Cousin Bette Page 4
A woman’s regard for her husband, the respect with which she hedges him about, are contagious in the family. Hortense thought of her father as a perfect husband, a model, quite without fault. As for her brother, he had been brought up in an atmosphere of admiration of the Baron, in whom everyone saw one of the giants who had stood by Napoleon’s side, and he knew that he owed his own position to his father’s name and standing, the regard in which his father was held. Besides, the impressions of childhood hold their influence long, and he still feared his father. Even if he had suspected the irregularities disclosed by Crevel, he would have been too respectful to protest, and also he would have found excuses, looking at such lapses from a man’s point of view.
But now, the extraordinary devotion of this beautiful and magnanimous woman demands some explanation; and, briefly, here is Madame Hulot’s story.
From a village on the extreme frontiers of Lorraine, at the foot of the Vosges, three brothers named Fischer, simple peasants, came to join what was called the Army of the Rhine, as a result of the Republican call-up.
In 1799, the second of the brothers, André, a widower and Madame Hulot’s father, left his daughter in the care of his elder brother Pierre Fischer, who had been wounded in 1797 and invalided out of the Army, and had then undertaken some small-scale contracting work for Military Transport, business which he owed to the favour of the Commissary general, Hulot d’ Ervy. By a natural enough chance, Hulot, on his way to Strasbourg, met the Fischer family. Adeline’s father and his younger brother were at that time employed as contractors for the supply of forage in Alsace.
Adeline, then aged sixteen, was comparable in her loveliness to the famous Madame du Barry, like her a daughter of Lorraine. She belonged to the company of perfect, dazzling beauties, of women like Madame Tallien, whom Nature fashions with peculiar care, bestowing on them her most precious gifts: distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance; an incomparable complexion, its colour compounded in the mysterious workshops of chance. All such beautiful women resemble one another. Bianca Capello, whose portrait is one of Bronzino’s masterpieces, Jean Goujon’s Venus, whose original was the famous Diane de Poitiers, that Signora Olympia whose portrait is in the Doria gallery, and Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges, Madame Récamier, were all women who remained lovely in spite of the years, their passions, and their lives of excess. There are similarities in their build and proportions, and in the character of their beauty, striking enough to persuade one that there must exist an Aphrodisian current in the ocean of generation, from which spring all these Venuses, daughters of the same salt wave.
Adeline Fischer, one of the most beautiful of this divine race, possessed the noble features, the curving lines, the veined flesh, of women born to be queens. The blonde hair that our mother Eve had from God’s own hand, an empress’s stature, a stately bearing, an imposing profile, the modesty of a country upbringing – these made men come to a halt as she passed, enchanted, like amateurs of art before a Raphael. And so, seeing her, the Commissary general made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer his wife forthwith, to the great surprise of the Fischers, who had all been brought up to look up to their betters.
The eldest, the soldier of 1792, who had been seriously wounded in the attack on Wissembourg, worshipped the Emperor Napoleon and everything that pertained to the Grand Army. André and Johann spoke with respect of Commissary general Hulot, a protégé of the Emperor’s, and the man, besides, to whom they owed their prosperity; for Hulot d’Ervy, finding them men of intelligence and integrity, had taken them from army forage wagons and put them in charge of important special supplies. The Fischer brothers had done good service in the campaign of 1804. Hulot, after the peace, had obtained for them their contract to supply forage in Alsace, not knowing that he himself would be sent later to Strasbourg, to make preparations there for the campaign of 1806.
For the young peasant girl, this marriage was something like an Assumption. The lovely Adeline passed without transition from her village mud to the paradise of the Imperial Court; for it was at that time that the Commissary general, one of the most trustworthy and most active and indefatigable members of his corps, was made Baron, given a place near the Emperor, and attached to the Imperial Guard. The beautiful village maid had the spirit to educate herself, out of love for her husband, with whom she was quite madly in love. It is easy to understand why, for the Commissary general was a masculine counterpart of Adeline, as outstanding among men as she was among women, one of the elect company of handsome men. Tall, well-built, fair, with blue eyes of a gaiety, fire, and charm that were irresistible, with an elegant and graceful figure, he was remarkable even among the d’Orsays, the Forbins, the Ouvrards, and the whole array of the Empire beaux. He was a man accustomed to making conquests and imbued with the ideas of Directory times regarding women, yet his gay career was at that period interrupted for a considerable time by his attachment to his wife.
