Albert Savarus

* * * * *

In all ages France and England have carried on an exchange of trifles, which is all the more constant because it evades the tyranny of the Custom-house.  The fashion that is called English in Paris is called French in London, and this is reciprocal.  The hostility of the two nations is suspended on two points—­the uses of words and the fashions of dress. God Save the King, the national air of England, is a tune written by Lulli for the Chorus of Esther or of Athalie.  Hoops, introduced at Paris by an Englishwoman, were invented in London, it is known why, by a Frenchwoman, the notorious Duchess of Portsmouth.  They were at first so jeered at that the first Englishwoman who appeared in them at the Tuileries narrowly escaped being crushed by the crowd; but they were adopted.  This fashion tyrannized over the ladies of Europe for half a century.  At the peace of 1815, for a year, the long waists of the English were a standing jest; all Paris went to see Pothier and Brunet in Les Anglaises pour rire; but in 1816 and 1817 the belt of the Frenchwoman, which in 1814 cut her across the bosom, gradually descended till it reached the hips.

Within ten years England has made two little gifts to our language.  The Incroyable, the Merveilleux, the Elegant, the three successes of the petit-maitre of discreditable etymology, have made way for the “dandy” and the “lion.”  The lion is not the parent of the lionne.  The lionne is due to the famous song by Alfred de Musset: 

  Avez vous vu dans Barcelone
  . . . . . . 
  C’est ma maitresse et ma lionne.

There has been a fusion—­or, if you prefer it, a confusion—­of the two words and the leading ideas.  When an absurdity can amuse Paris, which devours as many masterpieces as absurdities, the provinces can hardly be deprived of them.  So, as soon as the lion paraded Paris with his mane, his beard and moustaches, his waistcoats and his eyeglass, maintained in its place, without the help of his hands, by the contraction of his cheek, and eye-socket, the chief towns of some departments had their sub-lions, who protested by the smartness of their trouser-straps against the untidiness of their fellow-townsmen.

Thus, in 1834, Besancon could boast of a lion, in the person of Monsieur Amedee-Sylvain de Soulas, spelt Souleyas at the time of the Spanish occupation.  Amedee de Soulas is perhaps the only man in Besancon descended from a Spanish family.  Spain sent men to manage her business in the Comte, but very few Spaniards settled there.  The Soulas remained in consequence of their connection with Cardinal Granvelle.  Young Monsieur de Soulas was always talking of leaving Besancon, a dull town, church-going, and not literary, a military centre and garrison town, of which the manners and customs and physiognomy are worth describing.  This opinion allowed of his lodging, like a man uncertain of the future, in three very scantily furnished rooms at the end of the Rue Neuve, just where it opens into the Rue de la Prefecture.

Young Monsieur de Soulas could not possibly live without a tiger.  This tiger was the son of one of his farmers, a small servant aged fourteen, thick-set, and named Babylas.  The lion dressed his tiger very smartly—­a short tunic-coat of iron-gray cloth, belted with patent leather, bright blue plush breeches, a red waistcoat, polished leather top-boots, a shiny hat with black lacing, and brass buttons with the arms of Soulas.  Amedee gave this boy white cotton gloves and his washing, and thirty-six francs a month to keep himself—­a sum that seemed enormous to the grisettes of Besancon:  four hundred and twenty francs a year to a child of fifteen, without counting extras!  The extras consisted in the price for which he could sell his turned clothes, a present when Soulas exchanged one of his horses, and the perquisite of the manure.  The two horses, treated with sordid economy, cost, one with another, eight hundred francs a year.  His bills for articles received from Paris, such as perfumery, cravats, jewelry, patent blacking, and clothes, ran to another twelve hundred francs.  Add to this the groom, or tiger, the horses, a very superior style of dress, and six hundred francs a year for rent, and you will see a grand total of three thousand francs.

