thejealousiesof a- country Town

(Les Rivalitts)

and

THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY

(L Interdiction)

XIV

TRANSLATED BY

ELLEN MARRIAGE

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY

AVIL PUBLISHING PUBLISHERS- NEV DRK

COPYRIGHTED 1901

BY

3obn 2). B\>tl

All Rights Reserved

This Touraine Edition de Luxe of the complete works of Honor e de Balzac is lim- ited to twelve hundred and fifty sets, of which this copy is number. *w.-hu'.

CONTENTS

MM

INTRODUCTION - vU

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN:

THE OW> MAID - ... I

THK COUACTION OF ANTIQUITIES - - 147

THE COMMISSION IN L UNACY - - 303

ILLUSTRATIONS

' PHOTOGRAVURES

"AH, SUSANNE, IS THAT YOU?" (il) - Frontispiece

PAGE

HE LISTENED PATIENTLY ... TO TALES OF THE LITTLE WOES OF LIFE IN A COUNTRY TOWN .... 8

AT ONCE HE TURNED TO LOOK AT ATH- ANASE - - - -

76

WHAT IS IT, MONSIEUR ? " SHE ASKED, POSING IN HER DISORDER -

- 242

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

AND THE COMMISSION IN LUNACY

INTRODUCTION

The two stories of Les Rivalites are more closely connected than it was always Balzac's habit to connect the tales which he united under a common heading. Not only are both de- voted to the society of Alengon — a town and neighborhood to which he had evidently strong, though it is not clearly known what, attractions — not only is the Chevalier de Valois a notable figure in each; but the community, imparted by the elaborate study of the old noblesse in each case, is even greater than either of these ties could give. Indeed, if instead of Les Rivalites the author had chosen some label indicating the study of the noblesse qui s'en va, it might almost have been preferable. He did not, however; and though in a man who so constantly changed his titles and his arrangements the actual ones are not excessively authoritative, they have authority.

La Vieille Fille, despite a certain tone of levity — which, to do Balzac justice, is not common with him, and which is rather hard upon the poor heroine — is one of the best and liveliest things he ever did. The opening picture of the Chevalier, though, like other things of its author's, especially in his overtures, liable to the charge of being elaborated a little too much, is one of the very best things of its kind, and is a sort of locus classicus for its subject. The whole picture of country town society is about as good as it can be; and the only blot that I know is to be found in the sentimental Athanase, who was not quite within Balzac's province, ex-

(vii)

viii INTRODUCTION

tensive as that province is. If we compare Mr. Augustus Moddle, we shall see one of the not too numerous instances in which Dickens has a clear advantage over Balzac; and if it be retorted that Balzac's object was not to present a merely ridiculous object, the rejoinder is not very far to seek. Such a character, with such a fate as Balzac has assigned to him, must be either humorously grotesque or unfeignedly pathetic, and Balzac has not quite made Athanase either.

He is, however, if he is a failure, about the only failure in the book, and he is atoned for by a whole bundle of successes. Of the Chevalier, little more need be said. Balzac, it must be remembered, was the oldest novelist of distinct genius who had the opportunity of delineating the survivors of the ancien regime from the life, and directly. It is certain — even if we hesitate at believing him quite so familiar with all the classes of higher society from the Faubourg down- wards, as he would have us believe him — that he saw some- thing of most of them, and his genius was unquestionably of the kind to which a mere thumbnail study, a mere passing view, suffices for the acquisition of a thorough working knowledge of the object. In this case the Chevalier has served, and not improperly served, as the original of a thou- sand after-studies. His rival, less carefully projected, is also perhaps a little less alive. Again, Balzac was old enough to have foregathered with many men of the Revolution. But the most characteristic of them were not long-lived, the "little window" and other things having had a bad effect on them; and most of those who survived had, by the time he was old enough to take much notice, gone through metamor- phoses of Bonapartism, Constitutional Liberalism, and what not. But still du Bousquier is alive, as well as all the minor

INTRODUCTION lx

assistants and spectators in the battle for the old maid's hand. Suzanne, that tactful and graceless Suzanne to whom we are introduced first of all, is very much alive; and for all her gracelessness, not at all disagreeable. I am only sorry that she sold the counterfeit presentment of the Princess Goritza after all.

Le Cabinet des Antiques, in its Alencon scenes, is a worthy pendant to La Vieille FUle. The old-world honor of the Marquis d'Esgrignon, the thankless sacrifices of Armande, the prisca fides of Maitre Chesnel, present pictures for which, out of Balzac, we can look only in Jules Sandeau, and which in Sandeau, though they are presented with a more poetical touch, have less masterly outline than here. One takes — or, at least, I take — less interest in the ignoble intrigues of the other side, except in so far as they menace the fortunes of a worthy house unworthily represented. Victurnien d'Es- grignon, like his companion, Savinien de Portenduere (who, however, is, in every respect, a very much better fellow), does not argue in Balzac any high opinion of the fits de famille. He is, in fact, an extremely feeble youth, who does not seem to have got much real satisfaction out of the escapades, for which he risked not merely his family's fortune, but his own honor, and who would seem to have been a rake, not from natural taste and spirit and relish, but because it seemed to him to be the proper thing to be. But the beginnings of the fortune of the aspiring and intriguing Camusots are ad- mirably painted; and Madame de Maufrigneuse, that rather doubtful divinity, who appears so frequently in Balzac, here acts the dea ex machina with considerable effect. And we end well (as we generally do when Blondet, whom Balzac seems more than once to adopt as mask, is the narrator), in the

x INTRODUCTION

last glimpse of Mile. Armande left alone with the remains of her beauty, the ruins of everything dear to her — and God.

These two stories were written at no long interval, yet, for some reason or other, Balzac did not at once unite them. La Vieille Fille first appeared in November and December 1836 in the Presse, and was inserted next year in the Scenes de la Vie de Province. It had three chapter divisions. The second part did not appear all at once. Its first instalment, under the general title, came out in the Ghronique de Paris even before the Vieille Fille appeared in March 1836; the completion was not published (under the title of Les Rivalites en Province) till the autumn of 1838, when the Constitu- tionnel served as its vehicle. There were eight chapter divi- sions in this latter. The whole of the Cabinet was published in book form (with Gambara to follow it) in 1839. There were some changes here; and the divisions were abolished when the whole book in 1844 entered the Comedie. One of the greatest mistakes which, in my humble judgment, the organizers of the edition definitive have made, is their adop- tion of Balzac's never executed separation of the pair and deletion of the excellent joint-title Les Rivalites.

Lf Interdiction belongs with the Honorine group in Scenes de la Vie Priv'ee, being placed here for purpose of con- venience. It is good in its own way. It is indeed impossible to say that there is not in the manner, though perhaps there may be none in the fact, of the Marquis d'Espard's restitu- tion, and the rest of it, a little touch of the madder side of Quixotism; and one sees all the speculative and planning Balzac in that notable scheme of the great work on China, which brought in far, far more, I fear, than any work on

INTRODUCTION xl

China ever has or is likely to bring in to its devisers. But

the conduct of Popinot, in his interview with the Marquise,

is really admirable. The great scenes of fictitious finesse

do not always "come off ;" we do not invariably find ourselves

experiencing that sense of the ability of his characters which

the novelist appears to entertain, and expects us to entertain

likewise. But this is admirable; it is, with Charles de

Bernard's Le Gendre, perhaps the very best thing of the kind

to be found anywhere. This story would serve to show any

intelligent critic that genius of no ordinary kind had passed

that way.

L' Interdiction first appeared in the Chronique de Paris

in 1836; was at first separated from the Etudes Philoso-

phiques to be a Scene de la Vie Parisienne. G. S.

vol. 7 — 23

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN THE OLD MAID

To M. Eug&ne Auguste Georges Louis Midy de la Greneraye Surville, Civil Engineer of the Corps Royal, a token of affection from his brother-in-law. De Balzac.

Plenty of people must have come across at least one Chevalier de Valois in the provinces; there was one in Normandy, another was extant at Bourges, a third flourished at Alengon in the year 1816, and the South very likely pos- sessed one of its own. But we are not here concerned with the numbering of the Valois tribe. Some of them, no doubt, were about as much of Valois as Louis XIV. was a Bourbon ; and every Chevalier was so slightly acquainted with the rest, that it was anything but politic to mention one of them when speaking to another. All of them, however, agreed to leave the Bourbons in perfect tranquillity on the throne of France, for it is a little too well proven that Henri IV. succeeded to the crown in default of heirs male in the Orleans, otherwise the Valois branch ; so that if any Valois exist at all, they must be descendants of Charles of Valois, Duke of Angouleme, and Marie Touchet; and even there the direct line was extinct (unless proof to the contrary is forthcoming) in the person of the Abbe de Rothelin. As for the Valois Saint-Eemy, descended from Henri II., they likewise came to an end with the too famous Lamothe- Valois of the Diamond Necklace affair.

Every one of the Chevaliers, if information is correct, was, like the Chevalier of Alengon, an elderly noble, tall, lean, and without fortune. The Bourges Chevalier had emigrated, the

[1)

2 THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN

Touraine Valois went into hiding during the Revolution, and the Alen^on Chevalier was mixed up in the Vendean war, and implicated to some extent in Chouannerie. The last- named gentleman spent the most part of his youth in Paris, where, at the age of thirty, the Revolution broke in upon his career of conquests. Accepted as a true Valois by persons of the highest quality in his province, the Chevalier de Valois d'Alencon (like his namesakes) was remarkable for his fine manners, and had evidently been accustomed to move in the best society.

He dined out every day, and played cards of an evening, and, thanks to one of his weaknesses, was regarded as a great wit; he had a habit of relating a host of anecdotes of the times of Louis Quinze, and those who heard his stories for the first time thought them passably well narrated. The Chevalier de Valois, moreover, had one virtue ; he refrained from repeat- ing his own good sayings, and never alluded to his conquests, albeit his smiles and airs were delightfully indiscreet. The old gentleman took full advantage of the old-fashioned Voltairean noble's privilege of staying away from Mass, but his irreligion was very tenderly dealt with out of regard for his devotion to the Royalist cause.

One of his most remarkable graces (Mole must have learned it of him) was his way of taking snuff from an old- fashioned snuff-box with a portrait of a lady on the lid. The Princess Goritza, a lovely Hungarian, had been famous for her beauty towards the end of the reign of Louis XV. ; and the Chevalier could never speak without emotion of the foreign great lady whom he loved in his youth, for whom he had fought a duel with M. de Lauzun.

But by this time the Chevalier had lived fifty-eight years, -and if he owned to but fifty of them, he might safely indulge himself in that harmless deceit. Thin, fair-complexioned men, among other privileges, retain that youthfulness of shape which in men, as in women, contributes as much as anything to stave off any appearance of age. And, indeed, it is a fact that all the life, or rather, all the grace, which is the expres-

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 3

sion of life, lies in the figure. Among the Chevalier's per- sonal traits, mention must be made of the portentous nose with which Nature had endowed him. It cut a pallid countenance sharply into two sections which seemed to have nothing to do with each other; so much so, indeed, that only one-half of his face would flush with the exertion of digestion after dinner; all the glow being confined to the left side, a phenomenon worthy of note in times when physiology is so much occupied with the human heart. M. de Valois' health was not apparently robust, judging by his long, thin legs, lean frame, and sallow complexion; but he ate like an ogre, alleging, doubtless by way of excuse for his voracity, that he suffered from a complaint known in the provinces as a "hot liver." The flush on his left cheek confirmed the story; but in a land where meab are developed on the lines of thirty or forty dishes, and last for four hours at a stretch, the Chevalier's abnormal appetite might well seem to be a special mark of the favor of Providence vouchsafed to the good town. That flush on the left cheek, according to divers medical authorities, is a sign of prodigality of heart ; and, indeed, the Chevalier's past record of gallantry might seem to confirm a professional dictum for which the present chronicler (most fortunately) is in nowise responsible. But in spite of these symptoms, M. de Valois was of nervous temperament, and in consequence long-lived; and if his liver was hot, to use the old-fashioned phrase, his heart was not a whit less inflamma- ble. If there was a line worn here and there in his face, and a silver thread or so in his hair, an experienced eye would have discerned in these signs and tokens the stigmata of desire, the furrows traced by past pleasure. And, in fact, in his face, the unmistakable marks of the crow's foot and the serpent's tooth took the shape of the delicate wrinkles so prized at the court of Cytherea.

Everything about the gallant Chevalier revealed the ladies' man." So minutely careful was he over his ablutions, that it was a pleasure to see his cheeks; they might have been brushed over with some miraculous water. That portion of

4 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

his head which the hair refused to hide from view shone like ivory. His eyebrows, like his hair, had a youthful look, so carefully was their growth trained and regulated by the comb. A naturally fair skin seemed to be yet further whitened by some mysterious preparation; and while the Chevalier never used scent, there was about him, as it were, a perfume of youth which enhanced the freshness of his looks. His hands, that told of race, were as carefully kept as if they belonged to some coxcomb of the gentler sex ; you could not help notic- ing those rose-pink neatly-trimmed finger-nails. Indeed, but for his lordly superlative nose, the Chevalier would have looked like a doll.

It takes some resolution to spoil this portrait with the ad- mission of a foible ; the Chevalier put cotton wool in his ears, and still continued to wear ear-rings — two tiny negroes' heads set with brilliants. They were of admirable workmanship, it is true, and their owner was so far attached to the singular appendages, that he used to justify his fancy by saying "that his sick headaches had left him since his ears were pierced." He used to suffer from sick headaches. The Chevalier is not held up as a flawless character; but even if an old bachelor's heart sends too much blood to his face, is he never therefore to be forgiven for his adorable absurdities? Perhaps (who knows?) there are sublime secrets hidden away beneath them. And besides, the Chevalier de Valois made amends for his negroes' heads with such a variety of other and different charms, that society ought to have felt itself sufficiently com- pensated. He really was at great pains to conceal his age and to make himself agreeable.

First and foremost, witness the extreme care which he gave to his linen, the one distinction in dress which a gentleman may permit himself in modern days. The Chevalier's linen was invariably fine and white, as befitted a noble. His coat, though remarkably neat, was always somewhat worn, but spot- less and uncreased. The preservation of this garment bordered on the miraculous in the opinion of those who noticed the Chevalier's elegant indifference on this head; not

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 6

that he went so far as to scrape his clothes with broken glass (a refinement invented by the Prince of Wales), but he set himself to carry out the first principles of dress as laid down by Englishmen of the very highest and finest fashion, and this with a personal element of coxcombry which Alencon was scarcely capable of appreciating. Does the world owe no esteem to those that take such pains for it? And what was all this labor but the fulfilment of that very hardest of sayings in the Gospel, which bids us return good for evil ? The fresh- ness of the toilet, the care for dress, suited well with the Chevalier's blue eyes, ivory teeth, and bland personality ; still, the superannuated Adonis had nothing masculine in his ap- pearance, and it would seem that he employed the illusion of the toilet to hide the ravages of other than military campaigns.

To tell the whole truth, the Chevalier had a voice singularly at variance with his delicate fairness. So full was it and sonorous, that you would have been startled by the sound of it unless, with certain observers of human nature, you held the theory that the voice was only what might be expected of such a nose. With something less of volume than a giant double- bass, it was a full, pleasant baritone, reminding you of the hautboy among musical instruments, sweet and resistant, deep and rich.

M. de Valois had discarded the absurd costume still worn by a few antiquated Royalists, and frankly modernized his dress. He always appeared in a maroon coat with gilt but- tons, loosely-fitting breeches with gold buckles at the knees, a white sprigged waistcoat, a tight stock, and a collarless shirt ; this being a last vestige of eighteenth century costume, which its wearer was the less willing to relinquish because it enabled him to display a throat not unworthy of a lay abbe. Square gold buckles of a kind unknown to the present genera- tion shone conspicuous upon his patent leather shoes. Two watch chains hung in view in parallel lines from a couple of fobs, another survival of an eighteenth century mode which the incroyable did not disdain to copy in the time of the

6 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

Directory. This costume of a transition period, reuniting two centuries, was worn by the Chevalier with the grace of an old-world marquis, a grace lost to the French stage since Mole's last pupil, Fleury, retired from the boards and took his secret with him.

The old bachelor's private life, seemingly open to all eyes, was in reality inscrutable. He lived in a modest lodging (to say the least of it) up two pairs of stairs in a house in the Rue du Cours, his landlady being the laundress most in re- quest in Alencon — which fact explains the extreme elegance of the Chevalier's linen. Ill luck was so to order it that Alengon one day could actually believe that he had not always conducted himself as befitted a man of his quality, and that in his old age he privately married one Cesarine, the mother of an infant which had the impertinence to come without being called.

"He gave his hand to her who for so long had lent her hand to iron his linen," said a certain M. du Bousquier.

The sensitive noble's last days were the more vexed by this unpleasant scandal, because, as shall be shown in the course of this present Scene, he had already lost a long- cherished hope for which he had made many a sacrifice.

Mme. Lardot's two rooms were let to M. le Chevalier de Valois at the moderate rent of a hundred francs per annum. The worthy gentleman dined out every night, and only came home to sleep; he was therefore at charges for nothing but his breakfast, which always consisted of a cup of chocolate with butter and fruit, according to the season. A fire was never lighted in his rooms except in the very coldest winters, and then only while he was dressing. Between the hours of eleven and four M. de Valois took his walks abroad, read the ftpera, ;md paid calls.

When the Chevalier first settled in Alencon, he magnani- mously owned that he had nothing but an annuity of six hundred livres paid in quarterly instalments by his old man of business, with whom the certificates were deposited. This was all that remained of his former wealth. And every three

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 1

months, in fact, a banker in the town paid him a hundred and fifty francs remitted by one M. Bordin of Paris, the last of the procureurs du Chatelet. These particulars everybody knew, for the Chevalier had taken care to ask his confidant to keep the matter a profound secret. He reaped the fruits of his misfortunes. A cover was laid for him in all the best houses in Alencon; he was asked to every evening party. His talents as a card-player, a teller of anecdotes, a pleasant and well-bred man of the world, were so thoroughly appreciated that an evening was spoiled if the connoisseur of the town was not present. The host and hostess and all the ladies present missed his little approving grimace. "You are adorably well dressed," from the old bachelor's lips, was sweeter to a young woman in a ballroom than the sight of her rival's despair.

There were certain old-world expressions which no one could pronounce so well. "My heart," "my jewel," "my little love," "my queen," and all the dear diminutives of the year 1770 took an irresistible charm from M. de Valois' lips; in short, the privilege of superlatives was his. His compli- ments, of which, moreover, he was chary, won him the good- will of the elderly ladies ; he flattered every one down to the officials of whom he had no need.

He was so fine a gentleman at the card-table, that his be- havior would have marked him out anywhere. He never com- plained; when his opponents lost he praised their play; he never undertook the education of his partners by showing them what they ought to have done. If a nauseating discus- sion of this kind began while the cards were making, the Chevalier brought out his snuff-box with a gesture worthy of Mole, looked at the Princess Goritza's portrait, took off the lid in a stately manner, heaped up a pinch, rubbed it to a fine powder between finger and thumb, blew off the light particles, shaped a little cone in his hand, and by the time the cards were dealt he had replenished the cavities in his nostrils and replaced the Princess in his waistcoat pocket — always to the left-hand side.

8 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

None but a noble of the Gracious as distinguished from the Great Century could have invented such a compromise between a disdainful silence and an epigram which would have passed over the heads of his company. The Chevalier took dull minds as he found them, and knew how to turn them to account. His irresistible evenness of temper caused many a one to say, "I admire the Chevalier de Valois!" Everything about him, his conversation and his manner, seemed in keeping with his mild appearance. He was care- ful to come into collision with no one, man or woman. In- dulgent with deformity as with defects of intellect, he listened patiently (with the help of the Princess Goritza) to tales of the little woes of life in a country town; to anecdotes of the undercooked egg at breakfast, or the sour cream in the coffee ; to small grotesque details of physical ailments; to tales of dreams and visitations and wakings with a start. The Chevalier was an exquisite listener. He had a languishing glance, a stock attitude to denote compassion; he put in his "Ohs" and "Poohs" and "What-did-you-dos ?" with charming appropriateness. Till his dying day no one ever suspected that while these avalanches of nonsense lasted, the Chevalier in his own mind was rehearsing the warmest passages of an old romance, of which the Princess Goritza was the heroine. Has any one ever given a thought to the social uses of extinct sentiment ? — or guessed in how many indirect ways love bene- fits humanity?

