marshal Hulot, hearing that only his brother was with the Minister, ventured at this juncture to come in, and, like all deaf people, went straight up to the Prince.

"Oh," cried the hero of Poland, "I know what you are here for, my old friend! But we can do nothing."

"Do nothing!" echoed Marshal Hulot, who had heard only the last word.

"Nothing; you have come to intercede for your brother. But do you know what your brother is?"

"My brother?" asked the deaf man.

"Yes, he is a damned infernal blackguard, and unworthy of you."

The Marshal in his rage shot from his eyes those fulminating fires which, like Napoleon's, broke a man's will and judgment.

"You lie, Cottin!" said Marshal Hulot, turning white. "Throw down your baton as I throw mine! I am ready."

The Prince went up to his old comrade, looked him in the face, and shouted in his ear as he grasped his hand:

"Are you a man?"

"You will see that I am."

"Well, then, pull yourself together! You must face the worst misfortune that can befall you."

The Prince turned round, took some papers from the table, and placed them in the Marshal's hands, saying, "Read that."

The Comte de Forzheim read the following letter, which lay uppermost:--

"To his Excellency the President of the Council.

"Private and Confidential.

"ALGIERS.

"MY DEAR PRINCE,--We have a very ugly business on our hands, as you will see by the accompanying documents.

"The story, briefly told, is this: Baron Hulot d'Ervy sent out to the province of Oran an uncle of his as a broker in grain and forage, and gave him an accomplice in the person of a storekeeper. This storekeeper, to curry favor, has made a confession, and finally made his escape. The Public Prosecutor took the matter up very thoroughly, seeing, as he supposed, that only two inferior agents were implicated; but Johann Fischer, uncle to your Chief of the Commissariat Department, finding that he was to be brought up at the Assizes, stabbed himself in prison with a nail.

"That would have been the end of the matter if this worthy and honest man, deceived, it would seem, by his agent and by his nephew, had not thought proper to write to Baron Hulot. This letter, seized as a document, so greatly surprised the Public Prosecutor, that he came to see me. Now, the arrest and public trial of a Councillor of State would be such a terrible thing--of a man high in office too, who has a good record for loyal service --for after the Beresina, it was he who saved us all by reorganizing the administration--that I desired to have all the papers sent to me.

"Is the matter to take its course? Now that the principal agent is dead, will it not be better to smother up the affair and sentence the storekeeper in default?

"The Public Prosecutor has consented to my forwarding the documents for your perusal; the Baron Hulot d'Ervy, being resident in Paris, the proceedings will lie with your Supreme Court. We have hit on this rather shabby way of ridding ourselves of the difficulty for the moment.

"Only, my dear Marshal, decide quickly. This miserable business is too much talked about already, and it will do as much harm to us as to you all if the name of the principal culprit--known at present only to the Public Prosecutor, the examining judge, and myself--should happen to leak out."

At this point the letter fell from Marshal Hulot's hands; he looked at his brother; he saw that there was no need to examine the evidence. But he looked for Johann Fischer's letter, and after reading it at a glance, held it out to Hector:--

"FROM THE PRISON AT ORAN.

"DEAR NEPHEW,--When you read this letter, I shall have ceased to live.

"Be quite easy, no proof can be found to incriminate you. When I am dead and your Jesuit of a Chardin fled, the trial must collapse. The face of our Adeline, made so happy by you, makes death easy to me. Now you need not send the two hundred thousand francs. Good-bye.

"This letter will be delivered by a prisoner for a short term whom I can trust, I believe.

"JOHANN FISCHER."

"I beg your pardon," said Marshal Hulot to the Prince de Wissembourg with pathetic pride.

"Come, come, say tu, not the formal vous," replied the Minister, clasping his old friend's hand. "The poor lancer killed no one but himself," he added, with a thunderous look at Hulot d'Ervy.

"How much have you had?" said the Comte de Forzheim to his brother.

"Two hundred thousand francs."

"My dear friend," said the Count, addressing the Minister, "you shall have the two hundred thousand francs within forty-eight hours. It shall never be said that a man bearing the name of Hulot has wronged the public treasury of a single sou."

"What nonsense!" said the Prince. "I know where the money is, and I can get it back.--Send in your resignation and ask for your pension!" he went on, sending a double sheet of foolscap flying across to where the Councillor of State had sat down by the table, for his legs gave way under him. "To bring you to trial would disgrace us all. I have already obtained from the superior Board their sanction to this line of action. Since you can accept life with dishonor--in my opinion the last degradation--you will get the pension you have earned. Only take care to be forgotten."

The Minister rang.

"Is Marneffe, the head-clerk, out there?"

"Yes, monseigneur."

"Show him in!"

"You," said the Minister as Marneffe came in, "you and your wife have wittingly and intentionally ruined the Baron d'Ervy whom you see."

"Monsieur le Ministre, I beg your pardon. We are very poor. I have nothing to live on but my pay, and I have two children, and the one that is coming will have been brought into the family by Monsieur le Baron."

"What a villain he looks!" said the Prince, pointing to Marneffe and addressing Marshal Hulot.--"No more of Sganarelle speeches," he went on; "you will disgorge two hundred thousand francs, or be packed off to Algiers."

"But, Monsieur le Ministre, you do not know my wife. She has spent it all. Monsieur le Baron asked six persons to dinner every evening. --Fifty thousand francs a year are spent in my house."

"Leave the room!" said the Minister, in the formidable tones that had given the word to charge in battle. "You will have notice of your transfer within two hours. Go!"

"I prefer to send in my resignation," said Marneffe insolently. "For it is too much to be what I am already, and thrashed into the bargain. That would not satisfy me at all."

And he left the room.

"What an impudent scoundrel!" said the Prince.

Marshal Hulot, who had stood up throughout this scene, as pale as a corpse, studying his brother out of the corner of his eye, went up to the Prince, and took his hand, repeating:

"In forty-eight hours the pecuniary mischief shall be repaired; but honor!--Good-bye, Marshal. It is the last shot that kills. Yes, I shall die of it!" he said in his ear.

"What the devil brought you here this morning?" said the Prince, much moved.

"I came to see what can be done for his wife," replied the Count, pointing to his brother. "She is wanting bread--especially now!"

"He has his pension."

"It is pledged!"

"The Devil must possess such a man," said the Prince, with a shrug. "What philtre do those baggages give you to rob you of your wits?" he went on to Hulot d'Ervy. "How could you--you, who know the precise details with which in French offices everything is written down at full length, consuming reams of paper to certify to the receipt or outlay of a few centimes--you, who have so often complained that a hundred signatures are needed for a mere trifle, to discharge a soldier, to buy a curry-comb--how could you hope to conceal a theft for any length of time? To say nothing of the newspapers, and the envious, and the people who would like to steal!--those women must rob you of your common-sense! Do they cover your eyes with walnut-shells? or are you yourself made of different stuff from us?--You ought to have left the office as soon as you found that you were no longer a man, but a temperament. If you have complicated your crime with such gross folly, you will end--I will not say where----"

"Promise me, Cottin, that you will do what you can for her," said the Marshal, who heard nothing, and was still thinking of his sister-in-law.

"Depend on me!" said the Minister.

"Thank you, and good-bye then!--Come, monsieur," he said to his brother.

The Prince looked with apparent calmness at the two brothers, so different in their demeanor, conduct, and character--the brave man and the coward, the ascetic and the profligate, the honest man and the peculator--and he said to himself:

"That mean creature will not have courage to die! And my poor Hulot, such an honest fellow! has death in his knapsack, I know!"

He sat down again in his big chair and went on reading the despatches from Africa with a look characteristic at once of the coolness of a leader and of the pity roused by the sight of a battle-field! For in reality no one is so humane as a soldier, stern as he may seem in the icy determination acquired by the habit of fighting, and so absolutely essential in the battle-field.

Next morning some of the newspapers contained, under various headings, the following paragraphs:--

"Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy has applied for his retiring pension. The unsatisfactory state of the Algerian exchequer, which has come out in consequence of the death and disappearance of two employes, has had some share in this distinguished official's decision. On hearing of the delinquencies of the agents whom he had unfortunately trusted, Monsieur le Baron Hulot had a paralytic stroke in the War Minister's private room.

"Monsieur Hulot d'Ervy, brother to the Marshal Comte de Forzheim, has been forty-five years in the service. His determination has been vainly opposed, and is greatly regretted by all who know Monsieur Hulot, whose private virtues are as conspicuous as his administrative capacity. No one can have forgotten the devoted conduct of the Commissary General of the Imperial Guard at Warsaw, or the marvelous promptitude with which he organized supplies for the various sections of the army so suddenly required by Napoleon in 1815.

"One more of the heroes of the Empire is retiring from the stage. Monsieur le Baron Hulot has never ceased, since 1830, to be one of the guiding lights of the State Council and of the War Office."

"ALGIERS.--The case known as the forage supply case, to which some of our contemporaries have given absurd prominence, has been closed by the death of the chief culprit. Johann Wisch has committed suicide in his cell; his accomplice, who had absconded, will be sentenced in default.

"Wisch, formerly an army contractor, was an honest man and highly respected, who could not survive the idea of having been the dupe of Chardin, the storekeeper who has disappeared."

And in the Paris News the following paragraph appeared:

"Monsieur le Marechal the Minister of War, to prevent the recurrence of such scandals for the future, has arranged for a regular Commissariat office in Africa. A head-clerk in the War Office, Monsieur Marneffe, is spoken of as likely to be appointed to the post of director."

"The office vacated by Baron Hulot is the object of much ambition. The appointment is promised, it is said, to Monsieur le Comte Martial de la Roche-Hugon, Deputy, brother-in-law to Monsieur le Comte de Rastignac. Monsieur Massol, Master of Appeals, will fill his seat on the Council of State, and Monsieur Claude Vignon becomes Master of Appeals."

Of all kinds of false gossip, the most dangerous for the Opposition newspapers is the official bogus paragraph. However keen journalists may be, they are sometimes the voluntary or involuntary dupes of the cleverness of those who have risen from the ranks of the Press, like Claude Vignon, to the higher realms of power. The newspaper can only be circumvented by the journalist. It may be said, as a parody on a line by Voltaire:

"The Paris news is never what the foolish folk believe."

Marshal Hulot drove home with his brother, who took the front seat, respectfully leaving the whole of the back of the carriage to his senior. The two men spoke not a word. Hector was helpless. The Marshal was lost in thought, like a man who is collecting all his strength, and bracing himself to bear a crushing weight. On arriving at his own house, still without speaking, but by an imperious gesture, he beckoned his brother into his study. The Count had received from the Emperor Napoleon a splendid pair of pistols from the Versailles factory; he took the box, with its inscription. "Given by the Emperor Napoleon to General Hulot," out of his desk, and placing it on the top, he showed it to his brother, saying, "There is your remedy."

Lisbeth, peeping through the chink of the door, flew down to the carriage and ordered the coachman to go as fast as he could gallop to the Rue Plumet. Within about twenty minutes she had brought back Adeline, whom she had told of the Marshal's threat to his brother.

The Marshal, without looking at Hector, rang the bell for his factotum, the old soldier who had served him for thirty years.

"Beau-Pied," said he, "fetch my notary, and Count Steinbock, and my niece Hortense, and the stockbroker to the Treasury. It is now half-past ten; they must all be here by twelve. Take hackney cabs --and go faster than that!" he added, a republican allusion which in past days had been often on his lips. And he put on the scowl that had brought his soldiers to attention when he was beating the broom on the heaths of Brittany in 1799. (See Les Chouans.)

"You shall be obeyed, Marechal," said Beau-Pied, with a military salute.

Still paying no heed to his brother, the old man came back into his study, took a key out of his desk, and opened a little malachite box mounted in steel, the gift of the Emperor Alexander.

By Napoleon's orders he had gone to restore to the Russian Emperor the private property seized at the battle of Dresden, in exchange for which Napoleon hoped to get back Vandamme. The Czar rewarded General Hulot very handsomely, giving him this casket, and saying that he hoped one day to show the same courtesy to the Emperor of the French; but he kept Vandamme. The Imperial arms of Russia were displayed in gold on the lid of the box, which was inlaid with gold.

The Marshal counted the bank-notes it contained; he had a hundred and fifty-two thousand francs. He saw this with satisfaction. At the same moment Madame Hulot came into the room in a state to touch the heart of the sternest judge. She flew into Hector's arms, looking alternately with a crazy eye at the Marshal and at the case of pistols.

"What have you to say against your brother? What has my husband done to you?" said she, in such a voice that the Marshal heard her.

"He has disgraced us all!" replied the Republican veteran, who spoke with a vehemence that reopened one of his old wounds. "He has robbed the Government! He has cast odium on my name, he makes me wish I were dead--he has killed me!--I have only strength enough left to make restitution!

"I have been abased before the Conde of the Republic, the man I esteem above all others, and to whom I unjustifiably gave the lie--the Prince of Wissembourg!--Is that nothing? That is the score his country has against him!"

He wiped away a tear.

"Now, as to his family," he went on. "He is robbing you of the bread I had saved for you, the fruit of thirty years' economy, of the privations of an old soldier! Here is what was intended for you," and he held up the bank-notes. "He has killed his Uncle Fischer, a noble and worthy son of Alsace who could not--as he can--endure the thought of a stain on his peasant's honor.

"To crown all, God, in His adorable clemency, had allowed him to choose an angel among women; he has had the unspeakable happiness of having an Adeline for his wife! And he has deceived her, he has soaked her in sorrows, he has neglected her for prostitutes, for street-hussies, for ballet-girls, actresses--Cadine, Josepha, Marneffe! --And that is the brother I treated as a son and made my pride!

"Go, wretched man; if you can accept the life of degradation you have made for yourself, leave my house! I have not the heart to curse a brother I have loved so well--I am as foolish about him as you are, Adeline--but never let me see him again. I forbid his attending my funeral or following me to the grave. Let him show the decency of a criminal if he can feel no remorse."

The Marshal, as pale as death, fell back on the settee, exhausted by his solemn speech. And, for the first time in his life perhaps, tears gathered in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.

"My poor uncle!" cried Lisbeth, putting a handkerchief to her eyes.

"Brother!" said Adeline, kneeling down by the Marshal, "live for my sake. Help me in the task of reconciling Hector to the world and making him redeem the past."

"He!" cried the Marshal. "If he lives, he is not at the end of his crimes. A man who has misprized an Adeline, who has smothered in his own soul the feelings of a true Republican which I tried to instill into him, the love of his country, of his family, and of the poor --that man is a monster, a swine!--Take him away if you still care for him, for a voice within me cries to me to load my pistols and blow his brains out. By killing him I should save you all, and I should save him too from himself."

The old man started to his feet with such a terrifying gesture that poor Adeline exclaimed:

"Hector--come!"

She seized her husband's arm, dragged him away, and out of the house; but the Baron was so broken down, that she was obliged to call a coach to take him to the Rue Plumet, where he went to bed. The man remained there for several days in a sort of half-dissolution, refusing all nourishment without a word. By floods of tears, Adeline persuaded him to swallow a little broth; she nursed him, sitting by his bed, and feeling only, of all the emotions that once had filled her heart, the deepest pity for him.

At half-past twelve, Lisbeth showed into her dear Marshal's room--for she would not leave him, so much was she alarmed at the evident change in him--Count Steinbock and the notary.

"Monsieur le Comte," said the Marshal, "I would beg you to be so good as to put your signature to a document authorizing my niece, your wife, to sell a bond for certain funds of which she at present holds only the reversion.--You, Mademoiselle Fischer, will agree to this sale, thus losing your life interest in the securities."

"Yes, dear Count," said Lisbeth without hesitation.

"Good, my dear," said the old soldier. "I hope I may live to reward you. But I did not doubt you; you are a true Republican, a daughter of the people." He took the old maid's hand and kissed it.

"Monsieur Hannequin," he went on, speaking to the notary, "draw up the necessary document in the form of a power of attorney, and let me have it within two hours, so that I may sell the stock on the Bourse to-day. My niece, the Countess, holds the security; she will be here to sign the power of attorney when you bring it, and so will mademoiselle. Monsieur le Comte will be good enough to go with you and sign it at your office."

The artist, at a nod from Lisbeth, bowed respectfully to the Marshal and went away.

Next morning, at ten o'clock, the Comte de Forzheim sent in to announce himself to the Prince, and was at once admitted.

"Well, my dear Hulot," said the Prince, holding out the newspapers to his old friend, "we have saved appearances, you see.--Read."

Marshal Hulot laid the papers on his comrade's table, and held out to him the two hundred thousand francs.

"Here is the money of which my brother robbed the State," said he.

"What madness!" cried the Minister. "It is impossible," he said into the speaking-trumpet handed to him by the Marshal, "to manage this restitution. We should be obliged to declare your brother's dishonest dealings, and we have done everything to hide them."

"Do what you like with the money; but the family shall not owe one sou of its fortune to a robbery on the funds of the State," said the Count.

"I will take the King's commands in the matter. We will discuss it no further," replied the Prince, perceiving that it would be impossible to conquer the old man's sublime obstinacy on the point.

"Good-bye, Cottin," said the old soldier, taking the Prince's hand. "I feel as if my soul were frozen--"

Then, after going a step towards the door, he turned round, looked at the Prince, and seeing that he was deeply moved, he opened his arms to clasp him in them; the two old soldiers embraced each other.

"I feel as if I were taking leave of the whole of the old army in you," said the Count.

"Good-bye, my good old comrade!" said the Minister.

"Yes, it is good-bye; for I am going where all our brave men are for whom we have mourned--"

Just then Claude Vignon was shown in. The two relics of the Napoleonic phalanx bowed gravely to each other, effacing every trace of emotion.

"You have, I hope, been satisfied by the papers," said the Master of Appeals-elect. "I contrived to let the Opposition papers believe that they were letting out our secrets."

"Unfortunately, it is all in vain," replied the Minister, watching Hulot as he left the room. "I have just gone through a leave-taking that has been a great grief to me. For, indeed, Marshal Hulot has not three days to live; I saw that plainly enough yesterday. That man, one of those honest souls that are above proof, a soldier respected by the bullets in spite of his valor, received his death-blow--there, in that armchair--and dealt by my hand, in a letter!--Ring and order my carriage. I must go to Neuilly," said he, putting the two hundred thousand francs into his official portfolio.

Notwithstanding Lisbeth's nursing, Marshal Hulot three days later was a dead man. Such men are the glory of the party they support. To Republicans, the Marshal was the ideal of patriotism; and they all attended his funeral, which was followed by an immense crowd. The army, the State officials, the Court, and the populace all came to do homage to this lofty virtue, this spotless honesty, this immaculate glory. Such a last tribute of the people is not a thing to be had for the asking.

This funeral was distinguished by one of those tributes of delicate feeling, of good taste, and sincere respect which from time to time remind us of the virtues and dignity of the old French nobility. Following the Marshal's bier came the old Marquis de Montauran, the brother of him who, in the great rising of the Chouans in 1799, had been the foe, the luckless foe, of Hulot. That Marquis, killed by the balls of the "Blues," had confided the interests of his young brother to the Republican soldier. (See Les Chouans.) Hulot had so faithfully acted on the noble Royalist's verbal will, that he succeeded in saving the young man's estates, though he himself was at the time an emigre. And so the homage of the old French nobility was not wanting to the leader who, nine years since, had conquered MADAME.

This death, happening just four days before the banns were cried for the last time, came upon Lisbeth like the thunderbolt that burns the garnered harvest with the barn. The peasant of Lorraine, as often happens, had succeeded too well. The Marshal had died of the blows dealt to the family by herself and Madame Marneffe.

The old maid's vindictiveness, which success seemed to have somewhat mollified, was aggravated by this disappointment of her hopes. Lisbeth went, crying with rage, to Madame Marneffe; for she was homeless, the Marshal having agreed that his lease was at any time to terminate with his life. Crevel, to console Valerie's friend, took charge of her savings, added to them considerably, and invested the capital in five per cents, giving her the life interest, and putting the securities into Celestine's name. Thanks to this stroke of business, Lisbeth had an income of about two thousand francs.

When the Marshal's property was examined and valued, a note was found, addressed to his sister-in-law, to his niece Hortense, and to his nephew Victorin, desiring that they would pay among them an annuity of twelve hundred francs to Mademoiselle Lisbeth Fischer, who was to have been his wife.

Adeline, seeing her husband between life and death, succeeded for some days in hiding from him the fact of his brother's death; but Lisbeth came, in mourning, and the terrible truth was told him eleven days after the funeral.

The crushing blow revived the sick man's energies. He got up, found his family collected in the drawing-room, all in black, and suddenly silent as he came in. In a fortnight, Hulot, as lean as a spectre, looked to his family the mere shadow of himself.

"I must decide on something," said he in a husky voice, as he seated himself in an easy-chair, and looked round at the party, of whom Crevel and Steinbock were absent.

"We cannot stay here, the rent is too high," Hortense was saying just as her father came in.

"As to a home," said Victorin, breaking the painful silence, "I can offer my mother----"

As he heard these words, which excluded him, the Baron raised his head, which was sunk on his breast as though he were studying the pattern of the carpet, though he did not even see it, and he gave the young lawyer an appealing look. The rights of a father are so indefeasibly sacred, even when he is a villain and devoid of honor, that Victorin paused.

"To your mother," the Baron repeated. "You are right, my son."

"The rooms over ours in our wing," said Celestine, finishing her husband's sentence.

"I am in your way, my dears?" said the Baron, with the mildness of a man who has judged himself. "But do not be uneasy as to the future; you will have no further cause for complaint of your father; you will not see him till the time when you need no longer blush for him."

He went up to Hortense and kissed her brow. He opened his arms to his son, who rushed into his embrace, guessing his father's purpose. The Baron signed to Lisbeth, who came to him, and he kissed her forehead. Then he went to his room, whither Adeline followed him in an agony of dread.

"My brother was quite right, Adeline," he said, holding her hand. "I am unworthy of my home life. I dared not bless my children, who have behaved so nobly, but in my heart; tell them that I could only venture to kiss them; for the blessing of a bad man, a father who has been an assassin and the scourge of his family instead of its protector and its glory, might bring evil on them; but assure them that I shall bless them every day.--As to you, God alone, for He is Almighty, can ever reward you according to your merits!--I can only ask your forgiveness!" and he knelt at her feet, taking her hands and wetting them with his tears.

"Hector, Hector! Your sins have been great, but Divine Mercy is infinite, and you may repair all by staying with me.--Rise up in Christian charity, my dear--I am your wife, and not your judge. I am your possession; do what you will with me; take me wherever you go, I feel strong enough comfort you, to make life endurable to you, by the strength of my love, my care, and respect.--Our children are settled in life; they need me no more. Let me try to be an amusement to you, an occupation. Let me share the pain of your banishment and of your poverty, and help to mitigate it. I could always be of some use, if it were only to save the expense of a servant."

"Can you forgive, my dearly-beloved Adeline?"

"Yes, only get up, my dear!"

"Well, with that forgiveness I can live," said he, rising to his feet. "I came back into this room that my children should not see their father's humiliation. Oh! the sight constantly before their eyes of a father so guilty as I am is a terrible thing; it must undermine parental influence and break every family tie. So I cannot remain among you, and I must go to spare you the odious spectacle of a father bereft of dignity. Do not oppose my departure Adeline. It would only be to load with your own hand the pistol to blow my brains out. Above all, do not seek me in my hiding-place; you would deprive me of the only strong motive remaining in me, that of remorse."

Hector's decisiveness silenced his dejected wife. Adeline, lofty in the midst of all this ruin, had derived her courage from her perfect union with her husband; for she had dreamed of having him for her own, of the beautiful task of comforting him, of leading him back to family life, and reconciling him to himself.

"But, Hector, would you leave me to die of despair, anxiety, and alarms!" said she, seeing herself bereft of the mainspring of her strength.

"I will come back to you, dear angel--sent from Heaven expressly for me, I believe. I will come back, if not rich, at least with enough to live in ease.--Listen, my sweet Adeline, I cannot stay here for many reasons. In the first place, my pension of six thousand francs is pledged for four years, so I have nothing. That is not all. I shall be committed to prison within a few days in consequence of the bills held by Vauvinet. So I must keep out of the way until my son, to whom I will give full instructions, shall have bought in the bills. My disappearance will facilitate that. As soon as my pension is my own, and Vauvinet is paid off, I will return to you.--You would be sure to let out the secret of my hiding-place. Be calm; do not cry, Adeline --it is only for a month--"

"Where will you go? What will you do? What will become of you? Who will take care of you now that you are no longer young? Let me go with you--we will go abroad--" said she.

"Well, well, we will see," he replied.

The Baron rang and ordered Mariette to collect all his things and pack them quickly and secretly. Then, after embracing his wife with a warmth of affection to which she was unaccustomed, he begged her to leave him alone for a few minutes while he wrote his instructions for Victorin, promising that he would not leave the house till dark, or without her.

As soon as the Baroness was in the drawing-room, the cunning old man stole out through the dressing-closet to the anteroom, and went away, giving Mariette a slip of paper, on which was written, "Address my trunks to go by railway to Corbeil--to Monsieur Hector, cloak-room, Corbeil."

The Baron jumped into a hackney coach, and was rushing across Paris by the time Mariette came to give the Baroness this note, and say that her master had gone out. Adeline flew back into her room, trembling more violently than ever; her children followed on hearing her give a piercing cry. They found her in a dead faint; and they put her to bed, for she was seized by a nervous fever which held her for a month between life and death.

"Where is he?" was the only thing she would say.

Victorin sought for him in vain.

And this is why. The Baron had driven to the Place du Palais Royal. There this man, who had recovered all his wits to work out a scheme which he had premeditated during the days he had spent crushed with pain and grief, crossed the Palais Royal on foot, and took a handsome carriage from a livery-stable in the Rue Joquelet. In obedience to his orders, the coachman went to the Rue de la Ville l'Eveque, and into the courtyard of Josepha's mansion, the gates opening at once at the call of the driver of such a splendid vehicle. Josepha came out, prompted by curiosity, for her man-servant had told her that a helpless old gentleman, unable to get out of his carriage, begged her to come to him for a moment.

"Josepha!--it is I----"

The singer recognized her Hulot only by his voice.

"What? you, poor old man?--On my honor, you look like a twenty-franc piece that the Jews have sweated and the money-changers refuse."

"Alas, yes," replied Hulot; "I am snatched from the jaws of death! But you are as lovely as ever. Will you be kind?"

"That depends," said she; "everything is relative."

"Listen," said Hulot; "can you put me up for a few days in a servant's room under the roof? I have nothing--not a farthing, not a hope; no food, no pension, no wife, no children, no roof over my head; without honor, without courage, without a friend; and worse than all that, liable to imprisonment for not meeting a bill."

"Poor old fellow! you are without most things.--Are you also sans culotte?"

"You laugh at me! I am done for," cried the Baron. "And I counted on you as Gourville did on Ninon."

"And it was a 'real lady,' I am told who brought you to this," said Josepha. "Those precious sluts know how to pluck a goose even better than we do!--Why, you are like a corpse that the crows have done with --I can see daylight through!"

"Time is short, Josepha!"

"Come in, old boy, I am alone, as it happens, and my people don't know you. Send away your trap. Is it paid for?"

"Yes," said the Baron, getting out with the help of Josepha's arm.

"You may call yourself my father if you like," said the singer, moved to pity.

She made Hulot sit down in the splendid drawing-room where he had last seen her.

"And is it the fact, old man," she went on, "that you have killed your brother and your uncle, ruined your family, mortgaged your children's house over and over again, and robbed the Government till in Africa, all for your princess?"

Hulot sadly bent his head.

"Well, I admire that!" cried Josepha, starting up in her enthusiasm. "It is a general flare-up! It is Sardanapalus! Splendid, thoroughly complete! I may be a hussy, but I have a soul! I tell you, I like a spendthrift, like you, crazy over a woman, a thousand times better than those torpid, heartless bankers, who are supposed to be so good, and who ruin no end of families with their rails--gold for them, and iron for their gulls! You have only ruined those who belong to you, you have sold no one but yourself; and then you have excuses, physical and moral."

She struck a tragic attitude, and spouted:

"'Tis Venus whose grasp never parts from her prey.

And there you are!" and she pirouetted on her toe.

Vice, Hulot found, could forgive him; vice smiled on him from the midst of unbridled luxury. Here, as before a jury, the magnitude of a crime was an extenuating circumstance. "And is your lady pretty at any rate?" asked Josepha, trying as a preliminary act of charity, to divert Hulot's thoughts, for his depression grieved her.

"On my word, almost as pretty as you are," said the Baron artfully.

"And monstrously droll? So I have been told. What does she do, I say? Is she better fun than I am?"

"I don't want to talk about her," said Hulot.

"And I hear she has come round my Crevel, and little Steinbock, and a gorgeous Brazilian?"

"Very likely."

"And that she has got a house as good as this, that Crevel has given her. The baggage! She is my provost-marshal, and finishes off those I have spoiled. I tell you why I am so curious to know what she is like, old boy; I just caught sight of her in the Bois, in an open carriage --but a long way off. She is a most accomplished harpy, Carabine says. She is trying to eat up Crevel, but he only lets her nibble. Crevel is a knowing hand, good-natured but hard-headed, who will always say Yes, and then go his own way. He is vain and passionate; but his cash is cold. You can never get anything out of such fellows beyond a thousand to three thousand francs a month; they jib at any serious outlay, as a donkey does at a running stream.

"Not like you, old boy. You are a man of passions; you would sell your country for a woman. And, look here, I am ready to do anything for you! You are my father; you started me in life; it is a sacred duty. What do you want? Do you want a hundred thousand francs? I will wear myself to a rag to gain them. As to giving you bed and board--that is nothing. A place will be laid for you here every day; you can have a good room on the second floor, and a hundred crowns a month for pocket-money."

The Baron, deeply touched by such a welcome, had a last qualm of honor.

"No, my dear child, no; I did not come here for you to keep me," said he.

"At your age it is something to be proud of," said she.

"This is what I wish, my child. Your Duc d'Herouville has immense estates in Normandy, and I want to be his steward, under the name of Thoul. I have the capacity, and I am honest. A man may borrow of the Government, and yet not steal from a cash-box----"

"H'm, h'm," said Josepha. "Once drunk, drinks again."

"In short, I only want to live out of sight for three years--"

"Well, it is soon done," said Josepha. "This evening, after dinner, I have only to speak. The Duke would marry me if I wished it, but I have his fortune, and I want something better--his esteem. He is a Duke of the first water. He is high-minded, as noble and great as Louis XIV. and Napoleon rolled into one, though he is a dwarf. Besides, I have done for him what la Schontz did for Rochefide; by taking my advice he has made two millions.

"Now, listen to me, old popgun. I know you; you are always after the women, and you would be dancing attendance on the Normandy girls, who are splendid creatures, and getting your ribs cracked by their lovers and fathers, and the Duke would have to get you out of the scrape. Why, can't I see by the way you look at me that the young man is not dead in you--as Fenelon put it.--No, this stewardship is not the thing for you. A man cannot be off with his Paris and with us, old boy, for the saying! You would die of weariness at Herouville."

"What is to become of me?" said the Baron, "for I will only stay here till I see my way."

"Well, shall I find a pigeon-hole for you? Listen, you old pirate. Women are what you want. They are consolation in all circumstances. Attend now.--At the end of the Alley, Rue Saint-Maur-du-Temple, there is a poor family I know of where there is a jewel of a little girl, prettier than I was at sixteen.--Ah! there is a twinkle in your eye already!--The child works sixteen hours a day at embroidering costly pieces for the silk merchants, and earns sixteen sous a day--one sou an hour!--and feeds like the Irish, on potatoes fried in rats' dripping, with bread five times a week--and drinks canal water out of the town pipes, because the Seine water costs too much; and she cannot set up on her own account for lack of six or seven thousand francs. Your wife and children bore you to death, don't they?--Besides, one cannot submit to be nobody where one has been a little Almighty. A father who has neither money nor honor can only be stuffed and kept in a glass case."

The Baron could not help smiling at these abominable jests.

"Well, now, Bijou is to come to-morrow morning to bring me an embroidered wrapper, a gem! It has taken six months to make; no one else will have any stuff like it! Bijou is very fond of me; I give her tidbits and my old gowns. And I send orders for bread and meat and wood to the family, who would break the shin-bones of the first comer if I bid them.--I try to do a little good. Ah! I know what I endured from hunger myself!--Bijou has confided to me all her little sorrows. There is the making of a super at the Ambigu-Comique in that child. Her dream is to wear fine dresses like mine; above all, to ride in a carriage. I shall say to her, 'Look here, little one, would you like to have a friend of--' How old are you?" she asked, interrupting herself. "Seventy-two?"

"I have given up counting."

"'Would you like an old gentleman of seventy-two?' I shall say. 'Very clean and neat, and who does not take snuff, who is as sound as a bell, and as good as a young man? He will marry you (in the Thirteenth Arrondissement) and be very kind to you; he will place seven thousand francs in your account, and furnish you a room all in mahogany, and if you are good, he will sometimes take you to the play. He will give you a hundred francs a month for pocket-money, and fifty francs for housekeeping.'--I know Bijou; she is myself at fourteen. I jumped for joy when that horrible Crevel made me his atrocious offers. Well, and you, old man, will be disposed of for three years. She is a good child, well behaved; for three or four years she will have her illusions--not for longer."

Hulot did not hesitate; he had made up his mind to refuse; but to seem grateful to the kind-hearted singer, who was benevolent after her lights, he affected to hesitate between vice and virtue.

"Why, you are as cold as a paving-stone in winter!" she exclaimed in amazement. "Come, now. You will make a whole family happy--a grandfather who runs all the errands, a mother who is being worn out with work, and two sisters--one of them very plain--who make thirty-two sous a day while putting their eyes out. It will make up for the misery you have caused at home, and you will expiate your sin while you are having as much fun as a minx at Mabille."

Hulot, to put an end to this temptation, moved his fingers as if he were counting out money.

"Oh! be quite easy as to ways and means," replied Josepha. "My Duke will lend you ten thousand francs; seven thousand to start an embroidery shop in Bijou's name, and three thousand for furnishing; and every three months you will find a cheque here for six hundred and fifty francs. When you get your pension paid you, you can repay the seventeen thousand francs. Meanwhile you will be as happy as a cow in clover, and hidden in a hole where the police will never find you. You must wear a loose serge coat, and you will look like a comfortable householder. Call yourself Thoul, if that is your fancy. I will tell Bijou that you are an uncle of mine come from Germany, having failed in business, and you will be cosseted like a divinity.--There now, Daddy!--And who knows! you may have no regrets. In case you should be bored, keep one Sunday rig-out, and you can come and ask me for a dinner and spend the evening here."

"I!--and I meant to settle down and behave myself!--Look here, borrow twenty thousand francs for me, and I will set out to make my fortune in America, like my friend d'Aiglemont when Nucingen cleaned him out."

"You!" cried Josepha. "Nay, leave morals to work-a-day folks, to raw recruits, to the worrrthy citizens who have nothing to boast of but their virtue. You! You were born to be something better than a nincompoop; you are as a man what I am as a woman--a spendthrift of genius."

"We will sleep on it and discuss it all to-morrow morning."

"You will dine with the Duke. My d'Herouville will receive you as civilly as if you were the saviour of the State; and to-morrow you can decide. Come, be jolly, old boy! Life is a garment; when it is dirty, we must brush it; when it is ragged, it must be patched; but we keep it on as long as we can."

This philosophy of life, and her high spirits, postponed Hulot's keenest pangs.

At noon next day, after a capital breakfast, Hulot saw the arrival of one of those living masterpieces which Paris alone of all the cities in the world can produce, by means of the constant concubinage of luxury and poverty, of vice and decent honesty, of suppressed desire and renewed temptation, which makes the French capital the daughter of Ninevah, of Babylon, and of Imperial Rome.

Mademoiselle Olympe Bijou, a child of sixteen, had the exquisite face which Raphael drew for his Virgins; eyes of pathetic innocence, weary with overwork--black eyes, with long lashes, their moisture parched with the heat of laborious nights, and darkened with fatigue; a complexion like porcelain, almost too delicate; a mouth like a partly opened pomegranate; a heaving bosom, a full figure, pretty hands, the whitest teeth, and a mass of black hair; and the whole meagrely set off by a cotton frock at seventy-five centimes the metre, leather shoes without heels, and the cheapest gloves. The girl, all unconscious of her charms, had put on her best frock to wait on the fine lady.

The Baron, gripped again by the clutch of profligacy, felt all his life concentrated in his eyes. He forgot everything on beholding this delightful creature. He was like a sportsman in sight of the game; if an emperor were present, he must take aim!

"And warranted sound," said Josepha in his ear. "An honest child, and wanting bread. This is Paris--I have been there!"

"It is a bargain," replied the old man, getting up and rubbing his hands.

When Olympe Bijou was gone, Josepha looked mischievously at the Baron.

"If you want things to keep straight, Daddy," said she, "be as firm as the Public Prosecutor on the bench. Keep a tight hand on her, be a Bartholo! Ware Auguste, Hippolyte, Nestor, Victor--or, that is gold, in every form. When once the child is fed and dressed, if she gets the upper hand, she will drive you like a serf.--I will see to settling you comfortably. The Duke does the handsome; he will lend--that is, give--you ten thousand francs; and he deposits eight thousand with his notary, who will pay you six hundred francs every quarter, for I cannot trust you.--Now, am I nice?"

"Adorable."

Ten days after deserting his family, when they were gathered round Adeline, who seemed to be dying, as she said again and again, in a weak voice, "Where is he?" Hector, under the name of Thoul, was established in the Rue Saint-Maur, at the head of a business as embroiderer, under the name of Thoul and Bijou.

Victorin Hulot, under the overwhelming disasters of his family, had received the finishing touch which makes or mars the man. He was perfection. In the great storms of life we act like the captain of a ship who, under the stress of a hurricane, lightens the ship of its heaviest cargo. The young lawyer lost his self-conscious pride, his too evident assertiveness, his arrogance as an orator and his political pretensions. He was as a man what his wife was as a woman. He made up his mind to make the best of his Celestine--who certainly did not realize his dreams--and was wise enough to estimate life at its true value by contenting himself in all things with the second best. He vowed to fulfil his duties, so much had he been shocked by his father's example.

These feelings were confirmed as he stood by his mother's bed on the day when she was out of danger. Nor did this happiness come single. Claude Vignon, who called every day from the Prince de Wissembourg to inquire as to Madame Hulot's progress, desired the re-elected deputy to go with him to see the Minister.

"His Excellency," said he, "wants to talk over your family affairs with you."

The Prince had long known Victorin Hulot, and received him with a friendliness that promised well.

"My dear fellow," said the old soldier, "I promised your uncle, in this room, that I would take care of your mother. That saintly woman, I am told, is getting well again; now is the time to pour oil into your wounds. I have for you here two hundred thousand francs; I will give them to you----"

The lawyer's gesture was worthy of his uncle the Marshal.

"Be quite easy," said the Prince, smiling; "it is money in trust. My days are numbered; I shall not always be here; so take this sum, and fill my place towards your family. You may use this money to pay off the mortgage on your house. These two hundred thousand francs are the property of your mother and your sister. If I gave the money to Madame Hulot, I fear that, in her devotion to her husband, she would be tempted to waste it. And the intention of those who restore it to you is, that it should produce bread for Madame Hulot and her daughter, the Countess Steinbock. You are a steady man, the worthy son of your noble mother, the true nephew of my friend the Marshal; you are appreciated here, you see--and elsewhere. So be the guardian angel of your family, and take this as a legacy from your uncle and me."

"Monseigneur," said Hulot, taking the Minister's hand and pressing it, "such men as you know that thanks in words mean nothing; gratitude must be proven."

"Prove yours--" said the old man.

"In what way?"

"By accepting what I have to offer you," said the Minister. "We propose to appoint you to be attorney to the War Office, which just now is involved in litigations in consequence of the plan for fortifying Paris; consulting clerk also to the Prefecture of Police; and a member of the Board of the Civil List. These three appointments will secure you salaries amounting to eighteen thousand francs, and will leave you politically free. You can vote in the Chamber in obedience to your opinions and your conscience. Act in perfect freedom on that score. It would be a bad thing for us if there were no national opposition!

"Also, a few lines from your uncle, written a day or two before he breathed his last, suggested what I could do for your mother, whom he loved very truly.--Mesdames Popinot, de Rastignac, de Navarreins, d'Espard, de Grandlieu, de Carigliano, de Lenoncourt, and de la Batie have made a place for your mother as a Lady Superintendent of their charities. These ladies, presidents of various branches of benevolent work, cannot do everything themselves; they need a lady of character who can act for them by going to see the objects of their beneficence, ascertaining that charity is not imposed upon, and whether the help given really reaches those who applied for it, finding out that the poor who are ashamed to beg, and so forth. Your mother will fulfil an angelic function; she will be thrown in with none but priests and these charitable ladies; she will be paid six thousand francs and the cost of her hackney coaches.

"You see, young man, that a pure and nobly virtuous man can still assist his family, even from the grave. Such a name as your uncle's is, and ought to be, a buckler against misfortune in a well-organized scheme of society. Follow in his path; you have started in it, I know; continue in it."

"Such delicate kindness cannot surprise me in my mother's friend," said Victorin. "I will try to come up to all your hopes."

"Go at once, and take comfort to your family.--By the way," added the Prince, as he shook hands with Victorin, "your father has disappeared?"

"Alas! yes."

"So much the better. That unhappy man has shown his wit, in which, indeed, he is not lacking."

"There are bills of his to be met."

"Well, you shall have six months' pay of your three appointments in advance. This pre-payment will help you, perhaps, to get the notes out of the hands of the money-lender. And I will see Nucingen, and perhaps may succeed in releasing your father's pension, pledged to him, without its costing you or our office a sou. The peer has not killed the banker in Nucingen; he is insatiable; he wants some concession.--I know not what----"

So on his return to the Rue Plumet, Victorin could carry out his plan of lodging his mother and sister under his roof.

The young lawyer, already famous, had, for his sole fortune, one of the handsomest houses in Paris, purchased in 1834 in preparation for his marriage, situated on the boulevard between the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Louis-le-Grand. A speculator had built two houses between the boulevard and the street; and between these, with the gardens and courtyards to the front and back, there remained still standing a splendid wing, the remains of the magnificent mansion of the Verneuils. The younger Hulot had purchased this fine property, on the strength of Mademoiselle Crevel's marriage-portion, for one million francs, when it was put up to auction, paying five hundred thousand down. He lived on the ground floor, expecting to pay the remainder out of letting the rest; but though it is safe to speculate in house-property in Paris, such investments are capricious or hang fire, depending on unforeseen circumstances.

As the Parisian lounger may have observed, the boulevard between the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Louis-le-Grand prospered but slowly; it took so long to furbish and beautify itself, that trade did not set up its display there till 1840--the gold of the money-changers, the fairy-work of fashion, and the luxurious splendor of shop-fronts.

In spite of two hundred thousand francs given by Crevel to his daughter at the time when his vanity was flattered by this marriage, before the Baron had robbed him of Josepha; in spite of the two hundred thousand francs paid off by Victorin in the course of seven years, the property was still burdened with a debt of five hundred thousand francs, in consequence of Victorin's devotion to his father. Happily, a rise in rents and the advantages of the situation had at this time improved the value of the houses. The speculation was justifying itself after eight years' patience, during which the lawyer had strained every nerve to pay the interest and some trifling amounts of the capital borrowed.

The tradespeople were ready to offer good rents for the shops, on condition of being granted leases for eighteen years. The dwelling apartments rose in value by the shifting of the centre in Paris life --henceforth transferred to the region between the Bourse and the Madeleine, now the seat of the political power and financial authority in Paris. The money paid to him by the Minister, added to a year's rent in advance and the premiums paid by his tenants, would finally reduce the outstanding debt to two hundred thousand francs. The two houses, if entirely let, would bring in a hundred thousand francs a year. Within two years more, during which the Hulots could live on his salaries, added to by the Marshal's investments, Victorin would be in a splendid position.

This was manna from heaven. Victorin could give up the first floor of his own house to his mother, and the second to Hortense, excepting two rooms reserved for Lisbeth. With Cousin Betty as the housekeeper, this compound household could bear all these charges, and yet keep up a good appearance, as beseemed a pleader of note. The great stars of the law-courts were rapidly disappearing; and Victorin Hulot, gifted with a shrewd tongue and strict honesty, was listened to by the Bench and Councillors; he studied his cases thoroughly, and advanced nothing that he could not prove. He would not hold every brief that offered; in fact, he was a credit to the bar.

The Baroness' home in the Rue Plumet had become so odious to her, that she allowed herself to be taken to the Rue Louis-le-Grand. Thus, by her son's care, Adeline occupied a fine apartment; she was spared all the daily worries of life; for Lisbeth consented to begin again, working wonders of domestic economy, such as she had achieved for Madame Marneffe, seeing here a way of exerting her silent vengeance on those three noble lives, the object, each, of her hatred, which was kept growing by the overthrow of all her hopes.

Once a month she went to see Valerie, sent, indeed, by Hortense, who wanted news of Wenceslas, and by Celestine, who was seriously uneasy at the acknowledged and well-known connection between her father and a woman to whom her mother-in-law and sister-in-law owed their ruin and their sorrows. As may be supposed, Lisbeth took advantage of this to see Valerie as often as possible.

Thus, about twenty months passed by, during which the Baroness recovered her health, though her palsied trembling never left her. She made herself familiar with her duties, which afforded her a noble distraction from her sorrow and constant food for the divine goodness of her heart. She also regarded it as an opportunity for finding her husband in the course of one of those expeditions which took her into every part of Paris.

During this time, Vauvinet had been paid, and the pension of six thousand francs was almost redeemed. Victorin could maintain his mother as well as Hortense out of the ten thousand francs interest on the money left by Marshal Hulot in trust for them. Adeline's salary amounted to six thousand francs a year; and this, added to the Baron's pension when it was freed, would presently secure an income of twelve thousand francs a year to the mother and daughter.

