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.