The Marriage Contract

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

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

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

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

“Undoubtedly,” she replied.

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

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

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

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

“What are yours?” said Solonet.

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

“Our rights,” replied Solonet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madame Evangelista replied with a shake of her head: —

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

“I fear to say too much.”

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

“And why?”

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

“It soon will be,” said Paul.

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

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

“How so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I am certain they are tricking us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, brother notary,” said Solonet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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