Possibly this listener's faculty sufficiently explains the Chevalier's popularity; he was always the spoiled child of the town, although he never quitted a drawing-room without carrying on* about five livres in his pocket. Sometimes he lost, and he made the most of his losses, but it very seldom happened. All those who knew him say with one accord that ■ t in any place have they met with so agreeable a mummy, not even in the Egyptian museum at Turin. Surely in no known country of the globe did parasite appear in such a benignant shape. Never did selfishness in its most concen- d form show itself so inoffensive, so full of good offices

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d wakings wi
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THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 9

as in this gentleman; the Chevalier's egoism was as good as another man's devoted friendship. If any person went to ask M. de Valois to do some trifling service which the worthy Chevalier could not perform without inconvenience, that per- son never went away without conceiving a great liking for him, and departed fully convinced that the Chevalier could do nothing in the matter, or might do harm if he meddled with it.

To explain this problematical existence the chronicler is bound to admit, while Truth — that ruthless debauchee — has caught him by the throat, that latterly after the three sad, glorious Days of July, Alengon discovered that M. de Valois' winnings at cards amounted to something like a hundred and fifty crowns every quarter, which amount the ingenious Chevalier intrepidly remitted to himself as an annuity, so that he might not appear to be without resources in a country with a great turn for practical details. Plenty of his friends — he was dead by that time, please to remark — plenty of his friends denied this in toto, they maintained that the stories were fables and slanders set in circulation by the Liberal party and that M. de Valois was an honorable and worthy gentleman. Luckily for clever gamblers, there will always be champions of this sort for them among the onlookers. Feeling ashamed to excuse wrongdoing, they stoutly deny that wrong has been done. Do not accuse them of wrong- headedness ; they have their own sense of self-respect, and the Government sets them an example of the virtue which consists in burying its dead by night without chanting a Te Deum over a defeat. And suppose that M. de Valois permitted him- self a neat stratagem that would have won Gramont's esteem, a smile from Baron de Fceneste, and a shake of the hand from the Marquis de Moncade, was he any the less the pleasant dinner guest, the wit, the unvarying card-player, the charming retailer of anecdotes, the delight of Alengon? In what, moreover, does the action, lying, as it does, outside the laws of right and wrong, offend against the elegant code of a man of birth and breeding ? When so many people are

10 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

obliged to give pensions to others, what more natural than of one's own accord to allow an annuity to one's own best friend? But Laius is dead. . . .

After some fifteen years of this kind of life, the Chevalier had amassed ten thousand and some odd hundred francs. When the Bourbons returned, he said that an old friend of his, M. le Marquis de Pombreton, late a lieutenant in the Black Musketeers, had returned a loan of twelve hundred pistoles with which he emigrated. The incident made a sensation. It was quoted afterwards as a set-off against droll stories in the Constitutionnel of the ways in which some emigres paid their debts. The poor Chevalier used to blush all over the right side of his face whenever this noble trait in the Marquis de Pombreton came up in conversation. At the time every one rejoiced with M. de Valois; he used to consult capitalists as to the best way of investing this wreck of his former fortune ; and, putting faith in the Eestoration, invested it all in Government stock when the funds had fallen to fifty-six francs twenty-five centimes. MM. de Lenon- court, de Navarreins, de Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La Bil- lardiere, to whom he was known, had obtained a pension of a hundred crowns for him from the privy purse, he said, and the Cross of St. Louis. By what means the old Chevalier obtained the two solemn confirmations of his title and quality, no one ever knew; but this much is certain, the Cross of St. Louis gave him brevet rank as a colonel on a retiring pen- sion, by reason of his services with the Catholic army in the West.

Besides the fiction of the annuity, to which no one gave a thought, the Chevalier was now actually possessed of a genuine income of a thousand francs. But with this im- provement in his circumstances he made no change in his life or manners ; only — the red ribbon looked wondrous well on his maroon coat; it was a finishing touch, as it were, to this portrait of a gentleman. Ever since the year 1802 the Chevalier had sealed his letters with an ancient gold seal, engraved roughly enough, but not so badly but that the Cas-

M«HE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 11

terans, d'Esgrignons, and Troisvilles might see that he bore the arms of France impaled with his own, to wit, France per pale, gules two bars gemelles, a cross of five mascles con- joined or, on a chief sable a cross pattee argent over all; with a knight's casquet for crest and the motto — Valeo. With these noble arms the so-called bastard Valois was en- titled to ride in all the royal coaches in the world.

Plenty of people envied the old bachelor his easy life, made up of boston, trictrac, reversis, whist, and piquet; of good play, dinners well digested, pinches of snuff gracefully taken, and quiet walks abroad. Almost all Alencon thought that his existence was empty alike of ambitions and cares; but where is the man whose life is quite as simple as they sup- pose who envy him?

In the remotest country village you shall find human mol- lusks, rotifers inanimate to all appearance, which cherish a passion for lepidoptera or conchology, and are at infinite pains to acquire some new butterfly, or a specimen of Concha Veneris. And the Chevalier had not merely shells and but- terflies of his own, he cherished an ambitious desire with a pertinacity and profound strategy worthy of a Sixtus V. He meant to marry a rich old maid ; in all probability because a wealthy marriage would be a stepping-stone to the high spheres of the Court. This was the secret of his royal bear- ing and prolonged abode in Alencon.

Very early one Tuesday morning in the middle of spring in the year '16 (to use his own expression), the Chevalier was just slipping on his dressing-gown, an old-fashioned green silk damask of a flowered pattern, when, in spite of the cotton in his ears, he heard a girl's light footstep on the stairs. In another moment some one tapped discreetly three times on the door, and then, without waiting for an answer, a very handsome damsel slipped like a snake into the old bachelor's apartment.

"Ah, Suzanne, is that you?" said the Chevalier de Valois, continuing to strop his razor. "What are you here for? dear little jewel of mischief?"

12 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

"I have come to tell you something which perhaps will give you as much pleasure as annoyance."

"Is it something about Cesarine ?"

"Much I trouble myself about your Cesarine," pouted she, half careless, half in earnest.

The charming Suzanne, whose escapade was to exercise so great an influence on the lives of all the principal charac- ters in this story, was one of Mme. Lardot's laundry girls. And now for a few topographical details.

The whole ground floor of the house was given up to the laundry. The little yard was a drying-ground where em- broidered handkerchiefs, collarettes, muslin slips, cuffs, frilled shirts, cravats, laces, embroidered petticoats, all the fine wash- ing of the best houses in the town, in short, hung out along the lines of hair rope. The Chevalier used to say that he was kept informed of the progress of the receiver-general's wife's flirtations by the number of slips thus brought to light ; and the amount of frilled shirts and cambric cravats varied directly with the petticoats and collarettes. By this system of double entry, as it were, he detected all the assignations in the town; but the Chevalier was always discreet, he never let fall an epigram that might have closed a house to him. And yet he was a witty talker ! For which reason you may be sure that M. de Valois' manners were of the finest, while his talents, as so often happens, were thrown away upon a narrow circle. Still, for he was only human after all, he sometimes could not resist the pleasure of a searching side glance which made women tremble, and nevertheless they liked him when they found out how profoundly discreet he was, how full of sympathy for their pretty frailties.

Mme. Lardot's forewoman and factotum, an alarmingly ugly spinster of five-and-forty, occupied the rest of the second floor with the Chevalier. Her door on the landing was exactly opposite his; and her apartment, like his own, con- sisted of two rooms, looking respectively upon the street and vard. Above, there was nothing but the attics where linen was dried in winter. Below lodged Mme. Lardot's

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 13

grandfather. The old man, Grevin by name, had been a privateer in his time, and had served under Admiral Simeuse in the Indies; now he was paralyzed and stone deaf. Mme. Lardot herself occupied the rooms beneath her forewoman, and so great was her weakness for people of condition, that she might be said to be blind where the Chevalier was con- cerned. In her eyes, M. de Valois was an absolute monarch, a king that could do no wrong; even if one of her own work-girls had been said to be guilty of finding favor in his sight, she would have said, "He is so amiable !"

And so, if M. de Valois, like most people in the provinces, lived in a glass house, it was secret as a robber's cave so far as he at least was concerned. A born confidant of the little intrigues of the laundry, he never passed the door — which al- most always stood ajar — without bringing something for his pets — chocolate, bonbons, ribbons, laces, a gilt cross, and the jokes that grisettes love. Wherefore the little girls adored the Chevalier. Women can tell by instinct whether a man is attracted to anything that wears a petticoat; they know at once the kind of man who enjoys the mere sense of their presence, who never thinks of making blundering demands of repayment for his gallantry. In this respect womankind has a canine faculty; a dog in any company goes straight to the man who respects animals. The Chevalier de Valois in his poverty preserved something of his former life; he was as unable to live without some fair one under his protection as any grand seigneur of a bygone age. He clung to the traditions of the petite maison. He loved to give to women, and women alone can receive gracefully, perhaps because it is always in their power to repay.

In these days, when every lad on leaving school tries his hand at unearthing symbols or sifting legends, is it not ex- traordinary that no one has explained that portent, the Courtesan of the Eighteenth Century ? What was she but the tournament of the Sixteenth in another shape? In 1550 the knights displayed their prowess for their ladies; in 1750 they displayed their mistresses at Longchamps; to-day they run

14 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

their horses over the course. The noble of every age has done his best to invent a life which he, and he only, can live. The painted shoes of the Fourteenth Century are the talons rouges of the Eighteenth; the parade of a mistress was one fashion in ostentation; the sentiment of chivalry and the knight errant was another.

The Chevalier de Valois could no longer ruin himself for a mistress, so for bonbons wrapped in bank-bills he politely offered a bag of genuine cracknels ; and to the credit of Alen- gon, be it said, the cracknels caused far more pleasure to the recipients than M. d'Artois' presents of carriages or silver- gilt toilet sets ever gave to the fair Duthe. There was not a girl in the laundry but recognized the Chevalier's fallen great- ness, and kept his familiarities in the house a profound secret.

In answer to questions, they always spoke gravely of the Chevalier de Valois; they watched over him. For others he became a venerable gentleman, his life was a flower of sanctity. But at home they would have lighted on his shoulders like paroquets.

The Chevalier liked to know the intimate aspects of family life which laundresses learn; they used to go up to his room of a morning to retail the gossip of the town ; he called them his "gazettes in petticoats," his "living feuilletons." M. Sartine himself had not such intelligent spies at so cheap a rate, nor yet so loyal in their rascality. Eemark, moreover, that the Chevalier thoroughly enjoyed his breakfasts.

Suzanne was one of his favorites. A clever and ambitious girl with the stuff of a Sophie Arnould in her, she was be- sides as beautiful as the loveliest courtesan that Titian ever prayed to pose against a background of dark velvet as a model .for his Venus. Her forehead and all the upper part of her face about the eyes were delicately moulded ; but the contours of the lower half were cast in a commoner mould. Hers was the beauty of a Normande, fresh, plump, and brilliant- complexioned, with that Rubens fleshiness which should be combined with the muscular development of a Farnese Her-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 15

cules : This was no Venus 6V Medici, the graceful feminine counterpart of Apollo.

"Well, child," said the Chevalier, "tell me your adventures little or big."

The Chevalier's fatherly benignity with these grisettes would have marked him out anywhere between Paris and Pekin. The girls put him in mind of the courtesans of an- other age, of the illustrious queens of opera of European fame during a good third of the eighteenth century. Certain it is that he who had lived for so long in a world of women now as dead and forgotten as the Jesuits, the buccaneers, the abbes, and the farmers-general, and all great things generally — certain it is that the Chevalier had acquired an irresistible good humor, a gracious ease, an unconcern, with no trace of egoism discernible in it. So might Jupiter have appeared to Alcmena — a king that chooses to be a woman's dupe, and flings majesty and its thunderbolts to the winds, that he may squander Olympus in follies, and "little suppers," and feminine extravagance; wishful, of all things, to be far enough away from Juno.

The room in which the Chevalier received company was bare enough, with its shabby bit of tapestry to do duty as a carpet, and very dirty, old-fashioned easy-chairs; the walls were covered with a cheap paper, on which the countenances of Louis XVI. and his family, framed in weeping willow, appear- ed at intervals among funeral urns, bearing the sublime testa- ment by way of inscription, amid a whole host of sentimental emblems invented by Royalism under the Terror ; but in spite of all this, in spite of the old flowered green silk dressing- gown, in spite of its owner's air of dilapidation, a certain fragrance of the eighteenth century clung about the Chevalier de Valois as he shaved himself before the old-fashioned toilet glass, covered with cheap lace. All the graceless graces of his youth seemed to reappear ; he might have had three hundred thousand francs' worth of debts to his name, and a chariot at his door. He looked a great man, great as Berthier in the Retreat from Moscow issuing the order of the day to bat- talions which were no more. vol. 7—24

16 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

"M. le Chevalier/' Suzanna replied archly, "it seems to me that I have nothing to tell you— you have only to look !"

So saying, she turned and stood sidewise to prove her words by ocular demonstrations; and the Chevalier, deep old gentle- man, still holding his razor across his chin, cast his right eye downwards upon the damsel, and pretended to understand.

"Very good, my little pet, we will have a little talk to- gether presently. But you come first, it seems, to me."

"But, M. le Chevalier, am I to wait till my mother beats me and Mme. Lardot turns me away ? If I do not go to Paris at once, I shall never get married here, where the men are so ridiculous."

"These things cannot be helped, child ! Society changes, and women suffer just as much as the nobles from the shock- ing confusion which ensues. Topsy-turvydom in politics ends in topsy-turvy manners. Alas ! woman soon will cease to be woman" (here he took the cotton wool out of his ears to continue his toilet). "Women will lose a great deal by plunging into sentiment ; they will torture their nerves, and there will be an end of the good old ways of our time, when a little pleasure was desired without blushes, and accepted without more ado, and the vapors" (he polished the earrings with the negroes' heads) — "the vapors were only known as a means of getting one's way ; before long they will take the proportions of a complaint only to be cured by an infusion of orange-blossoms." (The Chevalier burst out laughing.) "Marriage, in short," he resumed, taking a pair of tweezers to pluck out a gray hair, "marriage will come to be a very dull institution indeed, and it was so joyous in my time. The reign of Louis Quatorze and Louis Quinze, bear this in mind, my child, saw the last of the finest manners in the .world."

"But, M. le Chevalier," urged the girl, "it is your little Suzanne's character and reputation that is at stake, and you are not going to forsake her, I hope !"

"What is all this?" cried the Chevalier, with a finishing touch to his hair; "I would sooner lose my name!"

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 17

"Ah!" said Suzanne.

"Listen to me, little masquerader." He sat down in a large, low chair, a duchess, as it used to be called, which Mme. Lar- dot had picked up somewhere for her lodger. Then he drew the magnificent Suzanne to him till she stood between his knees; and Suzanne submitted — Suzanne who held her head so high in the streets, and had refused a score of overtures from admirers in Alengon, not so much from self-respect as in disdain of their pettiness. Suzanne so brazenly made the most of the supposed consequences of her errors, that the old sinner, who had fathomed so many mysteries in persons far more astute than Suzanne, saw the real state of affairs at once. He knew well enough that a grisette does not laugh when disgrace is really in question, but he scorned to throw down the scaffolding of an engaging fib with a touch.

"We are slandering ourselves," said he, and there was an inimitable subtlety in his smile. "We are as well conducted as the fair one whose name we bear; we can marry without fear. But we do not want to vegetate here; we long for Paris, where charming creatures can be rich if they are clever, and we are not a fool. So we should like to find out whether the City of Pleasure has young Chevaliers de Valois in store for us, and a carriage and diamonds and an opera box. There are Russians and English and Austrians that are bringing millions to spend in Paris, and some of that money mamma settled on us as a marriage portion when she gave us our good looks. And besides, we are patriotic ; we should like to help France to find her own money in these gentlemen's pockets. Eh ! eh ! my dear little devil's lamb, all this is not bad. The neighbors will cry out upon you a little at first perhaps, but success will make everything right. The real crime, my child, is poverty ; and you and I both suffer for it. As we are not lacking in intelligence, we thought we might turn our dear little reputation to account to take in an old bachelor, but the old bachelor, sweetheart, knows the alpha and omega of woman's wiles ; which is to say, that you would find it easier to put a grain of salt upon a sparrow's

18 THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN

tail than to persuade me to believe that I have had any share in your affair.

"Go to Paris, my child, go at the expense of a bachelor's vanity; I am not going to hinder you, I will help you, for the old bachelor, Suzanne, is the cash-box provided by nature for a young girl. But do not thrust me into the affair. Now, listen, my queen, understanding life so well as you do — you see, you might do me a good deal of harm and give me trouble; harm, because you might spoil my marriage in a place where people are so particular ; trouble on your account, because you will get yourself in a scrape for nothing, a scrape entirely of your own invention, sly girl; and you know, my pet, that I have no money left, I am as poor as a church mouse. Ah ! if I were to marry Mile. Cormon, if I were rich again, I would certainly rather have you than Cesarine. You were always fine gold enough to gild lead, it seemed to me; you were made to be a great lord's love; and as I knew you were a clever girl, I am not at all surprised by this trick of yours, I expected as much. For a girl, this means that you burn your boats. It is no common mind, my angel, that can do it; and for that reason you have my esteem," and he be- stowed confirmation upon her cheek after the manner of a bishop, with two fingers.

"But, M. le Chevalier, I do assure you that you are mis- taken, and " she blushed, and dared not finish her sen- tence, at a glance he had seen through her, and read her plans from beginning to end.

"Yes, I understand, you wish me to believe you. Very well, I believe. But take my advice and go to M. du Bousquier. You have taken M. du Bousquier's linen home from the wash for five or six months, have you not? — Very good. I do not ask to know what has happened between you ; but I know him, he is vain, he is an old bachelor, he is very rich, he has an income of two thousand five hundred lime, and spends less than eight hundred. If you are the clever girl that I take you for, you will find your way to Paris at his expense. Go to him, my pet, twist him round your

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 19

fingers, and of all things, be supple as silk, and make a double twist and a knot at every word; he is just the man to be afraid of a scandal ; and if he knows that you can make him sit on the stool of repentance In short, you under- stand, threaten to apply to the ladies of the charitable fund. He is ambitious besides. Well and good, with a wife to help him there should be nothing beyond a man's reach; and are you not handsome enough and clever enough to make your husband's fortune? Why, plague take it, you might hold your own with a court lady."

The Chevalier's last words let the light into Suzanne's brain; she was burning with impatience to rush off to du Bousquier ; but as she could not hurry away too abruptly, she helped the Chevalier to dress, asking questions about Paris as she did so. As for the Chevalier, he saw that his remarks had taken effect, and gave Suzanne an excuse to go, asking her to tell Cesarine to bring up the chocolate that Mme. Lar- dot made for him every morning, and Suzanne forthwith slipped off in search of her prey.

And here follows du Bousquier's biography. — He came of an old Alengon family in a middle rank between the burghers and the country squires. On the death of his father, a magistrate in the criminal court, he was left without resource, and, like most ruined provincials, betook himself to Paris to seek his fortune. When the Revolution broke out, du Bousquier was a man of affairs; and in those days (in spite of the Republicans, who are all up in arms for the honesty of their government, the word "affairs" was used very loosely. Political spies, jobbers, and contractors, the men who ar- ranged with the syndics of communes for the sale of the property of emigres, and then bought up land at low prices to sell again, — all these folk, like ministers and generals, were men of affairs.

From 1793 to 1799 du Bousquier held contracts to supply the army with forage and provisions. During those years he lived in a splendid mansion; he was one of the great capitalists of the time; he went shares with Ouvrard; kepi

20 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

open house and led the scandalous life of the times. A Cincinnatus, reaping where he had not sowed, and rich with stolen rations and sacks of corn, he kept petites maisons and a bevy of mistresses, and gave fine entertainments to the directors of the Kepublic. Citizen du Bousquier was one of Barms' intimates ; he was on the best of terms with Fouche, an<l hand and glove with Bernadotte. He thought to be a Minister of State one day, and threw himself heart and soul into the party that secretly plotted against Bonaparte before the battle of Marengo. And but for Kellermann's charge and the death of Desaix, du Bousquier would have played a great part in the state. He was one of the upper members of the permanent staff of the promiscuous government which was driven by Napoleon's luck to vanish into the side-scenes of 1793.*

The victory unexpectedly won by stubborn fighting ended in the downfall of this party; they had placards ready printed, and were only waiting for the First Consul's defeat to proclaim a return to the principles of the Mountain.