Now, Monsieur de Soulas’ father had left him only four thousand francs a year, the income from some cottage farms which lent painful uncertainty to the rents.  The lion had hardly three francs a day left for food, amusements, and gambling.  He very often dined out, and breakfasted with remarkable frugality.  When he was positively obliged to dine at his own cost, he sent his tiger to fetch a couple of dishes from a cookshop, never spending more than twenty-five sous.

Young Monsieur de Soulas was supposed to be a spendthrift, recklessly extravagant, whereas the poor man made the two ends meet in the year with a keenness and skill which would have done honor to a thrifty housewife.  At Besancon in those days no one knew how great a tax on a man’s capital were six francs spent in polish to spread on his boots or shoes, yellow gloves at fifty sous a pair, cleaned in the deepest secrecy to make them three times renewed, cravats costing ten francs, and lasting three months, four waistcoats at twenty-five francs, and trousers fitting close to the boots.  How could he do otherwise, since we see women in Paris bestowing their special attention on simpletons who visit them, and cut out the most remarkable men by means of these frivolous advantages, which a man can buy for fifteen louis, and get his hair curled and a fine linen shirt into the bargain?

If this unhappy youth should seem to you to have become a lion on very cheap terms, you must know that Amedee de Soulas had been three times to Switzerland, by coach and in short stages, twice to Paris, and once from Paris to England.  He passed as a well-informed traveler, and could say, “In England, where I went . . .”  The dowagers of the town would say to him, “You, who have been in England . . .”  He had been as far as Lombardy, and seen the shores of the Italian lakes.  He read new books.  Finally, when he was cleaning his gloves, the tiger Babylas replied to callers, “Monsieur is very busy.”  An attempt had been made to withdraw Monsieur Amedee de Soulas from circulation by pronouncing him “A man of advanced ideas.”  Amedee had the gift of uttering with the gravity of a native the commonplaces that were in fashion, which gave him the credit of being one of the most enlightened of the nobility.  His person was garnished with fashionable trinkets, and his head furnished with ideas hall-marked by the press.

In 1834 Amedee was a young man of five-and-twenty, of medium height, dark, with a very prominent thorax, well-made shoulders, rather plump legs, feet already fat, white dimpled hands, a beard under his chin, moustaches worthy of the garrison, a good-natured, fat, rubicund face, a flat nose, and brown expressionless eyes; nothing Spanish about him.  He was progressing rapidly in the direction of obesity, which would be fatal to his pretensions.  His nails were well kept, his beard trimmed, the smallest details of his dress attended to with English precision.  Hence Amedee de Soulas was looked upon as the finest man in Besancon.  A hairdresser who waited upon him at a fixed hour—­another luxury, costing sixty francs a year—­held him up as the sovereign authority in matters of fashion and elegance.

Amedee slept late, dressed and went out towards noon, to go to one of his farms and practise pistol-shooting.  He attached as much importance to this exercise as Lord Byron did in his later days.  Then, at three o’clock he came home, admired on horseback by the grisettes and the ladies who happened to be at their windows.  After an affectation of study or business, which seemed to engage him till four, he dressed to dine out, spent the evening in the drawing-rooms of the aristocracy of Besancon playing whist, and went home to bed at eleven.  No life could be more above board, more prudent, or more irreproachable, for he punctually attended the services at church on Sundays and holy days.

