Title: The Marriage Contract
Author: Balzac, Honoré de
Language: English
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THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT


By Honore De Balzac



Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley



                             DEDICATION

                             To Rossini.



THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT



CHAPTER I. PRO AND CON


Monsieur de Manerville, the father, was a worthy Norman gentleman,
well known to the Marechael de Richelieu, who married him to one of the
richest heiresses of Bordeaux in the days when the old duke reigned in
Guienne as governor. The Norman then sold the estate he owned in Bessin,
and became a Gascon, allured by the beauty of the chateau de Lanstrac,
a delightful residence owned by his wife. During the last days of the
reign of Louis XV., he bought the post of major of the Gate Guards, and
lived till 1813, having by great good luck escaped the dangers of the
Revolution in the following manner.

Toward the close of the year, 1790, he went to Martinque, where his wife
had interests, leaving the management of his property in Gascogne to an
honest man, a notary’s clerk, named Mathias, who was inclined to--or
at any rate did--give into the new ideas. On his return the Comte de
Manerville found his possessions intact and well-managed. This sound

Madame de Manerville died in 1810. Having learned the importance of
worldly goods through the dissipations of his youth, and, giving them,
like many another old man, a higher place than they really hold in life,
Monsieur de Manerville became increasingly economical, miserly, and
sordid. Without reflecting that the avarice of parents prepares the way
for the prodigalities of children, he allowed almost nothing to his son,
although that son was an only child.

Paul de Manerville, coming home from the college of Vendome in 1810,
lived under close paternal discipline for three years. The tyranny by
which the old man of seventy oppressed his heir influenced, necessarily,
a heart and a character which were not yet formed. Paul, the son,
without lacking the physical courage which is vital in the air of
Gascony, dared not struggle against his father, and consequently lost
that faculty of resistance which begets moral courage. His thwarted
feelings were driven to the depths of his heart, where they remained
without expression; later, when he felt them to be out of harmony with
the maxims of the world, he could only think rightly and act mistakenly.
He was capable of fighting for a mere word or look, yet he trembled at
the thought of dismissing a servant,--his timidity showing itself in
those contests only which required a persistent will. Capable of doing
great things to fly from persecution, he would never have prevented it
by systematic opposition, nor have faced it with the steady employment
of force of will. Timid in thought, bold in actions, he long preserved
that inward simplicity which makes a man the dupe and the voluntary
victim of things against which certain souls hesitate to revolt,
preferring to endure them rather than complain. He was, in point of
fact, imprisoned by his father’s old mansion, for he had not enough
money to consort with young men; he envied their pleasures while unable
to share them.

The old gentleman took him every evening, in an old carriage drawn
by ill-harnessed old horses, attended by ill-dressed old servants, to
royalist houses, where he met a society composed of the relics of the
parliamentary nobility and the martial nobility. These two nobilities
coalescing after the Revolution, had now transformed themselves into
a landed aristocracy. Crushed by the vast and swelling fortunes of the
maritime cities, this Faubourg Saint-Germain of Bordeaux responded
by lofty disdain to the sumptuous displays of commerce, government
administrations, and the military. Too young to understand social
distinctions and the necessities underlying the apparent assumption
which they create, Paul was bored to death among these ancients, unaware
that the connections of his youth would eventually secure to him that
aristocratic pre-eminence which Frenchmen will forever desire.

He found some slight compensations for the dulness of these evenings in
certain manual exercises which always delight young men, and which his
father enjoined upon him. The old gentleman considered that to know the
art of fencing and the use of arms, to ride well on horseback, to play
tennis, to acquire good manners,--in short, to possess all the frivolous
accomplishments of the old nobility,--made a young man of the present
day a finished gentleman. Accordingly, Paul took a fencing-lesson every
morning, went to the riding-school, and practised in a pistol-gallery.
The rest of his time was spent in reading novels, for his father would
never have allowed the more abstruse studies now considered necessary to
finish an education.

So monotonous a life would soon have killed the poor youth if the death
of the old man had not delivered him from this tyranny at the moment
when it was becoming intolerable. Paul found himself in possession of
considerable capital, accumulated by his father’s avarice, together with
landed estates in the best possible condition. But he now held Bordeaux
in horror; neither did he like Lanstrac, where his father had taken him
to spend the summers, employing his whole time from morning till night
in hunting.

As soon as the estate was fairly settled, the young heir, eager for
enjoyment, bought consols with his capital, left the management of the
landed property to old Mathias, his father’s notary, and spent the next
six years away from Bordeaux. At first he was attached to the French
embassy at Naples; after that he was secretary of legation at Madrid,
and then in London,--making in this way the tour of Europe.

After seeing the world and life, after losing several illusions, after
dissipating all the loose capital which his father had amassed, there
came a time when, in order to continue his way of life, Paul was forced
to draw upon the territorial revenues which his notary was laying by. At
this critical moment, seized by one of the so-called virtuous impulses,
he determined to leave Paris, return to Bordeaux, regulate his affairs,
lead the life of a country gentleman at Lanstrac, improve his property,
marry, and become, in the end, a deputy.

Paul was a count; nobility was once more of matrimonial value; he could,
and he ought to make a good marriage. While many women desire a title,
many others like to marry a man to whom a knowledge of life is familiar.
Now Paul had acquired, in exchange for the sum of seven hundred thousand
francs squandered in six years, that possession, which cannot be bought
and is practically of more value than gold and silver; a knowledge
which exacts long study, probation, examinations, friends, enemies,
acquaintances, certain manners, elegance of form and demeanor, a
graceful and euphonious name,--a knowledge, moreover, which means
many love-affairs, duels, bets lost on a race-course, disillusions,
deceptions, annoyances, toils, and a vast variety of undigested
pleasures. In short, he had become what is called elegant. But in spite
of his mad extravagance he had never made himself a mere fashionable
man. In the burlesque army of men of the world, the man of fashion holds
the place of a marshal of France, the man of elegance is the equivalent
of a lieutenant-general. Paul enjoyed his lesser reputation,
of elegance, and knew well how to sustain it. His servants were
well-dressed, his equipages were cited, his suppers had a certain vogue;
in short, his bachelor establishment was counted among the seven or
eight whose splendor equalled that of the finest houses in Paris.

But--he had not caused the wretchedness of any woman; he gambled without
losing; his luck was not notorious; he was far too upright to deceive
or mislead any one, no matter who, even a wanton; never did he leave
his billets-doux lying about, and he possessed no coffer or desk for
love-letters which his friends were at liberty to read while he tied
his cravat or trimmed his beard. Moreover, not willing to dip into his
Guienne property, he had not that bold extravagance which leads to great
strokes and calls attention at any cost to the proceedings of a young
man. Neither did he borrow money, but he had the folly to lend to
friends, who then deserted him and spoke of him no more either for good
or evil. He seemed to have regulated his dissipations methodically. The
secret of his character lay in his father’s tyranny, which had made him,
as it were, a social mongrel.

So, one morning, he said to a friend named de Marsay, who afterwards
became celebrated:--

“My dear fellow, life has a meaning.”

“You must be twenty-seven years of age before you can find it out,”
 replied de Marsay, laughing.

“Well, I am twenty-seven; and precisely because I am twenty-seven I mean
to live the life of a country gentleman at Lanstrac. I’ll transport
my belongings to Bordeaux into my father’s old mansion, and I’ll spend
three months of the year in Paris in this house, which I shall keep.”

“Will you marry?”

“I will marry.”

“I’m your friend, as you know, my old Paul,” said de Marsay, after a
moment’s silence, “and I say to you: settle down into a worthy father
and husband and you’ll be ridiculous for the rest of your days. If you
could be happy and ridiculous, the thing might be thought of; but
you will not be happy. You haven’t a strong enough wrist to drive a
household. I’ll do you justice and say you are a perfect horseman; no
one knows as well as you how to pick up or thrown down the reins, and
make a horse prance, and sit firm to the saddle. But, my dear fellow,
marriage is another thing. I see you now, led along at a slapping
pace by Madame la Comtesse de Manerville, going whither you would not,
oftener at a gallop than a trot, and presently unhorsed!--yes, unhorsed
into a ditch and your legs broken. Listen to me. You still have some
forty-odd thousand francs a year from your property in the Gironde.
Good. Take your horses and servants and furnish your house in Bordeaux;
you can be king of Bordeaux, you can promulgate there the edicts that
we put forth in Paris; you can be the correspondent of our stupidities.
Very good. Play the rake in the provinces; better still, commit follies;
follies may win you celebrity. But--don’t marry. Who marries now-a-days?
Only merchants, for the sake of their capital, or to be two to drag the
cart; only peasants who want to produce children to work for them; only
brokers and notaries who want a wife’s ‘dot’ to pay for their practice;
only miserable kings who are forced to continue their miserable
dynasties. But we are exempt from the pack, and you want to shoulder it!
And why DO you want to marry? You ought to give your best friend
your reasons. In the first place, if you marry an heiress as rich as
yourself, eighty thousand francs a year for two is not the same thing as
forty thousand francs a year for one, because the two are soon three or
four when the children come. You haven’t surely any love for that silly
race of Manerville which would only hamper you? Are you ignorant of what
a father and mother have to be? Marriage, my old Paul, is the silliest
of all the social immolations; our children alone profit by it, and
don’t know its price until their horses are nibbling the flowers on our
grave. Do you regret your father, that old tyrant who made your first
years wretched? How can you be sure that your children will love you?
The very care you take of their education, your precautions for their
happiness, your necessary sternness will lessen their affection.
Children love a weak or a prodigal father, whom they will despise in
after years. You’ll live betwixt fear and contempt. No man is a good
head of a family merely because he wants to be. Look round on all our
friends and name to me one whom you would like to have for a son. We
have known a good many who dishonor their names. Children, my dear Paul,
are the most difficult kind of merchandise to take care of. Yours, you
think, will be angels; well, so be it! Have you ever sounded the gulf
which lies between the lives of a bachelor and a married man? Listen. As
a bachelor you can say to yourself: ‘I shall never exhibit more than
a certain amount of the ridiculous; the public will think of me what
I choose it to think.’ Married, you’ll drop into the infinitude of the
ridiculous! Bachelor, you can make your own happiness; you enjoy some
to-day, you do without it to-morrow; married, you must take it as it
comes; and the day you want it you will have to go without it. Marry,
and you’ll grow a blockhead; you’ll calculate dowries; you’ll talk
morality, public and religious; you’ll think young men immoral and
dangerous; in short, you’ll become a social academician. It’s pitiable!
The old bachelor whose property the heirs are waiting for, who fights
to his last breath with his nurse for a spoonful of drink, is blest in
comparison with a married man. I’m not speaking of all that will
happen to annoy, bore, irritate, coerce, oppose, tyrannize, narcotize,
paralyze, and idiotize a man in marriage, in that struggle of two beings
always in one another’s presence, bound forever, who have coupled each
other under the strange impression that they were suited. No, to tell
you those things would be merely a repetition of Boileau, and we know
him by heart. Still, I’ll forgive your absurd idea if you will promise
me to marry “en grand seigneur”; to entail your property; to have two
legitimate children, to give your wife a house and household absolutely
distinct from yours; to meet her only in society, and never to return
from a journey without sending her a courier to announce it. Two hundred
thousand francs a year will suffice for such a life and your antecedents
will enable you to marry some rich English woman hungry for a title.
That’s an aristocratic life which seems to me thoroughly French; the
only life in which we can retain the respect and friendship of a woman;
the only life which distinguishes a man from the present crowd,--in
short, the only life for which a young man should even think of
resigning his bachelor blessings. Thus established, the Comte de
Manerville may advise his epoch, place himself above the world, and be
nothing less than a minister or an ambassador. Ridicule can never touch
him; he has gained the social advantages of marriage while keeping all
the privileges of a bachelor.”

“But, my good friend, I am not de Marsay; I am plainly, as you yourself
do me the honor to say, Paul de Manerville, worthy father and husband,
deputy of the Centre, possibly peer of France,--a destiny extremely
commonplace; but I am modest and I resign myself.”

“Yes, but your wife,” said the pitiless de Marsay, “will she resign
herself?”

“My wife, my dear fellow, will do as I wish.”

“Ah! my poor friend, is that where you are? Adieu, Paul. Henceforth, I
refuse to respect you. One word more, however, for I cannot agree coldly
to your abdication. Look and see in what the strength of our position
lies. A bachelor with only six thousand francs a year remaining to him
has at least his reputation for elegance and the memory of success.
Well, even that fantastic shadow has enormous value in it. Life still
offers many chances to the unmarried man. Yes, he can aim at anything.
But marriage, Paul, is the social ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no
farther.’ Once married you can never be anything but what you then
are--unless your wife should deign to care for you.”

“But,” said Paul, “you are crushing me down with exceptional theories. I
am tired of living for others; of having horses merely to exhibit them;
of doing all things for the sake of what may be said of them; of wasting
my substance to keep fools from crying out: ‘Dear, dear! Paul is still
driving the same carriage. What has he done with his fortune? Does
he squander it? Does he gamble at the Bourse? No, he’s a millionaire.
Madame such a one is mad about him. He sent to England for a harness
which is certainly the handsomest in all Paris. The four-horse
equipages of Messieurs de Marsay and de Manerville were much noticed
at Longchamps; the harness was perfect’--in short, the thousand silly
things with which a crowd of idiots lead us by the nose. Believe me, my
dear Henri, I admire your power, but I don’t envy it. You know how to
judge of life; you think and act as a statesman; you are able to place
yourself above all ordinary laws, received ideas, adopted conventions,
and acknowledged prejudices; in short, you can grasp the profits of
a situation in which I should find nothing but ill-luck. Your cool,
systematic, possibly true deductions are, to the eyes of the masses,
shockingly immoral. I belong to the masses. I must play my game of life
according to the rules of the society in which I am forced to live.
While putting yourself above all human things on peaks of ice, you still
have feelings; but as for me, I should freeze to death. The life of that
great majority, to which I belong in my commonplace way, is made up
of emotions of which I now have need. Often a man coquets with a dozen
women and obtains none. Then, whatever be his strength, his cleverness,
his knowledge of the world, he undergoes convulsions, in which he is
crushed as between two gates. For my part, I like the peaceful chances
and changes of life; I want that wholesome existence in which we find a
woman always at our side.”

“A trifle indecorous, your marriage!” exclaimed de Marsay.

Paul was not to be put out of countenance, and continued: “Laugh if you
like; I shall feel myself a happy man when my valet enters my room
in the morning and says: ‘Madame is awaiting monsieur for breakfast’;
happier still at night, when I return to find a heart--”

“Altogether indecorous, my dear Paul. You are not yet moral enough to
marry.”

“--a heart in which to confide my interests and my secrets. I wish
to live in such close union with a woman that our affection shall not
depend upon a yes or a no, or be open to the disillusions of love. In
short, I have the necessary courage to become, as you say, a worthy
husband and father. I feel myself fitted for family joys; I wish to put
myself under the conditions prescribed by society; I desire to have a
wife and children.”

“You remind me of a hive of honey-bees! But go your way, you’ll be a
dupe all your life. Ha, ha! you wish to marry to have a wife! In other
words, you wish to solve satisfactorily to your own profit the most
difficult problem invented by those bourgeois morals which were created
by the French Revolution; and, what is more, you mean to begin your
attempt by a life of retirement. Do you think your wife won’t crave the
life you say you despise? Will _she_ be disgusted with it, as you are?
If you won’t accept the noble conjugality just formulated for your
benefit by your friend de Marsay, listen, at any rate, to his final
advice. Remain a bachelor for the next thirteen years; amuse yourself
like a lost soul; then, at forty, on your first attack of gout, marry a
widow of thirty-six. Then you may possibly be happy. If you now take a
young girl to wife, you’ll die a madman.”

“Ah ca! tell me why!” cried Paul, somewhat piqued.

“My dear fellow,” replied de Marsay, “Boileau’s satire against women is
a tissue of poetical commonplaces. Why shouldn’t women have defects? Why
condemn them for having the most obvious thing in human nature? To my
mind, the problem of marriage is not at all at the point where Boileau
puts it. Do you suppose that marriage is the same thing as love, and
that being a man suffices to make a wife love you? Have you gathered
nothing in your boudoir experience but pleasant memories? I tell you
that everything in our bachelor life leads to fatal errors in the
married man unless he is a profound observer of the human heart. In the
happy days of his youth a man, by the caprice of our customs, is always
lucky; he triumphs over women who are all ready to be triumphed over
and who obey their own desires. One thing after another--the obstacles
created by the laws, the sentiments and natural defences of women--all
engender a mutuality of sensations which deceives superficial persons as
to their future relations in marriage, where obstacles no longer exist,
where the wife submits to love instead of permitting it, and frequently
repulses pleasure instead of desiring it. Then, the whole aspect of a
man’s life changes. The bachelor, who is free and without a care, need
never fear repulsion; in marriage, repulsion is almost certain and
irreparable. It may be possible for a lover to make a woman reverse an
unfavorable decision, but such a change, my dear Paul, is the Waterloo
of husbands. Like Napoleon, the husband is thenceforth condemned to
victories which, in spite of their number, do not prevent the first
defeat from crushing him. The woman, so flattered by the perseverance,
so delighted with the ardor of a lover, calls the same things brutality
in a husband. You, who talk of marrying, and who will marry, have you
ever meditated on the Civil Code? I myself have never muddied my feet
in that hovel of commentators, that garret of gossip, called the
Law-school. I have never so much as opened the Code; but I see its
application on the vitals of society. The Code, my dear Paul, makes
woman a ward; it considers her a child, a minor. Now how must we govern
children? By fear. In that one word, Paul, is the curb of the
beast. Now, feel your own pulse! Have you the strength to play the
tyrant,--you, so gentle, so kind a friend, so confiding; you, at whom
I have laughed, but whom I love, and love enough to reveal to you my
science? For this is science. Yes, it proceeds from a science which
the Germans are already calling Anthropology. Ah! if I had not already
solved the mystery of life by pleasure, if I had not a profound
antipathy for those who think instead of act, if I did not despise the
ninnies who are silly enough to believe in the truth of a book, when
the sands of the African deserts are made of the ashes of I know not
how many unknown and pulverized Londons, Romes, Venices, and Parises, I
would write a book on modern marriages made under the influence of the
Christian system, and I’d stick a lantern on that heap of sharp stones
among which lie the votaries of the social ‘multiplicamini.’ But the
question is, Does humanity require even an hour of my time? And besides,
isn’t the more reasonable use of ink that of snaring hearts by writing
love-letters?--Well, shall you bring the Comtesse de Manerville here,
and let us see her?”

“Perhaps,” said Paul.

“We shall still be friends,” said de Marsay.

“If--” replied Paul.

“Don’t be uneasy; we will treat you politely, as Maison-Rouge treated
the English at Fontenoy.”



CHAPTER II. THE PINK OF FASHION


Though the foregoing conversation affected the Comte de Manerville
somewhat, he made it a point of duty to carry out his intentions, and he
returned to Bordeaux during the winter of the year 1821.

The expenses he incurred in restoring and furnishing his family mansion
sustained the reputation for elegance which had preceded him. Introduced
through his former connections to the royalist society of Bordeaux, to
which he belonged as much by his personal opinions as by his name and
fortune, he soon obtained a fashionable pre-eminence. His knowledge
of life, his manners, his Parisian acquirements enchanted the Faubourg
Saint-Germain of Bordeaux. An old marquise made use of a term formerly
in vogue at court to express the flowery beauty of the fops and beaux of
the olden time, whose language and demeanor were social laws: she called
him “the pink of fashion.” The liberal clique caught up the word and
used it satirically as a nickname, while the royalist party continued to
employ it in good faith.

Paul de Manerville acquitted himself gloriously of the obligations
imposed by his flowery title. It happened to him, as to many a mediocre
actor, that the day when the public granted him their full attention he
became, one may almost say, superior. Feeling at his ease, he displayed
the fine qualities which accompanied his defects. His wit had
nothing sharp or bitter in it; his manners were not supercilious; his
intercourse with women expressed the respect they like,--it was neither
too deferential, nor too familiar; his foppery went no farther than a
care for his personal appearance which made him agreeable; he showed
consideration for rank; he allowed young men a certain freedom, to which
his Parisian experience assigned due limits; though skilful with sword
and pistol, he was noted for a feminine gentleness for which others were
grateful. His medium height and plumpness (which had not yet increased
into obesity, an obstacle to personal elegance) did not prevent his
outer man from playing the part of a Bordelais Brummell. A white skin
tinged with the hues of health, handsome hands and feet, blue eyes with
long lashes, black hair, graceful motions, a chest voice which kept to
its middle tones and vibrated in the listener’s heart, harmonized well
with his sobriquet. Paul was indeed that delicate flower which needs
such careful culture, the qualities of which display themselves only in
a moist and suitable soil,--a flower which rough treatment dwarfs, which
the hot sun burns, and a frost lays low. He was one of those men made
to receive happiness, rather than to give it; who have something of the
woman in their nature, wishing to be divined, understood, encouraged; in
short, a man to whom conjugal love ought to come as a providence.

If such a character creates difficulties in private life, it is gracious
and full of attraction for the world. Consequently, Paul had great
success in the narrow social circle of the provinces, where his mind,
always, so to speak, in half-tints, was better appreciated than in
Paris.

The arrangement of his house and the restoration of the chateau de
Lanstrac, where he introduced the comfort and luxury of an English
country-house, absorbed the capital saved by the notary during the
preceding six years. Reduced now to his strict income of forty-odd
thousand a year, he thought himself wise and prudent in so regulating
his household as not to exceed it.

After publicly exhibiting his equipages, entertaining the most
distinguished young men of the place, and giving various hunting parties
on the estate at Lanstrac, Paul saw very plainly that provincial life
would never do without marriage. Too young to employ his time in
miserly occupations, or in trying to interest himself in the speculative
improvements in which provincials sooner or later engage (compelled
thereto by the necessity of establishing their children), he soon felt
the need of that variety of distractions a habit of which becomes
at last the very life of a Parisian. A name to preserve, property to
transmit to heirs, social relations to be created by a household
where the principal families of the neighborhood could assemble, and
a weariness of all irregular connections, were not, however, the
determining reasons of his matrimonial desires. From the time he first
returned to the provinces he had been secretly in love with the queen of
Bordeaux, the great beauty, Mademoiselle Evangelista.

About the beginning of the century, a rich Spaniard, named Evangelista,
established himself in Bordeaux, where his letters of recommendation,
as well as his large fortune, gave him an entrance to the salons of
the nobility. His wife contributed greatly to maintain him in the good
graces of an aristocracy which may perhaps have adopted him in the first
instance merely to pique the society of the class below them. Madame
Evangelista, who belonged to the Casa-Reale, an illustrious family of
Spain, was a Creole, and, like all women served by slaves, she lived as
a great lady, knew nothing of the value of money, repressed no whims,
even the most expensive, finding them ever satisfied by an adoring
husband who generously concealed from her knowledge the running-gear of
the financial machine. Happy in finding her pleased with Bordeaux, where
his interests obliged him to live, the Spaniard bought a house, set up a
household, received in much style, and gave many proofs of possessing a
fine taste in all things. Thus, from 1800 to 1812, Monsieur and Madame
Evangelista were objects of great interest to the community of Bordeaux.

The Spaniard died in 1813, leaving his wife a widow at thirty-two years
of age, with an immense fortune and the prettiest little girl in the
world, a child of eleven, who promised to be, and did actually become,
a most accomplished young woman. Clever as Madame Evangelista was, the
Restoration altered her position; the royalist party cleared its ranks
and several of the old families left Bordeaux. Though the head and hand
of her husband were lacking in the direction of her affairs, for which
she had hitherto shown the indifference of a Creole and the inaptitude
of a lackadaisical woman, she was determined to make no change in her
manner of living. At the period when Paul resolved to return to his
native town, Mademoiselle Natalie Evangelista was a remarkably beautiful
young girl, and, apparently, the richest match in Bordeaux, where the
steady diminution of her mother’s capital was unknown. In order to
prolong her reign, Madame Evangelista had squandered enormous sums.
Brilliant fetes and the continuation of an almost regal style of living
kept the public in its past belief as to the wealth of the Spanish
family.

Natalie was now in her nineteenth year, but no proposal of marriage
had as yet reached her mother’s ear. Accustomed to gratify her fancies,
Mademoiselle Evangelista wore cashmeres and jewels, and lived in a style
of luxury which alarmed all speculative suitors in a region and at a
period when sons were as calculating as their parents. The fatal remark,
“None but a prince can afford to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista,”
 circulated among the salons and the cliques. Mothers of families,
dowagers who had granddaughters to establish, young girls jealous of
Natalie, whose elegance and tyrannical beauty annoyed them, took pains
to envenom this opinion with treacherous remarks. When they heard a
possible suitor say with ecstatic admiration, as Natalie entered a
ball-room, “Heavens, how beautiful she is!” “Yes,” the mammas would
answer, “but expensive.” If some new-comer thought Mademoiselle
Evangelista bewitching and said to a marriageable man that he couldn’t
do it better, “Who would be bold enough,” some woman would reply, “to
marry a girl whose mother gives her a thousand francs a month for her
toilet,--a girl who has horses and a maid of her own, and wears laces?
Yes, her ‘peignoirs’ are trimmed with mechlin. The price of her washing
would support the household of a clerk. She wears pelerines in the
morning which actually cost six francs to get up.”

These, and other speeches said occasionally in the form of praise
extinguished the desires that some men might have had to marry the
beautiful Spanish girl. Queen of every ball, accustomed to flattery,
“blasee” with the smiles and the admiration which followed her every
step, Natalie, nevertheless, knew nothing of life. She lived as the
bird which flies, as the flower that blooms, finding every one about her
eager to do her will. She was ignorant of the price of things; she
knew neither the value of money, nor whence it came, how it should be
managed, and how spent. Possibly she thought that every household had
cooks and coachmen, lady’s-maids and footmen, as the fields have hay and
the trees their fruits. To her, beggars and paupers, fallen trees and
waste lands seemed in the same category. Pampered and petted as her
mother’s hope, no fatigue was allowed to spoil her pleasure. Thus she
bounded through life as a courser on his steppe, unbridled and unshod.

Six month’s after Paul’s arrival the Pink of Fashion and the Queen of
Balls met in presence of the highest society of the town of Bordeaux.
The two flowers looked at each other with apparent coldness, and
mutually thought each other charming. Interested in watching the effects
of the meeting, Madame Evangelista divined in the expression of Paul’s
eyes the feelings within him, and she muttered to herself, “He will be
my son-in-law.” Paul, on the other hand, said to himself, as he looked
at Natalie, “She will be my wife.”

The wealth of the Evangelistas, proverbial in Bordeaux, had remained in
Paul’s mind as a memory of his childhood. Thus the pecuniary conditions
were known to him from the start, without necessitating those
discussions and inquiries which are as repugnant to a timid mind as to a
proud one. When some persons attempting to say to Paul a few flattering
phrases as to Natalie’s manner, language, and beauty, ending by remarks,
cruelly calculated to deter him, on the lavish extravagance of the
Evangelistas, the Pink of Fashion replied with a disdain that was
well-deserved by such provincial pettiness. This method of receiving
such speeches soon silenced them; for he now set the tone to the ideas
and language as well as to the manners of those about him. He had
imported from his travels a certain development of the Britannic
personality with its icy barriers, also a tone of Byronic pessimism
as to life, together with English plate, boot-polish, ponies, yellow
gloves, cigars, and the habit of galloping.

It thus happened that Paul escaped the discouragements hitherto
presented to marriageable men by dowagers and young girls. Madame
Evangelista began by asking him to formal dinners on various occasions.
The Pink of Fashion would not, of course, miss festivities to which none
but the most distinguished young men of the town were bidden. In spite
of the coldness that Paul assumed, which deceived neither mother
nor daughter, he was drawn, step by step, into the path of marriage.
Sometimes as he passed in his tilbury, or rode by on his fine English
horse, he heard the young men of his acquaintance say to one another:--

“There’s a lucky man. He is rich and handsome, and is to marry, so they
say, Mademoiselle Evangelista. There are some men for whom the world
seems made.”

When he met the Evangelistas he felt proud of the particular distinction
which mother and daughter imparted to their bows. If Paul had not
secretly, within his heart, fallen in love with Mademoiselle Natalie,
society would certainly have married him to her in spite of himself.
Society, which never causes good, is the accomplice of much evil; then
when it beholds the evil it has hatched maternally, it rejects and
revenges it. Society in Bordeaux, attributing a “dot” of a million to
Mademoiselle Evangelista, bestowed it upon Paul without awaiting the
consent of either party. Their fortunes, so it was said, agreed as well
as their persons. Paul had the same habits of luxury and elegance in
the midst of which Natalie had been brought up. He had just arranged for
himself a house such as no other man in Bordeaux could have offered her.
Accustomed to Parisian expenses and the caprices of Parisian women, he
alone was fitted to meet the pecuniary difficulties which were likely to
follow this marriage with a girl who was as much of a Creole and a great
lady as her mother. Where they themselves, remarked the marriageable
men, would have been ruined, the Comte de Manerville, rich as he was,
could evade disaster. In short, the marriage was made. Persons in
the highest royalist circles said a few engaging words to Paul which
flattered his vanity:--

“Every one gives you Mademoiselle Evangelista. If you marry her you will
do well. You could not find, even in Paris, a more delightful girl. She
is beautiful, graceful, elegant, and takes after the Casa-Reales through
her mother. You will make a charming couple; you have the same tastes,
the same desires in life, and you will certainly have the most agreeable
house in Bordeaux. Your wife need only bring her night-cap; all is ready
for her. You are fortunate indeed in such a mother-in-law. A woman of
intelligence, and very adroit, she will be a great help to you in
public life, to which you ought to aspire. Besides, she has sacrificed
everything to her daughter, whom she adores, and Natalie will, no doubt,
prove a good wife, for she loves her mother. You must soon bring the
matter to a conclusion.”

