Little La Baudraye, who came jauntily enough to say good-bye to his wife and his children, appeared in a white india-rubber overcoat. He was so firm on his feet, and so exactly like the La Baudraye of 1836, that Dinah despaired of ever burying the dreadful little dwarf. From the garden, where he was smoking a cigar, the journalist could watch Monsieur de la Baudraye for so long as it took the little reptile to cross the forecourt, but that was enough for Lousteau; it was plain to him that the little man had intended to wreck every hope of his dying that his wife might have conceived.
This short scene made a considerable change in the writer’s secret scheming. As he smoked a second cigar, he seriously reviewed the position.
His life with Madame de la Baudraye had hitherto cost him quite as much as it had cost her. To use the language of business, the two sides of the account balanced, and they could, if necessary, cry quits. Considering how small his income was, and how hardly he earned it, Lousteau regarded himself, morally speaking, as the creditor. It was, no doubt, a favorable moment for throwing the woman over. Tired at the end of three years of playing a comedy which never can become a habit, he was perpetually concealing his weariness; and this fellow, who was accustomed to disguise none of his feelings, compelled himself to wear a smile at home like that of a debtor in the presence of his creditor. This compulsion was every day more intolerable.
Hitherto the immense advantages he foresaw in the future had given him strength; but when he saw Monsieur de la Baudraye embark for the United States, as briskly as if it were to go down to Rouen in a steamboat, he ceased to believe in the future.
He went in from the garden to the pretty drawing-room, where Dinah had just taken leave of her husband.
“Etienne,” said Madame de la Baudraye, “do you know what my lord and master has proposed to me? In the event of my wishing to return to live at Anzy during his absence, he has left his orders, and he hopes that my mother’s good advice will weigh with me, and that I shall go back there with my children.”
“It is very good advice,” replied Lousteau drily, knowing the passionate disclaimer that Dinah expected, and indeed begged for with her eyes.
The tone, the words, the cold look, all hit the hapless woman so hard, who lived only in her love, that two large tears trickled slowly down her cheeks, while she did not speak a word, and Lousteau only saw them when she took out her handkerchief to wipe away these two beads of anguish.
“What is it, Didine?” he asked, touched to the heart by this excessive sensibility.
“Just as I was priding myself on having won our freedom,” said she – “at the cost of my fortune – by selling – what is most precious to a mother’s heart – selling my children! – for he is to have them from the age of six – and I cannot see them without going to Sancerre! – and that is torture! – Ah, dear God! What have I done – ?”
Lousteau knelt down by her and kissed her hands with a lavish display of coaxing and petting.
“You do not understand me,” said he. “I blame myself, for I am not worth such sacrifices, dear angel. I am, in a literary sense, a quite second-rate man. If the day comes when I can no longer cut a figure at the bottom of the newspaper, the editors will let me lie, like an old shoe flung into the rubbish heap. Remember, we tight-rope dancers have no retiring pension! The State would have too many clever men on its hands if it started on such a career of beneficence. I am forty-two, and I am as idle as a marmot. I feel it – I know it” – and he took her by the hand – “my love can only be fatal to you.
“As you know, at two-and-twenty I lived on Florine; but what is excusable in a youth, what then seems smart and charming, is a disgrace to a man of forty. Hitherto we have shared the burden of existence, and it has not been lovely for this year and half. Out of devotion to me you wear nothing but black, and that does me no credit.” – Dinah gave one of those magnanimous shrugs which are worth all the words ever spoken. – “Yes,” Etienne went on, “I know you sacrifice everything to my whims, even your beauty. And I, with a heart worn out in past struggles, a soul full of dark presentiments as to the future, I cannot repay your exquisite love with an equal affection. We were very happy – without a cloud – for a long time. – Well, then, I cannot bear to see so sweet a poem end badly. Am I wrong?”
Madame de la Baudraye loved Etienne so truly, that this prudence, worthy of de Clagny, gratified her and stanched her tears.
“He loves me for myself alone!” thought she, looking at him with smiling eyes.
After four years of intimacy, this woman’s love now combined every shade of affection which our powers of analysis can discern, and which modern society has created; one of the most remarkable men of our age, whose death is a recent loss to the world of letters, Beyle (Stendhal), was the first to delineate them to perfection.