Thus, the poor woman would have been almost happy but for her perpetual anxieties as to the Baron's fate; for she longed to have him with her to share the improved fortunes that smiled on the family; and but for the constant sight of her forsaken daughter; and but for the terrible thrusts constantly and unconsciously dealt her by Lisbeth, whose diabolical character had free course.

A scene which took place at the beginning of the month of March 1843 will show the results of Lisbeth's latent and persistent hatred, still seconded, as she always was, by Madame Marneffe.

Two great events had occurred in the Marneffe household. In the first place, Valerie had given birth to a still-born child, whose little coffin had cost her two thousand francs a year. And then, as to Marneffe himself, eleven months since, this is the report given by Lisbeth to the Hulot family one day on her return from a visit of discovery at the hotel Marneffe.

"This morning," said she, "that dreadful Valerie sent for Doctor Bianchon to ask whether the medical men who had condemned her husband yesterday had made no mistake. Bianchon pronounced that to-night at the latest that horrible creature will depart to the torments that await him. Old Crevel and Madame Marneffe saw the doctor out; and your father, my dear Celestine, gave him five gold pieces for his good news.

"When he came back into the drawing-room, Crevel cut capers like a dancer; he embraced that woman, exclaiming, 'Then, at last, you will be Madame Crevel!'--And to me, when she had gone back to her husband's bedside, for he was at his last gasp, your noble father said to me, 'With Valerie as my wife, I can become a peer of France! I shall buy an estate I have my eye on--Presles, which Madame de Serizy wants to sell. I shall be Crevel de Presles, member of the Common Council of Seine-et-Oise, and Deputy. I shall have a son! I shall be everything I have ever wished to be.'--'Heh!' said I, 'and what about your daughter?'--'Bah!' says he, 'she is only a woman! And she is quite too much of a Hulot. Valerie has a horror of them all.--My son-in-law has never chosen to come to this house; why has he given himself such airs as a Mentor, a Spartan, a Puritan, a philanthropist? Besides, I have squared accounts with my daughter; she has had all her mother's fortune, and two hundred thousand francs to that. So I am free to act as I please.--I shall judge of my son-in-law and Celestine by their conduct on my marriage; as they behave, so shall I. If they are nice to their stepmother, I will receive them. I am a man, after all!'--In short, all this rhodomontade! And an attitude like Napoleon on the column."

The ten months' widowhood insisted on by the law had now elapsed some few days since. The estate of Presles was purchased. Victorin and Celestine had that very morning sent Lisbeth to make inquiries as to the marriage of the fascinating widow to the Mayor of Paris, now a member of the Common Council of the Department of Seine-et-Oise.

Celestine and Hortense, in whom the ties of affection had been drawn closer since they had lived under the same roof, were almost inseparable. The Baroness, carried away by a sense of honesty which led her to exaggerate the duties of her place, devoted herself to the work of charity of which she was the agent; she was out almost every day from eleven till five. The sisters-in-law, united in their cares for the children whom they kept together, sat at home and worked. They had arrived at the intimacy which thinks aloud, and were a touching picture of two sisters, one cheerful and the other sad. The less happy of the two, handsome, lively, high-spirited, and clever, seemed by her manner to defy her painful situation; while the melancholy Celestine, sweet and calm, and as equable as reason itself, might have been supposed to have some secret grief. It was this contradiction, perhaps, that added to their warm friendship. Each supplied the other with what she lacked.

Seated in a little summer-house in the garden, which the speculator's trowel had spared by some fancy of the builder's, who believed that he was preserving these hundred feet square of earth for his own pleasure, they were admiring the first green shoots of the lilac-trees, a spring festival which can only be fully appreciated in Paris when the inhabitants have lived for six months oblivious of what vegetation means, among the cliffs of stone where the ocean of humanity tosses to and fro.

"Celestine," said Hortense to her sister-in-law, who had complained that in such fine weather her husband should be kept at the Chamber, "I think you do not fully appreciate your happiness. Victorin is a perfect angel, and you sometimes torment him."

"My dear, men like to be tormented! Certain ways of teasing are a proof of affection. If your poor mother had only been--I will not say exacting, but always prepared to be exacting, you would not have had so much to grieve over."

"Lisbeth is not come back. I shall have to sing the song of Malbrouck," said Hortense. "I do long for some news of Wenceslas! --What does he live on? He has not done a thing these two years."

"Victorin saw him, he told me, with that horrible woman not long ago; and he fancied that she maintains him in idleness.--If you only would, dear soul, you might bring your husband back to you yet."

Hortense shook her head.

"Believe me," Celestine went on, "the position will ere long be intolerable. In the first instance, rage, despair, indignation, gave you strength. The awful disasters that have come upon us since--two deaths, ruin, and the disappearance of Baron Hulot--have occupied your mind and heart; but now you live in peace and silence, you will find it hard to bear the void in your life; and as you cannot, and will never leave the path of virtue, you will have to be reconciled to Wenceslas. Victorin, who loves you so much, is of that opinion. There is something stronger than one's feelings even, and that is Nature!"

"But such a mean creature!" cried the proud Hortense. "He cares for that woman because she feeds him.--And has she paid his debts, do you suppose?--Good Heaven! I think of that man's position day and night! He is the father of my child, and he is degrading himself."

"But look at your mother, my dear," said Celestine.

Celestine was one of those women who, when you have given them reasons enough to convince a Breton peasant, still go back for the hundredth time to their original argument. The character of her face, somewhat flat, dull, and common, her light-brown hair in stiff, neat bands, her very complexion spoke of a sensible woman, devoid of charm, but also devoid of weakness.

"The Baroness would willingly go to join her husband in his disgrace, to comfort him and hide him in her heart from every eye," Celestine went on. "Why, she has a room made ready upstairs for Monsieur Hulot, as if she expected to find him and bring him home from one day to the next."

"Oh yes, my mother is sublime!" replied Hortense. "She has been so every minute of every day for six-and-twenty years; but I am not like her, it is not my nature.--How can I help it? I am angry with myself sometimes; but you do not know, Celestine, what it would be to make terms with infamy."

"There is my father!" said Celestine placidly. "He has certainly started on the road that ruined yours. He is ten years younger than the Baron, to be sure, and was only a tradesman; but how can it end? This Madame Marneffe has made a slave of my father; he is her dog; she is mistress of his fortune and his opinions, and nothing can open his eyes. I tremble when I remember that their banns of marriage are already published!--My husband means to make a last attempt; he thinks it a duty to try to avenge society and the family, and bring that woman to account for all her crimes. Alas! my dear Hortense, such lofty souls as Victorin and hearts like ours come too late to a comprehension of the world and its ways!--This is a secret, dear, and I have told you because you are interested in it, but never by a word or a look betray it to Lisbeth, or your mother, or anybody, for--"

"Here is Lisbeth!" said Hortense. "Well, cousin, and how is the Inferno of the Rue Barbet going on?"

"Badly for you, my children.--Your husband, my dear Hortense, is more crazy about that woman than ever, and she, I must own, is madly in love with him.--Your father, dear Celestine, is gloriously blind. That, to be sure, is nothing; I have had occasion to see it once a fortnight; really, I am lucky never to have had anything to do with men, they are besotted creatures.--Five days hence you, dear child, and Victorin will have lost your father's fortune."

"Then the banns are cried?" said Celestine.

"Yes," said Lisbeth, "and I have just been arguing your case. I pointed out to that monster, who is going the way of the other, that if he would only get you out of the difficulties you are in by paying off the mortgage on the house, you would show your gratitude and receive your stepmother--"

Hortense started in horror.

"Victorin will see about that," said Celestine coldly.

"But do you know what Monsieur le Maire's answer was?" said Lisbeth. "'I mean to leave them where they are. Horses can only be broken in by lack of food, sleep, and sugar.'--Why, Baron Hulot was not so bad as Monsieur Crevel.

"So, my poor dears, you may say good-bye to the money. And such a fine fortune! Your father paid three million francs for the Presles estate, and he has thirty thousand francs a year in stocks! Oh!--he has no secrets from me. He talks of buying the Hotel de Navarreins, in the Rue du Bac. Madame Marneffe herself has forty thousand francs a year. --Ah!--here is our guardian angel, here comes your mother!" she exclaimed, hearing the rumble of wheels.

And presently the Baroness came down the garden steps and joined the party. At fifty-five, though crushed by so many troubles, and constantly trembling as if shivering with ague, Adeline, whose face was indeed pale and wrinkled, still had a fine figure, a noble outline, and natural dignity. Those who saw her said, "She must have been beautiful!" Worn with the grief of not knowing her husband's fate, of being unable to share with him this oasis in the heart of Paris, this peace and seclusion and the better fortune that was dawning on the family, her beauty was the beauty of a ruin. As each gleam of hope died out, each day of search proved vain, Adeline sank into fits of deep melancholy that drove her children to despair.

The Baroness had gone out that morning with fresh hopes, and was anxiously expected. An official, who was under obligations to Hulot, to whom he owed his position and advancement, declared that he had seen the Baron in a box at the Ambigu-Comique theatre with a woman of extraordinary beauty. So Adeline had gone to call on the Baron Verneuil. This important personage, while asserting that he had positively seen his old patron, and that his behaviour to the woman indicated an illicit establishment, told Madame Hulot that to avoid meeting him the Baron had left long before the end of the play.

"He looked like a man at home with the damsel, but his dress betrayed some lack of means," said he in conclusion.

"Well?" said the three women as the Baroness came towards them.

"Well, Monsieur Hulot is in Paris; and to me," said Adeline, "it is a gleam of happiness only to know that he is within reach of us."

"But he does not seem to have mended his ways," Lisbeth remarked when Adeline had finished her report of her visit to Baron Verneuil. "He has taken up some little work-girl. But where can he get the money from? I could bet that he begs of his former mistresses--Mademoiselle Jenny Cadine or Josepha."

The Baroness trembled more severely than ever; every nerve quivered; she wiped away the tears that rose to her eyes and looked mournfully up to heaven.

"I cannot think that a Grand Commander of the Legion of Honor will have fallen so low," said she.

"For his pleasure what would he not do?" said Lisbeth. "He robbed the State, he will rob private persons, commit murder--who knows?"

"Oh, Lisbeth!" cried the Baroness, "keep such thoughts to yourself."

At this moment Louise came up to the family group, now increased by the arrival of the two Hulot children and little Wenceslas to see if their grandmother's pockets did not contain some sweetmeats.

"What is it, Louise?" asked one and another.

"A man who wants to see Mademoiselle Fischer."

"Who is the man?" asked Lisbeth.

"He is in rags, mademoiselle, and covered with flue like a mattress-picker; his nose is red, and he smells of brandy.--He is one of those men who work half of the week at most."

This uninviting picture had the effect of making Lisbeth hurry into the courtyard of the house in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, where she found a man smoking a pipe colored in a style that showed him an artist in tobacco.

"Why have you come here, Pere Chardin?" she asked. "It is understood that you go, on the first Saturday in every month, to the gate of the Hotel Marneffe, Rue Barbet-de-Jouy. I have just come back after waiting there for five hours, and you did not come."

"I did go there, good and charitable lady!" replied the mattress-picker. "But there was a game at pool going on at the Cafe des Savants, Rue du Cerf-Volant, and every man has his fancy. Now, mine is billiards. If it wasn't for billiards, I might be eating off silver plate. For, I tell you this," and he fumbled for a scrap of paper in his ragged trousers pocket, "it is billiards that leads on to a dram and plum-brandy.--It is ruinous, like all fine things, in the things it leads to. I know your orders, but the old 'un is in such a quandary that I came on to forbidden grounds.--If the hair was all hair, we might sleep sound on it; but it is mixed. God is not for all, as the saying goes. He has His favorites--well, He has the right. Now, here is the writing of your estimable relative and my very good friend--his political opinion."

Chardin attempted to trace some zigzag lines in the air with the forefinger of his right hand.

Lisbeth, not listening to him, read these few words:

"DEAR COUSIN,--Be my Providence; give me three hundred francs this day.

"HECTOR."

"What does he want so much money for?"

"The lan'lord!" said Chardin, still trying to sketch arabesques. "And then my son, you see, has come back from Algiers through Spain and Bayonee, and, and--he has found nothing--against his rule, for a sharp cove is my son, saving your presence. How can he help it, he is in want of food; but he will repay all we lend him, for he is going to get up a company. He has ideas, he has, that will carry him--"

"To the police court," Lisbeth put in. "He murdered my uncle; I shall not forget that."

"He--why, he could not bleed a chicken, honorable lady."

"Here are the three hundred francs," said Lisbeth, taking fifteen gold pieces out of her purse. "Now, go, and never come here again."

She saw the father of the Oran storekeeper off the premises, and pointed out the drunken old creature to the porter.

"At any time when that man comes here, if by chance he should come again, do not let him in. If he should ask whether Monsieur Hulot junior or Madame la Baronne Hulot lives here, tell him you know of no such persons."

"Very good, mademoiselle."

"Your place depends on it if you make any mistake, even without intending it," said Lisbeth, in the woman's ear.--"Cousin," she went on to Victorin, who just now came in, "a great misfortune is hanging over your head."

"What is that?" said Victorin.

"Within a few days Madame Marneffe will be your wife's stepmother."

"That remains to be seen," replied Victorin.

For six months past Lisbeth had very regularly paid a little allowance to Baron Hulot, her former protector, whom she now protected; she knew the secret of his dwelling-place, and relished Adeline's tears, saying to her, as we have seen, when she saw her cheerful and hopeful, "You may expect to find my poor cousin's name in the papers some day under the heading 'Police Report.'"

But in this, as on a former occasion, she let her vengeance carry her too far. She had aroused the prudent suspicions of Victorin. He had resolved to be rid of this Damocles' sword so constantly flourished over them by Lisbeth, and of the female demon to whom his mother and the family owed so many woes. The Prince de Wissembourg, knowing all about Madame Marneffe's conduct, approved of the young lawyer's secret project; he had promised him, as a President of the Council can promise, the secret assistance of the police, to enlighten Crevel and rescue a fine fortune from the clutches of the diabolical courtesan, whom he could not forgive either for causing the death of Marshal Hulot or for the Baron's utter ruin.

The words spoken by Lisbeth, "He begs of his former mistresses," haunted the Baroness all night. Like sick men given over by the physicians, who have recourse to quacks, like men who have fallen into the lowest Dantesque circle of despair, or drowning creatures who mistake a floating stick for a hawser, she ended by believing in the baseness of which the mere idea had horrified her; and it occurred to her that she might apply for help to one of those terrible women.

Next morning, without consulting her children or saying a word to anybody, she went to see Mademoiselle Josepha Mirah, prima donna of the Royal Academy of Music, to find or to lose the hope that had gleamed before her like a will-o'-the-wisp. At midday, the great singer's waiting-maid brought her in the card of the Baronne Hulot, saying that this person was waiting at the door, having asked whether Mademoiselle could receive her.

"Are the rooms done?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"And the flowers fresh?"

"Yes, mademoiselle."

"Just tell Jean to look round and see that everything is as it should be before showing the lady in, and treat her with the greatest respect. Go, and come back to dress me--I must look my very best."

She went to study herself in the long glass.

"Now, to put our best foot foremost!" said she to herself. "Vice under arms to meet virtue!--Poor woman, what can she want of me? I cannot bear to see.

"The noble victim of outrageous fortune!"

And she sang through the famous aria as the maid came in again.

"Madame," said the girl, "the lady has a nervous trembling--"

"Offer her some orange-water, some rum, some broth--"

"I did, mademoiselle; but she declines everything, and says it is an infirmity, a nervous complaint--"

"Where is she?"

"In the big drawing-room."

"Well, make haste, child. Give me my smartest slippers, the dressing-gown embroidered by Bijou, and no end of lace frills. Do my hair in a way to astonish a woman.--This woman plays a part against mine; and tell the lady--for she is a real, great lady, my girl, nay, more, she is what you will never be, a woman whose prayers can rescue souls from your purgatory--tell her I was in bed, as I was playing last night, and that I am just getting up."

The Baroness, shown into Josepha's handsome drawing-room, did not note how long she was kept waiting there, though it was a long half hour. This room, entirely redecorated even since Josepha had had the house, was hung with silk in purple and gold color. The luxury which fine gentlemen were wont to lavish on their petites maisons, the scenes of their profligacy, of which the remains still bear witness to the follies from which they were so aptly named, was displayed to perfection, thanks to modern inventiveness, in the four rooms opening into each other, where the warm temperature was maintained by a system of hot-air pipes with invisible openings.

The Baroness, quite bewildered, examined each work of art with the greatest amazement. Here she found fortunes accounted for that melt in the crucible under which pleasure and vanity feed the devouring flames. This woman, who for twenty-six years had lived among the dead relics of imperial magnificence, whose eyes were accustomed to carpets patterned with faded flowers, rubbed gilding, silks as forlorn as her heart, half understood the powerful fascinations of vice as she studied its results. It was impossible not to wish to possess these beautiful things, these admirable works of art, the creation of the unknown talent which abounds in Paris in our day and produces treasures for all Europe. Each thing had the novel charm of unique perfection. The models being destroyed, every vase, every figure, every piece of sculpture was the original. This is the crowning grace of modern luxury. To own the thing which is not vulgarized by the two thousand wealthy citizens whose notion of luxury is the lavish display of the splendors that shops can supply, is the stamp of true luxury --the luxury of the fine gentlemen of the day, the shooting stars of the Paris firmament.

As she examined the flower-stands, filled with the choicest exotic plants, mounted in chased brass and inlaid in the style of Boulle, the Baroness was scared by the idea of the wealth in this apartment. And this impression naturally shed a glamour over the person round whom all this profusion was heaped. Adeline imagined that Josepha Mirah --whose portrait by Joseph Bridau was the glory of the adjoining boudoir--must be a singer of genius, a Malibran, and she expected to see a real star. She was sorry she had come. But she had been prompted by a strong and so natural a feeling, by such purely disinterested devotion, that she collected all her courage for the interview. Besides, she was about to satisfy her urgent curiosity, to see for herself what was the charm of this kind of women, that they could extract so much gold from the miserly ore of Paris mud.

The Baroness looked at herself to see if she were not a blot on all this splendor; but she was well dressed in her velvet gown, with a little cape trimmed with beautiful lace, and her velvet bonnet of the same shade was becoming. Seeing herself still as imposing as any queen, always a queen even in her fall, she reflected that the dignity of sorrow was a match for the dignity of talent.

At last, after much opening and shutting of doors, she saw Josepha. The singer bore a strong resemblance to Allori's Judith, which dwells in the memory of all who have ever seen it in the Pitti palace, near the door of one of the great rooms. She had the same haughty mien, the same fine features, black hair simply knotted, and a yellow wrapper with little embroidered flowers, exactly like the brocade worn by the immortal homicide conceived of by Bronzino's nephew.

"Madame la Baronne, I am quite overwhelmed by the honor you do me in coming here," said the singer, resolved to play her part as a great lady with a grace.

She pushed forward an easy-chair for the Baroness and seated herself on a stool. She discerned the faded beauty of the woman before her, and was filled with pity as she saw her shaken by the nervous palsy that, on the least excitement, became convulsive. She could read at a glance the saintly life described to her of old by Hulot and Crevel; and she not only ceased to think of a contest with her, she humiliated herself before a superiority she appreciated. The great artist could admire what the courtesan laughed to scorn.

"Mademoiselle, despair brought me here. It reduces us to any means--"

A look in Josepha's face made the Baroness feel that she had wounded the woman from whom she hoped for so much, and she looked at her. Her beseeching eyes extinguished the flash in Josepha's; the singer smiled. It was a wordless dialogue of pathetic eloquence.

"It is now two years and a half since Monsieur Hulot left his family, and I do not know where to find him, though I know that he lives in Paris," said the Baroness with emotion. "A dream suggested to me the idea--an absurd one perhaps--that you may have interested yourself in Monsieur Hulot. If you could enable me to see him--oh! mademoiselle, I would pray Heaven for you every day as long as I live in this world--"

Two large tears in the singer's eyes told what her reply would be.

"Madame," said she, "I have done you an injury without knowing you; but, now that I have the happiness of seeing in you the most perfect virtue on earth, believe me I am sensible of the extent of my fault; I repent sincerely, and believe me, I will do all in my power to remedy it!"

She took Madame Hulot's hand and before the lady could do anything to hinder her, she kissed it respectfully, even humbling herself to bend one knee. Then she rose, as proud as when she stood on the stage in the part of Mathilde, and rang the bell.

"Go on horseback," said she to the man-servant, "and kill the horse if you must, to find little Bijou, Rue Saint-Maur-du-Temple, and bring her here. Put her into a coach and pay the coachman to come at a gallop. Do not lose a moment--or you lose your place.

"Madame," she went on, coming back to the Baroness, and speaking to her in respectful tones, "you must forgive me. As soon as the Duc d'Herouville became my protector, I dismissed the Baron, having heard that he was ruining his family for me. What more could I do? In an actress' career a protector is indispensable from the first day of her appearance on the boards. Our salaries do not pay half our expenses; we must have a temporary husband. I did not value Monsieur Hulot, who took me away from a rich man, a conceited idiot. Old Crevel would undoubtedly have married me--"

"So he told me," said the Baroness, interrupting her.

"Well, then, you see, madame, I might at this day have been an honest woman, with only one legitimate husband!"

"You have many excuses, mademoiselle," said Adeline, "and God will take them into account. But, for my part, far from reproaching you, I came, on the contrary, to make myself your debtor in gratitude--"

"Madame, for nearly three years I have provided for Monsieur le Baron's necessities--"

"You?" interrupted the Baroness, with tears in her eyes. "Oh, what can I do for you? I can only pray--"

"I and Monsieur le Duc d'Herouville," the singer said, "a noble soul, a true gentleman--" and Josepha related the settling and marriage of Monsieur Thoul.

"And so, thanks to you, mademoiselle, the Baron has wanted nothing?"

"We have done our best to that end, madame."

"And where is he now?"

"About six months ago, Monsieur le Duc told me that the Baron, known to the notary by the name of Thoul, had drawn all the eight thousand francs that were to have been paid to him in fixed sums once a quarter," replied Josepha. "We have heard no more of the Baron, neither I nor Monsieur d'Herouville. Our lives are so full, we artists are so busy, that I really have not time to run after old Thoul. As it happens, for the last six months, Bijou, who works for me--his--what shall I say--?"

"His mistress," said Madame Hulot.

"His mistress," repeated Josepha, "has not been here. Mademoiselle Olympe Bijou is perhaps divorced. Divorce is common in the thirteenth arrondissement."

Josepha rose, and foraging among the rare plants in her stands, made a charming bouquet for Madame Hulot, whose expectations, it may be said, were by no means fulfilled. Like those worthy fold, who take men of genius to be a sort of monsters, eating, drinking, walking, and speaking unlike other people, the Baroness had hoped to see Josepha the opera singer, the witch, the amorous and amusing courtesan; she saw a calm and well-mannered woman, with the dignity of talent, the simplicity of an actress who knows herself to be at night a queen, and also, better than all, a woman of the town whose eyes, attitude, and demeanor paid full and ungrudging homage to the virtuous wife, the Mater dolorosa of the sacred hymn, and who was crowning her sorrows with flowers, as the Madonna is crowned in Italy.

"Madame," said the man-servant, reappearing at the end of half an hour, "Madame Bijou is on her way, but you are not to expect little Olympe. Your needle-woman, madame, is settled in life; she is married--"

"More or less?" said Josepha.

"No, madame, really married. She is at the head of a very fine business; she has married the owner of a large and fashionable shop, on which they have spent millions of francs, on the Boulevard des Italiens; and she has left the embroidery business to her sister and mother. She is Madame Grenouville. The fat tradesman--"

"A Crevel?"

"Yes, madame," said the man. "Well, he has settled thirty thousand francs a year on Mademoiselle Bijou by the marriage articles. And her elder sister, they say, is going to be married to a rich butcher."

"Your business looks rather hopeless, I am afraid," said Josepha to the Baroness. "Monsieur le Baron is no longer where I lodged him."

Ten minutes later Madame Bijou was announced. Josepha very prudently placed the Baroness in the boudoir, and drew the curtain over the door.

"You would scare her," said she to Madame Hulot. "She would let nothing out if she suspected that you were interested in the information. Leave me to catechise her. Hide there, and you will hear everything. It is a scene that is played quite as often in real life as on the stage--"

"Well, Mother Bijou," she said to an old woman dressed in tartan stuff, and who looked like a porter's wife in her Sunday best, "so you are all very happy? Your daughter is in luck."

"Oh, happy? As for that!--My daughter gives us a hundred francs a month, while she rides in a carriage and eats off silver plate--she is a millionary, is my daughter! Olympe might have lifted me above labor. To have to work at my age? Is that being good to me?"

"She ought not to be ungrateful, for she owes her beauty to you," replied Josepha; "but why did she not come to see me? It was I who placed her in ease by settling her with my uncle."

"Yes, madame, with old Monsieur Thoul, but he is very old and broken--"

"But what have you done with him? Is he with you? She was very foolish to leave him; he is worth millions now."

"Heaven above us!" cried the mother. "What did I tell her when she behaved so badly to him, and he as mild as milk, poor old fellow? Oh! didn't she just give it him hot?--Olympe was perverted, madame?"

"But how?"

"She got to know a claqueur, madame, saving your presence, a man paid to clap, you know, the grand nephew of an old mattress-picker of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. This good-for-naught, as all your good-looking fellows are, paid to make a piece go, is the cock of the walk out on the Boulevard du Temple, where he works up the new plays, and takes care that the actresses get a reception, as he calls it. First, he has a good breakfast in the morning; then, before the play, he dines, to be 'up to the mark,' as he says; in short, he is a born lover of billiards and drams. 'But that is not following a trade,' as I said to Olympe."

"It is a trade men follow, unfortunately," said Josepha.

"Well, the rascal turned Olympe's head, and he, madame, did not keep good company--when I tell you he was very near being nabbed by the police in a tavern where thieves meet. 'Wever, Monsieur Braulard, the leader of the claque, got him out of that. He wears gold earrings, and he lives by doing nothing, hanging on to women, who are fools about these good-looking scamps. He spent all the money Monsieur Thoul used to give the child.

"Then the business was going to grief; what embroidery brought in went out across the billiard table. 'Wever, the young fellow had a pretty sister, madame, who, like her brother, lived by hook and by crook, and no better than she should be neither, over in the students' quarter."

"One of the sluts at the Chaumiere," said Josepha.

"So, madame," said the old woman. "So Idamore, his name is Idamore, leastways that is what he calls himself, for his real name is Chardin --Idamore fancied that your uncle had a deal more money than he owned to, and he managed to send his sister Elodie--and that was a stage name he gave her--to send her to be a workwoman at our place, without my daughter's knowing who she was; and, gracious goodness! but that girl turned the whole place topsy-turvy; she got all those poor girls into mischief--impossible to whitewash them, saving your presence----

"And she was so sharp, she won over poor old Thoul, and took him away, and we don't know where, and left us in a pretty fix, with a lot of bills coming in. To this day as ever is we have not been able to settle up; but my daughter, who knows all about such things, keeps an eye on them as they fall due.--Then, when Idamore saw he had got hold of the old man, through his sister, you understand, he threw over my daughter, and now he has got hold of a little actress at the Funambules.--And that was how my daughter came to get married, as you will see--"

"But you must know where the mattress-picker lives?" said Josepha.

"What! old Chardin? As if he lived anywhere at all!--He is drunk by six in the morning; he makes a mattress once a month; he hangs about the wineshops all day; he plays at pools--"

"He plays at pools?" said Josepha.

"You do not understand, madame, pools of billiards, I mean, and he wins three or four a day, and then he drinks."

"Water out of the pools, I suppose?" said Josepha. "But if Idamore haunts the Boulevard, by inquiring through my friend Vraulard, we could find him."

"I don't know, madame; all this was six months ago. Idamore was one of the sort who are bound to find their way into the police courts, and from that to Melun--and the--who knows--?"

"To the prison yard!" said Josepha.

"Well, madame, you know everything," said the old woman, smiling. "Well, if my girl had never known that scamp, she would now be--Still, she was in luck, all the same, you will say, for Monsieur Grenouville fell so much in love with her that he married her--"

"And what brought that about?"

"Olympe was desperate, madame. When she found herself left in the lurch for that little actress--and she took a rod out of pickle for her, I can tell you; my word, but she gave her a dressing!--and when she had lost poor old Thoul, who worshiped her, she would have nothing more to say to the men. 'Wever, Monsieur Grenouville, who had been dealing largely with us--to the tune of two hundred embroidered China-crape shawls every quarter--he wanted to console her; but whether or no, she would not listen to anything without the mayor and the priest. 'I mean to be respectable,' said she, 'or perish!' and she stuck to it. Monsieur Grenouville consented to marry her, on condition of her giving us all up, and we agreed--"

"For a handsome consideration?" said Josepha, with her usual perspicacity.

"Yes, madame, ten thousand francs, and an allowance to my father, who is past work."

"I begged your daughter to make old Thoul happy, and she has thrown me over. That is not fair. I will take no interest in any one for the future! That is what comes of trying to do good! Benevolence certainly does not answer as a speculation!--Olympe ought, at least, to have given me notice of this jobbing. Now, if you find the old man Thoul within a fortnight, I will give you a thousand francs."

"It will be a hard task, my good lady; still, there are a good many five-franc pieces in a thousand francs, and I will try to earn your money."

"Good-morning, then, Madame Bijou."

On going into the boudoir, the singer found that Madame Hulot had fainted; but in spite of having lost consciousness, her nervous trembling kept her still perpetually shaking, as the pieces of a snake that has been cut up still wriggle and move. Strong salts, cold water, and all the ordinary remedies were applied to recall the Baroness to her senses, or rather, to the apprehension of her sorrows.

"Ah! mademoiselle, how far has he fallen!" cried she, recognizing Josepha, and finding that she was alone with her.

"Take heart, madame," replied the actress, who had seated herself on a cushion at Adeline's feet, and was kissing her hands. "We shall find him; and if he is in the mire, well, he must wash himself. Believe me, with people of good breeding it is a matter of clothes.--Allow me to make up for you the harm I have done you, for I see how much you are attached to your husband, in spite of his misconduct--or you should not have come here.--Well, you see, the poor man is so fond of women. If you had had a little of our dash, you would have kept him from running about the world; for you would have been what we can never be --all the women man wants.

"The State ought to subsidize a school of manners for honest women! But governments are so prudish! Still, they are guided by men, whom we privately guide. My word, I pity nations!

"But the matter in question is how you can be helped, and not to laugh at the world.--Well, madame, be easy, go home again, and do not worry. I will bring your Hector back to you as he was as a man of thirty."

"Ah, mademoiselle, let us go to see that Madame Grenouville," said the Baroness. "She surely knows something! Perhaps I may see the Baron this very day, and be able to snatch him at once from poverty and disgrace."

"Madame, I will show you the deep gratitude I feel towards you by not displaying the stage-singer Josepha, the Duc d'Herouville's mistress, in the company of the noblest, saintliest image of virtue. I respect you too much to be seen by your side. This is not acted humility; it is sincere homage. You make me sorry, madame, that I cannot tread in your footsteps, in spite of the thorns that tear your feet and hands. --But it cannot be helped! I am one with art, as you are one with virtue."

"Poor child!" said the Baroness, moved amid her own sorrows by a strange sense of compassionate sympathy; "I will pray to God for you; for you are the victim of society, which must have theatres. When you are old, repent--you will be heard if God vouchsafes to hear the prayers of a--"

"Of a martyr, madame," Josepha put in, and she respectfully kissed the Baroness' skirt.

But Adeline took the actress' hand, and drawing her towards her, kissed her on the forehead. Coloring with pleasure Josepha saw the Baroness into the hackney coach with the humblest politeness.

"It must be some visiting Lady of Charity," said the man-servant to the maid, "for she does not do so much for any one, not even for her dear friend Madame Jenny Cadine."

"Wait a few days," said she, "and you will see him, madame, or I renounce the God of my fathers--and that from a Jewess, you know, is a promise of success."

At the very time when Madame Hulot was calling on Josepha, Victorin, in his study, was receiving an old woman of about seventy-five, who, to gain admission to the lawyer, had used the terrible name of the head of the detective force. The man in waiting announced:

"Madame de Saint-Esteve."

"I have assumed one of my business names," said she, taking a seat.

Victorin felt a sort of internal chill at the sight of this dreadful old woman. Though handsomely dressed, she was terrible to look upon, for her flat, colorless, strongly-marked face, furrowed with wrinkles, expressed a sort of cold malignity. Marat, as a woman of that age, might have been like this creature, a living embodiment of the Reign of Terror.

This sinister old woman's small, pale eyes twinkled with a tiger's bloodthirsty greed. Her broad, flat nose, with nostrils expanded into oval cavities, breathed the fires of hell, and resembled the beak of some evil bird of prey. The spirit of intrigue lurked behind her low, cruel brow. Long hairs had grown from her wrinkled chin, betraying the masculine character of her schemes. Any one seeing that woman's face would have said that artists had failed in their conceptions of Mephistopheles.

"My dear sir," she began, with a patronizing air, "I have long since given up active business of any kind. What I have come to you to do, I have undertaken, for the sake of my dear nephew, whom I love more than I could love a son of my own.--Now, the Head of the Police--to whom the President of the Council said a few words in his ear as regards yourself, in talking to Monsieur Chapuzot--thinks as the police ought not to appear in a matter of this description, you understand. They gave my nephew a free hand, but my nephew will have nothing to say to it, except as before the Council; he will not be seen in it."

"Then your nephew is--"

"You have hit it, and I am rather proud of him," said she, interrupting the lawyer, "for he is my pupil, and he soon could teach his teacher.--We have considered this case, and have come to our own conclusions. Will you hand over thirty thousand francs to have the whole thing taken off your hands? I will make a clean sweep of all, and you need not pay till the job is done."

"Do you know the persons concerned?"

"No, my dear sir; I look for information from you. What we are told is, that a certain old idiot has fallen into the clutches of a widow. This widow, of nine-and-twenty, has played her cards so well, that she has forty thousand francs a year, of which she has robbed two fathers of families. She is now about to swallow down eighty thousand francs a year by marrying an old boy of sixty-one. She will thus ruin a respectable family, and hand over this vast fortune to the child of some lover by getting rid at once of the old husband.--That is the case as stated."

"Quite correct," said Victorin. "My father-in-law, Monsieur Crevel--"

"Formerly a perfumer, a mayor--yes, I live in his district under the name of Ma'ame Nourrisson," said the woman.

"The other person is Madame Marneffe."

"I do not know," said Madame de Saint-Esteve. "But within three days I will be in a position to count her shifts."

"Can you hinder the marriage?" asked Victorin.

"How far have they got?"

"To the second time of asking."

"We must carry off the woman.--To-day is Sunday--there are but three days, for they will be married on Wednesday, no doubt; it is impossible.--But she may be killed--"

Victorin Hulot started with an honest man's horror at hearing these five words uttered in cold blood.

"Murder?" said he. "And how could you do it?"

"For forty years, now, monsieur, we have played the part of fate," replied she, with terrible pride, "and do just what we will in Paris. More than one family--even in the Faubourg Saint-Germain--has told me all its secrets, I can tell you. I have made and spoiled many a match, I have destroyed many a will and saved many a man's honor. I have in there," and she tapped her forehead, "a store of secrets which are worth thirty-six thousand francs a year to me; and you--you will be one of my lambs, hoh! Could such a woman as I am be what I am if she revealed her ways and means? I act.

"Whatever I may do, sir, will be the result of an accident; you need feel no remorse. You will be like a man cured by a clairvoyant; by the end of a month, it seems all the work of Nature."

Victorin broke out in a cold sweat. The sight of an executioner would have shocked him less than this prolix and pretentious Sister of the Hulks. As he looked at her purple-red gown, she seemed to him dyed in blood.

"Madame, I do not accept the help of your experience and skill if success is to cost anybody's life, or the least criminal act is to come of it."

"You are a great baby, monsieur," replied the woman; "you wish to remain blameless in your own eyes, while you want your enemy to be overthrown."

Victorin shook his head in denial.

"Yes," she went on, "you want this Madame Marneffe to drop the prey she has between her teeth. But how do you expect to make a tiger drop his piece of beef? Can you do it by patting his back and saying, 'Poor Puss'? You are illogical. You want a battle fought, but you object to blows.--Well, I grant you the innocence you are so careful over. I have always found that there was material for hypocrisy in honesty! One day, three months hence, a poor priest will come to beg of you forty thousand francs for a pious work--a convent to be rebuilt in the Levant--in the desert.--If you are satisfied with your lot, give the good man the money. You will pay more than that into the treasury. It will be a mere trifle in comparison with what you will get, I can tell you."

She rose, standing on the broad feet that seemed to overflow her satin shoes; she smiled, bowed, and vanished.

"The Devil has a sister," said Victorin, rising.

He saw the hideous stranger to the door, a creature called up from the dens of the police, as on the stage a monster comes up from the third cellar at the touch of a fairy's wand in a ballet-extravaganza.

After finishing what he had to do at the Courts, Victorin went to call on Monsieur Chapuzot, the head of one of the most important branches of the Central Police, to make some inquiries about the stranger. Finding Monsieur Chapuzot alone in his office, Victorin thanked him for his help.

"You sent me an old woman who might stand for the incarnation of the criminal side of Paris."

Monsieur Chapuzot laid his spectacles on his papers and looked at the lawyer with astonishment.

"I should not have taken the liberty of sending anybody to see you without giving you notice beforehand, or a line of introduction," said he.

"Then it was Monsieur le Prefet--?"

"I think not," said Chapuzot. "The last time that the Prince de Wissembourg dined with the Minister of the Interior, he spoke to the Prefet of the position in which you find yourself--a deplorable position--and asked him if you could be helped in any friendly way. The Prefet, who was interested by the regrets his Excellency expressed as to this family affair, did me the honor to consult me about it.

"Ever since the present Prefet has held the reins of this department --so useful and so vilified--he has made it a rule that family matters are never to be interfered in. He is right in principle and in morality; but in practice he is wrong. In the forty-five years that I have served in the police, it did, from 1799 till 1815, great services in family concerns. Since 1820 a constitutional government and the press have completely altered the conditions of existence. So my advice, indeed, was not to intervene in such a case, and the Prefet did me the honor to agree with my remarks. The Head of the detective branch has orders, in my presence, to take no steps; so if you have had any one sent to you by him, he will be reprimanded. It might cost him his place. 'The Police will do this or that,' is easily said; the Police, the Police! But, my dear sir, the Marshal and the Ministerial Council do not know what the Police is. The Police alone knows the Police; but as for ours, only Fouche, Monsieur Lenoir, and Monsieur de Sartines have had any notion of it.--Everything is changed now; we are reduced and disarmed! I have seen many private disasters develop, which I could have checked with five grains of despotic power.--We shall be regretted by the very men who have crippled us when they, like you, stand face to face with some moral monstrosities, which ought to be swept away as we sweep away mud! In public affairs the Police is expected to foresee everything, or when the safety of the public is involved--but the family?--It is sacred! I would do my utmost to discover and hinder a plot against the King's life, I would see through the walls of a house; but as to laying a finger on a household, or peeping into private interests--never, so long as I sit in this office. I should be afraid."

"Of what?"

"Of the Press, Monsieur le Depute, of the left centre."

"What, then, can I do?" said Hulot, after a pause.

"Well, you are the Family," said the official. "That settles it; you can do what you please. But as to helping you, as to using the Police as an instrument of private feelings, and interests, how is it possible? There lies, you see, the secret of the persecution, necessary, but pronounced illegal, by the Bench, which was brought to bear against the predecessor of our present chief detective. Bibi-Lupin undertook investigations for the benefit of private persons. This might have led to great social dangers. With the means at his command, the man would have been formidable, an underlying fate--"

"But in my place?" said Hulot.

"Why, you ask my advice? You who sell it!" replied Monsieur Chapuzot. "Come, come, my dear sir, you are making fun of me."

Hulot bowed to the functionary, and went away without seeing that gentleman's almost imperceptible shrug as he rose to open the door.

"And he wants to be a statesman!" said Chapuzot to himself as he returned to his reports.

Victorin went home, still full of perplexities which he could confide to no one.

At dinner the Baroness joyfully announced to her children that within a month their father might be sharing their comforts, and end his days in peace among his family.

"Oh, I would gladly give my three thousand six hundred francs a year to see the Baron here!" cried Lisbeth. "But, my dear Adeline, do not dream beforehand of such happiness, I entreat you!"

"Lisbeth is right," said Celestine. "My dear mother, wait till the end."

The Baroness, all feeling and all hope, related her visit to Josepha, expressed her sense of the misery of such women in the midst of good fortune, and mentioned Chardin the mattress-picker, the father of the Oran storekeeper, thus showing that her hopes were not groundless.

By seven next morning Lisbeth had driven in a hackney coach to the Quai de la Tournelle, and stopped the vehicle at the corner of the Rue de Poissy.

"Go to the Rue des Bernardins," said she to the driver, "No. 7, a house with an entry and no porter. Go up to the fourth floor, ring at the door to the left, on which you will see 'Mademoiselle Chardin --Lace and shawls mended.' She will answer the door. Ask for the Chevalier. She will say he is out. Say in reply, 'Yes, I know, but find him, for his bonne is out on the quay in a coach, and wants to see him.'"

Twenty minutes later, an old man, who looked about eighty, with perfectly white hair, and a nose reddened by the cold, and a pale, wrinkled face like an old woman's, came shuffling slowly along in list slippers, a shiny alpaca overcoat hanging on his stooping shoulders, no ribbon at his buttonhole, the sleeves of an under-vest showing below his coat-cuffs, and his shirt-front unpleasantly dingy. He approached timidly, looked at the coach, recognized Lisbeth, and came to the window.

"Why, my dear cousin, what a state you are in!"

"Elodie keeps everything for herself," said Baron Hulot. "Those Chardins are a blackguard crew."

"Will you come home to us?"

"Oh, no, no!" cried the old man. "I would rather go to America."

"Adeline is on the scent."

"Oh, if only some one would pay my debts!" said the Baron, with a suspicious look, "for Samanon is after me."

"We have not paid up the arrears yet; your son still owes a hundred thousand francs."

"Poor boy!"

"And your pension will not be free before seven or eight months.--If you will wait a minute, I have two thousand francs here."

The Baron held out his hand with fearful avidity.

"Give it me, Lisbeth, and may God reward you! Give it me; I know where to go."

"But you will tell me, old wretch?"

"Yes, yes. Then I can wait eight months, for I have discovered a little angel, a good child, an innocent thing not old enough to be depraved."

"Do not forget the police-court," said Lisbeth, who flattered herself that she would some day see Hulot there.

"No.--It is in the Rue de Charonne," said the Baron, "a part of the town where no fuss is made about anything. No one will ever find me there. I am called Pere Thorec, Lisbeth, and I shall be taken for a retired cabinet-maker; the girl is fond of me, and I will not allow my back to be shorn any more."

"No, that has been done," said Lisbeth, looking at his coat. "Supposing I take you there."

Baron Hulot got into the coach, deserting Mademoiselle Elodie without taking leave of her, as he might have tossed aside a novel he had finished.

In half an hour, during which Baron Hulot talked to Lisbeth of nothing but little Atala Judici--for he had fallen by degrees to those base passions that ruin old men--she set him down with two thousand francs in his pocket, in the Rue de Charonne, Faubourg Saint-Antoine, at the door of a doubtful and sinister-looking house.

"Good-day, cousin; so now you are to be called Thorec, I suppose? Send none but commissionaires if you need me, and always take them from different parts."

"Trust me! Oh, I am really very lucky!" said the Baron, his face beaming with the prospect of new and future happiness.

"No one can find him there," said Lisbeth; and she paid the coach at the Boulevard Beaumarchais, and returned to the Rue Louis-le-Grand in the omnibus.

On the following day Crevel was announced at the hour when all the family were together in the drawing-room, just after breakfast. Celestine flew to throw her arms round her father's neck, and behaved as if she had seen him only the day before, though in fact he had not called there for more than two years.

"Good-morning, father," said Victorin, offering his hand.

"Good-morning, children," said the pompous Crevel. "Madame la Baronne, I throw myself at your feet! Good Heavens, how the children grow! they are pushing us off the perch--'Grand-pa,' they say, 'we want our turn in the sunshine.'--Madame la Comtesse, you are as lovely as ever," he went on, addressing Hortense.--"Ah, ha! and here is the best of good money: Cousin Betty, the Wise Virgin."

"Why, you are really very comfortable here," said he, after scattering these greetings with a cackle of loud laughter that hardly moved the rubicund muscles of his broad face.

He looked at his daughter with some contempt.

"My dear Celestine, I will make you a present of all my furniture out of the Rue des Saussayes; it will just do here. Your drawing-room wants furnishing up.--Ha! there is that little rogue Wenceslas. Well, and are we very good children, I wonder? You must have pretty manners, you know."

"To make up for those who have none," said Lisbeth.

"That sarcasm, my dear Lisbeth, has lost its sting. I am going, my dear children, to put an end to the false position in which I have so long been placed; I have come, like a good father, to announce my approaching marriage without any circumlocution."

"You have a perfect right to marry," said Victorin. "And for my part, I give you back the promise you made me when you gave me the hand of my dear Celestine--"

"What promise?" said Crevel.

"Not to marry," replied the lawyer. "You will do me the justice to allow that I did not ask you to pledge yourself, that you gave your word quite voluntarily and in spite of my desire, for I pointed out to you at the time that you were unwise to bind yourself."

