The Muse of the Department

And this was said with such splendid coolness that no one would have dared to laugh at the little man. Only Monsieur Boirouge, the Presiding Judge, remarked:

“In your place, I should not be happy unless I had a daughter.”

“Well, I shall go to Paris before long – ” said the Baron.

In the early part of 1842 Madame de la Baudraye, feeling that she was to Lousteau no more than a reserve in the background, had again sacrificed herself absolutely to secure his comfort; she had resumed her black raiment, but now it was in sign of mourning, for her pleasure was turning to remorse. She was too often put to shame not to feel the weight of the chain, and her mother found her sunk in those moods of meditation into which visions of the future cast unhappy souls in a sort of torpor.

Madame Piedefer, by the advice of her spiritual director, was on the watch for the moment of exhaustion, which the priest told her would inevitably supervene, and then she pleaded in behalf of the children. She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically – in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common sense, the law of social proprieties, family interest – all the mixed elements which, since the Restoration, have been dignified by the mane of Public Morals, out of sheer aversion to the name of the Catholic religion – where this is seconded by a sense of insults a little too offensive; when the fatigue of constant self-sacrifice has almost reached the point of exhaustion; and when, under these circumstances, a too cruel blow – one of those mean acts which a man never lets a woman know of unless he believes himself to be her assured master – puts the crowning touch to her revulsion and disenchantment, the moment has come for the intervention of the friend who undertakes the cure. Madame Piedefer had no great difficulty now in removing the film from her daughter’s eyes.

She sent for Monsieur de Clagny, who completed the work by assuring Madame de la Baudraye that if she would give up Etienne, her husband would allow her to keep the children and to live in Paris, and would restore her to the command of her own fortune.

“And what a life you are leading!” said he. “With care and judgment, and the support of some pious and charitable persons, you may have a salon and conquer a position. Paris is not Sancerre.”

Dinah left it to Monsieur de Clagny to negotiate a reconciliation with the old man.

Monsieur de la Baudraye had sold his wine well, he had sold his wool, he had felled his timber, and, without telling his wife, he had come to Paris to invest two hundred thousand francs in the purchase of a delightful residence in the Rue de l’Arcade, that was being sold in liquidation of an aristocratic House that was in difficulties. He had been a member of the Council for the Department since 1826, and now, paying ten thousand francs in taxes, he was doubly qualified for a peerage under the conditions of the new legislation.

Some time before the elections of 1842 he had put himself forward as candidate unless he were meanwhile called to the Upper House as Peer of France. At the same time, he asked for the title of Count, and for promotion to the higher grade of the Legion of Honor. In the matter of the elections, the dynastic nominations; now, in the event of Monsieur de la Baudraye being won over to the Government, Sancerre would be more than ever a rotten borough of royalism. Monsieur de Clagny, whose talents and modesty were more and more highly appreciated by the authorities, gave Monsieur de la Baudraye his support; he pointed out that by raising this enterprising agriculturist to the peerage, a guarantee would be offered to such important undertakings.

Monsieur de la Baudraye, then, a Count, a Peer of France, and Commander of the Legion of Honor, was vain enough to wish to cut a figure with a wife and handsomely appointed house. – “He wanted to enjoy life,” he said.

He therefore addressed a letter to his wife, dictated by Monsieur de Clagny, begging her to live under his roof and to furnish the house, giving play to the taste of which the evidences, he said, had charmed him at the Chateau d’Anzy. The newly made Count pointed out to his wife that while the interests of their property forbade his leaving Sancerre, the education of their boys required her presence in Paris. The accommodating husband desired Monsieur de Clagny to place sixty thousand francs at the disposal of Madame la Comtesse for the interior decoration of their mansion, requesting that she would have a marble tablet inserted over the gateway with the inscription: Hotel de la Baudraye.

He then accounted to his wife for the money derived from the estate of Silas Piedefer, told her of the investment at four and a half per cent of the eight hundred thousand francs he had brought from New York, and allowed her that income for her expenses, including the education of the children. As he would be compelled to stay in Paris during some part of the session of the House of Peers, he requested his wife to reserve for him a little suite of rooms in an entresol over the kitchens.

“Bless me! why, he is growing young again – a gentleman! – a magnifico! – What will he become next? It is quite alarming,” said Madame de la Baudraye.

“He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty,” replied the lawyer.

The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had turned her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the Chamarolles’ school.

“I am a countess,” said Dinah to herself. “I shall have the peer’s blue hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary world in my drawing-room – and I will look at her!” – And it was this little triumph that told with all its weight at the moment of her rehabilitation, as the world’s contempt had of old weighed on her happiness.

One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:

“I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the pleasure of your company at the Rocher de Cancale.”

She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy manners assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave of his least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months past.

“Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night,” said he —une premiere, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.

“Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye,” said Dinah gravely. “I do not mean to understand such a word as figged out.”

“Didine a rebel!” said he, putting his arm round her waist.

“There is no such person as Didine; you have killed her, my dear,” she replied, releasing herself. “I am taking you to the first performance of Madame la Comtesse de la Baudraye.”

“It is true, then, that our insect is a peer of France?”

“The nomination is to be gazetted in this evening’s Moniteur, as I am told by Monsieur de Clagny, who is promoted to the Court of Appeal.”

“Well, it is quite right,” said the journalist. “The entomology of society ought to be represented in the Upper House.”

“My friend, we are parting for ever,” said Madame de la Baudraye, trying to control the trembling of her voice. “I have dismissed the two servants. When you go in, you will find the house in order, and no debts. I shall always feel a mother’s affection for you, but in secret. Let us part calmly, without a fuss, like decent people.

“Have you had a fault to find with my conduct during the past six years?”

“None, but that you have spoiled my life, and wrecked my prospects,” said he in a hard tone. “You have read Benjamin Constant’s book very diligently; you have even studied the last critique on it; but you have read with a woman’s eyes. Though you have one of those superior intellects which would make a fortune of a poet, you have never dared to take the man’s point of view.

“That book, my dear, is of both sexes. – We agreed that books were male or female, dark or fair. In Adolphe women see nothing but Ellenore; young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and Adolphe; political men see the whole of social existence. You did not think it necessary to read the soul of Adolphe – any more than your critic indeed, who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my dear, is that he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never can be what he might have been – an ambassador, a minister, a chamberlain, a poet – and rich. He gives up six years of his energy at that stage of his life when a man is ready to submit to the hardships of any apprenticeship – to a petticoat, which he outstrips in the career of ingratitude, for the woman who has thrown over her first lover is certain sooner or later to desert the second. Adolphe is, in fact, a tow-haired German, who has not spirit enough to be false to Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare their Ellenores all ignominious quarreling and reproaches, who say to themselves, ‘I will not talk of what I have sacrificed; I will not for ever be showing the stump of my wrist to let that incarnate selfishness I have made my queen,’ as Ramorny does in The Fair Maid of Perth. But men like that, my dear, get cast aside.

“Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright, his blighted position. – You, at this moment, are playing both parts. You are suffering from the pangs of having lost your position, and think yourself justified in throwing over a hapless lover whose misfortune it has been that he fancied you so far superior as to understand that, though a man’s heart ought to be true, his sex may be allowed to indulge its caprices.”

“And do you suppose that I shall not make it my business to restore to you all you have lost by me? Be quite easy,” said Madame de la Baudraye, astounded by this attack. “Your Ellenore is not dying; and if God gives her life, if you amend your ways, if you give up courtesans and actresses, we will find you a better match than a Felicie Cardot.”

The two lovers were sullen. Lousteau affected dejection, he aimed at appearing hard and cold; while Dinah, really distressed, listened to the reproaches of her heart.

“Why,” said Lousteau presently, “why not end as we ought to have begun – hide our love from all eyes, and see each other in secret?”

“Never!” cried the new-made Countess, with an icy look. “Do you not comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures? Our feelings seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on earth they are limited by the strength of our physical being. There are some feeble, mean natures which may receive an endless number of wounds and live on; but there are some more highly-tempered souls which snap at last under repeated blows. You have – ”

“Oh! enough!” cried he. “No more copy! Your dissertation is unnecessary, since you can justify yourself by merely saying – ‘I have ceased to love!’”

“What!” she exclaimed in bewilderment. “Is it I who have ceased to love?”

“Certainly. You have calculated that I gave you more trouble, more vexation than pleasure, and you desert your partner – ”

“I desert! – ” cried she, clasping her hands.

“Have not you yourself just said ‘Never’?”

“Well, then, yes! Never,” she repeated vehemently.

This final Never, spoken in the fear of falling once more under Lousteau’s influence, was interpreted by him as the death-warrant of his power, since Dinah remained insensible to his sarcastic scorn.

The journalist could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere, the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could hope for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of tormenting a cockchafer he has killed it, Lousteau shed a tear.

Madame de la Baudraye rushed out of the private room where they had been dining, paid the bill, and fled home to the Rue de l’Arcade, scolding herself and thinking herself a brute.

Dinah, who had made her house a model of comfort, now metamorphosed herself. This double metamorphosis cost thirty thousand francs more than her husband had anticipated.

The fatal accident which in 1842 deprived the House of Orleans of the heir-presumptive having necessitated a meeting of the Chambers in August of that year, little La Baudraye came to present his titles to the Upper House sooner than he had expected, and then saw what his wife had done. He was so much delighted, that he paid the thirty thousand francs without a word, just as he had formerly paid eight thousand for decorating La Baudraye.

