A Daughter of Eve

If you remember, dear lady, the pleasure your conversation gave to a certain traveler, making Paris live for him in Milan, you will not be surprised that he should lay one of his works at your feet, as a token of gratitude for so many delightful evenings spent in your society, nor that he should seek for it the shelter of a name which, in old times, was given to not a few of the tales by one of your early writers, beloved of the Milanese. You have an Eugénie, with more than the promise of beauty, whose speaking smile proclaims her to have inherited from you the most precious gifts a woman can possess, and whose childhood, it is certain, will be rich in all those joys which a harsh mother refused to the Eugénie of these pages. If Frenchmen are accused of being frivolous and inconstant, I, you see, am Italian in my faithfulness and attachment. How often, as I wrote the name of Eugénie, have my thoughts carried me back to the cool stuccoed drawing-room and little garden of the Vicolo del Capuccini, which used to resound to the dear child’s merry laughter, to our quarrels, and our stories. You have left the Corso for the Tre Monasteri, where I know nothing of your manner of life, and I am forced to picture you, no longer amongst the pretty things, which doubtless still surround you, but like one of the beautiful heads of Carlo Dolci, Raphael, Titian, or Allori, which, in their remoteness, seem to us like abstractions.

If this book succeed in making its way across the Alps, it will tell you of the lively gratitude and respectful friendship of

I

The Two Maries

It was half-past eleven in the evening, and two women were seated by the fire of a boudoir in one of the finest houses of the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins. The room was hung in blue velvet, of the kind with tender melting lights, which French industry has only lately learned to manufacture. The doors and windows had been draped by a really artistic decorator with rich cashmere curtains, matching the walls in color. From a prettily moulded rose in the centre of the ceiling, hung, by three finely wrought chains, a silver lamp, studded with turquoises. The plan of decoration had been carried out to the very minutest detail; even the ceiling was covered with blue silk, while long bands of cashmere, folded across the silk at equal distances, made stars of white, looped up with pearl beading. The feet sank in the warm pile of a Belgian carpet, close as a lawn, where blue nosegays were sprinkled over a ground the color of unbleached linen. The warm tone of the furniture, which was of solid rosewood and carved after the best antique models, saved from insipidity the general effect which a painter might have called wanting in “accent.” On the chair backs small panels of splendid broche silk—white with blue flowers—were set in broad leafy frames, finely cut on the wood. On either side of the window stood a set of shelves, loaded with valuable knickknacks, the flower of mechanical art, sprung into being at the touch of creative fancy. The mantelpiece of African marble bore a platinum timepiece with arabesques in black enamel, flanked by extravagant specimens of old Dresden—the inevitable shepherd with dainty bouquet forever tripping to meet his bride—embodying the Teutonic conception of ceramic art. Above sparkled the beveled facets of a Venetian mirror in an ebony frame, crowded with figures in relief, relic of some royal residence. Two flower-stands displayed at this season the sickly triumphs of the hothouse, pale, spirit-like blossoms, the pearls of the world of flowers. The room might have been for sale, it was so desperately tidy and prim. It bore no impress of will and character such as marks a happy home, and even the women did not break the general chilly impression, for they were weeping.

The proprietor of the house, Ferdinand du Tillet, was one of the richest bankers in Paris, and the very mention of his name will account for the lavish style of the house decoration, of which the boudoir may be taken as a sample. Du Tillet, though a man of no family and sprung from Heaven knows where, had taken for wife, in 1831, the only unmarried daughter of the Comte de Granville, whose name was one of the most illustrious on the French bench, and who had been made a peer of the realm after the Revolution of July. This ambitious alliance was not got for nothing; in the settlement, du Tillet had to sign a receipt for a dowry of which he never touched a penny. This nominal dowry was the same in amount as the huge sum given to the elder sister on her marriage with Comte Félix de Vandenesse, and which, in fact, was the price paid by the Granvilles in their turn for a matrimonial prize. Thus, in the long run, the bank repaired the breach which aristocracy had made in the finances of the bench. Could the Comte de Vandenesse have seen himself, three years in advance, brother-in-law of a Master Ferdinand, self-styled du Tillet, it is possible he might have declined the match; but who could have foreseen at the close of 1828 the strange upheavals which 1830 was to produce in the political, financial, and moral condition of France? Had Count Félix been told that in the general shuffle he would lose his peer’s coronet, to find it again on his father-in-law’s brow, he would have treated his informant as a lunatic.