"Yes, I do remember, my dear fellow," said Crevel, ashamed of himself. "But, on my honor, if you will but live with Madame Crevel, my children, you will find no reason to repent.--Your good feeling touches me, Victorin, and you will find that generosity to me is not unrewarded.--Come, by the Poker! welcome your stepmother and come to the wedding."

"But you have not told us the lady's name, papa," said Celestine.

"Why, it is an open secret," replied Crevel. "Do not let us play at guess who can! Lisbeth must have told you."

"My dear Monsieur Crevel," replied Lisbeth, "there are certain names we never utter here--"

"Well, then, it is Madame Marneffe."

"Monsieur Crevel," said the lawyer very sternly, "neither my wife nor I can be present at that marriage; not out of interest, for I spoke in all sincerity just now. Yes, I am most happy to think that you may find happiness in this union; but I act on considerations of honor and good feeling which you must understand, and which I cannot speak of here, as they reopen wounds still ready to bleed----"

The Baroness telegraphed a signal to Hortense, who tucked her little one under her arm, saying, "Come Wenceslas, and have your bath! --Good-bye, Monsieur Crevel."

The Baroness also bowed to Crevel without a word; and Crevel could not help smiling at the child's astonishment when threatened with this impromptu tubbing.

"You, monsieur," said Victorin, when he found himself alone with Lisbeth, his wife, and his father-in-law, "are about to marry a woman loaded with the spoils of my father; it was she who, in cold blood, brought him down to such depths; a woman who is the son-in-law's mistress after ruining the father-in-law; who is the cause of constant grief to my sister!--And you fancy that I shall seem to sanction your madness by my presence? I deeply pity you, dear Monsieur Crevel; you have no family feeling; you do not understand the unity of the honor which binds the members of it together. There is no arguing with passion--as I have too much reason to know. The slaves of their passions are as deaf as they are blind. Your daughter Celestine has too strong a sense of her duty to proffer a word of reproach."

"That would, indeed, be a pretty thing!" cried Crevel, trying to cut short this harangue.

"Celestine would not be my wife if she made the slightest remonstrance," the lawyer went on. "But I, at least, may try to stop you before you step over the precipice, especially after giving you ample proof of my disinterestedness. It is not your fortune, it is you that I care about. Nay, to make it quite plain to you, I may add, if it were only to set your mind at ease with regard to your marriage contract, that I am now in a position which leaves me with nothing to wish for--"

"Thanks to me!" exclaimed Crevel, whose face was purple.

"Thanks to Celestine's fortune," replied Victorin. "And if you regret having given to your daughter as a present from yourself, a sum which is not half what her mother left her, I can only say that we are prepared to give it back."

"And do you not know, my respected son-in-law," said Crevel, striking an attitude, "that under the shelter of my name Madame Marneffe is not called upon to answer for her conduct excepting as my wife--as Madame Crevel?"

"That is, no doubt, quite the correct thing," said the lawyer; "very generous so far as the affections are concerned and the vagaries of passion; but I know of no name, nor law, nor title that can shelter the theft of three hundred thousand francs so meanly wrung from my father!--I tell you plainly, my dear father-in-law, your future wife is unworthy of you, she is false to you, and is madly in love with my brother-in-law, Steinbock, whose debts she had paid."

"It is I who paid them!"

"Very good," said Hulot; "I am glad for Count Steinbock's sake; he may some day repay the money. But he is loved, much loved, and often--"

"Loved!" cried Crevel, whose face showed his utter bewilderment. "It is cowardly, and dirty, and mean, and cheap, to calumniate a woman! --When a man says such things, monsieur, he must bring proof."

"I will bring proof."

"I shall expect it."

"By the day after to-morrow, my dear Monsieur Crevel, I shall be able to tell you the day, the hour, the very minute when I can expose the horrible depravity of your future wife."

"Very well; I shall be delighted," said Crevel, who had recovered himself.

"Good-bye, my children, for the present; good-bye, Lisbeth."

"See him out, Lisbeth," said Celestine in an undertone.

"And is this the way you take yourself off?" cried Lisbeth to Crevel.

"Ah, ha!" said Crevel, "my son-in-law is too clever by half; he is getting on. The Courts and the Chamber, judicial trickery and political dodges, are making a man of him with a vengeance!--So he knows I am to be married on Wednesday, and on a Sunday my gentleman proposes to fix the hour, within three days, when he can prove that my wife is unworthy of me. That is a good story!--Well, I am going back to sign the contract. Come with me, Lisbeth--yes, come. They will never know. I meant to have left Celestine forty thousand francs a year; but Hulot has just behaved in a way to alienate my affection for ever."

"Give me ten minutes, Pere Crevel; wait for me in your carriage at the gate. I will make some excuse for going out."

"Very well--all right."

"My dears," said Lisbeth, who found all the family reassembled in the drawing-room, "I am going with Crevel: the marriage contract is to be signed this afternoon, and I shall hear what he has settled. It will probably be my last visit to that woman. Your father is furious; he will disinherit you--"

"His vanity will prevent that," said the son-in-law. "He was bent on owning the estate of Presles, and he will keep it; I know him. Even if he were to have children, Celestine would still have half of what he might leave; the law forbids his giving away all his fortune.--Still, these questions are nothing to me; I am only thinking of our honor. --Go then, cousin," and he pressed Lisbeth's hand, "and listen carefully to the contract."

Twenty minutes after, Lisbeth and Crevel reached the house in the Rue Barbet, where Madame Marneffe was awaiting, in mild impatience, the result of a step taken by her commands. Valerie had in the end fallen a prey to the absorbing love which, once in her life, masters a woman's heart. Wenceslas was its object, and, a failure as an artist, he became in Madame Marneffe's hands a lover so perfect that he was to her what she had been to Baron Hulot.

Valerie was holding a slipper in one hand, and Steinbock clasped the other, while her head rested on his shoulder. The rambling conversation in which they had been engaged ever since Crevel went out may be ticketed, like certain lengthy literary efforts of our day, "All rights reserved," for it cannot be reproduced. This masterpiece of personal poetry naturally brought a regret to the artist's lips, and he said, not without some bitterness:

"What a pity it is that I married; for if I had but waited, as Lisbeth told me, I might now have married you."

"Who but a Pole would wish to make a wife of a devoted mistress?" cried Valerie. "To change love into duty, and pleasure into a bore."

"I know you to be so fickle," replied Steinbock. "Did I not hear you talking to Lisbeth of that Brazilian, Baron Montes?"

"Do you want to rid me of him?"

"It would be the only way to hinder his seeing you," said the ex-sculptor.

"Let me tell you, my darling--for I tell you everything," said Valerie --"I was saving him up for a husband.--The promises I have made to that man!--Oh, long before I knew you," said she, in reply to a movement from Wenceslas. "And those promises, of which he avails himself to plague me, oblige me to get married almost secretly; for if he should hear that I am marrying Crevel, he is the sort of man that --that would kill me."

"Oh, as to that!" said Steinbock, with a scornful expression, which conveyed that such a danger was small indeed for a woman beloved by a Pole.

And in the matter of valor there is no brag or bravado in a Pole, so thoroughly and seriously brave are they all.

"And that idiot Crevel," she went on, "who wants to make a great display and indulge his taste for inexpensive magnificence in honor of the wedding, places me in difficulties from which I see no escape."

Could Valerie confess to this man, whom she adored, that since the discomfiture of Baron Hulot, this Baron Henri Montes had inherited the privilege of calling on her at all hours of the day or night; and that, notwithstanding her cleverness, she was still puzzled to find a cause of quarrel in which the Brazilian might seem to be solely in the wrong? She knew the Baron's almost savage temper--not unlike Lisbeth's --too well not to quake as she thought of this Othello of Rio de Janeiro.

As the carriage drove up, Steinbock released Valerie, for his arm was round her waist, and took up a newspaper, in which he was found absorbed. Valerie was stitching with elaborate care at the slippers she was working for Crevel.

"How they slander her!" whispered Lisbeth to Crevel, pointing to this picture as they opened the door. "Look at her hair--not in the least tumbled. To hear Victorin, you might have expected to find two turtle-doves in a nest."

"My dear Lisbeth," cried Crevel, in his favorite position, "you see that to turn Lucretia into Aspasia, you have only to inspire a passion!"

"And have I not always told you," said Lisbeth, "that women like a burly profligate like you?"

"And she would be most ungrateful, too," said Crevel; "for as to the money I have spent here, Grindot and I alone can tell!"

And he waved a hand at the staircase.

In decorating this house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc d'Herouville had placed Josepha's villa. But Crevel, incapable of understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had found it impossible to embody his architectural dream.

The difference between Josepha's house and that in the Rue Barbet was just that between the individual stamp on things and commonness. The objects you admired at Crevel's were to be bought in any shop. These two types of luxury are divided by the river Million. A mirror, if unique, is worth six thousand francs; a mirror designed by a manufacturer who turns them out by the dozen costs five hundred. A genuine lustre by Boulle will sell at a public auction for three thousand francs; the same thing reproduced by casting may be made for a thousand or twelve hundred; one is archaeologically what a picture by Raphael is in painting, the other is a copy. At what would you value a copy of a Raphael? Thus Crevel's mansion was a splendid example of the luxury of idiots, while Josepha's was a perfect model of an artist's home.

"War is declared," said Crevel, going up to Madame Marneffe.

She rang the bell.

"Go and find Monsieur Berthier," said she to the man-servant, "and do not return without him. If you had succeeded," said she, embracing Crevel, "we would have postponed our happiness, my dear Daddy, and have given a really splendid entertainment; but when a whole family is set against a match, my dear, decency requires that the wedding shall be a quiet one, especially when the lady is a widow."

"On the contrary, I intend to make a display of magnificence a la Louis XIV.," said Crevel, who of late had held the eighteenth century rather cheap. "I have ordered new carriages; there is one for monsieur and one for madame, two neat coupes; and a chaise, a handsome traveling carriage with a splendid hammercloth, on springs that tremble like Madame Hulot."

"Oh, ho! You intend?--Then you have ceased to be my lamb?--No, no, my friend, you will do what I intend. We will sign the contract quietly--just ourselves--this afternoon. Then, on Wednesday, we will be regularly married, really married, in mufti, as my poor mother would have said. We will walk to church, plainly dressed, and have only a low mass. Our witnesses are Stidmann, Steinbock, Vignon, and Massol, all wide-awake men, who will be at the mairie by chance, and who will so far sacrifice themselves as to attend mass.

"Your colleague will perform the civil marriage, for once in a way, as early as half-past nine. Mass is at ten; we shall be at home to breakfast by half-past eleven.

"I have promised our guests that we will sit at table till the evening. There will be Bixiou, your old official chum du Tillet, Lousteau, Vernisset, Leon de Lora, Vernou, all the wittiest men in Paris, who will not know that we are married. We will play them a little trick, we will get just a little tipsy, and Lisbeth must join us. I want her to study matrimony; Bixiou shall make love to her, and --and enlighten her darkness."

For two hours Madame Marneffe went on talking nonsense, and Crevel made this judicious reflection:

"How can so light-hearted a creature be utterly depraved? Feather-brained, yes! but wicked? Nonsense!"

"Well, and what did the young people say about me?" said Valerie to Crevel at a moment when he sat down by her on the sofa. "All sorts of horrors?"

"They will have it that you have a criminal passion for Wenceslas --you, who are virtue itself."

"I love him!--I should think so, my little Wenceslas!" cried Valerie, calling the artist to her, taking his face in her hands, and kissing his forehead. "A poor boy with no fortune, and no one to depend on! Cast off by a carrotty giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas is my poet, and I love him as if he were my own child, and make no secret of it. Bah! your virtuous women see evil everywhere and in everything. Bless me, could they not sit by a man without doing wrong? I am a spoilt child who has had all it ever wanted, and bonbons no longer excite me.--Poor things! I am sorry for them!

"And who slandered me so?"

"Victorin," said Crevel.

"Then why did you not stop his mouth, the odious legal macaw! with the story of the two hundred thousand francs and his mamma?"

"Oh, the Baroness had fled," said Lisbeth.

"They had better take care, Lisbeth," said Madame Marneffe, with a frown. "Either they will receive me and do it handsomely, and come to their stepmother's house--all the party!--or I will see them in lower depths than the Baron has reached, and you may tell them I said so! --At last I shall turn nasty. On my honor, I believe that evil is the scythe with which to cut down the good."

At three o'clock Monsieur Berthier, Cardot's successor, read the marriage-contract, after a short conference with Crevel, for some of the articles were made conditional on the action taken by Monsieur and Madame Victorin Hulot.

Crevel settled on his wife a fortune consisting, in the first place, of forty thousand francs in dividends on specified securities; secondly, of the house and all its contents; and thirdly, of three million francs not invested. He also assigned to his wife every benefit allowed by law; he left all the property free of duty; and in the event of their dying without issue, each devised to the survivor the whole of their property and real estate.

By this arrangement the fortune left to Celestine and her husband was reduced to two millions of francs in capital. If Crevel and his second wife should have children, Celestine's share was limited to five hundred thousand francs, as the life-interest in the rest was to accrue to Valerie. This would be about the ninth part of his whole real and personal estate.

Lisbeth returned to dine in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, despair written on her face. She explained and bewailed the terms of the marriage-contract, but found Celestine and her husband insensible to the disastrous news.

"You have provoked your father, my children. Madame Marneffe swears that you shall receive Monsieur Crevel's wife and go to her house," said she.

"Never!" said Victorin.

"Never!" said Celestine.

"Never!" said Hortense.

Lisbeth was possessed by the wish to crush the haughty attitude assumed by all the Hulots.

"She seems to have arms that she can turn against you," she replied. "I do not know all about it, but I shall find out. She spoke vaguely of some history of two hundred thousand francs in which Adeline is implicated."

The Baroness fell gently backward on the sofa she was sitting on in a fit of hysterical sobbing.

"Go there, go, my children!" she cried. "Receive the woman! Monsieur Crevel is an infamous wretch. He deserves the worst punishment imaginable.--Do as the woman desires you! She is a monster--she knows all!"

After gasping out these words with tears and sobs, Madame Hulot collected her strength to go to her room, leaning on her daughter and Celestine.

"What is the meaning of all this?" cried Lisbeth, left alone with Victorin.

The lawyer stood rigid, in very natural dismay, and did not hear her.

"What is the matter, my dear Victorin?"

"I am horrified!" said he, and his face scowled darkly. "Woe to anybody who hurts my mother! I have no scruples then. I would crush that woman like a viper if I could!--What, does she attack my mother's life, my mother's honor?"

"She said, but do not repeat it, my dear Victorin--she said you should all fall lower even than your father. And she scolded Crevel roundly for not having shut your mouths with this secret that seems to be such a terror to Adeline."

A doctor was sent for, for the Baroness was evidently worse. He gave her a draught containing a large dose of opium, and Adeline, having swallowed it, fell into a deep sleep; but the whole family were greatly alarmed.

Early next morning Victorin went out, and on his way to the Courts called at the Prefecture of the Police, where he begged Vautrin, the head of the detective department, to send him Madame de Saint-Esteve.

"We are forbidden, monsieur, to meddle in your affairs; but Madame de Saint-Esteve is in business, and will attend to your orders," replied this famous police officer.

On his return home, the unhappy lawyer was told that his mother's reason was in danger. Doctor Bianchon, Doctor Larabit, and Professor Angard had met in consultation, and were prepared to apply heroic remedies to hinder the rush of blood to the head. At the moment when Victorin was listening to Doctor Bianchon, who was giving him, at some length, his reasons for hoping that the crisis might be got over, the man-servant announced that a client, Madame de Saint-Esteve, was waiting to see him. Victorin left Bianchon in the middle of a sentence and flew downstairs like a madman.

"Is there any hereditary lunacy in the family?" said Bianchon, addressing Larabit.

The doctors departed, leaving a hospital attendant, instructed by them, to watch Madame Hulot.

"A whole life of virtue!----" was the only sentence the sufferer had spoken since the attack.

Lisbeth never left Adeline's bedside; she sat up all night, and was much admired by the two younger women.

"Well, my dear Madame de Saint-Esteve," said Victorin, showing the dreadful old woman into his study and carefully shutting the doors, "how are we getting on?"

"Ah, ha! my dear friend," said she, looking at Victorin with cold irony. "So you have thought things over?"

"Have you done anything?"

"Will you pay fifty thousand francs?"

"Yes," replied Victorin, "for we must get on. Do you know that by one single phrase that woman has endangered my mother's life and reason? So, I say, get on."

"We have got on!" replied the old woman.

"Well?" cried Victorin, with a gulp.

"Well, you do not cry off the expenses?"

"On the contrary."

"They run up to twenty-three thousand francs already."

Victorin looked helplessly at the woman.

"Well, could we hoodwink you, you, one of the shining lights of the law?" said she. "For that sum we have secured a maid's conscience and a picture by Raphael.--It is not dear."

Hulot, still bewildered, sat with wide open eyes.

"Well, then," his visitor went on, "we have purchased the honesty of Mademoiselle Reine Tousard, a damsel from whom Madame Marneffe has no secrets--"

"I understand!"

"But if you shy, say so."

"I will play blindfold," he replied. "My mother has told me that that couple deserve the worst torments--"

"The rack is out of date," said the old woman.

"You answer for the result?"

"Leave it all to me," said the woman; "your vengeance is simmering."

She looked at the clock; it was six.

"Your avenger is dressing; the fires are lighted at the Rocher de Cancale; the horses are pawing the ground; my irons are getting hot. --Oh, I know your Madame Marneffe by heart!--Everything is ready. And there are some boluses in the rat-trap; I will tell you to-morrow morning if the mouse is poisoned. I believe she will be; good evening, my son."

"Good-bye, madame."

"Do you know English?"

"Yes."

"Well, my son, thou shalt be King. That is to say, you shall come into your inheritance," said the dreadful old witch, foreseen by Shakespeare, and who seemed to know her Shakespeare.

She left Hulot amazed at the door of his study.

"The consultation is for to-morrow!" said she, with the gracious air of a regular client.

She saw two persons coming, and wished to pass in their eyes a pinchbeck countess.

"What impudence!" thought Hulot, bowing to his pretended client.

Baron Montes de Montejanos was a lion, but a lion not accounted for. Fashionable Paris, Paris of the turf and of the town, admired the ineffable waistcoats of this foreign gentleman, his spotless patent-leather boots, his incomparable sticks, his much-coveted horses, and the negro servants who rode the horses and who were entirely slaves and most consumedly thrashed.

His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but he was always seen alone. When he went to "first nights," he was in a stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any pretty woman of the world. To pass his time he played whist at the Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of Combabus.

Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious Carabine, with a large party of lions and lionesses, had invented this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Massol, as being on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote, preserved in Rollin's Ancient History, concerning Combabus, that voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a King of Assyria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia, and other geographical divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage, who continued the work of d'Anville, the creator of the East of antiquity. This nickname, which gave Carabine's guests laughter for a quarter of an hour, gave rise to a series of over-free jests, to which the Academy could not award the Montyon prize; but among which the name was taken up, to rest thenceforth on the curly mane of the handsome Baron, called by Josepha the splendid Brazilian--as one might say a splendid Catoxantha.

Carabine, the loveliest of her tribe, whose delicate beauty and amusing wit had snatched the sceptre of the Thirteenth Arrondissement from the hands of Mademoiselle Turquet, better known by the name of Malaga--Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet (this was her real name) was to du Tillet the banker what Josepha Mirah was to the Duc d'Herouville.

Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at about seven o'clock:

"If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the Rocher de Cancale and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether he has a mistress.--I bet that he has, and I should like to win."

"He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call," replied du Tillet. "We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters--the youngster Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan."

At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill in bank-notes. A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims; waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.

Five guests had arrived, and were waiting for nine more. These were first and foremost Bixiou, still flourishing in 1843, the salt of every intellectual dish, always supplied with fresh wit--a phenomenon as rare in Paris as virtue is; Leon de Lora, the greatest living painter of landscape and the sea who has this great advantage over all his rivals, that he has never fallen below his first successes. The courtesans could never dispense with these two kings of ready wit. No supper, no dinner, was possible without them.

Seraphine Sinet, dite Carabine, as the mistress en titre of the Amphitryon, was one of the first to arrive; and the brilliant lighting showed off her shoulders, unrivaled in Paris, her throat, as round as if turned in a lathe, without a crease, her saucy face, and dress of satin brocade in two shades of blue, trimmed with Honiton lace enough to have fed a whole village for a month.

Pretty Jenny Cadine, not acting that evening, came in a dress of incredible splendor; her portrait is too well known to need any description. A party is always a Longchamps of evening dress for these ladies, each anxious to win the prize for her millionaire by thus announcing to her rivals:

"This is the price I am worth!"

A third woman, evidently at the initial stage of her career, gazed, almost shamefaced, at the luxury of her two established and wealthy companions. Simply dressed in white cashmere trimmed with blue, her head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the old-fashioned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given the charm of ineptitude to her fair hair. Still unaccustomed to any finery, she showed the timidity--to use a hackneyed phrase --inseparable from a first appearance. She had come from Valognes to find in Paris some use for her distracting youthfulness, her innocence that might have stirred the senses of a dying man, and her beauty, worthy to hold its own with any that Normandy has ever supplied to the theatres of the capital. The lines of that unblemished face were the ideal of angelic purity. Her milk-white skin reflected the light like a mirror. The delicate pink in her cheeks might have been laid on with a brush. She was called Cydalise, and, as will be seen, she was an important pawn in the game played by Ma'ame Nourrisson to defeat Madame Marneffe.

"Your arm is not a match for your name, my child," said Jenny Cadine, to whom Carabine had introduced this masterpiece of sixteen, having brought her with her.

And, in fact, Cydalise displayed to public admiration a fine pair of arms, smooth and satiny, but red with healthy young blood.

"What do you want for her?" said Jenny Cadine, in an undertone to Carabine.

"A fortune."

"What are you going to do with her?"

"Well--Madame Combabus!"

"And what are you to get for such a job?"

"Guess."

"A service of plate?"

"I have three."

"Diamonds?"

"I am selling them."

"A green monkey?"

"No. A picture by Raphael."

"What maggot is that in your brain?"

"Josepha makes me sick with her pictures," said Carabine. "I want some better than hers."

Du Tillet came with the Brazilian, the hero of the feast; the Duc d'Herouville followed with Josepha. The singer wore a plain velvet gown, but she had on a necklace worth a hundred and twenty thousand francs, pearls hardly distinguishable from her skin like white camellia petals. She had stuck one scarlet camellia in her black hair --a patch--the effect was dazzling, and she had amused herself by putting eleven rows of pearls on each arm. As she shook hands with Jenny Cadine, the actress said, "Lend me your mittens!"

Josepha unclasped them one by one and handed them to her friend on a plate.

"There's style!" said Carabine. "Quite the Duchess! You have robbed the ocean to dress the nymph, Monsieur le Duc," she added turning to the little Duc d'Herouville.

The actress took two of the bracelets; she clasped the other twenty on the singer's beautiful arms, which she kissed.

Lousteau, the literary cadger, la Palferine and Malaga, Massol, Vauvinet, and Theodore Gaillard, a proprietor of one of the most important political newspapers, completed the party. The Duc d'Herouville, polite to everybody, as a fine gentleman knows how to be, greeted the Comte de la Palferine with the particular nod which, while it does not imply either esteem or intimacy, conveys to all the world, "We are of the same race, the same blood--equals!"--And this greeting, the shibboleth of the aristocracy, was invented to be the despair of the upper citizen class.

Carabine placed Combabus on her left, and the Duc d'Herouville on her right. Cydalise was next to the Brazilian, and beyond her was Bixiou. Malaga sat by the Duke.

Oysters appeared at seven o'clock; at eight they were drinking iced punch. Every one is familiar with the bill of fare of such a banquet. By nine o'clock they were talking as people talk after forty-two bottles of various wines, drunk by fourteen persons. Dessert was on the table, the odious dessert of the month of April. Of all the party, the only one affected by the heady atmosphere was Cydalise, who was humming a tune. None of the party, with the exception of the poor country girl, had lost their reason; the drinkers and the women were the experienced elite of the society that sups. Their wits were bright, their eyes glistened, but with no loss of intelligence, though the talk drifted into satire, anecdote, and gossip. Conversation, hitherto confined to the inevitable circle of racing, horses, hammerings on the Bourse, the different occupations of the lions themselves, and the scandals of the town, showed a tendency to break up into intimate tete-a-tete, the dialogues of two hearts.

And at this stage, at a signal from Carabine to Leon de Lora, Bixiou, la Palferine, and du Tillet, love came under discussion.

"A doctor in good society never talks of medicine, true nobles never speak of their ancestors, men of genius do not discuss their works," said Josepha; "why should we talk business? If I got the opera put off in order to dine here, it was assuredly not to work.--So let us change the subject, dear children."

"But we are speaking of real love, my beauty," said Malaga, "of the love that makes a man fling all to the dogs--father, mother, wife, children--and retire to Clichy."

"Talk away, then, 'don't know yer,'" said the singer.

The slang words, borrowed from the Street Arab, and spoken by these women, may be a poem on their lips, helped by the expression of the eyes and face.

"What, do not I love you, Josepha?" said the Duke in a low voice.

"You, perhaps, may love me truly," said she in his ear, and she smiled. "But I do not love you in the way they describe, with such love as makes the world dark in the absence of the man beloved. You are delightful to me, useful--but not indispensable; and if you were to throw me over to-morrow, I could have three dukes for one."

"Is true love to be found in Paris?" asked Leon de Lora. "Men have not even time to make a fortune; how can they give themselves over to true love, which swamps a man as water melts sugar? A man must be enormously rich to indulge in it, for love annihilates him--for instance, like our Brazilian friend over there. As I said long ago, 'Extremes defeat--themselves.' A true lover is like an eunuch; women have ceased to exist for him. He is mystical; he is like the true Christian, an anchorite of the desert!--See our noble Brazilian."

Every one at table looked at Henri Montes de Montejanos, who was shy at finding every eye centred on him.

"He has been feeding there for an hour without discovering, any more than an ox at pasture, that he is sitting next to--I will not say, in such company, the loveliest--but the freshest woman in all Paris."

"Everything is fresh here, even the fish; it is what the house is famous for," said Carabine.

Baron Montes looked good-naturedly at the painter, and said:

"Very good! I drink to your very good health," and bowing to Leon de Lora, he lifted his glass of port wine and drank it with much dignity.

"Are you then truly in love?" asked Malaga of her neighbor, thus interpreting his toast.

The Brazilian refilled his glass, bowed to Carabine, and drank again.

"To the lady's health then!" said the courtesan, in such a droll tone that Lora, du Tillet, and Bixiou burst out laughing.

The Brazilian sat like a bronze statue. This impassibility provoked Carabine. She knew perfectly well that Montes was devoted to Madame Marneffe, but she had not expected this dogged fidelity, this obstinate silence of conviction.

A woman is as often gauged by the attitude of her lover as a man is judged from the tone of his mistress. The Baron was proud of his attachment to Valerie, and of hers to him; his smile had, to these experienced connoisseurs, a touch of irony; he was really grand to look upon; wine had not flushed him; and his eyes, with their peculiar lustre as of tarnished gold, kept the secrets of his soul. Even Carabine said to herself:

"What a woman she must be! How she has sealed up that heart!"

"He is a rock!" said Bixiou in an undertone, imagining that the whole thing was a practical joke, and never suspecting the importance to Carabine of reducing this fortress.

While this conversation, apparently so frivolous, was going on at Carabine's right, the discussion of love was continued on her left between the Duc d'Herouville, Lousteau, Josepha, Jenny Cadine, and Massol. They were wondering whether such rare phenomena were the result of passion, obstinacy, or affection. Josepha, bored to death by it all, tried to change the subject.

"You are talking of what you know nothing about. Is there a man among you who ever loved a woman--a woman beneath him--enough to squander his fortune and his children's, to sacrifice his future and blight his past, to risk going to the hulks for robbing the Government, to kill an uncle and a brother, to let his eye be so effectually blinded that he did not even perceive that it was done to hinder his seeing the abyss into which, as a crowning jest, he was being driven? Du Tillet has a cash-box under his left breast; Leon de Lora has his wit; Bixiou would laugh at himself for a fool if he loved any one but himself; Massol has a minister's portfolio in the place of a heart; Lousteau can have nothing but viscera, since he could endure to be thrown over by Madame de Baudraye; Monsieur le Duc is too rich to prove his love by his ruin; Vauvinet is not in it--I do not regard a bill-broker as one of the human race; and you have never loved, nor I, nor Jenny Cadine, nor Malaga. For my part, I never but once even saw the phenomenon I have described. It was," and she turned to Jenny Cadine, "that poor Baron Hulot, whom I am going to advertise for like a lost dog, for I want to find him."

"Oh, ho!" said Carabine to herself, and looking keenly at Josepha, "then Madame Nourrisson has two pictures by Raphael, since Josepha is playing my hand!"

"Poor fellow," said Vauvinet, "he was a great man! Magnificent! And what a figure, what a style, the air of Francis I.! What a volcano! and how full of ingenious ways of getting money! He must be looking for it now, wherever he is, and I make no doubt he extracts it even from the walls built of bones that you may see in the suburbs of Paris near the city gates--"

"And all that," said Bixiou, "for that little Madame Marneffe! There is a precious hussy for you!"

"She is just going to marry my friend Crevel," said du Tillet.

"And she is madly in love with my friend Steinbock," Leon de Lora put in.

These three phrases were like so many pistol-shots fired point-blank at Montes. He turned white, and the shock was so painful that he rose with difficulty.

"You are a set of blackguards!" cried he. "You have no right to speak the name of an honest woman in the same breath with those fallen creatures--above all, not to make it a mark for your slander!"

He was interrupted by unanimous bravos and applause. Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Vauvinet, du Tillet, and Massol set the example, and there was a chorus.

"Hurrah for the Emperor!" said Bixiou.

"Crown him! crown him!" cried Vauvinet.

"Three groans for such a good dog! Hurrah for Brazil!" cried Lousteau.

"So, my copper-colored Baron, it is our Valerie that you love; and you are not disgusted?" said Leon de Lora.

"His remark is not parliamentary, but it is grand!" observed Massol.

"But, my most delightful customer," said du Tillet, "you were recommended to me; I am your banker; your innocence reflects on my credit."

"Yes, tell me, you are a reasonable creature----" said the Brazilian to the banker.

"Thanks on behalf of the company," said Bixiou with a bow.

"Tell me the real facts," Montes went on, heedless of Bixiou's interjection.

"Well, then," replied du Tillet, "I have the honor to tell you that I am asked to the Crevel wedding."

"Ah, ha! Combabus holds a brief for Madame Marneffe!" said Josepha, rising solemnly.

She went round to Montes with a tragic look, patted him kindly on the head, looked at him for a moment with comical admiration, and nodded sagely.

"Hulot was the first instance of love through fire and water," said she; "this is the second. But it ought not to count, as it comes from the Tropics."

Montes had dropped into his chair again, when Josepha gently touched his forehead, and looked at du Tillet as he said:

"If I am the victim of a Paris jest, if you only wanted to get at my secret----" and he sent a flashing look round the table, embracing all the guests in a flaming glance that blazed with the sun of Brazil,--"I beg of you as a favor to tell me so," he went on, in a tone of almost childlike entreaty; "but do not vilify the woman I love."

"Nay, indeed," said Carabine in a low voice; "but if, on the contrary, you are shamefully betrayed, cheated, tricked by Valerie, if I should give you the proof in an hour, in my own house, what then?"

"I cannot tell you before all these Iagos," said the Brazilian.

Carabine understood him to say magots (baboons).

"Well, well, say no more!" she replied, smiling. "Do not make yourself a laughing-stock for all the wittiest men in Paris; come to my house, we will talk it over."

Montes was crushed. "Proofs," he stammered, "consider--"

"Only too many," replied Carabine; "and if the mere suspicion hits you so hard, I fear for your reason."

"Is this creature obstinate, I ask you? He is worse than the late lamented King of Holland!--I say, Lousteau, Bixiou, Massol, all the crew of you, are you not invited to breakfast with Madame Marneffe the day after to-morrow?" said Leon de Lora.

"Ya," said du Tillet; "I have the honor of assuring you, Baron, that if you had by any chance thought of marrying Madame Marneffe, you are thrown out like a bill in Parliament, beaten by a blackball called Crevel. My friend, my old comrade Crevel, has eighty thousand francs a year; and you, I suppose, did not show such a good hand, for if you had, you, I imagine, would have been preferred."

Montes listened with a half-absent, half-smiling expression, which struck them all with terror.

At this moment the head-waiter came to whisper to Carabine that a lady, a relation of hers, was in the drawing-room and wished to speak to her.

Carabine rose and went out to find Madame Nourrisson, decently veiled with black lace.

"Well, child, am I to go to your house? Has he taken the hook?"

"Yes, mother; and the pistol is so fully loaded, that my only fear is that it will burst," said Carabine.

About an hour later, Montes, Cydalise, and Carabine, returning from the Rocher de Cancale, entered Carabine's little sitting-room in the Rue Saint-Georges. Madame Nourrisson was sitting in an armchair by the fire.

"Here is my worthy old aunt," said Carabine.

"Yes, child, I came in person to fetch my little allowance. You would have forgotten me, though you are kind-hearted, and I have some bills to pay to-morrow. Buying and selling clothes, I am always short of cash. Who is this at your heels? The gentleman looks very much put out about something."

The dreadful Madame Nourrisson, at this moment so completely disguised as to look like a respectable old body, rose to embrace Carabine, one of the hundred and odd courtesans she had launched on their horrible career of vice.

"He is an Othello who is not to be taken in, whom I have the honor of introducing to you--Monsieur le Baron Montes de Montejanos."

"Oh! I have heard him talked about, and know his name.--You are nicknamed Combabus, because you love but one woman, and in Paris, that is the same as loving no one at all. And is it by chance the object of your affections who is fretting you? Madame Marneffe, Crevel's woman? I tell you what, my dear sir, you may bless your stars instead of cursing them. She is a good-for-nothing baggage, is that little woman. I know her tricks!"

"Get along," said Carabine, into whose hand Madame Nourrisson had slipped a note while embracing her, "you do not know your Brazilians. They are wrong-headed creatures that insist on being impaled through the heart. The more jealous they are, the more jealous they want to be. Monsieur talks of dealing death all round, but he will kill nobody because he is in love.--However, I have brought him here to give him the proofs of his discomfiture, which I have got from that little Steinbock."

Montes was drunk; he listened as if the women were talking about somebody else.

Carabine went to take off her velvet wrap, and read a facsimile of a note, as follows:--

"DEAR PUSS.--He dines with Popinot this evening, and will come to fetch me from the Opera at eleven. I shall go out at about half-past five and count on finding you at our paradise. Order dinner to be sent in from the Maison d'or. Dress, so as to be able to take me to the Opera. We shall have four hours to ourselves. Return this note to me; not that your Valerie doubts you--I would give you my life, my fortune, and my honor, but I am afraid of the tricks of chance."

"Here, Baron, this is the note sent to Count Steinbock this morning; read the address. The original document is burnt."

Montes turned the note over and over, recognized the writing, and was struck by a rational idea, which is sufficient evidence of the disorder of his brain.

"And, pray," said he, looking at Carabine, "what object have you in torturing my heart, for you must have paid very dear for the privilege of having the note in your possession long enough to get it lithographed?"

"Foolish man!" said Carabine, at a nod from Madame Nourrisson, "don't you see that poor child Cydalise--a girl of sixteen, who has been pining for you these three months, till she has lost her appetite for food or drink, and who is heart-broken because you have never even glanced at her?"

Cydalise put her handkerchief to her eyes with an appearance of emotion--"She is furious," Carabine went on, "though she looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth, furious to see the man she adores duped by a villainous hussy; she would kill Valerie--"

"Oh, as for that," said the Brazilian, "that is my business!"

"What, killing?" said old Nourrisson. "No, my son, we don't do that here nowadays."

"Oh!" said Montes, "I am not a native of this country. I live in a parish where I can laugh at your laws; and if you give me proof--"

"Well, that note. Is that nothing?"

"No," said the Brazilian. "I do not believe in the writing. I must see for myself."

"See!" cried Carabine, taking the hint at once from a gesture of her supposed aunt. "You shall see, my dear Tiger, all you wish to see--on one condition."

"And that is?"

"Look at Cydalise."

At a wink from Madame Nourrisson, Cydalise cast a tender look at the Baron.

"Will you be good to her? Will you make her a home?" asked Carabine. "A girl of such beauty is well worth a house and a carriage! It would be a monstrous shame to leave her to walk the streets. And besides --she is in debt.--How much do you owe?" asked Carabine, nipping Cydalise's arm.

"She is worth all she can get," said the old woman. "The point is that she can find a buyer."

"Listen!" cried Montes, fully aware at last of this masterpiece of womankind "you will show me Valerie--"

"And Count Steinbock.--Certainly!" said Madame Nourrisson.

For the past ten minutes the old woman had been watching the Brazilian; she saw that he was an instrument tuned up to the murderous pitch she needed; and, above all, so effectually blinded, that he would never heed who had led him on to it, and she spoke:--

"Cydalise, my Brazilian jewel, is my niece, so her concerns are partly mine. All this catastrophe will be the work of a few minutes, for a friend of mine lets the furnished room to Count Steinbock where Valerie is at this moment taking coffee--a queer sort of coffee, but she calls it her coffee. So let us understand each other, Brazil!--I like Brazil, it is a hot country.--What is to become of my niece?"

"You old ostrich," said Montes, the plumes in the woman's bonnet catching his eye, "you interrupted me.--If you show me--if I see Valerie and that artist together--"

"As you would wish to be--" said Carabine; "that is understood."

"Then I will take this girl and carry her away--"

"Where?" asked Carabine.

"To Brazil," replied the Baron. "I will make her my wife. My uncle left me ten leagues square of entailed estate; that is how I still have that house and home. I have a hundred negroes--nothing but negroes and negresses and negro brats, all bought by my uncle--"

"Nephew to a nigger-driver," said Carabine, with a grimace. "That needs some consideration.--Cydalise, child, are you fond of the blacks?"

"Pooh! Carabine, no nonsense," said the old woman. "The deuce is in it! Monsieur and I are doing business."

"If I take up another Frenchwoman, I mean to have her to myself," the Brazilian went on. "I warn you, mademoiselle, I am king there, and not a constitutional king. I am Czar; my subjects are mine by purchase, and no one can escape from my kingdom, which is a hundred leagues from any human settlement, hemmed in by savages on the interior, and divided from the sea by a wilderness as wide as France."

"I should prefer a garret here."

"So thought I," said Montes, "since I sold all my land and possessions at Rio to come back to Madame Marneffe."

"A man does not make such a voyage for nothing," remarked Madame Nourrisson. "You have a right to look for love for your own sake, particularly being so good-looking.--Oh, he is very handsome!" said she to Carabine.

"Very handsome, handsomer than the Postillon de Longjumeau," replied the courtesan.

Cydalise took the Brazilian's hand, but he released it as politely as he could.

"I came back for Madame Marneffe," the man went on where he had left off, "but you do not know why I was three years thinking about it."

"No, savage!" said Carabine.

"Well, she had so repeatedly told me that she longed to live with me alone in a desert--"

"Oh, ho! he is not a savage after all," cried Carabine, with a shout of laughter. "He is of the highly-civilized tribe of Flats!"

"She had told me this so often," Montes went on, regardless of the courtesan's mockery, "that I had a lovely house fitted up in the heart of that vast estate. I came back to France to fetch Valerie, and the first evening I saw her--"

"Saw her is very proper!" said Carabine. "I will remember it."

"She told me to wait till that wretched Marneffe was dead; and I agreed, and forgave her for having admitted the attentions of Hulot. Whether the devil had her in hand I don't know, but from that instant that woman has humored my every whim, complied with all my demands --never for one moment has she given me cause to suspect her!--"

"That is supremely clever!" said Carabine to Madame Nourrisson, who nodded in sign of assent.

"My faith in that woman," said Montes, and he shed a tear, "was a match for my love. Just now, I was ready to fight everybody at table--"

"So I saw," said Carabine.

"And if I am cheated, if she is going to be married, if she is at this moment in Steinbock's arms, she deserves a thousand deaths! I will kill her as I would smash a fly--"

"And how about the gendarmes, my son?" said Madame Nourrisson, with a smile that made your flesh creep.

"And the police agents, and the judges, and the assizes, and all the set-out?" added Carabine.

"You are bragging, my dear fellow," said the old woman, who wanted to know all the Brazilian's schemes of vengeance.

"I will kill her," he calmly repeated. "You called me a savage.--Do you imagine that I am fool enough to go, like a Frenchman, and buy poison at the chemist's shop?--During the time while we were driving her, I thought out my means of revenge, if you should prove to be right as concerns Valerie. One of my negroes has the most deadly of animal poisons, and incurable anywhere but in Brazil. I will administer it to Cydalise, who will give it to me; then by the time when death is a certainty to Crevel and his wife, I shall be beyond the Azores with your cousin, who will be cured, and I will marry her. We have our own little tricks, we savages!--Cydalise," said he, looking at the country girl, "is the animal I need.--How much does she owe?"

"A hundred thousand francs," said Cydalise.

"She says little--but to the purpose," said Carabine, in a low tone to Madame Nourrisson.

"I am going mad!" cried the Brazilian, in a husky voice, dropping on to a sofa. "I shall die of this! But I must see, for it is impossible! --A lithographed note! What is to assure me that it is not a forgery? --Baron Hulot was in love with Valerie?" said he, recalling Josepha's harangue. "Nay; the proof that he did not love is that she is still alive--I will not leave her living for anybody else, if she is not wholly mine."

Montes was terrible to behold. He bellowed, he stormed; he broke everything he touched; rosewood was as brittle as glass.

"How he destroys things!" said Carabine, looking at the old woman. "My good boy," said she, giving the Brazilian a little slap, "Roland the Furious is very fine in a poem; but in a drawing-room he is prosaic and expensive."

"My son," said old Nourrisson, rising to stand in front of the crestfallen Baron, "I am of your way of thinking. When you love in that way, and are joined 'till death does you part,' life must answer for love. The one who first goes, carries everything away; it is a general wreck. You command my esteem, my admiration, my consent, especially for your inoculation, which will make me a Friend of the Negro.--But you love her! You will hark back?"

"I?--If she is so infamous, I--"

"Well, come now, you are talking too much, it strikes me. A man who means to be avenged, and who says he has the ways and means of a savage, doesn't do that.--If you want to see your 'object' in her paradise, you must take Cydalise and walk straight in with her on your arm, as if the servant had made a mistake. But no scandal! If you mean to be revenged, you must eat the leek, seem to be in despair, and allow her to bully you.--Do you see?" said Madame Nourrisson, finding the Brazilian quite amazed by so subtle a scheme.

"All right, old ostrich," he replied. "Come along: I understand."

"Good-bye, little one!" said the old woman to Carabine.

She signed to Cydalise to go on with Montes, and remained a minute with Carabine.

"Now, child, I have but one fear, and that is that he will strangle her! I should be in a very tight place; we must do everything gently. I believe you have won your picture by Raphael; but they tell me it is only a Mignard. Never mind, it is much prettier; all the Raphaels are gone black, I am told, whereas this one is as bright as a Girodet."

"All I want is to crow over Josepha; and it is all the same to me whether I have a Mignard or a Raphael!--That thief had on such pearls this evening!--you would sell your soul for them."

Cydalise, Montes, and Madame Nourrisson got into a hackney coach that was waiting at the door. Madame Nourrisson whispered to the driver the address of a house in the same block as the Italian Opera House, which they could have reached in five or six minutes from the Rue Saint-Georges; but Madame Nourrisson desired the man to drive along the Rue le Peletier, and to go very slowly, so as to be able to examine the carriages in waiting.

"Brazilian," said the old woman, "look out for your angel's carriage and servants."

The Baron pointed out Valerie's carriage as they passed it.

"She has told them to come for her at ten o'clock, and she is gone in a cab to the house where she visits Count Steinbock. She has dined there, and will come to the Opera in half an hour.--It is well contrived!" said Madame Nourrisson. "Thus you see how she has kept you so long in the dark."

The Brazilian made no reply. He had become the tiger, and had recovered the imperturbable cool ferocity that had been so striking at dinner. He was as calm as a bankrupt the day after he has stopped payment.

At the door of the house stood a hackney coach with two horses, of the kind known as a Compagnie Generale, from the Company that runs them.

"Stay here in the box," said the old woman to Montes. "This is not an open house like a tavern. I will send for you."

The paradise of Madame Marneffe and Wenceslas was not at all like that of Crevel--who, finding it useless now, had just sold his to the Comte Maxime de Trailles. This paradise, the paradise of all comers, consisted of a room on the fourth floor opening to the landing, in a house close to the Italian Opera. On each floor of this house there was a room which had originally served as the kitchen to the apartments on that floor. But the house having become a sort of inn, let out for clandestine love affairs at an exorbitant price, the owner, the real Madame Nourrisson, an old-clothes buyer in the Rue Nueve Saint-Marc, had wisely appreciated the great value of these kitchens, and had turned them into a sort of dining-rooms. Each of these rooms, built between thick party-walls and with windows to the street, was entirely shut in by very thick double doors on the landing. Thus the most important secrets could be discussed over a dinner, with no risk of being overheard. For greater security, the windows had shutters inside and out. These rooms, in consequence of this peculiarity, were let for twelve hundred francs a month. The whole house, full of such paradises and mysteries was rented by Madame Nourrisson the First for twenty-eight thousand francs of clear profit, after paying her housekeeper, Madame Nourrisson the Second, for she did not manage it herself.

The paradise let to Count Steinbock had been hung with chintz; the cold, hard floor, of common tiles reddened with encaustic, was not felt through a soft thick carpet. The furniture consisted of two pretty chairs and a bed in an alcove, just now half hidden by a table loaded with the remains of an elegant dinner, while two bottles with long necks and an empty champagne-bottle in ice strewed the field of bacchus cultivated by Venus.