Du Bousquier, feeling convinced that a victory was im- possible, had two special messengers on the battlefield, and speculated with the larger part of his fortune for a fall in the funds. The first courier came with the news that Melas was victorious; but the second arriving four hours afterwards, at night, brought the tidings of the Austrian defeat. Du Bousquier cursed Kellermann and Desaix; the First Consul owed him millions, he dared not curse him. But between the chance of making millions on the one hand, and stark ruin on the other, he lost his head. For several days he was half idiotic; he had undermined his constitution with excesses to such an extent that the thunderbolt left him helpless. He had something to hope from the settlement of his claims upon the Government ; but in spite of bribes, he was made to feel the weight of Napoleon's displeasure against army con- tractors who speculated on his defeat. M. de Fermon, so pleasantly nicknamed "Fermons la caisse" left du Bousquier

* See U)ie T&tiibrense Affaire.

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 2i

without a penny. The First Consul was even more incensed by the immorality of his private life and his connection with Barras and Bernadotte than by his speculations on the Bourse; he erased M. du Bousquier's name from the list of Receivers-general, on which a last remnant of credit had placed him for Alencon.

Of all his former wealth, nothing now remained to du Bousquier save an income of twelve hundred francs from the funds, an investment entirely due to chance, which saved him from actual want. His creditors, knowing nothing of the re- sults of his liquidation, only left him enough in consols to bring in a thousand francs per annum ; but their claims were paid in full after all, when the outstanding debts had been col- lected, and the Hotel de Beauseant, du Bousquier's town house, sold besides. So, after a close shave of bankruptcy, the sometime speculator emerged with his name intact. Preceded by a tremendous reputation due to his relations with former heads of government departments, his manner of life, his brief day of authority, and final ruin through the First Consul, the man interested the city of Alengon, where Koyalism was secretly predominant. Du Bousquier, exasperated against Bonaparte, with his tales of the First Consul's pettiness, of Josephine's lax morals, and a whole store of anecdotes of ten years of Eevolution, seen from within, met with a good re- ception.

It was about this period of his life that du Bousquier, now well over his fortieth year, came out as a bachelor of thirty- six. He was of medium height, fat as became a contractor, and willing to display a pair of calves that would have done credit to a gay and gallant attorney. He had strongly marked features; a flattened nose with tufts of hair in the equine nostrils, bushy black brows, and eyes beneath them that looked out shrewd as M. de Talleyrand's own, though they had lost something of their brightness. He wore his brown hair very long, and retained the side-whiskers {nageoires, as they were called) of the time of the Republic. You had only to look at his fingers, tufted at every joint, or at

a 11-

re

22 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

the blue knotted veins that stood out upon his hands, to see the unmistakable signs of a very remarkable muscular de- velopment; and, in truth, he had the chest of the Farnese Hercules, and shoulders fit to bear the burden of the national debt; you never see such shoulders nowadays. His was a luxuriant virility admirably described by an eighteenth cen- tury phrase which is scarcely intelligible to-day; the gal- lantry of a bygone age would have summed up du Bousqui as a "payer of arrears" — un vrai payeur d'arrerages.

Yet, as in the case of the Chevalier de Yalois, there were sundry indications at variance with the ex-contractor's general appearance. His vocal powers, for instance, were not in keeping with his muscles ; not that it was the mere thread of a voice which sometimes issues from the throats of such two- footed seals; on the contrary, it was loud but husky, some- thing like the sound of a saw cutting through damp, soft wood; it was, in fact, the voice of a speculator brought to grief. For a long while du Bousquier wore the costume in vogue in the days of his glory: the boots with turned-down tops, the while silk stockings, the short cloth breeches, ribbed with cinnamon color, the blue coat, the waistcoat a la Robespierre.

His hatred of the First Consul should have been a sort of passport into the best Royalist houses of Alengon ; but the seven or eight families that made up the local Faubourg Saint-Germain into which the Chevalier de Valois had the entrance, held aloof. Almost from the first, du Bousquier had aspired to marry one Mile. Armande, whose brother was one of the most esteemed nobles of the town; he thought to make this brother play a great part in his own schemes, for he was dreaming of a brilliant return match in politics. He met with a refusal, for which he consoled himself with such compensation as he might find among some half-score of retired manufacturers of Point a" Alengon, owners of grass lands or cattle, or wholesale linen merchants, thinking that among these chance might put a good match in his way. Indeed, the old bachelor had centered all his hopes on a pros-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 23

pective fortunate marriage, which a man, eligible in so many- ways, might fairly expect to make. For he was not without a certain financial acumen, of which not a few availed them- selves. He pointed out business speculations as a ruined gambler gives hints to new hands ; and he was expert at dis- covering the resources, chances, and management of a con- cern. People looked upon him as a good administrator. It was an often-discussed question whether he should not be mayor of Alencon, but the recollection of his Republican jobberies spoiled his chances, and he was never received at the prefecture.

Every successive government, even the government of the Hundred Days, declined to give him the coveted appoint- ment, which would have assured his marriage with an elderly spinster whom he now had in his mind. It was his detestation of the Imperial Government that drove him into the Royalist camp, where he stayed in spite of insults there received; but when the Bourbons returned, and still he was excluded from the prefecture, that final rebuff filled him with a hatred deep as the profound secrecy in which he wrapped it. Outwardly, he remained patiently faithful to his opinions; secretly, he became the leader of the Liberal party in Alencon, the in- visible controller of elections; and, by his cunningly devised manoeuvres and underhand methods, he worked no little harm to the restored Monarchy.

When a man is reduced to live through his intellect alone, his hatred is something as quiet as a little stream; in- significant to all appearance, but unfailing. This was the case with du Bousquier. His hatred was like a negro's, so placid, so patient, that it deceives the enemy. For fifteen years he brooded over a revenge which no victory, not even the Three Days of July 1830, could sate.

When the Chevalier sent Suzanne to du Bousquier, he had his own reasons for so doing. The Liberal and the Royalist divined each other, in spite of the skilful dissimulation which hid their common aim from the rest of the town.

The two old bachelors were rivals. Both of them had

t I THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

planned to marry the Demoiselle Cormon, whose name came up in the course of the Chevalier's conversation with Suzanne. Both of them, engrossed by their idea, and masquerading in indifference, were waiting for the moment when some chance should deliver the old maid to one or other of them. And the fact that they were rivals in this way would have been enough to make enemies of the pair even if each had not been the living embodiment of a political system.

Men take their color from their time. This pair of rivals is a case in point ; the historic tinge of their characters stood out in strong contrast in their talk, their ideas, their costume. The one, blunt and energetic, with his burly abrupt ways, curt speech, dark looks, dark hair, and dark complexion, alarming in appearance, but impotent in reality as insurrection, was the Republic personified; the other, bland and polished, elegant and fastidious, gaining his ends slowly but surely by diplomacy, and never unmindful of good taste, was the typical old-world courtier. They met on the same ground almost every evening. It was a rivalry always courteous and urbane on the part of the Chevalier, less ceremonious on du Bous- quier's, though he kept within the limits prescribed by Alen- gon, for he had no wish to be driven ignominiously from the field. The two men understood each other well ; but no one else saw what was going on. In spite of the minute and curious interest which provincials take in the small details of which their lives are made up, no one so much as suspected that the two men were rivals.

M. le Chevalier's position was somewhat the stronger; he had never proposed for Mile. Cormon, whereas du Bousquier had declared himself after a rebuff from one of the noblest families, and had met with a second refusal. Still, the Chevalier thought so well of his rival's chances, that he con- sidered it worth while to deal him a coup de Jarnac, a treacherous thrust from a weapon as finely tempered as Suzanne. He had fathomed du Bousquier; and, as will shortly be seen, he was not mistaken in any of his con- jectures.

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 25

Suzanne tripped away down the Rue du Cours, along thb Rue de la Porte de Seez and the Rue du Bercail to the Rue du Cygne, where du Bousquier, five years ago, had bought a small countrified house built of the gray stone of the dis- trict, which is used like granite in Normandy, or Breton schist in the West. The sometime forage-contractor had established himself there in more comfort than any other house in the town could boast, for he had brought with him some relics of past days of splendor ; but provincial manners and customs were slowly darkening the glory of the fallen Sardanapalus. The vestiges of past luxury looked about as much out of place in the house as a chandelier in a barn. Harmony, which links the works of man or of God together, was lacking in all things large or small. A ewer with a metal lid, such as you only see on the outskirts of Brittany, stood on a handsome chest of drawers; and while the bedroom floor was covered with a fine carpet, the window-curtains displayed a flower pattern only known to cheap printed cottons. The stone mantelpiece, daubed over with paint, was out of all keeping with a handsome clock disgraced by a shabby pair of candle- sticks. Local talent had made an unsuccessful attempt to paint the doors in vivid contrasts of startling colors; while the staircase, ascended by all and sundry in muddy boots, had not been painted at all. In short, du Bousquier's house, like the time which he represented, was a confused mixture of grandeur and squalor.

Du Bousquier was regarded as well-to-do, but he led the parasitical life of the Chevalier de Valois, and he is always rich enough that spends less than his income. His one serv- ant was a country bumpkin, a dull-witted youth enough ; but he had been trained, by slow degrees, to suit du Bousquier's requirements, until he had learned, much as an ourang-outang might learn, to scour floors, black boots, brush clothes, and to come for his master of anevening with a lantern if it was dark, and a pair of sabots if it rained. On great occasions, du Bousquier made him discard the blue-checked cotton blouse with loose sagging pockets behind, which always bulged with

20 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

a handkerchief, a clasp knife, apples, or "stickjaw." Ar- rayed in a regulation suit of clothes, he accompanied his master to wait at table, and over-ate himself afterwards with the other servants. Like many other mortals, Bene had only stuff enough in him for one vice, and his was gluttony. Du Bousquier made a reward of this service, and in return his Breton factotum was absolutely discreet.

"What, have you come our way, miss?" Eene asked when he saw Suzanne in the doorway. "It is not your day ; we have not got any linen for Mme. Lardot."

"Big stupid!" laughed the fair Suzanne, as she went up the stairs, leaving Eene to finish a porringer full of buck- wheat bannocks boiled in milk.

Du Bousquier was still in bed, ruminating his plans for fortune. To him, as to all who have squeezed the orange of pleasure, there was nothing left but ambition. Ambition, like gambling, is inexhaustible. And, moreover, given a good constitution, the passions of the brain will always outlive the heart's passions.

"Here I am !" said Suzanne, sitting down on the bed ; the curtain-rings grated along the rods as she swept them sharply back with an imperious gesture.

"Quesaco, my charmer?" asked du Bousquier, sitting up- right.

"Monsieur," Suzanne began, with much gravity, "you must be surprised to see me come in this way; but, under the cir- cumstances, it is no use my minding what people will say."

"What is all this about?" asked du Bousquier, folding his arms.

"Why, do you not understand?" returned Suzanne. "I know" (with an engaging little pout), "I know how ridiculous it is when a poor girl comes to bother a man about things that you think mere trifles. But if you really knew me, monsieur, if you only knew all that I would do for a man, if he cared about me as I could care about you, you would never repent of marrying me. It is not that I could be of so much use to you here, by the way ; but if we went to Paris, you should see

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 27

how far I could bring a man of spirit with such brains as yours, and especially just now, when they are re-making the Government from top to bottom, and the foreigners are the masters. Between ourselves, does this thing in question really matter after all ? Is it not a piece of good fortune for which you would be glad to pay a good deal one of these days? For whom are you going to think and work ?"

"For myself, to be sure !" du Bousquier answered brutally.

"Old monster ! you shall never be a father !" said Suzanne, with a ring in her voice which turned the words to a prophecy and a curse.

"Come, Suzanne, no nonsense; I am dreaming still, I think."

"What more do you want in the way of reality?" cried Suzanne, rising to her feet. Du Bousquier scrubbed his head with his cotton nightcap, which he twisted round and round with a fidgety energy that told plainly of prodigious mental ferment.

"He actually believes it!" Suzanne said within herself. "And his vanity is tickled. Good Lord, how easy it is to take them in!"

"Suzanne ! What the deuce do you want me to do ? It

is so extraordinary ... I that thought The fact

is. . . . But no, no, it can't be "

"Do you mean that you cannot marry me ?"

"Oh, as to that, no. I am not free."

"Is it Mile. Armande or Mile. Cormon, who have both refused you already ? Look here, M. du Bousquier, it is not as if I was obliged to get gendarmes to drag you to the registrar's office to save my character. There are plenty that would marry me, but I have no intention whatever of taking a man that does not know my value. You may be sorry some of these days that you behaved like this; for if you will not take your chance to-day, not for gold, nor silver, nor any- thing in this world will I give it you again."

"But, Suzanne — are you sure ?"

"Sir, for what do you take me?" asked the girl, draping

28 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

herself in her virtue. "I am not going to put you in mind of the promises you made, promises that have been the ruin of a poor girl, when all her fault was that she looked too high and loved too much."

But joy, suspicion, self-interest, and a host of contending emotions had taken possession of du Bousquier. For a long time past he had made up his mind that he would marry Mile. Cormon; for after long ruminations over the Charter, he saw that it opened up magnificent prospects to his ambition through the channels of a representative government. His marriage with that mature spinster would raise his social position very much; he would acquire great influence in Alengon. And here this wily Suzanne had conjured up a storm, which put him in a most awkward dilemma. But for that private hope of his, he would have married Suzanne out of hand, and put himself openly at the head of the Liberal party in the town. Such a marriage meant the final re- nunciation of the best society, and a drop into the ranks of the wealthy tradesmen, shopkeepers, rich manufacturers, and graziers who, beyond a doubt, would carry him as their can- didate in triumph. Already du Bousquier caught a glimpse of the Opposition benches. He did not attempt to hide his solemn deliberations ; he rubbed his hand over his head, made a wisp of the cotton nightcap, and a damaging confession of the nudity beneath it. As for Suzanne, after the wont of those who succeed beyond their utmost hopes, she sat dum- founded. To hide her amazement at his behavior, she drooped like a hapless victim before her seducer, while within herself she laughed like a grisette on a frolic.

"My dear child, I will have nothing to do with hanky- panky of this sort/'

This brief formula was the result of his cogitations. The ex-contractor to the Government prided himself upon belong- ing to that particular school of cynic philosophers which declines to be "taken in" by women, and includes the whole sex in one category as suspicious characters. Strong-minded. men of this stamp, weaklings are they for the most part, have

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 29

a catechism of their own in the matter of womankind. Every woman, according to them, from the Queen of France to the milliner, is at heart a rake, a hussy, a dangerous creature, not to say a bit of a rascal, a liar in grain, a being incapable of a serious thought. For du Bousquier and his like, woman is a maleficent bayadere that must be left to dance, and sing, and laugh. They see nothing holy, nothing great in woman ; for them she represents, not the poetry of the senses, but gross sensuality. They are like gluttons who should mistake the kitchen for the dining-room. On this showing, a man must be a consistent tyrant, unless he means to be enslaved. And in this respect, again, du Bousquier and the Chevalier de Valois stood at opposite poles.

As he delivered himself of the above remark, he flung his nightcap to the foot of the bed, much as Gregory the Great might have flung down the candle while he launched the thunders of an excommunication; and Suzanne learned that the old bachelor wore a false front.

"Bear in mind, M. du Bousquier, that by coming here I have done my duty," she remarked majestically. "Remember that I was bound to offer you my hand and to ask for yours ; but, at the same time, remember that I have behaved with the dignity of a self-respecting woman; I did not lower myself so far as to cry like a fool ; I did not insist ; I have not worried you at all. Now you know my position. You know that I cannot stay in Alengon. If I do, my mother will beat me; and Mme. Lardot is as high and mighty over principles as if she washed and ironed with them. She will turn me away. And where am I to go, poor work-girl that I am? To the hospital ? Am I to beg for bread ? Not I. I would sooner fling myself into the Brillante or the Sarthe. Now, would it not be simpler for me to go to Paris? Mother might find some excuse for sending me, an uncle wants me to come, or an aunt is going to die, or some lady takes an interest in me. It is just a question of money for the traveling expenses and — you know what "

This news was immeasurably more important to du Bous-

30 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

quier than to the Chevalier de Valois, for reasons which no one knew as yet but the two rivals, though they will appear in the course of the story. At this point, suffice it to say that Suzanne's fib had thrown the sometime forage-contractor's ideas into such confusion that he was incapable of thinking seriously. But for that bewilderment, but for the secret joy in his heart (for a man's own vanity is a swindler that never lacks a dupe), it must have struck him that any honest girl, with a heart still unspoiled, would have died a hundred deaths rather than enter upon such a discussion, or make a demand for money. He must have seen the look in the girl's eyes, seen the gambler's ruthless meanness that would take a life to gain money for a stake.

"Would you really go to Paris?" he asked.

The words brought a twinkle to Suzanne's gray eyes, but it was lost upon du Bousquier's self-satisfaction.

"I would indeed, sir/'

But at this du Bousquier broke out into a singular lament. He had just paid the balance of the purchase-money for his house; and there was the painter, and the glazier, and the bricklayer, and the carpenter. Suzanne let him talk; she was waiting for the figures. Du Bousquier at last proposed three hundred francs, and at this Suzanne got up as if to go-

"Eh, what! Where are you going?" du Bousquier cried uneasily. — "A fine thing to be a bachelor," he said to himself. "I'll be hanged if I remember doing more than rumple the girl's collar ; and hey presto ! on the strength of a joke she takes upon herself to draw a bill upon you, point-blank !"

Suzanne meanwhile began to cry. "Monsieur," she said, "I am going to Mme. Granson, the treasurer of the Maternity Fund; she pulled one poor girl in the same straits out of the water (as you may say) to my knowledge."

"Mme. Granson?"

"Yes. She is related to Mile. Cormon, the lady patroness of the society. Asking your pardon, some ladies in the town have started a society that will keep many a poor creature

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 31

from making away with her child, like that pretty Faustine of Argentan did; and paid for it with her life at Mortagne just three years ago."

"Here, Suzanne/' returned du Bousquier, holding out a key, "open the desk yourself. There is a bag that has been opened, with six hundred francs still left in it. It is all I have."

Du Bousquier's chopfallen expression plainly showed how little goodwill went with his compliance.

"An old thief!" said Suzanne to herself. "I will tell tales about his false hair !" Mentally she compared him with that delightful old Chevalier de Valois; he had given her nothing, but he understood her, he had advised her, he had the welfare of his grisettes at heart.

"If you are deceiving me, Suzanne," exclaimed the object of this unflattering comparison, as he watched her hand in the drawer, "you shall "

"So, monsieur, you would not give me the money if I asked you for it?" interrupted she with queenly insolence.

Once recalled to the ground of gallantry, recollections of his prime came back to the ex-contractor. He grunted as- sent. Suzanne took the bag and departed, first submitting her forehead to a kiss which he gave, but in a manner which seemed to say, "This is an expensive privilege; but it is better than being brow-beaten by counsel in a court of law as the seducer of a young woman accused of child murder."

Suzanne slipped the bag into a pouch-shaped basket on her

arm, execrating du Bousquier's stinginess as she did so, for

she wanted a thousand francs. If a girl is once possessed

by a desire, and has taken the first step in trickery and deceit,

she will go to great lengths. As the fair clear-starcher took

her way along the Eue du Bercail, it suddenly occurred to

her that the Maternity Fund under Mile. Cormon's presidency

would probably make up the sum which she regarded as

sufficient for a start, a very large amount in the eyes of an

Alencon grisette. And besides, she hated du Bousquier, and

du Bousquier seemed frightened when she talked of confess- vol. 7—25

32 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

ing her so-called strait to Mme. Granson. Wherefore Suzanne determined that whether or no she made a farthing out of the Maternity Fund, she would entangle du Bousquier in the inextricable undergrowth of the gossip of a country town. There is something of a monkey's love of mischief in every grisette. Suzanne composed her countenance dolorously and betook herself accordingly to Mme. Granson.