Crouching in a listening attitude in one of those low chairs called a chauffeuse, Mme. du Tillet pressed her sister’s hand to her breast with motherly tenderness, and from time to time kissed it. This sister was known in society as Mme. Félix de Vandenesse, the Christian name being joined to that of the family, in order to distinguish the Countess from her sister-in-law, wife of the former ambassador, Charles de Vandenesse, widow of the late Comte de Kergarouët, whose wealth she had inherited, and by birth a de Fontaine. The Countess had thrown herself back upon a lounge, a handkerchief in her other hand, her eyes swimming, her breath choked with half-stifled sobs. She had just poured out her confidences to Mme. du Tillet in a way which proved the tenderness of their sisterly love. In an age like ours it would have seemed so natural for sisters, who had married into such very different spheres, not to be on intimate terms, that a rapid glance at the story of their childhood will be necessary in order to explain the origin of this affection which had survived, without jar or flaw, the alienating forces of society and the mutual scorn of their husbands.

The early home of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie was a dismal house in the Marais. Here they were brought up by a pious but narrow-minded woman, “imbued with high principle,” as the classic phrase has it, who conceived herself to have performed the whole duty of a mother when her girls arrived at the door of matrimony without ever having traveled beyond the domestic circle embraced by the maternal eye. Up to that time they had never even been to a play. A Paris church was their nearest approach to a theatre. In short, their upbringing in their mother’s house was as strict as it could have been in a convent. From the time that they had ceased to be mere infants they always slept in a room adjoining that of the Countess, the door of which was kept open at night. The time not occupied by dressing, religious observances, and the minimum of study requisite for the children of gentlefolk, was spent in making poor-clothes and in taking exercise, modeled on the English Sunday walk, where any quickening of the solemn pace is checked as being suggestive of cheerfulness. Their lessons were kept within the limits imposed by confessors, chosen from among the least liberal and most Jansenist of ecclesiastics. Never were girls handed over to their husbands more pure and virgin: in this point, doubtless one of great importance, their mother seemed to have seen the fulfilment of her whole duty to God and man. Not a novel did the poor things read till they were married. In drawing an old maid was their instructor, and their only copies were figures whose anatomy would have confounded Cuvier, and so drawn as to have made a woman of the Farnese Hercules. A worthy priest taught them grammar, French, history, geography, and the little arithmetic a woman needs to know. As for literature, they read aloud in the evening from certain authorized books, such as the Lettres édifiantes and Noël’s Leçons de littérature, but only in the presence of their mother’s confessor, since even here passages might occur, which, apart from heedful commentary, would be liable to stir the imagination. Fénelon’s Telemachus was held dangerous. The Comtesse de Granville was not without affection for her daughters, and it showed itself in wishing to make angels of them in the fashion of Marie Alacoque, but the daughters would have preferred a mother less saintly and more human.

This education bore its inevitable fruit. Religion, imposed as a yoke and presented under its harshest aspect, wearied these innocent young hearts with a discipline adapted for hardened sinners. It repressed their feelings, and, though striking deep root, could create no affection. The two Maries had no alternative but to sink into imbecility or to long for independence. Independence meant marriage, and to this they looked as soon as they began to see something of the world and could exchange a few ideas, while yet remaining utterly unconscious of their own touching grace and rare qualities. Ignorant of what innocence meant, without arms against misfortune, without experience of happiness, how should they be able to judge of life? Their only comfort in the depths of this maternal jail was drawn from each other. Their sweet whispered talks at night, the few sentences they could exchange when their mother left them for a moment, contained sometimes more thoughts than could be put in words. Often would a stolen glance, charged with sympathetic message and response, convey a whole poem of bitter melancholy. They found a marvelous joy in simple things—the sight of a cloudless sky, the scent of flowers, a turn in the garden with interlacing arms—and would exult with innocent glee over the completion of a piece of embroidery.