There were also--the property, no doubt, of Valerie--a low easy-chair and a man's smoking-chair, and a pretty toilet chest of drawers in rosewood, the mirror handsomely framed a la Pompadour. A lamp hanging from the ceiling gave a subdued light, increased by wax candles on the table and on the chimney-shelf.

This sketch will suffice to give an idea, urbi et orbi, of clandestine passion in the squalid style stamped on it in Paris in 1840. How far, alas! from the adulterous love, symbolized by Vulcan's nets, three thousand years ago.

When Montes and Cydalise came upstairs, Valerie, standing before the fire, where a log was blazing, was allowing Wenceslas to lace her stays.

This is a moment when a woman who is neither too fat nor too thin, but like Valerie, elegant and slender, displays divine beauty. The rosy skin, mostly soft, invites the sleepiest eye. The lines of her figure, so little hidden, are so charmingly outlined by the white pleats of the shift and the support of the stays, that she is irresistible--like everything that must be parted from.

With a happy face smiling at the glass, a foot impatiently marking time, a hand put up to restore order among the tumbled curls, and eyes expressive of gratitude; with the glow of satisfaction which, like a sunset, warms the least details of the countenance--everything makes such a moment a mine of memories.

Any man who dares look back on the early errors of his life may, perhaps, recall some such reminiscences, and understand, though not excuse, the follies of Hulot and Crevel. Women are so well aware of their power at such a moment, that they find in it what may be called the aftermath of the meeting.

"Come, come; after two years' practice, you do not yet know how to lace a woman's stays! You are too much a Pole!--There, it is ten o'clock, my Wenceslas!" said Valerie, laughing at him.

At this very moment, a mischievous waiting-woman, by inserting a knife, pushed up the hook of the double doors that formed the whole security of Adam and Eve. She hastily pulled the door open--for the servants of these dens have little time to waste--and discovered one of the bewitching tableaux de genre which Gavarni has so often shown at the Salon.

"In here, madame," said the girl; and Cydalise went in, followed by Montes.

"But there is some one here.--Excuse me, madame," said the country girl, in alarm.

"What?--Why! it is Valerie!" cried Montes, violently slamming the door.

Madame Marneffe, too genuinely agitated to dissemble her feelings, dropped on to the chair by the fireplace. Two tears rose to her eyes, and at once dried away. She looked at Montes, saw the girl, and burst into a cackle of forced laughter. The dignity of the insulted woman redeemed the scantiness of her attire; she walked close up to the Brazilian, and looked at him so defiantly that her eyes glittered like knives.

"So that," said she, standing face to face with the Baron, and pointing to Cydalise--"that is the other side of your fidelity? You, who have made me promises that might convert a disbeliever in love! You, for whom I have done so much--have even committed crimes!--You are right, monsieur, I am not to compare with a child of her age and of such beauty!

"I know what you are going to say," she went on, looking at Wenceslas, whose undress was proof too clear to be denied. "This is my concern. If I could love you after such gross treachery--for you have spied upon me, you have paid for every step up these stairs, paid the mistress of the house, and the servant, perhaps even Reine--a noble deed!--If I had any remnant of affection for such a mean wretch, I could give him reasons that would renew his passion!--But I leave you, monsieur, to your doubts, which will become remorse.--Wenceslas, my gown!"

She took her dress and put it on, looked at herself in the glass, and finished dressing without heeding the Baron, as calmly as if she had been alone in the room.

"Wenceslas, are you ready?--Go first."

She had been watching Montes in the glass and out of the corner of her eye, and fancied she could see in his pallor an indication of the weakness which delivers a strong man over to a woman's fascinations; she now took his hand, going so close to him that he could not help inhaling the terrible perfumes which men love, and by which they intoxicate themselves; then, feeling his pulses beat high, she looked at him reproachfully.

"You have my full permission to go and tell your history to Monsieur Crevel; he will never believe you. I have a perfect right to marry him, and he becomes my husband the day after to-morrow.--I shall make him very happy.--Good-bye; try to forget me."

"Oh! Valerie," cried Henri Montes, clasping her in his arms, "that is impossible!--Come to Brazil!"

Valerie looked in his face, and saw him her slave.

"Well, if you still love me, Henri, two years hence I will be your wife; but your expression at this moment strikes me as very suspicious."

"I swear to you that they made me drink, that false friends threw this girl on my hands, and that the whole thing is the outcome of chance!" said Montes.

"Then I am to forgive you?" she asked, with a smile.

"But you will marry, all the same?" asked the Baron, in an agony of jealousy.

"Eighty thousand francs a year!" said she, with almost comical enthusiasm. "And Crevel loves me so much that he will die of it!"

"Ah! I understand," said Montes.

"Well, then, in a few days we will come to an understanding," said she.

And she departed triumphant.

"I have no scruples," thought the Baron, standing transfixed for a few minutes. "What! That woman believes she can make use of his passion to be quit of that dolt, as she counted on Marneffe's decease!--I shall be the instrument of divine wrath."

Two days later those of du Tillet's guests who had demolished Madame Marneffe tooth and nail, were seated round her table an hour after she has shed her skin and changed her name for the illustrious name of a Paris mayor. This verbal treason is one of the commonest forms of Parisian levity.

Valerie had had the satisfaction of seeing the Brazilian in the church; for Crevel, now so entirely the husband, had invited him out of bravado. And the Baron's presence at the breakfast astonished no one. All these men of wit and of the world were familiar with the meanness of passion, the compromises of pleasure.

Steinbock's deep melancholy--for he was beginning to despise the woman whom he had adored as an angel--was considered to be in excellent taste. The Pole thus seemed to convey that all was at an end between Valerie and himself. Lisbeth came to embrace her dear Madame Crevel, and to excuse herself for not staying to the breakfast on the score of Adeline's sad state of health.

"Be quite easy," said she to Valerie, "they will call on you, and you will call on them. Simply hearing the words two hundred thousand francs has brought the Baroness to death's door. Oh, you have them all hard and fast by that tale!--But you must tell it to me."

Within a month of her marriage, Valerie was at her tenth quarrel with Steinbock; he insisted on explanations as to Henri Montes, reminding her of the words spoken in their paradise; and, not content with speaking to her in terms of scorn, he watched her so closely that she never had a moment of liberty, so much was she fettered by his jealousy on one side and Crevel's devotion on the other.

Bereft now of Lisbeth, whose advice had always been so valuable she flew into such a rage as to reproach Wenceslas for the money she had lent him. This so effectually roused Steinbock's pride, that he came no more to the Crevels' house. So Valerie had gained her point, which was to be rid of him for a time, and enjoy some freedom. She waited till Crevel should make a little journey into the country to see Comte Popinot, with a view to arranging for her introduction to the Countess, and was then able to make an appointment to meet the Baron, whom she wanted to have at her command for a whole day to give him those "reasons" which were to make him love her more than ever.

On the morning of that day, Reine, who estimated the magnitude of her crime by that of the bribe she received, tried to warn her mistress, in whom she naturally took more interest than in strangers. Still, as she had been threatened with madness, and ending her days in the Salpetriere in case of indiscretion, she was cautious.

"Madame, you are so well off now," said she. "Why take on again with that Brazilian?--I do not trust him at all."

"You are very right, Reine, and I mean to be rid of him."

"Oh, madame, I am glad to hear it; he frightens me, does that big Moor! I believe him to be capable of anything."

"Silly child! you have more reason to be afraid for him when he is with me."

At this moment Lisbeth came in.

"My dear little pet Nanny, what an age since we met!" cried Valerie. "I am so unhappy! Crevel bores me to death; and Wenceslas is gone--we quarreled."

"I know," said Lisbeth, "and that is what brings me here. Victorin met him at about five in the afternoon going into an eating-house at five-and-twenty sous, and he brought him home, hungry, by working on his feelings, to the Rue Louis-le-Grand.--Hortense, seeing Wenceslas lean and ill and badly dressed, held out her hand. This is how you throw me over--"

"Monsieur Henri, madame," the man-servant announced in a low voice to Valerie.

"Leave me now, Lisbeth; I will explain it all to-morrow." But, as will be seen, Valerie was ere long not in a state to explain anything to anybody.

Towards the end of May, Baron Hulot's pension was released by Victorin's regular payment to Baron Nucingen. As everybody knows, pensions are paid half-yearly, and only on the presentation of a certificate that the recipient is alive: and as Hulot's residence was unknown, the arrears unpaid on Vauvinet's demand remained to his credit in the Treasury. Vauvinet now signed his renunciation of any further claims, and it was still indispensable to find the pensioner before the arrears could be drawn.

Thanks to Bianchon's care, the Baroness had recovered her health; and to this Josepha's good heart had contributed by a letter, of which the orthography betrayed the collaboration of the Duc d'Herouville. This was what the singer wrote to the Baroness, after twenty days of anxious search:--

"MADAME LA BARONNE,--Monsieur Hulot was living, two months since, in the Rue des Bernardins, with Elodie Chardin, a lace-mender, for whom he had left Mademoiselle Bijou; but he went away without a word, leaving everything behind him, and no one knows where he went. I am not without hope, however, and I have put a man on this track who believes he has already seen him in the Boulevard Bourdon.

"The poor Jewess means to keep the promise she made to the Christian. Will the angel pray for the devil? That must sometimes happen in heaven.--I remain, with the deepest respect, always your humble servant,

"JOSEPHA MIRAH."

The lawyer, Maitre Hulot d'Ervy, hearing no more of the dreadful Madame Nourrisson, seeing his father-in-law married, having brought back his brother-in-law to the family fold, suffering from no importunity on the part of his new stepmother, and seeing his mother's health improve daily, gave himself up to his political and judicial duties, swept along by the tide of Paris life, in which the hours count for days.

One night, towards the end of the session, having occasion to write up a report to the Chamber of Deputies, he was obliged to sit at work till late at night. He had gone into his study at nine o'clock, and, while waiting till the man-servant should bring in the candles with green shades, his thoughts turned to his father. He was blaming himself for leaving the inquiry so much to the singer, and had resolved to see Monsieur Chapuzot himself on the morrow, when he saw in the twilight, outside the window, a handsome old head, bald and yellow, with a fringe of white hair.

"Would you please to give orders, sir, that a poor hermit is to be admitted, just come from the Desert, and who is instructed to beg for contributions towards rebuilding a holy house."

This apparition, which suddenly reminded the lawyer of a prophecy uttered by the terrible Nourrisson, gave him a shock.

"Let in that old man," said he to the servant.

"He will poison the place, sir," replied the man. "He has on a brown gown which he has never changed since he left Syria, and he has no shirt--"

"Show him in," repeated the master.

The old man came in. Victorin's keen eye examined this so-called pilgrim hermit, and he saw a fine specimen of the Neapolitan friars, whose frocks are akin to the rags of the lazzaroni, whose sandals are tatters of leather, as the friars are tatters of humanity. The get-up was so perfect that the lawyer, though still on his guard, was vexed with himself for having believed it to be one of Madame Nourrisson's tricks.

"How much to you want of me?"

"Whatever you feel that you ought to give me."

Victorin took a five-franc piece from a little pile on his table, and handed it to the stranger.

"That is not much on account of fifty thousand francs," said the pilgrim of the desert.

This speech removed all Victorin's doubts.

"And has Heaven kept its word?" he said, with a frown.

"The question is an offence, my son," said the hermit. "If you do not choose to pay till after the funeral, you are in your rights. I will return in a week's time."

"The funeral!" cried the lawyer, starting up.

"The world moves on," said the old man, as he withdrew, "and the dead move quickly in Paris!"

When Hulot, who stood looking down, was about to reply, the stalwart old man had vanished.

"I don't understand one word of all this," said Victorin to himself. "But at the end of the week I will ask him again about my father, if we have not yet found him. Where does Madame Nourrisson--yes, that was her name--pick up such actors?"

On the following day, Doctor Bianchon allowed the Baroness to go down into the garden, after examining Lisbeth, who had been obliged to keep to her room for a month by a slight bronchial attack. The learned doctor, who dared not pronounce a definite opinion on Lisbeth's case till he had seen some decisive symptoms, went into the garden with Adeline to observe the effect of the fresh air on her nervous trembling after two months of seclusion. He was interested and allured by the hope of curing this nervous complaint. On seeing the great physician sitting with them and sparing them a few minutes, the Baroness and her family conversed with him on general subjects.

"You life is a very full and a very sad one," said Madame Hulot. "I know what it is to spend one's days in seeing poverty and physical suffering."

"I know, madame," replied the doctor, "all the scenes of which charity compels you to be a spectator; but you will get used to it in time, as we all do. It is the law of existence. The confessor, the magistrate, the lawyer would find life unendurable if the spirit of the State did not assert itself above the feelings of the individual. Could we live at all but for that? Is not the soldier in time of war brought face to face with spectacles even more dreadful than those we see? And every soldier that has been under fire is kind-hearted. We medical men have the pleasure now and again of a successful cure, as you have that of saving a family from the horrors of hunger, depravity, or misery, and of restoring it to social respectability. But what comfort can the magistrate find, the police agent, or the attorney, who spend their lives in investigating the basest schemes of self-interest, the social monster whose only regret is when it fails, but on whom repentance never dawns?

"One-half of society spends its life in watching the other half. A very old friend of mine is an attorney, now retired, who told me that for fifteen years past notaries and lawyers have distrusted their clients quite as much as their adversaries. Your son is a pleader; has he never found himself compromised by the client for whom he held a brief?"

"Very often," said Victorin, with a smile.

"And what is the cause of this deep-seated evil?" asked the Baroness.

"The decay of religion," said Bianchon, "and the pre-eminence of finance, which is simply solidified selfishness. Money used not to be everything; there were some kinds of superiority that ranked above it --nobility, genius, service done to the State. But nowadays the law takes wealth as the universal standard, and regards it as the measure of public capacity. Certain magistrates are ineligible to the Chamber; Jean-Jacques Rousseau would be ineligible! The perpetual subdivision of estate compels every man to take care of himself from the age of twenty.

"Well, then, between the necessity for making a fortune and the depravity of speculation there is no check or hindrance; for the religious sense is wholly lacking in France, in spite of the laudable endeavors of those who are working for a Catholic revival. And this is the opinion of every man who, like me, studies society at the core."

"And you have few pleasures?" said Hortense.

"The true physician, madame, is in love with his science," replied the doctor. "He is sustained by that passion as much as by the sense of his usefulness to society.

"At this very time you see in me a sort of scientific rapture, and many superficial judges would regard me as a man devoid of feeling. I have to announce a discovery to-morrow to the College of Medicine, for I am studying a disease that had disappeared--a mortal disease for which no cure is known in temperate climates, though it is curable in the West Indies--a malady known here in the Middle Ages. A noble fight is that of the physician against such a disease. For the last ten days I have thought of nothing but these cases--for there are two, a husband and wife.--Are they not connections of yours? For you, madame, are surely Monsieur Crevel's daughter?" said he, addressing Celestine.

"What, is my father your patient?" asked Celestine. "Living in the Rue Barbet-de-Jouy?"

"Precisely so," said Bianchon.

"And the disease is inevitably fatal?" said Victorin in dismay.

"I will go to see him," said Celestine, rising.

"I positively forbid it, madame," Bianchon quietly said. "The disease is contagious."

"But you go there, monsieur," replied the young woman. "Do you think that a daughter's duty is less binding than a doctor's?"

"Madame, a physician knows how to protect himself against infection, and the rashness of your devotion proves to me that you would probably be less prudent than I."

Celestine, however, got up and went to her room, where she dressed to go out.

"Monsieur," said Victorin to Bianchon, "have you any hope of saving Monsieur and Madame Crevel?"

"I hope, but I do not believe that I may," said Bianchon. "The case is to me quite inexplicable. The disease is peculiar to negroes and the American tribes, whose skin is differently constituted to that of the white races. Now I can trace no connection with the copper-colored tribes, with negroes or half-castes, in Monsieur or Madame Crevel.

"And though it is a very interesting disease to us, it is a terrible thing for the sufferers. The poor woman, who is said to have been very pretty, is punished for her sins, for she is now squalidly hideous if she is still anything at all. She is losing her hair and teeth, her skin is like a leper's, she is a horror to herself; her hands are horrible, covered with greenish pustules, her nails are loose, and the flesh is eaten away by the poisoned humors."

"And the cause of such a disease?" asked the lawyer.

"Oh!" said the doctor, "the cause lies in a form of rapid blood-poisoning; it degenerates with terrific rapidity. I hope to act on the blood; I am having it analyzed; and I am now going home to ascertain the result of the labors of my friend Professor Duval, the famous chemist, with a view to trying one of those desperate measures by which we sometimes attempt to defeat death."

"The hand of God is there!" said Adeline, in a voice husky with emotion. "Though that woman has brought sorrows on me which have led me in moments of madness to invoke the vengeance of Heaven, I hope --God knows I hope--you may succeed, doctor."

Victorin felt dizzy. He looked at his mother, his sister, and the physician by turns, quaking lest they should read his thoughts. He felt himself a murderer.

Hortense, for her part, thought God was just.

Celestine came back to beg her husband to accompany her.

"If you insist on going, madame, and you too, monsieur, keep at least a foot between you and the bed of the sufferer, that is the chief precaution. Neither you nor your wife must dream of kissing the dying man. And, indeed, you ought to go with your wife, Monsieur Hulot, to hinder her from disobeying my injunctions."

Adeline and Hortense, when they were left alone, went to sit with Lisbeth. Hortense had such a virulent hatred of Valerie that she could not contain the expression of it.

"Cousin Lisbeth," she exclaimed, "my mother and I are avenged! that venomous snake is herself bitten--she is rotting in her bed!"

"Hortense, at this moment you are not a Christian. You ought to pray to God to vouchsafe repentance to this wretched woman."

"What are you talking about?" said Betty, rising from her couch. "Are you speaking of Valerie?"

"Yes," replied Adeline; "she is past hope--dying of some horrible disease of which the mere description makes one shudder----"

Lisbeth's teeth chattered, a cold sweat broke out all over her; the violence of the shock showed how passionate her attachment to Valerie had been.

"I must go there," said she.

"But the doctor forbids your going out."

"I do not care--I must go!--Poor Crevel! what a state he must be in; for he loves that woman."

"He is dying too," replied Countess Steinbock. "Ah! all our enemies are in the devil's clutches--"

"In God's hands, my child--"

Lisbeth dressed in the famous yellow Indian shawl and her black velvet bonnet, and put on her boots; in spite of her relations' remonstrances, she set out as if driven by some irresistible power.

She arrived in the Rue Barbet a few minutes after Monsieur and Madame Hulot, and found seven physicians there, brought by Bianchon to study this unique case; he had just joined them. The physicians, assembled in the drawing-room, were discussing the disease; now one and now another went into Valerie's room or Crevel's to take a note, and returned with an opinion based on this rapid study.

These princes of science were divided in their opinions. One, who stood alone in his views, considered it a case of poisoning, of private revenge, and denied its identity with the disease known in the Middle Ages. Three others regarded it as a specific deterioration of the blood and the humors. The rest, agreeing with Bianchon, maintained that the blood was poisoned by some hitherto unknown morbid infection. Bianchon produced Professor Duval's analysis of the blood. The remedies to be applied, though absolutely empirical and without hope, depended on the verdict in this medical dilemma.

Lisbeth stood as if petrified three yards away from the bed where Valerie lay dying, as she saw a priest from Saint-Thomas d'Aquin standing by her friend's pillow, and a sister of charity in attendance. Religion could find a soul to save in a mass of rottenness which, of the five senses of man, had now only that of sight. The sister of charity who alone had been found to nurse Valerie stood apart. Thus the Catholic religion, that divine institution, always actuated by the spirit of self-sacrifice, under its twofold aspect of the Spirit and the Flesh, was tending this horrible and atrocious creature, soothing her death-bed by its infinite benevolence and inexhaustible stores of mercy.

The servants, in horror, refused to go into the room of either their master or mistress; they thought only of themselves, and judged their betters as righteously stricken. The smell was so foul that in spite of open windows and strong perfumes, no one could remain long in Valerie's room. Religion alone kept guard there.

How could a woman so clever as Valerie fail to ask herself to what end these two representatives of the Church remained with her? The dying woman had listened to the words of the priest. Repentance had risen on her darkened soul as the devouring malady had consumed her beauty. The fragile Valerie had been less able to resist the inroads of the disease than Crevel; she would be the first to succumb, and, indeed, had been the first attacked.

"If I had not been ill myself, I would have come to nurse you," said Lisbeth at last, after a glance at her friend's sunken eyes. "I have kept my room this fortnight or three weeks; but when I heard of your state from the doctor, I came at once."

"Poor Lisbeth, you at least love me still, I see!" said Valerie. "Listen. I have only a day or two left to think, for I cannot say to live. You see, there is nothing left of me--I am a heap of mud! They will not let me see myself in a glass.--Well, it is no more than I deserve. Oh, if I might only win mercy, I would gladly undo all the mischief I have done."

"Oh!" said Lisbeth, "if you can talk like that, you are indeed a dead woman."

"Do not hinder this woman's repentance, leave her in her Christian mind," said the priest.

"There is nothing left!" said Lisbeth in consternation. "I cannot recognize her eyes or her mouth! Not a feature of her is there! And her wit has deserted her! Oh, it is awful!"

"You don't know," said Valerie, "what death is; what it is to be obliged to think of the morrow of your last day on earth, and of what is to be found in the grave.--Worms for the body--and for the soul, what?--Lisbeth, I know there is another life! And I am given over to terrors which prevent my feeling the pangs of my decomposing body.--I, who could laugh at a saint, and say to Crevel that the vengeance of God took every form of disaster.--Well, I was a true prophet.--Do not trifle with sacred things, Lisbeth; if you love me, repent as I do."

"I!" said Lisbeth. "I see vengeance wherever I turn in nature; insects even die to satisfy the craving for revenge when they are attacked. And do not these gentlemen tell us"--and she looked at the priest --"that God is revenged, and that His vengeance lasts through all eternity?"

The priest looked mildly at Lisbeth and said:

"You, madame, are an atheist!"

"But look what I have come to," said Valerie.

"And where did you get this gangrene?" asked the old maid, unmoved from her peasant incredulity.

"I had a letter from Henri which leaves me in no doubt as to my fate. He has murdered me. And--just when I meant to live honestly--to die an object of disgust!

"Lisbeth, give up all notions of revenge. Be kind to that family to whom I have left by my will everything I can dispose of. Go, child, though you are the only creature who, at this hour, does not avoid me with horror--go, I beseech you, and leave me.--I have only time to make my peace with God!"

"She is wandering in her wits," said Lisbeth to herself, as she left the room.

The strongest affection known, that of a woman for a woman, had not such heroic constancy as the Church. Lisbeth, stifled by the miasma, went away. She found the physicians still in consultation. But Bianchon's opinion carried the day, and the only question now was how to try the remedies.

"At any rate, we shall have a splendid post-mortem," said one of his opponents, "and there will be two cases to enable us to make comparisons."

Lisbeth went in again with Bianchon, who went up to the sick woman without seeming aware of the malodorous atmosphere.

"Madame," said he, "we intend to try a powerful remedy which may save you--"

"And if you save my life," said she, "shall I be as good-looking as ever?"

"Possibly," said the judicious physician.

"I know your possibly," said Valerie. "I shall look like a woman who has fallen into the fire! No, leave me to the Church. I can please no one now but God. I will try to be reconciled to Him, and that will be my last flirtation; yes, I must try to come round God!"

"That is my poor Valerie's last jest; that is all herself!" said Lisbeth in tears.

Lisbeth thought it her duty to go into Crevel's room, where she found Victorin and his wife sitting about a yard away from the stricken man's bed.

"Lisbeth," said he, "they will not tell me what state my wife is in; you have just seen her--how is she?"

"She is better; she says she is saved," replied Lisbeth, allowing herself this play on the word to soothe Crevel's mind.

"That is well," said the Mayor. "I feared lest I had been the cause of her illness. A man is not a traveler in perfumery for nothing; I had blamed myself.--If I should lose her, what would become of me? On my honor, my children, I worship that woman."

He sat up in bed and tried to assume his favorite position.

"Oh, Papa!" cried Celestine, "if only you could be well again, I would make friends with my stepmother--I make a vow!"

"Poor little Celestine!" said Crevel, "come and kiss me."

Victorin held back his wife, who was rushing forward.

"You do not know, perhaps," said the lawyer gently, "that your disease is contagious, monsieur."

"To be sure," replied Crevel. "And the doctors are quite proud of having rediscovered in me some long lost plague of the Middle Ages, which the Faculty has had cried like lost property--it is very funny!"

"Papa," said Celestine, "be brave, and you will get the better of this disease."

"Be quite easy, my children; Death thinks twice of it before carrying off a Mayor of Paris," said he, with monstrous composure. "And if, after all, my district is so unfortunate as to lose a man it has twice honored with its suffrages--you see, what a flow of words I have! --Well, I shall know how to pack up and go. I have been a commercial traveler; I am experienced in such matters. Ah! my children, I am a man of strong mind."

"Papa, promise me to admit the Church--"

"Never," replied Crevel. "What is to be said? I drank the milk of Revolution; I have not Baron Holbach's wit, but I have his strength of mind. I am more Regence than ever, more Musketeer, Abbe Dubois, and Marechal de Richelieu! By the Holy Poker!--My wife, who is wandering in her head, has just sent me a man in a gown--to me! the admirer of Beranger, the friend of Lisette, the son of Voltaire and Rousseau. --The doctor, to feel my pulse, as it were, and see if sickness had subdued me--'You saw Monsieur l'Abbe?' said he.--Well, I imitated the great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor--see, like this," and he turned to show three-quarters face, like his portrait, and extended his hand authoritatively--"and I said:

"The slave was here, He showed his order, but he nothing gained.

"His order is a pretty jest, showing that even in death Monsieur le President de Montesquieu preserved his elegant wit, for they had sent him a Jesuit. I admire that passage--I cannot say of his life, but of his death--the passage--another joke!--The passage from life to death --the Passage Montesquieu!"

Victorin gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering whether folly and vanity were not forces on a par with true greatness of soul. The causes that act on the springs of the soul seem to be quite independent of the results. Can it be that the fortitude which upholds a great criminal is the same as that which a Champcenetz so proudly walks to the scaffold?

By the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after dreadful sufferings; and Crevel followed her within two days. Thus the marriage-contract was annulled. Crevel was heir to Valerie.

On the very day after the funeral, the friar called again on the lawyer, who received him in perfect silence. The monk held out his hand without a word, and without a word Victorin Hulot gave him eighty thousand-franc notes, taken from a sum of money found in Crevel's desk.

Young Madame Hulot inherited the estate of Presles and thirty thousand francs a year.

Madame Crevel had bequeathed a sum of three hundred thousand francs to Baron Hulot. Her scrofulous boy Stanislas was to inherit, at his majority, the Hotel Crevel and eighty thousand francs a year.

Among the many noble associations founded in Paris by Catholic charity, there is one, originated by Madame de la Chanterie, for promoting civil and religious marriages between persons who have formed a voluntary but illicit union. Legislators, who draw large revenues from the registration fees, and the Bourgeois dynasty, which benefits by the notary's profits, affect to overlook the fact that three-fourths of the poorer class cannot afford fifteen francs for the marriage-contract. The pleaders, a sufficiently vilified body, gratuitously defend the cases of the indigent, while the notaries have not as yet agreed to charge nothing for the marriage-contract of the poor. As to the revenue collectors, the whole machinery of Government would have to be dislocated to induce the authorities to relax their demands. The registrar's office is deaf and dumb.

Then the Church, too, receives a duty on marriages. In France the Church depends largely on such revenues; even in the House of God it traffics in chairs and kneeling stools in a way that offends foreigners; though it cannot have forgotten the anger of the Saviour who drove the money-changers out of the Temple. If the Church is so loath to relinquish its dues, it must be supposed that these dues, known as Vestry dues, are one of its sources of maintenance, and then the fault of the Church is the fault of the State.

The co-operation of these conditions, at a time when charity is too greatly concerned with the negroes and the petty offenders discharged from prison to trouble itself about honest folks in difficulties, results in the existence of a number of decent couples who have never been legally married for lack of thirty francs, the lowest figure for which the Notary, the Registrar, the Mayor and the Church will unite two citizens of Paris. Madame de la Chanterie's fund, founded to restore poor households to their religious and legal status, hunts up such couples, and with all the more success because it helps them in their poverty before attacking their unlawful union.

As soon as Madame Hulot had recovered, she returned to her occupations. And then it was that the admirable Madame de la Chanterie came to beg that Adeline would add the legalization of these voluntary unions to the other good works of which she was the instrument.

One of the Baroness' first efforts in this cause was made in the ominous-looking district, formerly known as la Petite Pologne--Little Poland--bounded by the Rue du Rocher, Rue de la Pepiniere, and Rue de Miromenil. There exists there a sort of offshoot of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. To give an idea of this part of the town, it is enough to say that the landlords of some of the houses tenanted by working men without work, by dangerous characters, and by the very poor employed in unhealthy toil, dare not demand their rents, and can find no bailiffs bold enough to evict insolvent lodgers. At the present time speculating builders, who are fast changing the aspect of this corner of Paris, and covering the waste ground lying between the Rue d'Amsterdam and the Rue Faubourg-du-Roule, will no doubt alter the character of the inhabitants; for the trowel is a more civilizing agent than is generally supposed. By erecting substantial and handsome houses, with porters at the doors, by bordering the streets with footwalks and shops, speculation, while raising the rents, disperses the squalid class, families bereft of furniture, and lodgers that cannot pay. And so these districts are cleared of such objectionable residents, and the dens vanish into which the police never venture but under the sanction of the law.

In June 1844, the purlieus of the Place de Laborde were still far from inviting. The genteel pedestrian, who by chance should turn out of the Rue de la Pepiniere into one of those dreadful side-streets, would have been dismayed to see how vile a bohemia dwelt cheek by jowl with the aristocracy. In such places as these, haunted by ignorant poverty and misery driven to bay, flourish the last public letter-writers who are to be found in Paris. Wherever you see the two words "Ecrivain Public" written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime. A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers.

While the Baroness had been ill, this quarter, to which she was a minor Providence, had seen the advent of a public writer who settled in the Passage du Soleil--Sun Alley--a spot of which the name is one of the antitheses dear to the Parisian, for the passage is especially dark. This writer, supposed to be a German, was named Vyder, and he lived on matrimonial terms with a young creature of whom he was so jealous that he never allowed her to go anywhere excepting to some honest stove and flue-fitters, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Italians, as such fitters always are, but long since established in Paris. These people had been saved from a bankruptcy, which would have reduced them to misery, by the Baroness, acting in behalf of Madame de la Chanterie. In a few months comfort had taken the place of poverty, and Religion had found a home in hearts which once had cursed Heaven with the energy peculiar to Italian stove-fitters. So one of Madame Hulot's first visits was to this family.

She was pleased at the scene that presented itself to her eyes at the back of the house where these worthy folks lived in the Rue Saint-Lazare, not far from the Rue du Rocher. High above the stores and workshops, now well filled, where toiled a swarm of apprentices and workmen--all Italians from the valley of Domo d'Ossola--the master's family occupied a set of rooms, which hard work had blessed with abundance. The Baroness was hailed like the Virgin Mary in person.

After a quarter of an hour's questioning, Adeline, having to wait for the father to inquire how his business was prospering, pursued her saintly calling as a spy by asking whether they knew of any families needing help.

"Ah, dear lady, you who could save the damned from hell!" said the Italian wife, "there is a girl quite near here to be saved from perdition."

"A girl well known to you?" asked the Baroness.

"She is the granddaughter of a master my husband formerly worked for, who came to France in 1798, after the Revolution, by name Judici. Old Judici, in Napoleon's time, was one of the principal stove-fitters in Paris; he died in 1819, leaving his son a fine fortune. But the younger Judici wasted all his money on bad women; till, at last, he married one who was sharper than the rest, and she had this poor little girl, who is just turned fifteen."

"And what is wrong with her?" asked Adeline, struck by the resemblance between this Judici and her husband.

"Well, madame, this child, named Atala, ran away from her father, and came to live close by here with an old German of eighty at least, named Vyder, who does odd jobs for people who cannot read and write. Now, if this old sinner, who bought the child of her mother, they say for fifteen hundred francs, would but marry her, as he certainly has not long to live, and as he is said to have some few thousand of francs a year--well, the poor thing, who is a sweet little angel, would be out of mischief, and above want, which must be the ruin of her."

"Thank you very much for the information. I may do some good, but I must act with caution.--Who is the old man?"

"Oh! madame, he is a good old fellow; he makes the child very happy, and he has some sense too, for he left the part of town where the Judicis live, as I believe, to snatch the child from her mother's clutches. The mother was jealous of her, and I dare say she thought she could make money out of her beauty and make a mademoiselle of the girl.

"Atala remembered us, and advised her gentleman to settle near us; and as the good man sees how decent we are, he allows her to come here. But get them married, madame, and you will do an action worthy of you. Once married, the child will be independent and free from her mother, who keeps an eye on her, and who, if she could make money by her, would like to see her on the stage, or successful in the wicked life she meant her to lead."

"Why doesn't the old man marry her?"

"There was no necessity for it, you see," said the Italian. "And though old Vyder is not a bad old fellow, I fancy he is sharp enough to wish to remain the master, while if he once got married--why, the poor man is afraid of the stone that hangs round every old man's neck."

"Could you send for the girl to come here?" said Madame Hulot. "I should see her quietly, and find out what could be done--"

The stove-fitter's wife signed to her eldest girl, who ran off. Ten minutes later she returned, leading by the hand a child of fifteen and a half, a beauty of the Italian type. Mademoiselle Judici inherited from her father that ivory skin which, rather yellow by day, is by artificial light of lily-whiteness; eyes of Oriental beauty, form, and brilliancy, close curling lashes like black feathers, hair of ebony hue, and that native dignity of the Lombard race which makes the foreigner, as he walks through Milan on a Sunday, fancy that every porter's daughter is a princess.

Atala, told by the stove-fitter's daughter that she was to meet the great lady of whom she had heard so much, had hastily dressed in a black silk gown, a smart little cape, and neat boots. A cap with a cherry-colored bow added to the brilliant effect of her coloring. The child stood in an attitude of artless curiosity, studying the Baroness out of the corner of her eye, for her palsied trembling puzzled her greatly.

Adeline sighed deeply as she saw this jewel of womanhood in the mire of prostitution, and determined to rescue her to virtue.

"What is your name, my dear?"

"Atala, madame."

"And can you read and write?"

"No, madame; but that does not matter, as monsieur can."

"Did your parents ever take you to church? Have you been to your first Communion? Do you know your Catechism?"

"Madame, papa wanted to make me do something of the kind you speak of, but mamma would not have it--"

"Your mother?" exclaimed the Baroness. "Is she bad to you, then?"

"She was always beating me. I don't know why, but I was always being quarreled over by my father and mother--"

"Did you ever hear of God?" cried the Baroness.

The girl looked up wide-eyed.

"Oh, yes, papa and mamma often said 'Good God,' and 'In God's name,' and 'God's thunder,'" said she, with perfect simplicity.

"Then you never saw a church? Did you never think of going into one?"

"A church?--Notre-Dame, the Pantheon?--I have seen them from a distance, when papa took me into town; but that was not very often. There are no churches like those in the Faubourg."

"Which Faubourg did you live in?"

"In the Faubourg."

"Yes, but which?"

"In the Rue de Charonne, madame."

The inhabitants of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine never call that notorious district other than the Faubourg. To them it is the one and only Faubourg; and manufacturers generally understand the words as meaning the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

"Did no one ever tell you what was right or wrong?"

"Mamma used to beat me when I did not do what pleased her."

"But did you not know that it was very wicked to run away from your father and mother to go to live with an old man?"

Atala Judici gazed at the Baroness with a haughty stare, but made no reply.

"She is a perfect little savage," murmured Adeline.

"There are a great many like her in the Faubourg, madame," said the stove-fitter's wife.

"But she knows nothing--not even what is wrong. Good Heavens!--Why do you not answer me?" said Madame Hulot, putting out her hand to take Atala's.

Atala indignantly withdrew a step.

"You are an old fool!" said she. "Why, my father and mother had had nothing to eat for a week. My mother wanted me to do much worse than that, I think, for my father thrashed her and called her a thief! However, Monsieur Vyder paid all their debts, and gave them some money --oh, a bagful! And he brought me away, and poor papa was crying. But we had to part!--Was it wicked?" she asked.

"And are you very fond of Monsieur Vyder?"

"Fond of him?" said she. "I should think so! He tells me beautiful stories, madame, every evening; and he has given me nice gowns, and linen, and a shawl. Why, I am figged out like a princess, and I never wear sabots now. And then, I have not known what it is to be hungry these two months past. And I don't live on potatoes now. He brings me bonbons and burnt almonds, and chocolate almonds.--Aren't they good? --I do anything he pleases for a bag of chocolate.--Then my old Daddy is very kind; he takes such care of me, and is so nice; I know now what my mother ought to have been.--He is going to get an old woman to help me, for he doesn't like me to dirty my hands with cooking. For the past month, too, he has been making a little money, and he gives me three francs every evening that I put into a money-box. Only he will never let me out except to come here--and he calls me his little kitten! Mamma never called me anything but bad names--and thief, and vermin!"

"Well, then, my child, why should not Daddy Vyder be your husband?"

"But he is, madame," said the girl, looking at Adeline with calm pride, without a blush, her brow smooth, her eyes steady. "He told me that I was his little wife; but it is a horrid bore to be a man's wife --if it were not for the burnt almonds!"

"Good Heaven!" said the Baroness to herself, "what monster can have had the heart to betray such perfect, such holy innocence? To restore this child to the ways of virtue would surely atone for many sins.--I knew what I was doing." thought she, remembering the scene with Crevel. "But she--she knows nothing."

"Do you know Monsieur Samanon?" asked Atala, with an insinuating look.

"No, my child; but why do you ask?"

"Really and truly?" said the artless girl.

"You have nothing to fear from this lady," said the Italian woman. "She is an angel."

"It is because my good old boy is afraid of being caught by Samanon. He is hiding, and I wish he could be free--"

"Why?"

"On! then he would take me to Bobino, perhaps to the Ambigu."

"What a delightful creature!" said the Baroness, kissing the girl.

"Are you rich?" asked Atala, who was fingering the Baroness' lace ruffles.

"Yes, and No," replied Madame Hulot. "I am rich for dear little girls like you when they are willing to be taught their duties as Christians by a priest, and to walk in the right way."

"What way is that?" said Atala; "I walk on my two feet."

"The way of virtue."

Atala looked at the Baroness with a crafty smile.

"Look at madame," said the Baroness, pointing to the stove-fitter's wife, "she has been quite happy because she was received into the bosom of the Church. You married like the beasts that perish."

"I?" said Atala. "Why, if you will give me as much as Daddy Vyder gives me, I shall be quite happy unmarried again. It is a grind.--Do you know what it is to--?"

"But when once you are united to a man as you are," the Baroness put in, "virtue requires you to remain faithful to him."

"Till he dies," said Atala, with a knowing flash. "I shall not have to wait long. If you only knew how Daddy Vyder coughs and blows.--Poof, poof," and she imitated the old man.

"Virtue and morality require that the Church, representing God, and the Mayor, representing the law, should consecrate your marriage," Madame Hulot went on. "Look at madame; she is legally married--"

"Will it make it more amusing?" asked the girl.

"You will be happier," said the Baroness, "for no one could then blame you. You would satisfy God! Ask her if she was married without the sacrament of marriage!"

Atala looked at the Italian.

"How is she any better than I am?" she asked. "I am prettier than she is."

"Yes, but I am an honest woman," said the wife, "and you may be called by a bad name."

"How can you expect God to protect you if you trample every law, human and divine, under foot?" said the Baroness. "Don't you know that God has Paradise in store for those who obey the injunctions of His Church?"

"What is there in Paradise? Are there playhouses?"

"Paradise!" said Adeline, "is every joy you can conceive of. It is full of angels with white wings. You see God in all His glory, you share His power, you are happy for every minute of eternity!"

Atala listened to the lady as she might have listened to music; but Adeline, seeing that she was incapable of understanding her, thought she had better take another line of action and speak to the old man.

"Go home, then, my child, and I will go to see Monsieur Vyder. Is he a Frenchman?"

"He is an Alsatian, madame. But he will be quite rich soon. If you would pay what he owes to that vile Samanon, he would give you back your money, for in a few months he will be getting six thousand francs a year, he says, and we are to go to live in the country a long way off, in the Vosges."

At the word Vosges the Baroness sat lost in reverie. It called up the vision of her native village. She was roused from her melancholy meditation by the entrance of the stove-fitter, who came to assure her of his prosperity.

"In a year's time, madame, I can repay the money you lent us, for it is God's money, the money of the poor and wretched. If ever I make a fortune, come to me for what you want, and I will render through you the help to others which you first brought us."

"Just now," said Madame Hulot, "I do not need your money, but I ask your assistance in a good work. I have just seen that little Judici, who is living with an old man, and I mean to see them regularly and legally married."

"Ah! old Vyder; he is a very worthy old fellow, with plenty of good sense. The poor old man has already made friends in the neighborhood, though he has been here but two months. He keeps my accounts for me. He is, I believe, a brave Colonel who served the Emperor well. And how he adores Napoleon!--He has some orders, but he never wears them. He is waiting till he is straight again, for he is in debt, poor old boy! In fact, I believe he is hiding, threatened by the law--"

"Tell him that I will pay his debts if he will marry the child."

"Oh, that will soon be settled.--Suppose you were to see him, madame; it is not two steps away, in the Passage du Soleil."

So the lady and the stove-fitter went out.

"This way, madame," said the man, turning down the Rue de la Pepiniere.

The alley runs, in fact, from the bottom of this street through to the Rue du Rocher. Halfway down this passage, recently opened through, where the shops let at a very low rent, the Baroness saw on a window, screened up to a height with a green, gauze curtain, which excluded the prying eyes of the passer-by, the words:

"ECRIVAIN PUBLIC"; and on the door the announcement:

BUSINESS TRANSACTED.

Petitions Drawn Up, Accounts Audited, Etc.

With Secrecy and Dispatch.

The shop was like one of those little offices where travelers by omnibus wait the vehicles to take them on to their destination. A private staircase led up, no doubt, to the living-rooms on the entresol which were let with the shop. Madame Hulot saw a dirty writing-table of some light wood, some letter-boxes, and a wretched second-hand chair. A cap with a peak and a greasy green shade for the eyes suggested either precautions for disguise, or weak eyes, which was not unlikely in an old man.

"He is upstairs," said the stove-fitter. "I will go up and tell him to come down."

Adeline lowered her veil and took a seat. A heavy step made the narrow stairs creak, and Adeline could not restrain a piercing cry when she saw her husband, Baron Hulot, in a gray knitted jersey, old gray flannel trousers, and slippers.

"What is your business, madame?" said Hulot, with a flourish.

She rose, seized Hulot by the arm, and said in a voice hoarse with emotion:

"At last--I have found you!"

"Adeline!" exclaimed the Baron in bewilderment, and he locked the shop door. "Joseph, go out the back way," he added to the stove-fitter.

"My dear!" she said, forgetting everything in her excessive joy, "you can come home to us all; we are rich. Your son draws a hundred and sixty thousand francs a year! Your pension is released; there are fifteen thousand francs of arrears you can get on showing that you are alive. Valerie is dead, and left you three hundred thousand francs.

"Your name is quite forgotten by this time; you may reappear in the world, and you will find a fortune awaiting you at your son's house. Come; our happiness will be complete. For nearly three years I have been seeking you, and I felt so sure of finding you that a room is ready waiting for you. Oh! come away from this, come away from the dreadful state I see you in!"

"I am very willing," said the bewildered Baron, "but can I take the girl?"

"Hector, give her up! Do that much for your Adeline, who has never before asked you to make the smallest sacrifice. I promise you I will give the child a marriage portion; I will see that she marries well, and has some education. Let it be said of one of the women who have given you happiness that she too is happy; and do not relapse into vice, into the mire."

"So it was you," said the Baron, with a smile, "who wanted to see me married?--Wait a few minutes," he added; "I will go upstairs and dress; I have some decent clothes in a trunk."

Adeline, left alone, and looking round the squalid shop, melted into tears.

"He has been living here, and we rolling in wealth!" said she to herself. "Poor man, he has indeed been punished--he who was elegance itself."

The stove-fitter returned to make his bow to his benefactress, and she desired him to fetch a coach. When he came back, she begged him to give little Atala Judici a home, and to take her away at once.

"And tell her that if she will place herself under the guidance of Monsieur the Cure of the Madeleine, on the day when she attends her first Communion I will give her thirty thousand francs and find her a good husband, some worthy young man."

"My eldest son, then madame! He is two-and-twenty, and he worships the child."

The Baron now came down; there were tears in his eyes.

"You are forcing me to desert the only creature who had ever begun to love me at all as you do!" said he in a whisper to his wife. "She is crying bitterly, and I cannot abandon her so--"

"Be quite easy, Hector. She will find a home with honest people, and I will answer for her conduct."

"Well, then, I can go with you," said the Baron, escorting his wife to the cab.

Hector, the Baron d'Ervy once more, had put on a blue coat and trousers, a white waistcoat, a black stock, and gloves. When the Baroness had taken her seat in the vehicle, Atala slipped in like an eel.

"Oh, madame," she said, "let me go with you. I will be so good, so obedient; I will do whatever you wish; but do not part me from my Daddy Vyder, my kind Daddy who gives me such nice things. I shall be beaten--"

"Come, come, Atala," said the Baron, "this lady is my wife--we must part--"

"She! As old as that! and shaking like a leaf!" said the child. "Look at her head!" and she laughingly mimicked the Baroness' palsy.