Mme. Granson was the widow of a lieutenant-colonel of artillery who fell at Jena. Her whole yearly income con- sisted of a pension of nine hundred francs for her lifetime, and her one possession besides was a son whose education and maintenance had absorbed every penny of her savings. She lived in the Eue du Bercail, in one of the cheerless ground- floor apartments through which you can see from back to front at a glance as you walk down the main street of any little town. Three steps, rising pyramid fashion, brought you to the level of the house door, which opened upon a passage-way and a little yard beyond, with a wooden-roofed staircase at the further end. Mme. Granson's kitchen and dining-room occupied the space on one side of the passage, on the other side a single room did duty for a variety of purposes, for the widow's bedroom among others. Her son, a young man of three-and-twenty, slept upstairs in an attic above the first floor. Athanase Granson contributed six hundred francs to the poor mother's housekeeping. He was distantly related to Mile. Cormon, whose influence had obtained him a little post in the registrar's office, where he was employed in making out certificates of births, marriages, and deaths.

After this, any one can see the little chilly yellow-curtained parlor, the furniture covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, and Mme. Granson going round the room, after her visitors had left, to straighten the little straw mats put down in front of each chair, so as to save the waxed and polished red brick floor from contact with dirty boots; and, this being accom- plished, returning to her place beside her work-table under the portrait of her lieutenant-general. The becushioned armchair, in which she sat at her sewing, was always drawn

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 3.°,

up between the two windows, so that she could look up and down the Eue du Bercail and see every one that passed. She was a good sort of woman, dressed with a homely simplicity in keeping with a pale face, beaten thin, as it were, by many cares. You felt the stern soberness of poverty in every little detail in that house, just as you breathed a moral atmosphere of austerity and upright provincial ways.

Mother and son at this moment were sitting together in the dining-room over their breakfast — a cup of coffee, bread and butter and radishes. And here, if the reader is to under- stand how gladly Mme. Granson heard Suzanne, some ex- planation of the secret hopes of the household must be given.

Athanase Granson was a thin, hollow-cheeked young man of medium height, with a white face in which a pair of dark eyes, bright with thought, looked like two marks made with charcoal. The somewhat worn contours of that face, the curving line of the lips, a sharply turned-up chin, a regu- larly cut marble forehead, a melancholy expression caused by the consciousness of power on the one hand and of poverty on the other, — all these signs and characteristics told of im- prisoned genius. So much so indeed, that anywhere but at Alen^on his face would have won help for him from dis- tinguished men, or from the women that can discern genius incognito. For if this was not genius, at least it was the out- ward form that genius takes; and if the strength of a high heart was wanting, it looked out surely from those eyes. And yet, while Athanase could find expression for the loftiest feel- ing, an outer husk of shyness spoiled everything in him, down to the very charm of youth, just as the frost of penury dis- heartened every effort. Shut in by the narrow circle of pro- vincial life, without approbation, encouragement, or any way of escape, the thought within him was dying out before its dawn. And Athanase besides had the fierce pride which pov- erty intensifies in certain natures, the kind of pride by which a man grows great in the stress of battle with men and cir- cumstances, while at the outset it only handicaps him.

Genius manifests itself in two ways — either by taking its

84 TUB JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

own as soon as he finds it, like a Napoleon or a Moliere, or by patiently revealing itself and waiting for recognition. Young Granson belonged to the latter class. He was easily discouraged, ignorant of his value. His turn of mind was contemplative, he lived in thought rather than in action, and possibly, to those who cannot imagine genius without the Frenchman's spark of enthusiasm, he might have seemed in- complete. But Athanase's power lay in the world of thought. He was to pass through successive phases of emotion, hidden from ordinary eyes, to one of those sudden resolves which bring the chapter to a close and set fools declaring that "the man is mad." The world's contempt for poverty was sapping the life in Athanase. The bow, continually strung tighter and tighter, was slackened by the enervating close air of a solitude with never a breath of fresh air in it. He was giving way under the strain of a cruel and fruit- less struggle. Athanase had that in him which might have placed his name among the foremost names of France ; he had known what it was to gaze with glowing eyes over Alpine heights and fields of air whither unfettered genius soars, and now he was pining to death like some caged and starved eagle.

While he had worked on unnoticed in the town library, he buried his dreams of fame in his own soul lest they should in- jure his prospects ; and he carried besides another secret hid- den even more deeply in his heart, the secret love which hol- lowed his cheeks and sallowed his forehead.

Athanase loved his distant cousin, that Mile. Cormon, for whom his unconscious rivals du Bousquier and the Chevalier de Valois were lying in ambush. It was a love born of self- interest. Mile. Cormon was supposed to be one of the richest people in the town ; and he, poor boy, had been drawn to love her partly through the desire for material welfare, partly through a wish formed times without number to gild his mother's declining years ; and partly also through cravings for the physical comfort necessary to men who live an intellectual life. in his own eyes, his Jove was dishonored by its very

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 35

natural origin ; and he was afraid of the ridicule which people pour on the love of a young man of three-and-twenty for a wo- man of forty. And yet his love was quite sincere. Much that happens in the provinces would be improbable upon the face of it anywhere else, especially in matters of this kind.

But in a country town there are no unforeseen con- tingencies ; there is no coming and going, no mystery, no such thing as chance. Marriage is a necessity, and no family will ac- cept a man of dissolute life. A connection between a young fel- low like Athanase and a handsome girl might seem a natural thing enough in a great city; in a country town it would be enough to ruin a young man's chances of marriage, especially if he were poor; for when the prospective bridegroom is wealthy an awkward business of this sort may be smoothed over. Between the degradation of certain courses and a sincere love, a man that is not heartless can make but one choice if he happens to be poor; he will prefer the disad- vantages of virtue to the disadvantages of vice. But in a country town the number of women with whom a young map can fall in love is strictly limited. A pretty girl with a fortune is beyond his reach in a place where every one's income is known to a farthing. A penniless beauty is equally out of the question. To take her for a wife would be "to marry hunger and thirst," as the provincial saying goes. Finally, celibacy has its dangers in youth. These reflections explain how it has come to pass that marriage is the very basis of provincial life.

Men in whom genius is hot and unquenchable, who are forced to take their stand on the independence of poverty, ought to leave these cold regions; in the provinces thought meets with the persecution of brutal indifference, and no woman cares or dares to play the part of a sister of charity to the worker, the lover of art or sciences.

Who can rightly understand Athanase's love for Mile. Cor- mon ? Not the rich, the sultans of society, who can find seragl- ios at their pleasure; not respectability, keeping to the track beaten hard by prejudice; nor yet those women who shut

80 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

their eye9 to the cravings of the artist temperament, and, tak- ing it for granted that both sexes are governed by the same laws, insist upon a system of reciprocity in their particular virtues. The appeal must, perhaps, be made to young men who suffer from the repression of young desires just as they are putting forth their full strength; to the artist whose genius is stilled within him by poverty till it becomes a dis- ease ; to power at first unsupported, persecuted, and too often unfriended till it emerges at length triumphant from the twofold agony of soul and body.

These will know the throbbing pangs of the cancer which was gnawing Athanase. Such as these have raised long, cruel debates within themselves, with the so high end in sight and no means of attaining to it. They have passed through the experience of abortive effort; they have left the spawn of genius on the barren sands. They know that the strength of desire is as the scope of the imagination ; the higher the leap, the lower the fall ; and how many restraints are broken in such falls! These, like Athanase, catch glimpses of a glorious future in the distance; all that lies between seems but a transparent film of gauze to their piercing sight ; but of that film which scarcely obscures the vision, society makes a wall of brass. Urged on by their vocation, by the artists instinct within them, they too seek times without number to make a stepping-stone of sentiments which society turns in the same way to practical ends. What! when marriages in the prov- inces are calculated and arranged on every side with a view to securing material welfare, shall it be forbidden to a strug- gling artist or man of science to keep two ends in view, to try to ensure his own subsistence that the thought within him may live ?

Athanase Granson, with such ideas as these fermenting in his head, thought at first of marriage with Mile. Cormon as a definite solution of the problem of existence. He would be free to work for fame, he could make his mother comfortable, and he felt sure of himself — he knew that he could be faith- ful to Mile. Cormon. But soon his purpose bred a real passion

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 3^

in him. It was an unconscious process. He set himself to study Mile. Cormon ; then familiarity exercised its spell, and at length Athanase saw nothing but beauties — the defects were all forgotten.

The senses count for so much in the love of a young man of three-and-twenty. Through the heat of desire woman is seen as through a prism. From this point of view it was a touch of genius in Beaumarchais to make the page Cherubino in the play strain Marcellina to his heart. If you recollect, more- over, that poverty restricted Athanase to a life of great loneli- ness, that there was no other woman to look at, that his eyes were always fastened upon Mile. Cormon, and that all the light in the picture was concentrated upon her, it seems natural, does it not, that he should love her? The feeling hidden in the depths of his heart could but grow stronger day by day. Desire and pain and hope and meditation, in silence and repose, were filling up Athanase's soul to the brim ; every hour added its drop. As his senses came to the aid of imagination and widened the inner horizon, Mile. Cormon became more and more awe-inspiring, and he grew more and more timid.

The mother had guessed it all. She was a provincial, and she frankly calculated the advantages of the match. Mile. Cormon might think herself very lucky to marry a young man of twenty-three with plenty of brains, a likely man to do honor to his name and country. Still the obstacles, Atha- nase's poverty and Mile. Cormon's age, seemed to her to be in- surmountable ; there was nothing for it that she could see but patience. She had a policy of her own, like du Bousquier and the Chevalier de Valois ; she was on the lookout for her oppor- tunity, waiting, with wits sharpened by self-interest and a mother's love, for the propitious moment.

Of the Chevalier de Valois, Mme. Granson had no sus- picion whatsoever ; du Bousquier she still credited with views upon the lady, albeit Mile. Cormon had once refused him. An adroit and secret enemy, Mme. Granson did the ex-contractor untold harm to serve the son to whom she had not spoken a

38 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

word. After this, who does not see# the importance of Su zanne's lie once confided to Mme. Granson ? What a weapoi put into the hands of the charitable treasurer of the Maternit; Fund ! How demurely she would carry the tale from housi to house when she asked for subscriptions for the chasfc Suzanne !

At this particular moment Athanase was pensively sitting with his elbow on the table, balancing a spoon on the edge o the empty bowl before him. He looked with unseeing eye round the poor room, over the walls covered with an old fashioned paper only seen in wine-shops, at the window-cur tains with a chessboard pattern of pink-and-white squares, a the red-brick floor, the straw-bottomed chairs, the painte< wooden sideboard, the glass door that opened into the kitcher As he sat facing his mother and with his back to the fire, am as the fireplace was almost opposite the door, the first thin which caught Suzanne's eyes was his pale face, with the ligb from the street window falling full upon it, a face framed i dark hair, and eyes with the gleam of despair in them, and fever kindled by the morning's thoughts.

The grisette surely knows by instinct the pain and sorro1 of love ; at the sight of Athanase, she felt that sudden electri thrill which comes we know not whence. We cannot explai it ; some strong-minded persons deny that it exists, but man a woman and many a man has felt that shock of sympath; It is a flash, lighting up the darkness of the future, and at tri same time a presentiment of the pure joy of love shared I two souls, and a certainty that this other too understands, is more like the strong, sure touch of a master hand upon tl clavier of the senses than anything else. Eyes are riveted t an irresistible fascination, hearts are troubled, the music < joy rings in the ears and thrills the soul ; a voice cries, "It he !" And then — then very likely, reflection throws a doucl of cold water over all this turbulent emotion, and there is s end of it.

In a moment, swift as a clap of thunder, a broadside new thoughts poured in upon Suzanne. A lightning flash

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 39

love burned the weeds which had sprung up in dissipation and wantonness. She saw all that she was losing by blighting her name with a lie, the desecration, the degradation of it. Only last evening this idea had been a joke, now it was like a i heavy sentence passed upon her. She recoiled before her suc- cess. But, after all, it was quite impossible that anything ; should come of this meeting; and the thought of Athanase's i poverty, and a vague hope of making money and coming back ' from Paris with both hands full, to say, "I loved you all along" — or fate, if you will have it so — dried up the beneficent dew. The ambitious damsel asked shyly to speak for a moment with ' Mme. Granson, who took her into her bedroom.

When Suzanne came out again she looked once more at Athanase. He was still sitting in the same attitude. She choked back her tears.

As for Mme. Granson, she was radiant. She had found a

terrible weapon to use against du Bousquier at last ; she could

: deal him a deadly blow. So she promised the poor victim of

. seduction the support of all the ladies who subscribed to the

Maternity Fund. She foresaw a dozen calls in prospect. In

i the course of the morning and afternoon she would conjure

1 down a terrific storm upon the elderly bachelor's head. The

i Chevalier de Valois certainly foresaw the turn that matters

; were likely to take, but he had not expected anything like the

amount of scandal that came of it.

"We are going to dine with Mile. Cormon, you know, dear boy," said Mme. Granson ; "take rather more pains with your appearance. It is a mistake to neglect your dress as you do ; i you look so untidy. Put on your best frilled shirt and your green cloth coat. I have my reasons," she added, with a mysterious air. "And besides, there will be a great many people ; Mile. Cormon is going to the Prebaudet directly. If a young man is thinking of marrying, he ought to make him- self agreeable in every possible way. If girls would only tell the truth, my boy, dear me! you would be surprised at the things that take their fancy. It is often quite enough if a young man rides by at the head of a company of artillery, or

40 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

comes to a dance in a suit of clothes that fits him passably well. A certain way of carrying the head, a melancholy atti- tude, is enough to set a girl imagining a whole life ; we invent a romance to suit the hero; often he is only a stupid youn^ man, but the marriage is made. Take notice of M. de Valois, study him, copy his manners ; see how he looks at ease ; he has not a constrained manner, as you have. And talk a little; any one might think that you knew nothing at all, you that know Hebrew by heart."

Athanase heard her submissively, but he looked surprised. He rose, took his cap, and went back to his work.

"Can mother have guessed my secret?" he thought, as he went round by the Eue du Val-Noble where Mile. Cormon lived, a little pleasure in which he indulged of a morning. His head was swarming with romantic fancies.

"How little she thinks that going past her house at this moment is a young man who would love her dearly, and be true to her, and never cause her a single care, and leave her fortune entirely in her own hands ! Oh me ! what a strange fatality it is that we two should live as we do in the same town and within a few paces of each other, and yet nothing can bring us any nearer ! How if I spoke to her to-night ?"

Meanwhile Suzanne went home to her mother, thinking the while of poor Athanase, feeling that for him she could find it in her heart to do what many a woman must have longed to do for the one beloved with superhuman strength ; she could have made a stepping-stone of her beautiful body if so he might come to his kingdom the sooner.

And now we must enter the house where all the actors in this Scene (Suzanne excepted) were to meet that very even- ing, the house belonging to the old maid, the converging point of so many interests. As for Suzanne, that young woman with her well-grown beauty, with courage sufficient to burn her boats, like Alexander, and to begin the battle of lifej with an uncalled-for sacrifice of her character, she now dis- appears from the stage after bringing about a violently excit-

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 41

ing situation. Her wishes, moreover, were more than ful- filled. A few days afterwards she left her native place with a stock of money and fine clothes, including a superb green rep gown and a green bonnet lined with rose color, M. de Valois' gifts, which Suzanne liked better than anything else, better even than the Maternity Society's money. If the Chevalier had gone to Paris while Suzanne was in her hey-day, she would assuredly have left all for him,

And so this chaste Susanna, of whom the elders scarcely had more than a glimpse, settled herself comfortably and hopefully in Paris, while all Alengon was deploring the mis- fortunes with which the ladies of the Charitable and Mater- nity Societies had manifested so lively a sympathy.

While Suzanne might be taken as a type of the handsome Norman virgins who furnish, on the showing of a learned physician, one-third of the supply devoured by the monster, Paris, she entered herself, and remained in those higher branches of her profession in which some regard is paid to appearances. In an age in which, as M. de Valois said, "woman has ceased to be woman," she was known merely as Mme. du Val-Noble; in other times she would have rivaled an Imperia, a Rhodope, a Ninon. One of the most distin- guished writers of the Restoration took her under his protec- tion, and very likely will marry her some day ; he is a journal- ist, and above public opinion, seeing that he creates a new one every six years.

In almost every prefecture of the second magnitude there is some salon frequented not exactly by the cream of the local society, but by personages both considerable and well consid- ered. The host and hostess probably will be among the fore- most people in the town. To them all houses are open; no entertainment, no public dinner is given, but they are asked to it * but in their salon you will not meet the gens a chateau — lords of the manor, peers 6f France living on their broad acres, and persons of the highest quality in the department, though these are all on visiting terms with the family, and exchange invitations to dinners and evening parties. The,

42 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

mixed society to be found there usually consists of the lesser noblesse resident in the town, with the clergy and judicial authorities. It is an influential assemblage. All the wit and sense of the district is concentrated in its solid, unpretentious ranks. Everybody in the set knows the exact amount of his neighbor's income, and professes the utmost indifference to dress and luxury, trifles held to be mere childish vanity com- pared with the acquisition of a mouchoir a bceufs — a pocket- handkerchief of some ten or a dozen acres, purchased after as many years of pondering and intriguing and a prodigious deal of diplomacy.

Unshaken in its prejudices whether good or ill, the coterie goes on its way without a look before or behind. Nothing from Paris is allowed to pass without a prolonged scrutiny; innovations are ridiculous, and consols and cashmere shawls alike objectionable. Provincials read nothing and wish to learn nothing; for them, science, literature, and mechanical invention are as the thing that is not. If a prefect does not suit their notions, they do their best to have him removed; if this cannot be done, they isolate him. So will you see the inmates of a beehive wall up an intruding snail with wax. Finally, of the gossip of the salon, history is made. Young married women put in an appearance there occasionally (though the card-table is the one resource) that their conduct may be stamped with the approval of the coterie and their social status confirmed.

Native susceptibilities are sometimes wounded by the su- premacy of a single house, but the rest comfort themselves with the thought that they save the expense entailed by the position. Sometimes it happens that no one can afford to keep open house, and then the bigwigs of the place look about them for some harmless person whose character, position, and social standing offer guarantees for the neutrality of the ground, and alarm nobody's vanity or self-interest. This had been the case at Alencon. For a long time past the best society of the town has been wont to assemble in the house of the old maid before mentioned, who little suspected Mme. Granson's de-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 43

signs on her fortune, or the secret hopes of the two elderly bachelors who have just been unmasked.

Mile. Cormon was Mme. Granson's fourth cousin. She lived with her mother's brother, a sometime vicar-general of the bishopric of Seez; she had been her uncle's ward, and would one day inherit his fortune. Rose Marie Victoire Cormon was the last representative of a house which, plebeian though it was, had associated and often allied itself with the noblesse, and ranked among the oldest families in the prov- ince. In former times the Cormons had been intendants of the duchy of Alengon, and had given a goodly number of magistrates to the bench, and several bishops to the Church. M. de Sponde, Mile. Cormon's maternal grandfather, was elected by the noblesse to the States-General ; and M. Cormon, her father, had been asked to represent the Third Estate, but neither of them accepted the responsibility. For the last century, the daughters of the house had married into the noble families of the province, in such sort that the Cormons were grafted into pretty nearly every genealogical tree in the duchy. No burgher family came so near being noble.

The house in which the present Mile. Cormon lived had never passed out of the family since it was built by Pierre Cormon in the reign of Henri IV. ; and of all the old maid's worldy possessions, this one appealed most to the greed of her elderly suitors; though, so far from bringing in money, the ancestral home of the Cormons was a positive expense to its owner. But it is such an unusual thing, in the very centre of a country town, to find a house handsome without, convenient within, and free from mean surroundings, that all Alengon shared the feeling of envy.

The old mansion stood exactly half-way down the Rue du Val-Noble, The Val-Noble, as it was called, probably because the Brillante, the little stream which flows through the town, has hollowed out a little valley for itself in a dip of the land thereabouts. The most noticeable feature of the house was its massive architecture, of the style introduced from Italy by Marie de' Medici ; all the corner-stones and facings were cut

44 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

with diamond-shaped bosses, in spite of the difficulty of work- ing in the granite of which it is built. It was a two-storied house with a very high-pitched roof, and a row of dormer windows, each with its carved tympanum standing pictur- esquely enough above the lead-lined parapet with its orna- mental balustrade. A grotesque gargoyle, the head of some fantastic bodyless beast, discharged the rain-water through its jaws into the street below, where great stone slabs, pierced with five holes, were placed to receive it. Each gable termi- nated in a leaden finial, a sign that this was a burgher's house, for none but nobles had a right to put up a weathercock in olden times. To right and left of the yard stood the stables and the coach-house; the kitchen, laundry, and wood-shed. One of the leaves of the great gate used to stand open; so that passers-by, looking in through the little low wicket with the bell attached, could see the parterre in the middle of a spacious paved court, and the low-clipped privet hedges which marked out miniature borders full of monthly roses, clove gilli flowers, scabious, and lilies, and Spanish broom; as well as the laurel bushes and pomegranates and myrtles which grew in tubs put out of doors for the summer.