Their mother’s friends, far from providing intellectual stimulus or calling forth their sympathies, only deepened the surrounding gloom. They were stiff-backed old ladies, dry and rigid, whose conversation turned on their ailments, on the shades of difference between preachers or confessors, or on the most trifling events in the religious world, which might be found in the pages of La Quotidienne or L’Ami de la Religion. The men again might have served as extinguishers to the torch of love, so cold and mournfully impassive were their faces. They had all reached the age when a man becomes churlish and irritable, when his tastes are blunted except at table, and are directed only to procuring the comforts of life. Religious egotism had dried up hearts devoted to task work and entrenched behind routine. They spent the greater part of the evening over silent card-parties. At times the two poor little girls, placed under the ban of this sanhedrim, who abetted the maternal severity, would suddenly feel that they could bear no longer the sight of these wearisome persons with their sunken eyes and frowning faces.

Against the dull background of this life stood out in bold relief the single figure of a man, that of their music-master. The confessors had ruled that music was a Christian art, having its source in the Catholic church and developed by it, and therefore the two little girls were allowed to learn music. A spectacled lady, who professed sol-fa and the piano at a neighboring convent, bored them for a time with exercises. But, when the elder of the girls was ten years old, the Comte de Granville pointed out the necessity of finding a master.

Mme. de Granville, who could not deny it, gave to her concession all the merit of wifely submissiveness. A pious woman never loses an opportunity of taking credit for doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German, one of those men who are born old and will always remain fifty, even if they live to be eighty. His hollowed, wrinkled, swarthy face had kept something childlike and simple in its darkest folds. The blue of innocence sparkled in his eyes, and the gay smile of spring dwelt on his lips. His gray old hair, which fell in natural curls, like those of Jesus Christ, added to his ecstatic air a vague solemnity which was highly misleading, for he was a man to make a fool of himself with the most exemplar gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope to which he paid no attention, for his gaze soared too high in the clouds to come in contact with material things. And so this great unrecognized artist belonged to that generous race of the absentminded, who give their time and their hearts to others, just as they drop their gloves on every table, their umbrellas at every door. His hands were of the kind which look dirty after washing. Finally, his aged frame, badly set up on tottering, knotty limbs, gave ocular proof how far a man’s body can become a mere accessory to his mind. It was one of those strange freaks of nature which no one has ever properly described except Hoffmann, a German, who has made himself the poet of all which appears lifeless and yet lives. Such was Schmucke, formerly choirmaster to the Margrave of Anspach, a learned man who underwent inspection from a council of piety. They asked him whether he fasted. The master was tempted to reply, “Look at me!” but it is ill work jesting with saints and Jansenist confessors.

This apocryphal old man held so large a place in the life of the two Maries—they became so much attached to the great simple-minded artist whose sole interest was in his art—that, after they were married, each bestowed on him an annuity of three hundred francs, a sum which sufficed for his lodging, his beer, his pipe, and his clothes. Six hundred francs a year and his lessons were a Paradise for Schmucke. He had not ventured to confide his poverty and his hopes to anyone except these two charming children, whose hearts had blossomed under the snow of maternal rigor and the frost of devotion, and this fact by itself sums up the character of Schmucke and the childhood of the two Maries.

No one could tell afterwards what abbé, what devout old lady, had unearthed this German, lost in Paris. No sooner did mothers of a family learn that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters than they all asked for his name and address. Schmucke had thirty houses in the Marais. This tardy success displayed itself in slippers with bronze steel buckles and lined with horsehair soles, and in a more frequent change of shirt. His childlike gaiety, long repressed by an honorable and seemly poverty, bubbled forth afresh. He let fall little jokes such as:—“Young ladies, the cats supped off the dirt of Paris last night,” when a frost had dried the muddy streets overnight, only they were spoken in a Germano-Gallic lingo:—“Younc ladies, de gads subbed off de dirt off Barees.” Gratified at having brought his adorable ladies this species of Vergiss mein nicht, culled from the flowers of his fancy, he put on an air of such ineffable roguishness in presenting it that mockery was disarmed. It made him so happy to call a smile to the lips of his pupils, the sadness of whose life was no mystery to him, that he would have made himself ridiculous on purpose if nature had not saved him the trouble. And yet there was no commonplace so vulgar that the warmth of his heart could not infuse it with fresh meaning. In the fine words of the late Saint-Martin, the radiance of his smile might have turned the mire of the highway to gold. The two Maries, following one of the best traditions of religious education, used to escort their master respectfully to the door of the suite when he left. There the poor girls would say a few kind words to him, happy in making him happy. It was the one chance they had of exercising their woman’s nature.

