Cousin Bette Read Online

For nearly forty years the Louvre has been crying from the open mouths of all the gashed walls, the gaping windows, ‘Strike these excrescences from my face!’ One must suppose that the utility of this cut-throat place has been recognized, and the need to symbolize in the heart of Paris that intimate alliance of squalor and splendour which is characteristic of the queen of capital cities. Indeed, these stark ruins, in the midst of which the legitimist newspaper contracted the malady of which it is dying, the shocking hovels of the rue du Musée, the boarded enclosure where the street-stall vendors display their wares, may perhaps have a longer and more prosperous existence than three dynasties!

In 1823, the moderate rent asked for rooms in condemned houses had brought Cousin Bette to live here, in spite of the necessity, imposed on her by the isolation of the quarter, to reach home before nightfall. She did not consider this a hardship, in fact, because she had preserved the country habit of going to bed and rising with the sun, a habit which enables country people to make substantial economies in light and heating. She lived, then, in one of the houses that, thanks to the demolition of the famous house once occupied by Cambacérès, now had a view of the Square.

Just as Baron Hulot was setting down his wife’s cousin at the door of this house and saying ‘Good-night, Cousin!’, a young woman, small, slender, pretty, dressed with great elegance and moving in a waft of expensive scent, passed between the cab and the wall to enter the same house. The eyes of this lady, turning simply in order to have a look at her fellowtenant’s cousin, met the Baron’s eyes, quite without premeditation; but the libertine experienced the sharp reaction that all Parisians feel when they meet a pretty woman who realizes, as the entomologists put it, all their desiderata, and he stood pulling on one of his gloves with a careful deliberation before getting into his cab again, so as to keep himself in countenance and be able to follow the young woman with his eye, a young woman whose dress was agreeably set swaying by something rather different from those hideous and fraudulent crinoline bustles.

‘There,’ he said to himself, ‘goes a charming little woman whom I would be very pleased to make happy, for I have no doubt she would do the same by me.’

When the stranger had reached the turn of the staircase serving the main building overlooking the street, she looked back at the carriage entrance out of the corner of her eye, without actually turning round, and saw the Baron nailed to the spot with admiration, consumed with desire and curiosity. Such a tribute is a flower, and all Parisian women breathe its fragrance with pleasure when they find it in their path. There are women devoted to their obligations, and virtuous as well as pretty, who come home in a bad temper when they have failed to gather their little bouquet in the course of their walk.

The young woman hurried up the staircase. Presently a second-floor window opened and she appeared, but in company with a gentleman whose bald pate and placid un-wrathful eye showed him to be a husband.

‘You could hardly call these creatures lacking in knowingness or directness!’ reflected the Baron. ‘She’s doing this to show me where she lives. It’s a little too smart, especially in a quarter like this. I had better take care.’

The Director looked up when he had got into the milord, and then the woman and her husband abruptly drew back, as if the Baron’s face were Medusa’s head.

‘One would suppose they know who I am,’ thought the Baron. ‘That would explain the whole thing.’

And when the cab had climbed the slope to the rue du Musée, he leaned out to look back at the stranger again, and found that she had returned to the window. Ashamed at being caught staring at the carriage hood which concealed her admirer, the young woman sprang hastily back.

‘I’ll find out who she is from Nanny,’ the Baron told himself.

Sight of the Councillor of State’s features had startled the couple very much, as we shall see.

‘But that is Baron Hulot, my chief!’ exclaimed the husband, as he stepped back from the balcony on to which the window opened.

‘Well then, Marneffe, can the old maid on the third floor at the far end of the court, who is living with that young man, be his cousin? How odd that we should only have found that out today, and by accident!’

‘Mademoiselle Fischer living with a young man!’ repeated the civil servant. ‘That’s just porters’ gossip. Let’s not speak so lightly of the cousin of a Councillor of State who makes the sun shine and the rain descend at the Ministry. Come on, let’s have dinner; I’ve been waiting for you since four o’clock!’

