The ignorance of all the tenants in the same building about their respective social positions is one of the permanent features which are most indicative of the pace of Parisian life. But it is easy to understand that a clerk who goes to his office early every morning, comes home for dinner, and goes out every evening, and a woman addicted to the pleasures of Paris, may know nothing of the life of an old maid living on the third floor at the end of the courtyard of their building, especially when she has the habits of Mademoiselle Fischer.
Lisbeth was the first in the house to go for her milk, bread, and fuel; she spoke to no one and went to bed with the sun. She never received letters or visits and kept herself to herself.
She led an anonymous, insect-like existence, the kind one finds in some houses where, after four years, one learns that there is an old gentleman on the fourth floor who knew Voltaire, Pilastre du Rosier,* Beaujon,* Marcel,* Molé,* Sophie Arnould,* Franklin,* and Robespierre.
What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said about Mademoiselle Fischer, they had learned because the district was so isolated, and also because their financial distress had established a relationship between them and the porters, whose good-will was so essential to them that they had had to cultivate it assiduously. Among the porters the old maid’s pride, silence, and reserve had induced that exaggerated respect and formal relationship which indicate the veiled discontent of inferiors. Moreover, the porters thought themselves the equals, in kind, as they say at the Palace, of a tenant whose rent was two hundred and fifty francs.
As Cousin Bette’s confidences to her young cousin Hortense were true, everyone will understand that, in some intimate conversation with the Marneffes, the porter had slandered Mademoiselle Fischer, thinking she was simply talking scandalous gossip about her.
When the old maid had taken her candle from the hands of respectable Madame Olivier, the porter, she stepped forward to see if there was a light in the windows of the attic above her flat.
At that hour, in July, it was so dark at the end of the courtyard that the old maid could not go to bed without a light.
Oh, don’t worry, Monsieur Steinbock is at home. He hasn’t even been out,’ Madame Olivier said knowingly to Mademoiselle Fischer.
The old maid did not answer.
She was still a peasant in that she did not care what was said by people far removed from her; and just as peasants see only their own village, she cared only about the opinion of the little circle in which she lived. So she went firmly upstairs, not to her own flat, but to the attic. And this is why.
At dessert, she had put fruit and sweets in her bag for her admirer, and she came to give them to him, exactly as an old maid brings back a titbit for her dog.
She found the hero of Hortense’s dreams working by the rays of a little lamp whose light was increased by passing through a water-filled globe. He was a pale, fair young man, seated at a kind of bench covered with a sculptor’s tools, red wax, chisels, rough-hewn pedestals, bronzes copied from models. He was wearing an overall and was holding a little group in modelling wax, at which he was gazing with the attention of a poet at work.
‘Look, Wenceslas. See what I have brought you,’ she said, placing her handkerchief on a corner of the bench.
Then she took the sweets and fruit carefully out of her basket.
‘You’re very kind, Mademoiselle,’ replied the poor exile sadly.
‘That will refresh you, my poor boy. You heat your blood working like this. You weren’t made for such a demanding occupation.’
Wenceslas Steinbock looked at the old maid with an expression of amazement.
‘Go on, eat,’ she replied sharply, ‘instead of staring at me like one of your sculptures when you’re pleased with it.’
When he received this, as it were, verbal slap, the young man ceased to be amazed, for he then recognized his female mentor whose tenderness continually surprised him, so used was he to being ill-treated. Although Steinbock was 29 years old, like many fair men he appeared five or six years less, and looking at this young man, whose bloom had faded with the fatigue and hardship of exile, beside that wizened, hard face, one would have thought that nature had made a mistake in allocating their sexes. He got up and threw himself into an old Louis XV easy chair covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, as if he wanted to take a rest in it. The old maid then picked up a greengage and offered it gently to her friend.
‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the fruit.
‘Are you tired?’ she asked, giving him another.
‘I am not tired by work, but tired by life,’ he replied.
‘What an idea!’ she exclaimed, with a certain sharpness. ‘Haven’t you got a good angel who is watching over you?’ she said, giving him the sweets and looking at him with pleasure as he ate them all. ‘You see, I thought of you as I was dining with my cousin.’
