Kitabı oku: «Cousin Betty», sayfa 26

“That is, no doubt, quite the correct thing,” said the lawyer; “very generous so far as the affections are concerned and the vagaries of passion; but I know of no name, nor law, nor title that can shelter the theft of three hundred thousand francs so meanly wrung from my father! – I tell you plainly, my dear father-in-law, your future wife is unworthy of you, she is false to you, and is madly in love with my brother-in-law, Steinbock, whose debts she had paid.”

“It is I who paid them!”

“Very good,” said Hulot; “I am glad for Count Steinbock’s sake; he may some day repay the money. But he is loved, much loved, and often – ”

“Loved!” cried Crevel, whose face showed his utter bewilderment. “It is cowardly, and dirty, and mean, and cheap, to calumniate a woman! – When a man says such things, monsieur, he must bring proof.”

“I will bring proof.”

“I shall expect it.”

“By the day after to-morrow, my dear Monsieur Crevel, I shall be able to tell you the day, the hour, the very minute when I can expose the horrible depravity of your future wife.”

“Very well; I shall be delighted,” said Crevel, who had recovered himself.

“Good-bye, my children, for the present; good-bye, Lisbeth.”

“See him out, Lisbeth,” said Celestine in an undertone.

“And is this the way you take yourself off?” cried Lisbeth to Crevel.

“Ah, ha!” said Crevel, “my son-in-law is too clever by half; he is getting on. The Courts and the Chamber, judicial trickery and political dodges, are making a man of him with a vengeance! – So he knows I am to be married on Wednesday, and on a Sunday my gentleman proposes to fix the hour, within three days, when he can prove that my wife is unworthy of me. That is a good story! – Well, I am going back to sign the contract. Come with me, Lisbeth – yes, come. They will never know. I meant to have left Celestine forty thousand francs a year; but Hulot has just behaved in a way to alienate my affection for ever.”

“Give me ten minutes, Pere Crevel; wait for me in your carriage at the gate. I will make some excuse for going out.”

“Very well – all right.”

“My dears,” said Lisbeth, who found all the family reassembled in the drawing-room, “I am going with Crevel: the marriage contract is to be signed this afternoon, and I shall hear what he has settled. It will probably be my last visit to that woman. Your father is furious; he will disinherit you – ”

“His vanity will prevent that,” said the son-in-law. “He was bent on owning the estate of Presles, and he will keep it; I know him. Even if he were to have children, Celestine would still have half of what he might leave; the law forbids his giving away all his fortune. – Still, these questions are nothing to me; I am only thinking of our honor. – Go then, cousin,” and he pressed Lisbeth’s hand, “and listen carefully to the contract.”

Twenty minutes after, Lisbeth and Crevel reached the house in the Rue Barbet, where Madame Marneffe was awaiting, in mild impatience, the result of a step taken by her commands. Valerie had in the end fallen a prey to the absorbing love which, once in her life, masters a woman’s heart. Wenceslas was its object, and, a failure as an artist, he became in Madame Marneffe’s hands a lover so perfect that he was to her what she had been to Baron Hulot.

Valerie was holding a slipper in one hand, and Steinbock clasped the other, while her head rested on his shoulder. The rambling conversation in which they had been engaged ever since Crevel went out may be ticketed, like certain lengthy literary efforts of our day, “All rights reserved,” for it cannot be reproduced. This masterpiece of personal poetry naturally brought a regret to the artist’s lips, and he said, not without some bitterness:

“What a pity it is that I married; for if I had but waited, as Lisbeth told me, I might now have married you.”

“Who but a Pole would wish to make a wife of a devoted mistress?” cried Valerie. “To change love into duty, and pleasure into a bore.”

“I know you to be so fickle,” replied Steinbock. “Did I not hear you talking to Lisbeth of that Brazilian, Baron Montes?”

“Do you want to rid me of him?”

“It would be the only way to hinder his seeing you,” said the ex-sculptor.

“Let me tell you, my darling – for I tell you everything,” said Valerie – “I was saving him up for a husband. – The promises I have made to that man! – Oh, long before I knew you,” said she, in reply to a movement from Wenceslas. “And those promises, of which he avails himself to plague me, oblige me to get married almost secretly; for if he should hear that I am marrying Crevel, he is the sort of man that – that would kill me.”

“Oh, as to that!” said Steinbock, with a scornful expression, which conveyed that such a danger was small indeed for a woman beloved by a Pole.

And in the matter of valor there is no brag or bravado in a Pole, so thoroughly and seriously brave are they all.

