The Collection of Antiquities

Victurnien received charming letters from his father and aunt, and also from the Chevalier.  That gentleman recalled himself to the Vidame’s memory.  He had been at Spa with M. de Pamiers in 1778, after a certain journey made by a celebrated Hungarian princess.  And Chesnel also wrote.  The fond flattery to which the unhappy boy was only too well accustomed shone out of every page; and Mlle. Armande seemed to share half of Mme. de Maufrigneuse’s happiness.

Thus happy in the approval of his family, the young Count made a spirited beginning in the perilous and costly ways of dandyism.  He had five horses—­he was moderate—­de Marsay had fourteen!  He returned the Vidame’s hospitality, even including Blondet in the invitation, as well as de Marsay and Rastignac.  The dinner cost five hundred francs, and the noble provincial was feted on the same scale.  Victurnien played a good deal, and, for his misfortune, at the fashionable game of whist.

He laid out his days in busy idleness.  Every day between twelve and three o’clock he was with the Duchess; afterwards he went to meet her in the Bois de Boulogne and ride beside her carriage.  Sometimes the charming couple rode together, but this was early in fine summer mornings.  Society, balls, the theatre, and gaiety filled the Count’s evening hours.  Everywhere Victurnien made a brilliant figure, everywhere he flung the pearls of his wit broadcast.  He gave his opinion on men, affairs, and events in profound sayings; he would have put you in mind of a fruit-tree putting forth all its strength in blossom.  He was leading an enervating life wasteful of money, and even yet more wasteful, it may be of a man’s soul; in that life the fairest talents are buried out of sight, the most incorruptible honesty perishes, the best-tempered springs of will are slackened.

The Duchess, so white and fragile and angel-like, felt attracted to the dissipations of bachelor life; she enjoyed first nights, she liked anything amusing, anything improvised.  Bohemian restaurants lay outside her experience; so d’Esgrignon got up a charming little party at the Rocher de Cancale for her benefit, asked all the amiable scamps whom she cultivated and sermonized, and there was a vast amount of merriment, wit, and gaiety, and a corresponding bill to pay.  That supper led to others.  And through it all Victurnien worshiped her as an angel.  Mme. de Maufrigneuse for him was still an angel, untouched by any taint of earth; an angel at the Varietes, where she sat out the half-obscene, vulgar farces, which made her laugh; an angel through the cross-fire of highly-flavored jests and scandalous anecdotes, which enlivened a stolen frolic; a languishing angel in the latticed box at the Vaudeville; an angel while she criticised the postures of opera dancers with the experience of an elderly habitue of le coin de la reine; an angel at the Porte Saint-Martin, at the little boulevard theatres, at the masked balls, which she enjoyed like any schoolboy.  She was an angel who asked him for the love that lives by self-abnegation and heroism and self-sacrifice; an angel who would have her lover live like an English lord, with an income of a million francs.  D’Esgrignon once exchanged a horse because the animal’s coat did not satisfy her notions.  At play she was an angel, and certainly no bourgeoise that ever lived could have bidden d’Esgrignon “Stake for me!” in such an angelic way.  She was so divinely reckless in her folly, that a man might well have sold his soul to the devil lest this angel should lose her taste for earthly pleasures.

The first winter went by.  The Count had drawn on M. Cardot for the trifling sum of thirty thousand francs over and above Chesnel’s remittance.  As Cardot very carefully refrained from using his right of remonstrance, Victurnien now learned for the first time that he had overdrawn his account.  He was the more offended by an extremely polite refusal to make any further advance, since it so happened that he had just lost six thousand francs at play at the club, and he could not very well show himself there until they were paid.

After growing indignant with Maitre Cardot, who had trusted him with thirty thousand francs (Cardot had written to Chesnel, but to the fair Duchess’ favorite he made the most of his so-called confidence in him), after all this, d’Esgrignon was obliged to ask the lawyer to tell him how to set about raising the money, since debts of honor were in question.

“Draw bills on your father’s banker, and take them to his correspondent; he, no doubt, will discount them for you.  Then write to your family, and tell them to remit the amount to the banker.”

An inner voice seemed to suggest du Croisier’s name in this predicament.  He had seen du Croisier on his knees to the aristocracy, and of the man’s real disposition he was entirely ignorant.  So to du Croisier he wrote a very offhand letter, informing him that he had drawn a bill of exchange on him for ten thousand francs, adding that the amount would be repaid on receipt of the letter either by M. Chesnel or by Mlle. Armande d’Esgrignon.  Then he indited two touching epistles—­one to Chesnel, another to his aunt.  In the matter of going headlong to ruin, a young man often shows singular ingenuity and ability, and fortune favors him.  In the morning Victurnien happened on the name of the Paris bankers in correspondence with du Croisier, and de Marsay furnished him with the Kellers’ address.  De Marsay knew everything in Paris.  The Kellers took the bill and gave him the sum without a word, after deducting the discount.  The balance of the account was in du Croisier’s favor.