Thus, up to the time of their marriage, music became for the girls a life within life, just as, we are told, the Russian peasant takes his dreams for realities, his waking life for a restless sleep. In their eagerness to find some bulwark against the rising tide of pettiness and consuming ascetic ideas, they threw themselves desperately into the difficulties of the musical art. Melody, harmony, and composition, those three daughters of the skies, rewarded their labors, making a rampart for them with their aerial dances, while the old Catholic faun, intoxicated by music, led the chorus. Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Paësiello, Cimarosa, Hummel, along with musicians of lesser rank, developed in them sensations which never passed beyond the modest limit of their veiled bosoms, but which went to the heart of that new world of fancy whither they eagerly betook themselves. When the execution of some piece had been brought to perfection, they would clasp hands and embrace in the wildest ecstasy. The old master called them his Saint Cecilias.

The two Maries did not go to balls till they were sixteen, and then only four times a year, to a few selected houses. They only left their mother’s side when well fortified with rules of conduct, so strict that they could reply nothing but yes and no to their partners. The eye of the Countess never quitted her daughters and seemed to read the words upon their lips. The ball-dresses of the poor little things were models of decorum—high-necked muslin frocks, with an extraordinary number of fluffy frills and long sleeves. This ungraceful costume, which concealed instead of setting off their beauty, reminded one of an Egyptian mummy, in spite of two sweetly pathetic faces which peeped out from the mass of cotton. With all their innocence, they were furious to find themselves the objects of a kindly pity. Where is the woman, however artless, who would not inspire envy rather than compassion? The white matter of their brains was unsoiled by a single perilous, morbid, or even equivocal thought; their hearts were pure, their hands were frightfully red; they were bursting with health. Eve did not leave the hands of her Creator more guileless than were these two girls when they left their mother’s home to go to the mairie and to the church, with one simple but awful command in their ears—to obey in all things the man by whose side they were to spend the night, awake or sleeping. To them it seemed impossible that they should suffer more in the strange house whither they were to be banished than in the maternal convent.

How came it that the father of these girls did nothing to protect them from so crushing a despotism? The Comte de Granville had a great reputation as a judge, able and incorruptible, if sometimes a little carried away by party feeling. Unhappily, by the terms of a remarkable compromise, agreed upon after ten years of married life, husband and wife lived apart, each in their own suite of apartments. The father, who judged the repressive system less dangerous for women than for men, kept the education of his boys in his own hands, while leaving that of the girls to their mother. The two Maries, who could hardly escape the imposition of some tyranny, whether in love or marriage, would suffer less than boys, whose intelligence ought to be unfettered and whose natural spirit would be broken by the harsh constraint of religious dogma, pushed to an extreme. Of four victims the Count saved two. The Countess looked on her sons, both destined for the law—the one for the magistrature assise, the other for the magistrature amovible1—as far too badly brought up to be allowed any intimacy with their sisters. All intercourse between the poor children was strictly guarded. When the Count took his boys from school for a day he was careful that it should not be spent in the house. After luncheon with their mother and sisters he would find something to amuse them outside. Restaurants, theatres, museums, an expedition to the country in summertime, were their treats. Only on important family occasions, such as the birthday of the Countess or of their father, New Year’s Day, and prize-giving days, did the boys spend day and night under the paternal roof, in extreme discomfort, and not daring to kiss their sisters under the eye of the Countess, who never left them alone together for an instant. Seeing so little of their brothers, how was it possible the poor girls should feel any bond with them? On these days it was a perpetual, “Where is Angélique?” “What is Eugénie about?” “Where can my children be?” When her sons were mentioned, the Countess would raise her cold and sodden eyes to Heaven, as though imploring pardon for having failed to snatch them from ungodliness. Her exclamations and her silence in regard to them were alike eloquent as the most lamentable verses of Jeremiah, and the girls not unnaturally came to look on their brothers as hopeless reprobates.