“And that idiot Crevel,” she went on, “who wants to make a great display and indulge his taste for inexpensive magnificence in honor of the wedding, places me in difficulties from which I see no escape.”

Could Valerie confess to this man, whom she adored, that since the discomfiture of Baron Hulot, this Baron Henri Montes had inherited the privilege of calling on her at all hours of the day or night; and that, notwithstanding her cleverness, she was still puzzled to find a cause of quarrel in which the Brazilian might seem to be solely in the wrong? She knew the Baron’s almost savage temper – not unlike Lisbeth’s – too well not to quake as she thought of this Othello of Rio de Janeiro.

As the carriage drove up, Steinbock released Valerie, for his arm was round her waist, and took up a newspaper, in which he was found absorbed. Valerie was stitching with elaborate care at the slippers she was working for Crevel.

“How they slander her!” whispered Lisbeth to Crevel, pointing to this picture as they opened the door. “Look at her hair – not in the least tumbled. To hear Victorin, you might have expected to find two turtle-doves in a nest.”

“My dear Lisbeth,” cried Crevel, in his favorite position, “you see that to turn Lucretia into Aspasia, you have only to inspire a passion!”

“And have I not always told you,” said Lisbeth, “that women like a burly profligate like you?”

“And she would be most ungrateful, too,” said Crevel; “for as to the money I have spent here, Grindot and I alone can tell!”

And he waved a hand at the staircase.

In decorating this house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc d’Herouville had placed Josepha’s villa. But Crevel, incapable of understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had found it impossible to embody his architectural dream.

The difference between Josepha’s house and that in the Rue Barbet was just that between the individual stamp on things and commonness. The objects you admired at Crevel’s were to be bought in any shop. These two types of luxury are divided by the river Million. A mirror, if unique, is worth six thousand francs; a mirror designed by a manufacturer who turns them out by the dozen costs five hundred. A genuine lustre by Boulle will sell at a public auction for three thousand francs; the same thing reproduced by casting may be made for a thousand or twelve hundred; one is archaeologically what a picture by Raphael is in painting, the other is a copy. At what would you value a copy of a Raphael? Thus Crevel’s mansion was a splendid example of the luxury of idiots, while Josepha’s was a perfect model of an artist’s home.

“War is declared,” said Crevel, going up to Madame Marneffe.

She rang the bell.

“Go and find Monsieur Berthier,” said she to the man-servant, “and do not return without him. If you had succeeded,” said she, embracing Crevel, “we would have postponed our happiness, my dear Daddy, and have given a really splendid entertainment; but when a whole family is set against a match, my dear, decency requires that the wedding shall be a quiet one, especially when the lady is a widow.”

“On the contrary, I intend to make a display of magnificence a la Louis XIV.,” said Crevel, who of late had held the eighteenth century rather cheap. “I have ordered new carriages; there is one for monsieur and one for madame, two neat coupes; and a chaise, a handsome traveling carriage with a splendid hammercloth, on springs that tremble like Madame Hulot.”

“Oh, ho! You intend?– Then you have ceased to be my lamb? – No, no, my friend, you will do what I intend. We will sign the contract quietly – just ourselves – this afternoon. Then, on Wednesday, we will be regularly married, really married, in mufti, as my poor mother would have said. We will walk to church, plainly dressed, and have only a low mass. Our witnesses are Stidmann, Steinbock, Vignon, and Massol, all wide-awake men, who will be at the mairie by chance, and who will so far sacrifice themselves as to attend mass.

“Your colleague will perform the civil marriage, for once in a way, as early as half-past nine. Mass is at ten; we shall be at home to breakfast by half-past eleven.

“I have promised our guests that we will sit at table till the evening. There will be Bixiou, your old official chum du Tillet, Lousteau, Vernisset, Leon de Lora, Vernou, all the wittiest men in Paris, who will not know that we are married. We will play them a little trick, we will get just a little tipsy, and Lisbeth must join us. I want her to study matrimony; Bixiou shall make love to her, and – and enlighten her darkness.”

For two hours Madame Marneffe went on talking nonsense, and Crevel made this judicious reflection:

“How can so light-hearted a creature be utterly depraved? Feather-brained, yes! but wicked? Nonsense!”

“Well, and what did the young people say about me?” said Valerie to Crevel at a moment when he sat down by her on the sofa. “All sorts of horrors?”

“They will have it that you have a criminal passion for Wenceslas – you, who are virtue itself.”