Lousteau could produce in Dinah the acute agitation which may be compared to magnetism, that upsets every power of the mind and body, and overcomes every instinct of resistance in a woman. A look from him, or his hand laid on hers, reduced her to implicit obedience. A kind word or a smile wreathed the poor woman’s soul with flowers; a fond look elated, a cold look depressed her. When she walked, taking his arm and keeping step with him in the street or on the boulevard, she was so entirely absorbed in him that she lost all sense of herself. Fascinated by this fellow’s wit, magnetized by his airs, his vices were but trivial defects in her eyes. She loved the puffs of cigar smoke that the wind brought into her room from the garden; she went to inhale them, and made no wry faces, hiding herself to enjoy them. She hated the publisher or the newspaper editor who refused Lousteau money on the ground of the enormous advances he had had already. She deluded herself so far as to believe that her bohemian was writing a novel, for which the payment was to come, instead of working off a debt long since incurred.
This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the love of the heart and of the head – passion, caprice, and taste – to accept Beyle’s definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in certain moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and constantly exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to read to the bottom of Lousteau’s soul, sense was still too much for reason, and suggested excuses.
“And what am I?” she replied. “A woman who has put herself outside the pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman’s honor, why should you not sacrifice to me some of a man’s honor? Do we not live outside the limits of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan can accept from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and only death can part us – you know. My happiness is your honor, Etienne, as my constancy and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you happy, all is at an end. If I cause you a pang, condemn me.
“Our debts are paid; we have ten thousand francs a year, and between us we can certainly make eight thousand francs a year – I will write theatrical articles. – With fifteen hundred francs a month we shall be as rich as Rothschild. – Be quite easy. I will have some lovely dresses, and give you every day some gratified vanity, as on the first night of Nathan’s play – ”
“And what about your mother, who goes to Mass every day, and wants to bring a priest to the house and make you give up this way of life?”
“Every one has a pet vice. You smoke, she preaches at me, poor woman! But she takes great care of the children, she takes them out, she is absolutely devoted, and idolizes me. Would you hinder her from crying?”
“What will be thought of me?”
“But we do not live for the world!” cried she, raising Etienne and making him sit by her. “Besides, we shall be married some day – we have the risks of a sea voyage – ”
“I never thought of that,” said Lousteau simply; and he added to himself, “Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back again.”
From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.
“Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from Dinah! But no one ever can!” said he. “She loves me enough to throw herself out of the window if I told her.”
The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against Dinah’s jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her – “You are betrayed,” and she only replied, “I know it.”
The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.
Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a word.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
“I would lose my soul for you!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet.
The hapless man’s eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf, his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he was so blessed as to be accepted as his idol’s avenger, and this poor joy filled him with rapture.
“Why are you so startled?” said she, making him sit down again. “That is how I love him.”
The lawyer understood this argument ad hominem. And there were tears in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!
Lousteau’s satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations, had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where those who love dwell and dream. These grains of sand, which grow to be pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big as rocks. Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood Lousteau’s character.
“He is,” she said to her mother, “a poet, defenceless against disaster, mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate. What would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he has no prospects. His talent would perish in privations.”
“Oh, my Dinah!” Madame Piedefer had exclaimed, “what a hell you live in! What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?”
“I will be a mother to him!” she had replied.
There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor. We accept compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to play prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had been torturing Dinah.
“To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to preserve her power,” said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was becoming a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a pleasure.
The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made it no easier to play. When he wanted to go out after dinner he would perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he had bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate would say, “Did I wound you?”
These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere plaything in the man’s hands, and at last she confessed to herself:
“Well, then, I will be his plaything!” finding joy in it – the rapture of damnation.
When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living in solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated and inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the joys, which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the midst of remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a No persuaded to be Yes. At every moment she seemed to come across the pool of bitter water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish than the traveler would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince’s table.
When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:
“Will he come home, or will he not?” she was not alive again till she heard the familiar sound of Lousteau’s boots, and his well-known ring at the bell.
She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that agitated heart. How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of Le Dernier Jour d’un condamne, saying to herself, “To-morrow we part.” And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently artless feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!
It was terrible. More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed. In fact, she had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a loving woman bears in her heart.
The romance of Adolphe was her Bible, her study, for above all else she would not be an Ellenore. She allowed herself no tears, she avoided all the bitterness so cleverly described by the critic to whom we owe an analysis of this striking work; whose comments indeed seemed to Dinah almost superior to the book. And she read again and again this fine essay by the only real critic who has written in the Revue des Deux Mondes, an article now printed at the beginning of the new edition of Adolphe.
“No,” she would say to herself, as she repeated the author’s fateful words, “no, I will not ‘give my requests the form of an order,’ I will not ‘fly to tears as a means of revenge,’ I will not ‘condemn the things I once approved without reservation,’ I will not ‘dog his footsteps with a prying eye’; if he plays truant, he shall not on his return ‘see a scornful lip, whose kiss is an unanswerable command.’ No, ‘my silence shall not be a reproach nor my first word a quarrel.’ – I will not be like every other woman!” she went on, laying on her table the little yellow paper volume which had already attracted Lousteau’s remark, “What! are you studying Adolphe?” – “If for one day only he should recognize my merits and say, ‘That victim never uttered a cry!’ – it will be all I ask. And besides, the others only have him for an hour; I have him for life!”
Thinking himself justified by his private tribunal in punishing his wife, Monsieur de la Baudraye robbed her to achieve his cherished enterprise of reclaiming three thousand acres of moorland, to which he had devoted himself ever since 1836, living like a mouse. He manipulated the property left by Monsieur Silas Piedefer so ingeniously, that he contrived to reduce the proved value to eight hundred thousand francs, while pocketing twelve hundred thousand. He did not announce his return; but while his wife was enduring unspeakable woes, he was building farms, digging trenches, and ploughing rough ground with a courage that ranked him among the most remarkable agriculturists of the province.
The four hundred thousand francs he had filched from his wife were spent in three years on this undertaking, and the estate of Anzy was expected to return seventy-two thousand francs a year of net profits after the taxes were paid. The eight hundred thousand he invested at four and a half per cent in the funds, buying at eighty francs, at the time of the financial crisis brought about by the Ministry of the First of March, as it was called. By thus securing to his wife an income of forty-eight thousand francs he considered himself no longer in her debt. Could he not restore the odd twelve hundred thousand as soon as the four and a half per cents had risen above a hundred? He was now the greatest man in Sancerre, with the exception of one – the richest proprietor in France – whose rival he considered himself. He saw himself with an income of a hundred and forty thousand francs, of which ninety thousand formed the revenue from the lands he had entailed. Having calculated that besides this net income he paid ten thousand francs in taxes, three thousand in working expenses, ten thousand to his wife, and twelve hundred to his mother-in-law, he would say in the literary circles of Sancerre:
“I am reputed miserly, and said to spend nothing; but my outlay amounts to twenty-six thousand five hundred francs a year. And I have still to pay for the education of my two children! I daresay it is not a pleasing fact to the Milauds of Nevers, but the second house of La Baudraye may yet have as noble a center as the first. – I shall most likely go to Paris and petition the King of the French to grant me the title of Count – Monsieur Roy is a Count – and my wife would be pleased to be Madame la Comtesse.”
And this was said with such splendid coolness that no one would have dared to laugh at the little man. Only Monsieur Boirouge, the Presiding Judge, remarked:
“In your place, I should not be happy unless I had a daughter.”
“Well, I shall go to Paris before long – ” said the Baron.
In the early part of 1842 Madame de la Baudraye, feeling that she was to Lousteau no more than a reserve in the background, had again sacrificed herself absolutely to secure his comfort; she had resumed her black raiment, but now it was in sign of mourning, for her pleasure was turning to remorse. She was too often put to shame not to feel the weight of the chain, and her mother found her sunk in those moods of meditation into which visions of the future cast unhappy souls in a sort of torpor.
Madame Piedefer, by the advice of her spiritual director, was on the watch for the moment of exhaustion, which the priest told her would inevitably supervene, and then she pleaded in behalf of the children. She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically – in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common sense, the law of social proprieties, family interest – all the mixed elements which, since the Restoration, have been dignified by the mane of Public Morals, out of sheer aversion to the name of the Catholic religion – where this is seconded by a sense of insults a little too offensive; when the fatigue of constant self-sacrifice has almost reached the point of exhaustion; and when, under these circumstances, a too cruel blow – one of those mean acts which a man never lets a woman know of unless he believes himself to be her assured master – puts the crowning touch to her revulsion and disenchantment, the moment has come for the intervention of the friend who undertakes the cure. Madame Piedefer had no great difficulty now in removing the film from her daughter’s eyes.
She sent for Monsieur de Clagny, who completed the work by assuring Madame de la Baudraye that if she would give up Etienne, her husband would allow her to keep the children and to live in Paris, and would restore her to the command of her own fortune.
“And what a life you are leading!” said he. “With care and judgment, and the support of some pious and charitable persons, you may have a salon and conquer a position. Paris is not Sancerre.”
Dinah left it to Monsieur de Clagny to negotiate a reconciliation with the old man.
Monsieur de la Baudraye had sold his wine well, he had sold his wool, he had felled his timber, and, without telling his wife, he had come to Paris to invest two hundred thousand francs in the purchase of a delightful residence in the Rue de l’Arcade, that was being sold in liquidation of an aristocratic House that was in difficulties. He had been a member of the Council for the Department since 1826, and now, paying ten thousand francs in taxes, he was doubly qualified for a peerage under the conditions of the new legislation.
Some time before the elections of 1842 he had put himself forward as candidate unless he were meanwhile called to the Upper House as Peer of France. At the same time, he asked for the title of Count, and for promotion to the higher grade of the Legion of Honor. In the matter of the elections, the dynastic nominations; now, in the event of Monsieur de la Baudraye being won over to the Government, Sancerre would be more than ever a rotten borough of royalism. Monsieur de Clagny, whose talents and modesty were more and more highly appreciated by the authorities, gave Monsieur de la Baudraye his support; he pointed out that by raising this enterprising agriculturist to the peerage, a guarantee would be offered to such important undertakings.
Monsieur de la Baudraye, then, a Count, a Peer of France, and Commander of the Legion of Honor, was vain enough to wish to cut a figure with a wife and handsomely appointed house. – “He wanted to enjoy life,” he said.
He therefore addressed a letter to his wife, dictated by Monsieur de Clagny, begging her to live under his roof and to furnish the house, giving play to the taste of which the evidences, he said, had charmed him at the Chateau d’Anzy. The newly made Count pointed out to his wife that while the interests of their property forbade his leaving Sancerre, the education of their boys required her presence in Paris. The accommodating husband desired Monsieur de Clagny to place sixty thousand francs at the disposal of Madame la Comtesse for the interior decoration of their mansion, requesting that she would have a marble tablet inserted over the gateway with the inscription: Hotel de la Baudraye.
He then accounted to his wife for the money derived from the estate of Silas Piedefer, told her of the investment at four and a half per cent of the eight hundred thousand francs he had brought from New York, and allowed her that income for her expenses, including the education of the children. As he would be compelled to stay in Paris during some part of the session of the House of Peers, he requested his wife to reserve for him a little suite of rooms in an entresol over the kitchens.
“Bless me! why, he is growing young again – a gentleman! – a magnifico! – What will he become next? It is quite alarming,” said Madame de la Baudraye.
“He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty,” replied the lawyer.
The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had turned her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the Chamarolles’ school.
“I am a countess,” said Dinah to herself. “I shall have the peer’s blue hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary world in my drawing-room – and I will look at her!” – And it was this little triumph that told with all its weight at the moment of her rehabilitation, as the world’s contempt had of old weighed on her happiness.
One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:
“I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the pleasure of your company at the Rocher de Cancale.”
She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy manners assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave of his least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months past.
“Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night,” said he —une premiere, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.
“Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye,” said Dinah gravely. “I do not mean to understand such a word as figged out.”
“Didine a rebel!” said he, putting his arm round her waist.
“There is no such person as Didine; you have killed her, my dear,” she replied, releasing herself. “I am taking you to the first performance of Madame la Comtesse de la Baudraye.”