For Adeline, the Baron was therefore from the beginning a kind of god who could do no wrong. She owed everything to him: fortune – she had a carriage, a fine house, all the luxury of the period; happiness, for she was openly loved; a title – she was a Baroness; celebrity – she was known as the beautiful Madame Hulot, and in Paris! To complete her success, she had the honour of refusing the Emperor’s addresses; and he presented her with a diamond necklace and repeatedly singled her out for marks of his interest, continuing to ask from time to time: ‘And is the lovely Madame Hulot still as virtuous as ever?’ in the tone of a man prepared to exact vengeance from anyone who had triumphed where he had failed.
It does not require much penetration, then, to understand the causes, affecting a simple, unsophisticated, and magnanimous soul – of the fanatical strain in Madame Hulot’s love. Having once fairly said to herself that in her eyes her husband could do no wrong, she became, of her own volition, in her inmost being, the humble, devoted, and blind servant of the man who had made her what she was.
Note, moreover, that she was endowed with great good sense, the good sense of the common people, which gave her education solidity. In society, she was accustomed to talk little, spoke ill of no one, made no effort to shine. She reflected upon everything, listened, and modelled herself upon the women most respected for their integrity and good breeding.
In 1815 Hulot followed the example of Prince de Wissem-bourg, one of his intimate friends, and became one of the organizers of that improvized army whose defeat brought the Napoleonic era to an end, at Waterloo. In 1816 the Baron was one of the most hated men of the Feltre Ministry, and was reappointed to the Commissariat only in 1823, when he was needed on account of the war in Spain. In 1830 he reappeared in the administration as Deputy Minister, at the time when Louis-Philippe was levying a kind of conscription among the old Napoleonic adherents. Since the advent to the throne of the younger branch, which he had actively supported, he had remained in the administration, an indispensable Director at the War Office. He had already been given his Marshal’s baton, and there was nothing more the King could do for him, short of making him a Minister, or a Peer of France.
With no occupation in the years between 1818 and 1823, the Baron had gone on active service – in a campaign against women. Madame Hulot dated her Hector’s first infidelities from the final dissolution of the Empire. The Baroness, then, had held for a dozen years of her married life the position of prima donna assoluta, unchallenged. She still continued to enjoy the inveterate old affection that husbands bear to wives who have resigned themselves to playing the part of good and kind companions. She knew that no rival would stand for two hours against one word of reproach from her, but she shut her eyes, she stopped her ears, her wish was to know nothing of her husband’s conduct outside his home. In the end, she came to treat her Hector as a mother treats a spoiled child. Three years before the conversation with Crevel that has been described, Hortense had recognized her father at the Variétés, in a first tier stage box, in Jenny Cadine’s company, and
exclaimed:
‘There’s Papa!’
‘You are mistaken, my dear; he is with the Marshal,’ the Baroness replied.
The Baroness had certainly seen Jenny Cadine; but instead of being sick at heart when she saw that she was so pretty, she had said to herself: ‘That rascal Hector is very lucky.’ She suffered nevertheless; she gave way secretly to storms of violent feeling; but as soon as she saw her Hector again, she saw again her twelve years of pure happiness, and was quite incapable of uttering a single word of complaint. She would very much have liked the Baron to confide in her; but she had never dared to let him know that she knew of his escapades, out of respect for him. Such excessive delicacy is found only in girls of noble character sprung from the people, who know how to take blows without returning them. In their veins flows the blood of the early martyrs. Well-born girls, as their husbands’ equals, feel a need to bait their husbands, to score off them as in a game of billiards, to make up for their acts of tolerance by biting remarks, in a spirit of revengeful spite and in order to assure themselves either of their own superiority or of their right to have their revenge.