But the gaming debt was as nothing in comparison with the state of things at home.  Invoices showered in upon Victurnien.

“I say!  Do you trouble yourself about that sort of thing?” Rastignac said, laughing.  “Are you putting them in order, my dear boy?  I did not think you were so business-like.”

“My dear fellow, it is quite time I thought about it; there are twenty odd thousand francs there.”

De Marsay, coming in to look up d’Esgrignon for a steeplechase, produced a dainty little pocket-book, took out twenty thousand francs, and handed them to him.

“It is the best way of keeping the money safe,” said he; “I am twice enchanted to have won it yesterday from my honored father, Milord Dudley.”

Such French grace completely fascinated d’Esgrignon; he took it for friendship; and as to the money, punctually forgot to pay his debts with it, and spent it on his pleasures.  The fact was that de Marsay was looking on with an unspeakable pleasure while young d’Esgrignon “got out of his depth,” in dandy’s idiom; it pleased de Marsay in all sorts of fondling ways to lay an arm on the lad’s shoulder; by and by he should feel its weight, and disappear the sooner.  For de Marsay was jealous; the Duchess flaunted her love affair; she was not at home to other visitors when d’Esgrignon was with her.  And besides, de Marsay was one of those savage humorists who delight in mischief, as Turkish women in the bath.  So when he had carried off the prize, and bets were settled at the tavern where they breakfasted, and a bottle or two of good wine had appeared, de Marsay turned to d’Esgrignon with a laugh: 

“Those bills that you are worrying over are not yours, I am sure.”

“Eh! if they weren’t, why should he worry himself?” asked Rastignac.

“And whose should they be?” d’Esgrignon inquired.

“Then you do not know the Duchess’ position?” queried de Marsay, as he sprang into the saddle.

“No,” said d’Esgrignon, his curiosity aroused.

“Well, dear fellow, it is like this,” returned de Marsay—­“thirty thousand francs to Victorine, eighteen thousand francs to Houbigaut, lesser amounts to Herbault, Nattier, Nourtier, and those Latour people,—­altogether a hundred thousand francs.”

“An angel!” cried d’Esgrignon, with eyes uplifted to heaven.

“This is the bill for her wings,” Rastignac cried facetiously.

“She owes all that, my dear boy,” continued de Marsay, “precisely because she is an angel.  But we have all seen angels in this position,” he added, glancing at Rastignac; “there is this about women that is sublime:  they understand nothing of money; they do not meddle with it, it is no affair of theirs; they are invited guests at the ‘banquet of life,’ as some poet or other said that came to an end in the workhouse.”

“How do you know this when I do not?” d’Esgrignon artlessly returned.

“You are sure to be the last to know it, just as she is sure to be the last to hear that you are in debt.”

“I thought she had a hundred thousand livres a year,” said d’Esgrignon.

“Her husband,” replied de Marsay, “lives apart from her.  He stays with his regiment and practises economy, for he has one or two little debts of his own as well, has our dear Duke.  Where do you come from?  Just learn to do as we do and keep our friends’ accounts for them.  Mlle. Diane (I fell in love with her for the name’s sake), Mlle. Diane d’Uxelles brought her husband sixty thousand livres of income; for the last eight years she has lived as if she had two hundred thousand.  It is perfectly plain that at this moment her lands are mortgaged up to their full value; some fine morning the crash must come, and the angel will be put to flight by—­must it be said?—­by sheriff’s officers that have the effrontery to lay hands on an angel just as they might take hold of one of us.”

“Poor angel!”

“Lord! it costs a great deal to dwell in a Parisian heaven; you must whiten your wings and your complexion every morning,” said Rastignac.

Now as the thought of confessing his debts to his beloved Diane had passed through d’Esgrignon’s mind, something like a shudder ran through him when he remembered that he still owed sixty thousand francs, to say nothing of bills to come for another ten thousand.  He went back melancholy enough.  His friends remarked his ill-disguised preoccupation, and spoke of it among themselves at dinner.

“Young d’Esgrignon is getting out of his depth.  He is not up to Paris.  He will blow his brains out.  A little fool!” and so on and so on.

D’Esgrignon, however, promptly took comfort.  His servant brought him two letters.  The first was from Chesnel.  A letter from Chesnel smacked of the stale grumbling faithfulness of honesty and its consecrated formulas.  With all respect he put it aside till the evening.  But the second letter he read with unspeakable pleasure.  In Ciceronian phrases, du Croisier groveled before him, like a Sganarelle before a Geronte, begging the young Count in future to spare him the affront of first depositing the amount of the bills which he should condescend to draw.  The concluding phrase seemed meant to convey the idea that here was an open cashbox full of coin at the service of the noble d’Esgrignon family.  So strong was the impression that Victurnien, like Sganarelle or Mascarille in the play, like everybody else who feels a twinge of conscience at his finger-tips, made an involuntary gesture.