“That is all very well,” replied Paul, who, in spite of his love, was
desirous of keeping his freedom of action, “but I must be sure that the
conclusion shall be a happy one.”

He now went frequently to Madame Evangelista’s, partly to occupy his
vacant hours, which were harder for him to employ than for most men.
There alone he breathed the atmosphere of grandeur and luxury to which
he was accustomed.

At forty years of age, Madame Evangelista was beautiful, with the
beauty of those glorious summer sunsets which crown a cloudless day. Her
spotless reputation had given an endless topic of conversation to the
Bordeaux cliques; the curiosity of the women was all the more lively
because the widow gave signs of the temperament which makes a Spanish
woman and a Creole particularly noted. She had black eyes and hair, the
feet and form of a Spanish woman,--that swaying form the movements of
which have a name in Spain. Her face, still beautiful, was particularly
seductive for its Creole complexion, the vividness of which can be
described only by comparing it to muslin overlying crimson, so equally
is the whiteness suffused with color. Her figure, which was full and
rounded, attracted the eye by a grace which united nonchalance with
vivacity, strength with ease. She attracted and she imposed, she
seduced, but promised nothing. She was tall, which gave her at times
the air and carriage of a queen. Men were taken by her conversation
like birds in a snare; for she had by nature that genius which necessity
bestows on schemes; she advanced from concession to concession,
strengthening herself with what she gained to ask for more, knowing
well how to retreat with rapid steps when concessions were demanded in
return. Though ignorant of facts, she had known the courts of Spain
and Naples, the celebrated men of the two Americas, many illustrious
families of England and the continent, all of which gave her so
extensive an education superficially that it seemed immense. She
received her society with the grace and dignity which are never learned,
but which come to certain naturally fine spirits like a second nature;
assimilating choice things wherever they are met. If her reputation
for virtue was unexplained, it gave at any rate much authority to her
actions, her conversation, and her character.

Mother and daughter had a true friendship for each other, beyond the
filial and maternal sentiment. They suited one another, and their
perpetual contact had never produced the slightest jar. Consequently
many persons explained Madame Evangelista’s actions by maternal love.
But although Natalie consoled her mother’s persistent widowhood, she may
not have been the only motive for it. Madame Evangelista had been, it
was said, in love with a man who recovered his titles and property
under the Restoration. This man, desirous of marrying her in 1814 had
discreetly severed the connection in 1816. Madame Evangelista, to all
appearance the best-hearted woman in the world, had, in the depths of
her nature, a fearful quality, explainable only by Catherine de Medici’s
device: “Odiate e aspettate”--“Hate and wait.” Accustomed to rule,
having always been obeyed, she was like other royalties, amiable,
gentle, easy and pleasant in ordinary life, but terrible, implacable,
if the pride of the woman, the Spaniard, and the Casa-Reale was touched.
She never forgave. This woman believed in the power of her hatred; she
made an evil fate of it and bade it hover above her enemy. This fatal
power she employed against the man who had jilted her. Events which
seemed to prove the influence of her “jettatura”--the casting of an evil
eye--confirmed her superstitious faith in herself. Though a minister and
peer of France, this man began to ruin himself, and soon came to total
ruin. His property, his personal and public honor were doomed to perish.
At this crisis Madame Evangelista in her brilliant equipage passed her
faithless lover walking on foot in the Champes Elysees, and crushed him
with a look which flamed with triumph. This misadventure, which occupied
her mind for two years, was the original cause of her not remarrying.
Later, her pride had drawn comparisons between the suitors who presented
themselves and the husband who had loved her so sincerely and so well.

She had thus reached, through mistaken calculations and disappointed
hopes, that period of life when women have no other part to take in life
than that of mother; a part which involves the sacrifice of themselves
to their children, the placing of their interests outside of self upon
another household,--the last refuge of human affections.

Madame Evangelista divined Paul’s nature intuitively, and hid her own
from his perception. Paul was the very man she desired for a son-in-law,
for the responsible editor of her future power. He belonged, through his
mother, to the family of Maulincour, and the old Baronne de Maulincour,
the friend of the Vidame de Pamiers, was then living in the centre of
the faubourg Saint-Germain. The grandson of the baroness, Auguste de
Maulincour, held a fine position in the army. Paul would therefore be
an excellent introducer for the Evangelistas into Parisian society. The
widow had known something of the Paris of the Empire, she now desired to
shine in the Paris of the Restoration. There alone were the elements of
political fortune, the only business in which women of the world could
decently co-operate. Madame Evangelista, compelled by her husband’s
affairs to reside in Bordeaux, disliked the place. She desired a wider
field, as gamblers rush to higher stakes. For her own personal ends,
therefore, she looked to Paul as a means of destiny, she proposed to
employ the resources of her own talent and knowledge of life to advance
her son-in-law, in order to enjoy through him the delights of power.
Many men are thus made the screens of secret feminine ambitions. Madame
Evangelista had, however, more than one interest, as we shall see, in
laying hold of her daughter’s husband.

Paul was naturally captivated by this woman, who charmed him all the
more because she seemed to seek no influence over him. In reality she
was using her ascendancy to magnify herself, her daughter, and all her
surroundings in his eyes, for the purpose of ruling from the start the
man in whom she saw a means of gratifying her social longings. Paul, on
the other hand, began to value himself more highly when he felt himself
appreciated by the mother and daughter. He thought himself much cleverer
than he really was when he found his reflections and sayings accepted
and understood by Mademoiselle Natalie--who raised her head and smiled
in response to them--and by the mother, whose flattery always seemed
involuntary. The two women were so kind and friendly to him, he was so
sure of pleasing them, they ruled him so delightfully by holding the
thread of his self-love, that he soon passed all his time at the hotel
Evangelista.

A year after his return to Bordeaux, Comte Paul, without having declared
himself, was so attentive to Natalie that the world considered him as
courting her. Neither mother nor daughter appeared to be thinking of
marriage. Mademoiselle Evangelista preserved towards Paul the reserve
of a great lady who can make herself charming and converse agreeably
without permitting a single step into intimacy. This reserve, so little
customary among provincials, pleased Paul immensely. Timid men are shy;
sudden proposals alarm them. They retreat from happiness when it comes
with a rush, and accept misfortune if it presents itself mildly with
gentle shadows. Paul therefore committed himself in his own mind all the
more because he saw no effort on Madame Evangelista’s part to bind him.
She fairly seduced him one evening by remarking that to superior women
as well as men there came a period of life when ambition superseded all
the earlier emotions of life.

“That woman is fitted,” thought Paul, as he left her, “to advance me in
diplomacy before I am even made a deputy.”

If, in all the circumstances of life a man does not turn over and over
both things and ideas in order to examine them thoroughly under their
different aspects before taking action, that man is weak and incomplete
and in danger of fatal failure. At this moment Paul was an optimist; he
saw everything to advantage, and did not tell himself than an ambitious
mother-in-law might prove a tyrant. So, every evening as he left the
house, he fancied himself a married man, allured his mind with its own
thought, and slipped on the slippers of wedlock cheerfully. In the first
place, he had enjoyed his freedom too long to regret the loss of it; he
was tired of a bachelor’s life, which offered him nothing new; he
now saw only its annoyances; whereas if he thought at times of the
difficulties of marriage, its pleasures, in which lay novelty, came far
more prominently before his mind.

“Marriage,” he said to himself, “is disagreeable for people without
means, but half its troubles disappear before wealth.”

Every day some favorable consideration swelled the advantages which he
now saw in this particular alliance.

“No matter to what position I attain, Natalie will always be on the
level of her part,” thought he, “and that is no small merit in a woman.
How many of the Empire men I’ve seen who suffered horribly through their
wives! It is a great condition of happiness not to feel one’s pride or
one’s vanity wounded by the companion we have chosen. A man can never
be really unhappy with a well-bred wife; she will never make him
ridiculous; such a woman is certain to be useful to him. Natalie will
receive in her own house admirably.”

So thinking, he taxed his memory as to the most distinguished women of
the faubourg Saint-Germain, in order to convince himself that Natalie
could, if not eclipse them, at any rate stand among them on a footing of
perfect equality. All comparisons were to her advantage, for they rested
on his own imagination, which followed his desires. Paris would have
shown him daily other natures, young girls of other styles of beauty and
charm, and the multiplicity of impressions would have balanced his mind;
whereas in Bordeaux Natalie had no rivals, she was the solitary flower;
moreover, she appeared to him at a moment when Paul was under the
tyranny of an idea to which most men succumb at his age.

Thus these reasons of propinquity, joined to reasons of self-love and a
real passion which had no means of satisfaction except by marriage, led
Paul on to an irrational love, which he had, however, the good sense to
keep to himself. He even endeavored to study Mademoiselle Evangelista
as a man should who desires not to compromise his future life; for the
words of his friend de Marsay did sometimes rumble in his ears like a
warning. But, in the first place, persons accustomed to luxury have a
certain indifference to it which misleads them. They despise it, they
use it; it is an instrument, and not the object of their existence. Paul
never imagined, as he observed the habits of life of the two ladies,
that they covered a gulf of ruin. Then, though there may exist some
general rules to soften the asperities of marriage, there are none by
which they can be accurately foreseen and evaded. When trouble arises
between two persons who have undertaken to render life agreeable and
easy to each other, it comes from the contact of continual intimacy,
which, of course, does not exist between young people before they marry,
and will never exist so long as our present social laws and customs
prevail in France. All is more or less deception between the two young
persons about to take each other for life,--an innocent and involuntary
deception, it is true. Each endeavors to appear in a favorable light;
both take a tone and attitude conveying a more favorable idea of their
nature than they are able to maintain in after years. Real life, like
the weather, is made up of gray and cloudy days alternating with those
when the sun shines and the fields are gay. Young people, however,
exhibit fine weather and no clouds. Later they attribute to marriage the
evils inherent in life itself; for there is in man a disposition to lay
the blame of his own misery on the persons and things that surround him.

To discover in the demeanor, or the countenance, or the words, or the
gestures of Mademoiselle Evangelista any indication that revealed the
imperfections of her character, Paul must have possessed not only the
knowledge of Lavater and Gall, but also a science in which there exists
no formula of doctrine,--the individual and personal science of an
observer, which, for its perfection, requires an almost universal
knowledge. Natalie’s face, like that of most young girls, was
impenetrable. The deep, serene peace given by sculptors to the virgin
faces of Justice and Innocence, divinities aloof from all earthly
agitations, is the greatest charm of a young girl, the sign of her
purity. Nothing, as yet, has stirred her; no shattered passion, no hope
betrayed has clouded the placid expression of that pure face. Is that
expression assumed? If so, there is no young girl behind it.

Natalie, closely held to the heart of her mother, had received, like
other Spanish women, an education that was solely religious, together
with a few instructions from her mother as to the part in life she was
called upon to play. Consequently, the calm, untroubled expression of
her face was natural. And yet it formed a casing in which the woman
was wrapped as the moth in its cocoon. Nevertheless, any man clever at
handling the scalpel of analysis might have detected in Natalie certain
indications of the difficulties her character would present when brought
into contact with conjugal or social life. Her beauty, which was really
marvellous, came from extreme regularity of feature harmonizing with the
proportions of the head and the body. This species of perfection augurs
ill for the mind; and there are few exceptions to the rule. All superior
nature is found to have certain slight imperfections of form which
become irresistible attractions, luminous points from which shine vivid
sentiments, and on which the eye rests gladly. Perfect harmony expresses
usually the coldness of a mixed organization.

Natalie’s waist was round,--a sign of strength, but also the infallible
indication of a will which becomes obstinacy in persons whose mind
is neither keen nor broad. Her hands, like those of a Greek statue,
confirmed the predictions of face and figure by revealing an inclination
for illogical domination, of willing for will’s sake only. Her eyebrows
met,--a sign, according to some observers, which indicates jealousy. The
jealousy of superior minds becomes emulation and leads to great things;
that of small minds turns to hatred. The “hate and wait” of her mother
was in her nature, without disguise. Her eyes were black apparently,
though really brown with orange streaks, contrasting with her hair,
of the ruddy tint so prized by the Romans, called auburn in England, a
color which often appears in the offspring of persons of jet black hair,
like that of Monsieur and Madame Evangelista. The whiteness and delicacy
of Natalie’s complexion gave to the contrast of color in her eyes and
hair an inexpressible charm; and yet it was a charm that was purely
external; for whenever the lines of a face are lacking in a certain
soft roundness, whatever may be the finish and grace of the details, the
beauty therein expressed is not of the soul. These roses of deceptive
youth will drop their leaves, and you will be surprised in a few years
to see hardness and dryness where you once admired what seemed to be the
beauty of noble qualities.

Though the outlines of Natalie’s face had something august about them,
her chin was slightly “empate,”--a painter’s expression which will serve
to show the existence of sentiments the violence of which would only
become manifest in after life. Her mouth, a trifle drawn in, expressed
a haughty pride in keeping with her hand, her chin, her brows, and her
beautiful figure. And--as a last diagnostic to guide the judgment of a
connoisseur--Natalie’s pure voice, a most seductive voice, had certain
metallic tones. Softly as that brassy ring was managed, and in spite of
the grace with which its sounds ran through the compass of the voice,
that organ revealed the character of the Duke of Alba, from whom the
Casa-Reales were collaterally descended. These indications were those
of violent passions without tenderness, sudden devotions, irreconcilable
dislikes, a mind without intelligence, and the desire to rule natural to
persons who feel themselves inferior to their pretensions.

These defects, born of temperament and constitution, were buried in
Natalie like ore in a mine, and would only appear under the shocks and
harsh treatment to which all characters are subjected in this world.
Meantime the grace and freshness of her youth, the distinction of her
manners, her sacred ignorance, and the sweetness of a young girl, gave
a delicate glamour to her features which could not fail to mislead an
unthinking or superficial mind. Her mother had early taught her the
trick of agreeable talk which appears to imply superiority, replying
to arguments by clever jests, and attracting by the graceful volubility
beneath which a woman hides the subsoil of her mind, as Nature disguises
her barren strata beneath a wealth of ephemeral vegetation. Natalie had
the charm of children who have never known what it is to suffer. She
charmed by her frankness, and had none of that solemn air which mothers
impose on their daughters by laying down a programme of behavior and
language until the time comes when they marry and are emancipated. She
was gay and natural, like any young girl who knows nothing of marriage,
expects only pleasure from it, replies to all objections with a jest,
foresees no troubles, and thinks she is acquiring the right to have her
own way.

How could Paul, who loved as men love when desire increases love,
perceive in a girl of this nature whose beauty dazzled him, the woman,
such as she would probably be at thirty, when observers themselves have
been misled by these appearances? Besides, if happiness might prove
difficult to find in a marriage with such a girl, it was not impossible.
Through these embryo defects shone several fine qualities. There is no
good quality which, if properly developed by the hand of an able master,
will not stifle defects, especially in a young girl who loves him. But
to render ductile so intractable a woman, the iron wrist, about which de
Marsay had preached to Paul, was needful. The Parisian dandy was right.
Fear, inspired by love is an infallible instrument by which to manage
the minds of women. Whoso loves, fears; whoso fears is nearer to
affection than to hatred.

Had Paul the coolness, firmness, and judgment required for this
struggle, which an able husband ought not to let the wife suspect? Did
Natalie love Paul? Like most young girls, Natalie mistook for love the
first emotions of instinct and the pleasure she felt in Paul’s external
appearance; but she knew nothing of the things of marriage nor
the demands of a home. To her, the Comte de Manerville, a rising
diplomatist, to whom the courts of Europe were known, and one of the
most elegant young men in Paris, could not seem, what perhaps he was,
an ordinary man, without moral force, timid, though brave in some ways,
energetic perhaps in adversity, but helpless against the vexations
and annoyances that hinder happiness. Would she, in after years, have
sufficient tact and insight to distinguish Paul’s noble qualities in the
midst of his minor defects? Would she not magnify the latter and forget
the former, after the manner of young wives who know nothing of life?
There comes a time when wives will pardon defects in the husband who
spares her annoyances, considering annoyances in the same category as
misfortunes. What conciliating power, what wise experience would uphold
and enlighten the home of this young pair? Paul and his wife would
doubtless think they loved when they had really not advanced beyond the
endearments and compliments of the honeymoon. Would Paul in that early
period yield to the tyranny of his wife, instead of establishing his
empire? Could Paul say, “No?” All was peril to a man so weak where even
a strong man ran some risks.

The subject of this Study is not the transition of a bachelor into a
married man,--a picture which, if broadly composed, would not lack the
attraction which the inner struggles of our nature and feelings give to
the commonest situations in life. The events and the ideas which led to
the marriage of Paul with Natalie Evangelista are an introduction to
our real subject, which is to sketch the great comedy that precedes, in
France, all conjugal pairing. This Scene, until now singularly neglected
by our dramatic authors, although it offers novel resources to their
wit, controlled Paul’s future life and was now awaited by Madame
Evangelista with feelings of terror. We mean the discussion which takes
place on the subject of the marriage contract in all families, whether
noble or bourgeois, for human passions are as keenly excited by small
interests as by large ones. These comedies, played before a notary, all
resemble, more or less, the one we shall now relate, the interest of
which will be far less in the pages of this book than in the memories of
married persons.



CHAPTER III. THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT--FIRST DAY


At the beginning of the winter of 1822, Paul de Manerville made a formal
request, through his great-aunt, the Baronne de Maulincour, for the hand
of Mademoiselle Natalie Evangelista. Though the baroness never stayed
more than two months in Medoc, she remained on this occasion till the
last of October, in order to assist her nephew through the affair and
play the part of a mother to him. After conveying the first suggestions
to Madame Evangelista the experienced old woman returned to inform Paul
of the results of the overture.

“My child,” she said, “the affair is won. In talking of property, I
found that Madame Evangelista gives nothing of her own to her daughter.
Mademoiselle Natalie’s dowry is her patrimony. Marry her, my dear boy.
Men who have a name and an estate to transmit, a family to continue,
must, sooner or later, end in marriage. I wish I could see my dear
Auguste taking that course. You can now carry on the marriage without
me; I have nothing to give you but my blessing, and women as old as I
are out of place at a wedding. I leave for Paris to-morrow. When you
present your wife in society I shall be able to see her and assist her
far more to the purpose than now. If you had had no house in Paris I
would gladly have arranged the second floor of mine for you.”

“Dear aunt,” said Paul, “I thank you heartily. But what do you mean
when you say that the mother gives nothing of her own, and that the
daughter’s dowry is her patrimony?”

“The mother, my dear boy, is a sly cat, who takes advantage of her
daughter’s beauty to impose conditions and allow you only that which she
cannot prevent you from having; namely, the daughter’s fortune from her
father. We old people know the importance of inquiring closely, What has
he? What has she? I advise you therefore to give particular instructions
to your notary. The marriage contract, my dear child, is the most sacred
of all duties. If your father and your mother had not made their
bed properly you might now be sleeping without sheets. You will have
children, they are the commonest result of marriage, and you must think
of them. Consult Maitre Mathias our old notary.”

Madame de Maulincour departed, having plunged Paul into a state of
extreme perplexity. His mother-in-law a sly cat! Must he struggle for
his interests in the marriage contract? Was it necessary to defend them?
Who was likely to attack them?

He followed the advice of his aunt and confided the drawing-up of the
marriage contract to Maitre Mathias. But these threatened discussions
oppressed him, and he went to see Madame Evangelista and announce his
intentions in a state of rather lively agitation. Like all timid men, he
shrank from allowing the distrust his aunt had put into his mind to be
seen; in fact, he considered it insulting. To avoid even a slight jar
with a person so imposing to his mind as his future mother-in-law, he
proceeded to state his intentions with the circumlocution natural to
persons who dare not face a difficulty.

“Madame,” he said, choosing a moment when Natalie was absent from the
room, “you know, of course, what a family notary is. Mine is a worthy
old man, to whom it would be a sincere grief if he were not entrusted
with the drawing of my marriage contract.”

“Why, of course!” said Madame Evangelista, interrupting him, “but are
not marriage contracts always made by agreement of the notaries of both
families?”

The time that Paul took to reply to this question was occupied by Madame
Evangelista in asking herself, “What is he thinking of?” for women
possess in an eminent degree the art of reading thoughts from the play
of countenance. She divined the instigations of the great-aunt in the
embarrassed glance and the agitated tone of voice which betrayed an
inward struggle in Paul’s mind.

“At last,” she thought to herself, “the fatal day has come; the crisis
begins--how will it end? My notary is Monsieur Solonet,” she said, after
a pause. “Yours, I think you said, is Monsieur Mathias; I will invite
them to dinner to-morrow, and they can come to an understanding then. It
is their business to conciliate our interests without our interference;
just as good cooks are expected to furnish good food without
instructions.”

“Yes, you are right,” said Paul, letting a faint sigh of relief escape
from him.

By a singular transposition of parts, Paul, innocent of all wrong-doing,
trembled, while Madame Evangelista, though a prey to the utmost anxiety,
was outwardly calm.

The widow owed her daughter one-third of the fortune left by Monsieur
Evangelista,--namely, nearly twelve hundred thousand francs,--and she
knew herself unable to pay it, even by taking the whole of her property
to do so. She would therefore be placed at the mercy of a son-in-law.
Though she might be able to control Paul if left to himself, would he,
when enlightened by his notary, agree to release her from rendering her
account as guardian of her daughter’s patrimony? If Paul withdrew
his proposals all Bordeaux would know the reason and Natalie’s future
marriage would be made impossible. This mother, who desired the
happiness of her daughter, this woman, who from infancy had lived
honorably, was aware that on the morrow she must become dishonest. Like
those great warriors who fain would blot from their lives the moment
when they had felt a secret cowardice, she ardently desired to cut this
inevitable day from the record of hers. Most assuredly some hairs on her
head must have whitened during the night, when, face to face with facts,
she bitterly regretted her extravagance as she felt the hard necessities
of the situation.

Among these necessities was that of confiding the truth to her notary,
for whom she sent in the morning as soon as she rose. She was forced to
reveal to him a secret defaulting she had never been willing to admit
to herself, for she had steadily advanced to the abyss, relying on some
chance accident, which never happened, to relieve her. There rose in her
soul a feeling against Paul, that was neither dislike, nor aversion,
nor anything, as yet, unkind; but HE was the cause of this crisis; the
opposing party in this secret suit; he became, without knowing it, an
innocent enemy she was forced to conquer. What human being did ever yet
love his or her dupe? Compelled to deceive and trick him if she could,
the Spanish woman resolved, like other women, to put her whole force of
character into the struggle, the dishonor of which could be absolved by
victory only.

In the stillness of the night she excused her conduct to her own mind
by a tissue of arguments in which her pride predominated. Natalie had
shared the benefit of her extravagance. There was not a single base or
ignoble motive in what she had done. She was no accountant, but was that
a crime, a delinquency? A man was only too lucky to obtain a wife like
Natalie without a penny. Such a treasure bestowed upon him might surely
release her from a guardianship account. How many men had bought the
women they loved by greater sacrifices? Why should a man do less for
a wife than for a mistress? Besides, Paul was a nullity, a man of no
force, incapable; she would spend the best resources of her mind upon
him and open to him a fine career; he should owe his future power and
position to her influence; in that way she could pay her debt. He would
indeed be a fool to refuse such a future; and for what? a few paltry
thousands, more or less. He would be infamous if he withdrew for such a
reason.

“But,” she added, to herself, “if the negotiation does not succeed
at once, I shall leave Bordeaux. I can still find a good marriage for
Natalie by investing the proceeds of what is left, house and diamonds
and furniture,--keeping only a small income for myself.”

When a strong soul constructs a way of ultimate escape,--as Richelieu
did at Brouage,--and holds in reserve a vigorous end, the resolution
becomes a lever which strengthens its immediate way. The thought of this
finale in case of failure comforted Madame Evangelista, who fell asleep
with all the more confidence as she remembered her assistance in the
coming duel.

This was a young man named Solonet, considered the ablest notary in
Bordeaux; now twenty-seven years of age and decorated with the Legion
of honor for having actively contributed to the second return of
the Bourbons. Proud and happy to be received in the home of Madame
Evangelista, less as a notary than as belonging to the royalist society
of Bordeaux, Solonet had conceived for that fine setting sun one of
those passions which women like Madame Evangelista repulse, although
flattered and graciously allowing them to exist upon the surface.
Solonet remained therefore in a self-satisfied condition of hope and
becoming respect. Being sent for, he arrived the next morning with the
promptitude of a slave and was received by the coquettish widow in
her bedroom, where she allowed him to find her in a very becoming
dishabille.

“Can I,” she said, “count upon your discretion and your entire devotion
in a discussion which will take place in my house this evening? You will
readily understand that it relates to the marriage of my daughter.”

The young man expended himself in gallant protestations.

“Now to the point,” she said.

“I am listening,” he replied, checking his ardor.

Madame Evangelista then stated her position baldly.

“My dear lady, that is nothing to be troubled about,” said Maitre
Solonet, assuming a confident air as soon as his client had given him
the exact figures. “The question is how have you conducted yourself
toward Monsieur de Manerville? In this matter questions of manner and
deportment are of greater importance than those of law and finance.”

Madame Evangelista wrapped herself in dignity. The notary learned to
his satisfaction that until the present moment his client’s relations
to Paul had been distant and reserved, and that partly from native pride
and partly from involuntary shrewdness she had treated the Comte de
Manerville as in some sense her inferior and as though it were an honor
for him to be allowed to marry Mademoiselle Evangelista. She assured
Solonet that neither she nor her daughter could be suspected of any
mercenary interests in the marriage; that they had the right, should
Paul make any financial difficulties, to retreat from the affair to an
illimitable distance; and finally, that she had already acquired over
her future son-in-law a very remarkable ascendancy.

“If that is so,” said Solonet, “tell me what are the utmost concessions
you are willing to make.”

“I wish to make as few as possible,” she answered, laughing.

“A woman’s answer,” cried Solonet. “Madame, are you anxious to marry
Mademoiselle Natalie?”

“Yes.”

“And you want a receipt for the eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand
francs, for which you are responsible on the guardianship account which
the law obliges you to render to your son-in-law?”

“Yes.”

“How much do you want to keep back?”

“Thirty thousand a year, at least.”

“It is a question of conquer or die, is it?”

“It is.”

“Well, then, I must reflect on the necessary means to that end; it
will need all our cleverness to manage our forces. I will give you some
instructions on my arrival this evening; follow them carefully, and I
think I may promise you a successful issue. Is the Comte de Manerville
in love with Mademoiselle Natalie?” he asked as he rose to take leave.

“He adores her.”

“That is not enough. Does he desire her to the point of disregarding all
pecuniary difficulties?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I call having a lien upon a daughter’s property,” cried the
notary. “Make her look her best to-night,” he added with a sly glance.

“She has a most charming dress for the occasion.”

“The marriage-contract dress is, in my opinion, half the battle,” said
Solonet.

This last argument seemed so cogent to Madame Evangelista that she
superintended Natalie’s toilet herself, as much perhaps to watch
her daughter as to make her the innocent accomplice of her financial
conspiracy.

With her hair dressed a la Sevigne and wearing a gown of white tulle
adorned with pink ribbons, Natalie seemed to her mother so beautiful
as to guarantee victory. When the lady’s-maid left the room and Madame
Evangelista was certain that no one could overhear her, she arranged a
few curls on her daughter’s head by way of exordium.

“Dear child,” she said, in a voice that was firm apparently, “do you
sincerely love the Comte de Manerville?”

Mother and daughter cast strange looks at each other.

“Why do you ask that question, little mother? and to-day more than
yesterday. Why have you thrown me with him?”

“If you and I had to part forever would you still persist in the
marriage?”

“I should give it up--and I should not die of grief.”

“You do not love him, my dear,” said the mother, kissing her daughter’s
forehead.

“But why, my dear mother, are you playing the Grand Inquisitor?”

“I wished to know if you desired the marriage without being madly in
love with the husband.”

“I love him.”

“And you are right. He is a count; we will make him a peer of France
between us; nevertheless, there are certain difficulties.”

“Difficulties between persons who love each other? Oh, no. The heart of
the Pink of Fashion is too firmly planted here,” she said, with a pretty
gesture, “to make the very slightest objection. I am sure of that.”

“But suppose it were otherwise?” persisted Madame Evangelista.

“He would be profoundly and forever forgotten,” replied Natalie.

“Good! You are a Casa-Reale. But suppose, though he madly loves you,
suppose certain discussions and difficulties should arise, not of his
own making, but which he must decide in your interests as well as in
mine--hey, Natalie, what then? Without lowering your dignity, perhaps a
little softness in your manner might decide him--a word, a tone, a mere
nothing. Men are so made; they resist a serious argument, but they yield
to a tender look.”

