Parisians in the Country

“You won’t understand me,” cried Lousteau, in a voice of exasperation. “Go away – she is there – ”

“I beg your pardon; why did you not tell me sooner? – You are of age, and so is she,” he added in a lower voice, but loud enough to be heard by Dinah. “She will make you repent bitterly of your happiness! – ”

“If it is a folly, I intend to commit it. – Good-bye.”

“A man gone overboard!” cried Bixiou.

“Devil take those friends who think they have a right to preach to you,” said Lousteau, opening the door of the bedroom, where he found Madame de la Baudraye sunk in an armchair and dabbing her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.

“Oh, why did I come here?” sobbed she. “Good Heavens, why indeed? – Etienne, I am not so provincial as you think me. – You are making a fool of me.”

“Darling angel,” replied Lousteau, taking Dinah in his arms, lifting her from her chair, and dragging her half dead into the drawing-room, “we have both pledged our future, it is sacrifice for sacrifice. While I was loving you at Sancerre, they were engaging me to be married here, but I refused. – Oh! I was extremely distressed – ”

“I am going,” cried Dinah, starting wildly to her feet and turning to the door.

“You will stay here, my Didine. All is at an end. And is this fortune so lightly earned after all? Must I not marry a gawky, tow-haired creature, with a red nose, the daughter of a notary, and saddle myself with a stepmother who could give Madame de Piedefer points on the score of bigotry – ”

Pamela flew in, and whispered in Lousteau’s ear:

“Madame Schontz!”

Lousteau rose, leaving Dinah on the sofa, and went out.

“It is all over with you, my dear,” said the woman. “Cardot does not mean to quarrel with his wife for the sake of a son-in-law. The lady made a scene – something like a scene, I can tell you! So, to conclude, the head-clerk, who was the late head-clerk’s deputy for two years, agrees to take the girl with the business.”

“Mean wretch!” exclaimed Lousteau. “What! in two hours he has made up his mind?”

“Bless me, that is simple enough. The rascal, who knew all the dead man’s little secrets, guessed what a fix his master was in from overhearing a few words of the squabble with Madame Cardot. The notary relies on your honor and good feeling, for the affair is settled. The clerk, whose conduct has been admirable, went so far as to attend mass! A finished hypocrite, I say – just suits the mamma. You and Cardot will still be friends. He is to be a director in an immense financial concern, and he may be of use to you. – So you have been waked from a sweet dream.”

“I have lost a fortune, a wife, and – ”

“And a mistress,” said Madame Schontz, smiling. “Here you are, more than married; you will be insufferable, you will be always wanting to get home, there will be nothing loose about you, neither your clothes nor your habits. And, after all, my Arthur does things in style. I will be faithful to him and cut Malaga’s acquaintance.

“Let me peep at her through the door – your Sancerre Muse,” she went on. “Is there no finer bird than that to be found in the desert?” she exclaimed. “You are cheated! She is dignified, lean, lachrymose; she only needs Lady Dudley’s turban!”

“What is it now?” asked Madame de la Baudraye, who had heard the rustle of a silk dress and the murmur of a woman’s voice.

“It is, my darling, that we are now indissolubly united. – I have just had an answer to the letter you saw me write, which was to break off my marriage – ”

“So that was the party which you gave up?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I will be more than your wife – I am your slave, I give you my life,” said the poor deluded creature. “I did not believe I could love you more than I did! – Now I shall not be a mere incident, but your whole life?”

“Yes, my beautiful, my generous Didine.”

“Swear to me,” said she, “that only death shall divide us.”

Lousteau was ready to sweeten his vows with the most fascinating prettinesses. And this was why. Between the door of the apartment where he had taken the lorette’s farewell kiss, and that of the drawing-room, where the Muse was reclining, bewildered by such a succession of shocks, Lousteau had remembered little De la Baudraye’s precarious health, his fine fortune, and Bianchon’s remark about Dinah, “She will be a rich widow!” and he said to himself, “I would a hundred times rather have Madame de la Baudraye for a wife than Felicie!”