To enable you to understand how exceptional is such a life, it is necessary to devote a few words to an account of Besancon.  No town ever offered more deaf and dumb resistance to progress.  At Besancon the officials, the employes, the military, in short, every one engaged in governing it, sent thither from Paris to fill a post of any kind, are all spoken of by the expressive general name of the Colony.  The colony is neutral ground, the only ground where, as in church, the upper rank and the townsfolk of the place can meet.  Here, fired by a word, a look, or gesture, are started those feuds between house and house, between a woman of rank and a citizen’s wife, which endure till death, and widen the impassable gulf which parts the two classes of society.  With the exception of the Clermont-Mont-Saint-Jean, the Beauffremont, the de Scey, and the Gramont families, with a few others who come only to stay on their estates in the Comte, the aristocracy of Besancon dates no further back than a couple of centuries, the time of the conquest by Louis XIV.  This little world is essentially of the parlement, and arrogant, stiff, solemn, uncompromising, haughty beyond all comparison, even with the Court of Vienna, for in this the nobility of Besancon would put the Viennese drawing-rooms to shame.  As to Victor Hugo, Nodier, Fourier, the glories of the town, they are never mentioned, no one thinks about them.  The marriages in these families are arranged in the cradle, so rigidly are the greatest things settled as well as the smallest.  No stranger, no intruder, ever finds his way into one of these houses, and to obtain an introduction for the colonels or officers of title belonging to the first families in France when quartered there, requires efforts of diplomacy which Prince Talleyrand would gladly have mastered to use at a congress.

In 1834 Amedee was the only man in Besancon who wore trouser-straps; this will account for the young man’s being regarded as a lion.  And a little anecdote will enable you to understand the city of Besancon.

Some time before the opening of this story, the need arose at the prefecture for bringing an editor from Paris for the official newspaper, to enable it to hold its own against the little Gazette, dropped at Besancon by the great Gazette, and the Patriot, which frisked in the hands of the Republicans.  Paris sent them a young man, knowing nothing about la Franche Comte, who began by writing them a leading article of the school of the Charivari.  The chief of the moderate party, a member of the municipal council, sent for the journalist and said to him, “You must understand, monsieur, that we are serious, more than serious—­tiresome; we resent being amused, and are furious at having been made to laugh.  Be as hard of digestion as the toughest disquisitions in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and you will hardly reach the level of Besancon.”

The editor took the hint, and thenceforth spoke the most incomprehensible philosophical lingo.  His success was complete.

If young Monsieur de Soulas did not fall in the esteem of Besancon society, it was out of pure vanity on its part; the aristocracy were happy to affect a modern air, and to be able to show any Parisians of rank who visited the Comte a young man who bore some likeness to them.

All this hidden labor, all this dust thrown in people’s eyes, this display of folly and latent prudence, had an object, or the lion of Besancon would have been no son of the soil.  Amedee wanted to achieve a good marriage by proving some day that his farms were not mortgaged, and that he had some savings.  He wanted to be the talk of the town, to be the finest and best-dressed man there, in order to win first the attention, and then the hand, of Mademoiselle Rosalie de Watteville.

In 1830, at the time when young Monsieur de Soulas was setting up in business as a dandy, Rosalie was but fourteen.  Hence, in 1834, Mademoiselle de Watteville had reached the age when young persons are easily struck by the peculiarities which attracted the attention of the town to Amedee.  There are so many lions who become lions out of self-interest and speculation.  The Wattevilles, who for twelve years had been drawing an income of fifty thousand francs a year, did not spend more than four-and-twenty thousand francs a year, while receiving all the upper circle of Besancon every Monday and Friday.  On Monday they gave a dinner, on Friday an evening party.  Thus, in twelve years, what a sum must have accumulated from twenty-six thousand francs a year, saved and invested with the judgment that distinguishes those old families!  It was very generally supposed that Madame de Watteville, thinking she had land enough, had placed her savings in the three per cents, in 1830.  Rosalie’s dowry would therefore, as the best informed opined, amount to about twenty thousand francs a year.  So for the last five years Amedee had worked like a mole to get into the highest favor of the severe Baroness, while laying himself out to flatter Mademoiselle de Watteville’s conceit.