On his return from the Luxembourg, where he had been presented according to custom by two of his peers – the Baron de Nucingen and the Marquis de Montriveau – the new Count met the old Duc de Chaulieu, a former creditor, walking along, umbrella in hand, while he himself sat perched in a low chaise on which his coat-of-arms was resplendent, with the motto, Deo sic patet fides et hominibus. This contrast filled his heart with a large draught of the balm on which the middle class has been getting drunk ever since 1840.

Madame de la Baudraye was shocked to see her husband improved and looking better than on the day of his marriage. The little dwarf, full of rapturous delight, at sixty-four triumphed in the life which had so long been denied him; in the family, which his handsome cousin Milaud of Nevers had declared he would never have; and in his wife – who had asked Monsieur and Madame de Clagny to dinner to meet the cure of the parish and his two sponsors to the Chamber of Peers. He petted the children with fatuous delight.

The handsome display on the table met with his approval.

“These are the fleeces of the Berry sheep,” said he, showing Monsieur de Nucingen the dish-covers surmounted by his newly-won coronet. “They are of silver, you see!”

Though consumed by melancholy, which she concealed with the determination of a really superior woman, Dinah was charming, witty, and above all, young again in her court mourning.

“You might declare,” cried La Baudraye to Monsieur de Nucingen with a wave of his hand to his wife, “that the Countess was not yet thirty.”

“Ah, ha! Matame is a voman of dirty!” replied the baron, who was prone to time-honored remarks, which he took to be the small change of conversation.

“In every sense of the words,” replied the Countess. “I am, in fact, five-and-thirty, and mean to set up a little passion – ”

“Oh, yes, my wife ruins me in curiosities and china images – ”

“She started that mania at an early age,” said the Marquis de Montriveau with a smile.

“Yes,” said La Baudraye, with a cold stare at the Marquis, whom he had known at Bourges, “you know that in ‘25, ‘26, and ‘27, she picked a million francs’ worth of treasures. Anzy is a perfect museum.”

“What a cool hand!” thought Monsieur de Clagny, as he saw this little country miser quite on the level of his new position.

But misers have savings of all kinds ready for use.

On the day after the vote on the Regency had passed the Chambers, the little Count went back to Sancerre for the vintage and resumed his old habits.

In the course of that winter, the Comtesse de la Baudraye, with the support of the Attorney-General to the Court of Appeals, tried to form a little circle. Of course, she had an “at home” day, she made a selection among men of mark, receiving none but those of serious purpose and ripe years. She tried to amuse herself by going to the Opera, French and Italian. Twice a week she appeared there with her mother and Madame de Clagny, who was made by her husband to visit Dinah. Still, in spite of her cleverness, her charming manners, her fashionable stylishness, she was never really happy but with her children, on whom she lavished all her disappointed affection.

Worthy Monsieur de Clagny tried to recruit women for the Countess’ circle, and he succeeded; but he was more successful among the advocates of piety than the women of fashion.

“And they bore her!” said he to himself with horror, as he saw his idol matured by grief, pale from remorse, and then, in all the splendor of recovered beauty, restored by a life of luxury and care for her boys. This devoted friend, encouraged in his efforts by her mother and by the cure was full of expedient. Every Wednesday he introduced some celebrity from Germany, England, Italy, or Prussia to his dear Countess; he spoke of her as a quite exceptional woman to people to whom she hardly addressed two words; but she listened to them with such deep attention that they went away fully convinced of her superiority. In Paris, Dinah conquered by silence, as at Sancerre she had conquered by loquacity. Now and then, some smart saying about affairs, or sarcasm on an absurdity, betrayed a woman accustomed to deal with ideas – the woman who, four years since, had given new life to Lousteau’s articles.

This phase was to the poor lawyer’s hapless passion like the late season known as the Indian summer after a sunless year. He affected to be older than he was, to have the right to befriend Dinah without doing her an injury, and kept himself at a distance as though he were young, handsome, and compromising, like a man who has happiness to conceal. He tried to keep his little attentions a profound secret, and the trifling gifts which Dinah showed to every one; he endeavored to suggest a dangerous meaning for his little services.

“He plays at passion,” said the Countess, laughing. She made fun of Monsieur de Clagny to his face, and the lawyer said, “She notices me.”

“I impress that poor man so deeply,” said she to her mother, laughing, “that if I would say Yes, I believe he would say No.”

One evening Monsieur de Clagny and his wife were taking his dear Countess home from the theatre, and she was deeply pensive. They had been to the first performance of Leon Gozlan’s first play, La Main Droite et la Main Gauche (The Right Hand and the Left).

“What are you thinking about?” asked the lawyer, alarmed at his idol’s dejection.