His plan of action was quickly decided on; he determined to play the farce of passion once more, and to perfection. His mean self-interestedness and his false vehemence of passion had disastrous results. Madame de la Baudraye, when she set out from Sancerre for Paris, had intended to live in rooms of her own quite near to Lousteau; but the proofs of devotion her lover had given her by giving up such brilliant prospects, and yet more the perfect happiness of the first days of their illicit union, kept her from mentioning such a parting. The second day was to be – and indeed was – a high festival, in which such a suggestion proposed to “her angel” would have been a discordant note.

Lousteau, on his part, anxious to make Dinah feel herself dependent on him, kept her in a state of constant intoxication by incessant amusement. These circumstances hindered two persons so clever as these were from avoiding the slough into which they fell – that of a life in common, a piece of folly of which, unfortunately, many instances may be seen in Paris in literary circles.

And thus was the whole programme played out of a provincial amour, so satirically described by Lousteau to Madame de la Baudraye – a fact which neither he nor she remembered. Passion is born a deaf-mute.

This winter in Paris was to Madame de la Baudraye all that the month of October had been at Sancerre. Etienne, to initiate “his wife” into Paris life, varied this honeymoon by evenings at the play, where Dinah would only go to the stage box. At first Madame de la Baudraye preserved some remnants of her countrified modesty; she was afraid of being seen; she hid her happiness. She would say:

“Monsieur de Clagny or Monsieur Gravier may have followed me to Paris.” She was afraid of Sancerre even in Paris.

Lousteau, who was excessively vain, educated Dinah, took her to the best dressmakers, and pointed out to her the most fashionable women, advising her to take them as models for imitation. And Madame de la Baudraye’s provincial appearance was soon a thing of the past. Lousteau, when his friends met him, was congratulated on his conquest.

All through that season Etienne wrote little and got very much into debt, though Dinah, who was proud, bought all her clothes out of her savings, and fancied she had not been the smallest expense to her beloved. By the end of three months Dinah was acclimatized; she had reveled in the music at the Italian opera; she knew the pieces “on” at all theatres, and the actors and jests of the day; she had become inured to this life of perpetual excitement, this rapid torrent in which everything is forgotten. She no longer craned her neck or stood with her nose in the air, like an image of Amazement, at the constant surprises that Paris has for a stranger. She had learned to breathe that witty, vitalizing, teeming atmosphere where clever people feel themselves in their element, and which they can no longer bear to quit.

One morning, as she read the papers, for Lousteau had them all, two lines carried her back to Sancerre and the past, two lines that seemed not unfamiliar – as follows:

“Monsieur le Baron de Clagny, Public Prosecutor to the Criminal Court at Sancerre, has been appointed Deputy Public Prosecutor to the Supreme Court in Paris.”

“How well that worthy lawyer loves you!” said the journalist, smiling.

“Poor man!” said she. “What did I tell you? He is following me.”

Etienne and Dinah were just then at the most dazzling and fervid stage of a passion when each is perfectly accustomed to the other, and yet love has not lost its freshness and relish. The lovers know each other well, but all is not yet understood; they have not been a second time to the same secret haunts of the soul; they have not studied each other till they know, as they must later, the very thought, word, and gesture that responds to every event, the greatest and the smallest. Enchantment reigns; there are no collisions, no differences of opinion, no cold looks. Their two souls are always on the same side. And Dinah would speak the magical words, emphasized by the yet more magical expression and looks which every woman can use under such circumstances.

“When you cease to love me, kill me. – If you should cease to love me, I believe I could kill you first and myself after.”

To this sweet exaggeration, Lousteau would reply:

“All I ask of God is to see you as constant as I shall be. It is you who will desert me!”

“My love is supreme.”

“Supreme,” echoed Lousteau. “Come, now? Suppose I am dragged away to a bachelor party, and find there one of my former mistresses, and she makes fun of me; I, out of vanity, behave as if I were free, and do not come in here till next morning – would you still love me?”

“A woman is only sure of being loved when she is preferred; and if you came back to me, if – Oh! you make me understand what the happiness would be of forgiving the man I adore.”

“Well, then, I am truly loved for the first time in my life!” cried Lousteau.