Madame de Watteville was in the secret of the devices by which Amedee succeeded in keeping up his rank in Besancon, and esteemed him highly for it.  Soulas had placed himself under her wing when she was thirty, and at that time had dared to admire her and make her his idol; he had got so far as to be allowed—­he alone in the world—­to pour out to her all the unseemly gossip which almost all very precise women love to hear, being authorized by their superior virtue to look into the gulf without falling, and into the devil’s snares without being caught.  Do you understand why the lion did not allow himself the very smallest intrigue?  He lived a public life, in the street so to speak, on purpose to play the part of a lover sacrificed to duty by the Baroness, and to feast her mind with the sins she had forbidden to her senses.  A man who is so privileged as to be allowed to pour light stories into the ear of a bigot is in her eyes a charming man.  If this exemplary youth had better known the human heart, he might without risk have allowed himself some flirtations among the grisettes of Besancon who looked up to him as a king; his affairs might perhaps have been all the more hopeful with the strict and prudish Baroness.  To Rosalie our Cato affected prodigality; he professed a life of elegance, showing her in perspective the splendid part played by a woman of fashion in Paris, whither he meant to go as Depute.

All these manoeuvres were crowned with complete success.  In 1834 the mothers of the forty noble families composing the high society of Besancon quoted Monsieur Amedee de Soulas as the most charming young man in the town; no one would have dared to dispute his place as cock of the walk at the Hotel de Rupt, and all Besancon regarded him as Rosalie de Watteville’s future husband.  There had even been some exchange of ideas on the subject between the Baroness and Amedee, to which the Baron’s apparent nonentity gave some certainty.

Mademoiselle de Watteville, to whom her enormous prospective fortune at that time lent considerable importance, had been brought up exclusively within the precincts of the Hotel de Rupt—­which her mother rarely quitted, so devoted was she to her dear Archbishop—­and severely repressed by an exclusively religious education, and by her mother’s despotism, which held her rigidly to principles.  Rosalie knew absolutely nothing.  Is it knowledge to have learned geography from Guthrie, sacred history, ancient history, the history of France, and the four rules all passed through the sieve of an old Jesuit?  Dancing and music were forbidden, as being more likely to corrupt life than to grace it.  The Baroness taught her daughter every conceivable stitch in tapestry and women’s work—­plain sewing, embroidery, netting.  At seventeen Rosalie had never read anything but the Lettres edifiantes and some works on heraldry.  No newspaper had ever defiled her sight.  She attended mass at the Cathedral every morning, taken there by her mother, came back to breakfast, did needlework after a little walk in the garden, and received visitors, sitting with the baroness until dinner-time.  Then, after dinner, excepting on Mondays and Fridays, she accompanied Madame de Watteville to other houses to spend the evening, without being allowed to talk more than the maternal rule permitted.

At eighteen Mademoiselle de Watteville was a slight, thin girl with a flat figure, fair, colorless, and insignificant to the last degree.  Her eyes, of a very light blue, borrowed beauty from their lashes, which, when downcast, threw a shadow on her cheeks.  A few freckles marred the whiteness of her forehead, which was shapely enough.  Her face was exactly like those of Albert Durer’s saints, or those of the painters before Perugino; the same plump, though slender modeling, the same delicacy saddened by ecstasy, the same severe guilelessness.  Everything about her, even to her attitude, was suggestive of those virgins, whose beauty is only revealed in its mystical radiance to the eyes of the studious connoisseur.  She had fine hands though red, and a pretty foot, the foot of an aristocrat.

She habitually wore simple checked cotton dresses; but on Sundays and in the evening her mother allowed her silk.  The cut of her frocks, made at Besancon, almost made her ugly, while her mother tried to borrow grace, beauty, and elegance from Paris fashions; for through Monsieur de Soulas she procured the smallest trifles of her dress from thence.  Rosalie had never worn a pair of silk stockings or thin boots, but always cotton stockings and leather shoes.  On high days she was dressed in a muslin frock, her hair plainly dressed, and had bronze kid shoes.

This education, and her own modest demeanor, hid in Rosalie a spirit of iron.  Physiologists and profound observers will tell you, perhaps to your astonishment, that tempers, characteristics, wit, or genius reappear in families at long intervals, precisely like what are known as hereditary diseases.  Thus talent, like the gout, sometimes skips over two generations.  We have an illustrious example of this phenomenon in George Sand, in whom are resuscitated the force, the power, and the imaginative faculty of the Marechal de Saxe, whose natural granddaughter she is.