“It is true, then, that our insect is a peer of France?”
“The nomination is to be gazetted in this evening’s Moniteur, as I am told by Monsieur de Clagny, who is promoted to the Court of Appeal.”
“Well, it is quite right,” said the journalist. “The entomology of society ought to be represented in the Upper House.”
“My friend, we are parting for ever,” said Madame de la Baudraye, trying to control the trembling of her voice. “I have dismissed the two servants. When you go in, you will find the house in order, and no debts. I shall always feel a mother’s affection for you, but in secret. Let us part calmly, without a fuss, like decent people.
“Have you had a fault to find with my conduct during the past six years?”
“None, but that you have spoiled my life, and wrecked my prospects,” said he in a hard tone. “You have read Benjamin Constant’s book very diligently; you have even studied the last critique on it; but you have read with a woman’s eyes. Though you have one of those superior intellects which would make a fortune of a poet, you have never dared to take the man’s point of view.
“That book, my dear, is of both sexes. – We agreed that books were male or female, dark or fair. In Adolphe women see nothing but Ellenore; young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and Adolphe; political men see the whole of social existence. You did not think it necessary to read the soul of Adolphe – any more than your critic indeed, who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my dear, is that he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never can be what he might have been – an ambassador, a minister, a chamberlain, a poet – and rich. He gives up six years of his energy at that stage of his life when a man is ready to submit to the hardships of any apprenticeship – to a petticoat, which he outstrips in the career of ingratitude, for the woman who has thrown over her first lover is certain sooner or later to desert the second. Adolphe is, in fact, a tow-haired German, who has not spirit enough to be false to Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare their Ellenores all ignominious quarreling and reproaches, who say to themselves, ‘I will not talk of what I have sacrificed; I will not for ever be showing the stump of my wrist to let that incarnate selfishness I have made my queen,’ as Ramorny does in The Fair Maid of Perth. But men like that, my dear, get cast aside.
“Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright, his blighted position. – You, at this moment, are playing both parts. You are suffering from the pangs of having lost your position, and think yourself justified in throwing over a hapless lover whose misfortune it has been that he fancied you so far superior as to understand that, though a man’s heart ought to be true, his sex may be allowed to indulge its caprices.”
“And do you suppose that I shall not make it my business to restore to you all you have lost by me? Be quite easy,” said Madame de la Baudraye, astounded by this attack. “Your Ellenore is not dying; and if God gives her life, if you amend your ways, if you give up courtesans and actresses, we will find you a better match than a Felicie Cardot.”
The two lovers were sullen. Lousteau affected dejection, he aimed at appearing hard and cold; while Dinah, really distressed, listened to the reproaches of her heart.
“Why,” said Lousteau presently, “why not end as we ought to have begun – hide our love from all eyes, and see each other in secret?”
“Never!” cried the new-made Countess, with an icy look. “Do you not comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures? Our feelings seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on earth they are limited by the strength of our physical being. There are some feeble, mean natures which may receive an endless number of wounds and live on; but there are some more highly-tempered souls which snap at last under repeated blows. You have – ”
“Oh! enough!” cried he. “No more copy! Your dissertation is unnecessary, since you can justify yourself by merely saying – ‘I have ceased to love!’”
“What!” she exclaimed in bewilderment. “Is it I who have ceased to love?”
“Certainly. You have calculated that I gave you more trouble, more vexation than pleasure, and you desert your partner – ”
“I desert! – ” cried she, clasping her hands.
“Have not you yourself just said ‘Never’?”
“Well, then, yes! Never,” she repeated vehemently.
This final Never, spoken in the fear of falling once more under Lousteau’s influence, was interpreted by him as the death-warrant of his power, since Dinah remained insensible to his sarcastic scorn.
The journalist could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere, the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could hope for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of tormenting a cockchafer he has killed it, Lousteau shed a tear.
Madame de la Baudraye rushed out of the private room where they had been dining, paid the bill, and fled home to the Rue de l’Arcade, scolding herself and thinking herself a brute.
Dinah, who had made her house a model of comfort, now metamorphosed herself. This double metamorphosis cost thirty thousand francs more than her husband had anticipated.