The stove-fitter, who had run after the girl, came to the carriage door.

"Take her away!" said Adeline. The man put his arms round Atala and fairly carried her off.

"Thanks for such a sacrifice, my dearest," said Adeline, taking the Baron's hand and clutching it with delirious joy. "How much you are altered! you must have suffered so much! What a surprise for Hortense and for your son!"

Adeline talked as lovers talk who meet after a long absence, of a hundred things at once.

In ten minutes the Baron and his wife reached the Rue Louis-le-Grand, and there Adeline found this note awaiting her:--

"MADAME LA BARONNE,--

"Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy lived for one month in the Rue de Charonne under the name of Thorec, an anagram of Hector. He is now in the Passage du Soleil by the name of Vyder. He says he is an Alsatian, and does writing, and he lives with a girl named Atala Judici. Be very cautious, madame, for search is on foot; the Baron is wanted, on what score I know not.

"The actress has kept her word, and remains, as ever,

"Madame la Baronne, your humble servant, "J. M."

The Baron's return was hailed with such joy as reconciled him to domestic life. He forgot little Atala Judici, for excesses of profligacy had reduced him to the volatility of feeling that is characteristic of childhood. But the happiness of the family was dashed by the change that had come over him. He had been still hale when he had gone away from his home; he had come back almost a hundred, broken, bent, and his expression even debased.

A splendid dinner, improvised by Celestine, reminded the old man of the singer's banquets; he was dazzled by the splendor of his home.

"A feast in honor of the return of the prodigal father?" said he in a murmur to Adeline.

"Hush!" said she, "all is forgotten."

"And Lisbeth?" he asked, not seeing the old maid.

"I am sorry to say that she is in bed," replied Hortense. "She can never get up, and we shall have the grief of losing her ere long. She hopes to see you after dinner."

At daybreak next morning Victorin Hulot was informed by the porter's wife that soldiers of the municipal guard were posted all round the premises; the police demanded Baron Hulot. The bailiff, who had followed the woman, laid a summons in due form before the lawyer, and asked him whether he meant to pay his father's debts. The claim was for ten thousand francs at the suit of an usurer named Samanon, who had probably lent the Baron two or three thousand at most. Victorin desired the bailiff to dismiss his men, and paid.

"But is it the last?" he anxiously wondered.

Lisbeth, miserable already at seeing the family so prosperous, could not survive this happy event. She grew so rapidly worse that Bianchon gave her but a week to live, conquered at last in the long struggle in which she had scored so many victories.

She kept the secret of her hatred even through a painful death from pulmonary consumption. And, indeed, she had the supreme satisfaction of seeing Adeline, Hortense, Hulot, Victorin, Steinbock, Celestine, and their children standing in tears round her bed and mourning for her as the angel of the family.

Baron Hulot, enjoying a course of solid food such as he had not known for nearly three years, recovered flesh and strength, and was almost himself again. This improvement was such a joy to Adeline that her nervous trembling perceptibly diminished.

"She will be happy after all," said Lisbeth to herself on the day before she died, as she saw the veneration with which the Baron regarded his wife, of whose sufferings he had heard from Hortense and Victorin.

And vindictiveness hastened Cousin Betty's end. The family followed her, weeping, to the grave.

The Baron and Baroness, having reached the age which looks for perfect rest, gave up the handsome rooms on the first floor to the Count and Countess Steinbock, and took those above. The Baron by his son's exertions found an official position in the management of a railroad, in 1845, with a salary of six thousand francs, which, added to the six thousand of his pension and the money left to him by Madame Crevel, secured him an income of twenty-four thousand francs. Hortense having enjoyed her independent income during the three years of separation from Wenceslas, Victorin now invested the two hundred thousand francs he had in trust, in his sister's name and he allowed her twelve thousand francs.

Wenceslas, as the husband of a rich woman, was not unfaithful, but he was an idler; he could not make up his mind to begin any work, however trifling. Once more he became the artist in partibus; he was popular in society, and consulted by amateurs; in short, he became a critic, like all the feeble folk who fall below their promise.

Thus each household, though living as one family, had its own fortune. The Baroness, taught by bitter experience, left the management of matters to her son, and the Baron was thus reduced to his salary, in hope that the smallness of his income would prevent his relapsing into mischief. And by some singular good fortune, on which neither the mother nor the son had reckoned, Hulot seemed to have foresworn the fair sex. His subdued behaviour, ascribed to the course of nature, so completely reassured the family, that they enjoyed to the full his recovered amiability and delightful qualities. He was unfailingly attentive to his wife and children, escorted them to the play, reappeared in society, and did the honors to his son's house with exquisite grace. In short, this reclaimed prodigal was the joy of his family.

He was a most agreeable old man, a ruin, but full of wit, having retained no more of his vice than made it an added social grace.

Of course, everybody was quite satisfied and easy. The young people and the Baroness lauded the model father to the skies, forgetting the death of the two uncles. Life cannot go on without much forgetting!

Madame Victorin, who managed this enormous household with great skill, due, no doubt, to Lisbeth's training, had found it necessary to have a man-cook. This again necessitated a kitchen-maid. Kitchen-maids are in these days ambitious creatures, eager to detect the chef's secrets, and to become cooks as soon as they have learnt to stir a sauce. Consequently, the kitchen-maid is liable to frequent change.

At the beginning of 1845 Celestine engaged as kitchen-maid a sturdy Normandy peasant come from Isigny--short-waisted, with strong red arms, a common face, as dull as an "occasional piece" at the play, and hardly to be persuaded out of wearing the classical linen cap peculiar to the women of Lower Normandy. This girl, as buxom as a wet-nurse, looked as if she would burst the blue cotton check in which she clothed her person. Her florid face might have been hewn out of stone, so hard were its tawny outlines.

Of course no attention was paid to the advent in the house of this girl, whose name was Agathe--an ordinary, wide-awake specimen, such as is daily imported from the provinces. Agathe had no attractions for the cook, her tongue was too rough, for she had served in a suburban inn, waiting on carters; and instead of making a conquest of her chief and winning from him the secrets of the high art of the kitchen, she was the object of his great contempt. The chef's attentions were, in fact, devoted to Louise, the Countess Steinbock's maid. The country girl, thinking herself ill-used, complained bitterly that she was always sent out of the way on some pretext when the chef was finishing a dish or putting the crowning touch to a sauce.

"I am out of luck," said she, "and I shall go to another place."

And yet she stayed though she had twice given notice to quit.

One night, Adeline, roused by some unusual noise, did not see Hector in the bed he occupied near hers; for they slept side by side in two beds, as beseemed an old couple. She lay awake an hour, but he did not return. Seized with a panic, fancying some tragic end had overtaken him--an apoplectic attack, perhaps--she went upstairs to the floor occupied by the servants, and then was attracted to the room where Agathe slept, partly by seeing a light below the door, and partly by the murmur of voices. She stood still in dismay on recognizing the voice of her husband, who, a victim to Agathe's charms, to vanquish this strapping wench's not disinterested resistance, went to the length of saying:

"My wife has not long to live, and if you like you may be a Baroness."

Adeline gave a cry, dropped her candlestick, and fled.

Three days later the Baroness, who had received the last sacraments, was dying, surrounded by her weeping family.

Just before she died, she took her husband's hand and pressed it, murmuring in his ear:

"My dear, I had nothing left to give up to you but my life. In a minute or two you will be free, and can make another Baronne Hulot."

And, rare sight, tears oozed from her dead eyes.

This desperateness of vice had vanquished the patience of the angel, who, on the brink of eternity, gave utterance to the only reproach she had ever spoken in her life.

The Baron left Paris three days after his wife's funeral. Eleven months after Victorin heard indirectly of his father's marriage to Mademoiselle Agathe Piquetard, solemnized at Isigny, on the 1st February 1846.

"Parents may hinder their children's marriage, but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood," said Maitre Hulot to Maitre Popinot, the second son of the Minister of Commerce, who was discussing this marriage.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Beauvisage, Phileas The Member for Arcis

Berthier (Parisian notary) Cousin Pons

Bianchon, Horace Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another Study of Woman La Grande Breteche

Bixiou, Jean-Jacques The Purse A Bachelor's Establishment The Government Clerks Modeste Mignon Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Firm of Nucingen The Muse of the Department The Member for Arcis Beatrix A Man of Business Gaudissart II. The Unconscious Humorists Cousin Pons

Braulard A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Cousin Pons

Bridau, Joseph The Purse A Bachelor's Establishment A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Start in Life Modeste Mignon Another Study of Woman Pierre Grassou Letters of Two Brides The Member for Arcis

Brisetout, Heloise Cousin Pons The Middle Classes

Cadine, Jenny Beatrix The Unconscious Humorists The Member for Arcis

Chanor Cousin Pons

Chocardelle, Mademoiselle Beatrix A Prince of Bohemia A Man of Business The Member for Arcis

Colleville, Flavie Minoret, Madame The Government Clerks The Middle Classes

Collin, Jacqueline Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Unconscious Humorists

Crevel, Celestin Cesar Birotteau Cousin Pons

Esgrignon, Victurnien, Comte (then Marquis d') Jealousies of a Country Town Letters of Two Brides A Man of Business The Secrets of a Princess

Falcon, Jean The Chouans The Muse of the Department

Graff, Wolfgang Cousin Pons

Grassou, Pierre Pierre Grassou A Bachelor's Establishment The Middle Classes Cousin Pons

Grindot Cesar Birotteau Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Start in Life Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Beatrix The Middle Classes

Hannequin, Leopold Albert Savarus Beatrix Cousin Pons

Herouville, Duc d' The Hated Son Jealousies of a Country Town Modeste Mignon

Hulot (Marshal) The Chouans The Muse of the Department

Hulot, Victorin The Member for Arcis

La Bastie la Briere, Madame Ernest de Modeste Mignon The Member for Arcis

La Baudraye, Madame Polydore Milaud de The Muse of the Department A Prince of Bohemia

La Chanterie, Baronne Henri le Chantre de The Seamy Side of History

Laginski, Comte Adam Mitgislas Another Study of Woman The Imaginary Mistress

La Palferine, Comte de A Prince of Bohemia A Man of Business Beatrix The Imaginary Mistress

La Roche-Hugon, Martial de Domestic Peace The Peasantry A Daughter of Eve The Member for Arcis The Middle Classes

Lebas, Joseph At the Sign of the Cat and Racket Cesar Birotteau

Lebas, Madame Joseph (Virginie) At the Sign of the Cat and Racket Cesar Birotteau

Lebas The Muse of the Department

Lefebvre, Robert The Gondreville Mystery

Lenoncourt-Givry, Duc de Letters of Two Brides The Member for Arcis

Lora, Leon de The Unconscious Humorists A Bachelor's Establishment A Start in Life Pierre Grassou Honorine Beatrix

Lousteau, Etienne A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Bachelor's Establishment Scenes from a Courtesan's Life A Daughter of Eve Beatrix The Muse of the Department A Prince of Bohemia A Man of Business The Middle Classes The Unconscious Humorists

Massol Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Magic Skin A Daughter of Eve The Unconscious Humorists

Montauran, Marquis de (younger brother of Alphonse de) The Chouans The Seamy Side of History

Montcornet, Marechal, Comte de Domestic Peace Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Peasantry A Man of Business

Navarreins, Duc de A Bachelor's Establishment Colonel Chabert The Muse of the Department The Thirteen Jealousies of a Country Town The Peasantry Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Country Parson The Magic Skin The Gondreville Mystery The Secrets of a Princess

Nourrisson, Madame Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Unconscious Humorists

Nucingen, Baron Frederic de The Firm of Nucingen Father Goriot Pierrette Cesar Birotteau Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Another Study of Woman The Secrets of a Princess A Man of Business The Muse of the Department The Unconscious Humorists

Paz, Thaddee The Imaginary Mistress

Popinot, Anselme Cesar Birotteau Gaudissart the Great Cousin Pons

Popinot, Madame Anselme Cesar Birotteau A Prince of Bohemia Cousin Pons

Popinot, Vicomte Cousin Pons

Rastignac, Eugene de Father Goriot A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Ball at Sceaux The Commission in Lunacy A Study of Woman Another Study of Woman The Magic Skin The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of Eve The Gondreville Mystery The Firm of Nucingen The Member for Arcis The Unconscious Humorists

Rivet, Achille Cousin Pons

Rochefide, Marquis Arthur de Beatrix

Ronceret, Madame Fabien du Beatrix The Muse of the Department The Unconscious Humorists

Samanon A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Government Clerks A Man of Business

Sinet, Seraphine The Unconscious Humorists

Steinbock, Count Wenceslas The Imaginary Mistress

Stidmann Modeste Mignon Beatrix The Member for Arcis Cousin Pons The Unconscious Humorists

Tillet, Ferdinand du Cesar Birotteau The Firm of Nucingen The Middle Classes A Bachelor's Establishment Pierrette Melmoth Reconciled A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of Eve The Member for Arcis The Unconscious Humorists

Trailles, Comte Maxime de Cesar Birotteau Father Goriot Gobseck Ursule Mirouet A Man of Business The Member for Arcis The Secrets of a Princess The Member for Arcis Beatrix The Unconscious Humorists

Turquet, Marguerite The Imaginary Mistress The Muse of the Department A Man of Business

Vauvinet The Unconscious Humorists

Vernisset, Victor de The Seamy Side of History Beatrix

Vernou, Felicien A Bachelor's Establishment Lost Illusions A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes from a Courtesan's Life A Daughter of Eve

Vignon, Claude A Distinguished Provincial at Paris A Daughter of Eve Honorine Beatrix The Unconscious Humorists

II

COUSIN PONS

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated by

Ellen Marriage

COUSIN PONS

Towards three o'clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year 1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was a smug expression about the mouth--he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human countenance.

As soon as the elderly person appeared in the distance, a smile broke out over the faces of the frequenters of the boulevard, who daily, from their chairs, watch the passers-by, and indulge in the agreeable pastime of analyzing them. That smile is peculiar to Parisians; it says so many things--ironical, quizzical, pitying; but nothing save the rarest of human curiosities can summon that look of interest to the faces of Parisians, sated as they are with every possible sight.

A saying recorded of Hyacinthe, an actor celebrated for his repartees, will explain the archaeological value of the old gentleman, and the smile repeated like an echo by all eyes. Somebody once asked Hyacinthe where the hats were made that set the house in a roar as soon as he appeared. "I don't have them made," he said; "I keep them!" So also among the million actors who make up the great troupe of Paris, there are unconscious Hyacinthes who "keep" all the absurd freaks of vanished fashions upon their backs; and the apparition of some bygone decade will startle you into laughter as you walk the streets in bitterness of soul over the treason of one who was your friend in the past.

In some respects the passer-by adhered so faithfully to the fashions of the year 1806, that he was not so much a burlesque caricature as a reproduction of the Empire period. To an observer, accuracy of detail in a revival of this sort is extremely valuable, but accuracy of detail, to be properly appreciated, demands the critical attention of an expert flaneur; while the man in the street who raises a laugh as soon as he comes in sight is bound to be one of those outrageous exhibitions which stare you in the face, as the saying goes, and produce the kind of effect which an actor tries to secure for the success of his entry. The elderly person, a thin, spare man, wore a nut-brown spencer over a coat of uncertain green, with white metal buttons. A man in a spencer in the year 1844! it was as if Napoleon himself had vouchsafed to come to life again for a couple of hours.

The spencer, as its name indicates, was the invention of an English lord, vain, doubtless, of his handsome shape. Some time before the Peace of Amiens, this nobleman solved the problem of covering the bust without destroying the outlines of the figure and encumbering the person with the hideous boxcoat, now finishing its career on the backs of aged hackney cabmen; but, elegant figures being in the minority, the success of the spencer was short-lived in France, English though it was.

At the sight of the spencer, men of forty or fifty mentally invested the wearer with top-boots, pistachio-colored kerseymere small clothes adorned with a knot of ribbon; and beheld themselves in the costumes of their youth. Elderly ladies thought of former conquests; but the younger men were asking each other why the aged Alcibiades had cut off the skirts of his overcoat. The rest of the costume was so much in keeping with the spencer, that you would not have hesitated to call the wearer "an Empire man," just as you call a certain kind of furniture "Empire furniture;" yet the newcomer only symbolized the Empire for those who had known that great and magnificent epoch at any rate de visu, for a certain accuracy of memory was needed for the full appreciation of the costume, and even now the Empire is so far away that not every one of us can picture it in its Gallo-Grecian reality.

The stranger's hat, for instance, tipped to the back of his head so as to leave almost the whole forehead bare, recalled a certain jaunty air, with which civilians and officials attempted to swagger it with military men; but the hat itself was a shocking specimen of the fifteen-franc variety. Constant friction with a pair of enormous ears had left their marks which no brush could efface from the underside of the brim; the silk tissue (as usual) fitted badly over the cardboard foundation, and hung in wrinkles here and there; and some skin-disease (apparently) had attacked the nap in spite of the hand which rubbed it down of a morning.

Beneath the hat, which seemed ready to drop off at any moment, lay an expanse of countenance grotesque and droll, as the faces which the Chinese alone of all people can imagine for their quaint curiosities. The broad visage was as full of holes as a colander, honeycombed with the shadows of the dints, hollowed out like a Roman mask. It set all the laws of anatomy at defiance. Close inspection failed to detect the substructure. Where you expected to find a bone, you discovered a layer of cartilaginous tissue, and the hollows of an ordinary human face were here filled out with flabby bosses. A pair of gray eyes, red-rimmed and lashless, looked forlornly out of a countenance which was flattened something after the fashion of a pumpkin, and surmounted by a Don Quixote nose that rose out of it like a monolith above a plain. It was the kind of nose, as Cervantes must surely have explained somewhere, which denotes an inborn enthusiasm for all things great, a tendency which is apt to degenerate into credulity.

And yet, though the man's ugliness was something almost ludicrous, it aroused not the slightest inclination to laugh. The exceeding melancholy which found an outlet in the poor man's faded eyes reached the mocker himself and froze the gibes on his lips; for all at once the thought arose that this was a human creature to whom Nature had forbidden any expression of love or tenderness, since such expression could only be painful or ridiculous to the woman he loved. In the presence of such misfortune a Frenchman is silent; to him it seems the most cruel of all afflictions--to be unable to please!

The man so ill-favored was dressed after the fashion of shabby gentility, a fashion which the rich not seldom try to copy. He wore low shoes beneath gaiters of the pattern worn by the Imperial Guard, doubtless for the sake of economy, because they kept the socks clean. The rusty tinge of his black breeches, like the cut and the white or shiny line of the creases, assigned the date of the purchase some three years back. The roomy garments failed to disguise the lean proportions of the wearer, due apparently rather to constitution than to a Pythagorean regimen, for the worthy man was endowed with thick lips and a sensual mouth; and when he smiled, displayed a set of white teeth which would have done credit to a shark.

A shawl-waistcoat, likewise of black cloth, was supplemented by a white under-waistcoat, and yet again beneath this gleamed the edge of a red knitted under-jacket, to put you in mind of Garat's five waistcoats. A huge white muslin stock with a conspicuous bow, invented by some exquisite to charm "the charming sex" in 1809, projected so far above the wearer's chin that the lower part of his face was lost, as it were, in a muslin abyss. A silk watch-guard, plaited to resemble the keepsakes made of hair, meandered down the shirt front and secured his watch from the improbable theft. The greenish coat, though older by some three years than the breeches, was remarkably neat; the black velvet collar and shining metal buttons, recently renewed, told of carefulness which descended even to trifles.

The particular manner of fixing the hat on the occiput, the triple waistcoat, the vast cravat engulfing the chin, the gaiters, the metal buttons on the greenish coat,--all these reminiscences of Imperial fashions were blended with a sort of afterwaft and lingering perfume of the coquetry of the Incroyable--with an indescribable finical something in the folds of the garments, a certain air of stiffness and correctness in the demeanor that smacked of the school of David, that recalled Jacob's spindle-legged furniture.

At first sight, moreover, you set him down either for the gentleman by birth fallen a victim to some degrading habit, or for the man of small independent means whose expenses are calculated to such a nicety that the breakage of a windowpane, a rent in a coat, or a visit from the philanthropic pest who asks you for subscriptions to a charity, absorbs the whole of a month's little surplus of pocket-money. If you had seen him that afternoon, you would have wondered how that grotesque face came to be lighted up with a smile; usually, surely, it must have worn the dispirited, passive look of the obscure toiler condemned to labor without ceasing for the barest necessaries of life. Yet when you noticed that the odd-looking old man was carrying some object (evidently precious) in his right hand with a mother's care; concealing it under the skirts of his coat to keep it from collisions in the crowd, and still more, when you remarked that important air always assumed by an idler when intrusted with a commission, you would have suspected him of recovering some piece of lost property, some modern equivalent of the marquise's poodle; you would have recognized the assiduous gallantry of the "man of the Empire" returning in triumph from his mission to some charming woman of sixty, reluctant as yet to dispense with the daily visit of her elderly attentif.

In Paris only among great cities will you see such spectacles as this; for of her boulevards Paris makes a stage where a never-ending drama is played gratuitously by the French nation in the interests of Art.

In spite of the rashly assumed spencer, you would scarcely have thought, after a glance at the contours of the man's bony frame, that this was an artist--that conventional type which is privileged, in something of the same way as a Paris gamin, to represent riotous living to the bourgeois and philistine mind, the most mirific joviality, in short (to use the old Rabelaisian word newly taken into use). Yet this elderly person had once taken the medal and the traveling scholarship; he had composed the first cantata crowned by the Institut at the time of the re-establishment of the Academie de Rome; he was M. Sylvain Pons, in fact--M. Sylvain Pons, whose name appears on the covers of well-known sentimental songs trilled by our mothers, to say nothing of a couple of operas, played in 1815 and 1816, and divers unpublished scores. The worthy soul was now ending his days as the conductor of an orchestra in a boulevard theatre, and a music master in several young ladies' boarding-schools, a post for which his face particularly recommended him. He was entirely dependent upon his earnings. Running about to give private lessons at his age! --Think of it. How many a mystery lies in that unromantic situation!

But the last man to wear the spencer carried something about him besides his Empire Associations; a warning and a lesson was written large over that triple waistcoat. Wherever he went, he exhibited, without fee or charge, one of the many victims of the fatal system of competition which still prevails in France in spite of a century of trial without result; for Poisson de Marigny, brother of the Pompadour and Director of Fine Arts, somewhere about 1746 invented this method of applying pressure to the brain. That was a hundred years ago. Try if you can count upon your fingers the men of genius among the prizemen of those hundred years.

In the first place, no deliberate effort of schoolmaster or administrator can replace the miracles of chance which produce great men: of all the mysteries of generation, this most defies the ambitious modern scientific investigator. In the second--the ancient Egyptians (we are told) invented incubator-stoves for hatching eggs; what would be thought of Egyptians who should neglect to fill the beaks of the callow fledglings? Yet this is precisely what France is doing. She does her utmost to produce artists by the artificial heat of competitive examination; but, the sculptor, painter, engraver, or musician once turned out by this mechanical process, she no more troubles herself about them and their fate than the dandy cares for yesterday's flower in his buttonhole. And so it happens that the really great man is a Greuze, a Watteau, a Felicien David, a Pagnesi, a Gericault, a Decamps, an Auber, a David d'Angers, an Eugene Delacroix, or a Meissonier--artists who take but little heed of grande prix, and spring up in the open field under the rays of that invisible sun called Vocation.

To resume. The Government sent Sylvain Pons to Rome to make a great musician of himself; and in Rome Sylvain Pons acquired a taste for the antique and works of art. He became an admirable judge of those masterpieces of the brain and hand which are summed up by the useful neologism "bric-a-brac;" and when the child of Euterpe returned to Paris somewhere about the year 1810, it was in the character of a rabid collector, loaded with pictures, statuettes, frames, wood-carving, ivories, enamels, porcelains, and the like. He had sunk the greater part of his patrimony, not so much in the purchases themselves as on the expenses of transit; and every penny inherited from his mother had been spent in the course of a three-years' travel in Italy after the residence in Rome came to an end. He had seen Venice, Milan, Florence, Bologna, and Naples leisurely, as he wished to see them, as a dreamer of dreams, and a philosopher; careless of the future, for an artist looks to his talent for support as the fille de joie counts upon her beauty.

All through those splendid years of travel Pons was as happy as was possible to a man with a great soul, a sensitive nature, and a face so ugly that any "success with the fair" (to use the stereotyped formula of 1809) was out of the question; the realities of life always fell short of the ideals which Pons created for himself; the world without was not in tune with the soul within, but Pons had made up his mind to the dissonance. Doubtless the sense of beauty that he had kept pure and living in his inmost soul was the spring from which the delicate, graceful, and ingenious music flowed and won him reputation between 1810 and 1814.

Every reputation founded upon the fashion or the fancy of the hour, or upon the short-lived follies of Paris, produces its Pons. No place in the world is so inexorable in great things; no city of the globe so disdainfully indulgent in small. Pons' notes were drowned before long in floods of German harmony and the music of Rossini; and if in 1824 he was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various drawing-room melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l! In 1844, the year in which the single drama of this obscure life began, Sylvain Pons was of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver; dealers in music had never heard of his name, though he was still composing, on scanty pay, for his own orchestra or for neighboring theatres.

And yet, the worthy man did justice to the great masters of our day; a masterpiece finely rendered brought tears to his eyes; but his religion never bordered on mania, as in the case of Hoffmann's Kreislers; he kept his enthusiasm to himself; his delight, like the paradise reached by opium or hashish, lay within his own soul.

The gift of admiration, of comprehension, the single faculty by which the ordinary man becomes the brother of the poet, is rare in the city of Paris, that inn whither all ideas, like travelers, come to stay for awhile; so rare is it, that Pons surely deserves our respectful esteem. His personal failure may seem anomalous, but he frankly admitted that he was weak in harmony. He had neglected the study of counterpoint; there was a time when he might have begun his studies afresh and held his own among modern composers, when he might have been, not certainly a Rossini, but a Herold. But he was alarmed by the intricacies of modern orchestration; and at length, in the pleasures of collecting, he found such ever-renewed compensation for his failure, that if he had been made to choose between his curiosities and the fame of Rossini--will it be believed?--Pons would have pronounced for his beloved collection.

Pons was of the opinion of Chenavard, the print-collector, who laid it down as an axiom--that you only fully enjoy the pleasure of looking at your Ruysdael, Hobbema, Holbein, Raphael, Murillo, Greuze, Sebastian del Piombo, Giorgione, Albrecht Durer, or what not, when you have paid less than sixty francs for your picture. Pons never gave more than a hundred francs for any purchase. If he laid out as much as fifty francs, he was careful to assure himself beforehand that the object was worth three thousand. The most beautiful thing in the world, if it cost three hundred francs, did not exist for Pons. Rare had been his bargains; but he possessed the three qualifications for success--a stag's legs, an idler's disregard of time, and the patience of a Jew.

This system, carried out for forty years, in Rome or Paris alike, had borne its fruits. Since Pons returned from Italy, he had regularly spent about two thousand francs a year upon a collection of masterpieces of every sort and description, a collection hidden away from all eyes but his own; and now his catalogue had reached the incredible number of 1907. Wandering about Paris between 1811 and 1816, he had picked up many a treasure for ten francs, which would fetch a thousand or twelve hundred to-day. Some forty-five thousand canvases change hands annually in Paris picture sales, and these Pons had sifted through year by year. Pons had Sevres porcelain, pate tendre, bought of Auvergnats, those satellites of the Black Band who sacked chateaux and carried off the marvels of Pompadour France in their tumbril carts; he had, in fact, collected the drifted wreck of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; he recognized the genius of the French school, and discerned the merit of the Lepautres and Lavallee-Poussins and the rest of the great obscure creators of the Genre Louis Quinze and the Genre Louis Seize. Our modern craftsmen now draw without acknowledgment from them, pore incessantly over the treasures of the Cabinet des Estampes, borrow adroitly, and give out their pastiches for new inventions. Pons had obtained many a piece by exchange, and therein lies the ineffable joy of the collector. The joy of buying bric-a-brac is a secondary delight; in the give-and-take of barter lies the joy of joys. Pons had begun by collecting snuff-boxes and miniatures; his name was unknown in bric-a-bracology, for he seldom showed himself in salesrooms or in the shops of well-known dealers; Pons was not aware that his treasures had any commercial value.

The late lamented Dusommerard tried his best to gain Pons' confidence, but the prince of bric-a-brac died before he could gain an entrance to the Pons museum, the one private collection which could compare with the famous Sauvageot museum. Pons and M. Sauvageot indeed resembled each other in more ways than one. M. Sauvageot, like Pons, was a musician; he was likewise a comparatively poor man, and he had collected his bric-a-brac in much the same way, with the same love of art, the same hatred of rich capitalists with well-known names who collect for the sake of running up prices as cleverly as possible. There was yet another point of resemblance between the pair; Pons, like his rival competitor and antagonist, felt in his heart an insatiable craving after specimens of the craftsman's skill and miracles of workmanship; he loved them as a man might love a fair mistress; an auction in the salerooms in the Rue des Jeuneurs, with its accompaniments of hammer strokes and brokers' men, was a crime of lese-bric-a-brac in Pons' eyes. Pons' museum was for his own delight at every hour; for the soul created to know and feel all the beauty of a masterpiece has this in common with the lover--to-day's joy is as great as the joy of yesterday; possession never palls; and a masterpiece, happily, never grows old. So the object that he held in his hand with such fatherly care could only be a "find," carried off with what affection amateurs alone know!

After the first outlines of this biographical sketch, every one will cry at once, "Why! this is the happiest man on earth, in spite of his ugliness!" And, in truth, no spleen, no dullness can resist the counter-irritant supplied by a "craze," the intellectual moxa of a hobby. You who can no longer drink of "the cup of pleasure," as it has been called through all ages, try to collect something, no matter what (people have been known to collect placards), so shall you receive the small change for the gold ingot of happiness. Have you a hobby? You have transferred pleasure to the plane of ideas. And yet, you need not envy the worthy Pons; such envy, like all kindred sentiments, would be founded upon a misapprehension.

With a nature so sensitive, with a soul that lived by tireless admiration of the magnificent achievements of art, of the high rivalry between human toil and the work of Nature--Pons was a slave to that one of the Seven Deadly Sins with which God surely will deal least hardly; Pons was a glutton. A narrow income, combined with a passion for bric-a-brac, condemned him to a regimen so abhorrent to a discriminating palate, that, bachelor as he was, he had cut the knot of the problem by dining out every day.

Now, in the time of the Empire, celebrities were more sought after than at present, perhaps because there were so few of them, perhaps because they made little or no political pretension. In those days, besides, you could set up for a poet, a musician, or a painter, with so little expense. Pons, being regarded as the probable rival of Nicolo, Paer, and Berton, used to receive so many invitations, that he was forced to keep a list of engagements, much as barristers note down the cases for which they are retained. And Pons behaved like an artist. He presented his amphitryons with copies of his songs, he "obliged" at the pianoforte, he brought them orders for boxes at the Feydeau, his own theatre, he organized concerts, he was not above taking the fiddle himself sometimes in a relation's house, and getting up a little impromptu dance. In those days, all the handsome men in France were away at the wars exchanging sabre-cuts with the handsome men of the Coalition. Pons was said to be, not ugly, but "peculiar-looking," after the grand rule laid down by Moliere in Eliante's famous couplets; but if he sometimes heard himself described as a "charming man" (after he had done some fair lady a service), his good fortune went no further than words.

It was between the years 1810 and 1816 that Pons contracted the unlucky habit of dining out; he grew accustomed to see his hosts taking pains over the dinner, procuring the first and best of everything, bringing out their choicest vintages, seeing carefully to the dessert, the coffee, the liqueurs, giving him of their best, in short; the best, moreover, of those times of the Empire when Paris was glutted with kings and queens and princes, and many a private house emulated royal splendours.

People used to play at Royalty then as they play nowadays at parliament, creating a whole host of societies with presidents, vice-presidents, secretaries and what not--agricultural societies, industrial societies, societies for the promotion of sericulture, viticulture, the growth of flax, and so forth. Some have even gone so far as to look about them for social evils in order to start a society to cure them.

But to return to Pons. A stomach thus educated is sure to react upon the owner's moral fibre; the demoralization of the man varies directly with his progress in culinary sapience. Voluptuousness, lurking in every secret recess of the heart, lays down the law therein. Honor and resolution are battered in breach. The tyranny of the palate has never been described; as a necessity of life it escapes the criticism of literature; yet no one imagines how many have been ruined by the table. The luxury of the table is indeed, in this sense, the courtesan's one competitor in Paris, besides representing in a manner the credit side in another account, where she figures as the expenditure.

With Pons' decline and fall as an artist came his simultaneous transformation from invited guest to parasite and hanger-on; he could not bring himself to quit dinners so excellently served for the Spartan broth of a two-franc ordinary. Alas! alas! a shudder ran through him at the mere thought of the great sacrifices which independence required him to make. He felt that he was capable of sinking to even lower depths for the sake of good living, if there were no other way of enjoying the first and best of everything, of guzzling (vulgar but expressive word) nice little dishes carefully prepared. Pons lived like a bird, pilfering his meal, flying away when he had taken his fill, singing a few notes by way of return; he took a certain pleasure in the thought that he lived at the expense of society, which asked of him--what but the trifling toll of grimaces? Like all confirmed bachelors, who hold their lodgings in horror, and live as much as possible in other people's houses, Pons was accustomed to the formulas and facial contortions which do duty for feeling in the world; he used compliments as small change; and as far as others were concerned, he was satisfied with the labels they bore, and never plunged a too-curious hand into the sack.

This not intolerable phase lasted for another ten years. Such years! Pons' life was closing with a rainy autumn. All through those years he contrived to dine without expense by making himself necessary in the houses which he frequented. He took the first step in the downward path by undertaking a host of small commissions; many and many a time Pons ran on errands instead of the porter or the servant; many a purchase he made for his entertainers. He became a kind of harmless, well-meaning spy, sent by one family into another; but he gained no credit with those for whom he trudged about, and so often sacrificed self-respect.

"Pons is a bachelor," said they; "he is at a loss to know what to do with his time; he is only too glad to trot about for us.--What else would he do?"

Very soon the cold which old age spreads about itself began to set in; the communicable cold which sensibly lowers the social temperature, especially if the old man is ugly and poor. Old and ugly and poor--is not this to be thrice old? Pons' winter had begun, the winter which brings the reddened nose, and frost-nipped cheeks, and the numbed fingers, numb in how many ways!

Invitations very seldom came for Pons now. So far from seeking the society of the parasite, every family accepted him much as they accepted the taxes; they valued nothing that Pons could do for them; real services from Pons counted for nought. The family circles in which the worthy artist revolved had no respect for art or letters; they went down on their knees to practical results; they valued nothing but the fortune or social position acquired since the year 1830. The bourgeoisie is afraid of intellect and genius, but Pons' spirit and manner were not haughty enough to overawe his relations, and naturally he had come at last to be accounted less than nothing with them, though he was not altogether despised.

He had suffered acutely among them, but, like all timid creatures, he kept silence as to his pain; and so by degrees schooled himself to hide his feelings, and learned to take sanctuary in his inmost self. Many superficial persons interpret this conduct by the short word "selfishness;" and, indeed, the resemblance between the egoist and the solitary human creature is strong enough to seem to justify the harsher verdict; and this is especially true in Paris, where nobody observes others closely, where all things pass swift as waves, and last as little as a Ministry.

So Cousin Pons was accused of selfishness (behind his back); and if the world accuses any one, it usually finds him guilty and condemns him into the bargain. Pons bowed to the decision. Do any of us know how such a timid creature is cast down by an unjust judgment? Who will ever paint all that the timid suffer? This state of things, now growing daily worse, explains the sad expression on the poor old musician's face; he lived by capitulations of which he was ashamed. Every time we sin against self-respect at the bidding of the ruling passion, we rivet its hold upon us; the more that passion requires of us, the stronger it grows, every sacrifice increasing, as it were, the value of a satisfaction for which so much has been given up, till the negative sum-total of renouncements looms very large in a man's imagination. Pons, for instance, after enduring the insolently patronizing looks of some bourgeois, incased in buckram of stupidity, sipped his glass of port or finished his quail with breadcrumbs, and relished something of the savor of revenge, besides. "It is not too dear at the price!" he said to himself.

After all, in the eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is the sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus of the Crosswords is sexless.

Setting aside one or two commonplace adventures in Italy, in which probably the climate accounted for his success, no woman had ever smiled upon Pons. Plenty of men are doomed to this fate. Pons was an abnormal birth; the child of parents well stricken in years, he bore the stigma of his untimely genesis; his cadaverous complexion might have been contracted in the flask of spirit-of-wine in which science preserves some extraordinary foetus. Artist though he was, with his tender, dreamy, sensitive soul, he was forced to accept the character which belonged to his face; it was hopeless to think of love, and he remained a bachelor, not so much of choice as of necessity. Then Gluttony, the sin of the continent monk, beckoned to Pons; he rushed upon temptation, as he had thrown his whole soul into the adoration of art and the cult of music. Good cheer and bric-a-brac gave him the small change for the love which could spend itself in no other way. As for music, it was his profession, and where will you find the man who is in love with his means of earning a livelihood? For it is with a profession as with marriage: in the long length you are sensible of nothing but the drawbacks.

Brillat-Savarin has deliberately set himself to justify the gastronome, but perhaps even he has not dwelt sufficiently on the reality of the pleasures of the table. The demands of digestion upon the human economy produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces which rivals the highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid with excess that the creature is easily killed. What man, on the wrong side of forty, is rash enough to work after dinner? And remark in the same connection, that all great men have been moderate eaters. The exhilarating effect of the wing of a chicken upon invalids recovering from serious illness, and long confined to a stinted and carefully chosen diet, has been frequently remarked. The sober Pons, whose whole enjoyment was concentrated in the exercise of his digestive organs, was in the position of chronic convalescence; he looked to his dinner to give him the utmost degree of pleasurable sensation, and hitherto he had procured such sensations daily. Who dares to bid farewell to old habit? Many a man on the brink of suicide has been plucked back on the threshold of death by the thought of the cafe where he plays his nightly game of dominoes.

In the year 1835, chance avenged Pons for the indifference of womankind by finding him a prop for his declining years, as the saying goes; and he, who had been old from his cradle, found a support in friendship. Pons took to himself the only life-partner permitted to him among his kind--an old man and a fellow-musician.

But for La Fontaine's fable, Les Deux Amis, this sketch should have borne the title of The Two Friends; but to take the name of this divine story would surely be a deed of violence, a profanation from which every true man of letters would shrink. The title ought to be borne alone and for ever by the fabulist's masterpiece, the revelation of his soul, and the record of his dreams; those three words were set once and for ever by the poet at the head of a page which is his by a sacred right of ownership; for it is a shrine before which all generations, all over the world, will kneel so long as the art of printing shall endure.

Pons' friend gave lessons on the pianoforte. They met and struck up an acquaintance in 1834, one prize day at a boarding-school; and so congenial were their ways of thinking and living, that Pons used to say that he had found his friend too late for his happiness. Never, perhaps, did two souls, so much alike, find each other in the great ocean of humanity which flowed forth, in disobedience to the will of God, from its source in the Garden of Eden. Before very long the two musicians could not live without each other. Confidences were exchanged, and in a week's time they were like brothers. Schmucke (for that was his name) had not believed that such a man as Pons existed, nor had Pons imagined that a Schmucke was possible. Here already you have a sufficient description of the good couple; but it is not every mind that takes kindly to the concise synthetic method, and a certain amount of demonstration is necessary if the credulous are to accept the conclusion.

This pianist, like all other pianists, was a German. A German, like the eminent Liszt and the great Mendelssohn, and Steibelt, and Dussek, and Meyer, and Mozart, and Doelher, and Thalberg, and Dreschok, and Hiller, and Leopold Hertz, Woertz, Karr, Wolff, Pixis, and Clara Wieck --and all Germans, generally speaking. Schmucke was a great musical composer doomed to remain a music master, so utterly did his character lack the audacity which a musical genius needs if he is to push his way to the front. A German's naivete does not invariably last him through his life; in some cases it fails after a certain age; and even as a cultivator of the soil brings water from afar by means of irrigation channels, so, from the springs of his youth, does the Teuton draw the simplicity which disarms suspicion--the perennial supplies with which he fertilizes his labors in every field of science, art, or commerce. A crafty Frenchman here and there will turn a Parisian tradesman's stupidity to good account in the same way. But Schmucke had kept his child's simplicity much as Pons continued to wear his relics of the Empire--all unsuspectingly. The true and noble-hearted German was at once the theatre and the audience, making music within himself for himself alone. In this city of Paris he lived as a nightingale lives among the thickets; and for twenty years he sang on, mateless, till he met with a second self in Pons. [See Une Fille d'Eve.]

Both Pons and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself alike in childlike ways--in a passion for flowers, in that form of nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with big glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature pictures of the view which he can behold about him of a natural size; in the inquiring turn of mind that sets a learned Teuton trudging three hundred miles in his gaiters in search of a fact which smiles up in his face from a wayside spring, or lurks laughing under the jessamine leaves in the back-yard; or (to take a final instance) in the German craving to endow every least detail in creation with a spiritual significance, a craving which produces sometimes Hoffmann's tipsiness in type, sometimes the folios with which Germany hedges the simplest questions round about, lest haply any fool should fall into her intellectual excavations; and, indeed, if you fathom these abysses, you find nothing but a German at the bottom.

Both friends were Catholics. They went to Mass and performed the duties of religion together; and, like children, found nothing to tell their confessors. It was their firm belief that music is to feeling and thought as thought and feeling are to speech; and of their converse on this system there was no end. Each made response to the other in orgies of sound, demonstrating their convictions, each for each, like lovers.

Schmucke was as absent-minded as Pons was wide-awake. Pons was a collector, Schmucke a dreamer of dreams; Schmucke was a student of beauty seen by the soul, Pons a preserver of material beauty. Pons would catch sight of a china cup and buy it in the time that Schmucke took to blow his nose, wondering the while within himself whether the musical phrase that was ringing in his brain--the motif from Rossini or Bellini or Beethoven or Mozart--had its origin or its counterpart in the world of human thought and emotion. Schmucke's economies were controlled by an absent mind, Pons was a spendthrift through passion, and for both the result was the same--they had not a penny on Saint Sylvester's day.

Perhaps Pons would have given way under his troubles if it had not been for this friendship; but life became bearable when he found some one to whom he could pour out his heart. The first time that he breathed a word of his difficulties, the good German had advised him to live as he himself did, and eat bread and cheese at home sooner than dine abroad at such a cost. Alas! Pons did not dare to confess that heart and stomach were at war within him, that he could digest affronts which pained his heart, and, cost what it might, a good dinner that satisfied his palate was a necessity to him, even as your gay Lothario must have a mistress to tease.

In time Schmucke understood; not just at once, for he was too much of a Teuton to possess that gift of swift perception in which the French rejoice; Schmucke understood and loved poor Pons the better. Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other. An angel could not have found a word to say to Schmucke rubbing his hands over the discovery of the hold that gluttony had gained over Pons. Indeed, the good German adorned their breakfast-table next morning with delicacies of which he went in search himself; and every day he was careful to provide something new for his friend, for they always breakfasted together at home.

If any one imagines that the pair could not escape ridicule in Paris, where nothing is respected, he cannot know that city. When Schmucke and Pons united their riches and poverty, they hit upon the economical expedient of lodging together, each paying half the rent of the very unequally divided second-floor of a house in the Rue de Normandie in the Marais. And as it often happened that they left home together and walked side by side along their beat of boulevard, the idlers of the quarter dubbed them "the pair of nutcrackers," a nickname which makes any portrait of Schmucke quite superfluous, for he was to Pons as the famous statue of the Nurse of Niobe in the Vatican is to the Tribune Venus.

Mme. Cibot, portress of the house in the Rue de Normandie, was the pivot on which the domestic life of the nutcrackers turned; but Mme. Cibot plays so large a part in the drama which grew out of their double existence, that it will be more appropriate to give her portrait on her first appearance in this Scene of Parisian Life.

One thing remains to be said of the characters of the pair of friends; but this one thing is precisely the hardest to make clear to ninety-nine readers out of a hundred in this forty-seventh year of the nineteenth century, perhaps by reason of the prodigious financial development brought about by the railway system. It is a little thing, and yet it is so much. It is a question, in fact, of giving an idea of the extreme sensitiveness of their natures. Let us borrow an illustration from the railways, if only by way of retaliation, as it were, for the loans which they levy upon us. The railway train of to-day, tearing over the metals, grinds away fine particles of dust, grains so minute that a traveler cannot detect them with the eye; but let a single one of those invisible motes find its way into the kidneys, it will bring about that most excruciating, and sometimes fatal, disease known as gravel. And our society, rushing like a locomotive along its metaled track, is heedless of the all but imperceptible dust made by the grinding of the wheels; but it was otherwise with the two musicians; the invisible grains of sand sank perpetually into the very fibres of their being, causing them intolerable anguish of heart. Tender exceedingly to the pain of others, they wept for their own powerlessness to help; and their own susceptibilities were almost morbidly acute. Neither age nor the continual spectacle of the drama of Paris life had hardened two souls still young and childlike and pure; the longer they lived, indeed, the more keenly they felt their inward suffering; for so it is, alas! with natures unsullied by the world, with the quiet thinker, and with such poets among the poets as have never fallen into any excess.

Since the old men began housekeeping together, the day's routine was very nearly the same for them both. They worked together in harness in the fraternal fashion of the Paris cab-horse; rising every morning, summer and winter, at seven o'clock, and setting out after breakfast to give music lessons in the boarding-schools, in which, upon occasion, they would take lessons for each other. Towards noon Pons repaired to his theatre, if there was a rehearsal on hand; but all his spare moments were spent in sauntering on the boulevards. Night found both of them in the orchestra at the theatre, for Pons had found a place for Schmucke, and upon this wise.