“I understand! a little touch to make my Favori leap the barrier,” said
Natalie, making the gesture of striking a horse with her whip.

“My darling! I ask nothing that resembles seduction. You and I have
sentiments of the old Castilian honor which will never permit us to pass
certain limits. Count Paul shall know our situation.”

“What situation?”

“You would not understand it. But I tell you now that if after seeing
you in all your glory his look betrays the slightest hesitation,--and I
shall watch him,--on that instant I shall break off the marriage; I will
liquidate my property, leave Bordeaux, and go to Douai, to be near the
Claes. Madame Claes is our relation through the Temnincks. Then I’ll
marry you to a peer of France, and take refuge in a convent myself, that
I may give up to you my whole fortune.”

“Mother, what am I to do to prevent such misfortunes?” cried Natalie.

“I have never seen you so beautiful as you are now,” replied her mother.
“Be a little coquettish, and all is well.”

Madame Evangelista left Natalie to her thoughts, and went to arrange
her own toilet in such a way that would bear comparison with that of her
daughter. If Natalie ought to make herself attractive to Paul she ought,
none the less, to inflame the ardor of her champion Solonet. The mother
and daughter were therefore under arms when Paul arrived, bearing the
bouquet which for the last few months he had daily offered to his
love. All three conversed pleasantly while awaiting the arrival of the
notaries.

This day brought to Paul the first skirmish of that long and wearisome
warfare called marriage. It is therefore necessary to state the forces
on both sides, the position of the belligerent bodies, and the ground on
which they are about to manoeuvre.

To maintain a struggle, the importance of which had wholly escaped him,
Paul’s only auxiliary was the old notary, Mathias. Both were about to be
confronted, unaware and defenceless, by a most unexpected circumstance;
to be pressed by an enemy whose strategy was planned, and driven to
decide on a course without having time to reflect upon it. Where is
the man who would not have succumbed, even though assisted by Cujas and
Barthole? How should he look for deceit and treachery where all seemed
compliant and natural? What could old Mathias do alone against Madame
Evangelista, against Solonet, against Natalie, especially when a client
in love goes over to the enemy as soon as the rising conflict threatens
his happiness? Already Paul was damaging his cause by making the
customary lover’s speeches, to which his passion gave excessive value
in the ears of Madame Evangelista, whose object it was to drive him to
commit himself.

The matrimonial condottieri now about to fight for their clients,
whose personal powers were to be so vitally important in this solemn
encounter, the two notaries, on short, represent individually the old
and the new systems,--old fashioned notarial usage, and the new-fangled
modern procedure.

Maitre Mathias was a worthy old gentleman sixty-nine years of age, who
took great pride in his forty years’ exercise of the profession. His
huge gouty feet were encased in shoes with silver buckles, making a
ridiculous termination to legs so spindling, with knees so bony, that
when he crossed them they made you think of the emblems on a tombstone.
His puny little thighs, lost in a pair of wide black breeches fastened
with buckles, seemed to bend beneath the weight of a round stomach and
a torso developed, like that of most sedentary persons, into a stout
barrel, always buttoned into a green coat with square tails, which no
man could remember to have ever seen new. His hair, well brushed and
powdered, was tied in a rat’s tail that lay between the collar of his
coat and that of his waistcoat, which was white, with a pattern of
flowers. With his round head, his face the color of a vine-leaf, his
blue eyes, a trumpet nose, a thick-lipped mouth, and a double-chin, the
dear old fellow excited, whenever he appeared among strangers who did
not know him, that satirical laugh which Frenchmen so generously bestow
on the ludicrous creations Dame Nature occasionally allows herself,
which Art delights in exaggerating under the name of caricatures.

But in Maitre Mathias, mind had triumphed over form; the qualities of
his soul had vanquished the oddities of his body. The inhabitants of
Bordeaux, as a rule, testified a friendly respect and a deference that
was full of esteem for him. The old man’s voice went to their hearts and
sounded there with the eloquence of uprightness. His craft consisted in
going straight to the fact, overturning all subterfuge and evil devices
by plain questionings. His quick perception, his long training in his
profession gave him that divining sense which goes to the depths of
conscience and reads its secret thoughts. Though grave and deliberate in
business, the patriarch could be gay with the gaiety of our ancestors.
He could risk a song after dinner, enjoy all family festivities,
celebrate the birthdays of grandmothers and children, and bury with due
solemnity the Christmas log. He loved to send presents at New Year,
and eggs at Easter; he believed in the duties of a godfather, and never
deserted the customs which colored the life of the olden time. Maitre
Mathias was a noble and venerable relic of the notaries, obscure
great men, who gave no receipt for the millions entrusted to them, but
returned those millions in the sacks they were delivered in, tied with
the same twine; men who fulfilled their trusts to the letter, drew
honest inventories, took fatherly interest in their clients, often
barring the way to extravagance and dissipation,--men to whom families
confided their secrets, and who felt so responsible for any error in
their deeds that they meditated long and carefully over them. Never
during his whole notarial life, had any client found reason to complain
of a bad investment or an ill-placed mortgage. His own fortune, slowly
but honorably acquired, had come to him as the result of a thirty years’
practice and careful economy. He had established in life fourteen of his
clerks. Religious, and generous in secret, Mathias was found whenever
good was to be done without remuneration. An active member on hospital
and other benevolent committees, he subscribed the largest sums to
relieve all sudden misfortunes and emergencies, as well as to create
certain useful permanent institutions; consequently, neither he nor
his wife kept a carriage. Also his word was felt to be sacred, and his
coffers held as much of the money of others as a bank; and also, we may
add, he went by the name of “Our good Monsieur Mathias,” and when he
died, three thousand persons followed him to his grave.

Solonet was the style of young notary who comes in humming a tune,
affects light-heartedness, declares that business is better done with
a laugh than seriously. He is the notary captain of the national guard,
who dislikes to be taken for a notary, solicits the cross of the Legion
of honor, keeps his cabriolet, and leaves the verification of his deeds
to his clerks; he is the notary who goes to balls and theatres, buys
pictures and plays at ecarte; he has coffers in which gold is received
on deposit and is later returned in bank-bills,--a notary who follows
his epoch, risks capital in doubtful investments, speculates with all
he can lay his hands on, and expects to retire with an income of thirty
thousand francs after ten years’ practice; in short, the notary whose
cleverness comes of his duplicity, whom many men fear as an accomplice
possessing their secrets, and who sees in his practice a means of
ultimately marrying some blue-stockinged heiress.

When the slender, fair-haired Solonet, curled, perfumed, and booted like
the leading gentleman at the Vaudeville, and dressed like a dandy whose
most important business is a duel, entered Madame Evangelista’s salon,
preceding his brother notary, whose advance was delayed by a twinge
of the gout, the two men presented to the life one of those famous
caricatures entitled “Former Times and the Present Day,” which had such
eminent success under the Empire. If Madame and Mademoiselle Evangelista
to whom the “good Monsieur Mathias,” was personally unknown, felt, on
first seeing him, a slight inclination to laugh, they were soon touched
by the old-fashioned grace with which he greeted them. The words he used
were full of that amenity which amiable old men convey as much by the
ideas they suggest as by the manner in which they express them. The
younger notary, with his flippant tone, seemed on a lower plane. Mathias
showed his superior knowledge of life by the reserved manner with which
he accosted Paul. Without compromising his white hairs, he showed that
he respected the young man’s nobility, while at the same time he claimed
the honor due to old age, and made it felt that social rights are
natural. Solonet’s bow and greeting, on the contrary, expressed a sense
of perfect equality, which would naturally affront the pretensions of
a man of society and make the notary ridiculous in the eyes of a
real noble. Solonet made a motion, somewhat too familiar, to Madame
Evangelista, inviting her to a private conference in the recess of
a window. For some minutes they talked to each other in a low voice,
giving way now and then to laughter,--no doubt to lessen in the minds of
others the importance of the conversation, in which Solonet was really
communicating to his sovereign lady the plan of battle.

“But,” he said, as he ended, “will you have the courage to sell your
house?”

“Undoubtedly,” she replied.

Madame Evangelista did not choose to tell her notary the motive of this
heroism, which struck him greatly. Solonet’s zeal might have cooled had
he known that his client was really intending to leave Bordeaux. She had
not as yet said anything about that intention to Paul, in order not to
alarm him with the preliminary steps and circumlocutions which must be
taken before he entered on the political life she planned for him.

After dinner the two plenipotentiaries left the loving pair with
the mother, and betook themselves to an adjoining salon where their
conference was arranged to take place. A dual scene then followed on
this domestic stage: in the chimney-corner of the great salon a scene of
love, in which to all appearances life was smiles and joy; in the other
room, a scene of gravity and gloom, where selfish interests, baldly
proclaimed, openly took the part they play in life under flowery
disguises.

“My dear master,” said Solonet, “the document can remain under your lock
and key; I know very well what I owe to my old preceptor.” Mathias bowed
gravely. “But,” continued Solonet, unfolding the rough copy of a deed he
had made his clerk draw up, “as we are the oppressed party, I mean the
daughter, I have written the contract--which will save you trouble. We
marry with our rights under the rule of community of interests; with
general donation of our property to each other in case of death without
heirs; if not, donation of one-fourth as life interest, and one-fourth
in fee; the sum placed in community of interests to be one-fourth of the
respective property of each party; the survivor to possess the furniture
without appraisal. It’s all as simple as how d’ye do.”

“Ta, ta, ta, ta,” said Mathias, “I don’t do business as one sings a
tune. What are your claims?”

“What are yours?” said Solonet.

“Our property,” replied Mathias, “is: the estate of Lanstrac, which
brings in a rental of twenty-three thousand francs a year, not counting
the natural products. Item: the farms of Grassol and Guadet, each
worth three thousand six hundred francs a year. Item: the vineyard of
Belle-Rose, yielding in ordinary years sixteen thousand francs; total,
forty-six thousand two hundred francs a year. Item: the patrimonial
mansion at Bordeaux taxed for nine hundred francs. Item: a handsome
house, between court and garden in Paris, rue de la Pepiniere, taxed
for fifteen hundred francs. These pieces of property, the title-deeds of
which I hold, are derived from our father and mother, except the
house in Paris, which we bought ourselves. We must also reckon in
the furniture of the two houses, and that of the chateau of Lanstrac,
estimated at four hundred and fifty thousand francs. There’s the table,
the cloth, and the first course. What do you bring for the second course
and the dessert?”

“Our rights,” replied Solonet.

“Specify them, my friend,” said Mathias. “What do you bring us? Where is
the inventory of the property left by Monsieur Evangelista? Show me the
liquidation, the investment of the amount. Where is your capital?--if
there is any capital. Where is your landed property?--if you have any.
In short, let us see your guardianship account, and tell us what you
bring and what your mother will secure to us.”

“Does Monsieur le Comte de Manerville love Mademoiselle Evangelista?”

“He wishes to make her his wife if the marriage can be suitably
arranged,” said the old notary. “I am not a child; this matter concerns
our business, and not our feelings.”

“The marriage will be off unless you show generous feeling; and for this
reason,” continued Solonet. “No inventory was made at the death of our
husband; we are Spaniards, Creoles, and know nothing of French laws.
Besides, we were too deeply grieved at our loss to think at such a time
of the miserable formalities which occupy cold hearts. It is publicly
well known that our late husband adored us, and that we mourned for
him sincerely. If we did have a settlement of accounts with a short
inventory attached, made, as one may say, by common report, you can
thank our surrogate guardian, who obliged us to establish a status and
assign to our daughter a fortune, such as it is, at a time when we were
forced to withdraw from London our English securities, the capital of
which was immense, and re-invest the proceeds in Paris, where interests
were doubled.”

“Don’t talk nonsense to me. There are various ways of verifying the
property. What was the amount of your legacy tax? Those figures will
enable us to get at the total. Come to the point. Tell us frankly what
you received from the father’s estate and how much remains of it. If we
are very much in love we’ll see then what we can do.”

“If you are marrying us for our money you can go about your business. We
have claims to more than a million; but all that remains to our mother
is this house and furniture and four hundred odd thousand francs
invested about 1817 in the Five-per-cents, which yield about
forty-thousand francs a year.”

“Then why do you live in a style that requires one hundred thousand a
year at the least?” cried Mathias, horror-stricken.

“Our daughter has cost us the eyes out of our head,” replied Solonet.
“Besides, we like to spend money. Your jeremiads, let me tell you, won’t
recover two farthings of the money.”

“With the fifty thousand francs a year which belong to Mademoiselle
Natalie you could have brought her up handsomely without coming to ruin.
But if you have squandered everything while you were a girl what will it
be when you are a married woman?”

“Then drop us altogether,” said Solonet. “The handsomest girl in
Bordeaux has a right to spend more than she has, if she likes.”

“I’ll talk to my client about that,” said the old notary.

“Very good, old father Cassandra, go and tell your client that we
haven’t a penny,” thought Solonet, who, in the solitude of his study,
had strategically massed his forces, drawn up his propositions, manned
the drawbridge of discussion, and prepared the point at which the
opposing party, thinking the affair a failure, could suddenly be led
into a compromise which would end in the triumph of his client.

The white dress with its rose-colored ribbons, the Sevigne curls,
Natalie’s tiny foot, her winning glance, her pretty fingers constantly
employed in adjusting curls that needed no adjustment, these girlish
manoeuvres like those of a peacock spreading his tail, had brought Paul
to the point at which his future mother-in-law desired to see him. He
was intoxicated with love, and his eyes, the sure thermometer of the
soul, indicated the degree of passion at which a man commits a thousand
follies.

“Natalie is so beautiful,” he whispered to the mother, “that I can
conceive the frenzy which leads a man to pay for his happiness by
death.”

Madame Evangelista replied with a shake of her head:--

“Lover’s talk, my dear count. My husband never said such charming things
to me; but he married me without a fortune and for thirteen years he
never caused me one moment’s pain.”

“Is that a lesson you are giving me?” said Paul, laughing.

“You know how I love you, my dear son,” she answered, pressing his hand.
“I must indeed love you well to give you my Natalie.”

“Give me, give me?” said the young girl, waving a screen of Indian
feathers, “what are you whispering about me?”

“I was telling her,” replied Paul, “how much I love you, since etiquette
forbids me to tell it to you.”

“Why?”

“I fear to say too much.”

“Ah! you know too well how to offer the jewels of flattery. Shall I tell
you my private opinion about you? Well, I think you have more mind than
a lover ought to have. To be the Pink of Fashion and a wit as well,” she
added, dropping her eyes, “is to have too many advantages: a man should
choose between them. I fear too, myself.”

“And why?”

“We must not talk in this way. Mamma, do you not think that this
conversation is dangerous inasmuch as the contract is not yet signed?”

“It soon will be,” said Paul.

“I should like to know what Achilles and Nestor are saying to each other
in the next room,” said Natalie, nodding toward the door of the little
salon with a childlike expression of curiosity.

“They are talking of our children and our death and a lot of other such
trifles; they are counting our gold to see if we can keep five horses in
the stables. They are talking also of deeds of gift; but there, I have
forestalled them.”

“How so?”

“Have I not given myself wholly to you?” he said, looking straight at
the girl, whose beauty was enhanced by the blush which the pleasure of
this answer brought to her face.

“Mamma, how can I acknowledge so much generosity.”

“My dear child, you have a lifetime before you in which to return it.
To make the daily happiness of a home, is to bring a treasure into it. I
had no other fortune when I married.”

“Do you like Lanstrac?” asked Paul, addressing Natalie.

“How could I fail to like the place where you were born?” she answered.
“I wish I could see your house.”

“_Our_ house,” said Paul. “Do you not want to know if I shall understand
your tastes and arrange the house to suit you? Your mother had made a
husband’s task most difficult; you have always been so happy! But where
love is infinite, nothing is impossible.”

“My dear children,” said Madame Evangelista, “do you feel willing to
stay in Bordeaux after your marriage? If you have the courage to face
the people here who know you and will watch and hamper you, so be it!
But if you feel that desire for a solitude together which can hardly be
expressed, let us go to Paris were the life of a young couple can pass
unnoticed in the stream. There alone you can behave as lovers without
fearing to seem ridiculous.”

“You are quite right,” said Paul, “but I shall hardly have time to get
my house ready. However, I will write to-night to de Marsay, the friend
on whom I can always count to get things done for me.”

At the moment when Paul, like all young men accustomed to satisfy
their desires without previous calculation, was inconsiderately binding
himself to the expenses of a stay in Paris, Maitre Mathias entered the
salon and made a sign to his client that he wished to speak to him.

“What is it, my friend?” asked Paul, following the old man to the recess
of a window.

“Monsieur le comte,” said the honest lawyer, “there is not a penny of
dowry. My advice is: put off the conference to another day, so that you
may gain time to consider your proper course.”

“Monsieur Paul,” said Natalie, “I have a word to say in private to you.”

Though Madame Evangelista’s face was calm, no Jew of the middle ages
ever suffered greater torture in his caldron of boiling oil than she was
enduring in her violet velvet gown. Solonet had pledged the marriage to
her, but she was ignorant of the means and conditions of success. The
anguish of this uncertainty was intolerable. Possibly she owed her
safety to her daughter’s disobedience. Natalie had considered the advice
of her mother and noted her anxiety. When she saw the success of her
own coquetry she was struck to the heart with a variety of contradictory
thoughts. Without blaming her mother, she was half-ashamed of manoeuvres
the object of which was, undoubtedly, some personal game. She was also
seized with a jealous curiosity which is easily conceived. She wanted to
find out if Paul loved her well enough to rise above the obstacles that
her mother foresaw and which she now saw clouding the face of the old
lawyer. These ideas and sentiments prompted her to an action of loyalty
which became her well. But, for all that, the blackest perfidy could not
have been as dangerous as her present innocence.

“Paul,” she said in a low voice, and she so called him for the first
time, “if any difficulties as to property arise to separate us, remember
that I free you from all engagements, and will allow you to let the
blame of such a rupture rest on me.”

She put such dignity into this expression of her generosity that Paul
believed in her disinterestedness and in her ignorance of the strange
fact that his notary had just told to him. He pressed the young girl’s
hand and kissed it like a man to whom love is more precious than wealth.
Natalie left the room.

“Sac-a-papier! Monsieur le comte, you are committing a great folly,”
 said the old notary, rejoining his client.

Paul grew thoughtful. He had expected to unite Natalie’s fortune with
his own and thus obtain for his married life an income of one hundred
thousand francs a year; and however much a man may be in love he cannot
pass without emotion and anxiety from the prospect of a hundred thousand
to the certainty of forty-six thousand a year and the duty of providing
for a woman accustomed to every luxury.

“My daughter is no longer here,” said Madame Evangelista, advancing
almost regally toward her son-in-law and his notary. “May I be told what
is happening?”

“Madame,” replied Mathias, alarmed at Paul’s silence, “an obstacle which
I fear will delay us has arisen--”

At these words, Maitre Solonet issued from the little salon and cut
short the old man’s speech by a remark which restored Paul’s composure.
Overcome by the remembrance of his gallant speeches and his lover-like
behavior, he felt unable to disown them or to change his course. He
longed, for the moment, to fling himself into a gulf; Solonet’s words
relieved him.

“There is a way,” said the younger notary, with an easy air, “by
which madame can meet the payment which is due to her daughter. Madame
Evangelista possesses forty thousand francs a year from an investment
in the Five-per-cents, the capital of which will soon be at par, if not
above it. We may therefore reckon it at eight hundred thousand francs.
This house and garden are fully worth two hundred thousand. On that
estimate, Madame can convey by the marriage contract the titles of that
property to her daughter, reserving only a life interest in it--for
I conclude that Monsieur le comte could hardly wish to leave his
mother-in-law without means? Though Madame has certainly run through her
fortune, she is still able to make good that of her daughter, or very
nearly so.”

“Women are most unfortunate in having no knowledge of business,”
 said Madame Evangelista. “Have I titles to property? and what are
life-interests?”

Paul was in a sort of ecstasy as he listened to this proposed
arrangement. The old notary, seeing the trap, and his client with one
foot caught in it, was petrified for a moment, as he said to himself:--

“I am certain they are tricking us.”

“If madame will follow my advice,” said Solonet, “she will secure her
own tranquillity. By sacrificing herself in this way she may be sure
that no minors will ultimately harass her--for we never know who
may live and who may die! Monsieur le comte will then give due
acknowledgment in the marriage contract of having received the sum total
of Mademoiselle Evangelista’s patrimonial inheritance.”

Mathias could not restrain the indignation which shone in his eyes and
flushed his face.

“And that sum,” he said, shaking, “is--”

“One million, one hundred and fifty-six thousand francs according to the
document--”

“Why don’t you ask Monsieur le comte to make over ‘hic et nunc’ his
whole fortune to his future wife?” said Mathias. “It would be more
honest than what you now propose. I will not allow the ruin of the Comte
de Manerville to take place under my very eyes--”

He made a step as if to address his client, who was silent throughout
this scene as if dazed by it; but he turned and said, addressing Madame
Evangelista:--

“Do not suppose, madame, that I think you a party to these ideas of
my brother notary. I consider you an honest woman and a lady who knows
nothing of business.”

“Thank you, brother notary,” said Solonet.

“You know that there can be no offence between you and me,” replied
Mathias. “Madame,” he added, “you ought to know the result of this
proposed arrangement. You are still young and beautiful enough to marry
again--Ah! madame,” said the old man, noting her gesture, “who can
answer for themselves on that point?”

“I did not suppose, monsieur,” said Madame Evangelista, “that, after
remaining a widow for the seven best years of my life, and refusing the
most brilliant offers for my daughter’s sake, I should be suspected of
such a piece of folly as marrying again at thirty-nine years of age.
If we were not talking business I should regard your suggestion as an
impertinence.”

“Would it not be more impertinent if I suggested that you could not
marry again?”

“Can and will are separate terms,” remarked Solonet, gallantly.

“Well,” resumed Maitre Mathias, “we will say nothing of your marriage.
You may, and we all desire it, live for forty-five years to come. Now,
if you keep for yourself the life-interest in your daughter’s patrimony,
your children are laid on the shelf for the best years of their lives.”

“What does that mean?” said the widow. “I don’t understand being laid on
a shelf.”

Solonet, the man of elegance and good taste, began to laugh.

“I’ll translate it for you,” said Mathias. “If your children are wise
they will think of the future. To think of the future means laying by
half our income, provided we have only two children, to whom we are
bound to give a fine education and a handsome dowry. Your daughter and
son-in-law will, therefore, be reduced to live on twenty thousand francs
a year, though each has spent fifty thousand while still unmarried. But
that is nothing. The law obliges my client to account, hereafter, to his
children for the eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand francs of their
mother’s patrimony; yet he may not have received them if his wife should
die and madame should survive her, which may very well happen. To sign
such a contract is to fling one’s self into the river, bound hand and
foot. You wish to make your daughter happy, do you not? If she loves her
husband, a fact which notaries never doubt, she will share his troubles.
Madame, I see enough in this scheme to make her die of grief and
anxiety; you are consigning her to poverty. Yes, madame, poverty; to
persons accustomed to the use of one hundred thousand francs a year,
twenty thousand is poverty. Moreover, if Monsieur le comte, out of
love for his wife, were guilty of extravagance, she could ruin him by
exercising her rights when misfortunes overtook him. I plead now for
you, for them, for their children, for every one.”

“The old fellow makes a lot of smoke with his cannon,” thought Maitre
Solonet, giving his client a look, which meant, “Keep on!”

“There is one way of combining all interests,” replied Madame
Evangelista, calmly. “I can reserve to myself only the necessary cost of
living in a convent, and my children can have my property at once. I can
renounce the world, if such anticipated death conduces to the welfare of
my daughter.”

“Madame,” said the old notary, “let us take time to consider and
weigh, deliberately, the course we had best pursue to conciliate all
interests.”

“Good heavens! monsieur,” cried Madame Evangelista, who saw defeat
in delay, “everything has already been considered and weighed. I was
ignorant of what the process of marriage is in France; I am a Spaniard
and a Creole. I did not know that in order to marry my daughter it was
necessary to reckon up the days which God may still grant me; that my
child would suffer because I live; that I do harm by living, and by
having lived! When my husband married me I had nothing but my name and
my person. My name alone was a fortune to him, which dwarfed his own.
What wealth can equal that of a great name? My dowry was beauty,
virtue, happiness, birth, education. Can money give those treasures?
If Natalie’s father could overhear this conversation, his generous soul
would be wounded forever, and his happiness in paradise destroyed. I
dissipated, foolishly, perhaps, a few of his millions without a quiver
ever coming to his eyelids. Since his death, I have grown economical and
orderly in comparison with the life he encouraged me to lead--Come, let
us break this thing off! Monsieur de Manerville is so disappointed that
I--”

No descriptive language can express the confusion and shock which the
words, “break off,” introduced into the conversation. It is enough to
say that these four apparently well-bred persons all talked at once.

“In Spain people marry in the Spanish fashion, or as they please; but
in France they marry according to French law, sensibly, and as best they
can,” said Mathias.

“Ah, madame,” cried Paul, coming out of his stupefaction, “you mistake
my feelings.”

“This is not a matter of feeling,” said the old notary, trying to stop
his client from concessions. “We are concerned now with the interests
and welfare of three generations. Have _we_ wasted the missing millions?
We are simply endeavoring to solve difficulties of which we are wholly
guiltless.”

“Marry us, and don’t haggle,” said Solonet.

“Haggle! do you call it haggling to defend the interests of father and
mother and children?” said Mathias.

“Yes,” said Paul, continuing his remarks to Madame Evangelista, “I
deplore the extravagance of my youth, which does not permit me to stop
this discussion, as you deplore your ignorance of business and your
involuntary wastefulness. God is my witness that I am not thinking, at
this moment, of myself. A simple life at Lanstrac does not alarm me; but
how can I ask Mademoiselle Natalie to renounce her tastes, her habits?
Her very existence would be changed.”

“Where did Evangelista get his millions?” said the widow.

“Monsieur Evangelista was in business,” replied the old notary; “he
played in the great game of commerce; he despatched ships and made
enormous sums; we are simply a landowner, whose capital is invested,
whose income is fixed.”

“There is still a way to harmonize all interests,” said Solonet,
uttering this sentence in a high falsetto tone, which silenced the other
three and drew their eyes and their attention upon himself.

This young man was not unlike a skilful coachman who holds the reins of
four horses, and amuses himself by first exciting his animals and then
subduing them. He had let loose these passions, and then, in turn, he
calmed them, making Paul, whose life and happiness were in the balance,
sweat in his harness, as well as his own client, who could not clearly
see her way through this involved discussion.

“Madame Evangelista,” he continued, after a slight pause, “can resign
her investment in the Five-per-cents at once, and she can sell this
house. I can get three hundred thousand francs for it by cutting the
land into small lots. Out of that sum she can give you one hundred and
fifty thousand francs. In this way she pays down nine hundred thousand
of her daughter’s patrimony, immediately. That, to be sure, is not all
that she owes her daughter, but where will you find, in France, a better
dowry?”

“Very good,” said Maitre Mathias; “but what, then, becomes of madame?”

At this question, which appeared to imply consent, Solonet said, softly,
to himself, “Well done, old fox! I’ve caught you!”

“Madame,” he replied, aloud, “will keep the hundred and fifty thousand
francs remaining from the sale of the house. This sum, added to the
value of her furniture, can be invested in an annuity which will give
her twenty thousand francs a year. Monsieur le comte can arrange to
provide a residence for her under his roof. Lanstrac is a large house.
You have also a house in Paris,” he went on, addressing himself to Paul.
“Madame can, therefore, live with you wherever you are. A widow with
twenty thousand francs a year, and no household to maintain, is richer
than madame was when she possessed her whole fortune. Madame Evangelista
has only this one daughter; Monsieur le comte is without relations; it
will be many years before your heirs attain their majority; no conflict
of interests is, therefore, to be feared. A mother-in-law and a
son-in-law placed in such relations will form a household of united
interests. Madame Evangelista can make up for the remaining deficit by
paying a certain sum for her support from her annuity, which will ease
your way. We know that madame is too generous and too large-minded to
be willing to be a burden on her children. In this way you can make one
household, united and happy, and be able to spend, in your own right,
one hundred thousand francs a year. Is not that sum sufficient, Monsieur
le comte, to enjoy, in all countries, the luxuries of life, and to
satisfy all your wants and caprices? Believe me, a young couple often
feel the need of a third member of the household; and, I ask you, what
third member could be so desirable as a good mother?”

“A little paradise!” exclaimed the old notary.

Shocked to see his client’s joy at this proposal, Mathias sat down on
an ottoman, his head in his hands, plunged in reflections that were
evidently painful. He knew well the involved phraseology in which
notaries and lawyers wrap up, intentionally, malicious schemes, and he
was not the man to be taken in by it. He now began, furtively, to watch
his brother notary and Madame Evangelista as they conversed with
Paul, endeavoring to detect some clew to the deep-laid plot which was
beginning to appear upon the surface.

“Monsieur,” said Paul to Solonet, “I thank you for the pains you take to
conciliate our interests. This arrangement will solve all difficulties
far more happily than I expected--if,” he added, turning to Madame
Evangelista, “it is agreeable to you, madame; for I could not desire
anything that did not equally please you.”

