Unfortunately, on the way from the Rue Plumet to get his share certificates from his own house, Crevel had to go by the Rue Vaneau and he could not resist the pleasure of going to see his little duchess.
He still looked upset when he arrived. He went into Valérie’s room and found her having her hair done.
She studied Crevel in the mirror and, like all women of her kind, even before knowing anything about it, she was shocked to see that he was under the sway of a strong emotion of which she was not the cause.
‘What’s the matter, my pet?’ she asked Crevel. ‘Is this the way to come into your little duchess’s room? Even if I weren’t still a duchess for you, Monsieur, I’d still be your little lovey-dovey, you old monster!’
Crevel replied with a sad smile and indicated Reine.
‘Reine, my girl, that’s enough for today. I’ll finish doing my hair myself. Give me my Chinese housecoat, for my Monsieur looks to me as if he’s well entangled in a Chinese puzzle.’
Reine, a girl with a face pitted like a sieve, who seemed to have been made expressly for Valérie, exchanged a smile with her mistress and brought the housecoat.
Valérie took off her dressing-gown, appeared in her slip, and fitted into her housecoat like an adder under its tuft of grass.
‘Madame is at home to no one?’
‘What a question!’ said Valérie. ‘Now, tell me, my big puss, have the left-bank shares slumped?’
‘No.’
‘You think you’re not the father of your little Crevel?’
‘What nonsense!’ replied Crevel in the tone of a man sure that he was loved.
‘Well, I’m nonplussed,’ said Madame Marneffe. ‘When I have to draw a friend’s troubles out of him as one draws corks from champagne bottles, I give up. Go away, you’re a…’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Crevel. ‘I need to raise two hundred thousand francs in two hours.’
‘Oh, you’ll find them all right. Look, I haven’t used the fifty thousand francs we got out of the police report on Hulot, and I can ask Henri for fifty thousand francs.’
‘Henri! Always Henri!’ cried Crevel.
‘And do you think, you fat, budding Machiavelli, that I’ll dismiss Henri? Does France disarm her fleet? Henri—why, he’s a dagger in its sheath, hanging on a nail. That boy’, she said, ‘is useful in letting me know if you love me. And you don’t love me this morning.’
‘I, not love you, Valérie!’ said Crevel. ‘I love you like a million!’
‘That’s not enough,’ she replied, jumping on to Crevel’s lap and putting her two arms round his neck as if she were hanging herself on a hat-peg. ‘I want to be loved like ten million, like all the gold in the world, and more. Henri would never stay five minutes without telling me what’s bothering him. Come, what’s the matter, my big darling? Unload all your little troubles. Tell your little lovey-dovey everything, and smartly.’
And she brushed Crevel’s face with her hair and tweaked his nose.
‘Can a man have a nose like that and keep a secret from his Vava-lélé-ririe?’ she went on.
At Vava, the nose was pulled to the right, at lélé it went to the left, and at ririe she put it back into place.
‘Well, I’ve just seen …’
Crevel stopped short and looked at Madame Marneffe.
‘Valérie, my treasure, will you promise me on your honour … you know, our honour, not to repeat a word of what I’m going to tell you?’
‘Agreed, Mayor. I raise my hand like this … and my foot.’
She posed in such a way as to strip Crevel from head to heel, as Rabelais put it; she was so amusing, with her superb naked form visible through the mist of fine lawn.
‘I’ve just seen virtue in despair.’
‘Is there any virtue in despair?’ she asked, shaking her head and folding her arms like Napoleon.
‘It’s poor Madame Hulot. She must have two hundred thousand francs. If she doesn’t get them, the Marshal and Père Fischer will blow their brains out, and since that’s a little because of you, my little duchess, I’m going to repair the damage. Oh, she’s a saintly woman, I know her, she’ll pay back the lot.’
At the mention of Hulot and two hundred thousand francs, Valérie darted a look from beneath her long eyelashes like the flash of a cannon in its smoke.
