‘Haven’t you got a guardian angel to watch over you?’ she went on, offering him the sweetmeats and watching with pleasure as he ate them all. ‘You see, while I was at dinner at my cousin’s I was thinking of you.’

‘I know,’ he said, turning a look at once caressing and plaintive on Lisbeth. ‘Without you I should have died long ago. But you know, my dear lady, artists need some distraction.…’

‘Ah, so that’s what’s in your mind!’ she interrupted him, sharply, setting her hands on her hips and fixing him with kindling eyes. ‘You want to ruin your health in the stews of Paris, and end up like so many artists, dying in the workhouse! No, no, make a fortune for yourself first, and when you have money stacked away you can take your fun then, my child. You will have the wherewithal then, you libertine, to pay for the doctors as well as the pleasures!’

Wenceslas Steinbock took this broadside, delivered with looks that searched him with their magnetic flame, and bowed his head. The most bitter-tongued of Mademoiselle Fischer’s detractors, watching even the beginning of this scene, would have acknowledged that the scandalous suggestions of the Olivier pair must be false. Everything in the tone, the gestures, and the looks of these two beings declared the purity of their life together. The old maid evinced the tender feeling of a dictatorial but sincere maternal affection. The young man submitted like a respectful son to a mother’s tyranny. This strange relationship appeared to be the result of a powerful will constantly acting upon a malleable nature, upon that inconsistency of the Slav temperament which allows Slavs to display heroic courage upon the battlefield and yet show an incredible lack of resolution in their conduct of ordinary life, a kind of flabbiness of the moral fibre whose causes might well be investigated by physiologists, for physiologists are to politics what entomologists are to agriculture.

‘And what if I die before I get rich?’ Wenceslas asked gloomily.

‘Die?’ exclaimed the spinster. ‘Oh, I won’t let you die! I have life enough for two, and I would give you my life-blood if it came to that.’

As he listened to that frank, vehement declaration, tears rose to Steinbock’s eyes.

‘Don’t he sad, my little Wenceslas,’ Lisbeth, touched in her turn, went on. ‘Do you know, I think my cousin Hortense thought your seal very nice. Now I’m going to set about getting your bronze group sold; you’ll be able to pay off your debt to me, and do what you like; you’ll be free! Come now, smile!’

‘I shall never be able to pay off my debt to you, Mademoiselle,’ the poor exile replied.

‘And why not?’ demanded the Vosges peasant, ready to take up the cudgels for the Livonian against herself.

‘Because you have not only fed, housed, and cared for me in my need, you have given me strength! You have made me what I am. You have often been harsh, you have made me suffer.…’

‘I?’ said the old maid. ‘Are you going to start on your usual nonsense about poetry and the arts, and crack your fingers and wave your arms, talking about ideal beauty and all your northern moonshine? Beauty is nothing compared with solid practical common sense, and I represent common sense. You have ideas in your mind, have you? That’s all very fine! I have my ideas too.… Of what use is what’s in the head if you don’t turn it to practical account? People with ideas don’t get on so well as those who have none, but know how to bestir themselves. Instead of thinking of your dreams, you need to work. What have you done while I was out?’

‘What did your pretty cousin say?’

‘Who told you she was pretty?’ Lisbeth instantly took him up, in a tone behind which could be heard the roar of a tigerish jealousy.

‘You did, of course.’

‘That was to see the face you would put on. You want to go chasing after petticoats, do you? You like women: well, model them, express your desires in bronze; for you’ll have to do without your little love-affairs for some time yet, and especially love-affairs with my cousin, my dear boy. She’s not game for your game-bag. That girl has to find a husband worth sixty thousand francs a year… and he’s been found.… Goodness, the bed is not made!’ she said, looking across into the other room. ‘Oh, poor dear, I’ve been neglecting you.’

And the energetic spinster at once took off her gloves, her cape and hat, and briskly set to work like a servant to make the narrow camp-bed on which the artist slept. The combination of brusqueness, of downright roughness even, and kindness in Lisbeth’s treatment of him may account for the ascendancy she had acquired over this man, of whom she was taking complete possession. Life binds us, surely, by both the good and the evil that come our way, fortuitously. If the Livonian had encountered Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found a complaisance in his patroness that would have led him into some miry and dishonourable path, in which he would have been lost. He would certainly not have worked, and the artist in him would not have burst the bud. And indeed, even while he groaned under the old maid’s bitter tongue and grasping ways, his good sense told him that he should prefer her iron rule to the idle and precarious existence which some of his compatriots led.

Here is the story of the events which brought about that alliance of feminine energy and masculine weakness – a kind of reversal of attributes said to be not uncommon in Poland.

In 1833, Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes used to work late at night when she had a great deal of work on hand, at about one o’clock in the morning noticed a strong smell of carbonic acid gas and heard the groans of a man at the point of death. The charcoal fumes and the throat-rattle came from an attic above the two rooms of her apartment. She surmised that a young man who had recently come to the house and rented the attic, empty for the previous three years, was attempting to commit suicide.