"Have done with all this, Monsieur Crevel. I will not, for your sake, forego the happiness a mother knows who can embrace her children without a single pang of remorse in her heart, who sees herself respected and loved by her family; and I will give up my soul to God unspotted——"
"Amen!" exclaimed Crevel, with the diabolical rage that embitters the face of these pretenders when they fail for the second time in such an attempt. "You do not yet know the latter end of poverty—shame, disgrace.—I have tried to warn you; I would have saved you, you and your daughter. Well, you must study the modern parable of the Prodigal Father from A to Z. Your tears and your pride move me deeply," said Crevel, seating himself, "for it is frightful to see the woman one loves weeping. All I can promise you, dear Adeline, is to do nothing against your interests or your husband's. Only never send to me for information. That is all."
"What is to be done?" cried Madame Hulot.
Up to now the Baroness had bravely faced the threefold torment which this explanation inflicted on her; for she was wounded as a woman, as a mother, and as a wife. In fact, so long as her son's father-in-law was insolent and offensive, she had found the strength in her resistance to the aggressive tradesman; but the sort of good-nature he showed, in spite of his exasperation as a mortified adorer and as a humiliated National Guardsman, broke down her nerve, strung to the point of snapping. She wrung her hands, melted into tears, and was in a state of such helpless dejection, that she allowed Crevel to kneel at her feet, kissing her hands.
"Good God! what will become of us!" she went on, wiping away her tears. "Can a mother sit still and see her child pine away before her eyes? What is to be the fate of that splendid creature, as strong in her pure life under her mother's care as she is by every gift of nature? There are days when she wanders round the garden, out of spirits without knowing why; I find her with tears in her eyes——"
"She is one-and-twenty," said Crevel.
"Must I place her in a convent?" asked the Baroness. "But in such cases religion is impotent to subdue nature, and the most piously trained girls lose their head!—Get up, pray, monsieur; do you not understand that everything is final between us? that I look upon you with horror? that you have crushed a mother's last hopes——"
"But if I were to restore them," asked he.
Madame Hulot looked at Crevel with a frenzied expression that really touched him. But he drove pity back to the depths of his heart; she had said, "I look upon you with horror."
Virtue is always a little too rigid; it overlooks the shades and instincts by help of which we are able to tack when in a false position.
"So handsome a girl as Mademoiselle Hortense does not find a husband nowadays if she is penniless," Crevel remarked, resuming his starchiest manner. "Your daughter is one of those beauties who rather alarm intending husbands; like a thoroughbred horse, which is too expensive to keep up to find a ready purchaser. If you go out walking with such a woman on your arm, every one will turn to look at you, and follow and covet his neighbor's wife. Such success is a source of much uneasiness to men who do not want to be killing lovers; for, after all, no man kills more than one. In the position in which you find yourself there are just three ways of getting your daughter married: Either by my help—and you will have none of it! That is one.—Or by finding some old man of sixty, very rich, childless, and anxious to have children; that is difficult, still such men are to be met with. Many old men take up with a Josepha, a Jenny Cadine, why should not one be found who is ready to make a fool of himself under legal formalities? If it were not for Celestine and our two grandchildren, I would marry Hortense myself. That is two.—The last way is the easiest——"
Madame Hulot raised her head, and looked uneasily at the ex-perfumer.
"Paris is a town whither every man of energy—and they sprout like saplings on French soil—comes to meet his kind; talent swarms here without hearth or home, and energy equal to anything, even to making a fortune. Well, these youngsters—your humble servant was such a one in his time, and how many he has known! What had du Tillet or Popinot twenty years since? They were both pottering round in Daddy Birotteau's shop, with not a penny of capital but their determination to get on, which, in my opinion, is the best capital a man can have. Money may be eaten through, but you don't eat through your determination. Why, what had I? The will to get on, and plenty of pluck. At this day du Tillet is a match for the greatest folks; little Popinot, the richest druggist of the Rue des Lombards, became a deputy, now he is in office.—Well, one of these free lances, as we say on the stock market, of the pen, or of the brush, is the only man in Paris who would marry a penniless beauty, for they have courage enough for anything. Monsieur Popinot married Mademoiselle Birotteau without asking for a farthing. Those men are madmen, to be sure! They trust in love as they trust in good luck and brains!—Find a man of energy who will fall in love with your daughter, and he will marry without a thought of money. You must confess that by way of an enemy I am not ungenerous, for this advice is against my own interests."
"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