The Baroness had an ardent admirer in her brother-in-law, Lieutenant-General Hulot, the venerable Colonel of the Infantry Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, who was to be given a Marshal’s baton in his later years. This veteran, after commanding from 1830 to 1834 the military region that included the Breton Departments of France (the theatre of his exploits in 1799 and 1800), had come to live in Paris, near his brother, for whom he still felt a fatherly affection. This old soldier’s heart was instinctively drawn to his sister-in-law. He admired her as the noblest, the saintliest creature of her sex. He had not married because he had hoped to meet a second Adeline, and had vainly searched for her in twenty provinces during a score of campaigns. Rather than suffer any diminution of the esteem in which she was held by the pure-souled unimpeachable old Republican, of whom Napoleon said: ‘that fine fellow Hulot is the most obstinate of Republicans, but he will never betray me,’ Adeline would have endured far worse pain than that she had just experienced. But this old man, aged seventy-two, broken by thirty campaigns, wounded for the twenty-seventh time at Waterloo, gave Adeline admiration, not protection. The poor Count, among other infirmities, could hear only with the aid of an ear-trumpet.
So long as Baron Hulot d’Ervy was a handsome man, his light loves made no inroads on his fortune; but at fifty it was necessary to propitiate the Graces. At that age, love suffers an old man’s change into vice: inordinate vanities become involved in it. At about that time Adeline watched her husband grow unbelievably finicking about his toilet, dyeing his hair and side whiskers, wearing belts and corsets. He was determined to remain handsome at all costs; and this concern for his personal appearance, a weakness which he had once found contemptible, he carried into the minutest details. Finally, Adeline began to realize that a river of gold was being poured out for the Baron’s mistresses, whose source was her own home. In eight years a considerable fortune had been dissipated, and so completely that two years previously, at the time when Hulot’s son was setting up his separate establishment, the Baron had been forced to admit to his wife that his salary constituted their entire resources.
‘Where will this lead us?’ had been Adeline’s comment.
‘Don’t worry,’ the Councillor of State had replied. ‘I shall turn over my salary to you and provide for a settlement for Hortense and our future, by doing some business.’
His wife’s profound faith in the ability and outstanding qualities, in the talents and character of her husband, had allayed her momentary misgivings.
And so it is not hard to imagine what the Baroness’s thoughts were, and her tears, after Crevel’s departure. The poor woman had for the past two years known herself to be living at the bottom of a pit, but she had thought that she was there alone. She had had no knowledge of how her son’s marriage had been arranged; she did not know of Hector’s liaison with the grasping Josépha; she had hoped that no one in the world knew of her sorrows. Now, if Crevel was talking so freely of the Baron’s dissipations, Hector was going to suffer loss of respect and reputation. She had caught a glimpse, through the injured ex-perfumer’s vulgarly expansive talk, of the hateful convivialities which had led to the young lawyer’s marriage. Two loose young women had been the priestesses of that hymen, first proposed during some drunken revel, in an atmosphere of humiliating intimacy and the degrading familiarities of two tipsy old men!
‘He has quite forgotten Hortense!’ she said to herself. ‘And yet he sees her every day. Will he find a husband for her among his good-for-nothing cronies?’
She was speaking only as a mother at that moment, and the wife’s voice was silenced, for she could see Hortense, with her Cousin Bette, laughing the unrestrained laughter of reckless youth, and she knew that such nervous outbursts of mirth were a symptom as much to be feared as the tearful reveries of her solitary rambles in the garden.