Now that he was sure of unlimited credit with the Kellers, he opened Chesnel’s letter gaily.  He had expected four full pages, full of expostulation to the brim; he glanced down the sheet for the familiar words “prudence,” “honor,” “determination to do right,” and the like, and saw something else instead which made his head swim.

“MONSIEUR LE COMTE,—­Of all my fortune I have now but two hundred thousand francs left.  I beg of you not to exceed that amount, if you should do one of the most devoted servants of your family the honor of taking it.  I present my respects to you.

CHESNEL.”

“He is one of Plutarch’s men,” Victurnien said to himself, as he tossed the letter on the table.  He felt chagrined; such magnanimity made him feel very small.

“There! one must reform,” he thought; and instead of going to a restaurant and spending fifty or sixty francs over his dinner, he retrenched by dining with the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and told her about the letter.

“I should like to see that man,” she said, letting her eyes shine like two fixed stars.

“What would you do?”

“Why, he should manage my affairs for me.”

Diane de Maufrigneuse was divinely dressed; she meant her toilet to do honor to Victurnien.  The levity with which she treated his affairs or, more properly speaking, his debts fascinated him.

The charming pair went to the Italiens.  Never had that beautiful and enchanting woman looked more seraphic, more ethereal.  Nobody in the house could have believed that she had debts which reached the sum total mentioned by de Marsay that very morning.  No single one of the cares of earth had touched that sublime forehead of hers, full of woman’s pride of the highest kind.  In her, a pensive air seemed to be some gleam of an earthly love, nobly extinguished.  The men for the most part were wagering that Victurnien, with his handsome figure, laid her under contribution; while the women, sure of their rival’s subterfuge, admired her as Michael Angelo admired Raphael, in petto.  Victurnien loved Diane, according to one of these ladies, for the sake of her hair—­she had the most beautiful fair hair in France; another maintained that Diane’s pallor was her principal merit, for she was not really well shaped, her dress made the most of her figure; yet others thought that Victurnien loved her for her foot, her one good point, for she had a flat figure.  But (and this brings the present-day manner of Paris before you in an astonishing manner) whereas all the men said that the Duchess was subsidizing Victurnien’s splendor, the women, on the other hand, gave people to understand that it was Victurnien who paid for the angel’s wings, as Rastignac said.

As they drove back again, Victurnien had it on the tip of his tongue a score of times to open this chapter, for the Duchess’ debts weighed more heavily upon his mind than his own; and a score of times his purpose died away before the attitude of the divine creature beside him.  He could see her by the light of the carriage lamps; she was bewitching in the love-languor which always seemed to be extorted by the violence of passion from her madonna’s purity.  The Duchess did not fall into the mistake of talking of her virtue, of her angel’s estate, as provincial women, her imitators, do.  She was far too clever.  She made him, for whom she made such great sacrifices, think these things for himself.  At the end of six months she could make him feel that a harmless kiss on her hand was a deadly sin; she contrived that every grace should be extorted from her, and this with such consummate art, that it was impossible not to feel that she was more an angel than ever when she yielded.

None but Parisian women are clever enough always to give a new charm to the moon, to romanticize the stars, to roll in the same sack of charcoal and emerge each time whiter than ever.  This is the highest refinement of intellectual and Parisian civilization.  Women beyond the Rhine or the English Channel believe nonsense of this sort when they utter it; while your Parisienne makes her lover believe that she is an angel, the better to add to his bliss by flattering his vanity on both sides—­temporal and spiritual.  Certain persons, detractors of the Duchess, maintain that she was the first dupe of her own white magic.  A wicked slander.  The Duchess believed in nothing but herself.

By the end of the year 1823 the Kellers had supplied Victurnien with two hundred thousand francs, and neither Chesnel nor Mlle. Armande knew anything about it.  He had had, besides, two thousand crowns from Chesnel at one time and another, the better to hide the sources on which he was drawing.  He wrote lying letters to his poor father and aunt, who lived on, happy and deceived, like most happy people under the sun.  The insidious current of life in Paris was bringing a dreadful catastrophe upon the great and noble house; and only one person was in the secret of it.  This was du Croisier.  He rubbed his hands gleefully as he went past in the dark and looked in at the Antiquities.  He had good hope of attaining his ends; and his ends were not, as heretofore, the simple ruin of the d’Esgrignons, but the dishonor of their house.  He felt instinctively at such times that his revenge was at hand; he scented it in the wind!  He had been sure of it indeed from the day when he discovered that the young Count’s burden of debt was growing too heavy for the boy to bear.

Du Croisier’s first step was to rid himself of his most hated enemy, the venerable Chesnel.  The good old man lived in the Rue du Bercail, in a house with a steep-pitched roof.  There was a little paved courtyard in front, where the rose-bushes grew and clambered up to the windows of the upper story.  Behind lay a little country garden, with its box-edged borders, shut in by damp, gloomy-looking walls.  The prim, gray-painted street door, with its wicket opening and bell attached, announced quite as plainly as the official scutcheon that “a notary lives here.”