“I?” she said; “all that makes the happiness of my children is joy to
me. Do not consider me in any way.”

“That would not be right,” said Paul, eagerly. “If your future is not
honorably provided for, Natalie and I would suffer more than you would
suffer for yourself.”

“Don’t be uneasy, Monsieur le comte,” interposed Solonet.

“Ah!” thought old Mathias, “they’ll make him kiss the rod before they
scourge him.”

“You may feel quite satisfied,” continued Solonet. “There are so many
enterprises going on in Bordeaux at this moment that investments for
annuities can be negotiated on very advantageous terms. After deducting
from the proceeds of the house and furniture the hundred and fifty
thousand francs we owe you, I think I can guarantee to madame that two
hundred and fifty thousand will remain to her. I take upon myself to
invest that sum in a first mortgage on property worth a million, and
to obtain ten per cent for it,--twenty-five thousand francs a year.
Consequently, we are marrying on nearly equal fortunes. In fact, against
your forty-six thousand francs a year, Mademoiselle Natalie brings you
forty thousand a year in the Five-per-cents, and one hundred and fifty
thousand in a round sum, which gives, in all, forty-seven thousand
francs a year.”

“That is evident,” said Paul.

As he ended his speech, Solonet had cast a sidelong glance at his
client, intercepted by Mathias, which meant: “Bring up your reserves.”

“But,” exclaimed Madame Evangelista, in tones of joy that did not seem
to be feigned, “I can give Natalie my diamonds; they are worth, at
least, a hundred thousand francs.”

“We can have them appraised,” said the notary. “This will change the
whole face of things. Madame can then keep the proceeds of her house,
all but fifty thousand francs. Nothing will prevent Monsieur le comte
from giving us a receipt in due form, as having received, in full,
Mademoiselle Natalie’s inheritance from her father; this will close, of
course, the guardianship account. If madame, with Spanish generosity,
robs herself in this way to fulfil her obligations, the least that her
children can do is to give her a full receipt.”

“Nothing could be more just than that,” said Paul. “I am simply
overwhelmed by these generous proposals.”

“My daughter is another myself,” said Madame Evangelista, softly.

Maitre Mathias detected a look of joy on her face when she saw that
the difficulties were being removed: that joy, and the previous
forgetfulness of the diamonds, which were now brought forward like fresh
troops, confirmed his suspicions.

“The scene has been prepared between them as gamblers prepare the cards
to ruin a pigeon,” thought the old notary. “Is this poor boy, whom I
saw born, doomed to be plucked alive by that woman, roasted by his very
love, and devoured by his wife? I, who have nursed these fine estates
for years with such care, am I to see them ruined in a single night?
Three million and a half to be hypothecated for eleven hundred thousand
francs these women will force him to squander!”

Discovering thus in the soul of the elder woman intentions which,
without involving crime, theft, swindling, or any actually evil or
blameworthy action, nevertheless belonged to all those criminalities in
embryo, Maitre Mathias felt neither sorrow nor generous indignation.
He was not the Misanthrope; he was an old notary, accustomed in his
business to the shrewd calculations of worldly people, to those clever
bits of treachery which do more fatal injury than open murder on
the high-road committed by some poor devil, who is guillotined in
consequence. To the upper classes of society these passages in life,
these diplomatic meetings and discussions are like the necessary
cesspools where the filth of life is thrown. Full of pity for his
client, Mathias cast a foreseeing eye into the future and saw nothing
good.

“We’ll take the field with the same weapons,” thought he, “and beat
them.”

At this moment, Paul, Solonet and Madame Evangelista, becoming
embarrassed by the old man’s silence, felt that the approval of that
censor was necessary to carry out the transaction, and all three turned
to him simultaneously.

“Well, my dear Monsieur Mathias, what do you think of it?” said Paul.

“This is what I think,” said the conscientious and uncompromising
notary. “You are not rich enough to commit such regal folly. The estate
of Lanstrac, if estimated at three per cent on its rentals, represents,
with its furniture, one million; the farms of Grassol and Guadet and
your vineyard of Belle-Rose are worth another million; your two houses
in Bordeaux and Paris, with their furniture, a third million. Against
those three millions, yielding forty-seven thousand francs a year,
Mademoiselle Natalie brings eight hundred thousand francs in the
Five-per-cents, the diamonds (supposing them to be worth a hundred
thousand francs, which is still problematical) and fifty thousand francs
in money; in all, one million and fifty thousand francs. In presence of
such facts my brother notary tells you boastfully that we are marrying
equal fortunes! He expects us to encumber ourselves with a debt
of eleven hundred and fifty-six thousand francs to our children by
acknowledging the receipt of our wife’s patrimony, when we have actually
received but little more than a doubtful million. You are listening to
such stuff with the rapture of a lover, and you think that old Mathias,
who is not in love, can forget arithmetic, and will not point out the
difference between landed estate, the actual value of which is enormous
and constantly increasing, and the revenues of personal property, the
capital of which is subject to fluctuations and diminishment of income.
I am old enough to have learned that money dwindles and land augments.
You have called me in, Monsieur le comte, to stipulate for your
interests; either let me defend those interests, or dismiss me.”

“If monsieur is seeking a fortune equal in capital to his own,” said
Solonet, “we certainly cannot give it to him. We do not possess three
millions and a half; nothing can be more evident. While you can boast
of your three overwhelming millions, we can only produce our poor one
million,--a mere nothing in your eyes, though three times the dowry of
an archduchess of Austria. Bonaparte received only two hundred and fifty
thousand francs with Maria-Louisa.”

“Maria-Louisa was the ruin of Bonaparte,” muttered Mathias.

Natalie’s mother caught the words.

“If my sacrifices are worth nothing,” she cried, “I do not choose to
continue such a discussion; I trust to the discretion of Monsieur le
comte, and I renounce the honor of his hand for my daughter.”

According to the strategy marked out by the younger notary, this battle
of contending interests had now reached the point where victory was
certain for Madame Evangelista. The mother-in-law had opened her heart,
delivered up her property, and was therefore practically released as her
daughter’s guardian. The future husband, under pain of ignoring the laws
of generous propriety and being false to love, ought now to accept these
conditions previously planned, and cleverly led up to by Solonet and
Madame Evangelista. Like the hands of a clock turned by mechanism, Paul
came faithfully up to time.

“Madame!” he exclaimed, “is it possible you can think of breaking off
the marriage?”

“Monsieur,” she replied, “to whom am I accountable? To my daughter. When
she is twenty-one years of age she will receive my guardianship account
and release me. She will then possess a million, and can, if she likes,
choose her husband among the sons of the peers of France. She is a
daughter of the Casa-Reale.”

“Madame is right,” remarked Solonet. “Why should she be more hardly
pushed to-day than she will be fourteen months hence? You ought not to
deprive her of the benefits of her maternity.”

“Mathias,” cried Paul, in deep distress, “there are two sorts of ruin,
and you are bringing one upon me at this moment.”

He made a step towards the old notary, no doubt intending to tell
him that the contract must be drawn at once. But Mathias stopped that
disaster with a glance which said, distinctly, “Wait!” He saw the tears
in Paul’s eyes,--tears drawn from an honorable man by the shame of this
discussion as much as by the peremptory speech of Madame Evangelista,
threatening rupture,--and the old man stanched them with a gesture like
that of Archimedes when he cried, “Eureka!” The words “peer of France”
 had been to him like a torch in a dark crypt.

Natalie appeared at this moment, dazzling as the dawn, saying, with
infantine look and manner, “Am I in the way?”

“Singularly so, my child,” answered her mother, in a bitter tone.

“Come in, dear Natalie,” said Paul, taking her hand and leading her to a
chair near the fireplace. “All is settled.”

He felt it impossible to endure the overthrow of their mutual hopes.

“Yes, all can be settled,” said Mathias, hastily interposing.

Like a general who, in a moment, upsets the plans skilfully laid and
prepared by the enemy, the old notary, enlightened by that genius which
presides over notaries, saw an idea, capable of saving the future of
Paul and his children, unfolding itself in legal form before his eyes.

Maitre Solonet, who perceived no other way out of these irreconcilable
difficulties than the resolution with which Paul’s love inspired him,
and to which this conflict of feelings and thwarted interests had
brought him, was extremely surprised at the sudden exclamation of his
brother notary. Curious to know the remedy that Mathias had found in
a state of things which had seemed to him beyond all other relief, he
said, addressing the old man:--

“What is it you propose?”

“Natalie, my dear child, leave us,” said Madame Evangelista.

“Mademoiselle is not in the way,” replied Mathias, smiling. “I am going
to speak in her interests as well as in those of Monsieur le comte.”

Silence reigned for a moment, during which time everybody present,
oppressed with anxiety, awaited the allocution of the venerable notary
with unspeakable curiosity.

“In these days,” continued Maitre Mathias, after a pause, “the
profession of notary has changed from what it was. Political revolutions
now exert an influence over the prospects of families, which never
happened in former times. In those days existences were clearly defined;
so were rank and position--”

“We are not here for a lecture on political ceremony, but to draw up a
marriage contract,” said Solonet, interrupting the old man, impatiently.

“I beg you to allow me to speak in my turn as I see fit,” replied the
other.

Solonet turned away and sat down on the ottoman, saying, in a low voice,
to Madame Evangelista:--

“You will now hear what we call in the profession ‘balderdash.’”

“Notaries are therefore compelled to follow the course of political
events, which are now intimately connected with private interests. Here
is an example: formerly noble families owned fortunes that were never
shaken, but which the laws, promulgated by the Revolution, destroyed,
and the present system tends to reconstruct,” resumed the old notary,
yielding to the loquacity of the “tabellionaris boa-constrictor”
 (boa-notary). “Monsieur le comte by his name, his talents, and his
fortune is called upon to sit some day in the elective Chamber. Perhaps
his destiny will take him to the hereditary Chamber, for we know that he
has talent and means enough to fulfil that expectation. Do you not agree
with me, madame?” he added, turning to the widow.

“You anticipate my dearest hope,” she replied. “Monsieur de Manerville
must be a peer of France, or I shall die of mortification.”

“Therefore all that leads to that end--” continued Mathias with a
cordial gesture to the astute mother-in-law.

“--will promote my eager desire,” she replied.

“Well, then,” said Mathias, “is not this marriage the proper occasion on
which to entail the estate and create the family? Such a course would,
undoubtedly, militate in the mind of the present government in favor of
the nomination of my client whenever a batch of appointments is sent in.
Monsieur le comte can very well afford to devote the estate of
Lanstrac (which is worth a million) to this purpose. I do not ask that
mademoiselle should contribute an equal sum; that would not be just.
But we can surely apply eight hundred thousand of her patrimony to this
object. There are two domains adjoining Lanstrac now to be sold, which
can be purchased for that sum, which will return in rentals four and a
half per cent. The house in Paris should be included in the entail. The
surplus of the two fortunes, if judiciously managed, will amply suffice
for the fortunes of the younger children. If the contracting parties
will agree to this arrangement, Monsieur ought certainly to accept your
guardianship account with its deficiency. I consent to that.”

“Questa coda non e di questo gatto (That tail doesn’t belong to that
cat),” murmured Madame Evangelista, appealing to Solonet.

“There’s a snake in the grass somewhere,” answered Solonet, in a low
voice, replying to the Italian proverb with a French one.

“Why do you make this fuss?” asked Paul, leading Mathias into the
adjoining salon.

“To save you from being ruined,” replied the old notary, in a whisper.
“You are determined to marry a girl and her mother who have already
squandered two millions in seven years; you are pledging yourself to
a debt of eleven hundred thousand francs to your children, to whom
you will have to account for the fortune you are acknowledging to have
received with their mother. You risk having your own fortune squandered
in five years, and to be left as naked as Saint-John himself, besides
being a debtor to your wife and children for enormous sums. If you are
determined to put your life in that boat, Monsieur le comte, of course
you can do as you choose; but at least let me, your old friend, try to
save the house of Manerville.”

“How is this scheme going to save it?” asked Paul.

“Monsieur le comte, you are in love--”

“Yes.”

“A lover is about as discreet as a cannon-ball; therefore, I shall not
explain. If you repeated what I should say, your marriage would probably
be broken off. I protect your love by my silence. Have you confidence in
my devotion?”

“A fine question!”

“Well, then, believe me when I tell you that Madame Evangelista, her
notary, and her daughter, are tricking us through thick and thin; they
are more than clever. Tudieu! what a sly game!”

“Not Natalie,” cried Paul.

“I sha’n’t put my fingers between the bark and the tree,” said the
old man. “You want her, take her! But I wish you were well out of this
marriage, if it could be done without the least wrong-doing on your
part.”

“Why do you wish it?”

“Because that girl will spend the mines of Peru. Besides, see how she
rides a horse,--like the groom of a circus; she is half emancipated
already. Such girls make bad wives.”

Paul pressed the old man’s hand, saying, with a confident air of
self-conceit:--

“Don’t be uneasy as to that! But now, at this moment, what am I to do?”

“Hold firm to my conditions. They will consent, for no one’s apparent
interest is injured. Madame Evangelista is very anxious to marry her
daughter; I see that in her little game--Beware of her!”

Paul returned to the salon, where he found his future mother-in-law
conversing in a low tone with Solonet. Natalie, kept outside of these
mysterious conferences, was playing with a screen. Embarrassed by her
position, she was thinking to herself: “How odd it is that they tell me
nothing of my own affairs.”

The younger notary had seized, in the main, the future effect of the new
proposal, based, as it was, on the self-love of both parties, into which
his client had fallen headlong. Now, while Mathias was more than a mere
notary, Solonet was still a young man, and brought into his business
the vanity of youth. It often happens that personal conceit makes a man
forgetful of the interests of his client. In this case, Maitre Solonet,
who would not suffer the widow to think that Nestor had vanquished
Achilles, advised her to conclude the marriage on the terms proposed.
Little he cared for the future working of the marriage contract; to him,
the conditions of victory were: Madame Evangelista released from her
obligations as guardian, her future secured, and Natalie married.

“Bordeaux shall know that you have ceded eleven hundred thousand francs
to your daughter, and that you still have twenty-five thousand francs
a year left,” whispered Solonet to his client. “For my part, I did not
expect to obtain such a fine result.”

“But,” she said, “explain to me why the creation of this entail should
have calmed the storm at once.”

“It relieves their distrust of you and your daughter. An entail is
unchangeable; neither husband nor wife can touch that capital.”

“Then this arrangement is positively insulting!”

“No; we call it simply precaution. The old fellow has caught you in a
net. If you refuse to consent to the entail, he can reply: ‘Then your
object is to squander the fortune of my client, who, by the creation
of this entail, is protected from all such injury as securely as if the
marriage took place under the “regime dotal.”’”

Solonet quieted his own scruples by reflecting: “After all, these
stipulations will take effect only in the future, by which time Madame
Evangelista will be dead and buried.”

Madame Evangelista contented herself, for the present, with these
explanations, having full confidence in Solonet. She was wholly ignorant
of law; considering her daughter as good as married, she thought she had
gained her end, and was filled with the joy of success. Thus, as
Mathias had shrewdly calculated, neither Solonet nor Madame Evangelista
understood as yet, to its full extent, this scheme which he had based on
reasons that were undeniable.

“Well, Monsieur Mathias,” said the widow, “all is for the best, is it
not?”

“Madame, if you and Monsieur le comte consent to this arrangement
you ought to exchange pledges. It is fully understood, I suppose,” he
continued, looking from one to the other, “that the marriage will
only take place on condition of creating an entail upon the estate of
Lanstrac and the house in the rue de la Pepiniere, together with eight
hundred thousand francs in money brought by the future wife, the said
sum to be invested in landed property? Pardon me the repetition, madame;
but a positive and solemn engagement becomes absolutely necessary.
The creation of an entail requires formalities, application to the
chancellor, a royal ordinance, and we ought at once to conclude the
purchase of the new estate in order that the property be included in
the royal ordinance by virtue of which it becomes inalienable. In many
families this would be reduced to writing, but on this occasion I think
a simple consent would suffice. Do you consent?”

“Yes,” replied Madame Evangelista.

“Yes,” said Paul.

“And I?” asked Natalie, laughing.

“You are a minor, mademoiselle,” replied Solonet; “don’t complain of
that.”

It was then agreed that Maitre Mathias should draw up the contract,
Maitre Solonet the guardianship account and release, and that both
documents should be signed, as the law requires some days before the
celebration of the marriage. After a few polite salutations the notaries
withdrew.

“It rains, Mathias; shall I take you home?” said Solonet. “My cabriolet
is here.”

“My carriage is here too,” said Paul, manifesting an intention to
accompany the old man.

“I won’t rob you of a moment’s pleasure,” said Mathias. “I accept my
friend Solonet’s offer.”

“Well,” said Achilles to Nestor, as the cabriolet rolled away, “you have
been truly patriarchal to-night. The fact is, those young people would
certainly have ruined themselves.”

“I felt anxious about their future,” replied Mathias, keeping silent as
to the real motives of his proposition.

At this moment the two notaries were like a pair of actors arm in
arm behind the stage on which they have played a scene of hatred and
provocation.

“But,” said Solonet, thinking of his rights as notary, “isn’t it my
place to buy that land you mentioned? The money is part of our dowry.”

“How can you put property bought in the name of Mademoiselle Evangelista
into the creation of an entail by the Comte de Manerville?” replied
Mathias.

“We shall have to ask the chancellor about that,” said Solonet.

“But I am the notary of the seller as well as of the buyer of that
land,” said Mathias. “Besides, Monsieur de Manerville can buy in his own
name. At the time of payment we can make mention of the fact that the
dowry funds are put into it.”

“You’ve an answer for everything, old man,” said Solonet, laughing. “You
were really surpassing to-night; you beat us squarely.”

“For an old fellow who didn’t expect your batteries of grape-shot, I did
pretty well, didn’t I?”

“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed Solonet.

The odious struggle in which the material welfare of a family had been
so perilously near destruction was to the two notaries nothing more than
a matter of professional polemics.

“I haven’t been forty years in harness for nothing,” remarked Mathias.
“Look here, Solonet,” he added, “I’m a good fellow; you shall help in
drawing the deeds for the sale of those lands.”

“Thanks, my dear Mathias. I’ll serve you in return on the very first
occasion.”

While the two notaries were peacefully returning homeward, with no other
sensations than a little throaty warmth, Paul and Madame Evangelista
were left a prey to the nervous trepidation, the quivering of the flesh
and brain which excitable natures pass through after a scene in which
their interests and their feelings have been violently shaken. In Madame
Evangelista these last mutterings of the storm were overshadowed by a
terrible reflection, a lurid gleam which she wanted, at any cost, to
dispel.

“Has Maitre Mathias destroyed in a few minutes the work I have been
doing for six months?” she asked herself. “Was he withdrawing Paul from
my influence by filling his mind with suspicion during their secret
conference in the next room?”

She was standing absorbed in these thoughts before the fireplace, her
elbow resting on the marble mantel-shelf. When the porte-cochere closed
behind the carriage of the two notaries, she turned to her future
son-in-law, impatient to solve her doubts.

“This has been the most terrible day of my life,” cried Paul, overjoyed
to see all difficulties vanish. “I know no one so downright in speech
as that old Mathias. May God hear him, and make me peer of France! Dear
Natalie, I desire this for your sake more than for my own. You are my
ambition; I live only in you.”

Hearing this speech uttered in the accents of the heart, and noting,
more especially, the limpid azure of Paul’s eyes, whose glance betrayed
no thought of double meaning, Madame Evangelista’s satisfaction was
complete. She regretted the sharp language with which she had spurred
him, and in the joy of success she resolved to reassure him as to the
future. Calming her countenance, and giving to her eyes that expression
of tender friendship which made her so attractive, she smiled and
answered:--

“I can say as much to you. Perhaps, dear Paul, my Spanish nature has
led me farther than my heart desired. Be what you are,--kind as God
himself,--and do not be angry with me for a few hasty words. Shake
hands.”

Paul was abashed; he fancied himself to blame, and he kissed Madame
Evangelista.

“Dear Paul,” she said with much emotion, “why could not those two sharks
have settled this matter without dragging us into it, since it was so
easy to settle?”

“In that case I should not have known how grand and generous you can
be,” replied Paul.

“Indeed she is, Paul,” cried Natalie, pressing his hand.

“We have still a few little matters to settle, my dear son,” said Madame
Evangelista. “My daughter and I are above the foolish vanities to which
so many persons cling. Natalie does not need my diamonds, but I am glad
to give them to her.”

“Ah! my dear mother, do you suppose that I will accept them?”

“Yes, my child; they are one of the conditions of the contract.”

“I will not allow it; I will not marry at all,” cried Natalie,
vehemently. “Keep those jewels which my father took such pride in
collecting for you. How could Monsieur Paul exact--”

“Hush, my dear,” said her mother, whose eyes now filled with tears. “My
ignorance of business compels me to a greater sacrifice than that.”

“What sacrifice?”

“I must sell my house in order to pay the money that I owe to you.”

“What money can you possibly owe to me?” she said; “to me, who owe
you life! If my marriage costs you the slightest sacrifice, I will not
marry.”

“Child!”

“Dear Natalie, try to understand that neither I, nor your mother, nor
you yourself, require these sacrifices, but our children.”

“Suppose I do not marry at all?”

“Do you not love me?” said Paul, tenderly.

“Come, come, my silly child; do you imagine that a contract is like a
house of cards which you can blow down at will? Dear little ignoramus,
you don’t know what trouble we have had to found an entail for the
benefit of your eldest son. Don’t cast us back into the discussions from
which we have just escaped.”

“Why do you wish to ruin my mother?” said Natalie, looking at Paul.

“Why are you so rich?” he replied, smiling.

“Don’t quarrel, my children, you are not yet married,” said Madame
Evangelista. “Paul,” she continued, “you are not to give either
corbeille, or jewels, or trousseau. Natalie has everything in profusion.
Lay by the money you would otherwise put into wedding presents. I know
nothing more stupidly bourgeois and commonplace than to spend a hundred
thousand francs on a corbeille, when five thousand a year given to a
young woman saves her much anxiety and lasts her lifetime. Besides, the
money for a corbeille is needed to decorate your house in Paris. We
will return to Lanstrac in the spring; for Solonet is to settle my debts
during the winter.”

“All is for the best,” cried Paul, at the summit of happiness.

“So I shall see Paris!” cried Natalie, in a tone that would justly have
alarmed de Marsay.

“If we decide upon this plan,” said Paul, “I’ll write to de Marsay and
get him to take a box for me at the Bouffons and also at the Italian
opera.”

“You are very kind; I should never have dared to ask for it,” said
Natalie. “Marriage is a very agreeable institution if it gives husbands
a talent for divining the wishes of their wives.”

“It is nothing else,” replied Paul. “But see how late it is; I ought to
go.”

“Why leave so soon to-night?” said Madame Evangelista, employing those
coaxing ways to which men are so sensitive.

Though all this passed on the best of terms, and according to the laws
of the most exquisite politeness, the effect of the discussion of
these contending interests had, nevertheless, cast between son and
mother-in-law a seed of distrust and enmity which was liable to sprout
under the first heat of anger, or the warmth of a feeling too harshly
bruised. In most families the settlement of “dots” and the deeds of
gift required by a marriage contract give rise to primitive emotions of
hostility, caused by self-love, by the lesion of certain sentiments, by
regret for the sacrifices made, and by the desire to diminish them. When
difficulties arise there is always a victorious side and a vanquished
one. The parents of the future pair try to conclude the matter, which is
purely commercial in their eyes, to their own advantage; and this
leads to the trickery, shrewdness, and deception of such negotiations.
Generally the husband alone is initiated into the secret of these
discussions, and the wife is kept, like Natalie, in ignorance of the
stipulations which make her rich or poor.

As he left the house, Paul reflected that, thanks to the cleverness
of his notary, his fortune was almost entirely secured from injury. If
Madame Evangelista did not live apart from her daughter their united
household would have an income of more than a hundred thousand francs
to spend. All his expectations of a happy and comfortable life would be
realized.

“My mother-in-law seems to me an excellent woman,” he thought, still
under the influence of the cajoling manner by which she had endeavored
to disperse the clouds raised by the discussion. “Mathias is mistaken.
These notaries are strange fellows; they envenom everything. The harm
started from that little cock-sparrow Solonet, who wanted to play a
clever game.”

While Paul went to bed recapitulating the advantages he had won during
the evening, Madame Evangelista was congratulating herself equally on
her victory.

“Well, darling mother, are you satisfied?” said Natalie, following
Madame Evangelista into her bedroom.

“Yes, love,” replied the mother, “everything went well, according to my
wishes; I feel a weight lifted from my shoulders which was crushing me.
Paul is a most easy-going man. Dear fellow! yes, certainly, we must make
his life prosperous. You will make him happy, and I will be responsible
for his political success. The Spanish ambassador used to be a friend
of mine, and I’ll renew the relation--as I will with the rest of my
old acquaintance. Oh! you’ll see! we shall soon be in the very heart
of Parisian life; all will be enjoyment for us. You shall have the
pleasures, my dearest, and I the last occupation of existence,--the game
of ambition! Don’t be alarmed when you see me selling this house. Do you
suppose we shall ever come back to live in Bordeaux? no. Lanstrac? yes.
But we shall spend all our winters in Paris, where our real interests
lie. Well, Natalie, tell me, was it very difficult to do what I asked of
you?”

“My little mamma! every now and then I felt ashamed.”

“Solonet advises me to put the proceeds of this house into an annuity,”
 said Madame Evangelista, “but I shall do otherwise; I won’t take a penny
of my fortune from you.”

“I saw you were all very angry,” said Natalie. “How did the tempest calm
down?”

“By an offer of my diamonds,” replied Madame Evangelista. “Solonet was
right. How ably he conducted the whole affair. Get out my jewel-case,
Natalie. I have never seriously considered what my diamonds are worth.
When I said a hundred thousand francs I talked nonsense. Madame de Gyas
always declared that the necklace and ear-rings your father gave me on
our marriage day were worth at least that sum. My poor husband was so
lavish! Then my family diamond, the one Philip the Second gave to the
Duke of Alba, and which my aunt bequeathed to me, the ‘Discreto,’ was,
I think, appraised in former times at four thousand quadruples,--one of
our Spanish gold coins.”

Natalie laid out upon her mother’s toilet-table the pearl necklace,
the sets of jewels, the gold bracelets and precious stones of all
description, with that inexpressible sensation enjoyed by certain women
at the sight of such treasures, by which--so commentators on the Talmud
say--the fallen angels seduce the daughters of men, having sought these
flowers of celestial fire in the bowels of the earth.

“Certainly,” said Madame Evangelista, “though I know nothing about
jewels except how to accept and wear them, I think there must be a great
deal of money in these. Then, if we make but one household, I can
sell my plate, the weight of which, as mere silver, would bring
thirty thousand francs. I remember when we brought it from Lima, the
custom-house officers weighed and appraised it. Solonet is right, I’ll
send to-morrow to Elie Magus. The Jew shall estimate the value of these
things. Perhaps I can avoid sinking any of my fortune in an annuity.”

“What a beautiful pearl necklace!” said Natalie.

“He ought to give it to you, if he loves you,” replied her mother; “and
I think he might have all my other jewels reset and let you keep them.
The diamonds are a part of your property in the contract. And now,
good-night, my darling. After the fatigues of this day we both need
rest.”

The woman of luxury, the Creole, the great lady, incapable of analyzing
the results of a contract which was not yet in force, went to sleep in
the joy of seeing her daughter married to a man who was easy to manage,
who would let them both be mistresses of his home, and whose fortune,
united to theirs, would require no change in their way of living.
Thus having settled her account with her daughter, whose patrimony was
acknowledged in the contract, Madame Evangelista could feel at her ease.

“How foolish of me to worry as I did,” she thought. “But I wish the
marriage were well over.”

So Madame Evangelista, Paul, Natalie, and the two notaries were equally
satisfied with the first day’s result. The Te Deum was sung in both
camps,--a dangerous situation; for there comes a moment when the
vanquished side is aware of its mistake. To Madame Evangelista’s mind,
her son-in-law was the vanquished side.



CHAPTER IV. THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT--SECOND DAY


The next day Elie Magus (who happened at that time to be in Bordeaux)
obeyed Madame Evangelista’s summons, believing, from general rumor as to
the marriage of Comte Paul with Mademoiselle Natalie, that it concerned
a purchase of jewels for the bride. The Jew was, therefore, astonished
when he learned that, on the contrary, he was sent for to estimate the
value of the mother-in-law’s property. The instinct of his race, as well
as certain insidious questions, made him aware that the value of the
diamonds was included in the marriage-contract. The stones were not to
be sold, and yet he was to estimate them as if some private person
were buying them from a dealer. Jewellers alone know how to distinguish
between the diamonds of Asia and those of Brazil. The stones of Golconda
and Visapur are known by a whiteness and glittering brilliancy which
others have not,--the water of the Brazilian diamonds having a yellow
tinge which reduces their selling value. Madame Evangelista’s necklace
and ear-rings, being composed entirely of Asiatic diamonds, were valued
by Elie Magus at two hundred and fifty thousand francs. As for
the “Discreto,” he pronounced it one of the finest diamonds in the
possession of private persons; it was known to the trade and valued at
one hundred thousand francs. On hearing this estimate, which proved to
her the lavishness of her husband, Madame Evangelista asked the old Jew
whether she should be able to obtain that money immediately.