“At last you understand that!” said she.

Lousteau proposed that they should each write a letter setting forth the reasons which would compel them to end by suicide. Once in possession of such a document, each might kill the other without danger in case of infidelity. But in spite of mutual promises, neither wrote the letter.

The journalist, happy for the moment, promised himself that he would deceive Dinah when he should be tired of her, and would sacrifice everything to the requirements of that deception. To him Madame de la Baudraye was a fortune in herself. At the same time, he felt the yoke.

Dinah, by consenting to this union, showed a generous mind and the power derived from self-respect. In this absolute intimacy, in which both lovers put off their masks, the young woman never abdicated her modesty, her masculine rectitude, and the strength peculiar to ambitious souls, which formed the basis of her character. Lousteau involuntarily held her in high esteem. As a Parisian, Dinah was superior to the most fascinating courtesan; she could be as amusing and as witty as Malaga; but her extensive information, her habits of mind, her vast reading enabled her to generalize her wit, while the Florines and the Schontzes exerted theirs over a very narrow circle.

“There is in Dinah,” said Etienne to Bixiou, “the stuff to make both a Ninon and a De Stael.”

“A woman who combines an encyclopaedia and a seraglio is very dangerous,” replied the mocking spirit.

When the expected infant became a visible fact, Madame de la Baudraye would be seen no more; but before shutting herself up, never to go out unless into the country, she was bent on being present at the first performance of a play by Nathan. This literary solemnity occupied the minds of the two thousand persons who regard themselves as constituting “all Paris.” Dinah, who had never been at a first night’s performance, was very full of natural curiosity. She had by this time arrived at such a pitch of affection for Lousteau that she gloried in her misconduct; she exerted a sort of savage strength to defy the world; she was determined to look it in the face without turning her head aside.

She dressed herself to perfection, in a style suited to her delicate looks and the sickly whiteness of her face. Her pallid complexion gave her an expression of refinement, and her black hair in smooth bands enhanced her pallor. Her brilliant gray eyes looked finer than ever, set in dark rings. But a terribly distressing incident awaited her. By a very simple chance, the box given to the journalist, on the first tier, was next to that which Anna Grossetete had taken. The two intimate friends did not even bow; neither chose to acknowledge the other. At the end of the first act Lousteau left his seat, abandoning Dinah to the fire of eyes, the glare of opera-glasses; while the Baronne de Fontaine and the Comtesse Marie de Vandenesse, who accompanied her, received some of the most distinguished men of fashion.

Dinah’s solitude was all the more distressing because she had not the art of putting a good face to the matter by examining the company through her opera-glass. In vain did she try to assume a dignified and thoughtful attitude, and fix her eyes on vacancy; she was overpoweringly conscious of being the object of general attention; she could not disguise her discomfort, and lapsed a little into provincialism, displaying her handkerchief and making involuntary movements of which she had almost cured herself. At last, between the second and third acts, a man had himself admitted to Dinah’s box! It was Monsieur de Clagny.

“I am happy to see you, to tell you how much I am pleased by your promotion,” said she.

“Oh! Madame, for whom should I come to Paris – ?”

“What!” said she. “Have I anything to do with your appointment?”

“Everything,” said he. “Since you left Sancerre, it had become intolerable to me; I was dying – ”

“Your sincere friendship does me good,” replied she, holding out her hand. “I am in a position to make much of my true friends; I now know their value. – I feared I must have lost your esteem, but the proof you have given me by this visit touches me more deeply than your ten years’ attachment.”

“You are an object of curiosity to the whole house,” said the lawyer. “Oh! my dear, is this a part for you to be playing? Could you not be happy and yet remain honored? – I have just heard that you are Monsieur Etienne Lousteau’s mistress, that you live together as man and wife! – You have broken for ever with society; even if you should some day marry your lover, the time will come when you will feel the want of the respectability you now despise. Ought you not to be in a home of your own with your mother, who loves you well enough to protect you with her aegis? – Appearances at least would be saved.”