“I love him! – I should think so, my little Wenceslas!” cried Valerie, calling the artist to her, taking his face in her hands, and kissing his forehead. “A poor boy with no fortune, and no one to depend on! Cast off by a carrotty giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas is my poet, and I love him as if he were my own child, and make no secret of it. Bah! your virtuous women see evil everywhere and in everything. Bless me, could they not sit by a man without doing wrong? I am a spoilt child who has had all it ever wanted, and bonbons no longer excite me. – Poor things! I am sorry for them!

“And who slandered me so?”

“Victorin,” said Crevel.

“Then why did you not stop his mouth, the odious legal macaw! with the story of the two hundred thousand francs and his mamma?”

“Oh, the Baroness had fled,” said Lisbeth.

“They had better take care, Lisbeth,” said Madame Marneffe, with a frown. “Either they will receive me and do it handsomely, and come to their stepmother’s house – all the party! – or I will see them in lower depths than the Baron has reached, and you may tell them I said so! – At last I shall turn nasty. On my honor, I believe that evil is the scythe with which to cut down the good.”

At three o’clock Monsieur Berthier, Cardot’s successor, read the marriage-contract, after a short conference with Crevel, for some of the articles were made conditional on the action taken by Monsieur and Madame Victorin Hulot.

Crevel settled on his wife a fortune consisting, in the first place, of forty thousand francs in dividends on specified securities; secondly, of the house and all its contents; and thirdly, of three million francs not invested. He also assigned to his wife every benefit allowed by law; he left all the property free of duty; and in the event of their dying without issue, each devised to the survivor the whole of their property and real estate.

By this arrangement the fortune left to Celestine and her husband was reduced to two millions of francs in capital. If Crevel and his second wife should have children, Celestine’s share was limited to five hundred thousand francs, as the life-interest in the rest was to accrue to Valerie. This would be about the ninth part of his whole real and personal estate.

Lisbeth returned to dine in the Rue Louis-le-Grand, despair written on her face. She explained and bewailed the terms of the marriage-contract, but found Celestine and her husband insensible to the disastrous news.

“You have provoked your father, my children. Madame Marneffe swears that you shall receive Monsieur Crevel’s wife and go to her house,” said she.

“Never!” said Victorin.

“Never!” said Celestine.

“Never!” said Hortense.

Lisbeth was possessed by the wish to crush the haughty attitude assumed by all the Hulots.

“She seems to have arms that she can turn against you,” she replied. “I do not know all about it, but I shall find out. She spoke vaguely of some history of two hundred thousand francs in which Adeline is implicated.”

The Baroness fell gently backward on the sofa she was sitting on in a fit of hysterical sobbing.

“Go there, go, my children!” she cried. “Receive the woman! Monsieur Crevel is an infamous wretch. He deserves the worst punishment imaginable. – Do as the woman desires you! She is a monster – she knows all!”

After gasping out these words with tears and sobs, Madame Hulot collected her strength to go to her room, leaning on her daughter and Celestine.

“What is the meaning of all this?” cried Lisbeth, left alone with Victorin.

The lawyer stood rigid, in very natural dismay, and did not hear her.

“What is the matter, my dear Victorin?”

“I am horrified!” said he, and his face scowled darkly. “Woe to anybody who hurts my mother! I have no scruples then. I would crush that woman like a viper if I could! – What, does she attack my mother’s life, my mother’s honor?”

“She said, but do not repeat it, my dear Victorin – she said you should all fall lower even than your father. And she scolded Crevel roundly for not having shut your mouths with this secret that seems to be such a terror to Adeline.”

A doctor was sent for, for the Baroness was evidently worse. He gave her a draught containing a large dose of opium, and Adeline, having swallowed it, fell into a deep sleep; but the whole family were greatly alarmed.

Early next morning Victorin went out, and on his way to the Courts called at the Prefecture of the Police, where he begged Vautrin, the head of the detective department, to send him Madame de Saint-Esteve.

“We are forbidden, monsieur, to meddle in your affairs; but Madame de Saint-Esteve is in business, and will attend to your orders,” replied this famous police officer.

On his return home, the unhappy lawyer was told that his mother’s reason was in danger. Doctor Bianchon, Doctor Larabit, and Professor Angard had met in consultation, and were prepared to apply heroic remedies to hinder the rush of blood to the head. At the moment when Victorin was listening to Doctor Bianchon, who was giving him, at some length, his reasons for hoping that the crisis might be got over, the man-servant announced that a client, Madame de Saint-Esteve, was waiting to see him. Victorin left Bianchon in the middle of a sentence and flew downstairs like a madman.