Hortense was like her mother in appearance, but her naturally wavy and astonishingly thick hair was red gold. Her dazzling skin had the quality of pearl. It was easy to see that she was the child of a true marriage, of pure and noble love in its perfect prime. There was an ardent eagerness in her face, a gaiety in her gestures, a youthful surge of vitality, a fresh bloom of life, a vigorous good health, that seemed to vibrate in the air about her and emanate from her in electric waves. All heads turned to watch Hortense. When her sea-blue eyes with their clear limpidity of innocence rested on some passerby, he involuntarily thrilled. Moreover, her complexion was not marred by freckles, which are the price that golden-fair girls often pay for the milky whiteness of their skins. Tall, rounded without being plump, of a graceful physique as noble as her mother’s, she merited the title of ‘goddess’ that the old authors bestow so freely. No one meeting her in the street could help exclaiming: ‘Heavens! what a lovely girl!’ She was so utterly innocent that she used to say when they came home: ‘How can they speak of a “lovely girl”, Mama, when you are with me? You are surely so much lovelier than I!…’
And, indeed, at past forty-seven, the Baroness might have been preferred to her daughter by those who admire the setting sun; for she had lost nothing yet of what women call their ‘good points,’ by a rare chance – especially rare in Paris, where, in the seventeenth century, Ninon was notorious for a similarly long-lived beauty, stealing the limelight at a time of life when women are plain.
From her daughter, the Baroness’s thoughts passed to Hortense’s father. She imagined him declining day by day by slow degrees, to end among the dregs of society, dismissed some day, perhaps, from the Ministry. This dream of her idol’s downfall, accompanied by a dim prevision of the misfortunes that Crevel had prophesied, was so excruciating that the poor woman lost consciousness and lay in a kind of trance.
Cousin Bette, as Hortense was talking, looked up from time to time to see whether they might return to the drawing-room; but her young cousin was pressing her so closely with teasing questions just when the Baroness reopened the french window, that she did not notice her.
Lisbeth Fischer, five years younger than Madame Hulot although she was the daughter of the eldest of the Fischer brothers, was far from being as beautiful as her cousin; and for that reason she had been desperately jealous of Adeline. Jealousy lay at the root of her character, which was full of eccentricities – a word that the English have coined to describe freakish behaviour in members of distinguished families, not ordinarily used of the socially unimportant. A peasant girl from the Vosges, with everything that that implies: thin, dark, with glossy black hair, heavy eyebrows meeting across the nose in a tuft, long and powerful arms, and broad solid feet, with some warts on her long, simian face: there is a quick sketch of the spinster.
The family, who lived as one household, had sacrificed the plebeian daughter to the pretty one, the astringent fruit to the brilliant flower. Lisbeth worked in the fields while her cousin was cosseted; and so it had happened one day
that Lisbeth, finding Adeline alone, had done her best to pull Adeline’s nose off, a true Grecian nose, much admired by all the old women. Although she was beaten for this misdeed, that did not prevent her from continuing to tear her favoured cousin’s dresses and crumple her collars.
When her cousin’s amazing marriage took place, Lisbeth had bowed before her elevation by destiny, as Napoleon’s brothers and sisters bowed before the glory of the throne and the authority of power. Adeline, who was good and kind to an exceptional degree, in Paris remembered Lisbeth and brought her there about 1809, intending to rescue her from poverty and find her a husband. The Baron found it impossible to marry off this girl with the black eyes and sooty eyebrows, who could neither read nor write, as quickly as Adeline would have liked. So, as a first step, he gave her a trade: he apprenticed Lisbeth to the Court embroiderers, the well-known Pons Brothers.
This cousin, called Bette for short, had the vigorous energy of all mountain-bred people, and, when she became a worker in gold and silver braid embroidery, applied her capacity for hard work to learning to read, write, and reckon; for her cousin, the Baron, had impressed upon her the necessity of possessing these techniques if she was to run an embroidering business of her own. She was determined to make her way, and within two years she had achieved a metamorphosis. By 1811, the peasant girl had become a passably pleasant-mannered, sufficiently skilled and dexterous forewoman.
Her line of business, passementerie – gold and silver lace-work – included the making of epaulettes, sword-knots, aiguillettes, and in fact all the vast variety of brilliant decoration that formerly glittered on the handsome uniforms of the French army, and on civilian dress clothes. The Emperor, with a true Italian fondness of finery, had embroidered gold and silver lace on every uniform in his service, and his empire comprised one hundred and thirty-three Departments. The supplying of these braid trimmings, in the ordinary way to substantial, solidly-established tailoring firms, but sometimes directly to important officials, was good business, a sound trade.