Young men of that kind are mad: they believe in love, just as they believe in their luck and their own wits I Look for a man of enterprise and vigour to fall in love with your daughter, and he will marry her without worrying about cash. You must admit that I’m pretty generous, for an enemy, giving you advice against my own interest!’

‘Ah, Monsieur Crevel, if only you would be my friend and give up your absurd ideas!’

‘Absurd? Madame, don’t rush on your own destruction. Consider your position… I love you, and you’ll be mine! I want to say, one day, to Hulot: “You took Josépha from me. Now I have your wife!” It’s the old law of an eye for an eye, and I’ll stick to my plan – unless, of course, you should become much too ugly. I’ll get my way, and I’ll tell you why.’ He struck his attitude, staring at Madame Hulot.

‘You will never find an old man or a young lover either,’ he resumed, after a pause, ‘because you love your daughter too much to expose her to the little games of an old rake, and because you, Baroness Hulot, sister-in-law of the old Lieuten-ant-General who commanded the veteran grenadiers of the Old Guard, will never resign yourself to looking for the young man of force and energy where he is to be found, because he might be an ordinary working man, like many a millionaire nowadays who was an ordinary mechanic ten years ago, or a simple works overseer, or an ordinary foreman in a factory. And then, watching your daughter, twenty years old, driven by the urges of youth, capable of disgracing you, you will say to yourself: “Better that I should dishonour myself than that she should; and if Monsieur Crevel is willing to keep my secret, I’ll go and earn my daughter’s dowry – two hundred thousand francs for ten years’ attachment to that old shopkeeper who knows how to get on… old Crevel!” I am vexing you, and what I say is shockingly immoral, isn’t it? But if you had been seized by an irresistible passion, you would be arguing with yourself, trying to think up reasons for yielding to me, such as women always do find when they’re in love. Well, Hortense’s plight will suggest these reasons to your heart, ways of settling things with your conscience!’

‘Hortense still has her uncle.’

‘Who? Old Fischer?… He’s winding up his business, and that’s the Baron’s fault too – he uses his rake on all the cash-boxes within reach.’

‘Count Hulot…’

‘Oh, your husband, Madame, has already squandered the old Lieutenant-General’s savings; he furnished his opera-singer’s house with them. Come now, are you going to let me go without some reason for hoping?’

‘Good-bye, Monsieur. A passion for a woman of my age is soon cured, and you will come to see things in a Christian light. God protects the unfortunate.’

The Baroness rose, in order to oblige the Captain to retreat, and drove him before her into the drawing-room.

‘Should the beautiful Madame Hulot have to live among worn-out trash like this?’ he said. And he pointed to an old lamp, the flaking gilt of a chandelier, the threadbare carpet: the tatters of opulence that made the great white, red, and gold room seem like the corpse of Empire gaiety.

‘Virtue, Monsieur, casts its own radiance over everything here. I have no desire to buy magnificent furnishings by using the beauty you attribute to me as “bird-lime, a trap to catch five-franc pieces”!’

The Captain bit his lip as he recognized the expressions that he had used to stigmatize Josépha’s greed.

‘And all this unswerving fidelity is for whose sake?’ he said.

By this time the Baroness had conducted the retired perfumer as far as the door.

‘For a libertine’s!’ he wound up, pursing his lips smugly, like a virtuous man and a millionaire.

‘If you were right, Monsieur, there would be some merit in my constancy, that’s all.’

She left the Captain, after bowing to him as one bows to some importunate bore to get rid of him, and turned away too quickly to see him for the last time striking his pose. She went to reopen the doors that she had closed, and did not observe the menacing gesture with which Crevel took his leave. She walked proudly, her head held high, as martyrs walked in the Colosseum. All the same, she had exhausted her strength, and she let herself sink on the divan in her blue boudoir as if she were on the point of fainting, and lay there with her eyes fixed on the little ruined summer-house where her daughter was chattering to Cousin Bette.

From the first days of her marriage until that moment, the Baroness had loved her husband, as Josephine had come in the end to love Napoleon: with an admiring love, a maternal love, with abject devotion. If she had not known the details which Crevel had just given her, she knew very well that for the past twenty years Baron Hulot had been habitually unfaithful to her; but she had sealed her eyes with lead; she had wept in secret, and no word of reproach had ever escaped her lips. To reward her for this angelic kindness, she had gained her husband’s veneration, and was worshipped by him as a kind of divinity.

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.