The scrupulous neatness and tidiness of the place must have struck any stranger, and furnished him with a clue to the old maid's character. The mistress' eyes must have been unemployed, careful, and prying; less, perhaps, from any natural bent, than for want of any occupation. Who but an elderly spinster, at a loss how to fill an always emptyday, would have insisted that no blade of grass should show Itself in the paved courtyard, that the wall-tops should be scoured, that the broom should always be busy, that the coach should never be left with the leather curtains undrawn? Who else, from sheer lack of other employment, could have introduced something like Dutch cleanliness into a little province be- tween Perche, Normandy, and Brittany, where the natives make boast of their crass indifference to comfort ? The Che- valier never climbed the steps without reflecting inwardly that the house was fit for a peer of France; and du Bousquier simi-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 45

larly considered that the Mayor of Alengon ought to live there.

A glass door at the top of the flight of steps gave admit- tance to an ante-chamber lighted by a second glass door oppo- site, above a corresponding flight of steps leading into the garden. This part of the house, a kind of gallery floored with square red tiles, and wainscoted to elbow-height, was a hos- pital for invalid family portraits ; one here and there had lost an eye or sustained injury to a shoulder, another stood with a hole in the place where his hat should have been, yet another had lost a leg by amputation. Here cloaks, clogs, overshoes, and umbrellas were left; everybody deposited his belongings in the ante-chamber on his arrival, and took them again at his departure. A long bench was set against either wall for the servants who came of an evening with their lanterns to fetch home their masters and mistresses, and a big stove was set in the middle to mitigate the icy blasts which swept across from door to door.

This gallery, then, divided the ground floor into two equal parts. The staircase rose to the left on the side nearest the courtyard, the rest of the space being taken up by the great dining-room, with its windows looking out upon the garden, and a pantry beyond, which communicated with the kitchen. To the right lay the salon, lighted by four windows, and a couple of smaller rooms beyond it, a boudoir which gave upon the garden, and a room which did duty as a study and looked into the courtyard. There was a complete suite of rooms on the first floor, beside the Abbe de Sponde's apartments ; while the attic story, in all probability roomy enough, had long since been given over to the tenancy of rats and mice. Mile. Cormon used to report their nocturnal exploits to the Cheva- lier de Valois, and marvel at the futility of all measures taken against them.

The garden, about half an acre in extent, was bounded by the Brill ante, so called from the mica spangles which glitter in its bed; not, however, in the Val-Noble, for the manu- facturers and dyers of Alengon pour all their refuse into the shallow stream before it reaches this point; and the opposite

46 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

bank, as always happens wherever a stream passes through a town, was lined with houses where various thirsty industries were carried on. Luckily, Mile. Cormon's neighbors were all of them quiet tradesmen — a baker, a fuller, and one or two cabinet-makers. Her garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, naturally ended in a terrace, by way of a quay, with a short flight of steps down to the water's edge. Try to picture the wall-flowers growing in blue-and-white glazed jars along the balustrade by the river, behold a shady walk to right and left beneath the square-clipped lime-trees, and you will have some idea of a scene full of unpretending cheerfulness and sober tranquillity ; you can see the views of homely humble life along the opposite bank, the quaint houses, the trickling stream of the Brillante, the garden itself, the linden walks under the garden walls, and the venerable home built by the Cormons. How peaceful, how quiet it was ! If there was no ostentation, there was nothing transitory, everything seemed to last for ever there.

The ground-floor rooms, therefore, were given over to social uses. You breathed the atmosphere of the Province, ancient, unalterable Province. The great square-shaped salon, with its four doors and four windows, was modestly wains- coted with carved panels, and painted gray. On the wall, above the single oblong mirror on the chimney-piece, the Hours, in monochrome, were ushering in the day. For this particular style of decoration, which used to infest the spaces above doors, the artist's invention devised the eternal Seasons which meet your eyes almost anywhere in central France, till you loathe the detestable Cupids engaged in reaping, skating, sowing seeds, or flinging flowers about. Every window was overarched with a sort of baldachin with green damask cur- tains drawn back with cords and huge tassels. The tapestry- covered furniture, with a darn here and there at the edges of the chairs, belonged distinctly to that period of the eighteenth century when curves and contortions were in the very height of fashion ; the frames were painted and varnished, the sub- jects in the medallions on the backs were taken from La Fon-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 4T

taine. Four card-tables, a table for piquet, and another for backgammon filled up the immense space. A rock crystal chandelier, shrouded in green gauze, hung suspended from the prominent crossbeam which divided the ceiling, the only plastered ceiling in the house. Two branched candle-sconces were fixed into the wall above the chimney-piece, where a couple of blue Sevres vases stood on either side of a copper gilt clock which represented a scene taken from Le Deserteur — a proof of the prodigious popularity of Sedaine's work. It was a group of no less than eleven figures, four inches high; the Deserter emerging from jail escorted by a guard of soldiers, while a young person, swooning in the foreground, held out his reprieve. The hearth and fire-irons were of the same date and style. The more recent family portraits — one or two Eigauds and three pastels by Latour — adorned the wainscot panels.

The study, paneled entirely in old lacquer work, red and black and gold, would have fetched fabulous sums a few years later; Mile. Cormon was as far as possible from suspecting its value; but if she had been offered a thousand crowns for every panel, she would not have parted with a single one. It was a part of her system to alter nothing, and everywhere in the provinces the belief in ancestral hoards is very strong. The boudoir, never used, was hung with the old-fashioned chintz so much run after nowadays by amateurs of the "Pompadour style," as it is called.

The dining-room was paved with black-and-white stone; it had not been ceiled, but the joists and beams were painted. Ranged round the walls, beneath a flowered trellis, painted in fresco, stood the portentous, marble-topped sideboards, in- dispensable in the warfare waged in the provinces against the powers of digestion. The chairs were cane-seated and varnished, the doors of unpolished walnut wood. Everything combined admirably to complete the general effect, the old- world air of the house within and without. The provincial spirit had preserved all as it had always been; nothing was new or old, young or decrepit. You felt a sense of chilly precision everywhere. vol. 7 — 26

48 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

Any tourist in Brittany, Normandy, Maine, or Anjou must have seen some house more or less like this in one or other provincial town; for the Hotel de Cormon was in its way a very pattern and model of burgher houses over a large part of France, and the better deserves a place in this chronicle because it is at once a commentary on the manners of the place and the expression of its ideas. Who does not feel, even now, how much the life within the old walls was one of peaceful routine?

For such library as the house possessed you must have de- scended rather below the level of the Brillante. There stood a solidly clasped oak-bound collection, none the worse, nay, rather the better, for a thick coating of dust; a collection kept as carefully as a cider-growing district is wont to keep the products of the presses of Burgundy, Touraine, Gascony, and the South. Here were works full of native force, and exquisite qualities, with an added perfume of antiquity. No one will import poor wines when the cost of carriage is so heavy.

Mile. Cormon's whole circle consisted of about a hundred and fifty persons. Of these, some went into the country, some were ill, others from home on business in the department, but there was a faithful band which always came, unless Mile. Cormon gave an evening party in form; so also did those persons who were bound either by their duties or old habit to live in Alengon itself. All these people were of ripe age. A few among them had traveled, but scarcely any of them had gone beyond the province, and one or two had been implicated in Chouannerie. People could begin to speak freely of the war, now that rewards had come to the heroic defenders of the good cause. M. de Valois had been concerned in the last rising, when the Marquis de Montauran lost his life, be- trayed by his mistress; and Marche-a-Terre, now peacefully driving a grazier's trade by the banks of the Mayenne, had made a famous name for himself. M. de Valois, during the past six months, had supplied the key to several shrewd tricks played off upon Hulot, the old Republican, commander of a

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 49

demi-brigade stationed at Alencon from 1798 till 1800. There was talk of Hulot yet in the countryside.*

The women made little pretence of dress, except on Wed- nesdays when Mile. Cormon gave a dinner party, and last week's guests came to pay their "visit of digestion." On Wednesday evening the rooms were filled. Guests and visitors came in gala dress; here and there a woman brought her knitting or her tapestry work, and some young ladies un- blushingly drew patterns for point d'Alengon, by which they supported themselves. Men brought their wives, because there was so few young fellows there ; no whisper could pass unnoticed, and therefore there was no danger of love-making for maid or matron. Every evening at six o'clock the lobby was filled with articles of dress, with sticks, cloaks, and lan- terns. Every one was so well acquainted, the customs of the house were so primitive, that if by any chance the Abbe de Sponde was in the lime-tree walk, and Mile. Cormon in her room, neither Josette the maid nor Jacquelin the man thought it necessary to inform them of the arrival of visitors. The first comer waited till some one else arrived; and when they mustered players sufficiently for whist or boston, the game was begun without waiting for the Abbe de Sponde or Made- moiselle. When it grew dark, Josette or Jacquelin brought lights as soon as the bell rang, and the old Abbe out in the garden, seeing the drawing-room windows illuminated, hastened slowly towards the house. Every evening the piquet, boston, and whist tables were full, giving an average of twenty-five or thirty persons, including those who came to chat; but often there were as many as thirty or forty, and then Jacquelin took candles into the study and the boudoir. Between eight and nine at night the servants began to fill the ante-chamber; and nothing short of a revolution would have found any one in the salon by ten o'clock. At that hour the frequenters of the house were walking home through the streets, discussing the points made, or keeping up a conversa- tion begun in the salon. Sometimes the talk turned on a

* See Les Chouam.

50 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

pocket-handkerchief of land on which somebody had an eye, sometimes it was the division of an inheritance and disputes among the legatees, or the pretensions of the aristocratic set. You see exactly the same thing at Paris when the theatres disgorge.

Some people who talk a great deal about poetry and un- derstand nothing about it, are wont to rail at provincial towns and provincial ways; but lean your forehead on your left hand, as you sit with your feet on the fire-dogs, and rest your elbow on your knee, and then — if you have fully realized for yourself the level pleasant landscape, the house, the in- terior, the folks within it and their interests, interests that seem all the larger because the mental horizon is so limited (as a grain of gold is beaten thin between two sheets of parchment) — then ask yourself what human life is. Try to decide between the engraver of the hieroglyphic birds on an Egyptian obelisk, and one of these folk in Alencon playing boston through a score of years with du Bousquier, M. de Yalois, Mile. Cormon, the President of the Tribunal, the Public Prosecutor, the Abbe de Sponde, Mme. Granson e tuUi quanti. If the daily round, the daily pacing of the same track in the footsteps of many yesterdays, is not ex- actly happiness, it is so much like it that others, driven by dint of storm-tossed days to reflect on the blessings of calm, will say that it is happiness indeed.

To give the exact measure of the importance of Mile. Cor- mon's salon, it will suffice to add that du Bousquier, a born statistician, computed that its frequenters mustered among them a hundred and thirty-one votes in the electoral college, and eighteen hundred thousand livres of income derived from lands in the province. The town of Alencon was not, it is true, completely represented there. The aristocratic section, for instance, had a salon of their own, and the receiver- general's house was a sort of official inn kept, as in duty bound, by the Government, where everybody who was anybody danced, flirted, fluttered, fell in love, and supped. One or two unclassified persons kept up the communications between

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 51

Mile. Conxion's salon and the other two, but the Cormon salon criticised all that passed in the opposed camps very severely. Sumptuous dinners gave rise to unfavorable comment; ices at a dance caused searchings of heart ; the women's behavior and dress and any innovations were much discussed.

Mile. Cormon being, as it were, the style of the firm, and figure-head of an imposing coterie, was inevitably the object of any ambition as profound as that of the du Bousquier or the Chevalier de Valois. To both gentlemen she meant a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, with a peerage for the Chevalier, a receiver-general's post for du Bousquier. A salon admittedly of the first rank is every whit as hard to build up in a country town as in Paris. And here was the salon ready made. To marry Mile. Cormon was to be lord of Alengon. Finally, Athanase, the only one of the three suitors that had ceased to calculate, cared as much for the woman as for her money.

Is there not a whole strange drama (to use the modern cant phrase) in the relative positions of these four human beings? There is something grotesque, is there not, in the idea of three rival suitors eagerly pressing about an old maid who never so much as suspected their intentions, in spite of her intense and very natural desire to be married? Yet although, things being so, it may seem an extraordinary thing that she should not have married before, it is not difficult to explain how and why, in spite of her fortune and her three suitors, Mile. Cormon was still unwed.

From the first, following the family tradition, Mile. Cor- mon had always wished to marry a noble, but between the years 1789 and 1799 circumstances were very much against her. While she would have wished to be the wife of a person of condition, she was horribly afraid of the Eevolutionary Tribunal ; and these two motives weighing about equally, she remained stationary, according to a law which holds equally good in aesthetics or statics. At the same time, the condition of suspended judgment is not unpleasant for a girl, so long

r,U THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

as she feels young and thinks that she can choose where she pleases. But, as all France knows, the system of government immediately preceding the wars of Napoleon produced a vast number of widows; and the number of heiresses was al- together out of proportion to the number of eligible men. When order was restored in the country, in the time of the Consulate, external difficulties made marriage as much of a problem as ever for Rose Marie Victoire. On the one hand, she declined to marry an elderly man ; and, on the other, dread of ridicule and circumstances put quite young men out of the question. In those days heads of families married their sons as mere boys, because in this way they escaped the conscrip- tion. With the obstinacy of a landed proprietor, made- moiselle would not hear of marrying a military man; she had no wish to take a husband only to give him back to the Emperor, she wished to keep him for herself. And so, be- tween 1804 and 1815 it was impossible to compete with a younger generation of girls, too numerous already in times when cannon shot had thinned the ranks of marriageable men.

Again, apart from Mile. Cormon's predilection for birth, she had a very pardonable craze for being loved for her own sake. You would scarcely believe the lengths to which she carried this fancy. She set her wits to work to lay snares for her admirers, to try their sentiments ; and that with such suc- cess, that the unfortunates one and all fell into them, and succumbed in the whimsical ordeals through which they passed at unawares. Mile. Cormon did not study her suitors, she played the spy upon them. A careless word, or a joke, and the lady did not understand jokes very well, was excuse enough to dismiss an aspirant as found wanting. This had neither spirit nor delicacy; that was untruthful and not a Christian ; one wanted to cut down tall timber and coin money under the marriage canopy ; another was not the man to make her happy; or, again, she had her suspicions of gout in the family, or took fright at her wooer's antecedents. Like Mother Church, she would fain see a priest without blemish

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 5S

at her altar. And then Eose Marie Victoire made the worst of herself, and was as anxious to be loved, with all her facti- tious plainness and imaginary faults, as other women are to be married for virtues which they have not and for borrowed beauty. Mile. Cormon's ambition had its source in the finest instincts of womanhood. She would reward her lover by discovering to him a thousand virtues after marriage, as other women reveal the many little faults kept hitherto strenu- ously out of sight. But no one understood. The noble girl came in contact with none but commonplace natures, with whom practical interests came first; the finer calculations of feeling were beyond their comprehension.

She grew more and more conspicuous as the critical period so ingeniously called "second youth" drew nearer. Her fancy for making the worst of herself with increasing success frightened away the latest recruits; they hesitated to unite their lot with hers. The strategy of her game of hoodman- blind (the virtues to be revealed when the finder's eyes were opened) was a complex study for which few men have in- clination ; they prefer perfection ready-made. An ever-pres- ent dread of being married for her money made her unrea- sonably distrustful and uneasy. She fell foul of the rich, and the rich could look higher; she was afraid of poor men, she would not believe them capable of that disinterestedness on which she set such store; till at length her rejections and other circumstances let in an unexpected light upon the minds of suitors thus presented for her selection like dried peas on a seedman's sieve. Every time a marriage project came to nothing, the unfortunate girl, being gradually led to despise mankind, saw the other sex at last in a false light. In- evitably, in her inmost soul, she grew misanthropic, a tinge of bitterness was infused into her conversation, a certain harshness into her expression. And her manners became more and more rigid under the stress of enforced celibacy; in her despair she sought to perfect herself. It was a noble vengeance. She would polish and cut for God the rough diamond rejected by men.

54 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

Before long public opinion was against Mile. Cormon. People accept the verdict which a woman passes upon herself if, being free to marry, she fails to fulfil expectations, or is known to have refused eligible suitors. Every one decides that she has her own reasons for declining marriage, and those reasons are always misinterpreted. There was some hidden physical defect or deformity, they said ; but she, poor girl, was pure as an angel, healthy as a child, and overflow- ing with kindness. Nature had meant her to know all the joys, all the happiness, all the burdens of motherhood.

Yet in her person Mile. Cormon did not find a natural auxiliary to gain her heart's desire. She had no beauty, save of the kind so improperly called "the devil's"; that full- blown freshness of youth which, theologically speaking, the Devil never could have possessed; unless, indeed, we are to look for an explanation of the expression in the Devil's con- tinual desire of refreshing himself. The heiress' feet were large and flat ; when, on rainy days, she crossed the wet streets between her house and St. Leonard's, her raised skirt dis- played (without malice, be it said) a leg which scarcely seemed to belong to a woman, so muscular was it, with a small, firm, prominent calf like a sailor's. She had a figure for a wet nurse. Her thick, honest waist, her strong, plump arms, her red hands; everything about her, in short, was in keeping with the round, expansive contours and portly fair- ness of the Norman style of beauty. Wide open, prominent eyes of no particular color gave to a face, by no means dis- tinguished in its round outlines, a sheepish, astonished ex- pression not altogether inappropriate, however, in an old maid : even if Rose had not been innocent, she must still have seemed so. An aquiline nose was oddly assorted with a low forehead, for a feature of that type is almost invariably found in company with a lofty brow. In spite of thick, red lips, the sign of great kindliness of nature, there were evidently so few ideas behind that forehead, that Hose's heart could scarcely have been directed by her brain. Kind she must certainly be, but not gracious. And we are apt to judge the

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 55

defects of goodness very harshly, while we make the most of the redeeming qualities of vice.

An extraordinary length of chestnut hair lent Eose Cormon such beauty as belongs to vigor and luxuriance, her chief per- sonal characteristics. In the time of her pretensions she had a trick of turning her face in three-quarters profile to display a very pretty ear, gracefully set between the azure-streaked white throat and the temple, and thrown into relief by thick masses of her hair. Dressed in a ball gown, with her head poised at this angle, Eose might almost seem beautiful. With her protuberant bust, her waist, her high health, she used to draw exclamations of admiration from Imperial officers. "What a fine girl !" they used to say.

But, as years went on, the stoutness induced by a quiet, regular life distributed itself so unfortunately over her person, that its original proportions were destroyed. No known variety of corset could have discovered the poor spinster's hips at this period of her existence ; she might have been cast in one uniform piece. The youthful proportions of her figure were completely lost ; her dimensions had grown so excessive, that no one could see her stoop without fearing that, being so topheavy, she would certainly overbalance herself; but nature had provided a sufficient natural counterpoise, which enabled her to dispense with all adventitious aid from "dress improvers." Everything about Eose was very genuine.

Her chin developed a triple fold, which reduced the appar- ent length of her throat, and made it no easy matter to turn her head. She had no wrinkles, she had creases. Wags used to assert that she powdered herself, as nurses powder babies, to prevent chafing of the skin. To a young man, consumed, like Athanase, with suppressed desires, this excessive corpu- lence offered just the kind of physical charm which could not fail to attract youth. Youthful imaginations, essentially in- trepid, stimulated by appetite, are prone to dilate upon the beauties of that living expanse. So does the plump partridge allure the epicure's knife. And, indeed, any debt-burdened young man of fashion in Paris would have resigned himself

56 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

readily enough to fulfilling his part of the contract and mak- ing Mile. Cormon happy. Still the unfortunate spinster had already passed her fortieth year!

