Towards the middle of July in the year 1838, a vehicle of the kind known as a milord* which had recently appeared on the Paris streets, was going along the Rue de l’Université. In it was a portly man of middle height, wearing the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.*
Amongst Parisians, who are reputed to be so intelligent, there are some who think they look infinitely better in uniform than in their ordinary clothes and who assume that women’s tastes are so depraved that they will be favourably impressed by the sight of a bearskin cap and military accoutrements.
The Captain, who belonged to the second company, had a self-satisfied expression which cast a glow over his ruddy complexion and his rather chubby face. One could see from the halo that wealth sets upon the brows of retired shopkeepers that he was an elected member of the Paris administration, a former deputy mayor of his district at the very least. So you may be sure that the ribbon of the Legion of Honour* was not missing from his chest, which bulged out swaggeringly in the Prussian manner. Proudly ensconced in a corner of the milord, this member of the Legion of Honour let his glance wander over the passers-by, who, in Paris, thus become the recipients of pleasant smiles intended for the bright eyes of absent beauties.
The milord stopped in the part of the street between the Rue de Bellechasse and the Rue de Bourgogne, at the door of a large house recently built on a section of the courtyard of an old mansion standing in its own garden. The mansion had been preserved and remained in its original form at the bottom of the courtyard, now reduced to half its size.
Merely from the way the Captain accepted the help of the driver in getting down from the milord, you would have known that he was in his fifties. There are movements which are obviously ponderous and thus as revealing as a birth-certificate. The Captain put his yellow glove back on his right hand and, without a word to the porter, made his way to the ground floor of the mansion with an air which proclaimed, ‘She is mine!’ Paris porters have a knowing eye. They do not stop men who wear a decoration, are dressed in a blue uniform, and have a heavy gait. In short, they recognize the rich.
This ground floor was wholly occupied by Monsieur le Baron Hulot d’Ervy, Commissary-in-Chief under the Republic, former Intendant-General of the army, and at that time head of one of the most important departments of the War Ministry, Councillor of State, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, etc., etc.
Baron Hulot had called himself d’Ervy, the name of his birthplace, so as to be distinguished from his brother, the famous General Hulot, Colonel of the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard, who had been made Count de Forzheim by the Emperor after the 1809 campaign.*
The older brother, the Count, given the responsibility of looking after his younger brother, had, with paternal prudence, placed him in the army administration. There, thanks to the services rendered by both brothers, the Baron had deserved and gained Napoleon’s favour. From 1807, Baron Hulot was Intendant-General of the armies in Spain.*
After ringing the bell, the citizen Captain made strenuous efforts to straighten his jacket, which, owing to the dimensions of his pear-shaped corporation, had rucked up both in front and behind. Admitted as soon as a liveried footman had caught sight of him, this important and imposing man followed the servant, who, as he opened the drawing-room door, announced, ‘Monsieur Crevel!’
On hearing this name, admirably suited to the figure of its owner, a tall, fair, very well-preserved woman jumped up as if she had received an electric shock.
‘Hortense, my love, go into the garden with Cousin Bette,’ she said quickly to her daughter, who was doing her embroidery nearby.
After dropping a graceful curtsey to the Captain, Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot went out by a french window, together with a dried-up old maid, who looked older than the Baroness although she was five years younger.
‘It’s about your marriage,’ whispered Cousin Bette to her young cousin Hortense, not appearing to be offended by the way in which the Baroness dismissed them as if she hardly counted at all.
The cousin’s dress would, if necessary, have explained this lack of ceremony.
The old maid wore a wine-coloured dress of merino wool, whose cut and trimmings were of the style in fashion at the time of the Restoration,* an embroidered collar worth about three francs, and a stitched straw hat with blue satin bows edged with straw, like those worn by old-clothes women at the market. On seeing her kid-leather shoes, whose style indicated the lowest class of shoemaker, a stranger would have hesitated to greet Cousin Bette as a relative of the family, for she looked exactly like a daily sewing-woman. Nevertheless, before leaving the room, the old maid gave Monsieur Crevel a little friendly nod, to which that dignitary replied with a sign of mutual understanding.
‘You will come tomorrow, won’t you, Mademoiselle Fischer?’ he said.
‘You won’t be having company?’ asked Cousin Bette.
‘My children and you, that’s all,’ replied the visitor.
‘Very well,’ she replied, ‘then you can count on me.’
‘I am at your service, Madame,’ said the captain of the citizen militia, bowing again to Baroness Hulot.
And he gave Madame Hulot a look like the one Tartuffe* casts at Elmire when a provincial actor at Poitiers or Coutances* thinks he should make the character’s intentions clear.
‘If you will follow me this way, Monsieur, we shall be much more comfortable for discussing business than in the drawing-room,’ said Madame Hulot, indicating an adjoining room, which, in the arrangement of the flat, was used as a card-room.
Only a thin partition divided this room from the boudoir, whose window looked on to the garden, and Madame Hulot left Monsieur Crevel alone for a moment, for she thought it necessary to close the boudoir door and window so that no one could go in there and listen. She even took the precaution of also shutting the drawing-room french window, smiling as she did so at her daughter and cousin, whom she saw settled in an old summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. She returned to the card-room, leaving the door open so that she could hear the drawing-room door being opened if anyone should come in. As she came and went, the Baroness, being unobserved, revealed all her thoughts in the expression of her face, and anyone seeing her would have been almost shocked by her agitation. But as she returned from the main drawing-room door to the card-room, her face assumed that veil of impenetrable reserve which all women, even the most open, seem to have at their command.
During these preparations, which were singular, to say the least, the National Guardsman examined the furniture of the room where he found himself. As he looked at the silk curtains which had been red but were now faded violet by the sun and worn threadbare at the folds by long use, at a carpet whose colours had vanished, at chairs which had lost their gilt and whose stained silk covers were worn out in strips, expressions of disdain, satisfaction, and hope followed each other in turn on his dull, parvenu shopkeeper’s face. He was looking at himself in the mirror above an old Empire clock,* passing himself in review, as it were, when the rustle of her silk dress indicated the Baroness’s return. And he immediately adopted a pose.
Having installed herself on a little couch, which undoubtedly must have been a very fine one about 1809, the Baroness motioned Crevel to an easy chair, with arms ending in bronze sphinx heads from which the paint was flaking off, so that parts of the wood were visible. She signed to him to sit down.
‘The precautions you are taking, Madame, would be a charming omen for a …’
‘A lover,’ she said, interrupting the National Guardsman.
‘That’s a weak word,’ he said, placing his right hand on his heart and rolling his eyes in a way which nearly always makes a woman laugh when she sees them assume such an expression in cold blood. ‘Lover! Lover! say rather a man bewitched.’