At the time of their first meeting, Pons had just received that marshal's baton of the unknown musical composer--an appointment as conductor of an orchestra. It had come to him unasked, by a favor of Count Popinot, a bourgeois hero of July, at that time a member of the Government. Count Popinot had the license of a theatre in his gift, and Count Popinot had also an old acquaintance of the kind that the successful man blushes to meet. As he rolls through the streets of Paris in his carriage, it is not pleasant to see his boyhood's chum down at heel, with a coat of many improbable colors and trousers innocent of straps, and a head full of soaring speculations on too grand a scale to tempt shy, easily scared capital. Moreover, this friend of his youth, Gaudissart by name, had done not a little in the past towards founding the fortunes of the great house of Popinot. Popinot, now a Count and a peer of France, after twice holding a portfolio had no wish to shake off "the Illustrious Gaudissart." Quite otherwise. The pomps and vanities of the Court of the Citizen-King had not spoiled the sometime druggist's kind heart; he wished to put his ex-commercial traveler in the way of renewing his wardrobe and replenishing his purse. So when Gaudissart, always an enthusiastic admirer of the fair sex, applied for the license of a bankrupt theatre, Popinot granted it on condition that Pons (a parasite of the Hotel Popinot) should be engaged as conductor of the orchestra; and at the same time, the Count was careful to send certain elderly amateurs of beauty to the theatre, so that the new manager might be strongly supported financially by wealthy admirers of feminine charms revealed by the costume of the ballet.

Gaudissart and Company, who, be it said, made their fortune, hit upon the grand idea of operas for the people, and carried it out in a boulevard theatre in 1834. A tolerable conductor, who could adapt or even compose a little music upon occasion, was a necessity for ballets and pantomimes; but the last management had so long been bankrupt, that they could not afford to keep a transposer and copyist. Pons therefore introduced Schmucke to the company as copier of music, a humble calling which requires no small musical knowledge; and Schmucke, acting on Pons' advice, came to an understanding with the chef-de-service at the Opera-Comique, so saving himself the clerical drudgery.

The partnership between Pons and Schmucke produced one brilliant result. Schmucke being a German, harmony was his strong point; he looked over the instrumentation of Pons' compositions, and Pons provided the airs. Here and there an amateur among the audience admired the new pieces of music which served as accompaniment to two or three great successes, but they attributed the improvement vaguely to "progress." No one cared to know the composer's name; like occupants of the baignoires, lost to view of the house, to gain a view of the stage, Pons and Schmucke eclipsed themselves by their success. In Paris (especially since the Revolution of July) no one can hope to succeed unless he will push his way quibuscumque viis and with all his might through a formidable host of competitors; but for this feat a man needs thews and sinews, and our two friends, be it remembered, had that affection of the heart which cripples all ambitious effort.

Pons, as a rule, only went to his theatre towards eight o'clock, when the piece in favor came on, and overtures and accompaniments needed the strict ruling of the baton; most minor theatres are lax in such matters, and Pons felt the more at ease because he himself had been by no means grasping in all his dealings with the management; and Schmucke, if need be, could take his place. Time went by, and Schmucke became an institution in the orchestra; the Illustrious Gaudissart said nothing, but he was well aware of the value of Pons' collaborator. He was obliged to include a pianoforte in the orchestra (following the example of the leading theatres); the instrument was placed beside the conductor's chair, and Schmucke played without increase of salary--a volunteer supernumerary. As Schmucke's character, his utter lack of ambition or pretence became known, the orchestra recognized him as one of themselves; and as time went on, he was intrusted with the often needed miscellaneous musical instruments which form no part of the regular band of a boulevard theatre. For a very small addition to his stipend, Schmucke played the viola d'amore, hautboy, violoncello, and harp, as well as the piano, the castanets for the cachucha, the bells, saxhorn, and the like. If the Germans cannot draw harmony from the mighty instruments of Liberty, yet to play all instruments of music comes to them by nature.

The two old artists were exceedingly popular at the theatre, and took its ways philosophically. They had put, as it were, scales over their eyes, lest they should see the offences that needs must come when a corps de ballet is blended with actors and actresses, one of the most trying combinations ever created by the laws of supply and demand for the torment of managers, authors, and composers alike.

Every one esteemed Pons with his kindness and his modesty, his great self-respect and respect for others; for a pure and limpid life wins something like admiration from the worst nature in every social sphere, and in Paris a fair virtue meets with something of the success of a large diamond, so great a rarity it is. No actor, no dancer however brazen, would have indulged in the mildest practical joke at the expense of either Pons or Schmucke.

Pons very occasionally put in an appearance in the foyer; but all that Schmucke knew of the theatre was the underground passage from the street door to the orchestra. Sometimes, however, during an interval, the good German would venture to make a survey of the house and ask a few questions of the first flute, a young fellow from Strasbourg, who came of a German family at Kehl. Gradually under the flute's tuition Schmucke's childlike imagination acquired a certain amount of knowledge of the world; he could believe in the existence of that fabulous creature the lorette, the possibility of "marriages at the Thirteenth Arrondissement," the vagaries of the leading lady, and the contraband traffic carried on by box-openers. In his eyes the more harmless forms of vice were the lowest depths of Babylonish iniquity; he did not believe the stories, he smiled at them for grotesque inventions. The ingenious reader can see that Pons and Schmucke were exploited, to use a word much in fashion; but what they lost in money they gained in consideration and kindly treatment.

It was after the success of the ballet with which a run of success began for the Gaudissart Company that the management presented Pons with a piece of plate--a group of figures attributed to Benvenuto Cellini. The alarming costliness of the gift caused talk in the green-room. It was a matter of twelve hundred francs! Pons, poor honest soul, was for returning the present, and Gaudissart had a world of trouble to persuade him to keep it.

"Ah!" said the manager afterwards, when he told his partner of the interview, "if we could only find actors up to that sample."

In their joint life, outwardly so quiet, there was the one disturbing element--the weakness to which Pons sacrificed, the insatiable craving to dine out. Whenever Schmucke happened to be at home while Pons was dressing for the evening, the good German would bewail this deplorable habit.

"Gif only he vas ony fatter vor it!" he many a time cried.

And Schmucke would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice, for a true friend's instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is unerring as a dog's sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the trouble in his friend's soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders it in his heart.

Pons, who always wore a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand, an ornament permitted in the time of the Empire, but ridiculous to-day--Pons, who belonged to the "troubadour time," the sentimental periods of the first Empire, was too much a child of his age, too much of a Frenchman to wear the expression of divine serenity which softened Schmucke's hideous ugliness. From Pons' melancholy looks Schmucke knew that the profession of parasite was growing daily more difficult and painful. And, in fact, in that month of October 1844, the number of houses at which Pons dined was naturally much restricted; reduced to move round and round the family circle, he had used the word family in far too wide a sense, as will shortly be seen.

M. Camusot, the rich silk mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, had married Pons' first cousin, Mlle. Pons, only child and heiress of one of the well-known firm of Pons Brothers, court embroiderers. Pons' own father and mother retired from a firm founded before the Revolution of 1789, leaving their capital in the business until Mlle. Pons' father sold it in 1815 to M. Rivet. M. Camusot had since lost his wife and married again, and retired from business some ten years, and now in 1844 he was a member of the Board of Trade, a deputy, and what not. But the Camusot clan were friendly; and Pons, good man, still considered that he was some kind of cousin to the children of the second marriage, who were not relations, or even connected with him in any way.

The second Mme. Camusot being a Mlle. Cardot, Pons introduced himself as a relative into the tolerably numerous Cardot family, a second bourgeois tribe which, taken with its connections, formed quite as strong a clan as the Camusots; for Cardot the notary (brother of the second Mme. Camusot) had married a Mlle. Chiffreville; and the well-known family of Chiffreville, the leading firm of manufacturing chemists, was closely connected with the whole drug trade, of which M. Anselme Popinot was for many years the undisputed head, until the Revolution of July plunged him into the very centre of the dynastic movement, as everybody knows. So Pons, in the wake of the Camusots and Cardots, reached the Chiffrevilles, and thence the Popinots, always in the character of a cousin's cousin.

The above concise statement of Pons' relations with his entertainers explains how it came to pass that an old musician was received in 1844 as one of the family in the houses of four distinguished persons--to wit, M. le Comte Popinot, peer of France, and twice in office; M. Cardot, retired notary, mayor and deputy of an arrondissement in Paris; M. Camusot senior, a member of the Board of Trade and the Municipal Chamber and a peerage; and lastly, M. Camusot de Marville, Camusot's son by his first marriage, and Pons' one genuine relation, albeit even he was a first cousin once removed.

This Camusot, President of a Chamber of the Court of Appeal in Paris, had taken the name of his estate at Marville to distinguish himself from his father and a younger half brother.

Cardot the retired notary had married his daughter to his successor, whose name was Berthier; and Pons, transferred as part of the connection, acquired a right to dine with the Berthiers "in the presence of a notary," as he put it.

This was the bourgeois empyrean which Pons called his "family," that upper world in which he so painfully reserved his right to a knife and fork.

Of all these houses, some ten in all, the one in which Pons ought to have met with the kindest reception should by rights have been his own cousin's; and, indeed, he paid most attention to President Camusot's family. But, alas! Mme. Camusot de Marville, daughter of the Sieur Thirion, usher of the cabinet to Louis XVIII. and Charles X., had never taken very kindly to her husband's first cousin, once removed. Pons had tried to soften this formidable relative; he wasted his time; for in spite of the pianoforte lessons which he gave gratuitously to Mlle. Camusot, a young woman with hair somewhat inclined to red, it was impossible to make a musician of her.

And now, at this very moment, as he walked with that precious object in his hand, Pons was bound for the President's house, where he always felt as if he were at the Tuileries itself, so heavily did the solemn green curtains, the carmelite-brown hangings, thick piled carpets, heavy furniture, and general atmosphere of magisterial severity oppress his soul. Strange as it may seem, he felt more at home in the Hotel Popinot, Rue Basse-du-Rempart, probably because it was full of works of art; for the master of the house, since he entered public life, had acquired a mania for collecting beautiful things, by way of contrast no doubt, for a politician is obliged to pay for secret services of the ugliest kind.

President de Marville lived in the Rue de Hanovre, in a house which his wife had bought ten years previously, on the death of her parents, for the Sieur and Dame Thirion left their daughter about a hundred and fifty thousand francs, the savings of a lifetime. With its north aspect, the house looks gloomy enough seen from the street, but the back looks towards the south over the courtyard, with a rather pretty garden beyond it. As the President occupied the whole of the first floor, once the abode of a great financier of the time of Louis XIV., and the second was let to a wealthy old lady, the house wore a look of dignified repose befitting a magistrate's residence. President Camusot had invested all that he inherited from his mother, together with the savings of twenty years, in the purchase of the splendid Marville estate; a chateau (as fine a relic of the past as you will find to-day in Normandy) standing in a hundred acres of park land, and a fine dependent farm, nominally bringing in twelve thousand francs per annum, though, as it cost the President at least a thousand crowns to keep up a state almost princely in our days, his yearly revenue, "all told," as the saying is, was a bare nine thousand francs. With this and his salary, the President's income amounted to about twenty thousand francs; but though to all appearance a wealthy man, especially as one-half of his father's property would one day revert to him as the only child of the first marriage, he was obliged to live in Paris as befitted his official position, and M. and Mme. de Marville spent almost the whole of their incomes. Indeed, before the year 1834 they felt pinched.

This family schedule sufficiently explains why Mlle. de Marville, aged three-and-twenty, was still unwed, in spite of a hundred thousand francs of dowry and tempting prospects, frequently, skilfully, but so far vainly, held out. For the past five years Pons had listened to Mme. la Presidente's lamentations as she beheld one young lawyer after another led to the altar, while all the newly appointed judges at the Tribunal were fathers of families already; and she, all this time, had displayed Mlle. de Marville's brilliant expectations before the undazzled eyes of young Vicomte Popinot, eldest son of the great man of the drug trade, he of whom it was said by the envious tongues of the neighborhood of the Rue des Lombards, that the Revolution of July had been brought about at least as much for his particular benefit as for the sake of the Orleans branch.

Arrived at the corner of the Rue de Choiseul and the Rue de Hanovre, Pons suffered from the inexplicable emotions which torment clear consciences; for a panic terror such as the worst of scoundrels might feel at sight of a policeman, an agony caused solely by a doubt as to Mme. de Marville's probable reception of him. That grain of sand, grating continually on the fibres of his heart, so far from losing its angles, grew more and more jagged, and the family in the Rue de Hanovre always sharpened the edges. Indeed, their unceremonious treatment and Pons' depreciation in value among them had affected the servants; and while they did not exactly fail in respect, they looked on the poor relation as a kind of beggar.

Pons' arch-enemy in the house was the ladies'-maid, a thin and wizened spinster, Madeleine Vivet by name. This Madeleine, in spite of, nay, perhaps on the strength of, a pimpled complexion and a viper-like length of spine, had made up her mind that some day she would be Mme. Pons. But in vain she dangled twenty thousand francs of savings before the old bachelor's eyes; Pons had declined happiness accompanied by so many pimples. From that time forth the Dido of the ante-chamber, who fain had called her master and mistress "cousin," wreaked her spite in petty ways upon the poor musician. She heard him on the stairs, and cried audibly, "Oh! here comes the sponger!" She stinted him of wine when she waited at dinner in the footman's absence; she filled the water-glass to the brim, to give him the difficult task of lifting it without spilling a drop; or she would pass the old man over altogether, till the mistress of the house would remind her (and in what a tone!--it brought the color to the poor cousin's face); or she would spill the gravy over his clothes. In short, she waged petty war after the manner of a petty nature, knowing that she could annoy an unfortunate superior with impunity.

Madeleine Vivet was Mme. de Marville's maid and housekeeper. She had lived with M. and Mme. Camusot de Marville since their marriage; she had shared the early struggles in the provinces when M. Camusot was a judge at Alencon; she had helped them to exist when M. Camusot, President of the Tribunal of Mantes, came to Paris, in 1828, to be an examining magistrate. She was, therefore, too much one of the family not to wish, for reasons of her own, to revenge herself upon them. Beneath her desire to pay a trick upon her haughty and ambitious mistress, and to call her master her cousin, there surely lurked a long-stifled hatred, built up like an avalanche, upon the pebble of some past grievance.

"Here comes your M. Pons, madame, still wearing that spencer of his!" Madeleine came to tell the Presidente. "He really might tell me how he manages to make it look the same for five-and-twenty years together."

Mme. Camusot de Marville, hearing a man's footstep in the little drawing-room between the large drawing-room and her bedroom, looked at her daughter and shrugged her shoulders.

"You always make these announcements so cleverly that you leave me no time to think, Madeleine."

"Jean is out, madame, I was all alone; M. Pons rang the bell, I opened the door; and as he is almost one of the family, I could not prevent him from coming after me. There he is, taking off his spencer."

"Poor little puss!" said the Presidente, addressing her daughter, "we are caught. We shall have to dine at home now.--Let us see," she added, seeing that the "dear puss" wore a piteous face; "must we get rid of him for good?"

"Oh! poor man!" cried Mlle. Camusot, "deprive him of one of his dinners?"

Somebody coughed significantly in the next room by way of warning that he could hear.

"Very well, let him come in!" said Mme. Camusot, looking at Madeleine with another shrug.

"You are here so early, cousin, that you have come in upon us just as mother was about to dress," said Cecile Camusot in a coaxing tone. But Cousin Pons had caught sight of the Presidente's shrug, and felt so cruelly hurt that he could not find a compliment, and contented himself with the profound remark, "You are always charming, my little cousin."

Then, turning to the mother, he continued with a bow:

"You will not take it amiss, I think, if I have come a little earlier than usual, dear cousin; I have brought something for you; you once did me the pleasure of asking me for it."

Poor Pons! Every time he addressed the President, the President's wife, or Cecile as "cousin," he gave them excruciating annoyance. As he spoke, he draw a long, narrow cherry-wood box, marvelously carved, from his coat-pocket.

"Oh, did I?--I had forgotten," the lady answered drily.

It was a heartless speech, was it not? Did not those few words deny all merit to the pains taken for her by the cousin whose one offence lay in the fact that he was a poor relation?

"But it is very kind of you, cousin," she added. "How much to I owe you for this little trifle?"

Pons quivered inwardly at the question. He had meant the trinket as a return for his dinners.

"I thought that you would permit me to offer it you----" he faltered out.

"What?" said Mme. Camusot. "Oh! but there need be no ceremony between us; we know each other well enough to wash our linen among ourselves. I know very well that you are not rich enough to give more than you get. And to go no further, it is quite enough that you should have spent a good deal of time in running among the dealers--"

"If you were asked to pay the full price of the fan, my dear cousin, you would not care to have it," answered poor Pons, hurt and insulted; "it is one of Watteau's masterpieces, painted on both sides; but you may be quite easy, cousin, I did not give one-hundredth part of its value as a work of art."

To tell a rich man that he is poor! you might as well tell the Archbishop of Granada that his homilies show signs of senility. Mme. la Presidente, proud of her husband's position, of the estate of Marville, and her invitations to court balls, was keenly susceptible on this point; and what was worse, the remark came from a poverty-stricken musician to whom she had been charitable.

"Then the people of whom you buy things of this kind are very stupid, are they?" she asked quickly.

"Stupid dealers are unknown in Paris," Pons answered almost drily.

"Then you must be very clever," put in Cecile by way of calming the dispute.

"Clever enough to know a Lancret, a Watteau, a Pater, or Greuze when I see it, little cousin; but anxious, most of all, to please your dear mamma."

Mme. de Marville, ignorant and vain, was unwilling to appear to receive the slightest trifle from the parasite; and here her ignorance served her admirably, she did not even know the name of Watteau. And, on the other hand, if anything can measure the extent of the collector's passion, which, in truth, is one of the most deeply seated of all passions, rivaling the very vanity of the author--if anything can give an idea of the lengths to which a collector will go, it is the audacity which Pons displayed on this occasion, as he held his own against his lady cousin for the first time in twenty years. He was amazed at his own boldness. He made Cecile see the beauties of the delicate carving on the sticks of this wonder, and as he talked to her his face grew serene and gentle again. But without some sketch of the Presidente, it is impossible fully to understand the perturbation of heart from which Pons suffered.

Mme. de Marville had been short and fair, plump and fresh; at forty-six she was as short as ever, but she looked dried up. An arched forehead and thin lips, that had been softly colored once, lent a soured look to a face naturally disdainful, and now grown hard and unpleasant with a long course of absolute domestic rule. Time had deepened her fair hair to a harsh chestnut hue; the pride of office, intensified by suppressed envy, looked out of eyes that had lost none of their brightness nor their satirical expression. As a matter of fact, Mme. Camusot de Marville felt almost poor in the society of self-made wealthy bourgeois with whom Pons dined. She could not forgive the rich retail druggist, ex-president of the Commercial Court, for his successive elevations as deputy, member of the Government, count and peer of France. She could not forgive her father-in-law for putting himself forward instead of his eldest son as deputy of his arrondissement after Popinot's promotion to the peerage. After eighteen years of services in Paris, she was still waiting for the post of Councillor of the Court of Cassation for her husband. It was Camusot's own incompetence, well known at the Law Courts, which excluded him from the Council. The Home Secretary of 1844 even regretted Camusot's nomination to the presidency of the Court of Indictments in 1834, though, thanks to his past experience as an examining magistrate, he made himself useful in drafting decrees.

These disappointments had told upon Mme. de Marville, who, moreover, had formed a tolerably correct estimate of her husband. A temper naturally shrewish was soured till she grew positively terrible. She was not old, but she had aged; she deliberately set herself to extort by fear all that the world was inclined to refuse her, and was harsh and rasping as a file. Caustic to excess she had few friends among women; she surrounded herself with prim, elderly matrons of her own stamp, who lent each other mutual support, and people stood in awe of her. As for poor Pons, his relations with this fiend in petticoats were very much those of a schoolboy with the master whose one idea of communication is the ferule.

The Presidente had no idea of the value of the gift. She was puzzled by her cousin's sudden access of audacity.

"Then, where did you find this?" inquired Cecile, as she looked closely at the trinket.

"In the Rue de Lappe. A dealer in second-hand furniture there had just brought it back with him from a chateau that is being pulled down near Dreux, Aulnay. Mme. de Pompadour used to spend part of her time there before she built Menars. Some of the most splendid wood-carving ever known has been saved from destruction; Lienard (our most famous living wood-carver) had kept a couple of oval frames for models, as the ne plus ultra of the art, so fine it is.--There were treasures in that place. My man found the fan in the drawer of an inlaid what-not, which I should certainly have bought if I were collecting things of the kind, but it is quite out of the question--a single piece of Riesener's furniture is worth three or four thousand francs! People here in Paris are just beginning to find out that the famous French and German marquetry workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries composed perfect pictures in wood. It is a collector's business to be ahead of the fashion. Why, in five years' time, the Frankenthal ware, which I have been collecting these twenty years, will fetch twice the price of Sevres pata tendre."

"What is Frankenthal ware?" asked Cecile.

"That is the name of the porcelain made by the Elector of the Palatinate; it dates further back than our manufactory at Sevres; just as the famous gardens at Heidelberg, laid waste by Turenne, had the bad luck to exist before the garden of Versailles. Sevres copied Frankenthal to a large extent.--In justice to the Germans, it must be said that they have done admirable work in Saxony and in the Palatinate."

Mother and daughter looked at one another as if Pons were speaking Chinese. No one can imagine how ignorant and exclusive Parisians are; they only learn what they are taught, and that only when they choose.

"And how do you know the Frankenthal ware when you see it?"

"Eh! by the mark!" cried Pons with enthusiasm. "There is a mark on every one of those exquisite masterpieces. Frankenthal ware is marked with a C and T (for Charles Theodore) interlaced and crowned. On old Dresden china there are two crossed swords and the number of the order in gilt figures. Vincennes bears a hunting-horn; Vienna, a V closed and barred. You can tell Berlin by the two bars, Mayence by the wheel, and Sevres by the two crossed L's. The queen's porcelain is marked A for Antoinette, with a royal crown above it. In the eighteenth century, all the crowned heads of Europe had rival porcelain factories, and workmen were kidnaped. Watteau designed services for the Dresden factory; they fetch frantic prices at the present day. One has to know what one is about with them too, for they are turning out imitations now at Dresden. Wonderful things they used to make; they will never make the like again--"

"Oh! pshaw!"

"No, cousin. Some inlaid work and some kinds of porcelain will never be made again, just as there will never be another Raphael, nor Titian, nor Rembrandt, nor Van Eyck, nor Cranach. . . . Well, now! there are the Chinese; they are very ingenious, very clever; they make modern copies of their 'grand mandarin' porcelain, as it is called. But a pair of vases of genuine 'grand mandarin' vases of the largest size, are worth, six, eight, and ten thousand francs, while you can buy the modern replicas for a couple of hundred!"

"You are joking."

"You are astonished at the prices, but that is nothing, cousin. A dinner service of Sevres pate tendre (and pate tendre is not porcelain)--a complete dinner service of Sevres pate tendre for twelve persons is not merely worth a hundred thousand francs, but that is the price charged on the invoice. Such a dinner-service cost fifteen thousand francs at Sevres in 1750; I have seen the original invoices."

"But let us go back to this fan," said Cecile. Evidently in her opinion the trinket was an old-fashioned thing.

"You can understand that as soon as your dear mamma did me the honor of asking for a fan, I went round of all the curiosity shops in Paris, but I found nothing fine enough. I wanted nothing less than a masterpiece for the dear Presidente, and thought of giving her one that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the most beautiful of all celebrated fans. But yesterday I was dazzled by this divine chef-d'oeuvre, which certainly must have been ordered by Louis XV. himself. Do you ask how I came to look for fans in the Rue de Lappe, among an Auvergnat's stock of brass and iron and ormolu furniture? Well, I myself believe that there is an intelligence in works of art; they know art-lovers, they call to them--'Cht-tt!'"

Mme. de Marville shrugged her shoulders and looked at her daughter; Pons did not notice the rapid pantomime.

"I know all those sharpers," continued Pons, "so I asked him, 'Anything fresh to-day, Daddy Monistrol?'--(for he always lets me look over his lots before the big buyers come)--and at that he began to tell me how Lienard, that did such beautiful work for the Government in the Chapelle de Dreux, had been at the Aulnay sale and rescued the carved panels out of the clutches of the Paris dealers, while their heads were running on china and inlaid furniture.--'I did not do much myself,' he went on, 'but I may make my traveling expenses out of this,' and he showed me a what-not; a marvel! Boucher's designs executed in marquetry, and with such art!--One could have gone down on one's knees before it.--'Look, sir,' he said, 'I have just found this fan in a little drawer; it was locked, I had to force it open. You might tell me where I can sell it'--and with that he brings out this little carved cherry-wood box.--'See,' says he, 'it is the kind of Pompadour that looks like decorated Gothic.'--'Yes,' I told him, 'the box is pretty; the box might suit me; but as for the fan, Monistrol, I have no Mme. Pons to give the old trinket to, and they make very pretty new ones nowadays; you can buy miracles of painting on vellum cheaply enough. There are two thousand painters in Paris, you know.' --And I opened out the fan carelessly, keeping down my admiration, looked indifferently at those two exquisite little pictures, touched off with an ease fit to send you into raptures. I held Mme. de Pompadour's fan in my hand! Watteau had done his utmost for this. --'What do you want for the what-not?'--'Oh! a thousand francs; I have had a bid already.'--I offered him a price for the fan corresponding with the probable expenses of the journey. We looked each other in the eyes, and I saw that I had my man. I put the fan back into the box lest my Auvergnat should begin to look at it, and went into ecstasies over the box; indeed, it is a jewel.--'If I take it,' said I, 'it is for the sake of the box; the box tempts me. As for the what-not, you will get more than a thousand francs for that. Just see how the brass is wrought; it is a model. There is business in it. . . . It has never been copied; it is a unique specimen, made solely for Mme. de Pompadour'--and so on, till my man, all on fire for his what-not, forgets the fan, and lets me have it for a mere trifle, because I have pointed out the beauties of his piece of Riesener's furniture. So here it is; but it needs a great deal of experience to make such a bargain as that. It is a duel, eye to eye; and who has such eyes as a Jew or an Auvergnat?"

The old artist's wonderful pantomime, his vivid, eager way of telling the story of the triumph of his shrewdness over the dealer's ignorance, would have made a subject for a Dutch painter; but it was all thrown away upon the audience. Mother and daughter exchanged cold, contemptuous glances.--"What an oddity!" they seemed to say.

"So it amuses you?" remarked Mme. de Marville. The question sent a cold chill through Pons; he felt a strong desire to slap the Presidente.

"Why, my dear cousin, that is the way to hunt down a work of art. You are face to face with antagonists that dispute the game with you. It is craft against craft! A work of art in the hands of a Norman, an Auvergnat, or a Jew, is like a princess guarded by magicians in a fairy tale."

"And how can you tell that this is by Wat--what do you call him?"

"Watteau, cousin. One of the greatest eighteenth century painters in France. Look! do you not see that it is his work?" (pointing to a pastoral scene, court-shepherd swains and shepherdesses dancing in a ring). "The movement! the life in it! the coloring! There it is--see! --painted with a stroke of the brush, as a writing-master makes a flourish with a pen. Not a trace of effort here! And, turn it over, look!--a ball in a drawing-room. Summer and Winter! And what ornaments! and how well preserved it is! The hinge-pin is gold, you see, and on cleaning it, I found a tiny ruby at either side."

"If it is so, cousin, I could not think of accepting such a valuable present from you. It would be better to lay up the money for yourself," said Mme. de Marville; but all the same, she asked no better than to keep the splendid fan.

"It is time that it should pass from the service of Vice into the hands of Virtue," said the good soul, recovering his assurance. "It has taken a century to work the miracle. No princess at Court, you may be sure, will have anything to compare with it; for, unfortunately, men will do more for a Pompadour than for a virtuous queen, such is human nature."

"Very well," Mme. de Marville said, laughing, "I will accept your present.--Cecile, my angel, go to Madeleine and see that dinner is worthy of your cousin."

Mme. de Marville wished to make matters even. Her request, made aloud, in defiance of all rules of good taste, sounded so much like an attempt to repay at once the balance due to the poor cousin, that Pons flushed red, like a girl found out in fault. The grain of sand was a little too large; for some moments he could only let it work in his heart. Cecile, a red-haired young woman, with a touch of pedantic affectation, combined her father's ponderous manner with a trace of her mother's hardness. She went and left poor Pons face to face with the terrible Presidente.

"How nice she is, my little Lili!" said the mother. She still called her Cecile by this baby name.

"Charming!" said Pons, twirling his thumbs.

"I cannot understand these times in which we live," broke out the Presidente. "What is the good of having a President of the Court of Appeal in Paris and a Commander of the Legion of Honor for your father, and for a grandfather the richest wholesale silk merchant in Paris, a deputy, and a millionaire that will be a peer of France some of these days?"

The President's zeal for the new Government had, in fact, recently been rewarded with a commander's ribbon--thanks to his friendship with Popinot, said the envious. Popinot himself, modest though he was, had, as has been seen, accepted the title of count, "for his son's sake," he told his numerous friends.

"Men look for nothing but money nowadays," said Cousin Pons. "No one thinks anything of you unless you are rich, and--"

"What would it have been if Heaven had spared my poor little Charles!--" cried the lady.

"Oh, with two children you would be poor," returned the cousin. "It practically means the division of the property. But you need not trouble yourself, cousin; Cecile is sure to marry sooner or later. She is the most accomplished girl I know."

To such depths had Pons fallen by adapting himself to the company of his entertainers! In their houses he echoed their ideas, and said the obvious thing, after the manner of a chorus in a Greek play. He did not dare to give free play to the artist's originality, which had overflowed in bright repartee when he was young; he had effaced himself, till he had almost lost his individuality; and if the real Pons appeared, as he had done a moment ago, he was immediately repressed.

"But I myself was married with only twenty thousand francs for my portion--"

"In 1819, cousin. And it was you, a woman with a head on your shoulders, and the royal protection of Louis XVIII."

"Be still, my child is a perfect angel. She is clever, she has a warm heart, she will have a hundred thousand francs on her wedding day, to say nothing of the most brilliant expectations; and yet she stays on our hands," and so on and so on. For twenty minutes, Mme. de Marville talked on about herself and her Cecile, pitying herself after the manner of mothers in bondage to marriageable daughters.

Pons had dined at the house every week for twenty years, and Camusot de Marville was the only cousin he had in the world; but he had yet to hear the first word spoken as to his own affairs--nobody cared to know how he lived. Here and elsewhere the poor cousin was a kind of sink down which his relatives poured domestic confidences. His discretion was well known; indeed, was he not bound over to silence when a single imprudent word would have shut the door of ten houses upon him? And he must combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from his point of view, every one must be in the right. And so, in the house of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a digestive apparatus.

In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with due circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law with her eyes shut. She was even disposed to think that at eight-and-forty or so a man with twenty thousand francs a year was a good match.

"Cecile is in her twenty-third year. If it should fall out so unfortunately that she is not married before she is five or six-and-twenty, it will be extremely hard to marry her at all. When a girl reaches that age, people want to know why she has been so long on hand. We are a good deal talked about in our set. We have come to the end of all the ordinary excuses--'She is so young.--She is so fond of her father and mother that she doesn't like to leave them.--She is so happy at home.--She is hard to please, she would like a good name--' We are beginning to look silly; I feel that distinctly. And besides, Cecile is tired of waiting, poor child, she suffers--"

"In what way?" Pons was noodle enough to ask.

"Why, because it is humiliating to her to see all her girl friends married before her," replied the mother, with a duenna's air.

"But, cousin, has anything happened since the last time that I had the pleasure of dining here? Why do you think of men of eight-and-forty?" Pons inquired humbly.

"This has happened," returned the Presidente. "We were to have had an interview with a Court Councillor; his son is thirty years old and very well-to-do, and M. de Marville would have obtained a post in the audit-office for him and paid the money. The young man is a supernumerary there at present. And now they tell us that he has taken it into his head to rush off to Italy in the train of a duchess from the Bal Mabille. . . . It is nothing but a refusal in disguise. The fact is, the young man's mother is dead; he has an income of thirty thousand francs, and more to come at his father's death, and they don't care about the match for him. You have just come in in the middle of all this, dear cousin, so you must excuse our bad temper."

While Pons was casting about for the complimentary answer which invariably occurred to him too late when he was afraid of his host, Madeleine came in, handed a folded note to the Presidente, and waited for an answer. The note ran as follows:

"DEAR MAMMA,--If we pretend that this note comes to you from papa at the Palais, and that he wants us both to dine with his friend because proposals have been renewed--then the cousin will go, and we can carry out our plan of going to the Popinots."

"Who brought the master's note?" the Presidente asked quickly.

"A lad from the Salle du Palais," the withered waiting woman unblushingly answered, and her mistress knew at once that Madeleine had woven the plot with Cecile, now at the end of her patience.

"Tell him that we will both be there at half-past five."

Madeleine had no sooner left the room than the Presidente turned to Cousin Pons with that insincere friendliness which is about as grateful to a sensitive soul as a mixture of milk and vinegar to the palate of an epicure.

"Dinner is ordered, dear cousin; you must dine without us; my husband has just sent word from the court that the question of the marriage has been reopened, and we are to dine with the Councillor. We need not stand on ceremony at all. Do just as if you were at home. I have no secrets from you; I am perfectly open with you, as you see. I am sure you would not wish to break off the little darling's marriage."

"I, cousin? On the contrary, I should like to find some one for her; but in my circle--"

"Oh, that is not at all likely," said the Presidente, cutting him short insolently. "Then you will stay, will you not? Cecile will keep you company while I dress.

"Oh! I can dine somewhere else, cousin."

Cruelly hurt though he was by her way of casting up his poverty to him, the prospect of being left alone with the servants was even more alarming.

"But why should you? Dinner is ready; you may just as well have it; if you do not, the servants will eat it."

At that atrocious speech Pons started up as if he had received a shock from a galvanic battery, bowed stiffly to the lady, and went to find his spencer. Now, it so happened that the door of Cecile's bedroom, beyond the little drawing-room, stood open, and looking into the mirror, he caught sight of the girl shaking with laughter as she gesticulated and made signs to her mother. The old artist understood beyond a doubt that he had been the victim of some cowardly hoax. Pons went slowly down the stairs; he could not keep back the tears. He understood that he had been turned out of the house, but why and wherefore he did not know.

"I am growing too old," he told himself. "The world has a horror of old age and poverty--two ugly things. After this I will not go anywhere unless I am asked."

Heroic resolve!

Downstairs the great gate was shut, as it usually is in houses occupied by the proprietor; the kitchen stood exactly opposite the porter's lodge, and the door was open. Pons was obliged to listen while Madeleine told the servants the whole story amid the laughter of the servants. She had not expected him to leave so soon. The footman loudly applauded a joke at the expense of a visitor who was always coming to the house and never gave you more than three francs at the year's end.

"Yes," put in the cook; "but if he cuts up rough and does not come back, there will be three francs the less for some of us on New Year's day."

"Eh! How is he to know?" retorted the footman.

"Pooh!" said Madeleine, "a little sooner or a little later--what difference does it make? The people at the other houses where he dines are so tired of him that they are going to turn him out."

"The gate, if you please!"

Madeleine had scarcely uttered the words when they heard the old musician's call to the porter. It sounded like a cry of pain. There was a sudden silence in the kitchen.

"He heard!" the footman said.

"Well, and if he did, so much the worser, or rather so much the better," retorted Madeleine. "He is an arrant skinflint."

Poor Pons had lost none of the talk in the kitchen; he heard it all, even to the last word. He made his way home along the boulevards, in the same state, physical and mental, as an old woman after a desperate struggle with burglars. As he went he talked to himself in quick spasmodic jerks; his honor had been wounded, and the pain of it drove him on as a gust of wind whirls away a straw. He found himself at last in the Boulevard du Temple; how he had come thither he could not tell. It was five o'clock, and, strange to say, he had completely lost his appetite.

But if the reader is to understand the revolution which Pons' unexpected return at that hour was to work in the Rue de Normandie, the promised biography of Mme. Cibot must be given in this place.

Any one passing along the Rue de Normandie might be pardoned for thinking that he was in some small provincial town. Grass runs to seed in the street, everybody knows everybody else, and the sight of a stranger is an event. The houses date back to the reign of Henry IV., when there was a scheme afoot for a quarter in which every street was to be named after a French province, and all should converge in a handsome square to which La France should stand godmother. The Quartier de l'Europe was a revival of the same idea; history repeats itself everywhere in the world, and even in the world of speculation.

The house in which the two musicians used to live is an old mansion with a courtyard in front and a garden at the back; but the front part of the house which gives upon the street is comparatively modern, built during the eighteenth century when the Marais was a fashionable quarter. The friends lived at the back, on the second floor of the old part of the house. The whole building belongs to M. Pillerault, an old man of eighty, who left matters very much in the hands of M. and Mme. Cibot, his porters for the past twenty-six years.

Now, as a porter cannot live by his lodge alone, the aforesaid Cibot had other means of gaining a livelihood; and supplemented his five per cent on the rental and his faggot from every cartload of wood by his own earnings as a tailor. In time Cibot ceased to work for the master tailors; he made a connection among the little trades-people of the quarter, and enjoyed a monopoly of the repairs, renovations, and fine drawing of all the coats and trousers in three adjacent streets. The lodge was spacious and wholesome, and boasted a second room; wherefore the Cibot couple were looked upon as among the luckiest porters in the arrondissement.

Cibot, small and stunted, with a complexion almost olive-colored by reason of sitting day in day out in Turk-fashion on a table level with the barred window, made about twelve or fourteen francs a week. He worked still, though he was fifty-eight years old, but fifty-eight is the porter's golden age; he is used to his lodge, he and his room fit each other like the shell and the oyster, and "he is known in the neighborhood."

Mme. Cibot, sometime opener of oysters at the Cadran Bleu, after all the adventures which come unsought to the belle of an oyster-bar, left her post for love of Cibot at the age of twenty-eight. The beauty of a woman of the people is short-lived, especially if she is planted espalier fashion at a restaurant door. Her features are hardened by puffs of hot air from the kitchen; the color of the heeltaps of customers' bottles, finished in the company of the waiters, gradually filters into her complexion--no beauty is full blown so soon as the beauty of an oyster-opener. Luckily for Mme. Cibot, lawful wedlock and a portress' life were offered to her just in time; while she still preserved a comeliness of a masculine order slandered by rivals of the Rue de Normandie, who called her "a great blowsy thing," Mme. Cibot might have sat as a model to Rubens. Those flesh tints reminded you of the appetizing sheen on a pat of Isigny butter; but plump as she was, no woman went about her work with more agility. Mme. Cibot had attained the time of life when women of her stamp are obliged to shave --which is as much as to say that she had reached the age of forty-eight. A porter's wife with a moustache is one of the best possible guarantees of respectability and security that a landlord can have. If Delacroix could have seen Mme. Cibot leaning proudly on her broom handle, he would assuredly have painted her as Bellona.

Strange as it may seem, the circumstances of the Cibots, man and wife (in the style of an indictment), were one day to affect the lives of the two friends; wherefore the chronicler, as in duty bound, must give some particulars as to the Cibots' lodge.

The house brought in about eight thousand francs for there were three complete sets of apartments--back and front, on the side nearest the Rue de Normandie, as well as the three floors in the older mansion between the courtyard and the garden, and a shop kept by a marine store-dealer named Remonencq, which fronted on the street. During the past few months this Remonencq had begun to deal in old curiosities, and knew the value of Pons' collection so well that he took off his hat whenever the musician came in or went out.

A sou in the livre on eight thousand francs therefore brought in about four hundred francs to the Cibots. They had no rent to pay and no expenses for firing; Cibot's earnings amounted on an average to seven or eight hundred francs, add tips at New Year, and the pair had altogether in income of sixteen hundred francs, every penny of which they spent, for the Cibots lived and fared better than working people usually do. "One can only live once," La Cibot used to say. She was born during the Revolution, you see, and had never learned her Catechism.

The husband of this portress with the unblenching tawny eyes was an object of envy to the whole fraternity, for La Cibot had not forgotten the knowledge of cookery picked up at the Cadran Bleu. So it had come to pass that the Cibots had passed the prime of life, and saw themselves on the threshold of old age without a hundred francs put by for the future. Well clad and well fed, they enjoyed among the neighbors, it is true, the respect due to twenty-six years of strict honesty; for if they had nothing of their own, they "hadn't nothing belonging to nobody else," according to La Cibot, who was a prodigal of negatives. "There wasn't never such a love of a man," she would say to her husband. Do you ask why? You might as well ask the reason of her indifference in matters of religion.

Both of them were proud of a life lived in open day, of the esteem in which they were held for six or seven streets round about, and of the autocratic rule permitted to them by the proprietor ("perprietor," they called him); but in private they groaned because they had no money lying at interest. Cibot complained of pains in his hands and legs, and his wife would lament that her poor, dear Cibot should be forced to work at his age; and, indeed, the day is not far distant when a porter after thirty years of such a life will cry shame upon the injustice of the Government and clamor for the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. Every time that the gossip of the quarter brought news of such and such a servant-maid, left an annuity of three or four hundred francs after eight or ten years of service, the porters' lodges would resound with complaints, which may give some idea of the consuming jealousies in the lowest walks of life in Paris.

"Oh, indeed! It will never happen to the like of us to have our names mentioned in a will! We have no luck, but we do more than servants, for all that. We fill a place of trust; we give receipts, we are on the lookout for squalls, and yet we are treated like dogs, neither more nor less, and that's the truth!"

"Some find fortune and some miss fortune," said Cibot, coming in with a coat.

"If I had left Cibot here in his lodge and taken a place as cook, we should have our thirty thousand francs out at interest," cried Mme. Cibot, standing chatting with a neighbor, her hands on her prominent hips. "But I didn't understand how to get on in life; housed inside of a snug lodge and firing found and want for nothing, but that is all."

In 1836, when the friends took up their abode on the second floor, they brought about a sort of revolution in the Cibot household. It befell on this wise. Schmucke, like his friend Pons, usually arranged that the porter or the porter's wife should undertake the cares of housekeeping; and being both of one mind on this point when they came to live in the Rue de Normandie, Mme. Cibot became their housekeeper at the rate of twenty-five francs per month--twelve francs fifty centimes for each of them. Before the year was out, the emeritus portress reigned in the establishment of the two old bachelors, as she reigned everywhere in the house belonging to M. Pillerault, great uncle of Mme. le Comtesse Popinot. Their business was her business; she called them "my gentlemen." And at last, finding the pair of nutcrackers as mild as lambs, easy to live with, and by no means suspicious--perfect children, in fact--her heart, the heart of a woman of the people, prompted her to protect, adore, and serve them with such thorough devotion, that she read them a lecture now and again, and saved them from the impositions which swell the cost of living in Paris. For twenty-five francs a month, the two old bachelors inadvertently acquired a mother.

As they became aware of Mme. Cibot's full value, they gave her outspoken praises, and thanks, and little presents which strengthened the bonds of the domestic alliance. Mme. Cibot a thousand times preferred appreciation to money payments; it is a well-known fact that the sense that one is appreciated makes up for a deficiency in wages. And Cibot did all that he could for his wife's two gentlemen, and ran errands and did repairs at half-price for them.

The second year brought a new element into the friendship between the lodge and the second floor, and Schmucke concluded a bargain which satisfied his indolence and desire for a life without cares. For thirty sous per day, or forty-five francs per month, Mme. Cibot undertook to provide Schmucke with breakfast and dinner; and Pons, finding his friend's breakfast very much to his mind, concluded a separate treaty for that meal only at the rate of eighteen francs. This arrangement, which added nearly ninety francs every month to the takings of the porter and his wife, made two inviolable beings of the lodgers; they became angels, cherubs, divinities. It is very doubtful whether the King of the French, who is supposed to understand economy, is as well served as the pair of nutcrackers used to be in those days.

For them the milk issued pure from the can; they enjoyed a free perusal of all the morning papers taken by other lodgers, later risers, who were told, if need be, that the newspapers had not come yet. Mme. Cibot, moreover, kept their clothes, their rooms, and the landing as clean as a Flemish interior. As for Schmucke, he enjoyed unhoped-for happiness; Mme. Cibot had made life easy for him; he paid her about six francs a month, and she took charge of his linen, washing, and mending. Altogether, his expenses amounted to sixty-six francs per month (for he spent fifteen francs on tobacco), and sixty-six francs multiplied by twelve produces the sum total of seven hundred and ninety-two francs. Add two hundred and twenty francs for rent, rates, and taxes, and you have a thousand and twelve francs. Cibot was Schmucke's tailor; his clothes cost him on average a hundred and fifty francs, which further swells the total to the sum of twelve hundred. On twelve hundred francs per annum this profound philosopher lived. How many people in Europe, whose one thought it is to come to Paris and live there, will be agreeably surprised to learn that you may exist in comfort upon an income of twelve hundred francs in the Rue de Normandie in the Marais, under the wing of a Mme. Cibot.

Mme. Cibot, to resume the story, was amazed beyond expression to see Pons, good man, return at five o'clock in the evening. Such a thing had never happened before; and not only so, but "her gentleman" had given her no greeting--had not so much as seen her!

"Well, well, Cibot," said she to her spouse, "M. Pons has come in for a million, or gone out of his mind!"

"That is how it looks to me," said Cibot, dropping the coat-sleeve in which he was making a "dart," in tailor's language.