It was half-past five o’clock in the afternoon, at which hour the old man usually sat digesting his dinner.  He had drawn his black leather-covered armchair before the fire, and put on his armor, a painted pasteboard contrivance shaped like a top boot, which protected his stockinged legs from the heat of the fire; for it was one of the good man’s habits to sit for a while after dinner with his feet on the dogs and to stir up the glowing coals.  He always ate too much; he was fond of good living.  Alas! if it had not been for that little failing, would he not have been more perfect than it is permitted to mortal man to be?  Chesnel had finished his cup of coffee.  His old housekeeper had just taken away the tray which had been used for the purpose for the last twenty years.  He was waiting for his clerks to go before he himself went out for his game at cards, and meanwhile he was thinking —­no need to ask of whom or what.  A day seldom passed but he asked himself, “Where is he?  What is he doing?” He thought that the Count was in Italy with the fair Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.

When every franc of a man’s fortune has come to him, not by inheritance, but through his own earning and saving, it is one of his sweetest pleasures to look back upon the pains that have gone to the making of it, and then to plan out a future for his crowns.  This it is to conjugate the verb “to enjoy” in every tense.  And the old lawyer, whose affections were all bound up in a single attachment, was thinking that all the carefully-chosen, well-tilled land which he had pinched and scraped to buy would one day go to round the d’Esgrignon estates, and the thought doubled his pleasure.  His pride swelled as he sat at his ease in the old armchair; and the building of glowing coals, which he raised with the tongs, sometimes seemed to him to be the old noble house built up again, thanks to his care.  He pictured the young Count’s prosperity, and told himself that he had done well to live for such an aim.  Chesnel was not lacking in intelligence; sheer goodness was not the sole source of his great devotion; he had a pride of his own; he was like the nobles who used to rebuild a pillar in a cathedral to inscribe their name upon it; he meant his name to be remembered by the great house which he had restored.  Future generations of d’Esgrignons should speak of old Chesnel.  Just at this point his old housekeeper came in with signs of alarm in her countenance.

“Is the house on fire, Brigitte?”

“Something of the sort,” said she.  “Here is M. du Croisier wanting to speak to you——­”

“M. du Croisier,” repeated the old lawyer.  A stab of cold misgiving gave him so sharp a pang at the heart that he dropped the tongs.  “M. du Croisier here!” thought he, “our chief enemy!”

Du Croisier came in at that moment, like a cat that scents milk in a dairy.  He made a bow, seated himself quietly in the easy-chair which the lawyer brought forward, and produced a bill for two hundred and twenty-seven thousand francs, principal and interest, the total amount of sums advanced to M. Victurnien in bills of exchange drawn upon du Croisier, and duly honored by him.  Of these, he now demanded immediate payment, with a threat of proceeding to extremities with the heir-presumptive of the house.  Chesnel turned the unlucky letters over one by one, and asked the enemy to keep the secret.  This he engaged to do if he were paid within forty-eight hours.  He was pressed for money he had obliged various manufacturers; and there followed a series of the financial fictions by which neither notaries nor borrowers are deceived.  Chesnel’s eyes were dim; he could scarcely keep back the tears.  There was but one way of raising the money; he must mortgage his own lands up to their full value.  But when du Croisier learned the difficulty in the way of repayment, he forgot that he was hard pressed; he no longer wanted ready money, and suddenly came out with a proposal to buy the old lawyer’s property.  The sale was completed within two days.  Poor Chesnel could not bear the thought of the son of the house undergoing a five years’ imprisonment for debt.  So in a few days’ time nothing remained to him but his practice, the sums that were due to him, and the house in which he lived.  Chesnel, stripped of all his lands, paced to and fro in his private office, paneled with dark oak, his eyes fixed on the beveled edges of the chestnut cross-beams of the ceiling, or on the trellised vines in the garden outside.  He was not thinking of his farms now, or of Le Jard, his dear house in the country; not he.

“What will become of him?  He ought to come back; they must marry him to some rich heiress,” he said to himself; and his eyes were dim, his head heavy.

How to approach Mlle. Armande, and in what words to break the news to her, he did not know.  The man who had just paid the debts of the family quaked at the thought of confessing these things.  He went from the Rue du Bercail to the Hotel d’Esgrignon with pulses throbbing like some girl’s heart when she leaves her father’s roof by stealth, not to return again till she is a mother and her heart is broken.

Mlle. Armande had just received a charming letter, charming in its hypocrisy.  Her nephew was the happiest man under the sun.  He had been to the baths, he had been traveling in Italy with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, and now sent his journal to his aunt.  Every sentence was instinct with love.  There were enchanting descriptions of Venice, and fascinating appreciations of the great works of Venetian art; there were most wonderful pages full of the Duomo at Milan, and again of Florence; he described the Apennines, and how they differed from the Alps, and how in some village like Chiavari happiness lay all around you, ready made.