The lovely Madame Marneffe, natural daughter of the Comte Montcornet, one of Napoleon’s most famous lieutenants, had been married, with the aid of a twenty-thousandfranc dowry, to a junior official in the Ministry of War. Through the influence of the illustrious Lieutenant-General, Marshal of France for the last six months of his life, this pen-pusher had reached the unlooked-for position of senior book-keeper in his office; but just as he was about to be appointed head clerk, the Marshal’s death had cut off Marneffe’s and his wife’s expectations at the root. Monsieur Marneffe’s means were small, for Mademoiselle Valérie Fortin’s dowry had already slipped through his fingers and melted away in paying his debts, buying all the things needed by a young man setting up house, and above all in satisfying the demands of a pretty wife accustomed in her mother’s house to luxuries which she had no mind to give up; so that the couple had been obliged to economize in house rent. The situation of the rue du Doyenné, not far from the Ministry of War and the centre of Paris, suited Monsieur and Madame Marneffe, and for the past four years or so they had been living in the same building as Mademoiselle Fischer.

Monsieur Jean-Paul-Stanislas Marneffe was an underling of the type that resists the stupefying effects of routine service in an office by the kind of power that depravity gives. This meagre little man, with wispy hair and beard, his face bloodless and wan, drawn rather than wrinkled, his eyes, with slightly reddened eyelids, harnessed with spectacles, of hangdog looks and still more hangdog bearing, was exactly the type of man who is brought before the police courts on a charge of indecent offences, as everyone pictures him.

The apartment occupied by this couple presented the flashy display of meretricious luxury all too often met with in Parisian homes, in establishments like theirs. In the drawing-room, the furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily-carved painted chandelier with its candle-rings of moulded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye – everything in the room, to the very curtains (which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts only for three years), everything cried poverty like a ragged beggar at a church door.

The dining-room, looked after incompetently by a single servant, had the nauseating atmosphere of provincial hotel dining-rooms; everything in it was greasy, ill-kept.

The master’s bedroom was more like a student’s room, with his single bed and the furniture he had used as a bachelor faded now and shabby like himself; and it was cleaned only once a week. It was a horrible room, in which nothing was put away and old socks dangled from the chairs, stuffed with horse-hair, on whose covers the faded flowers reappeared outlined in dust. It quite clearly proclaimed a man whose home meant nothing to him, who lived outside it: at gaminghouses, cafés, or elsewhere.

The mistress’s room was not like the others. There was no sign there of the degrading neglect shamefully evident in the rooms used in common, whose curtains were all discoloured with smoke and dust, in which the child, abandoned apparently to his own devices, left his toys lying everywhere. Situated in the wing of the house facing the street, to one side of the main block on the court of the adjoining property, Valérie’s bedroom and dressing-room, with their stylish chintz hangings, rosewood furniture, and velvet pile carpet, were redolent of the pretty woman, one might almost say the kept woman. On the velvet-draped mantelpiece stood the kind of clock that was a fashionable possession at the moment. A well-filled little cabinet for ornaments and richly mounted Chinese porcelain flowerstands caught the eye. The bed, the dressing-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the tête-à-tête sofa, the usual toys and trifles lying about – all bore witness to the affectations or whims of fashion.

Although the luxury and elegance were third-rate and everything was three years old, a dandy would have seen nothing to find fault with in the room, except perhaps that its opulence smacked of the middle class. Yet there was no art or distinction in the furnishing, nothing of the effect which good taste achieves by intelligent selection of possessions. A doctor in social science would have deduced the existence of a lover from some of the useless, highly ornamental knick-knacks, which in the home of a married woman could only have come from the demi-god, whose power is invisible but ever present.

The dinner that husband, wife, and child sat down to – the dinner that had been kept since four o’clock – would have revealed this family’s financial straits, for the table is the most reliable thermometer of the fortunes of Parisian households.