‘I know that, but for you, I would have been dead long ago,’ he said, giving Lisbeth a look that was both caressing and plaintive. ‘But, my dear lady, artists need distractions.’
‘Oh, so that’s the trouble!’ she exclaimed, interrupting him, putting her hands on her hips and turning to him with flaming eyes. ‘You want to go and lose your health in the dissipations of Paris, like so many workers who end up by dying in hospital! No, no, make a fortune for yourself, and when you have a steady income you can amuse yourself, my boy; then you’ll have the means to pay for doctors and pleasures, rake that you are.’
On receiving this broadside accompanied by looks which penetrated his being with a magnetic flame, Wenceslas Steinbock bowed his head.
If the most biting scandalmonger could have seen the beginning of this scene, he would already have realized the falsity of the slanders uttered by the Olivier couple about Mademoiselle Fischer. Everything in the tone, the movements, and the looks of these two people affirmed the purity of their private life. The old maid displayed the tenderness of a rough but genuine maternal feeling. The young man was like a respectful son who submitted to the tyranny of a mother.
This strange alliance seemed to be the result of a powerful will acting constantly on a weak character, upon that instability peculiar to Slavs which, though it endows them with heroic courage on the battlefield, makes their behaviour incredibly inconsistent and gives them a moral flabbiness. The causes for this ought to be studied by physiologists, for physiologists are to politics what entomologists are to agriculture.
‘And if I die before I become rich?’ Wenceslas asked gloomily.
‘Die? …’ exclaimed the old maid. ‘Oh, I shan’t let you die. I have life enough for two, and I’ll give you an infusion of my blood, if necessary.’
When he heard that frank, impulsive outburst, Steinbock’s eyes were suffused with tears.
‘Don’t be downhearted, my little Wenceslas,’ continued Lisbeth, deeply moved. ‘Listen, I think my cousin Hortense rather liked your seal. Well, I’ll help you to sell your bronze group at a good price, you’ll repay your debt to me, you’ll do as you like, you’ll be free! Come now, cheer up!’
‘I shall never be able to repay you, Mademoiselle,’ replied the poor exile.
‘But why not!’ asked the Vosges peasant woman, taking the Livonian’s side against herself.
‘Because you’ve not only fed, housed, and cared for me in my poverty, but, what’s more, you’ve given me strength. You’ve made me what I am; you’ve often been hard; you’ve made me suffer.’
‘I?’ said the old maid. ‘Are you going to start your nonsense again about poetry and the arts, crack your fingers and stretch out your arms, talking about ideal beauty and your crazy Nordic notions? The beautiful is not worth as much as the material, and I am the material! You have ideas in your head? That’s all very fine. And I, too, have ideas…. What’s the use of having ideas if you don’t make any use of them? People with ideas are not as far forward then as those with none but who know how to get going…. Instead of thinking of your daydreams, you must work. What have you done since I went out?’
‘What did your pretty cousin say?’
‘Who told you she was pretty?’ asked Lisbeth sharply, in a voice like a jealous tiger’s.
Oh, you yourself.’
‘That was to see the face you’d make! Do you want to go running after petticoats? You like women; very well, model them; translate your ideas into bronze, for you’ll have to do without love affairs for some time, and especially without my cousin, my dear. She’s not a fish for your net. That girl needs a man with an income of sixty thousand francs … and he’s been found. Oh dear, the bed’s not made,’ she said, looking through to the other room. ‘Oh, you poor dear, I forgot about you.’
The energetic spinster immediately took off her cape, hat, and gloves and, like a maid, she quickly made the little trestle-bed where the artist slept. The mixture of sharpness, even harshness, with kindness may explain the power that Lisbeth had acquired over this man whom she had made her own property. Does not life bind us by its alternation of good and bad?
If the Livonian had met Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found his protectress always willing to oblige him; this would have led him into some murky, dishonourable path where he would have been lost. He certainly would not have worked; the artist in him would not have developed. So, although he deplored the old maid’s fierce greed, his reason told him that her iron rule was better than the idle and precarious existence led by some of his compatriots.
Here is an account of the events that led to the alliance of this energetic woman and that weak man, a kind of reversal of roles which, they say, is not uncommon in Poland.