At this period of enforced loneliness, after the long, vain struggle to fill her life with those interests that are all in all to woman, she was fortifying herself in virtue by the most strict observance of religious duties; she had turned to the great consolation of well-preserved virginity. A confessor, endowed with no great wisdom, had directed Mile. Cormon in the paths of asceticism for some three years past, recommend- ing a system of self -scourging calculated, according to modern doctors, to produce an effect the exact opposite of that ex- pected by the poor priest, whose knowledge of hygiene was but limited. These absurd practices were beginning to bring a certain monastic tinge to Eose Cormon's face; with fre- quent pangs of despair, she watched the sallow hues of middle age creeping across its natural white and red ; while the trace of down about the corners of her upper lip showed a distinct tendency to darken and increase like smoke. Her temples grew shiny. She had passed the turning-point, in fact. It was known for certain in Alengon that Mile. Cormon suffered from heated blood. She inflicted her confidence upon the Chevalier de Valois, reckoning up the number of foot-baths that she took, and devising cooling treatment with him. And that shrewd observer would end by taking out his snuff-box, and gazing at the portrait of the Princess Goritza as he re- marked, "But the real sedative, my dear young lady, would be a good and handsome husband."

"But whom could one trust?" returned she.

But the Chevalier only flicked away the powdered snuff from the creases of his paduasoy waistcoat. To anybody else the proceeding would have seemed perfectly natural, but it always made the poor old maid feel uncomfortable.

The violence of her objectless longings grew to such a height that she shrank from looking a man in the face, so afraid was she that the thoughts which pierced her heart might be read in her eyes. It was one of her whims, possibly a later de-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 57

velopment of her former tactics, to behave almost ungra- ciously to the possible suitors towards whom she still felt her- self attracted, so afraid was she of being accused of folly. Most people in her circle were utterly incapable of appreciat- ing her motives, so noble throughout ; they explained her man- ner to her coevals in single blessedness by a theory of revenge for some past slight.

With the beginning of the year 1815 Rose Cormon had reached the fatal age, to which she did not confess. She was forty-two. By this time her desire to be married had reached a degree of intensity bordering on monomania. She saw her chances of motherhood fast slipping away for ever; and, in her divine ignorance, she longed above all things for children of her own. There was not a soul found in Alencon to impute a single unchaste desire to the virtuous girl. She loved love, taking all for granted, without realizing for her- self what love would be — a devout Agnes, incapable of in- venting one of the little shifts of Moliere's heroine.

She had been counting upon chance of late. The disband- ing of the Imperial troops and the reconstruction of the King's army was sending a tide of military men back to their native places, some of them on half-pay, some with pensions, some without, and all of them anxious to find some way of amending their bad fortune, and of finishing their days in a fashion which would mean the beginning of happiness for Mile. Cormon. It would be hard indeed if she could not find a single brave and honorable man among all those who were coming back to the neighborhood. He must have a sound constitution in the first place, he must be of suitable age, and a man whose personal character would serve as a passport to his Bonapartist opinions ; perhaps he might even be willing to turn Royalist for the sake of gaining a lost social position.

Supported by these mental calculations, Mile. Cormon maintained the severity of her attitude for the first few months of the year; but the men that came back to the town were all either too old or too young, or their characters were

58 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

too bad, or their opinions too Bonapartist, or their station in life was incompatible with her position, fortune, and habits. The case grew more and more desperate every day. Officers high in the service had used their advantages under Napoleon to marry, and these gentlemen now became Eoyalists for the sake of their families. In vain had she put up prayers to heaven to send her a husband that she might be happy in Christian fashion; it was written, no doubt, that she should die virgin and martyr, for not a single likely-looking man presented himself.

In the course of conversation in her drawing-room of an evening, the frequenters of the house kept the police register under tolerably strict supervision; no one could arrive in Alengon but they informed themselves at once as to the new- comer's mode of life, quality, and fortune. But, at the same time, Alengon is not a town to attract many strangers ; it is not on the highroad to any larger city; there are no chance arrivals ; naval officers on their way to Brest do not so much as stop in the place.

Poor Mile. Cormon at last comprehended that her choice was reduced to the natives. At times her eyes took an almost fierce expression, to which the Chevalier would respond with a keen glance at her as he drew out his snuff-box to gaze at the Princess Goritza. M. de Valois knew that in feminine jurisprudence, fidelity to an old love is a guarantee for the new. But Mile. Cormon, it cannot be denied, was not very intelligent. His snuff-box strategy was wasted upon her.

She redoubled her watchfulness, the better to combat the "evil one," and with devout rigidness and the sternest prin- ciples she consigned her cruel sufferings to the secret places of her life.

At night, when she was alone, she thought of her lost youth, of her faded bloom, of the thwarted instincts of her nature; and while she laid her passionate longings at the foot of the Cross, together with all the poetry doomed to remain pent within her, she vowed inwardly to take the first man that was willing to marry her, just as he was, without putting him to

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 59

any proof whatsoever. Sounding her own dispositions, after a series of vigils, each more trying than the last, in her own mind she went so far as to espouse a sub-lieutenant, a tobacco-smoker to boot ; nay, he was even head over ears in debt. Him she proposed to transform with care, submission, and gentleness into a pattern for mankind. But only in the silence of night could she plan these imaginary marriages, in which she amused herself with playing the sublime part of guardian angel ; with morning, if Josette found her mistress' bedclothes turned topsy-turvy, mademoiselle had recovered her dignity; with morning, after breakfast, she would have nothing less than a solid landowner, a well-preserved man of forty — a young man, as you may say.

The Abbe de Sponde was incapable of giving his niece as- sistance of any sort in schemes for marriage. The good man, aged seventy or thereabouts, referred all the calamities of the Eevolution to the design of a Providence prompt to punish a dissolute Church. For which reasons M. de Sponde had long since entered upon a deserted path to heaven, the way trodden by the hermits of old. He led an ascetic life, simply, unobtru- sively, hiding his deeds of charity, his constant prayer and fasting from all other eyes. Necessity was laid upon all priests, he thought, to do as he did; he preached by ex- ample, turning a serene and smiling face upon the world, while he completely cut himself off from worldly interests. All his thoughts were given to the afflicted, to the needs of the Church, and the saving of his own soul. He left the management of his property to his niece. She paid over his yearly income to him, and, after a slight deduction for his maintenance, the whole of it went in private almsgiving or in donations to the Church.

All the Abbe's affections were centered upon his niece, and she looked upon him as a father. He was a somewhat absent- minded father, however, without the remotest conception of the rebellion of the flesh; a father who gave thanks to God for maintaining his beloved daughter in a state of virginity ; for from his youth up he had held, with St. John Chrysostom,

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"that virginity is as much above the estate of marriage as the angels are above man/'

Mile. Cormon was accustomed to look up to her uncle ; she did not venture to confide her wishes for a change of i condition to him ; and he, good man, on his side was ac- customed to the ways of the house, and perhaps might not \ have relished the introduction of a master into it. Absorbed in thoughts of the distress which he relieved, or lost in fathom- less inner depths of prayer, he was often unconscious of what j was going on about him ; frequenters of the house set this down to absent-mindedness; but while he said little, hisj silence was neither unsociable nor ungenial. A tall, spare, grave, and solemn man, his face told of kindly feeling and a ; great inward peace. His presence in the house seemed as it ! were to consecrate it. The Abbe entertained a strong liking j for that elderly sceptic the Chevalier de Valois. Far apart as their lives were, the two grand wrecks of the eighteenth cen- 1 tury clergy and noblesse recognized each other by generic signs and tokens; and the Chevalier, for that matter, could j converse with unction with the Abbe, just as he talked like a | father with his grisettes.

Some may think that Mile. Cormon would leave no means j untried to gain her end; that among other permissible femi- nine artifices, for instance, she would turn to her toilettes, wear low-cut bodices, use the passive coquetry of a display of the splendid equipment with which she might take the field. | On the contrary, she was as heroic and steadfast in her high- necked gown as a sentry in his sentry-box. All her dresses,,' bonnets, and finery were made in Alencon by two hunchbacked sisters, not wanting in taste. But in spite of the entreaties of the two artists, Mile. Cormon utterly declined the ad-; ventitious aid of elegance; she must be substantial through- out, body and plumage, and possibly her heavy-looking dresses! became her not amiss. Laugh who will at her, poor thing. Generous natures, those who never trouble themselves abouil the form in which good feeling shows itself, but admire it wherever they find it, will see something sublime in this trait

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 61

Perhaps some slight-natured feminine critic may begin to carp, and say that there is no woman in France so simple but that she can angle for a husband ; that Mile. Cormon is one of those abnormal creatures which common-sense for- bids us to take for a type; that the best or the most babyish unmarried woman that has a mind to hook a gudgeon can put forward some physical charm wherewith to bait her line. But when you begin to think that the sublime Apostolic Roman Catholic is still a power in Brittany and the ancient duchy of Alengon, these criticisms fall to the ground. Faith and piety admit no such subtleties. Mile. Cormon kept to the straight path, preferring the misfortunes of a maidenhood in- finitely prolonged to the misery of untruthfulness, to the sin of small deceit. Armed with self-discipline, such a girl can- not make a sacrifice of a principle; and therefore love (or self-interest) must make a determined effort to find her out and win her.

Let us have the courage to make a confession, painful in these days when religion is nothing but a means of advance- ment for some, a dream for others ; the devout are subject to a kind of moral ophthalmia, which, by the especial grace of Providence, removes a host of small earthly concerns out of the sight of the pilgrim of Eternity. In a word, the devout are apt to be dense in a good many ways. Their stupidity, at the same time, is a measure of the force with which their spirits turn heavenwards; albeit the sceptical M. de Yalois maintained that it is a moot point whether stupid women take naturally to piety, or whether piety, on the other hand, has a stupefying effect upon an intelligent girl.

It must be borne in mind that it is the purest orthodox goodness, ready to drink rapturously of every cup set before it, to submit devoutly to the will of God, to see the print of the divine finger everywhere in the day of life, — that it is catholic virtue stealing like hidden light into the innermost recesses of this History that alone can bring everything into right relief, and widen its significance for those who yet have faith. And, again, if the stupidity is admitted, why should

62 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

the misfortunes of stupidity be less interesting than the woes of genius in a world where fools so overwhelmingly pre- ponderate ?

To resume. Mile. Cormon's divine girlish ignorance of life was an offence in the eyes of the world. She was any- thing but observant, as her treatment of her suitors suffi- ciently showed. At this very moment, a girl of sixteen who had never opened a novel in her life might have read a hun- dred chapters of romance in Athanase's eyes. But Mile. Cormon saw nothing all the while; she never knew that the young man's voice was unsteady with emotion which he dared not express, and the woman who could invent refinements of high sentiment to her own undoing could not discern the same feelings in Athanase.

Those who know that qualities of heart and brain are as independent of each other as genius and greatness of soul, will see nothing extraordinary in this psychological phenomenon. A complete human being is so rare a prodigy, that Socrates, that pearl among mankind, agreed with a con- temporary phrenologist that he himself was born to be a very scurvy knave. A great general may save his country at Zu- rich, and yet take a commission from contractors ; a banker's doubtful honesty does not prevent him from being a states- man ; a great composer may give the world divine music, and yet forge another man's signature, and a woman of refined feeling may be excessively weak-minded. In short, a devout woman may have a very lofty soul, and yet have no ears to hear the voice of another noble soul at her side.

The unaccountable freaks of physical infirmity find a parallel in the moral world. Here was a good creature mak- ing her preserves and breaking her heart till she grew almost ridiculous, because, forsooth, there was no one to eat theml but her uncle and herself. Those who sympathized with her I for the sake of her good qualities, or, in some cases, on ac- count of her defects, used to laugh over her disappointments.' People began to wonder what would become of so fine a prop-i erty with all Mile. Cormon's savings, and her uncle's col boot

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 63

It was long since the}' began to suspect that at bottom, and in spite of appearances, Mile. Cormon was "an original." Originality is not allowed in the provinces ; originality means that you have ideas which nobody else can understand, and in a country town people's intellects, like their manner of life, must all be on a level. Even in 1804 Kose's matri- monial prospects were considered so problematical, that "to marry like Mile. Cormon" was a current saying in Alengon, and the most ironical way of suggesting Such-an- one would never marry at all.

The necessity to laugh at some one must indeed be im- perious in France, if any one could be found to raise a smile at the expense of that excellent creature. Not merely did she entertain the whole town, she was charitable, she was good ; she was incapable of saying a spiteful word ; and more than that, she was so much in unison with the whole spirit of the place, its manners and its customs, that she was gen- erally beloved as the very incarnation of the life of the province ; she had imbibed all its prejudices and made its in- terests hers ; she had never gone beyond its limits, she adored it ; she was embedded in provincial tradition. In spite of her eighteen thousand livres .per annum, a tolerably large income for the neighborhood, she accommodated herself to the ways of her less wealthy neighbors. When she went to her country house, the Prebaudet, for instance, she drove over in an old- fashioned wicker cariole hung with white leather straps, and fitted with a couple of rusty weather-beaten leather curtains, which scarcely closed it in. The equipage, drawn by a fat broken-winded mare, was known all over the town. Jacque- lin, the man-servant, cleaned it as carefully as if it had been the finest brougham from Paris. Mademoiselle was fond of it ; it had lasted her a dozen years, a fact which she was wont to point out with the triumphant joy of contented parsimony. Most people were grateful to her for forbearing to humiliate them by splendor which she might have flaunted before their eyes ; it is even credible that if she had sent for a caleehe from

Paris, it would have caused more talk than any of her "disap-

vol. 7 — 27

Q4 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

pointments." After all, the finest carriage in the world, like the old-fashioned cariole, could only have taken her to the Prebaudet; and in the provinces they always keep the end in view, and trouble themselves very little about the elegance of the means, provided that they are sufficient.

To complete the picture of Mile. Cormon's household and domestic life, several figures must be grouped round Mile. Cormon and the Abbe de Sponde. Jacquelin, and Josette, and Mariette, the cook, ministered to the comfort of uncie and niece.

Jacquelin, a man of forty, short and stout, dark-haired and ruddy, with a countenance of the Breton sailor type, had been in service in the house for twenty-two years. He waited at table, groomed the mare, worked in the garden, cleaned the Abbe's shoes, ran errands, chopped firewood, drove the cariole, went to the Prebaudet for corn, hay and straw, and slept like a dormouse in the ante-chamber of an evening. He was supposed to be fond of Josette, and Josette was six-and- thirty. But if she had married him, Mile. Cormon would have dismissed her, and so the poor lovers were fain to save up their wages in silence, and to wait and hope for made- moiselle's marriage, much as the Jews look for the advent of the Messiah.

Josette came from the district between Alengon and Mortagne; she was a fat little woman. Her face, which re- minded you of a mud-bespattered apricot, was not wanting either in character or intelligence. She was supposed to rule her mistress. Josette and Jacquelin, feeling sure of the event, found consolation, presumably by discounting the future. Mariette, the cook, had likewise been in the family for fifteen years; she was skilled in the cookery of the country and the preparation of the most esteemed provincial dishes.

Perhaps the fat old bay mare, of the Normandy breed, which Mile. Cormon used to drive to the Prebaudet, ought to count a good deal, for the affection which the five inmates of the house bore the animal amounted to mania. Penelope, for that was her name, had been with them for eighteen years ;

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 65

and so well was she cared for, so regularly tended, that Jacque- lin and mademoiselle hoped to get quite another ten years of work out of her. Penelope was a stock subject and source of interest in their lives. It seemed as if poor Mile. Cormon, with no child of her own, lavished all her maternal affection upon the lucky beast. Almost every human being leading a solitary life in a crowded world will surround himself with a make-believe family of some sort, and Penelope took the place of dogs, cats, or canaries.

These four faithful servants — for Penelope's intelligence had been trained till it was very nearly on a par with the wits of the other three, while they had sunk pretty much into the dumb, submissive jog-trot life of the animal — these four retainers came and went and did the same things day after day, with the unfailing regularity of clockwork. But, to use their own expression, "they had eaten their white bread first/' Mile. Cormon suffered from a fixed idea upon the nerves; and, after the wont of such sufferers, she grew fidgety and hard to please, not by force of nature, but because she had no outlet for her energies. She had neither husband nor children to fill her thoughts, so they fastened upon trifles. She would talk for hours at a stretch of some inconceivably small matter, of a dozen serviettes, for instance, lettered Z, which somehow or other had been put before 0.

"Why, what can Josette be thinking about?" she cried. "Has she no notion what she is doing ?"

Jacquelin chanced to be late in feeding Penelope one after- noon, so every day for a whole week afterwards mademoiselle inquired whether the horse had been fed at two o'clock. Her narrow imagination spent itself on small matters. A layer of dust forgotten by the feather mop, a slice of scorched toast, an omission to close the shutters on Jacquelin's part when the sun shone in upon furniture and carpets, — all these important trifles produced serious trouble, mademoiselle lost her temper over them. "Nothing was the same as it used to be. The servants of old days were so changed that she did not know them. They were spoilt. She was too good to them/' and

66 TUB JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

bo forth and so forth. One day Josette gave her mistress the Journee du Chretien instead of the Quinzaine de Paques. The whole town heard of the mistake before night. Mademoiselle had been obliged to get up and come out of church, disturbing whole rows of chairs and raising the wildest conjectures, so that she was obliged afterwards to give all her friends a full account of the mishap.

"Josette/' she said mildly, when she had come the whole way home from St. Leonard's, "this must never happen again."

Mile. Cormon was far from suspecting that it was a very fortunate thing for her that she could vent her spleen in petty squabbles. The mind, like the body, requires exercise ; these quarrels were a sort of mental gymnastics. Josette and Jacque- lin took such unevennesses of temper as the agricultural laborer takes the changes of the weather. The three good souls could say among themselves that "It is a fine day," or "It rains," without murmuring against the powers above. Sometimes in the kitchen of a morning they would wonder in what humor mademoiselle would wake, much as a farmer studies the morning mists. And of necessity Mile. Cormon ended by seeing herself in all the infinitely small details which made up her life. Herself and God, her confessor and her washing-days, the preserves to be made, the services of the church to attend, and the uncle to take care of, — all these things absorbed faculties that were none of the strongest. For her the atoms of life were magnified by virtue of anoptical process peculiar to the selfish or the self-absorbed. To so per- fectly healthy a woman, the slightest symptom of indigestion was a positively alarming portent. She lived, moreover, under the ferule of the system of medicine practised by our grandsires ; a drastic dose fit to kill Penelope, taken four times a year, merely gave Mile. Cormon a fillip.

What tremendous ransackings of the week's dietary if Josette, assisting her mistress to dress, discovered a scarcely visible pimple on shoulders that still boasted a satin skin! What triumph if the maid could bring a certain hare to her

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 07

mistress' recollection, and trace the accursed pimple to its origin in that too heating article of food ! With what joy the two women would cry, "It is the hare beyond a doubt !"

"Mariette over-seasoned it," mademoiselle would add; "I always tell her not to overdo it for my uncle and me, but Mariette has no more memory than "

"Than the hare," suggested Josette.

"It is the truth/' returned mademoiselle; "she has no more memory than the hare ; you have just hit it."

Four times in a year, at the beginning of each season, Mile. Cormon went to spend a certain number of days at the Prebaudet. It was now the middle of May, when she liked to see how her apple-trees had "snowed," as they say in the cider country, an allusion to the white blossoms strewn in the orchards in the spring. When the circles of fallen petals look like snow-drifts under the trees, the proprietor may hope to have abundance of cider in the autumn. Mile. Cormon esti- mated her barrels, and at the same time superintended any necessary after-winter repairs, planning out work in the garden and orchard, from which she drew no inconsiderable supplies. Each time of year had its special business.

Mademoiselle used to give a farewell dinner to her faithful inner circle before leaving, albeit she would see them again | at the end of three weeks. All Alengon knew when the i journey was to be undertaken. Any one that had fallen behind- ! hand immediately paid a call, her drawing-room was filled; everybody wished her a prosperous journey, as if she had been starting for Calcutta. Then, in the morning, all the trades- people were standing in their doorways ; every one, great and ' small, watched the cariole go past, and it seemed as if every- body learned a piece of fresh news when one repeated after another, "So Mile. Cormon is going to the Prebaudet." One would remark, "She has bread ready baked, she has !" And his neighbor would return, "Eh ! my lads, she is a good woman ; if property always fell into such hands as hers, there would not be a beggar to be seen in the countryside."

88 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

Or another would exclaim, "Hullo ! I should not wonder if our oldest vines are in flower, for there is Mile. Cormon setting out for the Prebaudet. How comes it that she is so little given to marrying ?"

"I should be quite ready to marry her, all the same," a wag would answer. "The marriage is half made — one side is willing, but the other isn't. Pooh ! the oven is heating for M. du Bousquier."

