This woman, more closely observed, would have revealed the fiercely ungovernable side of the peasant character. She was still the child who had tried to tear her cousin’s nose off, and who, if she had not learned rational behaviour, would perhaps have killed her in a paroxysm of jealousy. She held in check, only by her knowledge of law and the world, the primitive impetuous directness with which country people, like savages, translate emotion into action.

In this directness, perhaps, lies the whole difference between primitive and civilized man. The savage has only emotions. The civilized man has emotions plus ideas. In the savage, the brain receives, one may conclude, few impressions, so that he is at the mercy of one all-pervading emotion; whereas thoughts, in the civilized man, act upon his feelings and alter them. He is alive to a host of interests and many emotions, while the savage entertains only one concept at a time. The momentary ascendancy that a child holds over his parents is due to a similar cause, but it ceases when his wish is satisfied, whereas in primitive people this cause operates constantly.

Cousin Bette, a primitive peasant from Lorraine and not without a strain of treachery, had a nature of this savage kind, a kind that is commoner among the masses than is generally supposed and that may explain their behaviour during revolutions.

At the time when the curtain rises on this drama, if Cousin Bette had chosen to allow herself to be well dressed, if she had learned to follow the fashion – like Parisian women – through every change of style, she would have been presentable and acceptable; but she remained as stiff as a stick. Now, without charm or grace a woman might as well not exist in Paris. Her black head of hair, her fine hard eyes, the rigid lines of her face, the Spanish darkness of her complexion – which made her look like a figure by Giotto, and which a true Parisian would have set off and used as assets – above all her strange clothes, gave Cousin Bette such a bizarre appearance that at times she reminded one of the monkeys dressed up as women that children, in Savoy, lead about on a string. As she was well known in the households connected by family ties among whom she moved, as she restricted her social movements to that circle and liked to keep herself to herself, her oddities no longer surprised anyone and, out-of-doors, were lost to view in the ceaseless maelstrom of life thronging Parisian streets, where it is only pretty women that attract attention.

Hortense’s laughter at that moment was caused by a triumph over an obstinate refusal of Cousin Bette’s. She had just caught her out in an admission which she had been trying for three years to wring from her. However secretive an old maid may be, there is one emotion that will always make her break silence, and that is vanity! For three years Hortense had been extremely inquisitive about a certain topic, and had bombarded her cousin with questions, which, indeed, revealed her completely innocent mind: she wanted to know why her cousin had not married. Hortense, who knew the story of the five rejected suitors, had built up her own little romance. She believed that Cousin Bette was cherishing a secret passion in her heart, and a half-serious game of attack and riposte had developed between them. Hortense would speak of ‘marriageable young girls like us!’ meaning herself and her cousin. Cousin Bette had on several occasions retorted provocatively: ‘How do you know that I haven’t a sweetheart?’ So Cousin Bette’s sweetheart, real or fictitious, was now a centre of interest and a subject for playful teasing. On Bette’s last visit, after three years of this light-hearted warfare, Hortense had greeted her with the words:

‘How is your sweetheart?’

‘Only middling,’ she had replied. ‘He’s not very well, poor young man.’

‘Ah! He’s delicate, is he?’ the Baroness had asked, with a laugh.

‘Yes, indeed. He is so fair.… A coal-black creature like me had to fall in love, of course, with a fair man, the colour of moonlight.’

‘But who is he? What does he do?’ said Hortense. ‘Is he a prince?’

‘A prince of tools, just as I’m a queen of spools. Can a poor girl like me expect to be loved by a rich man with a house of his own, and money in government stocks, or a duke and peer, or some Prince Charming out of one of your fairy tales?’

‘Oh, how I should like to see him!’ Hortense had exclaimed, smiling.

‘To find out what the man who can love an old nanny looks like?’ asked Cousin Bette.

‘He must be some monster of an old clerk with a goatee beard!’ said Hortense, looking at her mother.

‘Well, that’s where you are mistaken, Mademoiselle!’

‘Ah, then you really have a sweetheart?’ exclaimed Hortense triumphantly.

‘Just as really as you have not!’ her cousin had retorted, apparently piqued.

‘Well, if you have a sweetheart, Bette, why don’t you marry him?’ the Baroness had said, exchanging a look with her daughter. ‘It’s three years now since we first heard of him, and you have had plenty of time to find out what he is like. If he has remained faithful to you, you ought not to prolong a situation that he must find trying. It’s a question of conscience. And then, even if he is young, it is time that you were thinking of providing a crutch for old age.’

Cousin Bette had stared at the Baroness, and, seeing that she was laughing, had replied:

‘That would be hunger marrying thirst. He works for his living as I work for mine. If we had children they would have to work for theirs.… No, no, ours is a love of the soul. It costs less!’

‘Why do you hide him?’ Hortense asked.

‘He’s not presentable,’ replied the old maid, laughing.

‘Do you love him?’ the Baroness asked.

‘Certainly I do! I love him for himself alone, the angel. I have been carrying his image in my heart for four years now.’

‘Well, if you love him for himself,’ the Baroness had said gravely, ‘if he really exists, you are treating him shockingly badly.