“I am in the wrong to have come here,” replied she, “that is all. – I have bid farewell to all the advantages which the world confers on women who know how to reconcile happiness and the proprieties. My abnegation is so complete that I only wish I could clear a vast space about me to make a desert of my love, full of God, of him, and of myself. – We have made too many sacrifices on both sides not to be united – united by disgrace if you will, but indissolubly one. I am happy; so happy that I can love freely, my friend, and confide in you more than of old – for I need a friend.”

The lawyer was magnanimous, nay, truly great. To this declaration, in which Dinah’s soul thrilled, he replied in heartrending tones:

“I wanted to go to see you, to be sure that you were loved: I shall now be easy and no longer alarmed as to your future. – But will your lover appreciate the magnitude of your sacrifice; is there any gratitude in his affection?”

“Come to the Rue des Martyrs and you will see!”

“Yes, I will call,” he replied. “I have already passed your door without daring to inquire for you. – You do not yet know the literary world. There are glorious exceptions, no doubt; but these men of letters drag terrible evils in their train; among these I account publicity as one of the greatest, for it blights everything. A woman may commit herself with – ”

“With a Public Prosecutor?” the Baronne put in with a smile.

“Well! – and then after a rupture there is still something to fall back on; the world has known nothing. But with a more or less famous man the public is thoroughly informed. Why look there! What an example you have close at hand! You are sitting back to back with the Comtesse Marie Vandenesse, who was within an ace of committing the utmost folly for a more celebrated man than Lousteau – for Nathan – and now they do not even recognize each other. After going to the very edge of the precipice, the Countess was saved, no one knows how; she neither left her husband nor her house; but as a famous man was scorned, she was the talk of the town for a whole winter. But her husband’s great fortune, great name, and high position, but for the admirable management of that true statesman – whose conduct to his wife, they say, was perfect – she would have been ruined; in her position no other woman would have remained respected as she is.”

“And how was Sancerre when you came away?” asked Madame de la Baudraye, to change the subject.

“Monsieur de la Baudraye announced that your expected confinement after so many years made it necessary that it should take place in Paris, and that he had insisted on your going to be attended by the first physicians,” replied Monsieur de Clagny, guessing what it was that Dinah most wanted to know. “And so, in spite of the commotion to which your departure gave rise, you still have your legal status.”

“Why!” she exclaimed, “can Monsieur de la Baudraye still hope – ”

“Your husband, madame, did what he always does – made a little calculation.”

The lawyer left the box when the journalist returned, bowing with dignity.

“You are a greater hit than the piece,” said Etienne to Dinah.

This brief triumph brought greater happiness to the poor woman than she had ever known in the whole of her provincial existence; still, as they left the theatre she was very grave.

“What ails you, my Didine?” asked Lousteau.

“I am wondering how a woman succeeds in conquering the world?”

“There are two ways. One is by being Madame de Stael, the other is by having two hundred thousand francs a year.”

“Society,” said she, “asserts its hold on us by appealing to our vanity, our love of appearances. – Pooh! We will be philosophers!”

That evening was the last gleam of the delusive well-being in which Madame de la Baudraye had lived since coming to Paris. Three days later she observed a cloud on Lousteau’s brow as he walked round the little garden-plot smoking a cigar. This woman, who had acquired from her husband the habit and the pleasure of never owing anybody a sou, was informed that the household was penniless, with two quarters’ rent owing, and on the eve, in fact, of an execution.

This reality of Paris life pierced Dinah’s heart like a thorn; she repented of having tempted Etienne into the extravagances of love. It is so difficult to pass from pleasure to work, that happiness has wrecked more poems than sorrows ever helped to flow in sparkling jets. Dinah, happy in seeing Etienne taking his ease, smoking a cigar after breakfast, his face beaming as he basked like a lizard in the sunshine, could not summon up courage enough to make herself the bum-bailiff of a magazine.

It struck her that through the worthy Migeon, Pamela’s father, she might pawn the few jewels she possessed, on which her “uncle,” for she was learning to talk the slang of the town, advanced her nine hundred francs. She kept three hundred for her baby-clothes and the expenses of her illness, and joyfully presented the sum due to Lousteau, who was ploughing, furrow by furrow, or, if you will, line by line, through a novel for a periodical.