"M . du Bousquier ? She has refused him."

At every house that evening people remarked solemnly, "Mile. Cormon has gone."

Or perhaps, "So you have let Mile. Cormon go !"

The Wednesday selected by Suzanne for making a scandal chanced to be this very day of leave-taking, when Mile. Cor- mon nearly drove Josette to distraction over the packing of the parcels which she meant to take with her. A good deal that was done and said in the town that morning was like to lend additional interest to the farewell gathering at night. While the old maid was busily making preparations for her journey; while the astute Chevalier was playing his game of piquet in the house of Mile. Armande de Gordes, sister of the aged Marquis de Gordes, and queen of the aristocratic salon, Mme. Granson had sounded the alarm bell in half a score of houses. There was not a soul but felt some curiosity to see what sort of figure the seducer would cut that evening ; and to Mme. Granson and the Chevalier de Valois it was an impor- tant matter to know how Mile. Cormon would take the news, in her double quality of marriageable spinster and lady presi- dent of the Maternity Fund. As for the unsuspecting du Bousquier, he was taking the air on the Parade. He was just beginning to think that Suzanne had made a fool of him ; and this suspicion only confirmed the rules which he had laid down with regard to womankind.

On these high days the cloth was laid about half-past three in the Maison Cormon. Four o'clock was the state dinner hour in Alenqon, on ordinary days they dined at two, as in the time of the Empire ; but, then, they supped I

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN (J9

Mile. Cormon always felt an inexpressible sense of satisfac- tion when she was dressed to receive her guests as mistress of her house. It was one of the pleasures which she most relished, be it said without malice, though egoism certainly lay beneath the feeling. When thus arrayed for conquest, a ray of hope slid across the darkness of her soul ; a voice within her cried that nature had not endowed her so abundantly in vain, that surely some enterprising man was about to appear for her. She felt the younger for the wish, and the fresher for her toilet; she looked at her stout figure with a certain elation; and afterwards, when she went downstairs to submit salon, study, and boudoir to an awful scrutiny, this sense of satisfac- tion still remained with her. To and fro she went, with the naive contentment of the rich man who feels conscious at every moment that he is rich and will lack for nothing all his life long. She looked round upon her furniture, the eternal furni- ture, the antiquities, the lacquered panels, and told herself that such fine things ought to have a master.

After admiring the dining-room, where the space was filled by the long table with its snowy cloth, its score of covers symmetrically laid; after going through the roll-call of a squadron of bottles ordered up from the cellar, and mak- ing sure that each bore an honorable label ; and finally, after a most minute verification of a score of little slips of paper on which the Abbe had written the names of the guests with a trembling hand — it was the sole occasion on which he took an active part in the household, and the place of every guest always gave rise to grave discussion — after this review, Mile. Cormon in her fine array went into the garden to join her uncle ; for at this pleasantest hour of the day he used to walk up and down the terrace beside the Brillante, listening to the twittering of the birds, which, hidden closely among the leaves in the lime-tree walk, knew no fear of boys or sports- men.

Mile. Cormon never came out to the Abbe during these intervals of waiting without asking some hopelessly absurd Question, in the hope of drawing the good man into a discus-

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sion which might interest him. Her reasons for so doing must be given, for this very characteristic trait adds the finishing touch to her portrait.

Mile. Cormon considered it a duty to talk; not that she was naturally loquacious, for, unfortunately, with her dearth of ideas and very limited stock of phrases, it was difficult to hold forth at any length ; but she thought that in this way she was fulfilling the social duties prescribed by religion, which bids us be agreeable to our neighbor. It was a duty which weighed so much upon her mind, that she had submitted this case of conscience out of the Child's Guide to Manners to her director, the Abbe Couturier. Whereupon, so far from being disarmed by the penitent's humble admission of the violence of her mental struggles to find something to say, the old ecclesiastic, being firm in matters of discipline, read her a whole chapter out of St. Frangois de Sales on the Duties of a Woman in the World ; on the decent gaiety of the pious Chris- tian female, and the duty of confining her austerities to her- self ; a woman, according to this authority, ought to be amiable in her home and to act in such a sort that her neighbor never feels dull in her company. After this Mile. Cormon, with a deep sense of duty, was anxious to obey her director at any cost. He had bidden her to discourse agreeably, so every time the conversation languished she felt the perspiration breaking out over her with the violence of her exertions to find some- thing to say which should stimulate the flagging interest. She would come out with odd remarks at such times. Once she revived, with some success, a discussion on the ubiquity of the apostles (of which she understood not a syllable) by the un- expected observation that "You cannot be in two places at once unless you are a bird." With such conversational cues as these, the lady had earned the title of "dear, good Mile. Cormon" in her set, which phrase, in the mouth of local wits, might be taken to mean that she was as ignorant as a carp, and a bit of a "natural;" but there were plenty of people of her own calibre to take the remark literally, and reply, "Oh yes, Mile. Cormon is very good."

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 71

Sometimes (always in her desire to be agreeable to her guests and fulfil her duties as a hostess) she asked such ab- surd questions that everybody burst out laughing. She wanted to know, for example, what the Government did with the taxes which it had been receiving all these years; or how it was that the Bible had not been printed in the time of Christ, see- ing that it had been written by Moses. Altogether she was on a par with the English country gentleman, and member of the House of Commons, who made the famous speech in which he said, "I am always hearing of Posterity; I should very much like to know what Posterity has done for the country."

On such occasions, the heroic Chevalier de Valois came to the rescue, bringing up all the resources of his wit and tact at the sight of the smiles exchanged by pitiless smatterers. He loved to give to woman, did this elderly noble ; he lent his wit to Mile. Cormon by coming to her assistance with a para- dox, and covered her retreat so well, that sometimes it seemed as if she had said nothing foolish. She once owned seriously that she did not know the difference between an ox and a bull. The enchanting Chevalier stopped the roars of laughter by saying that oxen could never be more than uncles to the bullocks. Another time, hearing much talk of cattle-breeding and its difficulties — a topic which often comes up in conversa- tion in the neighborhood of the superb du Pin stud — she so far grasped the technicalities of horse breeding to ask, "Why, if they wanted colts, they did not serve a mare twice a year." The Chevalier drew down the laughter upon himself.

"It is quite possible," said he. The company pricked up their ears.

"The fault lies with the naturalists," he continued; "they have not found out how to breed mares that are less than eleven months in foal."

Poor Mile. Cormon no more understood the meaning of the words than the difference between the ox and the bull. The Chevalier met with no gratitude for his pains ; his chivalrous services were beyond the reach of the lady's comprehension.

£ THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

She saw that the conversation grew livelier ; she was relieved to find that she was not so stupid as she imagined. A day came at last when she settled down in her ignorance, like the Due de Brancas ; and the hero of Le Distrait, it may be re- membered, made himself so comfortable in the ditch after his fall, that when the people came to pull him out, he asked what they wanted with him. Since a somewhat recent period Mile. Cormon had lost her fears. She brought out her conversa- tional cues with a self-possession akin to that solemn manner — the very coxcombry of stupidity — which accompanies the fatuous utterances of British patriotism.

As she went with stately steps towards the terrace there- fore, she was chewing the cud of reflection, seeking for some question which should draw her uncle out of a silence which always hurt her feelings ; she thought that he felt dull.

"Uncle," she began, hanging on his arm, and nestling joy- ously close to him (for this was another of her make-believes, "If I had a husband, I should do just so!" she thought) — "Uncle, if everything on earth happens by the will of God, there must be a reason for everything."

"Assuredly," the Abbe de Sponde answered gravely. He loved his niece, and submitted with angelic patience to be torn from his meditations.

"Then if I never marry at all, it will be because it is the will of God?"

"Yes, my child."

"But still, as there is nothing to prevent me from marrying to-morrow, my will perhaps might thwart the will of God ?"

"That might be so, if we really knew God's will," returned the sub-prior of the Sorbonne. "Remark, my dear, that you insert an if."

Poor Rose was bewildered. She had hoped to lead her uncle to the subject of marriage by way of an argument ad omnipotentem. But the naturally obtuse are wont to adopt the remorseless logic of childhood, which is to say, they pre ceed from the answer to another question, a method frequently found embarrassing.

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 73

"But, uncle," she persisted, "God cannot mean women never to marry; for if He did, all of them ought to be either un- married or married. Their lots are distributed unjustly."

"My child," said the good Abbe, "you are finding fault with the Church, which teaches that celibacy is a more excellent way to God."

"But if the Church was right, and everybody was a good Catholic, there would soon be no more people, uncle."

"You are too ingenious, Rose ; there is no need to be so in- genious to be happy."

Such words brought a smile of satisfaction to poor Rose's lips and confirmed her in the good opinion which she began to conceive of herself. Behold how the world, like our friends and enemies, contributes to strengthen our faults. At this moment guests began to arrive, and the conversation was in- terrupted. On these high festival occasions, the disposition of the rooms brought about little familiarities between the servants and invited guests. Mariette saw the President of the Tribunal, a triple expansion glutton, as he passed by her kitchen.

"Oh, M. du Ronceret, I have been making cauliflower au gratin on purpose for you, for mademoiselle knows how fond you are of it. 'Mind you do not fail with it, Mariette/ 6he said ; *M. le President is coming.' "

"Good Mile. Cormon," returned the man of law. "Mari- ette, did you baste the cauliflowers with gravy instead of stock? It is more savory." And the President did not dis- dain to enter the council-chamber where Mariette ruled the roast, nor to cast an epicure's eye over her preparations, and give his opinion as a master of the craft.

"Good-day, madame," said Josette, addressing Mme. Gran- son, who sedulously cultivated the waiting-woman. "Made- moiselle has not forgotten you ; you are to have a dish of fish."

As for the Chevalier de Valois, he spoke to Mariette with the jocularity of a great noble unbending to an inferior :

"Well, dear cordon bleu, I would give you the Cross of the Legion of Honor if I could; tell me, is there any dainty morsel for which one ought to save oneself ?"

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"Yes, yes, M. de Valois, a hare from the Prebaudet; it weighed fourteen pounds !"

"That's a good girl," said the Chevalier, patting Josette on the cheek with two fingers. "Ah! weighs fourteen pounds, does it?"

Du Bousquier was not of the party. Mile. Cormon treated him hardly, faithful to her system before described. In the very bottom of her heart she felt an inexplicable drawing towards this man of fifty, whom she had once refused. Some- times she repented of that refusal, and yet she had a pre- sentiment that she should marry him after all, and a dread of him which forbade her to wish for the marriage. These ideas stimulated her interest in du Bousquier. The Eepublican's herculean proportions produced an effect upon her which she would not admit to herself; and the Chevalier de Valois and Mme. Granson, while they could not explain Mile. Cormon's inconsistencies, had detected naive, furtive glances, sufficiently clear in their significance to set them both on the watch to ruin the hopes which du Bousquier clearly entertained in spite of a first check.

Two guests kept the others waiting, but their official duties excused them both. One was M. du Coudrai, registrar of mortgages; the other, M. Choisnel, had once acted as land- steward to the Marquis de Gordes. Choisnel was the notary of the old noblesse, and received everywhere among them with the distinction which his merits deserved ; he had besides a not inconsiderable private fortune. When the two late comers ar- rived,. Jacquelin, the man-servant, seeing them turn to go into the drawing-room, came forward with, " 'They' are all in the garden/'

The registrar of mortgages was one of the most amiable men in the town. There were but two things against him — he had married an old woman for her money in the first place, and in the second it was his habit to perpetrate outrageous puns, at which he was the first to laugh. But, doubtless, the stomachs of the guests were growing impatient, for at first sight he was hailed with that faint sigh which usually wel-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 73

comes last comers under such circumstances. Pending the official announcement of dinner, the company strolled up and down the terrace by the Brillante, looking out over the stream with its bed of mosaic and its water-plants, at the so pictur- esque details of the row of houses huddled together on the opposite bank; the old-fashioned wooden balconies, the tumble-down window sills, the balks of timber that shored up a story projecting over the river, the cabinet-maker's work- shop, the tiny gardens where odds and ends of clothing were hanging out to dry. It was, in short, the poor quarter of a country town, to which the near neighborhood of the water, a weeping willow drooping over the bank, a rosebush or so, and a few flowers, had lent an indescribable charm, worthy of a landscape painter's brush.

The Chevalier meanwhile was narrowly watching the faces of the guests. He knew that his firebrand had very success- fully taken hold of the best coteries in the town ; but no one spoke openly of Suzanne and du Bousquier and the great news as yet. The art of distilling scandal is possessed by pro- vincials in a supreme degree. It was felt that the time was not yet ripe for open discussion of the strange event. Every one was bound to go through a private rehearsal first. So it was whispered:

"Have you heard ?"

"Yes."

"Du Bousquier?"

"And the fair Suzanne."

"Does Mile. Cormon know anything?"

"No."

"Ah!"

This was gossip piano, presently destined to swell into a crescendo when they were ready to discuss the first dish of scandal.

All of a sudden the Chevalier confronted Mme. Granson. That lady had sported her green bonnet, trimmed with au- riculas ; her face was beaming. Was she simply longing to begin the concert ? Such news is as good as a gold-mine to be

76 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

worked in the monotonous lives of these people ; but the ob- servant and uneasy Chevalier fancied that he read something more in the good lady's expression — to wit, the exultation of self-interest! At once he turned to look at Athanase, and detected in his silence the signs of profound concentration of some kind. In another moment the young man's glance at Mile. Cormon's figure, which sufficiently resembled a pair of regimental kettledrums, shot a sudden light across the Cheva- lier's brain. By that gleam he could read the whole past.

"Egad !" he said to himself, "what a slap in the face I have laid myself out to get !"

He went across to offer his arm to Mile. Cormon, so that he might afterwards take her in to dinner. She regarded the Chevalier with respectful esteem ; for, in truth, with his name and position in the aristocratic constellations of the province, he was one of the most brilliant ornaments of her salon. In her heart of hearts, she had longed to be Mme. de Valois at any time during the past twelve years. The name was like a branch for the swarming thoughts of her brain to cling about — he fulfilled ail her ideals as to the birth, quality, and ex- ternals of an eligible man. But while the Chevalier de Valois was the choice of heart and brain and social ambition, the elderly ruin, curled though he was like a St. John of a proces- sion-day, filled Mile. Cormon with dismay; the heiress saw nothing but the noble ; the woman could not think of him as a husband. The Chevalier's affectation of indifference to mar- riage, and still more his unimpeachable character in a house- ful of work-girls, had seriously injured him, contrary to his own expectations. The man of quality, so clear-sighted in the matter of the annuity, miscalculated on this subject; and Mile. Cormon herself was not aware that her private reflec- tions upon the too well-conducted Chevalier might have been translated by the remark, "What a pity that he is not a little bit of a rake !"

Students of human nature have remarked these leanings of the saint towards the sinner, and wondered at a taste so little in accordance, as they imagine, with Christian virtue. But, to

r TOWN

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resembled a pair o light across the Cheva could read the whole past.

p in the face I hav

to Mile. Cormon, so tl n to dinner. She regards for, in truth, with his ostellations of the provinc( -naments of her sale-: (:d to be Mme. de Val<

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d seriously injured him, contrary to his

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'■ ffro«o loanin:. at a taste so little Christian virtue. But, to

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 71

go no further, what nobler destiny for a virtuous woman than the task of cleansing, after the manner of charcoal, the turbid waters of vice? How is it that nobody has seen that these generous creatures, confined by their principles to strict con- jugal fidelity, must naturally desire a mate of great practical experience ? A reformed rake makes the best husband. And so it came to pass that the poor spinster must sigh over the chosen vessel, offered her as it were in two pieces. Heaven alone could weld the Chevalier de Yalois and du Bousquier in one.

If the significance of the few words exchanged between the Chevalier and Mile. Cormon is to be properly understood, it is necessary to put other matters before the reader. Two very serious questions were dividing Alengon into two camps, and, moreover, du Bousquier was mixed up in both affairs in some mysterious way. The first of these debates concerned the cure. He had taken the oath of allegiance in the time of the Revolu- tion, and now was living down orthodox prejudices by setting an example of the loftiest goodness. He was a Cheverus on a smaller scale, and so much was he appreciated, that when he died the whole town wept for him. Mile. Cormon and the Abbe de Sponde belonged, however, to the minority, to the Church sublime in its orthodoxy, a section which was to the Court of Rome as the Ultras were shortly to be to the Court of Louis XVIII. The Abbe, in particular, declined to recog- nize the Church that had submitted to force and made terms with the Constitutionnels. So the cure was never seen in the salon of the Maison Cormon, and the sympathies of its fre- quenters were with the officiating priest of St. Leonard's, the aristocratic church in Alengon. Du Bousquier, that rabid Lib- eral under a Royalist's skin, knew how necessary it is to find standards to rally the discontented, who form, as it were, the back-shop of every opposition, and therefore he had already enlisted the sympathies of the trading classes for the cure.

Now for the second affair. The same blunt diplomatist was the secret instigator of a scheme for building a theatre, an idea which had only lately sprouted in Alengon. Du Bous-

78 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

quier's zealots knew not their Mahomet, but they were more ardent in their defence of what they believed to be their own plan. Athanase was one of the very hottest of the partisans in favor of the theatre ; in the mayor's office for several days past he had been pleading for the cause which all the younger men had taken up.

To return to the Chevalier. He offered his arm to 3Ille. Cormon, who thanked him with a radiant glance for this at- tention. For all answer the Chevalier indicated Athanase by a meaning look.

"Mademoiselle," he began, "as you have such well-balanced judgment in matters of social convention, and as that young man is related to you in some way "

"Very distantly," she broke in.

"Ought you not to use the influence which you possess with him and his mother to prevent him from going utterly to the bad? He is not very religious as it is; he defends that per- jured priest ; but that is nothing. It is a much more serious matter ; is he not plunging thoughtlessly into opposition with- out realizing how his conduct may affect his prospects? He is scheming to build this theatre; he is the dupe of that Ee- publican in disguise, du Bousquier "

"Dear me, M. de Valois, his mother tells me that he is so clever, and he has not a word to say for himself; he always stands planted before you like a statute "

"Of limitations," cried the registrar. "I caught that fly- ing.— I present my devoars to the Chevalier de Valois," he added, saluting the latter with the exaggeration of Henri Monnier as "Joseph Prudhomme," an admirable type of the class to which M. du Coudrai belonged.

M. de Valois, in return, gave him the abbreviated patroniz- ing nod of a noble standing on his dignity ; then he drew Mile. Cormon further along the terrace by the distance of several flower-pots, to make the registrar understand that he did not wish to be overheard.

Then, lowering his voice, he bent to say in Mile. Cormon's ear: "How can you expect that lads educated in these de-

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 79

testable Imperial Lyceums should have any ideas? Great ideas and a lofty love can only come of right courses and nobleness of life. It is not difficult to foresee, from the look of the poor fellow, that he will be weak in his intellect and come to a miserable end. See how pale and haggard he looks !"

"His mother says that he works far too hard," she replied innocently. "He spends his nights, think of it! in reading books and writing. What good can it possibly do a young man's prospects to sit up writing at night ?"

"Why, it exhausts him/' said the Chevalier, trying to bring the lady's thoughts back to the point, which was to disgust her with Athanase. "The things that went on in those Im- perial Lyceums were something really shocking."

"Oh yes," said the simple lady. "Did they not make them walk out with drums in front? The masters had no more religion than heathens; and they put them in uniform, poor boys, exactly as if they had been soldiers. What notions !"

"And see what comes of it," continued the Chevalier, indi- cating Athanase. "In my time, where was the young man that could not look a pretty woman in the face? Now, he lowers his eyes as soon as he sees you. That young man alarms me, because I am interested in him. Tell him not to intrigue with Bonapartists, as he is doing, to build this theatre ; if these little youngsters do not raise an insurrection and demand it (for insurrection and constitution, to my mind, are two words for the same thing), the authorities will build it. And tell his mother to look after him."

"Oh, she will not allow him to see these half-pay people or to keep low company, I am sure. I will speak to him about it," said Mile. Cormon; "he might lose his situation at the mayor's office. And then what would they do, he and his mother? It makes you shudder."

As M. de Talleyrand said of his wife, so said the Cheva- lier within himself at that moment, as he looked at the lady :

"If there is a stupider woman, I should like to see her. On the honor of a gentleman, if virtue makes a woman so stupid vol. 7— 2S

80 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

as this, is it not a vice? And yet, what an adorable wife she would make for a man of my age ! What principle ! What ignorance of life !"