The Count gave to each of his sons, at the age of eighteen, a couple of rooms in his own suite, and they then began to study law under the direction of his secretary, a barrister, to whom he entrusted the task of initiating them into the mysteries of their profession.

The two Maries, therefore, had no practical knowledge of what it is to have a brother. On the occasion of their sisters’ weddings it happened that both brothers were detained at a distance by important cases: the one having then a post as avocat général2 at a distant Court, while the other was making his first appearance in the provinces. In many families the reality of that home-life, which we are apt to picture as linked together by the closest and most vital ties, is something very different. The brothers are far away, engrossed in moneymaking, in pushing their way in the world, or they are chained to the public service; the sisters are absorbed in a vortex of family interests, outside their own circle. Thus the different members spend their lives apart and indifferent to each other, held together only by the feeble bond of memory. If on occasion pride or self-interest reunites them, just as often these motives act in the opposite sense and divide them in heart, as they have already been divided in life, so that it becomes a rare exception to find a family living in one home and animated by one spirit. Modern legislation, by splitting up the family into units, has created that most hideous evil—the isolation of the individual.

Angélique and Eugénie, amid the profound solitude in which their youth glided by, saw their father but rarely, and it was a melancholy face which he showed in his wife’s handsome rooms on the ground floor. At home, as on the bench, he maintained the grave and dignified bearing of the judge. When the girls had passed the period of toys and dolls, when they were beginning, at twelve years of age, to think for themselves, and had given up making fun of Schmucke, they found out the secret of the cares which lined the Count’s forehead. Under the mask of severity they could read traces of a kindly, lovable nature. He had yielded to the Church his place as head of the household, his hopes of wedded happiness had been blighted, and his father’s heart was wounded in its tenderest spot—the love he bore his daughters. Sorrows such as these rouse strange pity in the breasts of girls who have never known tenderness. Sometimes he would stroll in the garden between his daughters, an arm round each little figure, fitting his pace to their childish steps; then, stopping in the shrubbery, he would kiss them, one after the other, on the forehead, while his eyes, his mouth, and his whole expression breathed the deepest pity.

“You are not very happy, my darlings,” he said on one such occasion; “but I shall marry you early, and it will be a good day for me when I see you take wing.”

“Papa,” said Eugénie, “we have made up our minds to marry the first man who offers.”

“And this,” he exclaimed, “is the bitter fruit of such a system. In trying to make saints of them, they …”

He stopped. Often the girls were conscious of a passionate tenderness in their father’s farewell, or in the way he looked at them when by chance he dined with their mother. This father, whom they so rarely saw, became the object of their pity, and whom we pity we love. The marriage of both sisters—welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina was by nature—was the direct result of this strict conventual training. Many men, when thinking of marriage, prefer a girl taken straight from the convent and impregnated with an atmosphere of devotion to one who has been trained in the school of society. There is no medium. On the one hand is the girl with nothing left to learn, who reads and discusses the papers, who has spun round ballrooms in the arms of countless young men, who has seen every play and devoured every novel, whose knees have been made supple by a dancing-master, pressing them against his own, who does not trouble her head about religion and has evolved her own morality; on the other is the guileless, simple girl of the type of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie. Possibly the husband’s risk is no greater in the one case than in the other, but the immense majority of men, who have not yet reached the age of Arnolphe, would choose a saintly Agnes rather than a budding Célimène.

The two Maries were identical in figure, feet, and hands. Both were small and slight. Eugénie, the younger, was fair like her mother; Angélique, dark like her father. But they had the same complexion—a skin of that mother-of-pearl white which tells of a rich and healthy blood and against which the carnation stands out in vivid patches, firm in texture like the jasmine, and like it also, delicate, smooth, and soft to the touch. The blue eyes of Eugénie, the brown eyes of Angélique, had the same naive expression of indifference and unaffected astonishment, betrayed by the indecisive wavering of the iris in the liquid white. Their figures were good; the shoulders, a little angular now, would be rounded by time. The neck and bosom, which had been so long veiled, appeared quite startlingly perfect in form, when, at the request of her husband, each sister for the first time attired herself for a ball in a low-necked dress. What blushes covered the poor innocent things, so charming in their shamefacedness, as they first saw themselves in the privacy of their own rooms; nor did the color fade all evening!