“Dearest heart,” said she, “finish your novel without making any sacrifice to necessity; polish the style, work up the subject. – I have played the fine lady too long; I am going to be the housewife and attend to business.”

For the last four months Etienne had been taking Dinah to the Cafe Riche to dine every day, a corner being always kept for them. The countrywoman was in dismay at being told that five hundred francs were owing for the last fortnight.

“What! we have been drinking wine at six francs a bottle! A sole Normande costs five francs! – and twenty centimes for a roll?” she exclaimed, as she looked through the bill Lousteau showed her.

“Well, it makes very little difference to us whether we are robbed at a restaurant or by a cook,” said Lousteau.

“Henceforth, for the cost of your dinner, you shall live like a prince.”

Having induced the landlord to let her have a kitchen and two servants’ rooms, Madame de la Baudraye wrote a few lines to her mother, begging her to send her some linen and a loan of a thousand francs. She received two trunks full of linen, some plate, and two thousand francs, sent by the hand of an honest and pious cook recommended her by her mother.

Ten days after the evening at the theatre when they had met, Monsieur de Clagny came to call at four o’clock, after coming out of court, and found Madame de la Baudraye making a little cap. The sight of this proud and ambitious woman, whose mind was so accomplished, and who had queened it so well at the Chateau d’Anzy, now condescending to household cares and sewing for the coming infant, moved the poor lawyer, who had just left the bench. And as he saw the pricks on one of the taper fingers he had so often kissed, he understood that Madame de la Baudraye was not merely playing at this maternal task.

In the course of this first interview the magistrate saw to the depths of Dinah’s soul. This perspicacity in a man so much in love was a superhuman effort. He saw that Didine meant to be the journalist’s guardian spirit and lead him into a nobler road; she had seen that the difficulties of his practical life were due to some moral defects. Between two beings united by love – in one so genuine, and in the other so well feigned – more than one confidence had been exchanged in the course of four months. Notwithstanding the care with which Etienne wrapped up his true self, a word now and then had not failed to enlighten Dinah as to the previous life of a man whose talents were so hampered by poverty, so perverted by bad examples, so thwarted by obstacles beyond his courage to surmount. “He will be a greater man if life is easy to him,” said she to herself. And she strove to make him happy, to give him the sense of a sheltered home by dint of such economy and method as are familiar to provincial folks. Thus Dinah became a housekeeper, as she had become a poet, by the soaring of her soul towards the heights.

“His happiness will be my absolution.”

These words, wrung from Madame de la Baudraye by her friend the lawyer, accounted for the existing state of things. The publicity of his triumph, flaunted by Etienne on the evening of the first performance, had very plainly shown the lawyer what Lousteau’s purpose was. To Etienne, Madame de la Baudraye was, to use his own phrase, “a fine feather in his cap.” Far from preferring the joys of a shy and mysterious passion, of hiding such exquisite happiness from the eyes of the world, he found a vulgar satisfaction in displaying the first woman of respectability who had ever honored him with her affection.

The Judge, however, was for some time deceived by the attentions which any man would lavish on any woman in Madame de la Baudraye’s situation, and Lousteau made them doubly charming by the ingratiating ways characteristic of men whose manners are naturally attractive. There are, in fact, men who have something of the monkey in them by nature, and to whom the assumption of the most engaging forms of sentiment is so easy that the actor is not detected; and Lousteau’s natural gifts had been fully developed on the stage on which he had hitherto figured.

Between the months of April and July, when Dinah expected her confinement, she discovered why it was that Lousteau had not triumphed over poverty; he was idle and had no power of will. The brain, to be sure, must obey its own laws; it recognizes neither the exigencies of life nor the voice of honor; a man cannot write a great book because a woman is dying, or to pay a discreditable debt, or to bring up a family; at the same time, there is no great talent without a strong will. These twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast edifice of personal glory. A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a productive condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons always ready for battle. They conquer indolence, they deny themselves enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their powers. This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle – in short, every man who delighted, governed, or led his contemporaries.