‘What did the old lady do to make you sorry for her? She showed you what? Her … her religion?’
‘Don’t make fun of her, my love. She’s a very saintly, noble, and devout woman, who deserves respect.’
‘And don’t I deserve respect?’ asked Valérie, with an ominous look.
‘I’m not saying you don’t, replied Crevel, realizing how much his praise of virtue must hurt Madame Marneffe.
‘I’m devout too,’ said Valérie, moving away and sitting down in an armchair. ‘But I don’t make a parade of my religion; I go to church secretly.’
She sat in silence and paid no more attention to Crevel.
Greatly perturbed, Crevel went and stood in front of the chair into which Valérie had retreated, but he found her lost in the thoughts he had so foolishly aroused.
‘Valérie, my little angel…!’
Profound silence. A rather dubious tear was furtively wiped away.
‘One word, my lovey-dovey …’
‘Monsieur!’
‘What are you thinking of, my love?’
‘Oh Monsieur Crevel, I’m thinking of the day of my first communion. How lovely I was! How pure! How saintly and immaculate! Oh, if anyone had come and told my mother, ‘Your daughter will be a slut; she’ll deceive her husband. One day, a police commissioner will find her in a little house; she will sell herself to a Crevel to betray a Hulot, two horrid old men …’ Oh, it’s disgusting! She’d have died before the end of the sentence—she loved me so much, poor woman!’
‘Calm down.’
‘You don’t know how much an adulteress must love a man to silence the remorse that gnaws at her heart. I’m sorry Reine has gone. She would have told you that this morning she found me at prayer with tears in my eyes. You see, Monsieur Crevel, I don’t scoff at religion. Have you ever heard me say a word against it?’
Crevel made a gesture of denial.
‘I don’t allow people to talk about it in front of me. I make fun of anything you like: royalty, politics, finance, everything that is sacred in the eyes of the world, judges, marriage, love, young girls, old men. But the Church! … But God! … Oh, there I draw the line. I know very well that I’m doing wrong, that I’m sacrificing my future to you. And yet you don’t even suspect the extent of my love!’
Crevel clasped his hands.
‘Oh, you’d have to see right into my heart, to measure the extent of my convictions, to realize all that I’m sacrificing for you! I feel I have in me the stuff of which a Magdalen is made. And see what respect I show to the priests. Look how many presents I make to the Church. My mother brought me up in the Catholic faith and I realize what God is. It is to us sinners that he speaks most awesomely.’
Valérie wiped away two tears that rolled down her cheeks.
Crevel was appalled. Madame Marneffe got up, became intensely excited.
‘Calm down, my lovey-dovey. You frighten me!’
Madame Marneffe fell on her knees.
‘Oh God! I am not bad at heart,’ she said, putting her hands together. ‘Deign to rescue your lost sheep. Strike her, wound her to save her from the hands that turn her into an infamous adulteress. She will hide her head against your shoulder. She will return filled with happiness to the fold.’
She got up, and looked at Crevel, and Crevel was afraid of Valérie’s blank stare.
‘And then, Crevel, do you know? Now and again, I’m afraid. God’s justice prevails in this world below as well as in the next. What good can I expect from God? His vengeance comes down on the guilty in all sorts of ways. It takes the form of every kind of misfortune. All the misfortunes which fools cannot explain are punishments. That’s what my mother told me on her death-bed, speaking of her old age. But if I were to lose you! …’ she added, clutching Crevel in a wildly fierce embrace …’ Oh, I’d die!’
Madame Marneffe released Crevel, knelt again in front of her chair, placed her hands together (and in what a ravishing pose), and recited with remarkable fervour the following prayer:
‘And you, Sainte Valérie, my good patron saint, why don’t you visit more often the bedside of her who is entrusted to your care? Oh, come this evening as you came this morning to inspire me with good thoughts, and I shall leave the path of wickedness. Like Magdalen, I shall give up false joys, the deceptive glamour of the world, even the man I love so much.’