This deep and persistent melancholy, though disguised by the Countess, was a perilous malady for which Monsieur de Clagny knew no remedy; for true love is often clumsy, especially when it is not reciprocated. True love takes its expression from the character. Now, this good man loved after the fashion of Alceste, when Madame de la Baudraye wanted to be loved after the manner of Philinte. The meaner side of love can never get on with the Misanthrope’s loyalty. Thus, Dinah had taken care never to open her heart to this man. How could she confess to him that she sometimes regretted the slough she had left?

She felt a void in this fashionable life; she had no one for whom to dress, or whom to tell of her successes and triumphs. Sometimes the memory of her wretchedness came to her, mingled with memories of consuming joys. She would hate Lousteau for not taking any pains to follow her; she would have liked to get tender or furious letters from him.

Dinah made no reply, so Monsieur de Clagny repeated the question, taking the Countess’ hand and pressing it between his own with devout respect.

“Will you have the right hand or the left?” said she, smiling.

“The left,” said he, “for I suppose you mean the truth or a fib.”

“Well, then, I saw him,” she said, speaking into the lawyer’s ear. “And as I saw him looking so sad, so out of heart, I said to myself, Has he a cigar? Has he any money?”

“If you wish for the truth, I can tell it you,” said the lawyer. “He is living as a husband with Fanny Beaupre. You have forced me to tell you this secret; I should never have told you, for you might have suspected me perhaps of an ungenerous motive.”

Madame de la Baudraye grasped his hand.

“Your husband,” said she to her chaperon, “is one of the rarest souls! – Ah! Why – ”

She shrank into her corner, looking out of the window, but she did not finish her sentence, of which the lawyer could guess the end: “Why had not Lousteau a little of your husband’s generosity of heart?”

This information served, however, to cure Dinah of her melancholy; she threw herself into the whirl of fashion. She wished for success, and she achieved it; still, she did not make much way with women, and found it difficult to get introductions.

In the month of March, Madame Piedefer’s friends the priests and Monsieur de Clagny made a fine stroke by getting Madame de la Baudraye appointed receiver of subscriptions for the great charitable work founded by Madame de Carcado. Then she was commissioned to collect from the Royal Family their donations for the benefit of the sufferers from the earthquake at Guadeloupe. The Marquise d’Espard, to whom Monsieur de Canalis read the list of ladies thus appointed, one evening at the Opera, said, on hearing that of the Countess:

“I have lived a long time in the world, and I can remember nothing finer than the manoeuvres undertaken for the rehabilitation of Madame de la Baudraye.”

In the early spring, which, by some whim of our planets, smiled on Paris in the first week of March in 1843, making the Champs-Elysees green and leafy before Longchamp, Fanny Beaupre’s attache had seen Madame de la Baudraye several times without being seen by her. More than once he was stung to the heart by one of those promptings of jealousy and envy familiar to those who are born and bred provincials, when he beheld his former mistress comfortably ensconced in a handsome carriage, well dressed, with dreamy eyes, and his two little boys, one at each window. He accused himself with all the more virulence because he was waging war with the sharpest poverty of all – poverty unconfessed. Like all essentially light and frivolous natures, he cherished the singular point of honor which consists in never derogating in the eyes of one’s own little public, which makes men on the Bourse commit crimes to escape expulsion from the temple of the goddess Per-cent, and has given some criminals courage enough to perform acts of virtue.

Lousteau dined and breakfasted and smoked as if he were a rich man. Not for an inheritance would he have bought any but the dearest cigars, for himself as well as for the playwright or author with whom he went into the shop. The journalist took his walks abroad in patent leather boots; but he was constantly afraid of an execution on goods which, to use the bailiff’s slang, had already received the last sacrament. Fanny Beaupre had nothing left to pawn, and her salary was pledged to pay her debts. After exhausting every possible advance of pay from newspapers, magazines, and publishers, Etienne knew not of what ink he could churn gold. Gambling-houses, so ruthlessly suppressed, could no longer, as of old, cash I O U’s drawn over the green table by beggary in despair. In short, the journalist was reduced to such extremity that he had just borrowed a hundred francs of the poorest of his friends, Bixiou, from whom he had never yet asked for a franc. What distressed Lousteau was not the fact of owing five thousand francs, but seeing himself bereft of his elegance, and of the furniture purchased at the cost of so many privations, and added to by Madame de la Baudraye.

On April the 3rd, a yellow poster, torn down by the porter after being displayed on the wall, announced the sale of a handsome suite of furniture on the following Saturday, the day fixed for sales under legal authority. Lousteau was taking a walk, smoking cigars, and seeking ideas – for, in Paris, ideas are in the air, they smile on you from a street corner, they splash up with a spurt of mud from under the wheels of a cab! Thus loafing, he had been seeking ideas for articles, and subjects for novels for a month past, and had found nothing but friends who carried him off to dinner or to the play, and who intoxicated his woes, telling him that champagne would inspire him.