The poor aunt was under the spell.  She saw the far-off country of love, she saw, hovering above the land, the angel whose tenderness gave to all that beauty a burning glow.  She was drinking in the letter at long draughts; how should it have been otherwise?  The girl who had put love from her was now a woman ripened by repressed and pent-up passion, by all the longings continually and gladly offered up as a sacrifice on the altar of the hearth.  Mlle. Armande was not like the Duchess.  She did not look like an angel.  She was rather like the little, straight, slim and slender, ivory-tinted statues, which those wonderful sculptors, the builders of cathedrals, placed here and there about the buildings.  Wild plants sometimes find a hold in the damp niches, and weave a crown of beautiful bluebell flowers about the carved stone.  At this moment the blue buds were unfolding in the fair saint’s eyes.  Mlle. Armande loved the charming couple as if they stood apart from real life; she saw nothing wrong in a married woman’s love for Victurnien; any other woman she would have judged harshly; but in this case, not to have loved her nephew would have been the unpardonable sin.  Aunts, mothers, and sisters have a code of their own for nephews and sons and brothers.

Mlle. Armande was in Venice; she saw the lines of fairy palaces that stand on either side of the Grand Canal; she was sitting in Victurnien’s gondola; he was telling her what happiness it had been to feel that the Duchess’ beautiful hand lay in his own, to know that she loved him as they floated together on the breast of the amorous Queen of Italian seas.  But even in that moment of bliss, such as angels know, some one appeared in the garden walk.  It was Chesnel!  Alas! the sound of his tread on the gravel might have been the sound of the sands running from Death’s hour-glass to be trodden under his unshod feet.  The sound, the sight of a dreadful hopelessness in Chesnel’s face, gave her that painful shock which follows a sudden recall of the senses when the soul has sent them forth into the world of dreams.

“What is it?” she cried, as if some stab had pierced to her heart.

“All is lost!” said Chesnel.  “M. le Comte will bring dishonor upon the house if we do not set it in order.”  He held out the bills, and described the agony of the last few days in a few simple but vigorous and touching words.

“He is deceiving us!  The miserable boy!” cried Mlle. Armande, her heart swelling as the blood surged back to it in heavy throbs.

“Let us both say mea culpa, mademoiselle,” the old lawyer said stoutly; “we have always allowed him to have his own way; he needed stern guidance; he could not have it from you with your inexperience of life; nor from me, for he would not listen to me.  He has had no mother.”

“Fate sometimes deals terribly with a noble house in decay,” said Mlle. Armande, with tears in her eyes.

The Marquis came up as she spoke.  He had been walking up and down the garden while he read the letter sent by his son after his return.  Victurnien gave his itinerary from an aristocrat’s point of view; telling how he had been welcomed by the greatest Italian families of Genoa, Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Naples.  This flattering reception he owed to his name, he said, and partly, perhaps, to the Duchess as well.  In short, he had made his appearance magnificently, and as befitted a d’Esgrignon.

“Have you been at your old tricks, Chesnel?” asked the Marquis.

Mlle. Armande made Chesnel an eager sign, dreadful to see.  They understood each other.  The poor father, the flower of feudal honor, must die with all his illusions.  A compact of silence and devotion was ratified between the two noble hearts by a simple inclination of the head.

“Ah!  Chesnel, it was not exactly in this way that the d’Esgrignons went into Italy at the end of the fourteenth century, when Marshal Trivulzio, in the service of the King of France, served under a d’Esgrignon, who had a Bayard too under his orders.  Other times, other pleasures.  And, for that matter, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse is at least the equal of a Marchesa di Spinola.”

And, on the strength of his genealogical tree, the old man swung himself off with a coxcomb’s air, as if he himself had once made a conquest of the Marchesa di Spinola, and still possessed the Duchess of to-day.

The two companions in unhappiness were left together on the garden bench, with the same thought for a bond of union.  They sat for a long time, saying little save vague, unmeaning words, watching the father walk away in his happiness, gesticulating as if he were talking to himself.

“What will become of him now?” Mlle. Armande asked after a while.

“Du Croisier has sent instructions to the MM.  Keller; he is not to be allowed to draw any more without authorization.”

“And there are debts,” continued Mlle. Armande.

“I am afraid so.”

“If he is left without resources, what will he do?”

“I dare not answer that question to myself.”

“But he must be drawn out of that life, he must come back to us, or he will have nothing left.”

“And nothing else left to him,” Chesnel said gloomily.  But Mlle. Armande as yet did not and could not understand the full force of those words.

“Is there any hope of getting him away from that woman, that Duchess?  Perhaps she leads him on.”

“He would not stick at a crime to be with her,” said Chesnel, trying to pave the way to an intolerable thought by others less intolerable.