‘My lovey-dovey!’ said Crevel.
‘No more lovey-dovey, Monsieur!’ She turned round with the pride of a virtuous wife and, her eyes wet with tears, she appeared dignified, cold, and indifferent.
‘Leave me,’ she said, repulsing Crevel. ‘What is my duty? To belong to my husband; he is dying. And what am I doing? I deceive him at the brink of the grave. He thinks your son is his…. I’m going to tell him the truth and begin by asking his forgiveness before asking for God’s. We must part. Goodbye, Monsieur Crevel,’ she continued, getting up and offering him an ice-cold hand. ‘Goodbye, my friend, we shall meet again only in a better world. You owe a few pleasures to me, very sinful ones, but now I want… yes, I shall have your esteem.’
Crevel was weeping bitterly.
‘You big idiot!’ she cried with a peal of diabolical laughter. ‘That’s what pious women do to wangle two hundred thousand francs out of you. And you, who talk about the Maréchal de Richelieu, the model for Lovelace,* you let yourself be caught by that well-tried gambit, to use Steinbock’s language! I could extract sums of two hundred thousand francs out of you if I wanted to, you big fool. Keep your money, then. If you’ve got a surplus, that surplus belongs to me. If you give two sous to that respectable woman who practises religion because she’s 57 years old, we’ll never meet again and you can take her as your mistress. You’ll come back to me the next day all bruised from her bony caresses and saturated with her tears, her trashy little caps, and her lamentations, which must turn her favours into showers of rain.’
‘The fact is,’ said Crevel, ‘that two hundred thousand francs is a lot of money.’
‘They have good appetites, these pious women! Oh, would you believe it, they sell their sermons for more than we get for the rarest and the surest thing on earth, pleasure…. And what tales they tell! No—oh, I know them; I’ve seen some of them at my mother’s. They think they can do anything for the Church, for … Oh, you should be ashamed, my pet, you who are so little of a giver. For you haven’t given me two hundred thousand francs, all told.’
‘Oh, but I have,’ replied Crevel. ‘The little house alone will cost that.’
‘So then you have four hundred thousand francs,’ she said meditatively.
‘No.’
‘Well, Monsieur, were you intending to lend that old frump the two hundred thousand for my hotel? That’s high treason against your lovey-dovey!’
‘If you were giving that money to some stupid philanthropic enterprise you’d be looked on as a coming man,’ she said, becoming more eloquent, ‘and I’d be the first to advise you to do so, for you’re too simple to write fat books about politics which would make your reputation. You can’t write well enough even to knock up long-winded pamphlets. Like everyone in your position, you might cover your name with glory by placing yourself at the head of some social, moral, national, or anything-at-all organization. Benevolence is not an option any more; it’s got no reputation now. Young ex-prisoners who are given a better lot than poor honest devils, that’s old hat. For two hundred thousand francs I’d like to see you think up something less simple, something really useful. Then you’d be talked about like Edmé Champion* with his little blue cloak, or a Montyon,* and I’d be proud of you. But to throw two hundred thousand francs into a holy-water basin, to lend them to a religious fanatic deserted by her husband for some reason or other—you can be sure there’s always a reason; does anyone desert me?—is a stupidity which, in our time, can only germinate in the brain of an ex-perfumer. It smacks of his shop. Two days later, you wouldn’t dare look at yourself in the mirror. Go and deposit the money in the sinking fund; be quick, for I won’t let you in here again without the receipt for the amount. Go! And be quick about it, right away!’
She pushed Crevel out of the room by the shoulders, seeing avarice bloom once again on his face.
When the outer door of the flat had closed, she said:
‘There’s Lisbeth well and truly avenged! What a pity she’s at her old Marshal’s; what a good laugh we’d have had! So the old lady wants to take the bread from my mouth! I’ll give her a good shaking up.’