At the moment when this story opens, with the younger Marie consoling her weeping sister, they are no longer raw girls. Each had nursed an infant—one a boy, the other a girl—and the hands and arms of both were white as milk. Eugénie had always seemed something of a madcap to her terrible mother, who redoubled her watchful care and severity on her behalf. Angélique, stately and proud, had, she thought, a soul of high temper fitted to guard itself, while the skittish Eugénie seemed to demand a firmer hand. There are charming natures of this kind, misread by destiny, whose life ought to be unbroken sunshine, but who live and die in misery, plagued by some evil genius, the victims of chance. Thus the sprightly, artless Eugénie had fallen under the malign despotism of a parvenu when released from the maternal clutches. Angélique, high-strung and sensitive, had been sent adrift in the highest circles of Parisian society without any restraining curb.

II

Sisterly Confidences

Mme. de Vandenesse, it was plain, was crushed by the burden of troubles too heavy for a mind still unsophisticated after six years of marriage. She lay at length, her limbs flaccid, her body bent, her head fallen anyhow on the back of the lounge. Having looked in at the opera before hurrying to her sister’s, she had still a few flowers in the plaits of her hair, while others lay scattered on the carpet, together with her gloves, her mantle of fur-lined silk, her muff, and her hood. Bright tears mingled with the pearls on her white bosom and brimming eyes told a tale in gruesome contrast with the luxury around. The Countess had no heart for further words.

“You poor darling,” said Mme. du Tillet, “what strange delusion as to my married life made you come to me for help?”

It seemed as though the torrent of her sister’s grief had forced these words from the heart of the banker’s wife, as melting snow will set free stones that are held the fastest in the river’s bed. The Countess gazed stupidly on her with fixed eyes, in which terror had dried the tears.

“Can it be that the waters have closed over your head too, my sweet one?” she said in a low voice.

“Nay, dear, my troubles won’t lessen yours.”

“But tell me them, dear child. Do you think I am so sunk in self already as not to listen? Then we are comrades again in suffering as of old!”

“But we suffer apart,” sadly replied Mme. du Tillet. “We live in opposing camps. It is my turn to visit the Tuileries now that you have ceased to go. Our husbands belong to rival parties. I am the wife of an ambitious banker, a bad man. Your husband, sweetest, is kind, noble, generous—”

“Ah! do not reproach me,” cried the Countess. “No woman has the right to do so, who has not suffered the weariness of a tame, colorless life and passed from it straight to the paradise of love. She must have known the bliss of living her whole life in another, of espousing the ever-varying emotions of a poet’s soul. In every flight of his imagination, in all the efforts of his ambition, in the great part he plays upon the stage of life, she must have borne her share, suffering in his pain and mounting on the wings of his measureless delights; and all this while never losing her cold, impassive demeanor before a prying world. Yes, dear, a tumult of emotion may rage within, while one sits by the fire at home, quietly and comfortably like this. And yet what joy to have at every instant one overwhelming interest which expands the heart and makes it live in every fibre. Nothing is indifferent to you; your very life seems to depend on a drive, which gives you the chance of seeing in the crowd the one man before the flash of whose eye the sunlight pales; you tremble if he is late, and could strangle the bore who steals from you one of those precious moments when happiness throbs in every vein! To be alive, only to be alive is rapture. Think of it, dear, to live, when so many women would give the world to feel as I do, and cannot. Remember, child, that for this poetry of life there is but one season—the season of youth. Soon, very soon, will come the chills of winter. Oh! if you were rich as I am in these living treasures of the heart and were threatened with losing them—”

Mme. du Tillet, terrified, had hidden her face in her hands during this wild rhapsody. At last, seeing the warm tears on her sister’s cheek, she began:

“I never dreamed of reproaching you, my darling. Your words have, in a single instant, stirred in my heart more burning thoughts than all my tears have quenched, for indeed the life I lead might well plead within me for a passion such as you describe. Let me cling to the belief that if we had seen more of each other we should not have drifted to this point. The knowledge of my sufferings would have enabled you to realize your own happiness, and I might perhaps have learned from you courage to resist the tyranny which has crushed the sweetness out of my life. Your misery is an accident which chance may remedy, mine is unceasing. My husband neither has real affection for me nor does he trust me. I am a mere peg for his magnificence, the hallmark of his ambition, a tidbit for his vanity.