“Is there any hereditary lunacy in the family?” said Bianchon, addressing Larabit.

The doctors departed, leaving a hospital attendant, instructed by them, to watch Madame Hulot.

“A whole life of virtue! – ” was the only sentence the sufferer had spoken since the attack.

Lisbeth never left Adeline’s bedside; she sat up all night, and was much admired by the two younger women.

“Well, my dear Madame de Saint-Esteve,” said Victorin, showing the dreadful old woman into his study and carefully shutting the doors, “how are we getting on?”

“Ah, ha! my dear friend,” said she, looking at Victorin with cold irony. “So you have thought things over?”

“Have you done anything?”

“Will you pay fifty thousand francs?”

“Yes,” replied Victorin, “for we must get on. Do you know that by one single phrase that woman has endangered my mother’s life and reason? So, I say, get on.”

“We have got on!” replied the old woman.

“Well?” cried Victorin, with a gulp.

“Well, you do not cry off the expenses?”

“On the contrary.”

“They run up to twenty-three thousand francs already.”

Victorin looked helplessly at the woman.

“Well, could we hoodwink you, you, one of the shining lights of the law?” said she. “For that sum we have secured a maid’s conscience and a picture by Raphael. – It is not dear.”

Hulot, still bewildered, sat with wide open eyes.

“Well, then,” his visitor went on, “we have purchased the honesty of Mademoiselle Reine Tousard, a damsel from whom Madame Marneffe has no secrets – ”

“I understand!”

“But if you shy, say so.”

“I will play blindfold,” he replied. “My mother has told me that that couple deserve the worst torments – ”

“The rack is out of date,” said the old woman.

“You answer for the result?”

“Leave it all to me,” said the woman; “your vengeance is simmering.”

She looked at the clock; it was six.

“Your avenger is dressing; the fires are lighted at the Rocher de Cancale; the horses are pawing the ground; my irons are getting hot. – Oh, I know your Madame Marneffe by heart! – Everything is ready. And there are some boluses in the rat-trap; I will tell you to-morrow morning if the mouse is poisoned. I believe she will be; good evening, my son.”

“Good-bye, madame.”

“Do you know English?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my son, thou shalt be King. That is to say, you shall come into your inheritance,” said the dreadful old witch, foreseen by Shakespeare, and who seemed to know her Shakespeare.

She left Hulot amazed at the door of his study.

“The consultation is for to-morrow!” said she, with the gracious air of a regular client.

She saw two persons coming, and wished to pass in their eyes a pinchbeck countess.

“What impudence!” thought Hulot, bowing to his pretended client.

Baron Montes de Montejanos was a lion, but a lion not accounted for. Fashionable Paris, Paris of the turf and of the town, admired the ineffable waistcoats of this foreign gentleman, his spotless patent-leather boots, his incomparable sticks, his much-coveted horses, and the negro servants who rode the horses and who were entirely slaves and most consumedly thrashed.

His fortune was well known; he had a credit account up to seven hundred thousand francs in the great banking house of du Tillet; but he was always seen alone. When he went to “first nights,” he was in a stall. He frequented no drawing-rooms. He had never given his arm to a girl on the streets. His name would not be coupled with that of any pretty woman of the world. To pass his time he played whist at the Jockey-Club. The world was reduced to calumny, or, which it thought funnier, to laughing at his peculiarities; he went by the name of Combabus.

Bixiou, Leon de Lora, Lousteau, Florine, Mademoiselle Heloise Brisetout, and Nathan, supping one evening with the notorious Carabine, with a large party of lions and lionesses, had invented this name with an excessively burlesque explanation. Massol, as being on the Council of State, and Claude Vignon, erewhile Professor of Greek, had related to the ignorant damsels the famous anecdote, preserved in Rollin’s Ancient History, concerning Combabus, that voluntary Abelard who was placed in charge of the wife of a King of Assyria, Persia, Bactria, Mesopotamia, and other geographical divisions peculiar to old Professor du Bocage, who continued the work of d’Anville, the creator of the East of antiquity. This nickname, which gave Carabine’s guests laughter for a quarter of an hour, gave rise to a series of over-free jests, to which the Academy could not award the Montyon prize; but among which the name was taken up, to rest thenceforth on the curly mane of the handsome Baron, called by Josepha the splendid Brazilian – as one might say a splendid Catoxantha.