“Crime,” repeated Mlle. Armande.  “Oh, Chesnel, no one but you would think of such a thing!” she added, with a withering look; before such a look from a woman’s eyes no mortal can stand.  “There is but one crime that a noble can commit—­the crime of high treason; and when he is beheaded, the block is covered with a black cloth, as it is for kings.”

“The times have changed very much,” said Chesnel, shaking his head.  Victurnien had thinned his last thin, white hairs.  “Our Martyr-King did not die like the English King Charles.”

That thought soothed Mlle. Armande’s splendid indignation; a shudder ran through her; but still she did not realize what Chesnel meant.

“To-morrow we will decide what we must do,” she said; “it needs thought.  At the worst, we have our lands.”

“Yes,” said Chesnel.  “You and M. le Marquis own the estate conjointly; but the larger part of it is yours.  You can raise money upon it without saying a word to him.”

The players at whist, reversis, boston, and backgammon noticed that evening that Mlle. Armande’s features, usually so serene and pure, showed signs of agitation.

“That poor heroic child!” said the old Marquise de Casteran, “she must be suffering still.  A woman never knows what her sacrifices to her family may cost her.”

Next day it was arranged with Chesnel that Mlle. Armande should go to Paris to snatch her nephew from perdition.  If any one could carry off Victurnien, was it not the woman whose motherly heart yearned over him?  Mlle. Armande made up her mind that she would go to the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and tell her all.  Still, some sort of pretext was necessary to explain the journey to the Marquis and the whole town.  At some cost to her maidenly delicacy, Mlle. Armande allowed it to be thought that she was suffering from a complaint which called for a consultation of skilled and celebrated physicians.  Goodness knows whether the town talked of this or no!  But Mlle. Armande saw that something far more than her own reputation was at stake.  She set out.  Chesnel brought her his last bag of louis; she took it, without paying any attention to it, as she took her white capuchine and thread mittens.

“Generous girl!  What grace!” he said, as he put her into the carriage with her maid, a woman who looked like a gray sister.

Du Croisier had thought out his revenge, as provincials think out everything.  For studying out a question in all its bearings, there are no folk in this world like savages, peasants, and provincials; and this is how, when they proceed from thought to action, you find every contingency provided for from beginning to end.  Diplomatists are children compared with these classes of mammals; they have time before them, an element which is lacking to those people who are obliged to think about a great many things, to superintend the progress of all kinds of schemes, to look forward for all sorts of contingencies in the wider interests of human affairs.  Had de Croisier sounded poor Victurnien’s nature so well, that he foresaw how easily the young Count would lend himself to his schemes of revenge?  Or was he merely profiting by an opportunity for which he had been on the watch for years?  One circumstance there was, to be sure, in his manner of preparing his stroke, which shows a certain skill.  Who was it that gave du Croisier warning of the moment?  Was it the Kellers?  Or could it have been President du Ronceret’s son, then finishing his law studies in Paris?

Du Croisier wrote to Victurnien, telling him that the Kellers had been instructed to advance no more money; and that letter was timed to arrive just as the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was in the utmost perplexity, and the Comte d’Esgrignon consumed by the sense of poverty as dreadful as it was cunningly hidden.  The wretched young man was exerting all his ingenuity to seem as if he were wealthy!

Now in the letter which informed the victim that in future the Kellers would make no further advances without security, there was a tolerably wide space left between the forms of an exaggerated respect and the signature.  It was quite easy to tear off the best part of the letter and convert it into a bill of exchange for any amount.  The diabolical missive had been enclosed in an envelope, so that the other side of the sheet was blank.  When it arrived, Victurnien was writhing in the lowest depths of despair.  After two years of the most prosperous, sensual, thoughtless, and luxurious life, he found himself face to face with the most inexorable poverty; it was an absolute impossibility to procure money.  There had been some throes of crisis before the journey came to an end.  With the Duchess’ help he had managed to extort various sums from bankers; but it had been with the greatest difficulty, and, moreover, those very amounts were about to start up again before him as overdue bills of exchange in all their rigor, with a stern summons to pay from the Bank of France and the commercial court.  All through the enjoyments of those last weeks the unhappy boy had felt the point of the Commander’s sword; at every supper-party he heard, like Don Juan, the heavy tread of the statue outside upon the stairs.  He felt an unaccountable creeping of the flesh, a warning that the sirocco of debt is nigh at hand.  He reckoned on chance.  For five years he had never turned up a blank in the lottery, his purse had always been replenished.  After Chesnel had come du Croisier (he told himself), after du Croisier surely another gold mine would pour out its wealth.  And besides, he was winning great sums at play; his luck at play had saved him several unpleasant steps already; and often a wild hope sent him to the Salon des Etrangers only to lose his winnings afterwards at whist at the club.  His life for the past two months had been like the immortal finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; and of a truth, if a young man has come to such a plight as Victurnien’s, that finale is enough to make him shudder.  Can anything better prove the enormous power of music than that sublime rendering of the disorder and confusion arising out of a life wholly give up to sensual indulgence? that fearful picture of a deliberate effort to shut out the thought of debts and duels, deceit and evil luck?  In that music Mozart disputes the palm with Moliere.  The terrific finale, with its glow, its power, its despair and laughter, its grisly spectres and elfish women, centres about the prodigal’s last effort made in the after-supper heat of wine, the frantic struggle which ends the drama.  Victurnien was living through this infernal poem, and alone.  He saw visions of himself—­a friendless, solitary outcast, reading the words carved on the stone, the last words on the last page of the book that had held him spellbound—­THE END!

Yes; for him all would be at an end, and that soon.  Already he saw the cold, ironical eyes which his associates would turn upon him, and their amusement over his downfall.  Some of them he knew were playing high on that gambling-table kept open all day long at the Bourse, or in private houses at the clubs, and anywhere and everywhere in Paris; but not one of these men could spare a banknote to save an intimate.  There was no help for it—­Chesnel must be ruined.  He had devoured Chesnel’s living.

He sat with the Duchess in their box at the Italiens, the whole house envying them their happiness, and while he smiled at her, all the Furies were tearing at his heart.  Indeed, to give some idea of the depths of doubt, despair, and incredulity in which the boy was groveling; he who so clung to life—­the life which the angel had made so fair—­who so loved it, that he would have stooped to baseness merely to live; he, the pleasure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d’Esgrignon, had even taken out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide.  He who would never have brooked the appearance of an insult was abusing himself in language which no man is likely to hear except from himself.

He left du Croisier’s letter lying open on the bed.  Josephin had brought it in at nine o’clock.  Victurnien’s furniture had been seized, but he slept none the less.  After he came back from the Opera, he and the Duchess had gone to a voluptuous retreat, where they often spent a few hours together after the most brilliant court balls and evening parties and gaieties.  Appearances were very cleverly saved.  Their love-nest was a garret like any other to all appearance; Mme. de Maufrigneuse was obliged to bow her head with its court feathers or wreath of flowers to enter in at the door; but within all the peris of the East had made the chamber fair.  And now that the Count was on the brink of ruin, he had longed to bid farewell to the dainty nest, which he had built to realize a day-dream worthy of his angel.  Presently adversity would break the enchanted eggs; there would be no brood of white doves, no brilliant tropical birds, no more of the thousand bright-winged fancies which hover above our heads even to the last days of our lives.  Alas! alas! in three days he must be gone; his bills had fallen into the hands of the money-lenders, the law proceedings had reached the last stage.

An evil thought crossed his brain.  He would fly with the Duchess; they would live in some undiscovered nook in the wilds of North or South America; but—­he would fly with a fortune, and leave his creditors to confront their bills.  To carry out the plan, he had only to cut off the lower portion of that letter with du Croisier’s signature, and to fill in the figures to turn it into a bill, and present it to the Kellers.  There was a dreadful struggle with temptation; tears shed, but the honor of the family triumphed, subject to one condition.  Victurnien wanted to be sure of his beautiful Diane; he would do nothing unless she should consent to their flight.  So he went to the Duchess in the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honore, and found her in coquettish morning dress, which cost as much in thought as in money, a fit dress in which to begin to play the part of Angel at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Mme. de Maufrigneuse was somewhat pensive.  Cares of a similar kind were gnawing her mind; but she took them gallantly.  Of all the various feminine organizations classified by physiologists, there is one that has something indescribably terrible about it.  Such women combine strength of soul and clear insight, with a faculty for prompt decision, and a recklessness, or rather resolution in a crisis which would shake a man’s nerves.  And these powers lie out of sight beneath an appearance of the most graceful helplessness.  Such women only among womankind afford examples of a phenomenon which Buffon recognized in men alone, to wit, the union, or rather the disunion, of two different natures in one human being.  Other women are wholly women; wholly tender, wholly devoted, wholly mothers, completely null and completely tiresome; nerves and brain and blood are all in harmony; but the Duchess, and others like her, are capable of rising to the highest heights of feelings, or of showing the most selfish insensibility.  It is one of the glories of Moliere that he has given us a wonderful portrait of such a woman, from one point of view only, in that greatest of his full-length figures—­Celimene; Celimene is the typical aristocratic woman, as Figaro, the second edition of Panurge, represents the people.

So, the Duchess, being overwhelmed with debt, laid it upon herself to give no more than a moment’s thought to the avalanche of cares, and to take her resolution once and for all; Napoleon could take up or lay down the burden of his thoughts in precisely the same way.  The Duchess possessed the faculty of standing aloof from herself; she could look on as a spectator at the crash when it came, instead of submitting to be buried beneath.  This was certainly great, but repulsive in a woman.  When she awoke in the morning she collected her thoughts; and by the time she had begun to dress she had looked at the danger in its fullest extent and faced the possibilities of terrific downfall.  She pondered.  Should she take refuge in a foreign country?  Or should she go to the King and declare her debts to him?  Or again, should she fascinate a du Tillet or a Nucingen, and gamble on the stock exchange to pay her creditors?  The city man would find the money; he would be intelligent enough to bring her nothing but the profits, without so much as mentioning the losses, a piece of delicacy which would gloss all over.  The catastrophe, and these various ways of averting it, had all been reviewed quite coolly, calmly, and without trepidation.

As a naturalist takes up some king of butterflies and fastens him down on cotton-wool with a pin, so Mme. de Maufrigneuse had plucked love out of her heart while she pondered the necessity of the moment, and was quite ready to replace the beautiful passion on its immaculate setting so soon as her duchess’ coronet was safe. She knew none of the hesitation which Cardinal Richelieu hid from all the world but Pere Joseph; none of the doubts that Napoleon kept at first entirely to himself.  “Either the one or the other,” she told herself.

She was sitting by the fire, giving orders for her toilette for a drive in the Bois if the weather should be fine, when Victurnien came in.

The Comte d’Esgrignon, with all his stifled capacity, his so keen intellect, was in exactly the state which might have been looked for in the woman.  His heart was beating violently, the perspiration broke out over him as he stood in his dandy’s trappings; he was afraid as yet to lay a hand on the corner-stone which upheld the pyramid of his life with Diane.  So much it cost him to know the truth.  The cleverest men are fain to deceive themselves on one or two points if the truth once known is likely to humiliate them in their own eyes, and damage themselves with themselves.  Victurnien forced his own irresolution into the field by committing himself.

“What is the matter with you?” Diane de Maufrigneuse had said at once, at the sight of her beloved Victurnien’s face.

“Why, dear Diane, I am in such a perplexity; a man gone to the bottom and at his last gasp is happy in comparison.”

“Pshaw! it is nothing,” said she; “you are a child.  Let us see now; tell me about it.”

“I am hopelessly in debt.  I have come to the end of my tether.”

“Is that all?” said she, smiling at him.  “Money matters can always be arranged somehow or other; nothing is irretrievable except disasters in love.”

Victurnien’s mind being set at rest by this swift comprehension of his position, he unrolled the bright-colored web of his life for the last two years and a half; but it was the seamy side of it which he displayed with something of genius, and still more of wit, to his Diane.  He told his tale with the inspiration of the moment, which fails no one in great crises; he had sufficient artistic skill to set it off by a varnish of delicate scorn for men and things.  It was an aristocrat who spoke.  And the Duchess listened as she could listen.

One knee was raised, for she sat with her foot on a stool.  She rested her elbow on her knee and leant her face on her hand so that her fingers closed daintily over her shapely chin.  Her eyes never left his; but thoughts by myriads flitted under the blue surface, like gleams of stormy light between two clouds.  Her forehead was calm, her mouth gravely intent—­grave with love; her lips were knotted fast by Victurnien’s lips.  To have her listening thus was to believe that a divine love flowed from her heart.  Wherefore, when the Count had proposed flight to this soul, so closely knit to his own, he could not help crying, “You are an angel!”

The fair Maufrigneuse made silent answer; but she had not spoken as yet.

“Good, very good,” she said at last. (She had not given herself up to the love expressed in her face; her mind had been entirely absorbed by deep-laid schemes which she kept to herself.) “But that is not the question, dear.” (The “angel” was only “that” by this time.) “Let us think of your affairs.  Yes, we will go, and the sooner the better.  Arrange it all; I will follow you.  It is glorious to leave Paris and the world behind.  I will set about my preparations in such a way that no one can suspect anything.”

I will follow you!  Just so Mlle. Mars might have spoken those words to send a thrill through two thousand listening men and women.  When a Duchesse de Maufrigneuse offers, in such words, to make such a sacrifice to love, she has paid her debt.  How should Victurnien speak of sordid details after that?  He could so much the better hide his schemes, because Diane was particularly careful not to inquire into them.  She was now, and always, as de Marsay said, an invited guest at a banquet wreathed with roses, a banquet which mankind, as in duty bound, made ready for her.

Victurnien would not go till the promise had been sealed.  He must draw courage from his happiness before he could bring himself to do a deed on which, as he inwardly told himself, people would be certain to put a bad construction.  Still (and this was the thought that decided him) he counted on his aunt and father to hush up the affair; he even counted on Chesnel.  Chesnel would think of one more compromise.  Besides, “this business,” as he called it in his thoughts, was the only way of raising money on the family estate.  With three hundred thousand francs, he and Diane would lead a happy life hidden in some palace in Venice; and there they would forget the world.  They went through their romance in advance.

Next day Victurnien made out a bill for three hundred thousand francs, and took it to the Kellers.  The Kellers advanced the money, for du Croisier happened to have a balance at the time; but they wrote to let him know that he must not draw again on them without giving them notice.  Du Croisier, much astonished, asked for a statement of accounts.  It was sent.  Everything was explained.  The day of his vengeance had arrived.