The decisive character and romantic daring of the famous Watteville had reappeared in the soul of his grand-niece, reinforced by the tenacity and pride of blood of the Rupts.  But these qualities—­or faults, if you will have it so—­were as deeply buried in this young girlish soul, apparently so weak and yielding, as the seething lavas within a hill before it becomes a volcano.  Madame de Watteville alone, perhaps, suspected this inheritance from two strains.  She was so severe to her Rosalie, that she replied one day to the Archbishop, who blamed her for being too hard on the child, “Leave me to manage her, monseigneur.  I know her!  She has more than one Beelzebub in her skin!”

The Baroness kept all the keener watch over her daughter, because she considered her honor as a mother to be at stake.  After all, she had nothing else to do.  Clotilde de Rupt, at this time five-and-thirty, and as good as widowed, with a husband who turned egg-cups in every variety of wood, who set his mind on making wheels with six spokes out of iron-wood, and manufactured snuff-boxes for everyone of his acquaintance, flirted in strict propriety with Amedee de Soulas.  When this young man was in the house, she alternately dismissed and recalled her daughter, and tried to detect symptoms of jealousy in that youthful soul, so as to have occasion to repress them.  She imitated the police in its dealings with the republicans; but she labored in vain.  Rosalie showed no symptoms of rebellion.  Then the arid bigot accused her daughter of perfect insensibility.  Rosalie knew her mother well enough to be sure that if she had thought young Monsieur de Soulas nice, she would have drawn down on herself a smart reproof.  Thus, to all her mother’s incitement she replied merely by such phrases as are wrongly called Jesuitical—­wrongly, because the Jesuits were strong, and such reservations are the chevaux de frise behind which weakness takes refuge.  Then the mother regarded the girl as a dissembler.  If by mischance a spark of the true nature of the Wattevilles and the Rupts blazed out, the mother armed herself with the respect due from children to their parents to reduce Rosalie to passive obedience.

This covert battle was carried on in the most secret seclusion of domestic life, with closed doors.  The Vicar-General, the dear Abbe Grancey, the friend of the late Archbishop, clever as he was in his capacity of the chief Father Confessor of the diocese, could not discover whether the struggle had stirred up some hatred between the mother and daughter, whether the mother were jealous in anticipation, or whether the court Amedee was paying to the girl through her mother had not overstepped its due limits.  Being a friend of the family, neither mother nor daughter, confessed to him.  Rosalie, a little too much harried, morally, about young de Soulas, could not abide him, to use a homely phrase, and when he spoke to her, trying to take her heart by surprise, she received him but coldly.  This aversion, discerned only by her mother’s eyes, was a constant subject of admonition.

“Rosalie, I cannot imagine why you affect such coldness towards Amedee.  Is it because he is a friend of the family, and because we like him—­your father and I?”

“Well, mamma,” replied the poor child one day, “if I made him welcome, should I not be still more in the wrong?”

“What do you mean by that?” cried Madame de Watteville.  “What is the meaning of such words?  Your mother is unjust, no doubt, and according to you, would be so in any case!  Never let such an answer pass your lips again to your mother—­” and so forth.

This quarrel lasted three hours and three-quarters.  Rosalie noted the time.  Her mother, pale with fury, sent her to her room, where Rosalie pondered on the meaning of this scene without discovering it, so guileless was she.  Thus young Monsieur de Soulas, who was supposed by every one to be very near the end he was aiming at, all neckcloths set, and by dint of pots of patent blacking—­an end which required so much waxing of his moustaches, so many smart waistcoats, wore out so many horseshoes and stays—­for he wore a leather vest, the stays of the lion—­Amedee, I say, was further away than any chance comer, although he had on his side the worthy and noble Abbe de Grancey.