Carabine, the loveliest of her tribe, whose delicate beauty and amusing wit had snatched the sceptre of the Thirteenth Arrondissement from the hands of Mademoiselle Turquet, better known by the name of Malaga – Mademoiselle Seraphine Sinet (this was her real name) was to du Tillet the banker what Josepha Mirah was to the Duc d’Herouville.

Now, on the morning of the very day when Madame de Saint-Esteve had prophesied success to Victorin, Carabine had said to du Tillet at about seven o’clock:

“If you want to be very nice, you will give me a dinner at the Rocher de Cancale and bring Combabus. We want to know, once for all, whether he has a mistress. – I bet that he has, and I should like to win.”

“He is still at the Hotel des Princes; I will call,” replied du Tillet. “We will have some fun. Ask all the youngsters – the youngster Bixiou, the youngster Lora, in short, all the clan.”

At half-past seven that evening, in the handsomest room of the restaurant where all Europe has dined, a splendid silver service was spread, made on purpose for entertainments where vanity pays the bill in bank-notes. A flood of light fell in ripples on the chased rims; waiters, whom a provincial might have taken for diplomatists but for their age, stood solemnly, as knowing themselves to be overpaid.

Five guests had arrived, and were waiting for nine more. These were first and foremost Bixiou, still flourishing in 1843, the salt of every intellectual dish, always supplied with fresh wit – a phenomenon as rare in Paris as virtue is; Leon de Lora, the greatest living painter of landscape and the sea who has this great advantage over all his rivals, that he has never fallen below his first successes. The courtesans could never dispense with these two kings of ready wit. No supper, no dinner, was possible without them.

Seraphine Sinet, dite Carabine, as the mistress en titre of the Amphitryon, was one of the first to arrive; and the brilliant lighting showed off her shoulders, unrivaled in Paris, her throat, as round as if turned in a lathe, without a crease, her saucy face, and dress of satin brocade in two shades of blue, trimmed with Honiton lace enough to have fed a whole village for a month.

Pretty Jenny Cadine, not acting that evening, came in a dress of incredible splendor; her portrait is too well known to need any description. A party is always a Longchamps of evening dress for these ladies, each anxious to win the prize for her millionaire by thus announcing to her rivals:

“This is the price I am worth!”

A third woman, evidently at the initial stage of her career, gazed, almost shamefaced, at the luxury of her two established and wealthy companions. Simply dressed in white cashmere trimmed with blue, her head had been dressed with real flowers by a coiffeur of the old-fashioned school, whose awkward hands had unconsciously given the charm of ineptitude to her fair hair. Still unaccustomed to any finery, she showed the timidity – to use a hackneyed phrase – inseparable from a first appearance. She had come from Valognes to find in Paris some use for her distracting youthfulness, her innocence that might have stirred the senses of a dying man, and her beauty, worthy to hold its own with any that Normandy has ever supplied to the theatres of the capital. The lines of that unblemished face were the ideal of angelic purity. Her milk-white skin reflected the light like a mirror. The delicate pink in her cheeks might have been laid on with a brush. She was called Cydalise, and, as will be seen, she was an important pawn in the game played by Ma’ame Nourrisson to defeat Madame Marneffe.

“Your arm is not a match for your name, my child,” said Jenny Cadine, to whom Carabine had introduced this masterpiece of sixteen, having brought her with her.

And, in fact, Cydalise displayed to public admiration a fine pair of arms, smooth and satiny, but red with healthy young blood.

“What do you want for her?” said Jenny Cadine, in an undertone to Carabine.

“A fortune.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“Well – Madame Combabus!”

“And what are you to get for such a job?”

“Guess.”

“A service of plate?”

“I have three.”

“Diamonds?”

“I am selling them.”

“A green monkey?”

“No. A picture by Raphael.”

“What maggot is that in your brain?”

“Josepha makes me sick with her pictures,” said Carabine. “I want some better than hers.”

Du Tillet came with the Brazilian, the hero of the feast; the Duc d’Herouville followed with Josepha. The singer wore a plain velvet gown, but she had on a necklace worth a hundred and twenty thousand francs, pearls hardly distinguishable from her skin like white camellia petals. She had stuck one scarlet camellia in her black hair – a patch – the effect was dazzling, and she had amused herself by putting eleven rows of pearls on each arm. As she shook hands with Jenny Cadine, the actress said, “Lend me your mittens!”

Josepha unclasped them one by one and handed them to her friend on a plate.

“There’s style!” said Carabine. “Quite the Duchess! You have robbed the ocean to dress the nymph, Monsieur le Duc,” she added turning to the little Duc d’Herouville.