“Ferdinand”—and she struck her hand upon the mantelpiece—“is hard and smooth like this marble. He is suspicious of me. If I ask anything for myself I know beforehand that refusal is certain; but for whatever may tickle his self-importance or advertise his wealth I have not even to express a desire. He decorates my rooms, and spends lavishly on my table; my servants, my boxes at the theatre, all the trappings of my life are of the smartest. He grudges nothing to his vanity. His children’s baby-linen must be trimmed with lace, but he would never trouble about their real needs, and would shut his ears to their cries. Can you understand such a state of things? I go to court loaded with diamonds, and my ornaments are of the most costly whenever I am in society; yet I have not a sou of my own. Mme. du Tillet, whom envious onlookers no doubt suppose to be rolling in wealth, cannot lay her hand on a hundred francs. If the father cares little for his children, he cares still less for their mother. Never does he allow me to forget that I have been paid for as a chattel, and that my personal fortune, which has never been in my possession, has been filched from him. If he stood alone I might have a chance of fascinating him, but there is an alien influence at work. He is under the thumb of a woman, a notary’s widow, over fifty, but who still reckons on her charms, and I can see very well that while she lives I shall never be free.

“My whole life here is planned out like a sovereign’s. A bell is rung for my lunch and dinner as at your castle. I never miss going to the Bois at a certain hour, accompanied by two footmen in full livery, and returning at a fixed time. In place of giving orders, I receive them. At balls and the theatre, a lackey comes up to me saying, ‘Your carriage waits, madame,’ and I have to go, whether I am enjoying myself or not. Ferdinand would be vexed if I did not carry out the code of rules drawn up for his wife, and I am afraid of him. Surrounded by all this hateful splendor, I sometimes look back with regret, and begin to think we had a kind mother. At least she left us our nights, and I had you to talk to. In my sufferings, then, I had a loving companion, but this gorgeous house is a desert to me.”

It was for the Countess now to play the comforter. As this tale of misery fell from her sister’s lips she took her hand and kissed it with tears.

“How is it possible for me to help you?” Eugénie went on in a low voice. “If he were to find us together he would suspect something. He would want to know what we had been talking about this hour, and it is not easy to put off the scent anyone so false and full of wiles. He would be sure to lay a trap for me. But enough of my troubles; let us think of you. Your forty thousand francs, darling, would be nothing to Ferdinand. He and the Baron de Nucingen, another of these rich bankers, are accustomed to handle millions. Sometimes at dinner I hear them talking of things to make your flesh creep. Du Tillet knows I am no talker, so they speak freely before me, confident that it will go no further, and I can assure you that highway murder would be an act of mercy compared to some of their financial schemes. Nucingen and he make as little of ruining a man as I do of all their display. Among the people who come to see me, often there are poor dupes whose affairs I have heard settled overnight, and who are plunging into speculations which will beggar them. How I long to act Leonarde in the brigands’ cave, and cry, ‘Beware!’ But what would become of me? I hold my tongue, but this luxurious mansion is nothing but a den of cutthroats. And du Tillet and Nucingen scatter banknotes in handfuls for any whim that takes their fancy. Ferdinand has bought the site of the old castle at Tillet, and intends rebuilding it, and then adding a forest and magnificent grounds. He says his son will be a count and his grandson a peer. Nucingen is tired of his house in the Hue Saint-Lazare and is having a palace built. His wife is a friend of mine. … Ah!” she cried, “she might be of use to us. She is not in awe of her husband, her property is in her own hands; she is the person to save you.”

“Darling,” cried Mme. de Vandenesse, throwing herself into her sister’s arms and bursting into tears, “there are only a few hours left. Let us go there tonight, this very instant.”