“Madame,” replied the Jew, “if you wish to sell I can give you only
seventy-five thousand for the brilliant, and one hundred and sixty
thousand for the necklace and earrings.”

“Why such reduction?”

“Madame,” replied Magus, “the finer the diamond, the longer we keep it
unsold. The rarity of such investments is one reason for the high value
set upon precious stones. As the merchant cannot lose the interest of
his money, this additional sum, joined to the rise and fall to which
such merchandise is subject, explains the difference between the price
of purchase and the price of sale. By owning these diamonds you have
lost the interest on three hundred thousand francs for twenty years.
If you wear your jewels ten times a year, it costs you three thousand
francs each evening to put them on. How many beautiful gowns you could
buy with that sum. Those who own diamonds are, therefore, very
foolish; but, luckily for us, women are never willing to understand the
calculation.”

“I thank you for explaining it to me, and I shall profit by it.”

“Do you wish to sell?” asked Magus, eagerly.

“What are the other jewels worth?”

The Jew examined the gold of the settings, held the pearls to the light,
scrutinized the rubies, the diadems, clasps, bracelets, and chains, and
said, in a mumbling tone:--

“A good many Portuguese diamonds from Brazil are among them. They are
not worth more than a hundred thousand to me. But,” he added, “a dealer
would sell them to a customer for one hundred and fifty thousand, at
least.”

“I shall keep them,” said Madame Evangelista.

“You are wrong,” replied Elie Magus. “With the income from the sum they
represent you could buy just as fine diamonds in five years, and have
the capital to boot.”

This singular conference became known, and corroborated certain rumors
excited by the discussion of the contract. The servants of the house,
overhearing high voices, supposed the difficulties greater than they
really were. Their gossip with other valets spread the information,
which from the lower regions rose to the ears of the masters. The
attention of society, and of the town in general, became so fixed on
the marriage of two persons equally rich and well-born, that every one,
great and small, busied themselves about the matter, and in less than a
week the strangest rumors were bruited about.

“Madame Evangelista sells her house; she must be ruined. She offered her
diamonds to Elie Magus. Nothing is really settled between herself and
the Comte de Manerville. Is it probable that the marriage will ever take
place?”

To this question some answered yes, and others said no. The two
notaries, when questioned, denied these calumnies, and declared that
the difficulties arose only from the official delay in constituting the
entail. But when public opinion has taken a trend in one direction it
is very difficult to turn it back. Though Paul went every day to Madame
Evangelista’s house, and though the notaries denied these assertions
continually, the whispered calumny went on. Young girls, and their
mothers and aunts, vexed at a marriage they had dreamed of for
themselves or for their families, could not forgive the Spanish ladies
for their happiness, as authors cannot forgive each other for their
success. A few persons revenged themselves for the twenty-years luxury
and grandeur of the family of Evangelista, which had lain heavily on
their self-love. A leading personage at the prefecture declared that
the notaries could have chosen no other language and followed no other
conduct in the case of a rupture. The time actually required for the
establishment of the entail confirmed the suspicions of the Bordeaux
provincials.

“They will keep the ball going through the winter; then, in the spring,
they will go to some watering-place, and we shall learn before the year
is out that the marriage is off.”

“And, of course, we shall be given to understand,” said others, “for
the sake of the honor of the two families, that the difficulties did not
come from either side, but the chancellor refused to consent; you may
be sure it will be some quibble about that entail which will cause the
rupture.”

“Madame Evangelista,” some said, “lived in a style that the mines of
Valencia couldn’t meet. When the time came to melt the bell, and pay the
daughter’s patrimony, nothing would be found to pay it with.”

The occasion was excellent to add up the spendings of the handsome widow
and prove, categorically, her ruin. Rumors were so rife that bets were
made for and against the marriage. By the laws of worldly jurisprudence
this gossip was not allowed to reach the ears of the parties concerned.
No one was enemy or friend enough to Paul or to Madame Evangelista
to inform either of what was being said. Paul had some business at
Lanstrac, and used the occasion to make a hunting-party for several
of the young men of Bordeaux,--a sort of farewell, as it were, to his
bachelor life. This hunting party was accepted by society as a signal
confirmation of public suspicion.

When this event occurred, Madame de Gyas, who had a daughter to marry,
thought it high time to sound the matter, and to condole, with joyful
heart, the blow received by the Evangelistas. Natalie and her mother
were somewhat surprised to see the lengthened face of the marquise, and
they asked at once if anything distressing had happened to her.

“Can it be,” she replied, “that you are ignorant of the rumors that are
circulating? Though I think them false myself, I have come to learn the
truth in order to stop this gossip, at any rate among the circle of my
own friends. To be the dupes or the accomplices of such an error is too
false a position for true friends to occupy.”

“But what is it? what has happened?” asked mother and daughter.

Madame de Gyas thereupon allowed herself the happiness of repeating all
the current gossip, not sparing her two friends a single stab. Natalie
and Madame Evangelista looked at each other and laughed, but they fully
understood the meaning of the tale and the motives of their friend.
The Spanish lady took her revenge very much as Celimene took hers on
Arsinoe.

“My dear, are you ignorant--you who know the provinces so well--can
you be ignorant of what a mother is capable when she has on her hands
a daughter whom she cannot marry for want of ‘dot’ and lovers, want of
beauty, want of mind, and, sometimes, want of everything? Why, a mother
in that position would rob a diligence or commit a murder, or wait for a
man at the corner of a street--she would sacrifice herself twenty times
over, if she was a mother at all. Now, as you and I both know, there are
many such in that situation in Bordeaux, and no doubt they attribute to
us their own thoughts and actions. Naturalists have depicted the habits
and customs of many ferocious animals, but they have forgotten the
mother and daughter in quest of a husband. Such women are hyenas, going
about, as the Psalmist says, seeking whom they may devour, and adding to
the instinct of the brute the intellect of man, and the genius of woman.
I can understand that those little spiders, Mademoiselle de Belor,
Mademoiselle de Trans, and others, after working so long at their webs
without catching a fly, without so much as hearing a buzz, should be
furious; I can even forgive their spiteful speeches. But that you, who
can marry your daughter when you please, you, who are rich and titled,
you who have nothing of the provincial about you, whose daughter is
clever and possesses fine qualities, with beauty and the power to
choose--that you, so distinguished from the rest by your Parisian grace,
should have paid the least heed to this talk does really surprise me. Am
I bound to account to the public for the marriage stipulations which
our notaries think necessary under the political circumstances of my
son-in-law’s future life? Has the mania for public discussion made its
way into families? Ought I to convoke in writing the fathers and mothers
of the province to come here and give their vote on the clauses of our
marriage contract?”

A torrent of epigram flowed over Bordeaux. Madame Evangelista was
about to leave the city, and could safely scan her friends and enemies,
caricature them and lash them as she pleased, with nothing to fear in
return. Accordingly, she now gave vent to her secret observations and
her latent dislikes as she sought for the reason why this or that person
denied the shining of the sun at mid-day.

“But, my dear,” said the Marquise de Gyas, “this stay of the count at
Lanstrac, these parties given to young men under such circumstances--”

“Ah! my dear,” said the great lady, interrupting the marquise, “do you
suppose that we adopt the pettiness of bourgeois customs? Is Count Paul
held in bonds like a man who might seek to get away? Think you we ought
to watch him with a squad of gendarmes lest some provincial conspiracy
should get him away from us?”

“Be assured, my dearest friend, that it gives me the greatest pleasure
to--”

Here her words were interrupted by a footman who entered the room to
announce Paul. Like many lovers, Paul thought it charming to ride twelve
miles to spend an hour with Natalie. He had left his friends while
hunting, and came in booted and spurred, and whip in hand.

“Dear Paul,” said Natalie, “you don’t know what an answer you are giving
to madame.”

When Paul heard of the gossip that was current in Bordeaux, he laughed
instead of being angry.

“These worthy people have found out, perhaps, that there will be no
wedding festivities, according to provincial usages, no marriage at
mid-day in the church, and they are furious. Well, my dear mother,” he
added, kissing her hand, “let us pacify them with a ball on the day when
we sign the contract, just as the government flings a fete to the people
in the great square of the Champs-Elysees, and we will give our dear
friends the dolorous pleasure of signing a marriage-contract such as
they have seldom heard of in the provinces.”

This little incident proved of great importance. Madame Evangelista
invited all Bordeaux to witness the signature of the contract, and
showed her intention of displaying in this last fete a luxury which
should refute the foolish lies of the community.

The preparations for this event required over a month, and it was called
the fete of the camellias. Immense quantities of that beautiful flower
were massed on the staircase, and in the antechamber and supper-room.
During this month the formalities for constituting the entail were
concluded in Paris; the estates adjoining Lanstrac were purchased, the
banns were published, and all doubts finally dissipated. Friends and
enemies thought only of preparing their toilets for the coming fete.

The time occupied by these events obscured the difficulties raised by
the first discussion, and swept into oblivion the words and arguments of
that stormy conference. Neither Paul nor his mother-in-law continued to
think of them. Were they not, after all, as Madame Evangelista had said,
the affair of the two notaries?

But--to whom has it never happened, when life is in its fullest flow, to
be suddenly changed by the voice of memory, raised, perhaps, too late,
reminding us of some important new fact, some threatened danger? On
the morning of the day when the contract was to be signed and the fete
given, one of these flashes of the soul illuminated the mind of Madame
Evangelista during the semi-somnolence of her waking hour. The words
that she herself had uttered at the moment when Mathias acceded to
Solonet’s conditions, “Questa coda non e di questo gatto,” were cried
aloud in her mind by that voice of memory. In spite of her incapacity
for business, Madame Evangelista’s shrewdness told her:--

“If so clever a notary as Mathias was pacified, it must have been that
he saw compensation at the cost of _some one_.”

That some one could not be Paul, as she had blindly hoped. Could it be
that her daughter’s fortune was to pay the costs of war? She resolved to
demand explanations on the tenor of the contract, not reflecting on the
course she would have to take in case she found her interests
seriously compromised. This day had so powerful an influence on Paul de
Manerville’s conjugal life that it is necessary to explain certain of
the external circumstances which accompanied it.

Madame Evangelista had shrunk from no expense for this dazzling fete.
The court-yard was gravelled and converted into a tent, and filled with
shrubs, although it was winter. The camellias, of which so much had
been said from Angouleme to Dax, were banked on the staircase and in the
vestibules. Wall partitions had disappeared to enlarge the supper-room
and the ball-room where the dancing was to be. Bordeaux, a city famous
for the luxury of colonial fortunes, was on a tiptoe of expectation for
this scene of fairyland. About eight o’clock, as the last discussion
of the contract was taking place within the house, the inquisitive
populace, anxious to see the ladies in full dress getting out of their
carriages, formed in two hedges on either side of the porte-cochere.
Thus the sumptuous atmosphere of a fete acted upon all minds at the
moment when the contract was being signed, illuminating colored lamps
lighted up the shrubs, and the wheels of the arriving guests echoed
from the court-yard. The two notaries had dined with the bridal pair and
their mother. Mathias’s head-clerk, whose business it was to receive the
signatures of the guests during the evening (taking due care that the
contract was not surreptitiously read by the signers), was also present
at the dinner.

No bridal toilet was ever comparable with that of Natalie, whose beauty,
decked with laces and satin, her hair coquettishly falling in a myriad
of curls about her throat, resembled that of a flower encased in its
foliage. Madame Evangelista, robed in a gown of cherry velvet, a color
judiciously chosen to heighten the brilliancy of her skin and her black
hair and eyes, glowed with the beauty of a woman at forty, and wore her
pearl necklace, clasped with the “Discreto,” a visible contradiction to
the late calumnies.

To fully explain this scene, it is necessary to say that Paul and
Natalie sat together on a sofa beside the fireplace and paid no
attention to the reading of the documents. Equally childish and equally
happy, regarding life as a cloudless sky, rich, young, and loving, they
chattered to each other in a low voice, sinking into whispers. Arming
his love with the presence of legality, Paul took delight in kissing the
tips of Natalie’s fingers, in lightly touching her snowy shoulders and
the waving curls of her hair, hiding from the eyes of others these
joys of illegal emancipation. Natalie played with a screen of peacock’s
feathers given to her by Paul,--a gift which is to love, according to
superstitious belief in certain countries, as dangerous an omen as the
gift of scissors or other cutting instruments, which recall, no doubt,
the Parces of antiquity.

Seated beside the two notaries, Madame Evangelista gave her closest
attention to the reading of the documents. After listening to the
guardianship account, most ably written out by Solonet, in which
Natalie’s share of the three million and more francs left by Monsieur
Evangelista was shown to be the much-debated eleven hundred and
fifty-six thousand, Madame Evangelista said to the heedless young
couple:--

“Come, listen, listen, my children; this is your marriage contract.”

The clerk drank a glass of iced-water, Solonet and Mathias blew their
noses, Paul and Natalie looked at the four personages before them,
listened to the preamble, and returned to their chatter. The statement
of the property brought by each party; the general deed of gift in
the event of death without issue; the deed of gift of one-fourth in
life-interest and one-fourth in capital without interest, allowed by
the Code, whatever be the number of the children; the constitution of a
common fund for husband and wife; the settlement of the diamonds on the
wife, the library and horses on the husband, were duly read and passed
without observations. Then followed the constitution of the entail.
When all was read and nothing remained but to sign the contract, Madame
Evangelista demanded to know what would be the ultimate effect of the
entail.

“An entail, madam,” replied Solonet, “means an inalienable right to
the inheritance of certain property belonging to both husband and wife,
which is settled from generation to generation on the eldest son of
the house, without, however, depriving him of his right to share in the
division of the rest of the property.”

“What will be the effect of this on my daughter’s rights?”

Maitre Mathias, incapable of disguising the truth, replied:--

“Madame, an entail being an appanage, or portion of property set aside
for this purpose from the fortunes of husband and wife, it follows that
if the wife dies first, leaving several children, one of them a son,
Monsieur de Manerville will owe those children three hundred and
sixty thousand francs only, from which he will deduct his fourth in
life-interest and his fourth in capital. Thus his debt to those
children will be reduced to one hundred and sixty thousand francs, or
thereabouts, exclusive of his savings and profits from the common fund
constituted for husband and wife. If, on the contrary, he dies first,
leaving a male heir, Madame de Manerville has a right to three hundred
and sixty thousand francs only, and to her deeds of gift of such of her
husband’s property as is not included in the entail, to the diamonds now
settled upon her, and to her profits and savings from the common fund.”

The effect of Maitre Mathias’s astute and far-sighted policy were now
plainly seen.

“My daughter is ruined,” said Madame Evangelista in a low voice.

The old and the young notary both overheard the words.

“Is it ruin,” replied Mathias, speaking gently, “to constitute for her
family an indestructible fortune?”

The younger notary, seeing the expression of his client’s face, thought
it judicious in him to state the disaster in plain terms.

“We tried to trick them out of three hundred thousand francs,” he
whispered to the angry woman. “They have actually laid hold of eight
hundred thousand; it is a loss of four hundred thousand from our
interests for the benefit of the children. You must now either break the
marriage off at once, or carry it through,” concluded Solonet.

It is impossible to describe the moment of silence that followed. Maitre
Mathias waited in triumph the signature of the two persons who had
expected to rob his client. Natalie, not competent to understand that
she had lost half her fortune, and Paul, ignorant that the house of
Manerville had gained it, were laughing and chattering still. Solonet
and Madame Evangelista gazed at each other; the one endeavoring to
conceal his indifference, the other repressing the rush of a crowd of
bitter feelings.

After suffering in her own mind the struggles of remorse, after blaming
Paul as the cause of her dishonesty, Madame Evangelista had decided to
employ those shameful manoeuvres to cast on him the burden of her own
unfaithful guardianship, considering him her victim. But now, in a
moment, she perceived that where she thought she triumphed she was about
to perish, and her victim was her own daughter. Guilty without profit,
she saw herself the dupe of an honorable old man, whose respect she had
doubtless lost. Her secret conduct must have inspired the stipulation
of old Mathias; and Mathias must have enlightened Paul. Horrible
reflection! Even if he had not yet done so, as soon as that contract was
signed the old wolf would surely warn his client of the dangers he
had run and had now escaped, were it only to receive the praise of his
sagacity. He would put him on his guard against the wily woman who had
lowered herself to this conspiracy; he would destroy the empire she
had conquered over her son-in-law! Feeble natures, once warned, turn
obstinate, and are never won again. At the first discussion of the
contract she had reckoned on Paul’s weakness, and on the impossibility
he would feel of breaking off a marriage so far advanced. But now, she
herself was far more tightly bound. Three months earlier Paul had no
real obstacles to prevent the rupture; now, all Bordeaux knew that the
notaries had smoothed the difficulties; the banns were published; the
wedding was to take place immediately; the friends of both families were
at that moment arriving for the fete, and to witness the contract. How
could she postpone the marriage at this late hour? The cause of the
rupture would surely be made known; Maitre Mathias’s stern honor was
too well known in Bordeaux; his word would be believed in preference to
hers. The scoffers would turn against her and against her daughter. No,
she could not break it off; she must yield!

These reflections, so cruelly sound, fell upon Madame Evangelista’s
brain like a water-spout and split it. Though she still maintained
the dignity and reserve of a diplomatist, her chin was shaken by that
apoplectic movement which showed the anger of Catherine the Second on
the famous day when, seated on her throne and in presence of her court
(very much in the present circumstances of Madame Evangelista), she was
braved by the King of Sweden. Solonet observed that play of the muscles,
which revealed the birth of a mortal hatred, a lurid storm to which
there was no lightning. At this moment Madame Evangelista vowed to her
son-in-law one of those unquenchable hatreds the seeds of which were
left by the Moors in the atmosphere of Spain.

“Monsieur,” she said, bending to the ear of her notary, “you called that
stipulation balderdash; it seems to me that nothing could have been more
clear.”

“Madame, allow me--”

“Monsieur,” she continued, paying no heed to his interruption, “if you
did not perceive the effect of that entail at the time of our first
conference, it is very extraordinary that it did not occur to you in the
silence of your study. This can hardly be incapacity.”

The young notary drew his client into the next room, saying to himself,
as he did so:--

“I get a three-thousand franc fee for the guardianship account, three
thousand for the contract, six thousand on the sale of the house,
fifteen thousand in all--better not be angry.”

He closed the door, cast on Madame Evangelista the cool look of a
business man, and said:--

“Madame, having, for your sake, passed--as I did--the proper limits
of legal craft, do you seriously intend to reward my devotion by such
language?”

“But, monsieur--”

“Madame, I did not, it is true, calculate the effect of the deeds of
gift. But if you do not wish Comte Paul for your son-in-law you are not
obliged to accept him. The contract is not signed. Give your fete, and
postpone the signing. It is far better to brave Bordeaux than sacrifice
yourself.”

“How can I justify such a course to society, which is already prejudiced
against us by the slow conclusion of the marriage?”

“By some error committed in Paris; some missing document not sent with
the rest,” replied Solonet.

“But those purchases of land near Lanstrac?”

“Monsieur de Manerville will be at no loss to find another bride and
another dowry.”

“Yes, he’ll lose nothing; but we lose all, all!”

“You?” replied Solonet; “why, you can easily find another count who will
cost you less money, if a title is the chief object of this marriage.”

“No, no! we can’t stake our honor in that way. I am caught in a trap,
monsieur. All Bordeaux will ring with this to-morrow. Our solemn words
are pledged--”

“You wish the happiness of Mademoiselle Natalie.”

“Above all things.”

“To be happy in France,” said the notary, “means being mistress of the
home. She can lead that fool of a Manerville by the nose if she chooses;
he is so dull he has actually seen nothing of all this. Even if he now
distrusts you, he will always trust his wife; and his wife is YOU, is
she not? The count’s fate is still within your power if you choose to
play the cards in your hand.”

“If that were true, monsieur, I know not what I would not do to show my
gratitude,” she said, in a transport of feeling that colored her cheeks.

“Let us now return to the others, madame,” said Solonet. “Listen
carefully to what I shall say; and then--you shall think me incapable if
you choose.”

“My dear friend,” said the young notary to Maitre Mathias, “in spite of
your great ability, you have not foreseen either the case of Monsieur
de Manerville dying without children, nor that in which he leaves only
female issue. In either of those cases the entail would pass to the
Manervilles, or, at any rate, give rise to suits on their part. I think,
therefore, it is necessary to stipulate that in the first case the
entailed property shall pass under the general deed of gift between
husband and wife; and in the second case that the entail shall be
declared void. This agreement concerns the wife’s interest.”

“Both clauses seem to me perfectly just,” said Maitre Mathias. “As
to their ratification, Monsieur le comte can, doubtless, come to an
understanding with the chancellor, if necessary.”

Solonet took a pen and added this momentous clause on the margin of the
contract. Paul and Natalie paid no attention to the matter; but Madame
Evangelista dropped her eyes while Maitre Mathias read the added
sentence aloud.

“We will now sign,” said the mother.

The volume of voice which Madame Evangelista repressed as she uttered
those words betrayed her violent emotion. She was thinking to herself:
“No, my daughter shall not be ruined--but he! My daughter shall have the
name, the title, and the fortune. If she should some day discover that
she does not love him, that she loves another, irresistibly, Paul shall
be driven out of France! My daughter shall be free, and happy, and
rich.”

If Maitre Mathias understood how to analyze business interests, he
knew little of the analysis of human passions. He accepted Madame
Evangelista’s words as an honorable “amende,” instead of judging them
for what they were, a declaration of war. While Solonet and his clerk
superintended Natalie as she signed the documents,--an operation which
took time,--Mathias took Paul aside and told him the meaning of the
stipulation by which he had saved him from ultimate pain.

“The whole affair is now ‘en regle.’ I hold the documents. But the
contract contains a rescript for the diamonds; you must ask for them.
Business is business. Diamonds are going up just now, but may go down.
The purchase of those new domains justifies you in turning everything
into money that you can. Therefore, Monsieur le comte, have no false
modesty in this matter. The first payment is due after the formalities
are over. The sum is two hundred thousand francs; put the diamonds into
that. You have the lien on this house, which will be sold at once, and
will pay the rest. If you have the courage to spend only fifty thousand
francs for the next three years, you can save the two hundred thousand
francs you are now obliged to pay. If you plant vineyards on your new
estates, you can get an income of over twenty-five thousand francs upon
them. You may be said, in short, to have made a good marriage.”

Paul pressed the hand of his old friend very affectionately, a gesture
which did not escape Madame Evangelista, who now came forward to offer
him the pen. Suspicion became certainty to her mind. She was confident
that Paul and Mathias had come to an understanding about her. Rage and
hatred sent the blood surging through her veins to her heart. The worst
had come.

After verifying that all the documents were duly signed and the initials
of the parties affixed to the bottom of the leaves, Maitre Mathias
looked from Paul to his mother-in-law, and seeing that his client did
not intend to speak of the diamonds, he said:--

“I do not suppose there can be any doubt about the transfer of the
diamonds, as you are now one family.”

“It would be more regular if Madame Evangelista made them over now,
as Monsieur de Manerville has become responsible for the guardianship
funds, and we never know who may live or die,” said Solonet, who thought
he saw in this circumstance fresh cause of anger in the mother-in-law
against the son-in-law.

“Ah! mother,” cried Paul, “it would be insulting to us all to do
that,--‘Summum jus, summum injuria,’ monsieur,” he said to Solonet.

“And I,” said Madame Evangelista, led by the hatred now surging in her
heart to see a direct insult to her in the indirect appeal of Maitre
Mathias, “I will tear that contract up if you do not take them.”

She left the room in one of those furious passions which long for the
power to destroy everything, and which the sense of impotence drives
almost to madness.

“For Heaven’s sake, take them, Paul,” whispered Natalie in his ear. “My
mother is angry; I shall know why to-night, and I will tell you. We must
pacify her.”

Calmed by this first outburst, madame kept the necklace and ear-rings,
which she was wearing, and brought the other jewels, valued at one
hundred and fifty thousand francs by Elie Magus. Accustomed to the sight
of family diamonds in all valuations of inheritance, Maitre Mathias and
Solonet examined these jewels in their cases and exclaimed upon their
duty.

“You will lose nothing, after all, upon the ‘dot,’ Monsieur le comte,”
 said Solonet, bringing the color to Paul’s face.

“Yes,” said Mathias, “these jewels will meet the first payment on the
purchase of the new estate.”

“And the costs of the contract,” added Solonet.

Hatred feeds, like love, on little things; the least thing strengthens
it; as one beloved can do no evil, so the person hated can do no good.
Madame Evangelista assigned to hypocrisy the natural embarrassment of
Paul, who was unwilling to take the jewels, and not knowing where to
put the cases, longed to fling them from the window. Madame Evangelista
spurred him with a glance which seemed to say, “Take your property from
here.”

“Dear Natalie,” said Paul, “put away these jewels; they are yours; I
give them to you.”

Natalie locked them into the drawer of a console. At this instant the
noise of the carriages in the court-yard and the murmur of voices in the
receptions-rooms became so loud that Natalie and her mother were forced
to appear. The salons were filled in a few moments, and the fete began.

“Profit by the honeymoon to sell those diamonds,” said the old notary to
Paul as he went away.

While waiting for the dancing to begin, whispers went round about the
marriage, and doubts were expressed as to the future of the promised
couple.

“Is it finally arranged?” said one of the leading personages of the town
to Madame Evangelista.

“We had so many documents to read and sign that I fear we are rather
late,” she replied; “but perhaps we are excusable.”

“As for me, I heard nothing,” said Natalie, giving her hand to her lover
to open the ball.

“Both of those young persons are extravagant, and the mother is not of a
kind to check them,” said a dowager.

“But they have founded an entail, I am told, worth fifty thousand francs
a year.”

“Pooh!”

“In that I see the hand of our worthy Monsieur Mathias,” said a
magistrate. “If it is really true, he has done it to save the future of
the family.”

“Natalie is too handsome not to be horribly coquettish. After a couple
of years of marriage,” said one young woman, “I wouldn’t answer for
Monsieur de Manerville’s happiness in his home.”

“The Pink of Fashion will then need staking,” said Solonet, laughing.

“Don’t you think Madame Evangelista looks annoyed?” asked another.

“But, my dear, I have just been told that all she is able to keep is
twenty-five thousand francs a year, and what is that to her?”

“Penury!”

“Yes, she has robbed herself for Natalie. Monsieur de Manerville has
been so exacting--”

“Extremely exacting,” put in Maitre Solonet. “But before long he will be
peer of France. The Maulincours and the Vidame de Pamiers will use their
influence. He belongs to the faubourg Saint-Germain.”

“Oh! he is received there, and that is all,” said a lady, who had
tried to obtain him as a son-in-law. “Mademoiselle Evangelista, as
the daughter of a merchant, will certainly not open the doors of the
chapter-house of Cologne to him!”

“She is grand-niece to the Duke of Casa-Reale.”

“Through the female line!”

The topic was presently exhausted. The card-players went to the tables,
the young people danced, the supper was served, and the ball was not
over till morning, when the first gleams of the coming day whitened the
windows.

Having said adieu to Paul, who was the last to go away, Madame
Evangelista went to her daughter’s room; for her own had been taken by
the architect to enlarge the scene of the fete. Though Natalie and her
mother were overcome with sleep, they said a few words to each other as
soon as they were alone.

“Tell me, mother dear, what was the matter with you?”

“My darling, I learned this evening to what lengths a mother’s
tenderness can go. You know nothing of business, and you are ignorant of
the suspicions to which my integrity has been exposed. I have trampled
my pride under foot, for your happiness and my reputation were at
stake.”

“Are you talking of the diamonds? Poor boy, he wept; he did not want
them; I have them.”

“Sleep now, my child. We will talk business when we wake--for,” she
added, sighing, “you and I have business now; another person has come
between us.”

“Ah! my dear mother, Paul will never be an obstacle to our happiness,
yours and mine,” murmured Natalie, as she went to sleep.

“Poor darling! she little knows that the man has ruined her.”

Madame Evangelista’s soul was seized at that moment with the first idea
of avarice, a vice to which many become a prey as they grow aged. It
came into her mind to recover in her daughter’s interest the whole
of the property left by her husband. She told herself that her honor
demanded it. Her devotion to Natalie made her, in a moment, as shrewd
and calculating as she had hitherto been careless and wasteful. She
resolved to turn her capital to account, after investing a part of it
in the Funds, which were then selling at eighty francs. A passion often
changes the whole character in a moment; an indiscreet person becomes a
diplomatist, a coward is suddenly brave. Hate made this prodigal woman
a miser. Chance and luck might serve the project of vengeance, still
undefined and confused, which she would now mature in her mind. She fell
asleep, muttering to herself, “To-morrow!” By an unexplained phenomenon,
the effects of which are familiar to all thinkers, her mind, during
sleep, marshalled its ideas, enlightened them, classed them, prepared a
means by which she was to rule Paul’s life, and showed her a plan which
she began to carry out on that very to-morrow.



CHAPTER V. THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT--THIRD DAY


Though the excitement of the fete had driven from Paul’s mind the
anxious thoughts that now and then assailed it, when he was alone with
himself and in his bed they returned to torment him.

“It seems to me,” he said to himself, “that without that good Mathias my
mother-in-law would have tricked me. And yet, is that believable? What
interest could lead her to deceive me? Are we not to join fortunes and
live together? Well, well, why should I worry about it? In two days
Natalie will be my wife, our money relations are plainly defined,
nothing can come between us. Vogue la galere--Nevertheless, I’ll be upon
my guard. Suppose Mathias was right? Well, if he was, I’m not obliged to
marry my mother-in-law.”

In this second battle of the contract Paul’s future had completely
changed in aspect, though he was not aware of it. Of the two persons
whom he was marrying, one, the cleverest, was now his mortal enemy,
and meditated already withdrawing her interests from the common fund.
Incapable of observing the difference that a Creole nature placed
between his mother-in-law and other women, Paul was far from suspecting
her craftiness. The Creole nature is apart from all others; it derives
from Europe by its intellect, from the tropics by the illogical violence
of its passions, from the East by the apathetic indifference with which
it does, or suffers, either good or evil, equally,--a graceful nature
withal, but dangerous, as a child is dangerous if not watched. Like a
child, the Creole woman must have her way immediately; like a child, she
would burn a house to boil an egg. In her soft and easy life she takes
no care upon her mind; but when impassioned, she thinks of all things.
She has something of the perfidy of the Negroes by whom she has been
surrounded from her cradle, but she is also as naive and even, at times,
as artless as they. Like them and like the children, she wishes doggedly
for one thing with a growing intensity of desire, and will brood upon
that idea until she hatches it. A strange assemblage of virtues
and defects! which her Spanish nature had strengthened in Madame
Evangelista, and over which her French experience had cast the glaze of
its politeness.

This character, slumbering in married happiness for sixteen years,
occupied since then with the trivialities of social life, this nature
to which a first hatred had revealed its strength, awoke now like a
conflagration; at the moment of the woman’s life when she was losing
the dearest object of her affections and needed another element for the
energy that possessed her, this flame burst forth. Natalie could be but
three days more beneath her influence! Madame Evangelista, vanquished
at other points, had one clear day before her, the last of those that
a daughter spends beside her mother. A few words, and the Creole nature
could influence the lives of the two beings about to walk together
through the brambled paths and the dusty high-roads of Parisian society,
for Natalie believed in her mother blindly. What far-reaching power
would the counsel of that Creole nature have on a mind so subservient!
The whole future of these lives might be determined by one single
speech. No code, no human institution can prevent the crime that
kills by words. There lies the weakness of social law; in that is the
difference between the morals of the great world and the morals of the
people: one is frank, the other hypocritical; one employs the knife,
the other the venom of ideas and language; to one death, to the other
impunity.

The next morning, about mid-day, Madame Evangelista was half seated,
half lying on the edge of her daughter’s bed. During that waking hour
they caressed and played together in happy memory of their loving life;
a life in which no discord had ever troubled either the harmony of
their feelings, the agreement of their ideas, or the mutual choice and
enjoyment of their pleasures.

“Poor little darling!” said the mother, shedding true tears, “how can I
help being sorrowful when I think that after I have fulfilled your every
wish during your whole life you will belong, to-morrow night, to a man
you must obey?”

“Oh, my dear mother, as for obeying!--” and Natalie made a little motion
of her head which expressed a graceful rebellion. “You are joking,” she
continued. “My father always gratified your caprices; and why not? he
loved you. And I am loved, too.”

“Yes, Paul has a certain love for you. But if a married woman is
not careful nothing more rapidly evaporates than conjugal love. The
influence a wife ought to have over her husband depends entirely on how
she begins with him. You need the best advice.”

“But you will be with us.”

“Possibly, my child. Last night, while the ball was going on, I
reflected on the dangers of our being together. If my presence were to
do you harm, if the little acts by which you ought slowly, but surely,
to establish your authority as a wife should be attributed to my
influence, your home would become a hell. At the first frown I saw upon
your husband’s brow I, proud as I am, should instantly leave his house.
If I were driven to leave it, better, I think, not to enter it. I should
never forgive your husband if he caused trouble between us. Whereas,
when you have once become the mistress, when your husband is to you what
your father was to me, that danger is no longer to be feared. Though
this wise policy will cost your young and tender heart a pang, your
happiness demands that you become the absolute sovereign of your home.”

“Then why, mamma, did you say just now I must obey him?”

“My dear little daughter, in order that a wife may rule, she must always
seem to do what her husband wishes. If you were not told this you might
by some impulsive opposition destroy your future. Paul is a weak young
man; he might allow a friend to rule him; he might even fall under the
dominion of some woman who would make you feel her influence. Prevent
such disasters by making yourself from the very start his ruler. Is it
not better that he be governed by you than by others?”


“Yes, certainly,” said Natalie. “I should think only of his happiness.”

“And it is my privilege, darling, to think only of yours, and to wish
not to leave you at so crucial a moment without a compass in the midst
of the reefs through which you must steer.”

“But, dearest mother, are we not strong enough, you and I, to stay
together beside him, without having to fear those frowns you seem to
dread. Paul loves you, mamma.”

“Oh! oh! He fears me more than he loves me. Observe him carefully to-day
when I tell him that I shall let you go to Paris without me, and you
will see on his face, no matter what pains he takes to conceal it, his
inward joy.”

“Why should he feel so?”

“Why? Dear child! I am like Saint-Jean Bouche-d’Or. I will tell that to
himself, and before you.”

“But suppose I marry on condition that you do not leave me?” urged
Natalie.

“Our separation is necessary,” replied her mother. “Several
considerations have greatly changed my future. I am now poor. You will
lead a brilliant life in Paris, and I could not live with you suitably
without spending the little that remains to me. Whereas, if I go to
Lanstrac, I can take care of your property there and restore my fortune
by economy.”

“You, mamma! _You_ practise economy!” cried Natalie, laughing. “Don’t
begin to be a grandmother yet. What! do you mean to leave me for such
reasons as those? Dear mother, Paul may seem to you a trifle stupid, but
he is not one atom selfish or grasping.”

“Ah!” replied Madame Evangelista, in a tone of voice big with
suggestions which made the girl’s heart throb, “those discussions about
the contract have made me distrustful. I have my doubts about him--But
don’t be troubled, dear child,” she added, taking her daughter by the
neck and kissing her. “I will not leave you long alone. Whenever my
return can take place without making difficulty between you, whenever
Paul can rightly judge me, we will begin once more our happy little
life, our evening confidences--”

“Oh! mother, how can you think of living without your Natalie?”

“Because, dear angel, I shall live for her. My mother’s heart will be
satisfied in the thought that I contribute, as I ought, to your future
happiness.”

“But, my dear, adorable mother, must I be alone with Paul, here, now,
all at once? What will become of me? what will happen? what must I do?
what must I not do?”

“Poor child! do you think that I would utterly abandon you to your first
battle? We will write to each other three times a week like lovers.
We shall thus be close to each other’s hearts incessantly. Nothing
can happen to you that I shall not know, and I can save you from all
misfortune. Besides, it would be too ridiculous if I never went to see
you; it would seem to show dislike or disrespect to your husband; I will
always spend a month or two every year with you in Paris.”

“Alone, already alone, and with him!” cried Natalie in terror,
interrupting her mother.

“But you wish to be his wife?”

“Yes, I wish it. But tell me how I should behave,--you, who did what you
pleased with my father. You know the way; I’ll obey you blindly.”

Madame Evangelista kissed her daughter’s forehead. She had willed and
awaited this request.

“Child, my counsels must adept themselves to circumstances. All men
are not alike. The lion and the frog are not more unlike than one man
compared with another,--morally, I mean. Do I know to-day what will
happen to you to-morrow? No; therefore I can only give you general
advice upon the whole tenor of your conduct.”

“Dear mother, tell me, quick, all that you know yourself.”

“In the first place, my dear child, the cause of the failure of married
women who desire to keep their husbands’ hearts--and,” she said, making
a parenthesis, “to keep their hearts and rule them is one and the same
thing--Well, the principle cause of conjugal disunion is to be found in
perpetual intercourse, which never existed in the olden time, but which
has been introduced into this country of late years with the mania for
family. Since the Revolution the manners and customs of the bourgeois
have invaded the homes of the aristocracy. This misfortune is due to one
of their writers, Rousseau, an infamous heretic, whose ideas were all
anti-social and who pretended, I don’t know how, to justify the most
senseless things. He declared that all women had the same rights and
the same faculties; that living in a state of society we ought,
nevertheless, to obey nature--as if the wife of a Spanish grandee, as
if you or I had anything in common with the women of the people! Since
then, well-bred women have suckled their children, have educated their
daughters, and stayed in their own homes. Life has become so involved
that happiness is almost impossible,--for a perfect harmony between
natures such as that which has made you and me live as two friends is an
exception. Perpetual contact is as dangerous for parents and children as
it is for husband and wife. There are few souls in which love survives
this fatal omnipresence. Therefore, I say, erect between yourself and
Paul the barriers of society; go to balls and operas; go out in the
morning, dine out in the evenings, pay visits constantly, and grant but
little of your time to your husband. By this means you will always keep
your value to him. When two beings bound together for life have
nothing to live upon but sentiment, its resources are soon exhausted,
indifference, satiety, and disgust succeed. When sentiment has withered
what will become of you? Remember, affection once extinguished can lead
to nothing but indifference or contempt. Be ever young and ever new to
him. He may weary you,--that often happens,--but you must never weary
him. The faculty of being bored without showing it is a condition of
all species of power. You cannot diversify happiness by the cares of
property or the occupations of a family. If you do not make your husband
share your social interests, if you do not keep him amused you will fall
into a dismal apathy. Then begins the SPLEEN of love. But a man will
always love the woman who amuses him and keeps him happy. To give
happiness and to receive it are two lines of feminine conduct which are
separated by a gulf.”

“Dear mother, I am listening to you, but I don’t understand one word you
say.”

“If you love Paul to the extent of doing all he asks of you, if you make
your happiness depend on him, all is over with your future life; you
will never be mistress of your home, and the best precepts in the world
will do you no good.”

“That is plainer; but I see the rule without knowing how to apply it,”
 said Natalie, laughing. “I have the theory; the practice will come.”

“My poor Ninie,” replied the mother, who dropped an honest tear at the
thought of her daughter’s marriage, “things will happen to teach it to
you--And,” she continued, after a pause, during which the mother and
daughter held each other closely embraced in the truest sympathy,
“remember this, my Natalie: we all have our destiny as women, just as
men have their vocation as men. A woman is born to be a woman of the
world and a charming hostess, as a man is born to be a general or a
poet. Your vocation is to please. Your education has formed you for
society. In these days women should be educated for the salon as they
once were for the gynoecium. You were not born to be the mother of a
family or the steward of a household. If you have children, I hope
they will not come to spoil your figure on the morrow of your marriage;
nothing is so bourgeois as to have a child at once. If you have them
two or three years after your marriage, well and good; governesses and
tutors will bring them up. YOU are to be the lady, the great lady, who
represents the luxury and the pleasure of the house. But remember
one thing--let your superiority be visible in those things only which
flatter a man’s self-love; hide the superiority you must also acquire
over him in great things.”

“But you frighten me, mamma,” cried Natalie. “How can I remember
all these precepts? How shall I ever manage, I, such a child, and so
heedless, to reflect and calculate before I act?”

“But, my dear little girl, I am telling you to-day that which you must
surely learn later, buying your experience by fatal faults and errors
of conduct which will cause you bitter regrets and embarrass your whole
life.”

“But how must I begin?” asked Natalie, artlessly.

“Instinct will guide you,” replied her mother. “At this moment Paul
desires you more than he loves you; for love born of desires is a hope;
the love that succeeds their satisfaction is the reality. There, my
dear, is the question; there lies your power. What woman is not loved
before marriage? Be so on the morrow and you shall remain so always.
Paul is a weak man who is easily trained to habit. If he yields to you
once he will yield always. A woman ardently desired can ask all things;
do not commit the folly of many women who do not see the importance of
the first hours of their sway,--that of wasting your power on trifles,
on silly things with no result. Use the empire your husband’s first
emotions give you to accustom him to obedience. And when you make him
yield, choose that it be on some unreasonable point, so as to test the
measure of your power by the measure of his concession. What victory
would there be in making him agree to a reasonable thing? Would that
be obeying you? We must always, as the Castilian proverb says, take
the bull by the horns; when a bull has once seen the inutility of his
defence and of his strength he is beaten. When your husband does a
foolish thing for you, you can govern him.”

“Why so?”

“Because, my child, marriage lasts a lifetime, and a husband is not a
man like other men. Therefore, never commit the folly of giving yourself
into his power in everything. Keep up a constant reserve in your speech
and in your actions. You may even be cold to him without danger, for you
can modify coldness at will. Besides, nothing is more easy to maintain
than our dignity. The words, ‘It is not becoming in your wife to do thus
and so,’ is a great talisman. The life of a woman lies in the words, ‘I
will not.’ They are the final argument. Feminine power is in them,
and therefore they should only be used on real occasions. But they
constitute a means of governing far beyond that of argument or
discussion. I, my dear child, reigned over your father by his faith in
me. If your husband believes in you, you can do all things with him. To
inspire that belief you must make him think that you understand him. Do
not suppose that that is an easy thing to do. A woman can always make a
man think that he is loved, but to make him admit that he is understood
is far more difficult. I am bound to tell you all now, my child, for
to-morrow life with its complications, life with two wills which
_must_ be made one, begins for you. Bear in mind, at all moments, that
difficulty. The only means of harmonizing your two wills is to arrange
from the first that there shall be but one; and that will must be yours.
Many persons declare that a wife creates her own unhappiness by changing
sides in this way; but, my dear, she can only become the mistress
by controlling events instead of bearing them; and that advantage
compensates for any difficulty.”

Natalie kissed her mother’s hands with tears of gratitude. Like all
women in whom mental emotion is never warmed by physical emotion, she
suddenly comprehended the bearings of this feminine policy; but, like
a spoiled child that never admits the force of reason and returns
obstinately to its one desire, she came back to the charge with one of
those personal arguments which the logic of a child suggests:--

“Dear mamma,” she said, “it is only a few days since you were talking
of Paul’s advancement, and saying that you alone could promote it; why,
then, do you suddenly turn round and abandon us to ourselves?”

“I did not then know the extent of my obligations nor the amount of my
debts,” replied the mother, who would not suffer her real motive to be
seen. “Besides, a year or two hence I can take up that matter again.
Come, let us dress; Paul will be here soon. Be as sweet and caressing
as you were,--you know?--that night when we first discussed this fatal
contract; for to-day we must save the last fragments of our fortune, and
I must win for you a thing to which I am superstitiously attached.”

“What is it?”

“The ‘Discreto.’”

Paul arrived about four o’clock. Though he endeavored to meet his
mother-in-law with a gracious look upon his face, Madame Evangelista saw
traces of the clouds which the counsels of the night and the reflections
of the morning had brought there.

“Mathias has told him!” she thought, resolving to defeat the old
notary’s action. “My dear son,” she said, “you left your diamonds in the
drawer of the console, and I frankly confess that I would rather not see
again the things that threatened to bring a cloud between us. Besides,
as Monsieur Mathias said, they ought to be sold at once to meet the
first payment on the estates you have purchased.”

“They are not mine,” he said. “I have given them to Natalie, and when
you see them upon her you will forget the pain they caused you.”

Madame Evangelista took his hand and pressed it cordially, with a tear
of emotion.

“Listen to me, my dear children,” she said, looking from Paul to
Natalie; “since you really feel thus, I have a proposition to make to
both of you. I find myself obliged to sell my pearl necklace and my
earrings. Yes, Paul, it is necessary; I do not choose to put a penny of
my fortune into an annuity; I know what I owe to you. Well, I admit
a weakness; to sell the ‘Discreto’ seems to me a disaster. To sell a
diamond which bears the name of Philip the Second and once adorned his
royal hand, an historic stone which the Duke of Alba touched for ten
years in the hilt of his sword--no, no, I cannot! Elie Magus estimates
my necklace and ear-rings at a hundred and some odd thousand francs
without the clasps. Will you exchange the other jewels I made over to
you for these? you will gain by the transaction, but what of that? I am
not selfish. Instead of those mere fancy jewels, Paul, your wife will
have fine diamonds which she can really enjoy. Isn’t it better that I
should sell those ornaments which will surely go out of fashion, and
that you should keep in the family these priceless stones?”

“But, my dear mother, consider yourself,” said Paul.

“I,” replied Madame Evangelista, “I want such things no longer. Yes,
Paul, I am going to be your bailiff at Lanstrac. It would be folly in
me to go to Paris at the moment when I ought to be here to liquidate
my property and settle my affairs. I shall grow miserly for my
grandchildren.”

“Dear mother,” said Paul, much moved, “ought I to accept this exchange
without paying you the difference?”

“Good heavens! are you not, both of you, my dearest interests? Do
you suppose I shall not find happiness in thinking, as I sit in my
chimney-corner, ‘Natalie is dazzling to-night at the Duchesse de Berry’s
ball’? When she sees my diamond at her throat and my ear-rings in
her ears she will have one of those little enjoyments of vanity which
contribute so much to a woman’s happiness and make her so gay and
fascinating. Nothing saddens a woman more than to have her vanity
repressed; I have never seen an ill-dressed woman who was amiable or
good-humored.”

“Heavens! what was Mathias thinking about?” thought Paul. “Well, then,
mamma,” he said, in a low voice, “I accept.”

“But I am confounded!” said Natalie.

At this moment Solonet arrived to announce the good news that he had
found among the speculators of Bordeaux two contractors who were much
attracted by the house, the gardens of which could be covered with
dwellings.

“They offer two hundred and fifty thousand francs,” he said; “but if you
consent to the sale, I can make them give you three hundred thousand.
There are three acres of land in the garden.”

“My husband paid two hundred thousand for the place, therefore I
consent,” she replied. “But you must reserve the furniture and the
mirrors.”

“Ah!” said Solonet, “you are beginning to understand business.”

“Alas! I must,” she said, sighing.

“I am told that a great many persons are coming to your midnight
service,” said Solonet, perceiving that his presence was inopportune,
and preparing to go.

Madame Evangelista accompanied him to the door of the last salon, and
there she said, in a low voice:--

“I now have personal property to the amount of two hundred and fifty
thousand francs; if I can get two hundred thousand for my share of the
house it will make a handsome capital, which I shall want to invest to
the very best advantage. I count on you for that. I shall probably live
at Lanstrac.”

The young notary kissed his client’s hand with a gesture of gratitude;
for the widow’s tone of voice made Solonet fancy that this alliance,
really made from self-interest only, might extend a little farther.

“You can count on me,” he replied. “I can find you investments in
merchandise on which you will risk nothing and make very considerable
profits.”

“Adieu until to-morrow,” she said; “you are to be our witness, you know,
with Monsieur le Marquis de Gyas.”

“My dear mother,” said Paul, when she returned to them, “why do you
refuse to come to Paris? Natalie is provoked with me, as if I were the
cause of your decision.”

“I have thought it all over, my children, and I am sure that I should
hamper you. You would feel obliged to make me a third in all you did,
and young people have ideas of their own which I might, unintentionally,
thwart. Go to Paris. I do not wish to exercise over the Comtesse de
Manerville the gentle authority I have held over Natalie. I desire to
leave her wholly to you. Don’t you see, Paul, that there are habits and
ways between us which must be broken up? My influence ought to yield to
yours. I want you to love me, and to believe that I have your interests
more at heart than you think for. Young husbands are, sooner or later,
jealous for the love of a wife for her mother. Perhaps they are right.
When you are thoroughly united, when love has blended your two souls
into one, then, my dear son, you will not fear an opposing influence if
I live in your house. I know the world, and men, and things; I have seen
the peace of many a home destroyed by the blind love of mothers who
made themselves in the end as intolerable to their daughters as to
their sons-in-law. The affection of old people is often exacting and
querulous. Perhaps I could not efface myself as I should. I have the
weakness to think myself still handsome; I have flatterers who declare
that I am still agreeable; I should have, I fear, certain pretensions
which might interfere with your lives. Let me, therefore, make one more
sacrifice for your happiness. I have given you my fortune, and now I
desire to resign to you my last vanities as a woman. Your notary Mathias
is getting old. He cannot look after your estates as I will. I will be
your bailiff; I will create for myself those natural occupations which
are the pleasures of old age. Later, if necessary, I will come to you
in Paris, and second you in your projects of ambition. Come, Paul, be
frank; my proposal suits you, does it not?”

Paul would not admit it, but he was at heart delighted to get his
liberty. The suspicions which Mathias had put into his mind respecting
his mother-in-law were, however, dissipated by this conversation, which
Madame Evangelista carried on still longer in the same tone.

“My mother was right,” thought Natalie, who had watched Paul’s
countenance. “He _is_ glad to know that I am separated from her--why?”

That “why” was the first note of a rising distrust; did it prove the
power of those maternal instructions?

There are certain characters which on the faith of a single proof
believe in friendship. To persons thus constituted the north wind drives
away the clouds as rapidly as the south wind brings them; they stop at
effects and never hark back to causes. Paul had one of those essentially
confiding natures, without ill-feelings, but also without foresight. His
weakness proceeded far more from his kindness, his belief in goodness,
than from actual debility of soul.

Natalie was sad and thoughtful, for she knew not what to do without
her mother. Paul, with that self-confident conceit which comes of love,
smiled to himself at her sadness, thinking how soon the pleasures
of marriage and the excitements of Paris would drive it away. Madame
Evangelista saw this confidence with much satisfaction. She had already
taken two great steps. Her daughter possessed the diamonds which had
cost Paul two hundred thousand francs; and she had gained her point of
leaving these two children to themselves with no other guide than their
illogical love. Her revenge was thus preparing, unknown to her daughter,
who would, sooner or later, become its accomplice. Did Natalie love
Paul? That was a question still undecided, the answer to which might
modify her projects, for she loved her daughter too sincerely not to
respect her happiness. Paul’s future, therefore, still depended on
himself. If he could make his wife love him, he was saved.

The next day, at midnight, after an evening spent together, with the
addition of the four witnesses, to whom Madame Evangelista gave the
formal dinner which follows the legal marriage, the bridal pair,
accompanied by their friends, heard mass by torchlight, in presence of
a crowd of inquisitive persons. A marriage celebrated at night always
suggests to the mind an unpleasant omen. Light is the symbol of life and
pleasure, the forecasts of which are lacking to a midnight wedding. Ask
the intrepid soul why it shivers; why the chill of those black arches
enervates it; why the sound of steps startles it; why it notices the cry
of bats and the hoot of owls. Though there is absolutely no reason to
tremble, all present do tremble, and the darkness, emblem of death,
saddens them. Natalie, parted from her mother, wept. The girl was now a
prey to those doubts which grasp the heart as it enters a new career in
which, despite all assurances of happiness, a thousand pitfalls await
the steps of a young wife. She was cold and wanted a mantle. The air and
manner of Madame Evangelista and that of the bridal pair excited some
comment among the elegant crowd which surrounded the altar.

“Solonet tells me that the bride and bridegroom leave for Paris
to-morrow morning, all alone.”

“Madame Evangelista was to live with them, I thought.”

“Count Paul has got rid of her already.”

“What a mistake!” said the Marquise de Gyas. “To shut the door on the
mother of his wife is to open it to a lover. Doesn’t he know what a
mother is?”

“He has been very hard on Madame Evangelista; the poor woman has had to
sell her house and her diamonds, and is going to live at Lanstrac.”

“Natalie looks very sad.”

“Would you like to be made to take a journey the day after your
marriage?”

“It is very awkward.”

“I am glad I came here to-night,” said a lady. “I am now convinced of
the necessity of the pomps of marriage and of wedding fetes; a scene
like this is very bare and sad. If I may say what I think,” she added,
in a whisper to her neighbor, “this marriage seems to me indecent.”

Madame Evangelista took Natalie in her carriage and accompanied her,
alone, to Paul’s house.

“Well, mother, it is done!”

“Remember, my dear child, my last advice, and you will be a happy woman.
Be his wife, and not his mistress.”

When Natalie had retired, the mother played the little comedy of
flinging herself with tears into the arms of her son-in-law. It was the
only provincial thing that Madame Evangelista allowed herself, but she
had her reasons for it. Amid tears and speeches, apparently half
wild and despairing, she obtained of Paul those concessions which all
husbands make.

The next day she put the married pair into their carriage, and
accompanied them to the ferry, by which the road to Paris crosses the
Gironde. With a look and a word Natalie enabled her mother to see that
if Paul had won the trick in the game of the contract, her revenge
was beginning. Natalie was already reducing her husband to perfect
obedience.



CHAPTER VI. CONCLUSION


Five years later, on an afternoon in the month of November, Comte Paul
de Manerville, wrapped in a cloak, was entering, with a bowed head and
a mysterious manner, the house of his old friend Monsieur Mathias at
Bordeaux.

Too old to continue in business, the worthy notary had sold his practice
and was ending his days peacefully in a quiet house to which he had
retired. An urgent affair had obliged him to be absent at the moment of
his guest’s arrival, but his housekeeper, warned of Paul’s coming, took
him to the room of the late Madame Mathias, who had been dead a year.
Fatigued by a rapid journey, Paul slept till evening. When the old man
reached home he went up to his client’s room, and watched him sleeping,
as a mother watches her child. Josette, the old housekeeper, followed
her master and stood before the bed, her hands on her hips.

“It is a year to-day, Josette, since I received my dear wife’s last
sigh; I little knew then that I should stand here again to see the count
half dead.”

“Poor man! he moans in his sleep,” said Josette.

“Sac a papier!” cried the old notary, an innocent oath which was a
sign with him of the despair on a man of business before insurmountable
difficulties. “At any rate,” he thought, “I have saved the title to the
Lanstrac estate for him, and that of Ausac, Saint-Froult, and his house,
though the usufruct has gone.” Mathias counted his fingers. “Five years!
Just five years this month, since his old aunt, now dead, that excellent
Madame de Maulincour, asked for the hand of that little crocodile of a
woman, who has finally ruined him--as I expected.”

And the gouty old gentleman, leaning on his cane, went to walk in the
little garden till his guest should awake. At nine o’clock supper
was served, for Mathias took supper. The old man was not a little
astonished, when Paul joined him, to see that his old client’s brow was
calm and his face serene, though noticeably changed. If at the age of
thirty-three the Comte de Manerville seemed to be a man of forty, that
change in his appearance was due solely to mental shocks; physically, he
was well. He clasped the old man’s hand affectionately, and forced him
not to rise, saying:--

“Dear, kind Maitre Mathias, you, too, have had your troubles.”

“Mine were natural troubles, Monsieur le comte; but yours--”

“We will talk of that presently, while we sup.”

“If I had not a son in the magistracy, and a daughter married,” said the
good old man, “you would have found in old Mathias, believe me, Monsieur
le comte, something better than mere hospitality. Why have you come to
Bordeaux at the very moment when posters are on all the walls of the
seizure of your farms at Grassol and Guadet, the vineyard of Belle-Rose
and the family mansion? I cannot tell you the grief I feel at the sight
of those placards,--I, who for forty years nursed that property as if it
belonged to me; I, who bought it for your mother when I was only third
clerk to Monsieur Chesnau, my predecessor, and wrote the deeds myself
in my best round hand; I, who have those titles now in my successor’s
office; I, who have known you since you were so high”; and the old man
stopped to put his hand near the ground. “Ah! a man must have been a
notary for forty-one years and a half to know the sort of grief I feel
to see my name exposed before the face of Israel in those announcements
of the seizure and sale of the property. When I pass through the streets
and see men reading these horrible yellow posters, I am ashamed, as if
my own honor and ruin were concerned. Some fools will stand there and
read them aloud expressly to draw other fools about them--and what
imbecile remarks they make! As if a man were not master of his own
property! Your father ran through two fortunes before he made the one
he left you; and you wouldn’t be a Manerville if you didn’t do likewise.
Besides, seizures of real estate have a whole section of the Code to
themselves; they are expected and provided for; you are in a position
recognized by the law.--If I were not an old man with white hair, I
would thrash those fools I hear reading aloud in the streets such an
abomination as this,” added the worthy notary, taking up a paper; “‘At
the request of Dame Natalie Evangelista, wife of Paul-Francois-Joseph,
Comte de Manerville, separated from him as to worldly goods and chattels
by the Lower court of the department of the Seine--’”

“Yes, and now separated in body,” said Paul.

“Ah!” exclaimed the old man.

“Oh! against my wife’s will,” added the count, hastily. “I was forced to
deceive her; she did not know that I was leaving her.”

“You have left her?”

“My passage is taken; I sail for Calcutta on the ‘Belle-Amelie.’”

“Two day’s hence!” cried the notary. “Then, Monsieur le comte, we shall
never meet again.”

“You are only seventy-three, my dear Mathias, and you have the gout, the
brevet of old age. When I return I shall find you still afoot. Your
good head and heart will be as sound as ever, and you will help me
to reconstruct what is now a shaken edifice. I intend to make a noble
fortune in seven years. I shall be only forty on my return. All is still
possible at that age.”

“You?” said Mathias, with a gesture of amazement,--you, Monsieur le
comte, to undertake commerce! How can you even think of it?”

“I am no longer Monsieur le comte, dear Mathias. My passage is taken
under the name of Camille, one of my mother’s baptismal names. I have
acquirements which will enable me to make my fortune otherwise than in
business. Commerce, at any rate, will be only my final chance. I start
with a sum in hand sufficient for the redemption of my future on a large
scale.”

“Where is that money?”

“A friend is to send it to me.”

The old man dropped his fork as he heard the word “friend,” not in
surprise, not scoffingly, but in grief; his look and manner expressed
the pain he felt in finding Paul under the influence of a deceitful
illusion; his practised eye fathomed a gulf where the count saw nothing
but solid ground.

“I have been fifty years in the notariat,” he said, “and I never yet
knew a ruined man whose friend would lend him money.”

“You don’t know de Marsay. I am certain that he has sold out some of his
investments already, and to-morrow you will receive from him a bill of
exchange for one hundred and fifty thousand francs.”

“I hope I may. If that be so, cannot your friend settle your
difficulties here? You could live quietly at Lanstrac for five or six
years on your wife’s income, and so recover yourself.”

“No assignment or economy on my part could pay off fifteen hundred
thousand francs of debt, in which my wife is involved to the amount of
five hundred and fifty thousand.”

“You cannot mean to say that in four years you have incurred a million
and a half of debt?”

“Nothing is more certain, Mathias. Did I not give those diamonds to my
wife? Did I not spend the hundred and fifty thousand I received from the
sale of Madame Evangelista’s house, in the arrangement of my house in
Paris? Was I not forced to use other money for the first payments on
that property demanded by the marriage contract? I was even forced to
sell out Natalie’s forty thousand a year in the Funds to complete the
purchase of Auzac and Saint-Froult. We sold at eighty-seven, therefore I
became in debt for over two hundred thousand francs within a month after
my marriage. That left us only sixty-seven thousand francs a year; but
we spent fully three times as much every year. Add all that up, together
with rates of interest to usurers, and you will soon find a million.”

“Br-r-r!” exclaimed the old notary. “Go on. What next?”

“Well, I wanted, in the first place, to complete for my wife that set
of jewels of which she had the pearl necklace clasped by the family
diamond, the ‘Discreto,’ and her mother’s ear-rings. I paid a hundred
thousand francs for a coronet of diamond wheat-ears. There’s eleven
hundred thousand. And now I find I owe the fortune of my wife, which
amounts to three hundred and sixty-six thousand francs of her ‘dot.’”

“But,” said Mathias, “if Madame la comtesse had given up her diamonds
and you had pledged your income you could have pacified your creditors
and have paid them off in time.”

“When a man is down, Mathias, when his property is covered with
mortgages, when his wife’s claims take precedence of his creditors’, and
when that man has notes out for a hundred thousand francs which he must
pay (and I hope I can do so out of the increased value of my property
here), what you propose is not possible.”

“This is dreadful!” cried Mathias; “would you sell Belle-Rose with the
vintage of 1825 still in the cellars?”

“I cannot help myself.”

“Belle-Rose is worth six hundred thousand francs.”

“Natalie will buy it in; I have advised her to do so.”

“I might push the price to seven hundred thousand, and the farms are
worth a hundred thousand each.”

“Then if the house in Bordeaux can be sold for two hundred thousand--”

“Solonet will give more than that; he wants it. He is retiring with
a handsome property made by gambling on the Funds. He has sold his
practice for three hundred thousand francs, and marries a mulatto woman.
God knows how she got her money, but they say it amounts to millions. A
notary gambling in stocks! a notary marrying a black woman! What an age!
It is said that he speculates for your mother-in-law with her funds.”

“She has greatly improved Lanstrac and taken great pains with its
cultivation. She has amply repaid me for the use of it.”

“I shouldn’t have thought her capable of that.”

“She is so kind and so devoted; she has always paid Natalie’s debts
during the three months she spent with us every year in Paris.”

“She could well afford to do so, for she gets her living out of
Lanstrac,” said Mathias. “She! grown economical! what a miracle! I am
told she has just bought the domain of Grainrouge between Lanstrac and
Grassol; so that if the Lanstrac avenue were extended to the high-road,
you would drive four and a half miles through your own property to reach
the house. She paid one hundred thousand francs down for Grainrouge.”

“She is as handsome as ever,” said Paul; “country life preserves her
freshness; I don’t mean to go to Lanstrac and bid her good-bye; her
heart would bleed for me too much.”

“You would go in vain; she is now in Paris. She probably arrived there
as you left.”

“No doubt she had heard of the sale of my property and came to help me.
I have no complaint to make of life, Mathias. I am truly loved,--as much
as any man ever could be here below; beloved by two women who outdo each
other in devotion; they are even jealous of each other; the daughter
blames the mother for loving me too much, and the mother reproaches the
daughter for what she calls her dissipations. I may say that this
great affection has been my ruin. How could I fail to satisfy even
the slightest caprice of a loving wife? Impossible to restrain myself!
Neither could I accept any sacrifice on her part. We might certainly, as
you say, live at Lanstrac, save my income, and part with her diamonds,
but I would rather go to India and work for a fortune than tear
my Natalie from the life she enjoys. So it was I who proposed the
separation as to property. Women are angels who ought not to be mixed up
in the sordid interests of life.”

Old Mathias listened in doubt and amazement.

“You have no children, I think,” he said.

“Fortunately, none,” replied Paul.

“That is not my idea of marriage,” remarked the old notary, naively. “A
wife ought, in my opinion, to share the good and evil fortunes of her
husband. I have heard that young married people who love like lovers, do
not want children? Is pleasure the only object of marriage? I say that
object should be the joys of family. Moreover, in this case--I am afraid
you will think me too much of notary--your marriage contract made it
incumbent upon you to have a son. Yes, monsieur le comte, you ought to
have had at once a male heir to consolidate that entail. Why not?
Madame Evangelista was strong and healthy; she had nothing to fear in
maternity. You will tell me, perhaps, that these are the old-fashioned
notions of our ancestors. But in those noble families, Monsieur le
comte, the legitimate wife thought it her duty to bear children and
bring them up nobly; as the Duchesse de Sully, the wife of the great
Sully, said, a wife is not an instrument of pleasure, but the honor and
virtue of her household.”

“You don’t know women, my good Mathias,” said Paul. “In order to be
happy we must love them as they want to be loved. Isn’t there something
brutal in at once depriving a wife of her charms, and spoiling her
beauty before she has begun to enjoy it?”

“If you had had children your wife would not have dissipated your
fortune; she would have stayed at home and looked after them.”

“If you were right, dear friend,” said Paul, frowning, “I should
be still more unhappy than I am. Do not aggravate my sufferings by
preaching to me after my fall. Let me go, without the pang of looking
backward to my mistakes.”

The next day Mathias received a bill of exchange for one hundred and
fifty thousand francs from de Marsay.

“You see,” said Paul, “he does not write a word to me. He begins by
obliging me. Henri’s nature is the most imperfectly perfect, the most
illegally beautiful that I know. If you knew with what superiority that
man, still young, can rise above sentiments, above self-interests, and
judge them, you would be astonished, as I am, to find how much heart he
has.”

Mathias tried to battle with Paul’s determination, but he found it
irrevocable, and it was justified by so many cogent reasons that the old
man finally ceased his endeavors to retain his client.

It is seldom that vessels sail promptly at the time appointed, but on
this occasion, by a fateful circumstance for Paul, the wind was fair and
the “Belle-Amelie” sailed on the morrow, as expected. The quay was lined
with relations, and friends, and idle persons. Among them were several
who had formerly known Manerville. His disaster, posted on the walls of
the town, made him as celebrated as he was in the days of his wealth and
fashion. Curiosity was aroused; every one had their word to say about
him. Old Mathias accompanied his client to the quay, and his sufferings
were sore as he caught a few words of those remarks:--

“Who could recognize in that man you see over there, near old Mathias,
the dandy who was called the Pink of Fashion five years ago, and made,
as they say, ‘fair weather and foul’ in Bordeaux.”

“What! that stout, short man in the alpaca overcoat, who looks like a
groom,--is that Comte Paul de Manerville?”

“Yes, my dear, the same who married Mademoiselle Evangelista. Here he
is, ruined, without a penny to his name, going out to India to look for
luck.”

“But how did he ruin himself? he was very rich.”

“Oh! Paris, women, play, luxury, gambling at the Bourse--”

“Besides,” said another, “Manerville always was a poor creature; no
mind, soft as papier-mache, he’d let anybody shear the wool from his
back; incapable of anything, no matter what. He was born to be ruined.”

Paul wrung the hand of the old man and went on board. Mathias stood upon
the pier, looking at his client, who leaned against the shrouds, defying
the crowed before him with a glance of contempt. At the moment when
the sailors began to weigh anchor, Paul noticed that Mathias was making
signals to him with his handkerchief. The old housekeeper had hurried
to her master, who seemed to be excited by some sudden event. Paul asked
the captain to wait a moment, and send a boat to the pier, which was
done. Too feeble himself to go aboard, Mathias gave two letters to a
sailor in the boat.

“My friend,” he said, “this packet” (showing one of the two letters) “is
important; it has just arrived by a courier from Paris in thirty-five
hours. State this to Monsieur le comte; don’t neglect to do so; it may
change his plans.”

“Would he come ashore?”

“Possibly, my friend,” said the notary, imprudently.

The sailor is, in all lands, a being of a race apart, holding all
land-folk in contempt. This one happened to be a bas-Breton, who saw but
one thing in Maitre Mathias’s request.

“Come ashore, indeed!” he thought, as he rowed. “Make the captain lose a
passenger! If one listened to those walruses we’d have nothing to do but
embark and disembark ‘em. He’s afraid that son of his will catch cold.”

The sailor gave Paul the letter and said not a word of the message.
Recognizing the handwriting of his wife and de Marsay, Paul supposed
that he knew what they both would urge upon him. Anxious not to be
influenced by offers which he believed their devotion to his welfare
would inspire, he put the letters in his pocket unread, with apparent
indifference.

Absorbed in the sad thoughts which assail the strongest man under such
circumstances, Paul gave way to his grief as he waved his hand to
his old friend, and bade farewell to France, watching the steeples of
Bordeaux as they fled out of sight. He seated himself on a coil of rope.
Night overtook him still lost in thought. With the semi-darkness of the
dying day came doubts; he cast an anxious eye into the future. Sounding
it, and finding there uncertainty and danger, he asked his soul if
courage would fail him. A vague dread seized his mind as he thought of
Natalie left wholly to herself; he repented the step he had taken; he
regretted Paris and his life there. Suddenly sea-sickness overcame him.
Every one knows the effect of that disorder. The most horrible of its
sufferings devoid of danger is a complete dissolution of the will.
An inexplicable distress relaxes to their very centre the cords of
vitality; the soul no longer performs its functions; the sufferer
becomes indifferent to everything; the mother forgets her child, the
lover his mistress, the strongest man lies prone, like an inert mass.
Paul was carried to his cabin, where he stayed three days, lying on his
back, gorged with grog by the sailors, or vomiting; thinking of nothing,
and sleeping much. Then he revived into a species of convalescence, and
returned by degrees to his ordinary condition. The first morning after
he felt better he went on deck and passed the poop, breathing in the
salt breezes of another atmosphere. Putting his hands into his pockets
he felt the letters. At once he opened them, beginning with that of his
wife.

In order that the letter of the Comtesse de Manerville be fully
understood, it is necessary to give the one which Paul had written to
her on the day that he left Paris.

  From Paul de Manerville to his wife:

  My beloved,--When you read this letter I shall be far away from
  you; perhaps already on the vessel which is to take me to India,
  where I am going to repair my shattered fortune.

  I have not found courage to tell you of my departure. I have
  deceived you; but it was best to do so. You would only have been
  uselessly distressed; you would have wished to sacrifice your
  fortune, and that I could not have suffered. Dear Natalie, feel no
  remorse; I have no regrets. When I return with millions I shall
  imitate your father and lay them at your feet, as he laid his at
  the feet of your mother, saying to you: “All I have is yours.”

  I love you madly, Natalie; I say this without fear that the
  avowal will lead you to strain a power which none but weak men
  fear; yours has been boundless from the day I knew you first. My
  love is the only accomplice in my disaster. I have felt, as my
  ruin progressed, the delirious joys of a gambler; as the money
  diminished, so my enjoyment grew. Each fragment of my fortune
  turned into some little pleasure for you gave me untold happiness.
  I could have wished that you had more caprices that I might
  gratify them all. I knew I was marching to a precipice, but I went
  on crowned with joys of which a common heart knows nothing. I have
  acted like those lovers who take refuge in a cottage on the shores
  of some lake for a year or two, resolved to kill themselves at
  last; dying thus in all the glory of their illusions and their
  love. I have always thought such persons infinitely sensible.

  You have known nothing of my pleasures or my sacrifices. The
  greatest joy of all was to hide from the one beloved the cost of
  her desires. I can reveal these secrets to you now, for when you
  hold this paper, heavy with love, I shall be far away. Though I
  lose the treasures of your gratitude, I do not suffer that
  contraction of the heart which would disable me if I spoke to you
  of these matters. Besides, my own beloved, is there not a tender
  calculation in thus revealing to you the history of the past? Does
  it not extend our love into the future?--But we need no such
  supports! We love each other with a love to which proof is
  needless,--a love which takes no note of time or distance, but
  lives of itself alone.

  Ah! Natalie, I have just looked at you asleep, trustful, restful
  as a little child, your hand stretched toward me. I left a tear
  upon the pillow which has known our precious joys. I leave you
  without fear, on the faith of that attitude; I go to win the
  future of our love by bringing home to you a fortune large enough
  to gratify your every taste, and let no shadow of anxiety disturb
  our joys. Neither you nor I can do without enjoyments in the life
  we live. To me belongs the task of providing the necessary
  fortune. I am a man; and I have courage.

  Perhaps you might seek to follow me. For that reason I conceal
  from you the name of the vessel, the port from which I sail, and
  the day of sailing. After I am gone, when too late to follow me, a
  friend will tell you all.

  Natalie! my affection is boundless. I love you as a mother loves
  her child, as a lover loves his mistress, with absolute
  unselfishness. To me the toil, to you the pleasures; to me all
  sufferings, to you all happiness. Amuse yourself; continue your
  habits of luxury; go to theatres and operas, enjoy society and
  balls; I leave you free for all things. Dear angel, when you
  return to this nest where for five years we have tasted the fruits
  which love has ripened think of your friend; think for a moment of
  me, and rest upon my heart.

  That is all I ask of you. For myself, dear eternal thought of
  mine! whether under burning skies, toiling for both of us, I face
  obstacles to vanquish, or whether, weary with the struggle, I rest
  my mind on hopes of a return, I shall think of you alone; of you
  who are my life,--my blessed life! Yes, I shall live in you. I
  shall tell myself daily that you have no troubles, no cares; that
  you are happy. As in our natural lives of day and night, of
  sleeping and waking, I shall have sunny days in Paris, and nights
  of toil in India,--a painful dream, a joyful reality; and I shall
  live so utterly in that reality that my actual life will pass as a
  dream. I shall have memories! I shall recall, line by line,
  strophe by strophe, our glorious five years’ poem. I shall
  remember the days of your pleasure in some new dress or some
  adornment which made you to my eyes a fresh delight. Yes, dear
  angel, I go like a man vowed to some great emprize, the guerdon of
  which, if success attend him, is the recovery of his beautiful
  mistress. Oh! my precious love, my Natalie, keep me as a religion
  in your heart. Be the child that I have just seen asleep! If you
  betray my confidence, my blind confidence, you need not fear my
  anger--be sure of that; I should die silently. But a wife does not
  deceive the man who leaves her free--for woman is never base. She
  tricks a tyrant; but an easy treachery, which would kill its
  victim, she will not commit--No, no! I will not think of it.
  Forgive this cry, this single cry, so natural to the heart of man!

  Dear love, you will see de Marsay; he is now the lessee of our
  house, and he will leave you in possession of it. This nominal
  lease was necessary to avoid a useless loss. Our creditors,
  ignorant that their payment is a question of time only, would
  otherwise have seized the furniture and the temporary possession
  of the house. Be kind to de Marsay; I have the most entire
  confidence in his capacity and his loyalty. Take him as your
  defender and adviser, make him your slave. However occupied, he
  will always find time to be devoted to you. I have placed the
  liquidation of my affairs and the payment of the debts in his
  hands. If he should advance some sum of which he should later feel
  in need I rely on you to pay it back. Remember, however, that I do
  not leave you to de Marsay, but _to yourself_; I do not seek to
  impose him upon you.

  Alas! I have but an hour more to stay beside you; I cannot spend
  that hour in writing business--I count your breaths; I try to
  guess your thoughts in the slight motions of your sleep. I would I
  could infuse my blood into your veins that you might be a part of
  me, my thought your thought, and your heart mine--A murmur has
  just escaped your lips as though it were a soft reply. Be calm and
  beautiful forever as you are now! Ah! would that I possessed that
  fabulous fairy power which, with a wand, could make you sleep
  while I am absent, until, returning, I should wake you with a
  kiss.

  How much I must love you, how much energy of soul I must possess,
  to leave you as I see you now! Adieu, my cherished one. Your poor
  Pink of Fashion is blown away by stormy winds, but--the wings of
  his good luck shall waft him back to you. No, my Ninie, I am not
  bidding you farewell, for I shall never leave you. Are you not the
  soul of my actions? Is not the hope of returning with happiness
  indestructible for YOU the end and aim of my endeavor? Does it not
  lead my every step? You will be with me everywhere. Ah! it will
  not be the sun of India, but the fire of your eyes that lights my
  way. Therefore be happy--as happy as a woman can be without her
  lover. I would the last kiss that I take from those dear lips were
  not a passive one; but, my Ninie, my adored one, I will not wake
  you. When you wake, you will find a tear upon your forehead--make
  it a talisman! Think, think of him who may, perhaps, die for you,
  far from you; think less of the husband than of the lover who
  confides you to God.


  From the Comtesse de Manerville to her husband:

  Dear, beloved one,--Your letter has plunged me into affliction.
  Had you the right to take this course, which must affect us
  equally, without consulting me? Are you free? Do you not belong to
  me? If you must go, why should I not follow you? You show me,
  Paul, that I am not indispensable to you. What have I done, to be
  deprived of my rights? Surely I count for something in this ruin.
  My luxuries have weighed somewhat in the scale. You make me curse
  the happy, careless life we have led for the last five years. To
  know that you are banished from France for years is enough to kill
  me. How soon can a fortune be made in India? Will you ever return?

  I was right when I refused, with instinctive obstinacy, that
  separation as to property which my mother and you were so
  determined to carry out. What did I tell you then? Did I not warn
  you that it was casting a reflection upon you, and would ruin your
  credit? It was not until you were really angry that I gave way.

  My dear Paul, never have you been so noble in my eyes as you are
  at this moment. To despair of nothing, to start courageously to
  seek a fortune! Only your character, your strength of mind could
  do it. I sit at your feet. A man who avows his weakness with your
  good faith, who rebuilds his fortune from the same motive that
  made him wreck it, for love’s sake, for the sake of an
  irresistible passion, oh, Paul, that man is sublime! Therefore,
  fear nothing; go on, through all obstacles, not doubting your
  Natalie--for that would be doubting yourself. Poor darling, you
  mean to live in me? And I shall ever be in you. I shall not be
  here; I shall be wherever you are, wherever you go.

  Though your letter has caused me the keenest pain, it has also
  filled me with joy--you have made me know those two extremes!
  Seeing how you love me, I have been proud to learn that my love is
  truly felt. Sometimes I have thought that I loved you more than
  you loved me. Now, I admit myself vanquished, you have added the
  delightful superiority--of loving--to all the others with which
  you are blest. That precious letter in which your soul reveals
  itself will lie upon my heart during all your absence; for my
  soul, too, is in it; that letter is my glory.

  I shall go to live at Lanstrac with my mother. I die to the world;
  I will economize my income and pay your debts to their last
  farthing. From this day forth, Paul, I am another woman. I bid
  farewell forever to society; I will have no pleasures that you
  cannot share. Besides, Paul, I ought to leave Paris and live in
  retirement. Dear friend, you will soon have a noble reason to make
  your fortune. If your courage needed a spur you would find it in
  this. Cannot you guess? We shall have a child. Your cherished
  desires are granted. I feared to give you one of those false hopes
  which hurt so much--have we not had grief enough already on that
  score? I was determined not to be mistaken in this good news.
  To-day I feel certain, and it makes me happy to shed this joy upon
  your sorrows.

  This morning, fearing nothing and thinking you still at home, I
  went to the Assumption; all things smiled upon me; how could I
  foresee misfortune? As I left the church I met my mother; she had
  heard of your distress, and came, by post, with all her savings,
  thirty thousand francs, hoping to help you. Ah! what a heart is
  hers, Paul! I felt joyful, and hurried home to tell you this good
  news, and to breakfast with you in the greenhouse, where I ordered
  just the dainties that you like. Well, Augustine brought me your
  letter,--a letter from you, when we had slept together! A cold
  fear seized me; it was like a dream! I read your letter! I read it
  weeping, and my mother shared my tears. I was half-dead. Such
  love, such courage, such happiness, such misery! The richest
  fortunes of the heart, and the momentary ruin of all interests! To
  lose you at a moment when my admiration of your greatness thrilled
  me! what woman could have resisted such a tempest of emotion? To
  know you far away when your hand upon my heart would have stilled
  its throbbings; to feel that YOU were not here to give me that
  look so precious to me, to rejoice in our new hopes; that I was
  not with you to soften your sorrows by those caresses which made
  your Natalie so dear to you! I wished to start, to follow you, to
  fly to you. But my mother told me you had taken passage in a ship
  which leaves Bordeaux to-morrow, that I could not reach you except
  by post, and, moreover, that it was madness in my present state to
  risk our future by attempting to follow you. I could not bear such
  violent emotions; I was taken ill, and am writing to you now in
  bed.

  My mother is doing all she can to stop certain calumnies which
  seem to have got about on your disaster. The Vandenesses, Charles
  and Felix, have earnestly defended you; but your friend de Marsay
  treats the affair satirically. He laughs at your accusers instead
  of replying to them. I do not like his way of lightly brushing
  aside such serious attacks. Are you not deceived in him? However,
  I will obey you; I will make him my friend. Do not be anxious, my
  adored one, on the points that concern your honor; is it not mine
  as well? My diamonds shall be pledged; we intend, mamma and I, to
  employ our utmost resources in the payment of your debts; and we
  shall try to buy back your vineyard at Belle-Rose. My mother, who
  understands business like a lawyer, blames you very much for not
  having told her of your embarrassments. She would not have bought
  --thinking to please you--the Grainrouge domain, and then she
  could have lent you that money as well as the thirty thousand
  francs she brought with her. She is in despair at your decision;
  she fears the climate of India for your health. She entreats you
  to be sober, and not to let yourself be trapped by women--That
  made me laugh; I am as sure of you as I am of myself. You will
  return to me rich and faithful. I alone know your feminine
  delicacy, and the secret sentiments which make you a human flower
  worthy of the gardens of heaven. The Bordeaux people were right
  when they gave you your floral nickname.

  But alas! who will take care of my delicate flower? My heart is
  rent with dreadful ideas. I, his wife, Natalie, I am here, and
  perhaps he suffers far away from me! And not to share your pains,
  your vexations, your dangers! In whom will you confide? how will
  you live without that ear into which you have hitherto poured all?
  Dear, sensitive plant, swept away by this storm, will you be able
  to survive in another soil than your native land?

  It seems to me that I have been alone for centuries. I have wept
  sorely. To be the cause of your ruin! What a text for the thoughts
  of a loving woman! You treated me like a child to whom we give all
  it asks, or like a courtesan, allowed by some thoughtless youth to
  squander his fortune. Ah! such indulgence was, in truth, an
  insult. Did you think I could not live without fine dresses, balls
  and operas and social triumphs? Am I so frivolous a woman? Do you
  think me incapable of serious thought, of ministering to your
  fortune as I have to your pleasures? If you were not so far away,
  and so unhappy, I would blame you for that impertinence. Why lower
  your wife in that way? Good heavens! what induced me to go into
  society at all?--to flatter your vanity; I adorned myself for you,
  as you well know. If I did wrong, I am punished, cruelly; your
  absence is a harsh expiation of our mutual life.

  Perhaps my happiness was too complete; it had to be paid by some
  great trial--and here it is. There is nothing now for me but
  solitude. Yes, I shall live at Lanstrac, the place your father
  laid out, the house you yourself refurnished so luxuriously. There
  I shall live, with my mother and my child, and await you,--sending
  you daily, night and morning, the prayers of all. Remember that
  our love is a talisman against all evil. I have no more doubt of
  you than you can have of me. What comfort can I put into this
  letter,--I so desolate, so broken, with the lonely years before
  me, like a desert to cross. But no! I am not utterly unhappy; the
  desert will be brightened by our son,--yes, it must be a _son_,
  must it not?

  And now, adieu, my own beloved; our love and prayers will follow
  you. The tears you see upon this paper will tell you much that I
  cannot write. I kiss you on this little square of paper, see!
  below. Take those kisses from

  Your Natalie.

    +--------+
    |        |
    |        |
    |        |
    +--------+


This letter threw Paul into a reverie caused as much by memories of the
past as by these fresh assurances of love. The happier a man is, the
more he trembles. In souls which are exclusively tender--and exclusive
tenderness carries with it a certain amount of weakness--jealousy and
uneasiness exist in direct proportion to the amount of the happiness and
its extent. Strong souls are neither jealous nor fearful; jealousy is
doubt, fear is meanness. Unlimited belief is the principal attribute
of a great man. If he is deceived (for strength as well as weakness may
make a man a dupe) his contempt will serve him as an axe with which to
cut through all. This greatness, however, is the exception. Which of us
has not known what it is to be abandoned by the spirit which sustains
our frail machine, and to hearken to that mysterious Voice denying
all? Paul, his mind going over the past, and caught here and there by
irrefutable facts, believed and doubted all. Lost in thought, a prey
to an awful and involuntary incredulity, which was combated by the
instincts of his own pure love and his faith in Natalie, he read and
re-read that wordy letter, unable to decide the question which it raised
either for or against his wife. Love is sometimes as great and true when
smothered in words as it is in brief, strong sentences.

To understand the situation into which Paul de Manerville was about to
enter we must think of him as he was at this moment, floating upon the
ocean as he floated upon his past, looking back upon the years of his
life as he looked at the limitless water and cloudless sky about him,
and ending his reverie by returning, through tumults of doubt, to faith,
the pure, unalloyed and perfect faith of the Christian and the lover,
which enforced the voice of his faithful heart.

It is necessary to give here his own letter to de Marsay written on
leaving Paris, to which his friend replied in the letter he received
through old Mathias from the dock:--

  From Comte Paul de Manerville to Monsieur le Marquis Henri de
  Marsay:

  Henri,--I have to say to you one of the most vital words a man can
  say to his friend:--I am ruined. When you read this I shall be on
  the point of sailing from Bordeaux to Calcutta on the brig
  “Belle-Amelie.”

  You will find in the hands of your notary a deed which only needs
  your signature to be legal. In it, I lease my house to you for six
  years at a nominal rent. Send a duplicate of that deed to my wife.
  I am forced to take this precaution that Natalie may continue to
  live in her own home without fear of being driven out by
  creditors.

  I also convey to you by deed the income of my share of the
  entailed property for four years; the whole amounting to one
  hundred and fifty thousand francs, which sum I beg you to lend me
  and to send in a bill of exchange on some house in Bordeaux to my
  notary, Maitre Mathias. My wife will give you her signature to
  this paper as an endorsement of your claim to my income. If the
  revenues of the entail do not pay this loan as quickly as I now
  expect, you and I will settle on my return. The sum I ask for is
  absolutely necessary to enable me to seek my fortune in India; and
  if I know you, I shall receive it in Bordeaux the night before I
  sail.

  I have acted as you would have acted in my place. I held firm to
  the last moment, letting no one suspect my ruin. Before the news
  of the seizure of my property at Bordeaux reached Paris, I had
  attempted, with one hundred thousand francs which I obtained on
  notes, to recover myself by play. Some lucky stroke might still
  have saved me. I lost.

  How have I ruined myself? By my own will, Henri. From the first
  month of my married life I saw that I could not keep up the style
  in which I started. I knew the result; but I chose to shut my
  eyes; I could not say to my wife, “We must leave Paris and live at
  Lanstrac.” I have ruined myself for her as men ruin themselves for
  a mistress, but I knew it all along. Between ourselves, I am
  neither a fool nor a weak man. A fool does not let himself be
  ruled with his eyes open by a passion; and a man who starts for
  India to reconstruct his fortune, instead of blowing out his
  brains, is not weak.

  I shall return rich, or I shall never return at all. Only, my dear
  friend, as I want wealth solely for _her_, as I must be absent six
  years at least, and as I will not risk being duped in any way, I
  confide to you my wife. I know no better guardian. Being
  childless, a lover might be dangerous to her. Henri! I love her
  madly, basely, without proper pride. I would forgive her, I think,
  an infidelity, not because I am certain of avenging it, but
  because I would kill myself to leave her free and happy--since I
  could not make her happiness myself. But what have I to fear?
  Natalie feels for me that friendship which is independent of love,
  but which preserves love. I have treated her like a petted child.
  I took such delight in my sacrifices, one led so naturally to
  another, that she can never be false; she would be a monster if
  she were. Love begets love.