The savory odor of a stew pervaded the whole courtyard, as Pons returned mechanically home. Mme. Cibot was dishing up Schmucke's dinner, which consisted of scraps of boiled beef from a little cook-shop not above doing a little trade of this kind. These morsels were fricasseed in brown butter, with thin slices of onion, until the meat and vegetables had absorbed the gravy and this true porter's dish was browned to the right degree. With that fricassee, prepared with loving care for Cibot and Schmucke, and accompanied by a bottle of beer and a piece of cheese, the old German music-master was quite content. Not King Solomon in all his glory, be sure, could dine better than Schmucke. A dish of boiled beef fricasseed with onions, scraps of saute chicken, or beef and parsley, or venison, or fish served with a sauce of La Cibot's own invention (a sauce with which a mother might unsuspectingly eat her child),--such was Schmucke's ordinary, varying with the quantity and quality of the remnants of food supplied by boulevard restaurants to the cook-shop in the Rue Boucherat. Schmucke took everything that "goot Montame Zipod" gave him, and was content, and so from day to day "goot Montame Zipod" cut down the cost of his dinner, until it could be served for twenty sous.

"It won't be long afore I find out what is the matter with him, poor dear," said Mme. Cibot to her husband, "for here is M. Schmucke's dinner all ready for him."

As she spoke she covered the deep earthenware dish with a plate; and, notwithstanding her age, she climbed the stair and reached the door before Schmucke opened it to Pons.

"Vat is de matter mit you, mein goot friend?" asked the German, scared by the expression of Pons' face.

"I will tell you all about it; but I have come home to have dinner with you--"

"Tinner! tinner!" cried Schmucke in ecstasy; "but it is impossible!" the old German added, as he thought of his friend's gastronomical tastes; and at that very moment he caught sight of Mme. Cibot listening to the conversation, as she had a right to do as his lawful housewife. Struck with one of those happy inspirations which only enlighten a friend's heart, he marched up to the portress and drew her out to the stairhead.

"Montame Zipod," he said, "der goot Pons is fond of goot dings; shoost go rount to der Catran Pleu und order a dainty liddle tinner, mit anjovies und maggaroni. Ein tinner for Lugullus, in vact."

"What is that?" inquired La Cibot.

"Oh! ah!" returned Schmucke, "it is veal a la pourcheoise" (bourgeoise, he meant), "a nice fisch, ein pottle off Porteaux, und nice dings, der fery best dey haf, like groquettes of rice und shmoked pacon! Bay for it, und say nodings; I vill gif you back de monny to-morrow morning."

Back went Schmucke, radiant and rubbing his hands; but his expression slowly changed to a look of bewildered astonishment as he heard Pons' story of the troubles that had but just now overwhelmed him in a moment. He tried to comfort Pons by giving him a sketch of the world from his own point of view. Paris, in his opinion, was a perpetual hurly-burly, the men and women in it were whirled away by a tempestuous waltz; it was no use expecting anything of the world, which only looked at the outsides of things, "und not at der inderior." For the hundredth time he related how that the only three pupils for whom he had really cared, for whom he was ready to die, the three who had been fond of him, and even allowed him a little pension of nine hundred francs, each contributing three hundred to the amount --his favorite pupils had quite forgotten to come to see him; and so swift was the current of Parisian life which swept them away, that if he called at their houses, he had not succeeded in seeing them once in three years--(it is a fact, however, that Schmucke had always thought fit to call on these great ladies at ten o'clock in the morning!) --still, his pension was paid quarterly through the medium of solicitors.

"Und yet, dey are hearts of gold," he concluded. "Dey are my liddle Saint Cecilias, sharming vimmen, Montame de Bordentuere, Montame de Fantenesse, und Montame du Dilet. Gif I see dem at all, it is at die Jambs Elusees, und dey do not see me . . . yet dey are ver' fond of me, und I might go to dine mit dem, und dey vould be ver' bleased to see me; und I might go to deir country-houses, but I vould much rader be mit mine friend Bons, because I kann see him venefer I like, und efery tay."

Pons took Schmucke's hand and grasped it between his own. All that was passing in his inmost soul was communicated in that tight pressure. And so for awhile the friends sat like two lovers, meeting at last after a long absence.

"Tine here, efery tay!" broke out Schmucke, inwardly blessing Mme. de Marville for her hardness of heart. "Look here! Ve shall go a prick-a-pracking togeders, und der teufel shall nefer show his tail here."

"Ve shall go prick-a-pracking togeders!" for the full comprehension of those truly heroic words, it must be confessed that Schmucke's ignorance of bric-a-brac was something of the densest. It required all the strength of his friendship to keep him from doing heedless damage in the sitting-room and study which did duty as a museum for Pons. Schmucke, wholly absorbed in music, a composer for love of his art, took about as much interest in his friend's little trifles as a fish might take in a flower-show at the Luxembourg, supposing that it had received a ticket of admission. A certain awe which he certainly felt for the marvels was simply a reflection of the respect which Pons showed his treasures when he dusted them. To Pons' exclamations of admiration, he was wont to reply with a "Yes, it is ver' bretty," as a mother answers baby-gestures with meaningless baby-talk. Seven times since the friends had lived together, Pons had exchanged a good clock for a better one, till at last he possessed a timepiece in Boule's first and best manner, for Boule had two manners, as Raphael had three. In the first he combined ebony and copper; in the second --contrary to his convictions--he sacrificed to tortoise-shell inlaid work. In spite of Pons' learned dissertations, Schmucke never could see the slightest difference between the magnificent clock in Boule's first manner and its six predecessors; but, for Pons' sake, Schmucke was even more careful among the "chimcracks" than Pons himself. So it should not be surprising that Schmucke's sublime words comforted Pons in his despair; for "Ve shall go prick-a-pracking togeders," meant, being interpreted, "I will put money into bric-a-brac, if you will only dine here."

"Dinner is ready," Mme. Cibot announced, with astonishing self-possession.

It is not difficult to imagine Pons' surprise when he saw and relished the dinner due to Schmucke's friendship. Sensations of this kind, that came so rarely in a lifetime, are never the outcome of the constant, close relationship by which friend daily says to friend, "You are a second self to me"; for this, too, becomes a matter of use and wont. It is only by contact with the barbarism of the world without that the happiness of that intimate life is revealed to us as a sudden glad surprise. It is the outer world which renews the bond between friend and friend, lover and lover, all their lives long, wherever two great souls are knit together by friendship or by love.

Pons brushed away two big tears, Schmucke himself wiped his eyes; and though nothing was said, the two were closer friends than before. Little friendly nods and glances exchanged across the table were like balm to Pons, soothing the pain caused by the sand dropped in his heart by the President's wife. As for Schmucke, he rubbed his hands till they were sore; for a new idea had occurred to him, one of those great discoveries which cause a German no surprise, unless they sprout up suddenly in a Teuton brain frost-bound by the awe and reverence due to sovereign princes.

"Mine goot Bons?" began Schmucke.

"I can guess what you mean; you would like us both to dine together here, every day--"

"Gif only I vas rich enof to lif like dis efery tay--" began the good German in a melancholy voice. But here Mme. Cibot appeared upon the scene. Pons had given her an order for the theatre from time to time, and stood in consequence almost as high in her esteem and affection as her boarder Schmucke.

"Lord love you," said she, "for three francs and wine extra I can give you both such a dinner every day that you will be ready to lick the plates as clean as if they were washed."

"It is a fact," Schmucke remarked, "dat die dinners dat Montame Zipod cooks for me are better as de messes dey eat at der royal dable!" In his eagerness, Schmucke, usually so full of respect for the powers that be, so far forgot himself as to imitate the irreverent newspapers which scoffed at the "fixed-price" dinners of Royalty.

"Really?" said Pons. "Very well, I will try to-morrow."

And at that promise Schmucke sprang from one end of the table to the other, sweeping off tablecloth, bottles, and dishes as he went, and hugged Pons to his heart. So might gas rush to combine with gas.

"Vat happiness!" cried he.

Mme. Cibot was quite touched. "Monsieur is going to dine here every day!" she cried proudly.

That excellent woman departed downstairs again in ignorance of the event which had brought about this result, entered her room like Josepha in William Tell, set down the plates and dishes on the table with a bang, and called aloud to her husband:

"Cibot! run to the Cafe Turc for two small cups of coffee, and tell the man at the stove that it is for me."

Then she sat down and rested her hands on her massive knees, and gazed out of the window at the opposite wall.

"I will go to-night and see what Ma'am Fontaine says," she thought. (Madame Fontaine told fortunes on the cards for all the servants in the quarter of the Marais.) "Since these two gentlemen came here, we have put two thousand francs in the savings bank. Two thousand francs in eight years! What luck! Would it be better to make no profit out of M. Pons' dinner and keep him here at home? Ma'am Fontaine's hen will tell me that."

Three years ago Mme. Cibot had begun to cherish a hope that her name might be mentioned in "her gentlemen's" wills; she had redoubled her zeal since that covetous thought tardily sprouted up in the midst of that so honest moustache. Pons hitherto had dined abroad, eluding her desire to have both of "her gentlemen" entirely under her management; his "troubadour" collector's life had scared away certain vague ideas which hovered in La Cibot's brain; but now her shadowy projects assumed the formidable shape of a definite plan, dating from that memorable dinner. Fifteen minutes later she reappeared in the dining-room with two cups of excellent coffee, flanked by a couple of tiny glasses of kirschwasser.

"Long lif Montame Zipod!" cried Schmucke; "she haf guessed right!"

The diner-out bemoaned himself a little, while Schmucke met his lamentations with coaxing fondness, like a home pigeon welcoming back a wandering bird. Then the pair set out for the theatre.

Schmucke could not leave his friend in the condition to which he had been brought by the Camusots--mistresses and servants. He knew Pons so well; he feared lest some cruel, sad thought should seize on him at his conductor's desk, and undo all the good done by his welcome home to the nest.

And Schmucke brought his friend back on his arm through the streets at midnight. A lover could not be more careful of his lady. He pointed out the edges of the curbstones, he was on the lookout whenever they stepped on or off the pavement, ready with a warning if there was a gutter to cross. Schmucke could have wished that the streets were paved with cotton-down; he would have had a blue sky overhead, and Pons should hear the music which all the angels in heaven were making for him. He had won the lost province in his friend's heart!

For nearly three months Pons and Schmucke dined together every day. Pons was obliged to retrench at once; for dinner at forty-five francs a month and wine at thirty-five meant precisely eighty francs less to spend on bric-a-brac. And very soon, in spite of all that Schmucke could do, in spite of his little German jokes, Pons fell to regretting the delicate dishes, the liqueurs, the good coffee, the table talk, the insincere politeness, the guests, and the gossip, and the houses where he used to dine. On the wrong side of sixty a man cannot break himself of a habit of thirty-six years' growth. Wine at a hundred and thirty francs per hogshead is scarcely a generous liquid in a gourmet's glass; every time that Pons raised it to his lips he thought, with infinite regret, of the exquisite wines in his entertainers' cellars.

In short, at the end of three months, the cruel pangs which had gone near to break Pons' sensitive heart had died away; he forgot everything but the charms of society; and languished for them like some elderly slave of a petticoat compelled to leave the mistress who too repeatedly deceives him. In vain he tried to hide his profound and consuming melancholy; it was too plain that he was suffering from one of the mysterious complaints which the mind brings upon the body.

A single symptom will throw light upon this case of nostalgia (as it were) produced by breaking away from an old habit; in itself it is trifling, one of the myriad nothings which are as rings in a coat of chain-mail enveloping the soul in a network of iron. One of the keenest pleasures of Pons' old life, one of the joys of the dinner-table parasite at all times, was the "surprise," the thrill produced by the extra dainty dish added triumphantly to the bill of fare by the mistress of a bourgeois house, to give a festal air to the dinner. Pons' stomach hankered after that gastronomical satisfaction. Mme. Cibot, in the pride of her heart, enumerated every dish beforehand; a salt and savor once periodically recurrent, had vanished utterly from daily life. Dinner proceeded without le plat couvert, as our grandsires called it. This lay beyond the bounds of Schmucke's powers of comprehension.

Pons had too much delicacy to grumble; but if the case of unappreciated genius is hard, it goes harder still with the stomach whose claims are ignored. Slighted affection, a subject of which too much has been made, is founded upon an illusory longing; for if the creature fails, love can turn to the Creator who has treasures to bestow. But the stomach! . . . Nothing can be compared to its sufferings; for, in the first place, one must live.

Pons thought wistfully of certain creams--surely the poetry of cookery!--of certain white sauces, masterpieces of the art; of truffled chickens, fit to melt your heart; and above these, and more than all these, of the famous Rhine carp, only known at Paris, served with what condiments! There were days when Pons, thinking upon Count Popinot's cook, would sigh aloud, "Ah, Sophie!" Any passer-by hearing the exclamation might have thought that the old man referred to a lost mistress; but his fancy dwelt upon something rarer, on a fat Rhine carp with a sauce, thin in the sauce-boat, creamy upon the palate, a sauce that deserved the Montyon prize! The conductor of the orchestra, living on memories of past dinners, grew visibly leaner; he was pining away, a victim to gastric nostalgia.

By the beginning of the fourth month (towards the end of January, 1845), Pons' condition attracted attention at the theatre. The flute, a young man named Wilhelm, like almost all Germans; and Schwab, to distinguish him from all other Wilhelms, if not from all other Schwabs, judged it expedient to open Schmucke's eyes to his friend's state of health. It was a first performance of a piece in which Schmucke's instruments were all required.

"The old gentleman is failing," said the flute; "there is something wrong somewhere; his eyes are heavy, and he doesn't beat time as he used to do," added Wilhelm Schwab, indicating Pons as he gloomily took his place.

"Dat is alvays de vay, gif a man is sixty years old," answered Schmucke.

The Highland widow, in The Chronicles of the Canongate, sent her son to his death to have him beside her for twenty-four hours; and Schmucke could have sacrificed Pons for the sake of seeing his face every day across the dinner-table.

"Everybody in the theatre is anxious about him," continued the flute; "and, as the premiere danseuse, Mlle. Brisetout, says, 'he makes hardly any noise now when he blows his nose.'"

And, indeed, a peal like a blast of a horn used to resound through the old musician's bandana handkerchief whenever he raised it to that lengthy and cavernous feature. The President's wife had more frequently found fault with him on that score than on any other.

"I vould gif a goot teal to amuse him," said Schmucke, "he gets so dull."

"M. Pons always seems so much above the like of us poor devils, that, upon my word, I didn't dare to ask him to my wedding," said Wilhelm Schwab. "I am going to be married--"

"How?" demanded Schmucke.

"Oh! quite properly," returned Wilhelm Schwab, taking Schmucke's quaint inquiry for a gibe, of which that perfect Christian was quite incapable.

"Come, gentlemen, take your places!" called Pons, looking round at his little army, as the stage manager's bell rang for the overture.

The piece was a dramatized fairy tale, a pantomime called The Devil's Betrothed, which ran for two hundred nights. In the interval, after the first act, Wilhelm Schwab and Schmucke were left alone in the orchestra, with a house at a temperature of thirty-two degrees Reaumur.

"Tell me your hishdory," said Schmucke.

"Look there! Do you see that young man in the box yonder? . . . Do you recognize him?"

"Nefer a pit--"

"Ah! That is because he is wearing yellow gloves and shines with all the radiance of riches, but that is my friend Fritz Brunner out of Frankfort-on-the-Main."

"Dat used to komm to see du blav und sit peside you in der orghestra?"

"The same. You would not believe he could look so different, would you?"

The hero of the promised story was a German of that particular type in which the sombre irony of Goethe's Mephistopheles is blended with a homely cheerfulness found in the romances of August Lafontaine of pacific memory; but the predominating element in the compound of artlessness and guile, of shopkeeper's shrewdness, and the studied carelessness of a member of the Jockey Club, was that form of disgust which set a pistol in the hands of a young Werther, bored to death less by Charlotte than by German princes. It was a thoroughly German face, full of cunning, full of simplicity, stupidity, and courage; the knowledge which brings weariness, the worldly wisdom which the veriest child's trick leaves at fault, the abuse of beer and tobacco,--all these were there to be seen in it, and to heighten the contrast of opposed qualities, there was a wild diabolical gleam in the fine blue eyes with the jaded expression.

Dressed with all the elegance of a city man, Fritz Brunner sat in full view of the house displaying a bald crown of the tint beloved by Titian, and a few stray fiery red hairs on either side of it; a remnant spared by debauchery and want, that the prodigal might have a right to spend money with the hairdresser when he should come into his fortune. A face, once fair and fresh as the traditional portrait of Jesus Christ, had grown harder since the advent of a red moustache; a tawny beard lent it an almost sinister look. The bright blue eyes had lost something of their clearness in the struggle with distress. The countless courses by which a man sells himself and his honor in Paris had left their traces upon his eyelids and carved lines about the eyes, into which a mother once looked with a mother's rapture to find a copy of her own fashioned by God's hand.

This precocious philosopher, this wizened youth was the work of a stepmother.

Herewith begins the curious history of a prodigal son of Frankfort-on-the-Main--the most extraordinary and astounding portent ever beheld by that well-conducted, if central, city.

Gideon Brunner, father of the aforesaid Fritz, was one of the famous innkeepers of Frankfort, a tribe who make law-authorized incisions in travelers' purses with the connivance of the local bankers. An innkeeper and an honest Calvinist to boot, he had married a converted Jewess and laid the foundations of his prosperity with the money she brought him.

When the Jewess died, leaving a son Fritz, twelve years of age, under the joint guardianship of his father and maternal uncle, a furrier at Leipsic, head of the firm of Virlaz and Company, Brunner senior was compelled by his brother-in-law (who was by no means as soft as his peltry) to invest little Fritz's money, a goodly quantity of current coin of the realm, with the house of Al-Sartchild. Not a penny of it was he allowed to touch. So, by way of revenge for the Israelite's pertinacity, Brunner senior married again. It was impossible, he said, to keep his huge hotel single-handed; it needed a woman's eye and hand. Gideon Brunner's second wife was an innkeeper's daughter, a very pearl, as he thought; but he had had no experience of only daughters spoiled by father and mother.

The second Mme. Brunner behaved as German girls may be expected to behave when they are frivolous and wayward. She squandered her fortune, she avenged the first Mme. Brunner by making her husband as miserable a man as you could find in the compass of the free city of Frankfort-on-the-Main, where the millionaires, it is said, are about to pass a law compelling womankind to cherish and obey them alone. She was partial to all the varieties of vinegar commonly called Rhine wine in Germany; she was fond of articles Paris, of horses and dress; indeed, the one expensive taste which she had not was a liking for women. She took a dislike to little Fritz, and would perhaps have driven him mad if that young offspring of Calvinism and Judaism had not had Frankfort for his cradle and the firm of Virlaz at Leipsic for his guardian. Uncle Virlaz, however, deep in his furs, confined his guardianship to the safe-keeping of Fritz's silver marks, and left the boy to the tender mercies of this stepmother.

That hyena in woman's form was the more exasperated against the pretty child, the lovely Jewess' son, because she herself could have no children in spite of efforts worthy of a locomotive engine. A diabolical impulse prompted her to plunge her young stepson, at twenty-one years of age, into dissipations contrary to all German habits. The wicked German hoped that English horses, Rhine vinegar, and Goethe's Marguerites would ruin the Jewess' child and shorten his days; for when Fritz came of age, Uncle Virlaz had handed over a very pretty fortune to his nephew. But while roulette at Baden and elsewhere, and boon companions (Wilhelm Schwab among them) devoured the substance accumulated by Uncle Virlaz, the prodigal son himself remained by the will of Providence to point a moral to younger brothers in the free city of Frankfort; parents held him up as a warning and an awful example to their offspring to scare them into steady attendance in their cast-iron counting houses, lined with silver marks.

But so far from perishing in the flower of his age, Fritz Brunner had the pleasure of laying his stepmother in one of those charming little German cemeteries, in which the Teuton indulges his unbridled passion for horticulture under the specious pretext of honoring his dead. And as the second Mme. Brunner expired while the authors of her being were yet alive, Brunner senior was obliged to bear the loss of the sums of which his wife had drained his coffers, to say nothing of other ills, which had told upon a Herculean constitution, till at the age of sixty-seven the innkeeper had wizened and shrunk as if the famous Borgia's poison had undermined his system. For ten whole years he had supported his wife, and now he inherited nothing! The innkeeper was a second ruin of Heidelberg, repaired continually, it is true, by travelers' hotel bills, much as the remains of the castle of Heidelberg itself are repaired to sustain the enthusiasm of the tourists who flock to see so fine and well-preserved a relic of antiquity.

At Frankfort the disappointment caused as much talk as a failure. People pointed out Brunner, saying, "See what a man may come to with a bad wife that leaves him nothing and a son brought up in the French fashion."

In Italy and Germany the French nation is the root of all evil, the target for all bullets. "But the god pursuing his way----" (For the rest, see Lefranc de Pompignan's Ode.)

The wrath of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel de Hollande fell on others besides the travelers, whose bills were swelled with his resentment. When his son was utterly ruined, Gideon, regarding him as the indirect cause of all his misfortunes, refused him bread and salt, fire, lodging, and tobacco--the force of the paternal malediction in a German and an innkeeper could no farther go. Whereupon the local authorities, making no allowance for the father's misdeeds, regarded him as one of the most ill-used persons in Frankfort-on-the-Main, came to his assistance, fastened a quarrel on Fritz (une querelle d'Allemand), and expelled him from the territory of the free city. Justice in Frankfort is no whit wiser nor more humane than elsewhere, albeit the city is the seat of the German Diet. It is not often that a magistrate traces back the stream of wrongdoing and misfortune to the holder of the urn from which the first beginnings trickled forth. If Brunner forgot his son, his son's friends speedily followed the old innkeeper's example.

Ah! if the journalists, the dandies, and some few fair Parisians among the audience wondered how that German with the tragical countenance had cropped up on a first night to occupy a side box all to himself when fashionable Paris filled the house,--if these could have seen the history played out upon the stage before the prompter's box, they would have found it far more interesting than the transformation scenes of The Devil's Betrothed, though indeed it was the two hundred thousandth representation of a sublime allegory performed aforetime in Mesopotamia three thousand years before Christ was born.

Fritz betook himself on foot to Strasbourg, and there found what the prodigal son of the Bible failed to find--to wit, a friend. And herein is revealed the superiority of Alsace, where so many generous hearts beat to show Germany the beauty of a combination of Gallic wit and Teutonic solidity. Wilhelm Schwab, but lately left in possession of a hundred thousand francs by the death of both parents, opened his arms, his heart, his house, his purse to Fritz. As for describing Fritz's feelings, when dusty, down on his luck, and almost like a leper, he crossed the Rhine and found a real twenty-franc piece held out by the hand of a real friend,--that moment transcends the powers of the prose writer; Pindar alone could give it forth to humanity in Greek that should rekindle the dying warmth of friendship in the world.

Put the names of Fritz and Wilheim beside those of Damon and Pythias, Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, Dubreuil and Pmejah, Schmucke and Pons, and all the names that we imagine for the two friends of Monomotapa, for La Fontaine (man of genius though he was) has made of them two disembodied spirits--they lack reality. The two new names may join the illustrious company, and with so much the more reason, since that Wilhelm who had helped to drink Fritz's inheritance now proceeded, with Fritz's assistance, to devour his own substance; smoking, needless to say, every known variety of tobacco.

The pair, strange to relate, squandered the property in the dullest, stupidest, most commonplace fashion, in Strasbourg brasseries, in the company of ballet-girls of the Strasbourg theatres, and little Alsaciennes who had not a rag of a tattered reputation left.

Every morning they would say, "We really must stop this, and make up our minds and do something or other with the money that is left."

"Pooh!" Fritz would retort, "just one more day, and to-morrow" . . . ah! to-morrow.

In the lives of Prodigal Sons, To-day is a prodigious coxcomb, but To-morrow is a very poltroon, taking fright at the big words of his predecessor. To-day is the truculent captain of old world comedy, To-morrow the clown of modern pantomime.

When the two friends had reached their last thousand-franc note, they took places in the mail-coach, styled Royal, and departed for Paris, where they installed themselves in the attics of the Hotel du Rhin, in the Rue du Mail, the property of one Graff, formerly Gideon Brunner's head-waiter. Fritz found a situation as clerk in the Kellers' bank (on Graff's recommendation), with a salary of six hundred francs. And a place as book-keeper was likewise found for Wilhelm, in the business of Graff the fashionable tailor, brother of Graff of the Hotel du Rhin, who found the scantily-paid employment for the pair of prodigals, for the sake of old times, and his apprenticeship at the Hotel de Hollande. These two incidents--the recognition of a ruined man by a well-to-do friend, and a German innkeeper interesting himself in two penniless fellow-countrymen--give, no doubt, an air of improbability to the story, but truth is so much the more like fiction, since modern writers of fiction have been at such untold pains to imitate truth.

It was not long before Fritz, a clerk with six hundred francs, and Wilhelm, a book-keeper with precisely the same salary, discovered the difficulties of existence in a city so full of temptations. In 1837, the second year of their abode, Wilhelm, who possessed a pretty talent for the flute, entered Pons' orchestra, to earn a little occasional butter to put on his dry bread. As to Fritz, his only way to an increase of income lay through the display of the capacity for business inherited by a descendant of the Virlaz family. Yet, in spite of his assiduity, in spite of abilities which possibly may have stood in his way, his salary only reached the sum of two thousand francs in 1843. Penury, that divine stepmother, did for the two men all that their mothers had not been able to do for them; Poverty taught them thrift and worldly wisdom; Poverty gave them her grand rough education, the lessons which she drives with hard knocks into the heads of great men, who seldom know a happy childhood. Fritz and Wilhelm, being but ordinary men, learned as little as they possibly could in her school; they dodged the blows, shrank from her hard breast and bony arms, and never discovered the good fairy lurking within, ready to yield to the caresses of genius. One thing, however, they learned thoroughly--they discovered the value of money, and vowed to clip the wings of riches if ever a second fortune should come to their door.

This was the history which Wilhelm Schwab related in German, at much greater length, to his friend the pianist, ending with;

"Well, Papa Schmucke, the rest is soon explained. Old Brunner is dead. He left four millions! He made an immense amount of money out of Baden railways, though neither his son nor M. Graff, with whom we lodge, had any idea that the old man was one of the original shareholders. I am playing the flute here for the last time this evening; I would have left some days ago, but this was a first performance, and I did not want to spoil my part."

"Goot, mine friend," said Schmucke. "But who is die prite?"

"She is Mlle. Graff, the daughter of our host, the landlord of the Hotel du Rhin. I have loved Mlle. Emilie these seven years; she has read so many immoral novels, that she refused all offers for me, without knowing what might come of it. She will be a very wealthy young lady; her uncles, the tailors in the Rue de Richelieu, will leave her all their money. Fritz is giving me the money we squandered at Strasbourg five times over! He is putting a million francs in a banking house, M. Graff the tailor is adding another five hundred thousand francs, and Mlle. Emilie's father not only allows me to incorporate her portion--two hundred and fifty thousand francs--with the capital, but he himself will be a shareholder with as much again. So the firm of Brunner, Schwab and Company will start with two millions five hundred thousand francs. Fritz has just bought fifteen hundred thousand francs' worth of shares in the Bank of France to guarantee our account with them. That is not all Fritz's fortune. He has his father's house property, supposed to be worth another million, and he has let the Grand Hotel de Hollande already to a cousin of the Graffs."

"You look sad ven you look at your friend," remarked Schmucke, who had listened with great interest. "Kann you pe chealous of him?"

"I am jealous for Fritz's happiness," said Wilhelm. "Does that face look as if it belonged to a happy man? I am afraid of Paris; I should like to see him do as I am doing. The old tempter may awake again. Of our two heads, his carries the less ballast. His dress, and the opera-glass and the rest of it make me anxious. He keeps looking at the lorettes in the house. Oh! if you only knew how hard it is to marry Fritz. He has a horror of 'going a-courting,' as you say; you would have to give him a drop into a family, just as in England they give a man a drop into the next world."

During the uproar that usually marks the end of a first night, the flute delivered his invitation to the conductor. Pons accepted gleefully; and, for the first time in three months, Schmucke saw a smile on his friend's face. They went back to the Rue de Normandie in perfect silence; that sudden flash of joy had thrown a light on the extent of the disease which was consuming Pons. Oh, that a man so truly noble, so disinterested, so great in feeling, should have such a weakness! . . . This was the thought that struck the stoic Schmucke dumb with amazement. He grew woefully sad, for he began to see that there was no help for it; he must even renounce the pleasure of seeing "his goot Bons" opposite him at the dinner-table, for the sake of Pons' welfare; and he did not know whether he could give him up; the mere thought of it drove him distracted.

Meantime, Pons' proud silence and withdrawal to the Mons Aventinus of the Rue de Normandie had, as might be expected, impressed the Presidente, not that she troubled herself much about her parasite, now that she was freed from him. She thought, with her charming daughter, that Cousin Pons had seen through her little "Lili's" joke. But it was otherwise with her husband the President.

Camusot de Marville, a short and stout man, grown solemn since his promotion at the Court, admired Cicero, preferred the Opera-Comique to the Italiens, compared the actors one with another, and followed the multitude step by step. He used to recite all the articles in the Ministerialist journals, as if he were saying something original, and in giving his opinion at the Council Board he paraphrased the remarks of the previous speaker. His leading characteristics were sufficiently well known; his position compelled him to take everything seriously; and he was particularly tenacious of family ties.

Like most men who are ruled by their wives, the President asserted his independence in trifles, in which his wife was very careful not to thwart him. For a month he was satisfied with the Presidente's commonplace explanations of Pons' disappearance; but at last it struck him as singular that the old musician, a friend of forty years' standing, should first make them so valuable a present as a fan that belonged to Mme. de Pompadour, and then immediately discontinue his visits. Count Popinot had pronounced the trinket a masterpiece; when its owner went to Court, the fan had been passed from hand to hand, and her vanity was not a little gratified by the compliments it received; others had dwelt on the beauties of the ten ivory sticks, each one covered with delicate carving, the like of which had never been seen. A Russian lady (Russian ladies are apt to forget that they are not in Russia) had offered her six thousand francs for the marvel one day at Count Popinot's house, and smiled to see it in such hands. Truth to tell, it was a fan for a Duchess.

"It cannot be denied that poor Cousin Pons understands rubbish of that sort--" said Cecile, the day after the bid.

"Rubbish!" cried her parent. "Why, Government is just about to buy the late M. le Conseiller Dusommerard's collection for three hundred thousand francs; and the State and the Municipality of Paris between them are spending nearly a million francs over the purchase and repair of the Hotel de Cluny to house the 'rubbish,' as you call it.--Such 'rubbish,' dear child," he resumed, "is frequently all that remains of vanished civilizations. An Etruscan jar, and a necklace, which sometimes fetch forty and fifty thousand francs, is 'rubbish' which reveals the perfection of art at the time of the siege of Troy, proving that the Etruscans were Trojan refugees in Italy."

This was the President's cumbrous way of joking; the short, fat man was heavily ironical with his wife and daughter.

"The combination of various kinds of knowledge required to understand such 'rubbish,' Cecile," he resumed, "is a science in itself, called archaeology. Archaeology comprehends architecture, sculpture, painting, goldsmiths' work, ceramics, cabinetmaking (a purely modern art), lace, tapestry--in short, human handiwork of every sort and description."

"Then Cousin Pons is learned?" said Cecile.

"Ah! by the by, why is he never to be seen nowadays?" asked the President. He spoke with the air of a man in whom thousands of forgotten and dormant impressions have suddenly begun to stir, and shaping themselves into one idea, reach consciousness with a ricochet, as sportsmen say.

"He must have taken offence at nothing at all," answered his wife. "I dare say I was not as fully sensible as I might have been of the value of the fan that he gave me. I am ignorant enough, as you know, of--"

"You! One of Servin's best pupils, and you don't know Watteau?" cried the President.

"I know Gerard and David and Gros and Griodet, and M. de Forbin and M. Turpin de Crisse--"

"You ought--"

"Ought what, sir?" demanded the lady, gazing at her husband with the air of a Queen of Sheba.

"To know a Watteau when you see it, my dear. Watteau is very much in fashion," answered the President with meekness, that told plainly how much he owed to his wife.

This conversation took place a few days before that night of first performance of The Devil's Betrothed, when the whole orchestra noticed how ill Pons was looking. But by that time all the circle of dinner-givers who were used to seeing Pons' face at their tables, and to send him on errands, had begun to ask each other for news of him, and uneasiness increased when it was reported by some who had seen him that he was always in his place at the theatre. Pons had been very careful to avoid his old acquaintances whenever he met them in the streets; but one day it so fell out that he met Count Popinot, the ex-cabinet minister, face to face in the bric-a-brac dealer's shop in the new Boulevard Beaumarchais. The dealer was none other than that Monistrol of whom Pons had spoken to the Presidente, one of the famous and audacious vendors whose cunning enthusiasm leads them to set more and more value daily on their wares; for curiosities, they tell you, are growing so scarce that they are hardly to be found at all nowadays.

"Ah, my dear Pons, how comes it that we never see you now? We miss you very much, and Mme. Popinot does not know what to think of your desertion."

"M. le Comte," said the good man, "I was made to feel in the house of a relative that at my age one is not wanted in the world. I have never had much consideration shown me, but at any rate I had not been insulted. I have never asked anything of any man," he broke out with an artist's pride. "I have often made myself useful in return for hospitality. But I have made a mistake, it seems; I am indefinitely beholden to those who honor me by allowing me to sit at table with them; my friends, and my relatives. . . . Well and good; I have sent in my resignation as smellfeast. At home I find daily something which no other house has offered me--a real friend."

The old artist's power had not failed him; with tone and gesture he put such bitterness into the words, that the peer of France was struck by them. He drew Pons aside.

"Come, now, my old friend, what is it? What has hurt you? Could you not tell me in confidence? You will permit me to say that at my house surely you have always met with consideration--"

"You are the one exception," said the artist. "And besides, you are a great lord and a statesman, you have so many things to think about. That would excuse anything, if there were need for it."

The diplomatic skill that Popinot had acquired in the management of men and affairs was brought to bear upon Pons, till at length the story of his misfortunes in the President's house was drawn from him.

Popinot took up the victim's cause so warmly that he told the story to Mme. Popinot as soon as he went home, and that excellent and noble-natured woman spoke to the Presidente on the subject at the first opportunity. As Popinot himself likewise said a word or two to the President, there was a general explanation in the family of Camusot de Marville.

Camusot was not exactly master in his own house; but this time his remonstrance was so well founded in law and in fact, that his wife and daughter were forced to acknowledge the truth. They both humbled themselves and threw the blame on the servants. The servants, first bidden, and then chidden, only obtained pardon by a full confession, which made it clear to the President's mind that Pons had done rightly to stop away. The President displayed himself before the servants in all his masculine and magisterial dignity, after the manner of men who are ruled by their wives. He informed his household that they should be dismissed forthwith, and forfeit any advantages which their long term of service in his house might have brought them, unless from that time forward his cousin and all those who did him the honor of coming to his house were treated as he himself was. At which speech Madeleine was moved to smile.

"You have only one chance of salvation as it is," continued the President. "Go to my cousin, make your excuses to him, and tell him that you will lose your situations unless he forgives you, for I shall turn you all away if he does not."

Next morning the President went out fairly early to pay a call on his cousin before going down to the court. The apparition of M. le President de Marville, announced by Mme. Cibot, was an event in the house. Pons, thus honored for the first time in his life saw reparation ahead.

"At last, my dear cousin," said the President after the ordinary greetings; "at last I have discovered the cause of your retreat. Your behavior increases, if that were possible, my esteem for you. I have but one word to say in that connection. My servants have all been dismissed. My wife and daughter are in despair; they want to see you to have an explanation. In all this, my cousin, there is one innocent person, and he is an old judge; you will not punish me, will you, for the escapade of a thoughtless child who wished to dine with the Popinots? especially when I come to beg for peace, admitting that all the wrong has been on our side? . . . An old friendship of thirty-six years, even suppose that there had been a misunderstanding, has still some claims. Come, sign a treaty of peace by dining with us to-night--"

Pons involved himself in a diffuse reply, and ended by informing his cousin that he was to sign a marriage contract that evening; how that one of the orchestra was not only going to be married, but also about to fling his flute to the winds to become a banker.

"Very well. To-morrow."

"Mme. la Comtesse Popinot has done me the honor of asking me, cousin. She was so kind as to write--"

"The day after to-morrow then."

"M. Brunner, a German, my first flute's future partner, returns the compliment paid him to-day by the young couple--"

"You are such pleasant company that it is not surprising that people dispute for the honor of seeing you. Very well, next Sunday? Within a week, as we say at the courts?"

"On Sunday we are to dine with M. Graff, the flute's father-in-law."

"Very well, on Saturday. Between now and then you will have time to reassure a little girl who has shed tears already over her fault. God asks no more than repentance; you will not be more severe than the Eternal father with poor little Cecile?--"

Pons, thus reached on his weak side, again plunged into formulas more than polite, and went as far as the stairhead with the President.

An hour later the President's servants arrived in a troop on poor Pons' second floor. They behaved after the manner of their kind; they cringed and fawned; they wept. Madeleine took M. Pons aside and flung herself resolutely at his feet.

"It is all my fault; and monsieur knows quite well that I love him," here she burst into tears. "It was vengeance boiling in my veins; monsieur ought to throw all the blame of the unhappy affair on that. We are all to lose our pensions. . . . Monsieur, I was mad, and I would not have the rest suffer for my fault. . . . I can see now well enough that fate did not make me for monsieur. I have come to my senses, I aimed too high, but I love you still, monsieur. These ten years I have thought of nothing but the happiness of making you happy and looking after things here. What a lot! . . . Oh! if monsieur but knew how much I love him! But monsieur must have seen it through all my mischief-making. If I were to die to-morrow, what would they find? --A will in your favor, monsieur. . . . Yes, monsieur, in my trunk under my best things."

Madeleine had set a responsive chord vibrating; the passion inspired in another may be unwelcome, but it will always be gratifying to self-love; this was the case with the old bachelor. After generously pardoning Madeleine, he extended his forgiveness to the other servants, promising to use his influence with his cousin the Presidente on their behalf.

It was unspeakably pleasant to Pons to find all his old enjoyments restored to him without any loss of self-respect. The world had come to Pons, he had risen in the esteem of his circle; but Schmucke looked so downcast and dubious when he heard the story of the triumph, that Pons felt hurt. When, however, the kind-hearted German saw the sudden change wrought in Pons' face, he ended by rejoicing with his friend, and made a sacrifice of the happiness that he had known during those four months that he had had Pons all to himself. Mental suffering has this immense advantage over physical ills--when the cause is removed it ceases at once. Pons was not like the same man that morning. The old man, depressed and visibly failing, had given place to the serenely contented Pons, who entered the Presidente's house that October afternoon with the Marquise de Pompadour's fan in his pocket. Schmucke, on the other hand, pondered deeply over this phenomenon, and could not understand it; your true stoic never can understand the courtier that dwells in a Frenchman. Pons was a born Frenchman of the Empire; a mixture of eighteenth century gallantry and that devotion to womankind so often celebrated in songs of the type of Partant pour la Syrie.

So Schmucke was fain to bury his chagrin beneath the flowers of his German philosophy; but a week later he grew so yellow that Mme. Cibot exerted her ingenuity to call in the parish doctor. The leech had fears of icterus, and left Mme. Cibot frightened half out of her wits by the Latin word for an attack of the jaundice.

Meantime the two friends went out to dinner together, perhaps for the first time in their lives. For Schmucke it was a return to the Fatherland; for Johann Graff of the Hotel du Rhin and his daughter Emilie, Wolfgang Graff the tailor and his wife, Fritz Brunner and Wilhelm Schwab, were Germans, and Pons and the notary were the only Frenchmen present at the banquet. The Graffs of the tailor's business owned a splendid house in the Rue de Richelieu, between the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs and the Rue Villedo; they had brought up their niece, for Emilie's father, not without reason, had feared contact with the very mixed society of an inn for his daughter. The good tailor Graffs, who loved Emilie as if she had been their own daughter, were giving up the ground floor of their great house to the young couple, and here the bank of Brunner, Schwab and Company was to be established. The arrangements for the marriage had been made about a month ago; some time must elapse before Fritz Brunner, author of all this felicity, could settle his deceased father's affairs, and the famous firm of tailors had taken advantage of the delay to redecorate the first floor and to furnish it very handsomely for the bride and bridegroom. The offices of the bank had been fitted into the wing which united a handsome business house with the hotel at the back, between courtyard and garden.

On the way from the Rue de Normandie to the Rue de Richelieu, Pons drew from the abstracted Schmucke the details of the story of the modern prodigal son, for whom Death had killed the fatted innkeeper. Pons, but newly reconciled with his nearest relatives, was immediately smitten with a desire to make a match between Fritz Brunner and Cecile de Marville. Chance ordained that the notary was none other than Berthier, old Cardot's son-in-law and successor, the sometime second clerk with whom Pons had been wont to dine.

"Ah! M. Berthier, you here!" he said, holding out a hand to his host of former days.

"We have not had the pleasure of seeing you at dinner lately; how is it?" returned the notary. "My wife has been anxious about you. We saw you at the first performance of The Devil's Betrothed, and our anxiety became curiosity?"

"Old folk are sensitive," replied the worthy musician; "they make the mistake of being a century behind the times, but how can it be helped? It is quite enough to represent one century--they cannot entirely belong to the century which sees them die."

"Ah!" said the notary, with a shrewd look, "one cannot run two centuries at once."

"By the by," continued Pons, drawing the young lawyer into a corner, "why do you not find some one for my cousin Cecile de Marville--"

"Ah! why--?" answered Berthier. "In this century, when luxury has filtered down to our very porters' lodges, a young fellow hesitates before uniting his lot with the daughter of a President of the Court of Appeal in Paris if she brings him only a hundred thousand francs. In the rank of life in which Mlle. de Marville's husband would take, the wife was never yet known that did not cost her husband three thousand francs a year; the interest on a hundred thousand francs would scarcely find her in pin-money. A bachelor with an income of fifteen or twenty thousand francs can live on an entre-sol; he is not expected to cut any figure; he need not keep more than one servant, and all his surplus income he can spend on his amusements; he puts himself in the hands of a good tailor, and need not trouble any further about keeping up appearances. Far-sighted mothers make much of him; he is one of the kings of fashion in Paris.

"But a wife changes everything. A wife means a properly furnished house," continued the lawyer; "she wants the carriage for herself; if she goes to the play, she wants a box, while the bachelor has only a stall to pay for; in short, a wife represents the whole of the income which the bachelor used to spend on himself. Suppose that husband and wife have thirty thousand francs a year between them--practically, the sometime bachelor is a poor devil who thinks twice before he drives out to Chantilly. Bring children on the scene--he is pinched for money at once.

"Now, as M. and Mme. de Marville are scarcely turned fifty, Cecile's expectations are bills that will not fall due for fifteen or twenty years to come; and no young fellow cares to keep them so long in his portfolio. The young featherheads who are dancing the polka with lorettes at the Jardin Mabille, are so cankered with self-interest, that they don't stand in need of us to explain both sides of the problem to them. Between ourselves, I may say that Mlle. de Marville scarcely sets hearts throbbing so fast but that their owners can perfectly keep their heads, and they are full of these anti-matrimonial reflections. If any eligible young man, in full possession of his senses and an income of twenty thousand francs, happens to be sketching out a programme of marriage that will satisfy his ambitions, Mlle. de Marville does not altogether answer the description--"

"And why not?" asked the bewildered musician.

"Oh!--" said the notary, "well--a young man nowadays may be as ugly as you and I, my dear Pons, but he is almost sure to have the impertinence to want six hundred thousand francs, a girl of good family, with wit and good looks and good breeding--flawless perfection in short."

"Then it will not be easy to marry her?"

"She will not be married so long as M. and Mme. de Marville cannot make up their minds to settle Marville on her when she marries; if they had chosen, she might have been the Vicomtesse Popinot by now. But here comes M. Brunner.--We are about to read the deed of partnership and the marriage contract."

Greetings and introductions over, the relations made Pons promise to sign the contract. He listened to the reading of the documents, and towards half-past five the party went into the dining-room. The dinner was magnificent, as a city merchant's dinner can be, when he allows himself a respite from money-making. Graff of the Hotel du Rhin was acquainted with the first provision dealers in Paris; never had Pons nor Schmucke fared so sumptuously. The dishes were a rapture to think of! Italian paste, delicate of flavor, unknown to the public; smelts fried as never smelts were fried before; fish from Lake Leman, with a real Genevese sauce, and a cream for plum-pudding which would have astonished the London doctor who is said to have invented it. It was nearly ten o'clock before they rose from table. The amount of wine, German and French, consumed at that dinner would amaze the contemporary dandy; nobody knows the amount of liquor that a German can imbibe and yet keep calm and quiet; to have even an idea of the quantity, you must dine in Germany and watch bottle succeed to bottle, like wave rippling after wave along the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, and disappear as if the Teuton possessed the absorbing power of sponges or sea sand. Perfect harmony prevails meanwhile; there is none of the racket that there would be over the liquor in France; the talk is as sober as a money-lender's extempore speech; countenances flush, like the faces of the brides in frescoes by Cornelius or Schnorr (imperceptibly, that is to say), and reminiscences are poured out slowly while the smoke puffs from the pipes.

About half-past ten that evening Pons and Schmucke found themselves sitting on a bench out in the garden, with the ex-flute between them; they were explaining their characters, opinions, and misfortunes, with no very clear idea as to why or how they had come to this point. In the thick of a potpourri of confidences, Wilhelm spoke of his strong desire to see Fritz married, expressing himself with vehement and vinous eloquence.

"What do you say to this programme for your friend Brunner?" cried Pons in confidential tones. "A charming and sensible young lady of twenty-four, belonging to a family of the highest distinction. The father holds a very high position as a judge; there will be a hundred thousand francs paid down and a million to come."