Please to bear in mind that these remarks were addressed to the Princess Goritza during the manipulation of a pinch of snuff.

"Mme. Granson felt instinctively that the Chevalier was talking of Athanase. In her eagerness to know what he had been saying, she followed Mile. Cormon, who walked up to the young man in question, putting out six feet of dignity in front: but at that very moment Jacquelin announced that "Mademoiselle was served," and the mistress of the house shot an appealing glance at the Chevalier. But the gallant reg- istrar of mortgages was beginning to see a something in M. do Valois' manner, a glimpse of the barrier which the noblesse were about to raise between themselves and the bourgeoisie; so, delighted with a chance to cut out the Chevalier, he crooked his arm, and Mile. Cormon was obliged to take it. M. de Valois, from motives of policy, fastened upon Mme. Granson.

"Mile. Cormon takes the liveliest interest in your dear Athanase, my dear lady," he said, as they slowly followed in the wake of the other guests, "but that interest is falling off through your son's fault. He is lax and Liberal in his opin- ions ; he is agitating for this theatre ; he is mixed up with the Bonapartists ; he takes the part of the Constitutionnel cure. This line of conduct may cost him his situation. You know how carefully his Majesty's government is weeding the service. If your dear Athanase is once cashiered, where will he find employment ? He must not get into bad odor with the author- ities."

"Oh, M. le Chevalier," cried the poor startled mother, "what do I not owe you for telling me this ! You are right ; my boy is a tool in the hands of a bad set ; I will open his eyes to his position."

It was long since the Chevalier had sounded Athanase's character at a glance. He saw in the depths of the young man's nature the scarcely malleable material of Eepublican

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 81

convictions ; a lad at that age will sacrifice everything for such ideas if he is smitten with the word Liberty, that so vague, so little comprehended word which is like a standard of revolt for those at the bottom of the wheel for whom revolt means revenge. Athanase was sure to stick to his opinions, for he had woven them, with his artist's sorrows and his embittered views of the social framework, into his political creed. He was ready to sacrifice his future at the outset for these opinions, not knowing that he, like all men of real ability, would have seen reason to modify them by the time he reached the age of six-and-thirty, when a man has formed his own conclusions of life, with its intricate relations and interde- pendences. If Athanase was faithful to the opposition in Alengon, he would fall into disgrace with Mile. Cormon. Thus far the Chevalier saw clearly.

And so this little town, so peaceful in appearance, was to the full as much agitated internally as any congress of diplomates, when craft and guile and passion and self-interest are met to discuss the weightiest questions between empire and em- pire.

Meanwhile the guests gathered about the table were eating their way through the first course as people eat in the prov- inces, without a blush for an honest appetite; whereas, in Paris, it would appear that our jaws are controlled by sump- tuary edicts which deliberately set the laws of anatomy at de- fiance. We eat with the tips of our teeth in Paris, we filch the pleasures of the table, but in the provinces things are taken more naturally; possibly existence centres a little too much about the great and universal method of maintenance to which God condemns all his creatures. It was at the end of the first course that Mile. Cormon brought out the most celebrated of all her conversational cues; it was talked of for two years afterwards; it is quoted even now, indeed, in the sub-bour- geois strata of Alencon whenever her marriage is under dis- cussion. Over the last entree but one, the conversation waxed lively and wordy, turning, as might have been expected, upon the affair of the theatre and the cure. In the first enthusiasm

82 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

of Royalism in 1816, those extremists, who were afterwards called les Jesuites du pays, were for expelling the Abb6 Francois from his cure. M. de Valois suspected du Bousquier of supporting the priest and instigating the intrigues ; at any rate, the noble Chevalier piled the burdens on du Bousquier's back with his wonted skill ; and du Bousquier, being unrepre- sented by counsel, was condemned and put in the pillory. Among those present, Athanase was the only person sufficient- ly frank to stand up for the absent, and he felt that he was not in a position to bring out his ideas before these Alengon mag- nates, of whose intellects he had the meanest opinion. Only in the provinces nowadays will you find young men keeping a respectful countenance before people of a certain age with- out daring to have a fling at their elders or to contradict them too flatly. To resume. On the advent of some delicious canards aux olives, the conversation first decidedly flagged, and then suddenly dropped dead. Mile. Cormon, emulous of her own poultr}', invented another canard in her anxiety to defend du Bousquier, who had been represented as an arch-eoncocter of intrigue, and a man to set mountains fighting.

"For my own part," said she, "I thought that M. du Bous- quier gave his whole attention to childish matters."

Under the circumstances, the epigram produced a tre- mendous effect. Mile. Cormon had a great success; she brought the Princess Goritza face downwards on the table. The Chevalier, by no means expecting his Dulcinea to say anything so much to the purpose, could find no words to ex- press his admiration ; he applauded after the Italian fashion, noiselessly, with the tips of his fingers.

"She is adorably witty," he said, turning to Mme. Granson. "I have always said that she would unmask her batteries some day."

"But when you know her very well, she is charming," said the widow.

"All women, madame, have esprit when you know them well."

When the Homeric laughter subsided, Mile. Cormon asked

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 83

for an explanation of her success. Then the chorus of scandal grew to a height. Du Bousquier was transformed into a bach- elor Pere Gigogne; it was he who filled the Foundling Hos- pital ; the immorality of his life was laid bare at last ; it was all of a piece with his Paris orgies, and so forth and so forth. Led by the Chevalier de Valois, the cleverest of conductors of this kind of orchestra, the overture was something mag- nificent.

"I do not know/' said he, with much indulgence, "what there could possibly be to prevent a du Bousquier from mar- rying a Mademoiselle Suzanne whatever-it-is — what do you call her ? — Suzette ! I only know the children by sight, though I lodge with Mme. Lardot. If this Suzon is a tall, fine-look- ing forward sort of girl with gray eyes, a slender figure, and little feet — I have not paid much attention to these things, but she seemed to me to be very insolent and very much du Bousquier's superior in the matter of manners. Besides, Suzanne has the nobility of beauty ; from that point of view, she would certainly make a marriage beneath her. The Em- peror Joseph, you know, had the curiosity to go to see the du Barry at Luciennes. He offered her his arm; and when the poor courtesan, overcome by such an honor, hesitated to take it, 'Beauty is always a queen/ said the Emperor. Remark that the Emperor Joseph was an Austrian German," added the Chevalier; "but, believe me, that Germany, which we think of as a very boorish country, is really a land of noble chivalry and fine manners, especially towards Poland and Hungary,

where there are " Here the Chevalier broke off, fearing

to make an allusion to his own happy fortune in the past; he only took up his snuff-box and confided the rest to the Princess, who had smiled on him for thirty-six years.

"The speech was delicately considerate for Louis XV.," said du Ronceret.

"But we are talking of the Emperor Joseph, I believe," re- turned Mile. Cormon, with a little knowing air.

"Mademoiselle," said the Chevalier, seeing the wicked glances exchanged by the President, the registrar, and the

S4 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

notary, "Mme. du Barry was Louis Quinze's Suzanne, a fact known well enough to us scapegraces, but which young ladies are not expected to know. Your ignorance shows that the diamond is flawless. The corruptions of history have not so much as touched you."

At this the Abbe de Sponde looked graciously upon M. de Valois and bent his head in laudatory approval.

"Do you not know history, mademoiselle," asked the regis- trar.

"If you muddle up Louis XV. and Suzanne, how can you expect me to know your history ?" was Mile. Cormon's angelic reply. She was so pleased ! The dish was empty and the con- versation revived to such purpose that everybody was laughing with their mouths full at her last observation.

"Poor young thing!" said the Abbe de Sponde. "When once trouble comes, that love grown divine called charity is as blind as the pagan love, and should see nothing of the causes of the trouble. You are President of the Maternity Societ}', Rose ; this child will need help ; it will not be easy for her to find a husband."

"Poor child !" said Mile. Cormon.

"Is du Bousquier going to marry her, do you suppose ?" asked the President of the Tribunal.

"It would be his duty to do so if he were a decent man,'' said Mme. Granson; "but, really, my dog has better notions of decency "

"And yet Azor is a great forager," put in the registrar, trying a joke this time as a change from a pun.

They were still talking of du Bousquier over the dessert. He was the butt of uncounted playful jests, which grew more and more thunder-charged under the influence of wine. Led off by the registrar, they followed up one pun with another. Du Bousquier's character was now ap-parent; he was not a father of the church, nor a reverend father, nor yet a con- script father, and so on and so on, till the Abbe de Sponde said, "In any case, he is not a foster-father," with a gravity Uiat checked the laughter.

THE JEALOUSIES OP A COUNTRY TOWN 85

"Nor a heavy father," added the Chevalier.

The Church and the aristocracy had descended into the arena of word-play without loss of dignity.

"Hush!" said the registrar, "I can hear du Bousquier's boots creaking; he is in over shoes over boots, and no mis- take."

It nearly always happens that when a man's name is in every one's mouth, he is the last to hear what is said of him ; the whole town may be talking of him, slandering him or cry- ing him down, and if he has no friends to repeat what other people say of him, he is not likely to hear it. So the blame- less du Bousquier, du Bousquier who would fain have been guilty, who wished that Suzanne had not lied to him, was supremely unconscious of all that was taking place. Nobody had spoken to him of Suzanne's revelations ; for that matter, everybody thought it indiscreet to ask questions about the affair, when the man most concerned sometimes possesses se- crets which compel him to keep silence. So when people ad- journed for coffee to the drawing-room, where several evening visitors were already assembled, du Bousquier wore an irre- sistible and slightly fatuous air.

Mile. Cormon, counseled by confusion, dared not look towards the terrible seducer. She took possession of Atha- nase and administered a lecture, bringing out the oddest as- sortment of the commonplaces of Royalist doctrines and edify- ing truisms. As the unlucky poet had no snuff-box with a por- trait of a princess on the lid to sustain him under the shower- bath of foolish utterances, it was with a vacant expression that he heard his adored lady. His eyes were fixed on that enor- mous bust, which maintained the absolute repose character- istic of great masses. Desire wrought a kind of intoxication in him. The old maid's thin, shrill voice became low music for his ears ; her platitudes were fraught with ideas.

Love is an utterer of false coin ; he is always at work trans- forming common copper into gold louis ; sometimes, also, he makes his seeming halfpence of fine gold.

"Well, Athanase, will you promise me ?"

80 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

The final phrase struck on the young man's ear; he woke with a start from a blissful dream.

"What, mademoiselle ?" returned he.

Mile. Cormon rose abruptly and glanced across at du Bous- quier. At that moment he looked like the brawny fabulous deity whose likeness you behold upon Eepublican three-franc pieces. She went over to Mme. Granson and said in a confi- dential tone:

"Your son is weak in his intellect, my poor friend. That lyceum has been the ruin of him," she added, recollecting how the Chevalier de Yalois had insisted on the bad education given in those institutions.

Here was a thunderbolt! Poor Athanase had had his chance of flinging fire upon the dried stems heaped up in the old maid's heart, and he had not known it ! If he had but listened to her, he might have made her understand; for in Mile. Cormon's present highly-wrought mood a word would have been enough, but the very force of the stupefying crav- ings of love-sick youth had spoiled his chances ; so sometimes a child full of life kills himself through ignorance.

"What can you have been saying to Mile. Cormon ?" asked his mother.

"Nothing."

"Nothing? — I will have this cleared up," she said, and put off serious business to the morrow; du Bousquier was hopelessly lost, she thought, and the speech troubled her very little.

Soon the four card-tables received their complement of players. Four persons sat down to piquet, the most expensive amusement of the evening, over which a good deal of money changed hands. M. Choisnel, the attorney for the crown, and a couple of ladies went to the red-lacquered cabinet for a game of tric-trac. The candles in the wall-sconces were lighted, and then the flower of Mile. Cormon's set blossomed out about the fire, on the settees, and about the tables. Each new couple, on entering the room, made the same remark to Mile. Cormon, "So you are going to the Prebaudet to-morrow?"

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 87

"Yes, I really must," she said, in answer to each.

All through the evening the hostess wore a preoccupied air. Mme. Granson was the first to see that she was not at all like herself. Mile. Cormon was thinking.

"What are you thinking about, cousin?" Mme. Gran- son asked at last, finding her sitting in the boudoir.

"I am thinking of that poor girl. Am I not patroness of the Maternity Society? I will go now to find ten crowns for

you."

"Ten crowns!" exclaimed Mme. Granson. "Why, you have never given so much to any one before !"

"But, my dear, it is so natural to have a child."

This improper cry from the heart struck the treasurer of the Maternity Society dumb from sheer astonishment. Du Bousquier had actually gone up in Mile. Cormon's opinion !

"Really," began Mme. Granson, "du Bousquier is not merely a monster — he is a villain into the bargain. When a man has spoiled somebody else's life, it is his duty surely to make amends. It should be his part rather than ours to res- cue this young person; and when all comes to all, she is a bad girl, it seems to me, for there are better men in Alengon than that cynic of a du Bousquier. A girl must be shameless indeed to have anything to do with him."

"Cynic? Your son, dear, teaches you Latin words that are quite beyond me. Certainly I do not want to make excuses for M. du Bousquier; but explain to me why it is immoral for a woman to prefer one man to another ?"

"Dear cousin, suppose now that you were to marry my Athanase; there would be nothing but what was very natural in that. He is young and good-looking ; he has a future before him; Alencon will be proud of him some day. But — every one would think that you took such a young man as your husband for the sake of greater conjugal felicity. Slanderous tongues would say that you were making a sufficient provision of bliss for yourself. There would be jealous women to bring charges of depravity against you. But what would it matter to you? You would be dearly loved — loved sincerely. If

88 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

Athanase seemed to you to be weak of intellect, my dear, it is because he has too many ideas. Extremes meet. He is as clean in his life as a girl of fifteen ; he has not wallowed in the pol- lutions of Paris. . . . Well, now, change the terms, as my poor husband used to say. It is relatively just the same situation as du Bousquier's and Suzanne's. But what would be slander in your case is true in every way of du Bousquier. Now do you understand ?"

"No more than if you were talking Greek," said Kose Cormon, opening wide eyes and exerting all the powers of her understanding.

"Well, then, cousin, since one must put dots on all the t's, it is quite out of the question that Suzanne should love du Bousquier. And when the heart counts for nothing in such an affair "

"Why, really, cousin, how should people love if not with their hearts ?"

At this Mme. Granson thought within herself, as the Cheva- lier had thought :

"The poor cousin is too innocent by far. This goes beyond

the permissible " Aloud she said, "Dear girl, it seems to

me that a child is not conceived of spirit alone/'

"Why, yes, dear, for the Holy Virgin "

"But, my dear, good girl, du Bousquier is not the Holy Ghost."

"That is true," returned the spinster ; "he is a man — a man dangerous enough for his friends to recommend him strongly to marry."

"You, cousin, might bring that about "

"Oh, how?" cried the spinster, with a glow of Christian! charity.

"Decline to receive him until he takes a wife. For the sake; of religion and morality, you ought to make an example of' him under the circumstances."

"We will talk of this again, dear Mme. Granson, when l| come back from the Prebaudet. I will ask advice of my unclei and the Abbe* Couturier," and Mile. Cormon went back toi

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 89

the large drawing-room. The liveliest hour of the evening had begun.

The lights, the groups of well-dressed women, the serious and magisterial air of the assembly, filled Mile. Cormon with pride in the aristocratic appearance of the rooms, a pride in which her guests all shared. There were plenty of people who thought that the finest company of Paris itself was no finer. At that moment du Bousquier, playing a rubber with M. de Valois and two elderly ladies, Mme. du Coudrai and Mme. du Eonceret, was the object of suppressed curiosity. Several women came up on the pretext of watching the game, and gave him such odd, albeit furtive, glances that the old bach- elor at last began to think that there must be something amiss with his appearance.

"Can it be that my toupet is askew?" he asked himself. And he felt that all-absorbing uneasiness to which the elderly bachelor is peculiarly subject. A blunder gave him an excuse for leaving the table at the end of the seventh rubber.

"I cannot touch a card but I lose," he said ; "I am decidedly too unlucky at cards."

"You are lucky in other respects," said the Chevalier, with a knowing look. Naturally, the joke made the round of the room, and every one exclaimed over the exquisite breeding shown by the Prince Talleyrand of Alengon.

"There is no one like M. de Valois for saying such things," said the niece of the cure of St. Leonard's.

Du Bousquier went up to the narrow mirror above "The Deserter," but he could detect nothing unusual.

Towards ten o'clock, after innumerable repetitions of the same phrase with every possible variation, the long ante- chamber began to fill with visitors preparing to embark ; Mile. Cormon convoying a few favored guests as far as the perron for a farewell embrace. Knots of guests took their departure, some in the direction of the Brittany road and the chateau, and others turning toward the quarter by the Sarthe. And then began the exchange of remarks with which the streets had echoed at the same hour for a score of years. There was the inevitable, "Mile. Cormon looked very well this evening."

90 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

"Mile. Corinon ? She looked strange, I thought."

"How the Abbe stoops, poor man! And how he goes to sleep — did you see? He never knows where the cards are now ; his mind wanders."

"We shall be very sorry to lose him."

"It is a fine night. We shall have a fine day to-morrow."

"Fine weather for the apples to set."

"You beat us to-night; you always do when M. de Valois is your partner."

"Then how much did he win ?"

"To-night ? Why, he won three or four francs. He never ) loses."

"Faith, no. There are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, you know; at that rate, whist is as good as a farm: for him."

"Oh ! what bad luck we had to-night !"

"You are very fortunate, monsieur and madame, here you1 are at your own doorstep, while we have half the town to. cross."

"I do not pity you ; you could keep a carriage if you liked,' you need not go afoot."

"Ah! monsieur, we have a daughter to marry (that means one wheel), and a son to keep in Paris, and that takes the other."

"Are you still determined to make a magistrate of him ?"

"What can one do? You must do something with a boy,, and besides, it is no disgrace to serve the King."

Sometimes a discussion on cider or flax was continued on the way, the very same things being said at the same season year after year. If any observer of human nature had lived in that particular street, their conversation would have sup- plied him with an almanac. At this moment, however, the talk was of a decidedly Rabelaisian turn; for du Bousquier, walking on ahead by himself, was humming the well-known tune "Femme sensible, entends-tu le ramage f without a sus- picion of its appropriateness. Some of the party held that du Bousquier was uncommonly long-headed, and that people

THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN 91

judged him unjustly. President du Eonceret inclined towards this view since he had been confirmed in his post by a new royal decree. The rest regarded the forage-contractor as a dangerous man of lax morals, of whom anything might be ex- pected. In the provinces, as in Paris, public men are very much in the position of the statue in Addison's ingenious fable. The statue was erected at a place where four roads met ; two cavaliers coming up on opposite sides declared, the one that it was white, the other that it was black, until they came to blows, and both of them lying on the ground discov- ered that it was black on one side and white on the other, while a third cavalier coming up to their assistance affirmed that it was red.

When the Chevalier de Valois reached home, he said to himself: "It is time to spread a report that I am going to marry Mile. Cormon. The news shall come from the d'Es- grignon's salon ; it shall go straight to the Bishop's palace at Seez and come back through one of the vicars-general to the cure of St. Leonard's. He will not fail to tell the Abbe Couturier, and in this way Mile. Cormon will receive the shot well under the water-line. The old Marquis d'Esgrignon is sure to ask the Abbe de Sponde to dinner to put a stop to gos- sip which might injure Mile. Cormon if I fail to come for- ward ; or me, if she refuses me. The Abbe shall be well and duly entangled; and after a call from Mile, de Gordes, in the course of which the grandeur and the prospects of the alli- ance will be put before Mile. Cormon, she is not likely to hold out. The Abbe will leave her more than a hundred thousand crowns; and as for her, she must have put by more than a hundred thousand livres by this time ; she has her house, the Prebaudet, and some fifteen thousand livres per annum. One word to my friend the Comte de Fontaine, and I am Mayor of Alengon, and deputy ; then, once seated on the right-hand benches, the way to a peerage is cleared by a well-timed cry of 'Cloture,' or 'Order/ "

When Mme. Granson reached home, she had a warm ex- planation with her son. He could not be made to understand

92 THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN

the connection between his political opinions and his love. It was the first quarrel which had troubled the peace of the poor little household.

Next morning, at nine o'clock, Mile. Cormon, packed into the cariole with Josette by her side, drove up the Eue Saint-