“How can I go out at eleven o’clock at night?”

“My carriage is here.”

“Well, what are you two plotting here?” It was du Tillet who threw open the door of the boudoir.

A false geniality lit up the blank countenance which met the sisters’ gaze. They had been too much absorbed in talking to notice the wheels of du Tillet’s carriage, and the thick carpets had muffled the sound of his steps. The Countess, who had an indulgent husband and was well used to society, had acquired a tact and address such as her sister, passing straight from a mother’s to a husband’s yoke, had had no opportunity of cultivating. She was able then to save the situation, which she saw that Eugénie’s terror was on the point of betraying, by a frank reply.

“I thought my sister wealthier than she is,” she said, looking her brother-in-law in the face. “Women sometimes get into difficulties which they don’t care to speak of to their husbands—witness Napoleon and Joséphine—and I came to ask a favor of her.”

“There will be no difficulty about that. Eugénie is a rich woman,” replied du Tillet, in a tone of honeyed acerbity.

“Only for you,” said the Countess, with a bitter smile.

“How much do you want?” said du Tillet, who was not sorry at the prospect of getting his sister-in-law into his toils.

“How dense you are! Didn’t I tell you that we want to keep our husbands out of this?” was the prudent reply of Mme. de Vandenesse, who feared to place herself at the mercy of the man whose character had by good luck just been sketched by her sister. “I shall come and see Eugénie tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? No,” said the banker coldly. “Mme. du Tillet dines tomorrow with a future peer of the realm, Baron de Nucingen, who is resigning to me his seat in the Chamber of Deputies.”

“Won’t you allow her to accept my box at the opera?” said the Countess, without exchanging even a look with her sister, in her terror lest their secret understanding should be betrayed.

“Thank you, she has her own,” said du Tillet, offended.

“Very well, then, I shall see her there,” replied the Countess.

“It will be the first time you have done us that honor,” said du Tillet.

The Countess felt the reproach and began to laugh.

“Keep your mind easy, you shan’t be asked to pay this time,” she said.—“Goodbye, darling.”

“The jade!” cried du Tillet, picking up the flowers which had fallen from the Countess’ hair. “You would do well,” he said to his wife, “to take a lesson from Mme. de Vandenesse. I should like to see you as saucy in society as she was here just now. Your want of style and spirit are enough to drive a man wild.”

For all reply, Eugénie raised her eyes to heaven.

“Well, madame, what have you two been about here?” said the banker after a pause, pointing to the flowers. “What has happened to bring your sister to your box tomorrow?”

In order to get away to her bedroom, and escape the cross-questioning she dreaded, the poor thrall made an excuse of being sleepy. But du Tillet took his wife’s arm and, dragging her back, planted her before him beneath the full blaze of the candles, flaming in their silver-gilt branches between two beautiful bunches of flowers. Fixing her eyes with his keen glance, he began with cold deliberation.

“Your sister came to borrow forty thousand francs to pay the debts of a man in whom she is interested, and who, within three days, will be under lock and key in the Rue de Clichy. He’s too precious to be left loose.”

The miserable woman tried to repress the nervous shiver which ran through her.

“You gave me a fright,” she said. “But you know that my sister has too much principle and too much affection for her husband to take that sort of interest in any man.”

“On the contrary,” he replied drily. “Girls brought up as you were, in a very straitlaced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined. Those are the girls that make bad wives.”

“Speak for me if you like,” said poor Eugénie, in a tone of bitter irony, “but respect my sister. The Comtesse de Vandenesse is too happy, too completely trusted by her husband, not to be attached to him. Besides, supposing what you say were true, she would not have told me.”

“It is as I said,” persisted du Tillet, “and I forbid you to have anything to do with the matter. It is to my interest that the man go to prison. Let that suffice.”

Mme. du Tillet left the room.

“She is sure to disobey me,” said du Tillet to himself, left alone in the boudoir, “and if I keep my eye on them I may be able to find out what they are up to. Poor fools, to pit themselves against us!”

He shrugged his shoulders and went to rejoin his wife, or, more properly speaking, his slave.