"Oh, Monsieur Crevel, if you would indeed be my friend and give up your ridiculous notions – "
"Ridiculous? Madame, do not run yourself down. Look at yourself – I love you, and you will come to be mine. The day will come when I shall say to Hulot, 'You took Josepha, I have taken your wife!'
"It is the old law of tit-for-tat! And I will persevere till I have attained my end, unless you should become extremely ugly. – I shall succeed; and I will tell you why," he went on, resuming his attitude, and looking at Madame Hulot. "You will not meet with such an old man, or such a young lover," he said after a pause, "because you love your daughter too well to hand her over to the manoeuvres of an old libertine, and because you – the Baronne Hulot, sister of the old Lieutenant-General who commanded the veteran Grenadiers of the Old Guard – will not condescend to take a man of spirit wherever you may find him; for he might be a mere craftsman, as many a millionaire of to-day was ten years ago, a working artisan, or the foreman of a factory.
"And then, when you see the girl, urged by her twenty years, capable of dishonoring you all, you will say to yourself, 'It will be better that I should fall! If Monsieur Crevel will but keep my secret, I will earn my daughter's portion – two hundred thousand francs for ten years' attachment to that old gloveseller – old Crevel!' – I disgust you no doubt, and what I am saying is horribly immoral, you think? But if you happened to have been bitten by an overwhelming passion, you would find a thousand arguments in favor of yielding – as women do when they are in love. – Yes, and Hortense's interests will suggest to your feelings such terms of surrendering your conscience – "
"Hortense has still an uncle."
"What! Old Fischer? He is winding up his concerns, and that again is the Baron's fault; his rake is dragged over every till within his reach."
"Comte Hulot – "
"Oh, madame, your husband has already made thin air of the old General's savings. He spent them in furnishing his singer's rooms. – Now, come; am I to go without a hope?"
"Good-bye, monsieur. A man easily gets over a passion for a woman of my age, and you will fall back on Christian principles. God takes care of the wretched – "
The Baroness rose to oblige the captain to retreat, and drove him back into the drawing-room.
"Ought the beautiful Madame Hulot to be living amid such squalor?" said he, and he pointed to an old lamp, a chandelier bereft of its gilding, the threadbare carpet, the very rags of wealth which made the large room, with its red, white, and gold, look like a corpse of Imperial festivities.
"Monsieur, virtue shines on it all. I have no wish to owe a handsome abode to having made of the beauty you are pleased to ascribe to me a man-trap and a money-box for five-franc pieces!"
The captain bit his lips as he recognized the words he had used to vilify Josepha's avarice.
"And for whom are you so magnanimous?" said he. By this time the baroness had got her rejected admirer as far as the door. – "For a libertine!" said he, with a lofty grimace of virtue and superior wealth.
"If you are right, my constancy has some merit, monsieur. That is all."
After bowing to the officer as a woman bows to dismiss an importune visitor, she turned away too quickly to see him once more fold his arms. She unlocked the doors she had closed, and did not see the threatening gesture which was Crevel's parting greeting. She walked with a proud, defiant step, like a martyr to the Coliseum, but her strength was exhausted; she sank on the sofa in her blue room, as if she were ready to faint, and sat there with her eyes fixed on the tumble-down summer-house, where her daughter was gossiping with Cousin Betty.
From the first days of her married life to the present time the Baroness had loved her husband, as Josephine in the end had loved Napoleon, with an admiring, maternal, and cowardly devotion. Though ignorant of the details given her by Crevel, she knew that for twenty years past Baron Hulot been anything rather than a faithful husband; but she had sealed her eyes with lead, she had wept in silence, and no word of reproach had ever escaped her. In return for this angelic sweetness, she had won her husband's veneration and something approaching to worship from all who were about her.
A wife's affection for her husband and the respect she pays him are infectious in a family. Hortense believed her father to be a perfect model of conjugal affection; as to their son, brought up to admire the Baron, whom everybody regarded as one of the giants who so effectually backed Napoleon, he knew that he owed his advancement to his father's name, position, and credit; and besides, the impressions of childhood exert an enduring influence. He still was afraid of his father; and if he had suspected the misdeeds revealed by Crevel, as he was too much overawed by him to find fault, he would have found excuses in the view every man takes of such matters.
It now will be necessary to give the reasons for the extraordinary self-devotion of a good and beautiful woman; and this, in a few words, is her past history.
Three brothers, simple laboring men, named Fischer, and living in a village situated on the furthest frontier of Lorraine, were compelled by the Republican conscription to set out with the so-called army of the Rhine.
In 1799 the second brother, Andre, a widower, and Madame Hulot's father, left his daughter to the care of his elder brother, Pierre Fischer, disabled from service by a wound received in 1797, and made a small private venture in the military transport service, an opening he owed to the favor of Hulot d'Ervy, who was high in the commissariat. By a very obvious chance Hulot, coming to Strasbourg, saw the Fischer family. Adeline's father and his younger brother were at that time contractors for forage in the province of Alsace.
Adeline, then sixteen years of age, might be compared with the famous Madame du Barry, like her, a daughter of Lorraine. She was one of those perfect and striking beauties – a woman like Madame Tallien, finished with peculiar care by Nature, who bestows on them all her choicest gifts – distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance, flesh of a superior texture, and a complexion mingled in the unknown laboratory where good luck presides. These beautiful creatures all have something in common: Bianca Capella, whose portrait is one of Bronzino's masterpieces; Jean Goujon's Venus, painted from the famous Diane de Poitiers; Signora Olympia, whose picture adorns the Doria gallery; Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges, Madame Recamier. – all these women who preserved their beauty in spite of years, of passion, and of their life of excess and pleasure, have in figure, frame, and in the character of their beauty certain striking resemblances, enough to make one believe that there is in the ocean of generations an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is born, all daughters of the same salt wave.
Adeline Fischer, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman born a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once seen her, the Commissariat