"Wait!" answered Schwab; "I will speak to Fritz this instant."

The pair watched Brunner and his friend as they walked round and round the garden; again and again they passed the bench, sometimes one spoke, sometimes the other.

Pons was not exactly intoxicated; his head was a little heavy, but his thoughts, on the contrary, seemed all the lighter; he watched Fritz Brunner's face through the rainbow mist of fumes of wine, and tried to read auguries favorable to his family. Before very long Schwab introduced his friend and partner to M. Pons; Fritz Brunner expressed his thanks for the trouble which Pons had been so good as to take.

In the conversation which followed, the two old bachelors Schmucke and Pons extolled the estate of matrimony, going so far as to say, without any malicious intent, "that marriage was the end of man." Tea and ices, punches and cakes, were served in the future home of the betrothed couple. The wine had begun to tell upon the honest merchants, and the general hilarity reached its height when it was announced that Schwab's partner thought of following his example.

At two o'clock that morning, Schmucke and Pons walked home along the boulevards, philosophizing a perte de raison as they went on the harmony pervading the arrangements of this our world below.

On the morrow of the banquet, Cousin Pons betook himself to his fair cousin the Presidente, overjoyed--poor dear noble soul!--to return good for evil. Surely he had attained to a sublime height, as every one will allow, for we live in an age when the Montyon prize is given to those who do their duty by carrying out the precepts of the Gospel.

"Ah!" said Pons to himself, as he turned the corner of the Rue de Choiseul, "they will lie under immense obligations to their parasite."

Any man less absorbed in his contentment, any man of the world, any distrustful nature would have watched the President's wife and daughter very narrowly on this first return to the house. But the poor musician was a child, he had all the simplicity of an artist, believing in goodness as he believed in beauty; so he was delighted when Cecile and her mother made much of him. After all the vaudevilles, tragedies, and comedies which had been played under the worthy man's eyes for twelve long years, he could not detect the insincerity and grimaces of social comedy, no doubt because he had seen too much of it. Any one who goes into society in Paris, and knows the type of woman, dried up, body and soul, by a burning thirst for social position, and a fierce desire to be thought virtuous, any one familiar with the sham piety and the domineering character of a woman whose word is law in her own house, may imagine the lurking hatred she bore this husband's cousin whom she had wronged.

All the demonstrative friendliness of mother and daughter was lined with a formidable longing for revenge, evidently postponed. For the first time in Amelie de Marville's life she had been put in the wrong, and that in the sight of the husband over whom she tyrannized; and not only so--she was obliged to be amiable to the author of her defeat! You can scarcely find a match for this position save in the hypocritical dramas which are sometimes kept up for years in the sacred college of cardinals, or in chapters of certain religious orders.

At three o'clock, when the President came back from the law-courts, Pons had scarcely made an end of the marvelous history of his acquaintance, M. Frederic Brunner. Cecile had gone straight to the point. She wanted to know how Frederic Brunner was dressed, how he looked, his height and figure, the color of his hair and eyes; and when she had conjectured a distinguished air for Frederic, she admired his generosity of character.

"Think of his giving five hundred thousand francs to his companion in misfortune! Oh! mamma, I shall have a carriage and a box at the Italiens----" Cecile grew almost pretty as she thought that all her mother's ambitions for her were about to be realized, that the hopes which had almost left her were to come to something after all.

As for the Presidente, all that she said was, "My dear little girl, you may perhaps be married within the fortnight."

All mothers with daughters of three-and-twenty address them as "little girl."

"Still," added the President, "in any case, we must have time to make inquiries; never will I give my daughter to just anybody--"

"As to inquiries," said Pons, "Berthier is drawing up the deeds. As to the young man himself, my dear cousin, you remember what you told me? Well, he is quite forty years old; he is bald. He wishes to find in family life a haven after a storm; I did not dissuade him; every man has his tastes--"

"One reason the more for a personal interview," returned the President. "I am not going to give my daughter to a valetudinarian."

"Very good, cousin, you shall see my suitor in five days if you like; for, with your views, a single interview would be enough"--(Cecile and her mother signified their rapture)--"Frederic is decidedly a distinguished amateur; he begged me to allow him to see my little collection at his leisure. You have never seen my pictures and curiosities; come and see them," he continued, looking at his relatives. "You can come simply as two ladies, brought by my friend Schmucke, and make M. Brunner's acquaintance without betraying yourselves. Frederic need not in the least know who you are."

"Admirable!" cried the President.

The attention they paid to the once scorned parasite may be left to the imagination! Poor Pons that day became the Presidente's cousin. The happy mother drowned her dislike in floods of joy; her looks, her smiles, her words sent the old man into ecstasies over the good that he had done, over the future that he saw by glimpses. Was he not sure to find dinners such as yesterday's banquet over the signing of the contract, multiplied indefinitely by three, in the houses of Brunner, Schwab, and Graff? He saw before him a land of plenty--a vie de cocagne, a miraculous succession of plats couverts, of delicate surprise dishes, of exquisite wines.

"If Cousin Pons brings this through," said the President, addressing his wife after Pons had departed, "we ought to settle an income upon him equal to his salary at the theatre."

"Certainly," said the lady; and Cecile was informed that if the proposed suitor found favor in her eyes, she must undertake to induce the old musician to accept a munificence in such bad taste.

Next day the President went to Berthier. He was anxious to make sure of M. Frederic Brunner's financial position. Berthier, forewarned by Mme. de Marville, had asked his new client Schwab to come. Schwab the banker was dazzled by the prospect of such a match for his friend (everybody knows how deeply a German venerates social distinctions, so much so, that in Germany a wife takes her husband's (official) title, and is the Frau General, the Frau Rath, and so forth)--Schwab therefore was as accommodating as a collector who imagines that he is cheating a dealer.

"In the first place," said Cecile's father, "as I shall make over my estate of Marville to my daughter, I should wish the contract to be drawn up on the dotal system. In that case, M. Brunner would invest a million francs in land to increase the estate, and by settling the land on his wife he would secure her and his children from any share in the liabilities of the bank."

Berthier stroked his chin. "He is coming on well, is M. le President," thought he.

When the dotal system had been explained to Schwab, he seemed much inclined that way for his friend. He had heard Fritz say that he wished to find some way of insuring himself against another lapse into poverty.

"There is a farm and pasture land worth twelve hundred thousand francs in the market at this moment," remarked the President.

"If we take up shares in the Bank of France to the amount of a million francs, that will be quite enough to guarantee our account," said Schwab. "Fritz does not want to invest more than two million francs in business; he will do as you wish, I am sure, M. le President."

The President's wife and daughter were almost wild with joy when he brought home this news. Never, surely, did so rich a capture swim so complacently into the nets of matrimony.

"You will be Mme. Brunner de Marville," said the parent, addressing his child; "I will obtain permission for your husband to add the name to his, and afterwards he can take out letters of naturalization. If I should be a peer of France some day, he will succeed me!"

The five days were spent by Mme. de Marville in preparations. On the great day she dressed Cecile herself, taking as much pains as the admiral of the British fleet takes over the dressing of the pleasure yacht for Her Majesty of England when she takes a trip to Germany.

Pons and Schmucke, on their side, cleaned, swept, and dusted Pons' museum rooms and furniture with the agility of sailors cleaning down a man-of-war. There was not a speck of dust on the carved wood; not an inch of brass but it glistened. The glasses over the pastels obscured nothing of the work of Latour, Greuze, and Liotard (illustrious painter of The Chocolate Girl), miracles of an art, alas! so fugitive. The inimitable lustre of Florentine bronze took all the varying hues of the light; the painted glass glowed with color. Every line shone out brilliantly, every object threw in its phrase in a harmony of masterpieces arranged by two musicians--both of whom alike had attained to be poets.

With a tact which avoided the difficulties of a late appearance on the scene of action, the women were the first to arrive; they wished to be on their own ground. Pons introduced his friend Schmucke, who seemed to his fair visitors to be an idiot; their heads were so full of the eligible gentleman with the four millions of francs, that they paid but little attention to the worthy Pons' dissertations upon matters of which they were completely ignorant.

They looked with indifferent eyes at Petitot's enamels, spaced over crimson velvet, set in three frames of marvelous workmanship. Flowers by Van Huysum, David, and Heim; butterflies painted by Abraham Mignon; Van Eycks, undoubted Cranachs and Albrecht Durers; the Giorgione, the Sebastian del Piombo; Backhuijzen, Hobbema, Gericault, the rarities of painting--none of these things so much as aroused their curiosity; they were waiting for the sun to arise and shine upon these treasures. Still, they were surprised by the beauty of some of the Etruscan trinkets and the solid value of the snuff-boxes, and out of politeness they went into ecstasies over some Florentine bronzes which they held in their hands when Mme. Cibot announced M. Brunner! They did not turn; they took advantage of a superb Venetian mirror framed in huge masses of carved ebony to scan this phoenix of eligible young men.

Frederic, forewarned by Wilhelm, had made the most of the little hair that remained to him. He wore a neat pair of trousers, a soft shade of some dark color, a silk waistcoat of superlative elegance and the very newest cut, a shirt with open-work, its linen hand-woven by a Friesland woman, and a blue-and-white cravat. His watch chain, like the head of his cane, came from Messrs. Florent and Chanor; and the coat, cut by old Graff himself, was of the very finest cloth. The Suede gloves proclaimed the man who had run through his mother's fortune. You could have seen the banker's neat little brougham and pair of horses mirrored in the surface of his speckless varnished boots, even if two pairs of sharp ears had not already caught the sound of wheels outside in the Rue de Normandie.

When the prodigal of twenty years is a kind of chrysalis from which a banker emerges at the age of forty, the said banker is usually an observer of human nature; and so much the more shrewd if, as in Brunner's case, he understands how to turn his German simplicity to good account. He had assumed for the occasion the abstracted air of a man who is hesitating between family life and the dissipations of bachelorhood. This expression in a Frenchified German seemed to Cecile to be in the highest degree romantic; the descendant of the Virlaz was a second Werther in her eyes--where is the girl who will not allow herself to weave a little novel about her marriage? Cecile thought herself the happiest of women when Brunner, looking round at the magnificent works of art so patiently collected during forty years, waxed enthusiastic, and Pons, to his no small satisfaction, found an appreciative admirer of his treasures for the first time in his life.

"He is poetical," the young lady said to herself; "he sees millions in the things. A poet is a man that cannot count and leaves his wife to look after his money--an easy man to manage and amuse with trifles."

Every pane in the two windows was a square of Swiss painted glass; the least of them was worth a thousand francs; and Pons possessed sixteen of these unrivaled works of art for which amateurs seek so eagerly nowadays. In 1815 the panes could be bought for six or ten francs apiece. The value of the glorious collection of pictures, flawless great works, authentic, untouched since they left the master's hands, could only be proved in the fiery furnace of a saleroom. Not a picture but was set in a costly frame; there were frames of every kind --Venetians, carved with heavy ornaments, like English plate of the present day; Romans, distinguishable among the others for a certain dash that artists call flafla; Spanish wreaths in bold relief; Flemings and Germans with quaint figures, tortoise-shell frames inlaid with copper and brass and mother-of-pearl and ivory; frames of ebony and boxwood in the styles of Louis Treize, Louis Quatorze, Louis Quinze, and Louis Seize--in short, it was a unique collection of the finest models. Pons, luckier than the art museums of Dresden and Vienna, possessed a frame by the famous Brustoloni--the Michael Angelo of wood-carvers.

Mlle. de Marville naturally asked for explanations of each new curiosity, and was initiated into the mysteries of art by Brunner. Her exclamations were so childish, she seemed so pleased to have the value and beauty of the paintings, carvings, or bronzes pointed out to her, that the German gradually thawed and looked quite young again, and both were led on further than they intended at this (purely accidental) first meeting.

The private view lasted for three hours. Brunner offered his arm when Cecile went downstairs. As they descended slowly and discreetly, Cecile, still talking fine art, wondered that M. Brunner should admire her cousin's gimcracks so much.

"Do you really think that these things that we have just seen are worth a great deal of money?"

"Mademoiselle, if your cousin would sell his collection, I would give eight hundred thousand francs for it this evening, and I should not make a bad bargain. The pictures alone would fetch more than that at a public sale."

"Since you say so, I believe it," returned she; "the things took up so much of your attention that it must be so."

"On! mademoiselle!" protested Brunner. "For all answer to your reproach, I will ask your mother's permission to call, so that I may have the pleasure of seeing you again."

"How clever she is, that 'little girl' of mine!" thought the Presidente, following closely upon her daughter's heels. Aloud she said, "With the greatest pleasure, monsieur. I hope that you will come at dinner-time with our Cousin Pons. The President will be delighted to make your acquaintance.--Thank you, cousin."

The lady squeezed Pons' arm with deep meaning; she could not have said more if she had used the consecrated formula, "Let us swear an eternal friendship." The glance which accompanied that "Thank you, cousin," was a caress.

When the young lady had been put into the carriage, and the jobbed brougham had disappeared down the Rue Charlot, Brunner talked bric-a-brac to Pons, and Pons talked marriage.

"Then you see no obstacle?" said Pons.

"Oh!" said Brunner, "she is an insignificant little thing, and the mother is a trifle prim.--We shall see."

"A handsome fortune one of these days. . . . More than a million--"

"Good-bye till Monday!" interrupted the millionaire. "If you should care to sell your collection of pictures, I would give you five or six hundred thousand francs--"

"Ah!" said Pons; he had no idea that he was so rich. "But they are my great pleasure in life, and I could not bring myself to part with them. I could only sell my collection to be delivered after my death."

"Very well. We shall see."

"Here we have two affairs afoot!" said Pons; he was thinking only of the marriage.

Brunner shook hands and drove away in his splendid carriage. Pons watched it out of sight. He did not notice that Remonencq was smoking his pipe in the doorway.

That evening Mme. de Marville went to ask advice of her father-in-law, and found the whole Popinot family at the Camusots' house. It was only natural that a mother who had failed to capture an eldest son should be tempted to take her little revenge; so Mme. de Marville threw out hints of the splendid marriage that her Cecile was about to make. --"Whom can Cecile be going to marry?" was the question upon all lips. And Cecile's mother, without suspecting that she was betraying her secret, let fall words and whispered confidences, afterwards supplemented by Mme. Berthier, till gossip circulating in the bourgeois empyrean where Pons accomplished his gastronomical evolutions took something like the following form:

"Cecile de Marville is engaged to be married to a young German, a banker from philanthropic motives, for he has four millions; he is like a hero in a novel, a perfect Werther, charming and kind-hearted. He has sown his wild oats, and he is distractedly in love with Cecile; it is a case of love at first sight; and so much the more certain, since Cecile had all Pons' paintings of Madonnas for rivals," and so forth and so forth.

Two or three of the set came to call on the Presidente, ostensibly to congratulate, but really to find out whether or not the marvelous tale were true. For their benefit Mme. de Marville executed the following admirable variations on the theme of son-in-law which mothers may consult, as people used to refer to the Complete Letter Writer.

"A marriage is not an accomplished fact," she told Mme. Chiffreville, "until you have been in the mayor's office and the church. We have only come as far as a personal interview; so I count upon your friendship to say nothing of our hopes."

"You are very fortunate, madame; marriages are so difficult to arrange in these days."

"What can one do? It was chance; but marriages are often made in that way."

"Ah! well. So you are going to marry Cecile?" said Mme. Cardot.

"Yes," said Cecile's mother, fully understanding the meaning of the "so." "We were very particular, or Cecile would have been established before this. But now we have found everything we wish: money, good temper, good character, and good looks; and my sweet little girl certainly deserves nothing less. M. Brunner is a charming young man, most distinguished; he is fond of luxury, he knows life; he is wild about Cecile, he loves her sincerely; and in spite of his three or four millions, Cecile is going to accept him.--We had not looked so high for her; still, store is no sore."

"It was not so much the fortune as the affection inspired by my daughter which decided us," the Presidente told Mme. Lebas. "M. Brunner is in such a hurry that he wants the marriage to take place with the least possible delay."

"Is he a foreigner?"

"Yes, madame; but I am very fortunate, I confess. No, I shall not have a son-in-law, but a son. M. Brunner's delicacy has quite won our hearts. No one would imagine how anxious he was to marry under the dotal system. It is a great security for families. He is going to invest twelve hundred thousand francs in grazing land, which will be added to Marville some day."

More variations followed on the morrow. For instance--M. Brunner was a great lord, doing everything in lordly fashion; he did not haggle. If M. de Marville could obtain letters of naturalization, qualifying M. Brunner for an office under Government (and the Home Secretary surely could strain a point for M. de Marville), his son-in-law would be a peer of France. Nobody knew how much money M. Brunner possessed; "he had the finest horses and the smartest carriages in Paris!" and so on and so on.

From the pleasure with which the Camusots published their hopes, it was pretty clear that this triumph was unexpected.

Immediately after the interview in Pons' museum, M. de Marville, at his wife's instance, begged the Home Secretary, his chief, and the attorney for the crown to dine with him on the occasion of the introduction of this phoenix of a son-in-law.

The three great personages accepted the invitation, albeit it was given on short notice; they all saw the part that they were to play in the family politics, and readily came to the father's support. In France we are usually pretty ready to assist the mother of marriageable daughters to hook an eligible son-in-law. The Count and Countess Popinot likewise lent their presence to complete the splendor of the occasion, although they thought the invitation in questionable taste.

There were eleven in all. Cecile's grandfather, old Camusot, came, of course, with his wife to a family reunion purposely arranged to elicit a proposal from M. Brunner.

The Camusot de Marvilles had given out that the guest of the evening was one of the richest capitalists in Germany, a man of taste (he was in love with "the little girl"), a future rival of the Nucingens, Kellers, du Tillets, and their like.

"It is our day," said the Presidente with elaborate simplicity, when she had named her guests one by one for the German whom she already regarded as her son-in-law. "We have only a few intimate friends --first, my husband's father, who, as you know, is sure to be raised to the peerage; M. le Comte and Mme. la Comtesse Popinot, whose son was not thought rich enough for Cecile; the Home Secretary; our First President; our attorney for the crown; our personal friends, in short. --We shall be obliged to dine rather late to-night, because the Chamber is sitting, and people cannot get away before six."

Brunner looked significantly at Pons, and Pons rubbed his hands as if to say, "Our friends, you see! My friends!"

Mme. de Marville, as a clever tactician, had something very particular to say to her cousin, that Cecile and her Werther might be left together for a moment. Cecile chattered away volubly, and contrived that Frederic should catch sight of a German dictionary, a German grammar, and a volume of Goethe hidden away in a place where he was likely to find them.

"Ah! are you learning German?" asked Brunner, flushing red.

(For laying traps of this kind the Frenchwoman has not her match!)

"Oh! how naughty you are!" she cried; "it is too bad of you, monsieur, to explore my hiding-places like this. I want to read Goethe in the original," she added; "I have been learning German for two years."

"Then the grammar must be very difficult to learn, for scarcely ten pages have been cut--" Brunner remarked with much candor.

Cecile, abashed, turned away to hide her blushes. A German cannot resist a display of this kind; Brunner caught Cecile's hand, made her turn, and watched her confusion under his gaze, after the manner of the heroes of the novels of Auguste Lafontaine of chaste memory.

"You are adorable," said he.

Cecile's petulant gesture replied, "So are you--who could help liking you?"

"It is all right, mamma," she whispered to her parent, who came up at that moment with Pons.

The sight of a family party on these occasions is not to be described. Everybody was well satisfied to see a mother put her hand on an eligible son-in-law. Compliments, double-barreled and double-charged, were paid to Brunner (who pretended to understand nothing); to Cecile, on whom nothing was lost; and to the Presidente, who fished for them. Pons heard the blood singing in his ears, the light of all the blazing gas-jets of the theatre footlights seemed to be dazzling his eyes, when Cecile, in a low voice and with the most ingenious circumspection, spoke of her father's plan of the annuity of twelve hundred francs. The old artist positively declined the offer, bringing forward the value of his fortune in furniture, only now made known to him by Brunner.

The Home Secretary, the First President, the attorney for the crown, the Popinots, and those who had other engagements, all went; and before long no one was left except M. Camusot senior, and Cardot the old notary, and his assistant and son-in-law Berthier. Pons, worthy soul, looking round and seeing no one but the family, blundered out a speech of thanks to the President and his wife for the proposal which Cecile had just made to him. So it is with those who are guided by their feelings; they act upon impulse. Brunner, hearing of an annuity offered in this way, thought that it had very much the look of a commission paid to Pons; he made an Israelite's return upon himself, his attitude told of more than cool calculation.

Meanwhile Pons was saying to his astonished relations, "My collection or its value will, in any case, go to your family, whether I come to terms with our friend Brunner or keep it." The Camusots were amazed to hear that Pons was so rich.

Brunner, watching, saw how all these ignorant people looked favorably upon a man once believed to be poor so soon as they knew that he had great possessions. He had seen, too, already that Cecile was spoiled by her father and mother; he amused himself, therefore, by astonishing the good bourgeois.

"I was telling mademoiselle," said he, "that M. Pons' pictures were worth that sum to me; but the prices of works of art have risen so much of late, that no one can tell how much the collection might sell for at public auction. The sixty pictures might fetch a million francs; several that I saw the other day were worth fifty thousand apiece."

"It is a fine thing to be your heir!" remarked old Cardot, looking at Pons.

"My heir is my Cousin Cecile here," answered Pons, insisting on the relationship. There was a flutter of admiration at this.

"She will be a very rich heiress," laughed old Cardot, as he took his departure.

Camusot senior, the President and his wife, Cecile, Brunner, Berthier, and Pons were now left together; for it was assumed that the formal demand for Cecile's hand was about to be made. No sooner was Cardot gone, indeed, than Brunner began with an inquiry which augured well.

"I think I understood," he said, turning to Mme. de Marville, "that mademoiselle is your only daughter."

"Certainly," the lady said proudly.

"Nobody will make any difficulties," Pons, good soul, put in by way of encouraging Brunner to bring out his proposal.

But Brunner grew thoughtful, and an ominous silence brought on a coolness of the strangest kind. The Presidente might have admitted that her "little girl" was subject to epileptic fits. The President, thinking that Cecile ought not to be present, signed to her to go. She went. Still Brunner said nothing. They all began to look at one another. The situation was growing awkward.

Camusot senior, a man of experience, took the German to Mme. de Marville's room, ostensibly to show him Pons' fan. He saw that some difficulty had arisen, and signed to the rest to leave him alone with Cecile's suitor-designate.

"Here is the masterpiece," said Camusot, opening out the fan.

Brunner took it in his hand and looked at it. "It is worth five thousand francs," he said after a moment.

"Did you not come here, sir, to ask for my granddaughter?" inquired the future peer of France.

"Yes, sir," said Brunner; "and I beg you to believe that no possible marriage could be more flattering to my vanity. I shall never find any one more charming nor more amiable, nor a young lady who answers to my ideas like Mlle. Cecile; but--"

"Oh, no buts!" old Camusot broke in; "or let us have the translation of your 'buts' at once, my dear sir."

"I am very glad, sir, that the matter has gone no further on either side," Brunner answered gravely. "I had no idea that Mlle. Cecile was an only daughter. Anybody else would consider this an advantage; but to me, believe me, it is an insurmountable obstacle to--"

"What, sir!" cried Camusot, amazed beyond measure. "Do you find a positive drawback in an immense advantage? Your conduct is really extraordinary; I should very much like to hear the explanation of it."

"I came here this evening, sir," returned the German phlegmatically, "intending to ask M. le President for his daughter's hand. It was my desire to give Mlle. Cecile a brilliant future by offering her so much of my fortune as she would consent to accept. But an only daughter is a child whose will is law to indulgent parents, who has never been contradicted. I have had the opportunity of observing this in many families, where parents worship divinities of this kind. And your granddaughter is not only the idol of the house, but Mme. la Presidente . . . you know what I mean. I have seen my father's house turned into a hell, sir, from this very cause. My stepmother, the source of all my misfortunes, an only daughter, idolized by her parents, the most charming betrothed imaginable, after marriage became a fiend incarnate. I do not doubt that Mlle. Cecile is an exception to the rule; but I am not a young man, I am forty years old, and the difference between our ages entails difficulties which would put it out of my power to make the young lady happy, when Mme. la Presidente always carried out her daughter's every wish and listened to her as if Mademoiselle was an oracle. What right have I to expect Mlle. Cecile to change her habits and ideas? Instead of a father and mother who indulge her every whim, she would find an egotistic man of forty; if she should resist, the man of forty would have the worst of it. So, as an honest man--I withdraw. If there should be any need to explain my visit here, I desire to be entirely sacrificed--"

"If these are your motives, sir," said the future peer of France, "however singular they may be, they are plausible--"

"Do not call my sincerity in question, sir," Brunner interrupted quickly. "If you know of a penniless girl, one of a large family, well brought up but without fortune, as happens very often in France; and if her character offers me security, I will marry her."

A pause followed; Frederic Brunner left Cecile's grandfather and politely took leave of his host and hostess. When he was gone, Cecile appeared, a living commentary upon her Werther's leave-taking; she was ghastly pale. She had hidden in her mother's wardrobe and overheard the whole conversation.

"Refused! . . ." she said in a low voice for her mother's ear.

"And why?" asked the Presidente, fixing her eyes upon her embarrassed father-in-law.

"Upon the fine pretext that an only daughter is a spoilt child," replied that gentleman. "And he is not altogether wrong there," he added, seizing an opportunity of putting the blame on the daughter-in-law, who had worried him not a little for twenty years.

"It will kill my child!" cried the Presidente, "and it is your doing!" she exclaimed, addressing Pons, as she supported her fainting daughter, for Cecile thought well to make good her mother's words by sinking into her arms. The President and his wife carried Cecile to an easy-chair, where she swooned outright. The grandfather rang for the servants.

"It is a plot of his weaving; I see it all now," said the infuriated mother.

Pons sprang up as if the trump of doom were sounding in his ears.

"Yes!" said the lady, her eyes like two springs of green bile, "this gentleman wished to repay a harmless joke by an insult. Who will believe that that German was right in his mind? He is either an accomplice in a wicked scheme of revenge, or he is crazy. I hope, M. Pons, that in future you will spare us the annoyance of seeing you in the house where you have tried to bring shame and dishonor."

Pons stood like a statue, with his eyes fixed on the pattern of the carpet.

"Well! Are you still here, monster of ingratitude?" cried she, turning round on Pons, who was twirling his thumbs.--"Your master and I are never at home, remember, if this gentleman calls," she continued, turning to the servants.--"Jean, go for the doctor; and bring hartshorn, Madeleine."

In the Presidente's eyes, the reason given by Brunner was simply an excuse, there was something else behind; but, at the same time, the fact that the marriage was broken off was only the more certain. A woman's mind works swiftly in great crises, and Mme. de Marville had hit at once upon the one method of repairing the check. She chose to look upon it as a scheme of revenge. This notion of ascribing a fiendish scheme to Pons satisfied family honor. Faithful to her dislike of the cousin, she treated a feminine suspicion as a fact. Women, generally speaking, hold a creed peculiar to themselves, a code of their own; to them anything which serves their interests or their passions is true. The Presidente went a good deal further. In the course of the evening she talked the President into her belief, and next morning found the magistrate convinced of his cousin's culpability.

Every one, no doubt, will condemn the lady's horrible conduct; but what mother in Mme. Camusot's position will not do the same? Put the choice between her own daughter and an alien, she will prefer to sacrifice the honor of the latter. There are many ways of doing this, but the end in view is the same.

The old musician fled down the staircase in haste; but he went slowly along the boulevards to his theatre, he turned in mechanically at the door, and mechanically he took his place and conducted the orchestra. In the interval he gave such random answers to Schmucke's questions, that his old friend dissembled his fear that Pons' mind had given way. To so childlike a nature, the recent scene took the proportions of a catastrophe. He had meant to make every one happy, and he had aroused a terrible slumbering feeling of hate; everything had been turned topsy-turvy. He had at last seen mortal hate in the Presidente's eyes, tones, and gesture.

On the morrow, Mme. Camusot de Marville made a great resolution; the President likewise sanctioned the step now forced upon them by circumstances. It was determined that the estate of Marville should be settled upon Cecile at the time of her marriage, as well as the house in the Rue de Hanovre and a hundred thousand francs. In the course of the morning, the Presidente went to call upon the Comtesse Popinot; for she saw plainly that nothing but a settled marriage could enable them to recover after such a check. To the Comtesse Popinot she told the shocking story of Pons' revenge, Pons' hideous hoax. It all seemed probable enough when it came out that the marriage had been broken off simply on the pretext that Cecile was an only daughter. The Presidente next dwelt artfully upon the advantage of adding "de Marville" to the name of Popinot; and the immense dowry. At the present price fetched by land in Normandy, at two per cent, the property represented nine hundred thousand francs, and the house in the Rue de Hanovre about two hundred and fifty thousand. No reasonable family could refuse such an alliance. The Comte and Comtesse Popinot accepted; and as they were now touched by the honor of the family which they were about to enter, they promised to help explain away yesterday evening's mishap.

And now in the house of the elder Camusot, before the very persons who had heard Mme. de Marville singing Frederic Brunner's praises but a few days ago, that lady, to whom nobody ventured to speak on the topic, plunged courageously into explanations.

"Really, nowadays" (she said), "one could not be too careful if a marriage was in question, especially if one had to do with foreigners."

"And why, madame?"

"What has happened to you?" asked Mme. Chiffreville.

"Do you not know about our adventure with that Brunner, who had the audacity to aspire to marry Cecile? His father was a German that kept a wine-shop, and his uncle is a dealer in rabbit-skins!"

"Is it possible? So clear-sighted as you are! . . ." murmured a lady.

"These adventurers are so cunning. But we found out everything through Berthier. His friend is a beggar that plays the flute. He is friendly with a person who lets furnished lodgings in the Rue du Mail and some tailor or other. . . . We found out that he had led a most disreputable life, and no amount of fortune would be enough for a scamp that has run through his mother's property."

"Why, Mlle. de Marville would have been wretched!" said Mme. Berthier.

"How did he come to your house?" asked old Mme. Lebas.

"It was M. Pons. Out of revenge, he introduced this fine gentleman to us, to make us ridiculous. . . . This Brunner (it is the same name as Fontaine in French)--this Brunner, that was made out to be such a grandee, has poor enough health, he is bald, and his teeth are bad. The first sight of him was enough for me; I distrusted him from the first."

"But how about the great fortune that you spoke of?" a young married woman asked shyly.

"The fortune was not nearly so large as they said. These tailors and the landlord and he all scraped the money together among them, and put all their savings into this bank that they are starting. What is a bank for those that begin in these days? Simply a license to ruin themselves. A banker's wife may lie down at night a millionaire and wake up in the morning with nothing but her settlement. At first word, at the very first sight of him, we made up our minds about this gentleman--he is not one of us. You can tell by his gloves, by his waistcoat, that he is a working man, the son of a man that kept a pot-house somewhere in Germany; he has not the instincts of a gentleman; he drinks beer, and he smokes--smokes? ah! madame, twenty-five pipes a day! . . . What would have become of poor Lili? . . . It makes me shudder even now to think of it. God has indeed preserved us! And besides, Cecile never liked him. . . . Who would have expected such a trick from a relative, an old friend of the house that had dined with us twice a week for twenty years? We have loaded him with benefits, and he played his game so well, that he said Cecile was his heir before the Keeper of the Seals and the Attorney General and the Home Secretary! . . . That Brunner and M. Pons had their story ready, and each of them said that the other was worth millions! . . . No, I do assure you, all of you would have been taken in by an artist's hoax like that."

In a few weeks' time, the united forces of the Camusot and Popinot families gained an easy victory in the world, for nobody undertook to defend the unfortunate Pons, that parasite, that curmudgeon, that skinflint, that smooth-faced humbug, on whom everybody heaped scorn; he was a viper cherished in the bosom of the family, he had not his match for spite, he was a dangerous mountebank whom nobody ought to mention.

About a month after the perfidious Werther's withdrawal, poor Pons left his bed for the first time after an attack of nervous fever, and walked along the sunny side of the street leaning on Schmucke's arm. Nobody in the Boulevard du Temple laughed at the "pair of nutcrackers," for one of the old men looked so shattered, and the other so touchingly careful of his invalid friend. By the time that they reached the Boulevard Poissonniere, a little color came back to Pons' face; he was breathing the air of the boulevards, he felt the vitalizing power of the atmosphere of the crowded street, the life-giving property of the air that is noticeable in quarters where human life abounds; in the filthy Roman Ghetto, for instance, with its swarming Jewish population, where malaria is unknown. Perhaps, too, the sight of the streets, the great spectacle of Paris, the daily pleasure of his life, did the invalid good. They walked on side by side, though Pons now and again left his friend to look at the shop windows. Opposite the Theatre des Varietes he saw Count Popinot, and went up to him very respectfully, for of all men Pons esteemed and venerated the ex-Minister.

The peer of France answered him severely:

"I am at a loss to understand, sir, how you can have no more tact than to speak to a near connection of a family whom you tried to brand with shame and ridicule by a trick which no one but an artist could devise. Understand this, sir, that from to-day we must be complete strangers to each other. Mme. la Comtesse Popinot, like every one else, feels indignant at your behavior to the Marvilles."

And Count Popinot passed on, leaving Pons thunderstruck. Passion, justice, policy, and great social forces never take into account the condition of the human creature whom they strike down. The statesman, driven by family considerations to crush Pons, did not so much as see the physical weakness of his redoubtable enemy.

"Vat is it, mine boor friend?" exclaimed Schmucke, seeing how white Pons had grown.

"It is a fresh stab in the heart," Pons replied, leaning heavily on Schmucke's arm. "I think that no one, save God in heaven, can have any right to do good, and that is why all those who meddle in His work are so cruelly punished."

The old artist's sarcasm was uttered with a supreme effort; he was trying, excellent creature, to quiet the dismay visible in Schmucke's face.

"So I dink," Schmucke replied simply.

Pons could not understand it. Neither the Camusots nor the Popinots had sent him notice of Cecile's wedding.

On the Boulevard des Italiens Pons saw M. Cardot coming towards them. Warned by Count Popinot's allocution, Pons was very careful not to accost the old acquaintance with whom he had dined once a fortnight for the last year; he lifted his hat, but the other, mayor and deputy of Paris, threw him an indignant glance and went by. Pons turned to Schmucke.

"Do go and ask him what it is that they all have against me," he said to the friend who knew all the details of the catastrophe that Pons could tell him.

"Mennseir," Schmucke began diplomatically, "mine friend Bons is chust recofering from an illness; you haf no doubt fail to rekognize him?"

"Not in the least."

"But mit vat kann you rebroach him?"

"You have a monster of ingratitude for a friend, sir; if he is still alive, it is because nothing kills ill weeds. People do well to mistrust artists; they are as mischievous and spiteful as monkeys. This friend of yours tried to dishonor his own family, and to blight a young girl's character, in revenge for a harmless joke. I wish to have nothing to do with him; I shall do my best to forget that I have known him, or that such a man exists. All the members of his family and my own share the wish, sir, so do all the persons who once did the said Pons the honor of receiving him."

"Boot, mennseir, you are a reasonaple mann; gif you vill bermit me, I shall exblain die affair--"

"You are quite at liberty to remain his friend, sir, if you are minded that way," returned Cardot, "but you need go no further; for I must give you warning that in my opinion those who try to excuse or defend his conduct are just as much to blame."

"To chustify it?"

"Yes, for his conduct can neither be justified nor qualified." And with that word, the deputy for the Seine went his way; he would not hear another syllable.

"I have two powers in the State against me," smiled poor Pons, when Schmucke had repeated these savage speeches.

"Eferpody is against us," Schmucke answered dolorously. "Let us go avay pefore we shall meed oder fools."

Never before in the course of a truly ovine life had Schmucke uttered such words as these. Never before had his almost divine meekness been ruffled. He had smiled childlike on all the mischances that befell him, but he could not look and see his sublime Pons maltreated; his Pons, his unknown Aristides, the genius resigned to his lot, the nature that knew no bitterness, the treasury of kindness, the heart of gold! . . . Alceste's indignation filled Schmucke's soul--he was moved to call Pons' amphitryons "fools." For his pacific nature that impulse equaled the wrath of Roland.

With wise foresight, Schmucke turned to go home by the way of the Boulevard du Temple, Pons passively submitting like a fallen fighter, heedless of blows; but chance ordered that he should know that all his world was against him. The House of Peers, the Chamber of Deputies, strangers and the family, the strong, the weak, and the innocent, all combined to send down the avalanche.

In the Boulevard Poissonniere, Pons caught sight of that very M. Cardot's daughter, who, young as she was, had learned to be charitable to others through trouble of her own. Her husband knew a secret by which he kept her in bondage. She was the only one among Pons' hostesses whom he called by her Christian name; he addressed Mme. Berthier as "Felicie," and he thought that she understood him. The gentle creature seemed to be distressed by the sight of Cousin Pons, as he was called (though he was in no way related to the family of the second wife of a cousin by marriage). There was no help for it, however; Felicie Berthier stopped to speak to the invalid.

"I did not think you were cruel, cousin," she said; "but if even a quarter of all that I hear of you is true, you are very false. . . . Oh! do not justify yourself," she added quickly, seeing Pons' significant gesture, "it is useless, for two reasons. In the first place, I have no right to accuse or judge or condemn anybody, for I myself know so well how much may be said for those who seem to be most guilty; secondly, your explanation would do no good. M. Berthier drew up the marriage contract for Mlle. de Marville and the Vicomte Popinot; he is so exasperated, that if he knew that I had so much as spoken one word to you, one word for the last time, he would scold me. Everybody is against you."

"So it seems indeed, madame," Pons said, his voice shaking as he lifted his hat respectfully.

Painfully he made his way back to the Rue de Normandie. The old German knew from the heavy weight on his arm that his friend was struggling bravely against failing physical strength. That third encounter was like the verdict of the Lamb at the foot of the throne of God; and the anger of the Angel of the Poor, the symbol of the Peoples, is the last word of Heaven. They reached home without another word.

There are moments in our lives when the sense that our friend is near is all that we can bear. Our wounds smart under the consoling words that only reveal the depths of pain. The old pianist, you see, possessed a genius for friendship, the tact of those who, having suffered much, knew the customs of suffering.

Pons was never to take a walk again. From one illness he fell into another. He was of a sanguine-bilious temperament, the bile passed into his blood, and a violent liver attack was the result. He had never known a day's illness in his life till a month ago; he had never consulted a doctor; so La Cibot, with almost motherly care and intentions at first of the very best, called in "the doctor of the quarter."

In every quarter of Paris there is a doctor whose name and address are only known to the working classes, to the little tradespeople and the porters, and in consequence he is called "the doctor of the quarter." He undertakes confinement cases, he lets blood, he is in the medical profession pretty much what the "general servant" of the advertising column is in the scale of domestic service. He must perforce be kind to the poor, and tolerably expert by reason of much practice, and he is generally popular. Dr. Poulain, called in by Mme. Cibot, gave an inattentive ear to the old musician's complainings. Pons groaned out that his skin itched; he had scratched himself all night long, till he could scarcely feel. The look of his eyes, with the yellow circles about them, corroborated the symptoms.

"Had you some violent shock a couple of days ago?" the doctor asked the patient.

"Yes, alas!"

"You have the same complaint that this gentleman was threatened with," said Dr. Poulain, looking at Schmucke as he spoke; "it is an attack of jaundice, but you will soon get over it," he added, as he wrote a prescription.

But in spite of that comfortable phrase, the doctor's eyes had told another tale as he looked professionally at the patient; and the death-sentence, though hidden under stereotyped compassion, can always be read by those who wish to know the truth. Mme. Cibot gave a spy's glance at the doctor, and read his thought; his bedside manner did not deceive her; she followed him out of the room.

"Do you think he will get over it?" asked Mme. Cibot, at the stairhead.

"My dear Mme. Cibot, your lodger is a dead man; not because of the bile in the system, but because his vitality is low. Still, with great care, your patient may pull through. Somebody ought to take him away for a change--"

"How is he to go?" asked Mme. Cibot. "He has nothing to live upon but his salary; his friend has just a little money from some great ladies, very charitable ladies, in return for his services, it seems. They are two children. I have looked after them for nine years."

"I spend my life watching people die, not of their disease, but of another bad and incurable complaint--the want of money," said the doctor. "How often it happens that so far from taking a fee, I am obliged to leave a five-franc piece on the mantel-shelf when I go--"

"Poor, dear M. Poulain!" cried Mme. Cibot. "Ah, if you hadn't only the hundred thousand livres a year, what some stingy folks has in the quarter (regular devils from hell they are), you would be like Providence on earth."

Dr. Poulain had made the little practice, by which he made a bare subsistence, chiefly by winning the esteem of the porters' lodges in his district. So he raised his eyes to heaven and thanked Mme. Cibot with a solemn face worthy of Tartuffe.

"Then you think that with careful nursing our dear patient will get better, my dear M. Poulain?"

"Yes, if this shock has not been too much for him."

"Poor man! who can have vexed him? There isn't nobody like him on earth except his friend M. Schmucke. I will find out what is the matter, and I will undertake to give them that upset my gentleman a hauling over the coals--"

"Look here, my dear Mme. Cibot," said the doctor as they stood in the gateway, "one of the principal symptoms of his complaint is great irritability; and as it is hardly to be supposed that he can afford a nurse, the task of nursing him will fall to you. So--"

"Are you talking of Mouchieu Ponsh?" asked the marine store-dealer. He was sitting smoking on the curb-post in the gateway, and now he rose to join in the conversation.

"Yes, Daddy Remonencq."

"All right," said Remonencq, "ash to moneysh, he ish better off than Mouchieu Monishtrol and the big men in the curioshity line. I know enough in the art line to tell you thish--the dear man has treasursh!" he spoke with a broad Auvergne dialect.

"Look here, I thought you were laughing at me the other day when my gentlemen were out and I showed you the old rubbish upstairs," said Mme. Cibot.

In Paris, where walls have ears, where doors have tongues, and window bars have eyes, there are few things more dangerous than the practice of standing to chat in a gateway. Partings are like postscripts to a letter--indiscreet utterances that do as much mischief to the speaker as to those who overhear them. A single instance will be sufficient as a parallel to an event in this history.

In the time of the Empire, when men paid considerable attention to their hair, one of the first coiffeurs of the day came out of a house where he had just been dressing a pretty woman's head. This artist in question enjoyed the custom of all the lower floor inmates of the house; and among these, there flourished an elderly bachelor guarded by a housekeeper who detested her master's next-of-kin. The ci-devant young man, falling seriously ill, the most famous of doctors of the day (they were not as yet styled the "princes of science") had been called in to consult upon his case; and it so chanced that the learned gentlemen were taking leave of one another in the gateway just as the hairdresser came out. They were talking as doctors usually talk among themselves when the farce of a consultation is over. "He is a dead man," quoth Dr. Haudry.--"He had not a month to live," added Desplein, "unless a miracle takes place."--These were the words overheard by the hairdresser.

Like all hairdressers, he kept up a good understanding with his customers' servants. Prodigious greed sent the man upstairs again; he mounted to the ci-devant young man's apartment, and promised the servant-mistress a tolerably handsome commission to persuade her master to sink a large portion of his money in an annuity. The dying bachelor, fifty-six by count of years, and twice as old as his age by reason of amorous campaigns, owned, among other property, a splendid house in the Rue de Richelieu, worth at that time about two hundred and fifty thousand francs. It was this house that the hairdresser coveted; and on agreement to pay an annuity of thirty thousand francs so long as the bachelor lived, it passed into his hands. This happened in 1806. And in this year 1846 the hairdresser is still paying that annuity. He has retired from business, he is seventy years old; the ci-devant young man is in his dotage; and as he has married his Mme. Evrard, he may last for a long while yet. As the hairdresser gave the woman thirty thousand francs, his bit of real estate has cost him, first and last, more than a million, and the house at this day is worth eight or nine hundred thousand francs.

Like the hairdresser, Remonencq the Auvergnat had overheard Brunner's parting remark in the gateway on the day of Cecile's first interview with that phoenix of eligible men. Remonencq at once longed to gain a sight of Pons' museum; and as he lived on good terms with his neighbors the Cibots, it was not very long before the opportunity came one day when the friends were out. The sight of such treasures dazzled him; he saw a "good haul," in dealers' phrase, which being interpreted means a chance to steal a fortune. He had been meditating this for five or six days.

"I am sho far from joking," he said, in reply to Mme. Cibot's remark, "that we will talk the thing over; and if the good shentleman will take an annuity, of fifty thousand francsh, I will shtand a hamper of wine, if--"

"Fifty thousand francs!" interrupted the doctor; "what are you thinking about? Why, if the good man is so well off as that, with me in attendance, and Mme. Cibot to nurse him, he may get better--for liver complaint is a disease that attacks strong constitutions."

"Fifty, did I shay? Why, a shentleman here, on your very doorshtep, offered him sheven hundred thoushand francsh, shimply for the pictursh, fouchtra!"

While Remonencq made this announcement, Mme. Cibot was looking at Dr. Poulain. There was a strange expression in her eyes; the devil might have kindled that sinister glitter in their tawny depths.

"Oh, come! we must not pay any attention to such idle tales," said the doctor, well pleased, however, to find that his patient could afford to pay for his visits.

"If my dear Mme. Cibot, here, would let me come and bring an ekshpert (shinsh the shentleman upshtairs ish in bed), I will shertainly find the money in a couple of hoursh, even if sheven hundred thousand francsh ish in queshtion--"

"All right, my friend," said the doctor. "Now, Mme. Cibot, be careful never to contradict the invalid. You must be prepared to be very patient with him, for he will find everything irritating and wearisome, even your services; nothing will please him; you must expect grumbling--"

"He will be uncommonly hard to please," said La Cibot.

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