The actress took two of the bracelets; she clasped the other twenty on the singer’s beautiful arms, which she kissed.

Lousteau, the literary cadger, la Palferine and Malaga, Massol, Vauvinet, and Theodore Gaillard, a proprietor of one of the most important political newspapers, completed the party. The Duc d’Herouville, polite to everybody, as a fine gentleman knows how to be, greeted the Comte de la Palferine with the particular nod which, while it does not imply either esteem or intimacy, conveys to all the world, “We are of the same race, the same blood – equals!” – And this greeting, the shibboleth of the aristocracy, was invented to be the despair of the upper citizen class.

Carabine placed Combabus on her left, and the Duc d’Herouville on her right. Cydalise was next to the Brazilian, and beyond her was Bixiou. Malaga sat by the Duke.

Oysters appeared at seven o’clock; at eight they were drinking iced punch. Every one is familiar with the bill of fare of such a banquet. By nine o’clock they were talking as people talk after forty-two bottles of various wines, drunk by fourteen persons. Dessert was on the table, the odious dessert of the month of April. Of all the party, the only one affected by the heady atmosphere was Cydalise, who was humming a tune. None of the party, with the exception of the poor country girl, had lost their reason; the drinkers and the women were the experienced elite of the society that sups. Their wits were bright, their eyes glistened, but with no loss of intelligence, though the talk drifted into satire, anecdote, and gossip. Conversation, hitherto confined to the inevitable circle of racing, horses, hammerings on the Bourse, the different occupations of the lions themselves, and the scandals of the town, showed a tendency to break up into intimate tete-a-tete, the dialogues of two hearts.

And at this stage, at a signal from Carabine to Leon de Lora, Bixiou, la Palferine, and du Tillet, love came under discussion.

“A doctor in good society never talks of medicine, true nobles never speak of their ancestors, men of genius do not discuss their works,” said Josepha; “why should we talk business? If I got the opera put off in order to dine here, it was assuredly not to work. – So let us change the subject, dear children.”

“But we are speaking of real love, my beauty,” said Malaga, “of the love that makes a man fling all to the dogs – father, mother, wife, children – and retire to Clichy.”

“Talk away, then, ‘don’t know yer,’” said the singer.

The slang words, borrowed from the Street Arab, and spoken by these women, may be a poem on their lips, helped by the expression of the eyes and face.

“What, do not I love you, Josepha?” said the Duke in a low voice.

“You, perhaps, may love me truly,” said she in his ear, and she smiled. “But I do not love you in the way they describe, with such love as makes the world dark in the absence of the man beloved. You are delightful to me, useful – but not indispensable; and if you were to throw me over to-morrow, I could have three dukes for one.”

“Is true love to be found in Paris?” asked Leon de Lora. “Men have not even time to make a fortune; how can they give themselves over to true love, which swamps a man as water melts sugar? A man must be enormously rich to indulge in it, for love annihilates him – for instance, like our Brazilian friend over there. As I said long ago, ‘Extremes defeat – themselves.’ A true lover is like an eunuch; women have ceased to exist for him. He is mystical; he is like the true Christian, an anchorite of the desert! – See our noble Brazilian.”

Every one at table looked at Henri Montes de Montejanos, who was shy at finding every eye centred on him.

“He has been feeding there for an hour without discovering, any more than an ox at pasture, that he is sitting next to – I will not say, in such company, the loveliest – but the freshest woman in all Paris.”

“Everything is fresh here, even the fish; it is what the house is famous for,” said Carabine.

Baron Montes looked good-naturedly at the painter, and said:

“Very good! I drink to your very good health,” and bowing to Leon de Lora, he lifted his glass of port wine and drank it with much dignity.

“Are you then truly in love?” asked Malaga of her neighbor, thus interpreting his toast.

The Brazilian refilled his glass, bowed to Carabine, and drank again.

“To the lady’s health then!” said the courtesan, in such a droll tone that Lora, du Tillet, and Bixiou burst out laughing.

The Brazilian sat like a bronze statue. This impassibility provoked Carabine. She knew perfectly well that Montes was devoted to Madame Marneffe, but she had not expected this dogged fidelity, this obstinate silence of conviction.

A woman is as often gauged by the attitude of her lover as a man is judged from the tone of his mistress. The Baron was proud of his attachment to Valerie, and of hers to him; his smile had, to these experienced connoisseurs, a touch of irony; he was really grand to look upon; wine had not flushed him; and his eyes, with their peculiar lustre as of tarnished gold, kept the secrets of his soul. Even Carabine said to herself: