Chapter 26

“Heavens! how stupid I am! he expects me to love him for himself.”

Accordingly the next day she took the Heir in her _caleche_ to the Bois, for she now had two little carriages, drawn by two horses. In the course of this public _tete-a-tete_ she opened the question of her future, and declared that she wished to marry.

“I have seven hundred thousand francs,” she said, “and I admit to you that if I could find a man full of ambition, who knew how to understand my character, I would change my position; for do you know what is the dream of my life? To become a true bourgeoise, enter an honorable family, and make my husband and children truly happy.”

The Norman would fain be “distinguished” by Madame Schontz, but as for marrying her, that folly seemed debatable to a bachelor of thirty-eight whom the revolution of July had made a judge. Seeing his hesitation, Madame Schontz made the Heir the butt of her wit, her jests, and her disdain, and turned to Couture. Within a week, the latter, whom she put upon the scent of her fortune, had offered his hand, and heart, and future,--three things of about the same value.

The manoeuvres of Madame Schontz had reached this stage of proceeding, when Madame de Grandlieu began her inquiries into the life and habits of the Beatrix of the Place Saint-Georges.

XXIV. THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL RELATIONS AND POSITION

In accordance with the advice of the Abbe Brossette the Duchesse de Grandlieu asked the Marquis d’Ajuda to bring her that king of political cut-throats, the celebrated Comte Maxime de Trailles, archduke of Bohemia, the youngest of young men, though he was now fully fifty years of age. Monsieur d’Ajuda arranged to dine with Maxime at the club in the rue de Beuane, and proposed to him after dinner to go and play dummy whist with the Duc de Grandlieu, who had an attack of gout and was all alone.

Though the son-in-law of the duke and the cousin of the duchess had every right to present him in a salon where he had never yet set foot, Maxime de Trailles did not deceive himself as to the meaning of an invitation thus given. He felt certain that the duke or the duchess had some need of him. Club life where men play cards with other men whom they do not receive in their own houses is by no means one of the most trifling signs of the present age.

The Duc de Grandlieu did Maxime the honor of appearing to suffer from his gout. After several games of whist he went to bed, leaving his wife _tete-a-tete_ with Maxime and d’Ajuda. The duchess, seconded by the marquis, communicated her project to Monsieur de Trailles, and asked his assistance, while ostensibly asking only for his advice. Maxime listened to the end without committing himself, and waited till the duchess should ask point-blank for his co-operation before replying.

“Madame, I fully understand you,” he then said, casting on her and the marquis one of those shrewd, penetrating, astute, comprehensive glances by which such great scamps compromise their interlocutors. “D’Ajuda will tell you that if any one in Paris can conduct that difficult negotiation, it is I,--of course without mixing you up in it; without its being even known that I have come here this evening. Only, before anything is done, we must settle preliminaries. How much are you willing to sacrifice?”

“All that is necessary.”

“Very well, then, Madame la duchesse. As the price of my efforts you must do me the honor to receive in your house and seriously protect Madame la Comtesse de Trailles.”

“What! are you married?” cried d’Ajuda.

“I shall be married within a fortnight to the heiress of a rich but extremely bourgeois family,--a sacrifice to opinion! I imbibe the very spirit of my government, and start upon a new career. Consequently, Madame la duchesse will understand how important it is to me to have my wife adopted by her and by her family. I am certain of being made deputy by the resignation of my father-in-law, and I am promised a diplomatic post in keeping with my new fortune. I do not see why my wife should not be as well received as Madame de Portenduere in that society of young women which includes Mesdames de la Bastie, Georges de Maufrigneuse, de L’Estorade, du Guenic, d’Ajuda, de Restaud, de Rastignac, de Vandenesse. My wife is pretty, and I will undertake to _un-cotton-night-cap_ her. Will this suit you, Madame la duchesse? You are religious, and if you say yes, your promise, which I know to be sacred, will greatly aid in my change of life. It will be one more good action to your account. Alas! I have long been the king of _mauvais sujets_, and I want to make an end of it. After all, we bear, azure, a wivern or, darting fire, ongle gules, and scaled vert, a chief ermine, from the time of Francois I., who thought proper to ennoble the valet of Louis XI., and we have been counts since Catherine de’ Medici.”

“I will receive and protect your wife,” said the duchess, solemnly, “and my family will not turn its back upon her; I give you my word.”

“Ah! Madame la duchesse,” cried Maxime, visibly touched, “if Monsieur le duc would also deign to treat me with some kindness, I promise you to make your plan succeed without its costing you very much. But,” he continued after a pause, “you must take upon yourself to follow my instructions. This is the last intrigue of my bachelor life; it must be all the better managed because it concerns a good action,” he added, smiling.

“Follow your instructions!” said the duchess. “Then I must appear in all this.”

“Ah! madame, I will not compromise you,” cried Maxime. “I esteem you too much to demand guarantees. I merely mean that you must follow my advice. For example, it will be necessary that du Guenic be taken away by his wife for at least two years; she must show him Switzerland, Italy, Germany,--in short, all possible countries.”

“Ah! you confirm a fear of my director,” said the duchess, naively, remembering the judicious objection of the Abbe Brossette.

Maxime and d’Ajuda could not refrain from smiling at the idea of this agreement between heaven and hell.

“To prevent Madame de Rochefide from ever seeing Calyste again,” she continued, “we will all travel, Juste and his wife, Calyste, Sabine, and I. I will leave Clotilde with her father--”

“It is too soon to sing victory, madame,” said Maxime. “I foresee enormous difficulties; though I shall no doubt vanquish them. Your esteem and your protection are rewards which would make me commit the vilest actions, but these will be--”

“The vilest actions!” cried the duchess, interrupting this modern condottiere, and showing on her countenance as much disgust as amazement.

“And you would share them, madame, inasmuch as I am only your agent. But are you ignorant of the degree of blindness to which Madame de Rochefide has brought your son-in-law? I know it from Canalis and Nathan, between whom she was hesitating when Calyste threw himself into the lioness’s jaws. Beatrix has contrived to persuade that serious Breton that she has never loved any one but him; that she is virtuous; that Conti was merely a sentimental head-love in which neither the heart nor the rest of it had any part,--a musical love, in short! As for Rochefide, that was duty. So, you understand, she is virgin!--a fact she proves by forgetting her son, whom for more than a year she has not made the slightest attempt to see. The truth is, the little count will soon be twelve years old, and he finds in Madame Schontz a mother who is all the more a mother because maternity is, as you know, a passion with women of that sort. Du Guenic would let himself be cut in pieces, and would chop up his wife for Beatrix; and you think it is an easy matter to drag a man from the depths of such credulity! Ah! madame, Shakespeare’s Iago would lose all his handkerchiefs. People think that Othello, or his younger brother, Orosmanes, or Saint-Preux, Rene, Werther, and other lovers now in possession of fame, represented love! Never did their frosty-hearted fathers know what absolute love is; Moliere alone conceived it. Love, Madame la duchesse, is not loving a noble woman, a Clarissa--a great effort, faith! Love is to say to one’s self: ‘She whom I love is infamous; she deceives me, she will deceive me; she is an abandoned creature, she smells of the frying of hell-fire;’ but we rush to her, we find there the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise. That is how Moliere loved, and how we, scamps that we are! how we love. As for me, I weep at the great scene of Arnolphe. Now, that is how your son-in-law loves Beatrix. I shall have trouble separating Rochefide from Madame Schontz; but Madame Schontz will no doubt lend herself to the plot; I shall study her interior. But as for Calyste and Beatrix, they will need the blows of an axe, far deeper treachery, and so base an infamy that your virtuous imagination could never descend to it--unless indeed your director gave you a hand. You have asked the impossible, you shall be obeyed. But in spite of my settled intention to war with fire and sword, I cannot absolutely promise you success. I have known lovers who did not recoil before the most awful disillusions. You are too virtuous to know the full power of women who are not virtuous.”

“Do not enter upon those infamous actions until I have consulted the Abbe Brossette to know how far I may be your accomplice,” cried the duchess, with a naivete which disclosed what selfishness there is in piety.

“You shall be ignorant of everything, my dear mother,” interposed d’Ajuda.

On the portico, while the carriage of the marquis was drawing up, d’Ajuda said to Maxime:--

“You frightened that good duchess.”

“But she has no idea of the difficulty of what she asks. Let us go to the Jockey Club; Rochefide must invite me to dine with Madame Schontz to-morrow, for to-night my plan will be made, and I shall have chosen the pawns on my chess-board to carry it out. In the days of her splendor Beatrix refused to receive me; I intend to pay off that score, and I will avenge your sister-in-law so cruelly that perhaps she will find herself too well revenged.”

The next day Rochefide told Madame Schontz that Maxime de Trailles was coming to dinner. That meant notifying her to display all her luxury, and prepare the choicest food for this connoisseur emeritus, whom all the women of the Madame Schontz type were in awe of. Madame Schontz herself thought as much of her toilet as of putting her house in a state to receive this personage.

In Paris there are as many royalties as there are varieties of art, mental and moral specialties, sciences, professions; the strongest and most capable of the men who practise them has a majesty which is all his own; he is appreciated, respected by his peers, who know the difficulties of his art or profession, and whose admiration is given to the man who surmounts them. Maxime was, in the eyes of _rats_ and courtesans, an extremely powerful and capable man, who had known how to make himself excessively loved. He was also admired by men who knew how difficult it is to live in Paris on good terms with creditors; in short, he had never had any other rival in elegance, deportment, and wit than the illustrious de Marsay, who frequently employed him on political missions. All this will suffice to explain his interview with the duchess, his prestige with Madame Schontz, and the authority of his words in a conference which he intended to have on the boulevard des Italiens with a young man already well-known, though lately arrived, in the Bohemia of Paris.

XXV. A PRINCE OF BOHEMIA

The next day, when Maxime de Trailles rose, Finot (whom he had summoned the night before) was announced. Maxime requested his visitor to arrange, as if by accident, a breakfast at the cafe Anglais, where Finot, Couture, and Lousteau should gossip beside him. Finot, whose position toward the Comte de Trailles was that of a sub-lieutenant before a marshall of France, could refuse him nothing; it was altogether too dangerous to annoy that lion. Consequently, when Maxime came to the breakfast, he found Finot and his two friends at table and the conversation already started on Madame Schontz, about whom Couture, well manoeuvred by Finot and Lousteau (Lousteau being, though not aware of it, Finot’s tool), revealed to the Comte de Trailles all that he wanted to know about her.

About one o’clock, Maxime was chewing a toothpick and talking with du Tillet on Tortoni’s portico, where speculation held a little Bourse, a sort of prelude to the great one. He seemed to be engaged in business, but he was really awaiting the Comte de la Palferine, who, within a given time, was certain to pass that way. The boulevard des Italiens is to-day what the Pont Neuf was in 1650; all persons known to fame pass along it once, at least, in the course of the day. Accordingly, at the end of about ten minutes, Maxime dropped du Tillet’s arm, and nodding to the young Prince of Bohemia said, smiling:--

“One word with you, count.”

The two rivals in their own principality, the one orb on its decline, the other like the rising sun, sat down upon four chairs before the Cafe de Paris. Maxime took care to place a certain distance between himself and some old fellows who habitually sunned themselves like wall-fruit at that hour in the afternoon, to dry out their rheumatic affections. He had excellent reasons for distrusting old men.

“Have you debts?” said Maxime, to the young count.

“If I had none, should I be worthy of being your successor?” replied La Palferine.

“In putting that question to you I don’t place the matter in doubt; I only want to know if the total is reasonable; if it goes to the five or the six?”

“Six what?”

“Figures; whether you owe fifty or one hundred thousand? I have owed, myself, as much as six hundred thousand.”

La Palferine raised his hat with an air as respectful as it was humorous.

“If I had sufficient credit to borrow a hundred thousand francs,” he replied, “I should forget my creditors and go and pass my life in Venice, amid masterpieces of painting and pretty women and--”

“And at my age what would you be?” asked Maxime.

“I should never reach it,” replied the young count.

Maxime returned the civility of his rival, and touched his hat lightly with an air of laughable gravity.

“That’s one way of looking at life,” he replied in the tone of one connoisseur to another. “You owe--?”

“Oh! a mere trifle, unworthy of being confessed to an uncle; he would disinherit me for such a paltry sum,--six thousand.”

“One is often more hampered by six thousand than by a hundred thousand,” said Maxime, sententiously. “La Palferine, you’ve a bold spirit, and you have even more spirit than boldness; you can go far, and make yourself a position. Let me tell you that of all those who have rushed into the career at the close of which I now am, and who have tried to oppose me, you are the only one who has ever pleased me.”

La Palferine colored, so flattered was he by this avowal made with gracious good-humor by the leader of Parisian adventurers. This action of his own vanity was however a recognition of inferiority which wounded him; but Maxime divined that unpleasant reaction, easy to foresee in so clever a mind, and he applied a balm instantly by putting himself at the discretion of the young man.

“Will you do something for me that will facilitate my retreat from the Olympic circus by a fine marriage? I will do as much for you.”

“You make me very proud; it realizes the fable of the Rat and the Lion,” said La Palferine.

“I shall begin by lending you twenty thousand francs,” continued Maxime.

“Twenty thousand francs! I knew very well that by dint of walking up and down this boulevard--” said La Palferine, in the style of a parenthesis.

“My dear fellow, you must put yourself on a certain footing,” said Maxime, laughing. “Don’t go on your own two feet, have six; do as I do, I never get out of my tilbury.”

“But you must be going to ask me for something beyond my powers.”

“No, it is only to make a woman love you within a fortnight.”

“Is it a lorette?”

“Why?”

“Because that’s impossible; but if it concerns a woman, and a well-bred one who is also clever--”

“She is a very illustrious marquise.”

“You want her letters?” said the young count.

“Ah! you are after my own heart!” cried Maxime. “No, that’s not it.”

“Then you want me to love her?”

“Yes, in the real sense--”

“If I am to abandon the aesthetic, it is utterly impossible,” said La Palferine. “I have, don’t you see, as to women a certain honor; we may play the fool with them, but not--”

“Ah! I was not mistaken!” cried Maxime. “Do you think I’m a man to propose mere twopenny infamies to you? No, you must go, and dazzle, and conquer. My good mate, I give you twenty thousand francs, and ten days in which to triumph. Meet me to-night at Madame Schontz’.”

“I dine there.”

“Very good,” returned Maxime. “Later, when you have need of me, Monsieur le comte, you will find me,” he added in the tone of a king who binds himself, but promises nothing.

“This poor woman must have done you some deadly harm,” said La Palferine.

“Don’t try to throw a plummet-line into my waters, my boy; and let me tell you that in case of success you will obtain such powerful influence that you will be able, like me, to retire upon a fine marriage when you are bored with your bohemian life.”

“Comes there a time when it is a bore to amuse one’s self,” said La Palferine, “to be nothing, to live like the birds, to hunt the fields of Paris like a savage, and laugh at everything?”

“All things weary, even hell,” said de Trailles, laughing. “Well, this evening.”

The two _roues_, the old and the young, rose. As Maxime got into his one-horse equipage, he thought to himself: “Madame d’Espard can’t endure Beatrix; she will help me. Hotel de Grandlieu,” he called out to the coachman, observing that Rastignac was just passing him.

Find a great man without some weakness!

The duchess, Madame du Guenic, and Clotilde were evidently weeping.

“What is the matter?” he asked the duchess.

“Calyste did not come home; this is the first time; my poor daughter is in despair.”

“Madame la duchesse,” said Maxime, drawing the pious lady into the embrasure of a window, “for Heaven’s sake keep the utmost secrecy as to my efforts, and ask d’Ajuda to do the same; for if Calyste ever hears of our plot there will be a duel between him and me to the death. When I told you that the affair would not cost much, I meant that you would not be obliged to spend enormous sums; but I do want twenty thousand francs; the rest is my affair; there may be important places to be given, a receiver-generalship possibly.”

The duchess and Maxime left the room. When Madame de Grandlieu returned to her daughter, she again listened to Sabine’s dithyrambics inlaid with family facts even more cruel than those which had already crushed the young wife’s happiness.

“Don’t be so troubled, my darling,” said the duchess. “Beatrix will pay dear for your tears and sufferings; the hand of Satan is upon her; she will meet with ten humiliations for every one she has inflicted upon you.”

Madame Schontz had invited Claude Vignon, who, on several occasions, had expressed a wish to know Maxime de Trailles personally. She also invited Couture, Fabien, Bixiou, Leon de Lora, La Palferine, and Nathan. The latter was asked by Rochefide on account of Maxime. Aurelie thus expected nine guests, all men of the first ability, with the exception of du Ronceret; but the Norman vanity and the brutal ambition of the Heir were fully on a par with Claude Vignon’s literary power, Nathan’s poetic gift, La Palferine’s _finesse_, Couture’s financial eye, Bixiou’s wit, Finot’s shrewdness, Maxime’s profound diplomacy, and Leon de Lora’s genius.

Madame Schontz, anxious to appear both young and beautiful, armed herself with a toilet which that sort of woman has the art of making. She wore a guipure pelerine of spidery texture, a gown of blue velvet, the graceful corsage of which was buttoned with opals, and her hair in bands as smooth and shining as ebony. Madame Schontz owed her celebrity as a pretty woman to the brilliancy and freshness of a complexion as white and warm as that of Creoles, to a face full of spirited details, the features of which were clearly and firmly drawn,--a type long presented in perennial youth by the Comtesse Merlin, and which is perhaps peculiar to Southern races. Unhappily, little Madame Schontz had tended towards ebonpoint ever since her life had become so happy and calm. Her neck, of exquisite roundness, was beginning to take on flesh about the shoulders; but in France the heads of women are principally treasured; so that fine heads will often keep an ill-formed body unobserved.

“My dear child,” said Maxime, coming in and kissing Madame Schontz on the forehead, “Rochefide wanted me to see your establishment; why, it is almost in keeping with his four hundred thousand francs a year. Well, well, he would never have had them if he hadn’t known you. In less than five years you have made him save what others--Antonia, Malaga, Cadine, or Florentine--would have made him lose.”

“I am not a lorette, I am an artist,” said Madame Schontz, with a sort of dignity, “I hope to end, as they say on the stage, as the progenitrix of honest men.”

“It is dreadful, but we are all marrying,” returned Maxime, throwing himself into an arm-chair beside the fire. “Here am I, on the point of making a Comtesse Maxime.”

“Oh, how I should like to see her!” exclaimed Madame Schontz. “But permit me to present to you Monsieur Claude Vignon--Monsieur Claude Vignon, Monsieur de Trailles.”

“Ah, so you are the man who allowed Camille Maupin, the innkeeper of literature, to go into a convent?” cried Maxime. “After you, God. I never received such an honor. Mademoiselle des Touches treated you, monsieur, as though you were Louis XIV.”

“That is how history is written!” replied Claude Vignon. “Don’t you know that her fortune was used to free the Baron du Guenic’s estates? Ah! if she only knew that Calyste now belongs to her ex-friend,” (Maxime pushed the critic’s foot, motioning to Rochefide), “she would issue from her convent, I do believe, to tear him from her.”

“Upon my word, Rochefide, if I were you,” said Maxime, finding that his warning did not stop Vignon, “I should give back my wife’s fortune, so that the world couldn’t say she attached herself to Calyste from necessity.”

“Maxime is right,” remarked Madame Schontz, looking at Arthur, who colored high. “If I have helped you to gain several thousand francs a year, you couldn’t better employ them. I shall have made the happiness of husband _and_ wife; what a feather in my cap!”

“I never thought of it,” replied the marquis; “but a man should be a gentleman before he’s a husband.”

“Let me tell you when is the time to be generous,” said Maxime.

“Arthur,” said Aurelie, “Maxime is right. Don’t you see, old fellow, that generous actions are like Couture’s investments?--you should make them in the nick of time.”

At that moment Couture, followed by Finot, came in; and, soon after, all the guests were assembled in the beautiful blue and gold salon of the hotel Schontz, a title which the various artists had given to their inn after Rochefide purchased it for his Ninon II. When Maxime saw La Palferine, the last to arrive, enter, he walked up to his lieutenant, and taking him aside into the recess of a window, gave him notes for twenty thousand francs.

“Remember, my boy, you needn’t economize them,” he said, with the particular grace of a true scamp.

“There’s none but you who can double the value of what you seem to give,” replied La Palferine.

“Have you decided?”

“Surely, inasmuch as I take the money,” said the count, with a mixture of haughtiness and jest.

“Well, then, Nathan, who is here to-night, will present you two days hence at the house of Madame la Marquise de Rochefide.”