  Alas! shall I tell you all, my dear Henri? I have just written her
  a letter in which I let her think that I go with heart of hope and
  brow serene; that neither jealousy, nor doubt, nor fear is in my
  soul,--a letter, in short, such as a son might write to his
  mother, aware that he is going to his death. Good God! de Marsay,
  as I wrote it hell was in my soul! I am the most wretched man on
  earth. Yes, yes, to you the cries, to you the grinding of my
  teeth! I avow myself to you a despairing lover; I would rather
  live these six years sweeping the streets beneath her windows than
  return a millionaire at the end of them--if I could choose. I
  suffer agony; I shall pass from pain to pain until I hear from you
  that you will take the trust which you alone can fulfil or
  accomplish.

  Oh! my dear de Marsay, this woman is indispensable to my life; she
  is my sun, my atmosphere. Take her under your shield and buckler,
  keep her faithful to me, even if she wills it not. Yes, I could be
  satisfied with a half-happiness. Be her guardian, her chaperon,
  for I could have no distrust of you. Prove to her that in
  betraying me she would do a low and vulgar thing, and be no better
  than the common run of women; tell her that faithfulness will
  prove her lofty spirit.

  She probably has fortune enough to continue her life of luxury and
  ease. But if she lacks a pleasure, if she has caprices which she
  cannot satisfy, be her banker, and do not fear, I _will_ return with
  wealth.

  But, after all, these fears are in vain! Natalie is an angel of
  purity and virtue. When Felix de Vandenesse fell deeply in love
  with her and began to show her certain attentions, I had only to
  let her see the danger, and she instantly thanked me so
  affectionately that I was moved to tears. She said that her
  dignity and reputation demanded that she should not close her
  doors abruptly to any man, but that she knew well how to dismiss
  him. She did, in fact, receive him so coldly that the affair all
  ended for the best. We have never had any other subject of dispute
  --if, indeed, a friendly talk could be called a dispute--in all
  our married life.

  And now, my dear Henri, I bid you farewell in the spirit of a man.
  Misfortune has come. No matter what the cause, it is here. I strip
  to meet it. Poverty and Natalie are two irreconcilable terms. The
  balance may be close between my assets and my liabilities, but no
  one shall have cause to complain of me. But, should any unforeseen
  event occur to imperil my honor, I count on you.

  Send letters under cover to the Governor of India at Calcutta. I
  have friendly relations with his family, and some one there will
  care for all letters that come to me from Europe. Dear friend, I
  hope to find you the same de Marsay on my return,--the man who
  scoffs at everything and yet is receptive of the feelings of
  others when they accord with the grandeur he is conscious of in
  himself. You stay in Paris, friend; but when you read these words,
  I shall be crying out, “To Carthage!”


  The Marquis Henri de Marsay to Comte Paul de Manerville:

  So, so, Monsieur le comte, you have made a wreck of it! Monsieur
  l’ambassadeur has gone to the bottom! Are these the fine things
  that you were doing?

  Why, Paul, why have you kept away from me? If you had said a
  single word, my poor old fellow, I would have made your position
  plain to you. Your wife has refused me her endorsement. May that
  one word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn
  that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur
  Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in
  Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for
  jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is
  the actual holder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs,
  on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only seventy
  thousand. Compared with Madame Evangelista, papa Gobseck is
  flannel, velvet, vanilla cream, a sleeping draught. Your vineyard
  of Belle-Rose is to fall into the clutches of your wife, to whom
  her mother pays the difference between the price it goes for at
  the auction sale and the amount of her dower claim upon it. Madame
  Evangelista will also have the farms at Guadet and Grassol, and
  the mortgages on your house in Bordeaux already belong to her, in
  the names of straw men provided by Solonet.

  Thus these two excellent women will make for themselves a united
  income of one hundred and twenty thousand francs a year out of
  your misfortunes and forced sale of property, added to the revenue
  of some thirty-odd thousand on the Grand-livre which these cats
  already possess.

  The endorsement of your wife was not needed; for this morning the
  said Sieur Lecuyer came to offer me a return of the sum I had lent
  you in exchange for a legal transfer of my rights. The vintage of
  1825 which your mother-in-law keeps in the cellars at Lanstrac
  will suffice to pay me.

  These two women have calculated, evidently, that you are now upon
  the ocean; but I send this letter by courier, so that you may have
  time to follow the advice I now give you.

  I made Lecuyer talk. I disentangled from his lies, his language,
  and his reticence, the threads I lacked to bring to light the
  whole plot of the domestic conspiracy hatched against you. This
  evening, at the Spanish embassy, I shall offer my admiring
  compliments to your mother-in-law and your wife. I shall pay
  court to Madame Evangelista; I intend to desert you basely, and
  say sly things to your discredit,--nothing openly, or that
  Mascarille in petticoats would detect my purpose. How did you make
  her such an enemy? That is what I want to know. If you had had the
  wit to be in love with that woman before you married her daughter,
  you would to-day be peer of France, Duc de Manerville, and,
  possibly, ambassador to Madrid.

  If you had come to me at the time of your marriage, I would have
  helped you to analyze and know the women to whom you were binding
  yourself; out of our mutual observations safety might have been
  yours. But, instead of that, these women judged me, became afraid
  of me, and separated us. If you had not stupidly given in to them
  and turned me the cold shoulder, they would never have been able
  to ruin you. Your wife brought on the coldness between us,
  instigated by her mother, to whom she wrote two letters a week,--a
  fact to which you paid no attention. I recognized my Paul when I
  heard that detail.

  Within a month I shall be so intimate with your mother-in-law that
  I shall hear from her the reasons of the hispano-italiano hatred
  which she feels for you,--for you, one of the best and kindest men
  on earth! Did she hate you before her daughter fell in love with
  Felix de Vandenesse; that’s a question in my mind. If I had not
  taken a fancy to go to the East with Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and
  a few other good fellows of your acquaintance, I should have been
  in a position to tell you something about that affair, which was
  beginning just as I left Paris. I saw the first gleams even then
  of your misfortune. But what gentleman is base enough to open such
  a subject unless appealed to? Who shall dare to injure a woman, or
  break that illusive mirror in which his friend delights in gazing
  at the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Illusions are the riches
  of the heart.

  Your wife, dear friend, is, I believe I may say, in the fullest
  application of the word, a fashionable woman. She thinks of
  nothing but her social success, her dress, her pleasures; she goes
  to opera and theatre and balls; she rises late and drives to the
  Bois, dines out, or gives a dinner-party. Such a life seems to me
  for women very much what war is for men; the public sees only the
  victors; it forgets the dead. Many delicate women perish in this
  conflict; those who come out of it have iron constitutions,
  consequently no heart, but good stomachs. There lies the reason of
  the cold insensibility of social life. Fine souls keep themselves
  reserved, weak and tender natures succumb; the rest are
  cobblestones which hold the social organ in its place, water-worn
  and rounded by the tide, but never worn-out. Your wife has
  maintained that life with ease; she looks made for it; she is
  always fresh and beautiful. To my mind the deduction is plain,
  --she has never loved you; and you have loved her like a madman.

  To strike out love from that siliceous nature a man of iron was
  needed. After standing, but without enduring, the shock of Lady
  Dudley, Felix was the fitting mate to Natalie. There is no great
  merit in divining that to you she was indifferent. In love with
  her yourself, you have been incapable of perceiving the cold
  nature of a young woman whom you have fashioned and trained for a
  man like Vandenesse. The coldness of your wife, if you perceived
  it, you set down, with the stupid jurisprudence of married people,
  to the honor of her reserve and her innocence. Like all husbands,
  you thought you could keep her virtuous in a society where women
  whisper from ear to ear that which men are afraid to say.

  No, your wife has liked the social benefits she derived from
  marriage, but the private burdens of it she found rather heavy.
  Those burdens, that tax was--you! Seeing nothing of all this, you
  have gone on digging your abysses (to use the hackneyed words of
  rhetoric) and covering them with flowers. You have mildly obeyed
  the law which rules the ruck of men; from which I desired to
  protect you. Dear fellow! only one thing was wanting to make you
  as dull as the bourgeois deceived by his wife, who is all
  astonishment or wrath, and that is that you should talk to me of
  your sacrifices, your love for Natalie, and chant that psalm:
  “Ungrateful would she be if she betrayed me; I have done this, I
  have done that, and more will I do; I will go to the ends of the
  earth, to the Indies for her sake. I--I--” etc. My dear Paul, have
  you never lived in Paris, have you never had the honor of
  belonging by ties of friendship to Henri de Marsay, that you
  should be so ignorant of the commonest things, the primitive
  principles that move the feminine mechanism, the a-b-c of their
  hearts? Then hear me:--

  Suppose you exterminate yourself, suppose you go to Saint-Pelagie
  for a woman’s debts, suppose you kill a score of men, desert a
  dozen women, serve like Laban, cross the deserts, skirt the
  galleys, cover yourself with glory, cover yourself with shame,
  refuse, like Nelson, to fight a battle until you have kissed the
  shoulder of Lady Hamilton, dash yourself, like Bonaparte, upon the
  bridge at Arcola, go mad like Roland, risk your life to dance five
  minutes with a woman--my dear fellow, what have all those things
  to do with _love_? If love were won by samples such as those
  mankind would be too happy. A spurt of prowess at the moment of
  desire would give a man the woman that he wanted. But love, _love_,
  my good Paul, is a faith like that in the Immaculate conception of
  the Holy Virgin; it comes, or it does not come. Will the mines of
  Potosi, or the shedding of our blood, or the making of our fame
  serve to waken an involuntary, an inexplicable sentiment? Young
  men like you, who expect to be loved as the balance of your
  account, are nothing else than usurers. Our legitimate wives owe
  us virtue and children, but they don’t owe us love.

  Love, my dear Paul, is the sense of pleasure given and received,
  and the certainty of giving and receiving it; love is a desire
  incessantly moving and growing, incessantly satisfied and
  insatiable. The day when Vandenesse stirred the cord of a desire
  in your wife’s heart which you had left untouched, all your
  self-satisfied affection, your gifts, your deeds, your money, ceased
  to be even memories; one emotion of love in your wife’s heart has
  cast out the treasures of your own passion, which are now nothing
  better than old iron. Felix has the virtues and the beauties in
  her eyes, and the simple moral is that blinded by your own love
  you never made her love you.

  Your mother-in-law is on the side of the lover against the
  husband,--secretly or not; she may have closed her eyes, or she
  may have opened them; I know not what she has done--but one thing
  is certain, she is for her daughter, and against you. During the
  fifteen years that I have observed society, I have never yet seen
  a mother who, under such circumstances, abandons her daughter.
  This indulgence seems to be an inheritance transmitted in the
  female line. What man can blame it? Some copyist of the Civil
  code, perhaps, who sees formulas only in the place of feelings.

  As for your present position, the dissipation into which the life
  of a fashionable woman cast you, and your own easy nature,
  possibly your vanity, have opened the way for your wife and her
  mother to get rid of you by this ruin so skilfully contrived. From
  all of which you will conclude, my good friend, that the mission
  you entrusted to me, and which I would all the more faithfully
  fulfil because it amused me, is, necessarily, null and void. The
  evil you wish me to prevent is accomplished,--“consummatum est.”

  Forgive me, dear friend, if I write to you, as you say, a la de
  Marsay on subjects which must seem to you very serious. Far be it
  from me to dance upon the grave of a friend, like heirs upon that
  of a progenitor. But you have written to me that you mean to act
  the part of a man, and I believe you; I therefore treat you as a
  man of the world, and not as a lover. For you, this blow ought to
  be like the brand on the shoulder of a galley-slave, which flings
  him forever into a life of systematic opposition to society. You
  are now freed of one evil; marriage possessed you; it now behooves
  you to turn round and possess marriage.

  Paul, I am your friend in the fullest acceptation of the word. If
  you had a brain in an iron skull, if you had the energy which has
  come to you too late, I would have proved my friendship by telling
  you things that would have made you walk upon humanity as upon a
  carpet. But when I did talk to you guardedly of Parisian
  civilization, when I told you in the disguise of fiction some of
  the actual adventures of my youth, you regarded them as mere
  romance and would not see their bearing. When I told you that
  history of a lawyer at the galleys branded for forgery, who
  committed the crime to give his wife, adored like yours, an income
  of thirty thousand francs, and whom his wife denounced that she
  might be rid of him and free to love another man, you exclaimed,
  and other fools who were supping with us exclaimed against me.
  Well, my dear Paul, you were that lawyer, less the galleys.

  Your friends here are not sparing you. The sister of the two
  Vandenesses, the Marquise de Listomere and all her set, in which,
  by the bye, that little Rastignac has enrolled himself,--the scamp
  will make his way!--Madame d’Aiglemont and her salon, the
  Lenoncourts, the Comtesse Ferraud, Madame d’Espard, the Nucingens,
  the Spanish ambassador, in short, all the cliques in society are
  flinging mud upon you. You are a bad man, a gambler, a dissipated
  fellow who has squandered his property. After paying your debts a
  great many times, your wife, an angel of virtue, has just redeemed
  your notes for one hundred thousand francs, although her property
  was separate from yours. Luckily, you had done the best you could
  do by disappearing. If you had stayed here you would have made her
  bed in the straw; the poor woman would have been the victim of her
  conjugal devotion!

  When a man attains to power, my dear Paul, he has all the virtues
  of an epitaph; let him fall into poverty, and he has more sins
  than the Prodigal Son; society at the present moment gives you the
  vices of a Don Juan. You gambled at the Bourse, you had licentious
  tastes which cost you fabulous sums of money to gratify; you paid
  enormous interests to money-lenders. The two Vandenesses have told
  everywhere how Gigonnet gave you for six thousand francs an ivory
  frigate, and made your valet buy it back for three hundred in
  order to sell it to you again. The incident did really happen to
  Maxime de Trailles about nine years ago; but it fits your present
  circumstances so well that Maxime has forever lost the command of
  his frigate.

  In short, I can’t tell you one-half that is said; you have
  supplied a whole encyclopaedia of gossip which the women have an
  interest in swelling. Your wife is having an immense success. Last
  evening at the opera Madame Firmiani began to repeat to me some of
  the things that are being said. “Don’t talk of that,” I replied.
  “You know nothing of the real truth, you people. Paul has robbed
  the Bank, cheated the Treasury, murdered Ezzelin and three Medoras
  in the rue Saint-Denis, and I think, between ourselves, that he is
  a member of the Dix-Mille. His associate is the famous Jacques
  Collin, on whom the police have been unable to lay a hand since he
  escaped from the galleys. Paul gave him a room in his house; you
  see he is capable of anything; in fact, the two have gone off to
  India together to rob the Great Mogul.” Madame Firmiani, like the
  distinguished woman that she is, saw that she ought not to convert
  her beautiful lips into a mouthpiece for false denunciation.

  Many persons, when they hear of these tragi-comedies of life,
  refuse to believe them. They take the side of human nature and
  fine sentiments; they declare that these things do not exist. But
  Talleyrand said a fine thing, my dear fellow: “All things happen.”
   Truly, things happen under our very noses which are more amazing
  than this domestic plot of yours; but society has an interest in
  denying them, and in declaring itself calumniated. Often these
  dramas are played so naturally and with such a varnish of good
  taste that even I have to rub the lens of my opera-glass to see to
  the bottom of them. But, I repeat to you, when a man is a friend
  of mine, when we have received together the baptism of champagne
  and have knelt together before the altar of the Venus Commodus,
  when the crooked fingers of play have given us their benediction,
  if that man finds himself in a false position I’d ruin a score of
  families to do him justice.

  You must be aware from all this that I love you. Have I ever in my
  life written a letter as long as this? No. Therefore, read with
  attention what I still have to say.

  Alas! Paul, I shall be forced to take to writing, for I am taking
  to politics. I am going into public life. I intend to have, within
  five years, the portfolio of a ministry or some embassy. There
  comes an age when the only mistress a man can serve is his
  country. I enter the ranks of those who intend to upset not only
  the ministry, but the whole present system of government. In
  short, I swim in the waters of a certain prince who is lame of the
  foot only,--a man whom I regard as a statesman of genius whose
  name will go down to posterity; a prince as complete in his way as
  a great artist may be in his.

  Several of us, Ronquerolles, Montriveau, the Grandlieus, La
  Roche-Hugon, Serisy, Feraud, and Granville, have allied ourselves
  against the “parti-pretre,” as the party-ninny represented by the
  “Constitutionnel” has ingeniously said. We intend to overturn the
  Navarreins, Lenoncourts, Vandenesses, and the Grand Almonry. In
  order to succeed we shall even ally ourselves with Lafayette, the
  Orleanists, and the Left,--people whom we can throttle on the
  morrow of victory, for no government in the world is possible with
  their principles. We are capable of anything for the good of the
  country--and our own.

  Personal questions as to the King’s person are mere sentimental
  folly in these days; they must be cleared away. From that point of
  view, the English with their sort of Doge, are more advanced than
  we are. Politics have nothing to do with that, my dear fellow.
  Politics consist in giving the nation an impetus by creating an
  oligarchy embodying a fixed theory of government, and able to
  direct public affairs along a straight path, instead of allowing
  the country to be pulled in a thousand different directions, which
  is what has been happening for the last forty years in our
  beautiful France--at once so intelligent and so sottish, so wise
  and so foolish; it needs a system, indeed, much more than men.
  What are individuals in this great question? If the end is a great
  one, if the country may live happy and free from trouble, what do
  the masses care for the profits of our stewardship, our fortune,
  privileges, and pleasures?

  I am now standing firm on my feet. I have at the present moment a
  hundred and fifty thousand francs a year in the Three per Cents,
  and a reserve of two hundred thousand francs to repair damages.
  Even this does not seem to me very much ballast in the pocket of a
  man starting left foot foremost to scale the heights of power.

  A fortunate accident settled the question of my setting out on
  this career, which did not particularly smile on me, for you know
  my predilection for the life of the East. After thirty-five years
  of slumber, my highly-respected mother woke up to the recollection
  that she had a son who might do her honor. Often when a vine-stock
  is eradicated, some years after shoots come up to the surface of
  the ground; well, my dear boy, my mother had almost torn me up by
  the roots from her heart, and I sprouted again in her head. At the
  age of fifty-eight, she thinks herself old enough to think no more
  of any men but her son. At this juncture she has met in some
  hot-water cauldron, at I know not what baths, a delightful old maid
  --English, with two hundred and forty thousand francs a year; and,
  like a good mother, she has inspired her with an audacious
  ambition to become my wife. A maid of six-and-thirty, my word!
  Brought up in the strictest puritanical principles, a steady
  sitting hen, who maintains that unfaithful wives should be
  publicly burnt. ‘Where will you find wood enough?’ I asked her. I
  could have sent her to the devil, for two hundred and forty
  thousand francs a year are no equivalent for liberty, nor a fair
  price for my physical and moral worth and my prospects. But she is
  the sole heiress of a gouty old fellow, some London brewer, who
  within a calculable time will leave her a fortune equal at least
  to what the sweet creature has already. Added to these advantages,
  she has a red nose, the eyes of a dead goat, a waist that makes
  one fear lest she should break into three pieces if she falls
  down, and the coloring of a badly painted doll. But--she is
  delightfully economical; but--she will adore her husband, do what
  he will; but--she has the English gift; she will manage my house,
  my stables, my servants, my estates better than any steward. She
  has all the dignity of virtue; she holds herself as erect as a
  confidante on the stage of the Francais; nothing will persuade me
  that she has not been impaled and the shaft broken off in her
  body. Miss Stevens is, however, fair enough to be not too
  unpleasing if I must positively marry her. But--and this to me is
  truly pathetic--she has the hands of a woman as immaculate as the
  sacred ark; they are so red that I have not yet hit on any way to
  whiten them that will not be too costly, and I have no idea how to
  fine down her fingers, which are like sausages. Yes; she evidently
  belongs to the brew-house by her hands, and to the aristocracy by
  her money; but she is apt to affect the great lady a little too
  much, as rich English women do who want to be mistaken for them,
  and she displays her lobster’s claws too freely.

  She has, however, as little intelligence as I could wish in a
  woman. If there were a stupider one to be found, I would set out
  to seek her. This girl, whose name is Dinah, will never criticise
  me; she will never contradict me; I shall be her Upper Chamber,
  her Lords and Commons. In short, Paul, she is indefeasible
  evidence of the English genius; she is a product of English
  mechanics brought to their highest pitch of perfection; she was
  undoubtedly made at Manchester, between the manufactory of Perry’s
  pens and the workshops for steam-engines. It eats, it drinks, it
  walks, it may have children, take good care of them, and bring
  them up admirably, and it apes a woman so well that you would
  believe it real.

  When my mother introduced us, she had set up the machine so
  cleverly, had so carefully fitted the pegs, and oiled the wheels
  so thoroughly, that nothing jarred; then, when she saw I did not
  make a very wry face, she set the springs in motion, and the woman
  spoke. Finally, my mother uttered the decisive words, “Miss Dinah
  Stevens spends no more than thirty thousand francs a year, and has
  been traveling for seven years in order to economize.”--So there
  is another image, and that one is silver.

  Matters are so far advanced that the banns are to be published. We
  have got as far as “My dear love.” Miss makes eyes at me that
  might floor a porter. The settlements are prepared. My fortune is
  not inquired into; Miss Stevens devotes a portion of hers to
  creating an entail in landed estate, bearing an income of two
  hundred and forty thousand francs, and to the purchase of a house,
  likewise entailed. The settlement credited to me is of a million
  francs. She has nothing to complain of. I leave her uncle’s money
  untouched.

  The worthy brewer, who has helped to found the entail, was near
  bursting with joy when he heard that his niece was to be a
  marquise. He would be capable of doing something handsome for my
  eldest boy.

  I shall sell out of the funds as soon as they are up to eighty,
  and invest in land. Thus, in two years I may look to get six
  hundred thousand francs a year out of real estate. So, you see,
  Paul, I do not give my friends advice that I am not ready to act
  upon.

  If you had but listened to me, you would have an English wife,
  some Nabob’s daughter, who would leave you the freedom of a
  bachelor and the independence necessary for playing the whist of
  ambition. I would concede my future wife to you if you were not
  married already. But that cannot be helped, and I am not the man
  to bid you chew the cud of the past.

  All this preamble was needful to explain to you that for the
  future my position in life will be such as a man needs if he wants
  to play the great game of pitch-and-toss. I cannot do without you,
  my friend. Now, then, my dear Paul, instead of setting sail for
  India you would do a much wiser thing to navigate with me the
  waters of the Seine. Believe me, Paris is still the place where
  fortune, abundant fortune, can be won. Potosi is in the rue
  Vivienne, the rue de la Paix, the Place Vendome, the rue de
  Rivoli. In all other places and countries material works and
  labors, marches and counter-marches, and sweatings of the brow are
  necessary to the building up of fortune; but in Paris _thought_
  suffices. Here, every man even mentally mediocre, can see a mine
  of wealth as he puts on his slippers, or picks his teeth after
  dinner, in his down-sitting and his up-rising. Find me another
  place on the globe where a good round stupid idea brings in more
  money, or is sooner understood than it is here.

  If I reach the top of the ladder, as I shall, am I the man to
  refuse you a helping hand, an influence, a signature? We shall
  want, we young roues, a faithful friend on whom to count, if only
  to compromise him and make him a scape-goat, or send him to die
  like a common soldier to save his general. Government is
  impossible without a man of honor at one’s side, in whom to
  confide and with whom we can do and say everything.

  Here is what I propose. Let the “Belle-Amelie” sail without you;
  come back here like a thunderbolt; I’ll arrange a duel for you
  with Vandenesse in which you shall have the first shot, and you
  can wing him like a pigeon. In France the husband who shoots his
  rival becomes at once respectable and respected. No one ever
  cavils at him again. Fear, my dear fellow, is a valuable social
  element, a means of success for those who lower their eyes before
  the gaze of no man living. I who care as little to live as to
  drink a glass of milk, and who have never felt the emotion of
  fear, I have remarked the strange effects produced by that
  sentiment upon our modern manners. Some men tremble to lose the
  enjoyments to which they are attached, others dread to leave a
  woman. The old adventurous habits of other days when life was
  flung away like a garment exist no longer. The bravery of a great
  many men is nothing more than a clever calculation on the fear of
  their adversary. The Poles are the only men in Europe who fight
  for the pleasure of fighting; they cultivate the art for the art’s
  sake, and not for speculation.

  Now hear me: kill Vandenesse, and your wife trembles, your
  mother-in-law trembles, the public trembles, and you recover your
  position, you prove your grand passion for your wife, you subdue
  society, you subdue your wife, you become a hero. Such is France.
  As for your embarrassments, I hold a hundred thousand francs for
  you; you can pay your principal debts, and sell what property you
  have left with a power of redemption, for you will soon obtain an
  office which will enable you by degrees to pay off your creditors.
  Then, as for your wife, once enlightened as to her character you
  can rule her. When you loved her you had no power to manage her;
  not loving her, you will have an unconquerable force. I will
  undertake, myself, to make your mother-in-law as supple as a
  glove; for you must recover the use of the hundred and fifty
  thousand francs a year those two women have squeezed out of you.

  Therefore, I say, renounce this expatriation which seems to me no
  better than a pan of charcoal or a pistol to your head. To go away
  is to justify all calumnies. The gambler who leaves the table to
  get his money loses it when he returns; we must have our gold in
  our pockets. Let us now, you and I, be two gamblers on the green
  baize of politics; between us loans are in order. Therefore take
  post-horses, come back instantly, and renew the game. You’ll win
  it with Henri de Marsay for your partner, for Henri de Marsay
  knows how to will, and how to strike.

  See how we stand politically. My father is in the British
  ministry; we shall have close relations with Spain through the
  Evangelistas, for, as soon as your mother-in-law and I have
  measured claws she will find there is nothing to gain by fighting
  the devil. Montriveau is our lieutenant-general; he will certainly
  be minister of war before long, and his eloquence will give him
  great ascendancy in the Chamber. Ronquerolles will be minister of
  State and privy-councillor; Martial de la Roche-Hugon is minister
  to Germany and peer of France; Serisy leads the Council of State,
  to which he is indispensable; Granville holds the magistracy, to
  which his sons belong; the Grandlieus stand well at court; Ferraud
  is the soul of the Gondreville coterie,--low intriguers who are
  always on the surface of things, I’m sure I don’t know why. Thus
  supported, what have we to fear? The money question is a mere
  nothing when this great wheel of fortune rolls for us. What is a
  woman?--you are not a schoolboy. What is life, my dear fellow, if
  you let a woman be the whole of it? A boat you can’t command,
  without a rudder, but not without a magnet, and tossed by every
  wind that blows. Pah!

  The great secret of social alchemy, my dear Paul, is to get the
  most we can out of each age of life through which we pass; to have
  and to hold the buds of our spring, the flowers of our summer, the
  fruits of our autumn. We amused ourselves once, a few good fellows
  and I, for a dozen or more years, like mousquetaires, black, red,
  and gray; we denied ourselves nothing, not even an occasional
  filibustering here and there. Now we are going to shake down the
  plums which age and experience have ripened. Be one of us; you
  shall have your share in the _pudding_ we are going to cook.

  Come; you will find a friend all yours in the skin of

  H. de Marsay.


As Paul de Manerville ended the reading of this letter, which fell like
the blows of a pickaxe on the edifice of his hopes, his illusions, and
his love, the vessel which bore him from France was beyond the Azores.
In the midst of this utter devastation a cold and impotent anger laid
hold of him.

“What had I done to them?” he said to himself.

That is the question of fools, of feeble beings, who, seeing nothing,
can nothing foresee. Then he cried aloud: “Henri! Henri!” to his loyal
friend. Many a man would have gone mad; Paul went to bed and slept that
heavy sleep which follows immense disasters,--the sleep that seized
Napoleon after Waterloo.



ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

     Casa-Real, Duc de
       The Quest of the Absolute

     Claes, Josephine de Temninck, Madame
       The Quest of the Absolute

     Magus, Elie
       The Vendetta
       A Bachelor’s Establishment
       Pierre Grassou
       Cousin Pons

     Manerville, Paul Francois-Joseph, Comte de
       The Thirteen
       The Ball at Sceaux
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

     Manerville, Comtesse Paul de
       The Lily of the Valley
       A Daughter of Eve

     Marsay, Henri de
       The Thirteen
       The Unconscious Humorists
       Another Study of Woman
       The Lily of the Valley
       Father Goriot
       Jealousies of a Country Town
       Ursule Mirouet
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Letters of Two Brides
       The Ball at Sceaux
       Modeste Mignon
       The Secrets of a Princess
       The Gondreville Mystery
       A Daughter of Eve

     Maulincour, Baronne de
       The Thirteen

     Stevens, Dinah
       Cousin Pons

     Vandenesse, Comte Felix de
       The Lily of the Valley
       Lost Illusions
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
       Cesar Birotteau
       Letters of Two Brides
       A Start in Life
       The Secrets of a Princess
       Another Study of Woman
       The Gondreville Mystery
       A Daughter of Eve





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