Twenty minutes later, Lisbeth and Crevel entered the house in the Rue Barbet where, mildly impatient, Madame Marneffe was awaiting the outcome of the step she had ordered Crevel to take.
In the end Valérie had succumbed to the overwhelming love which, once in a lifetime, grips a woman’s heart—such was her love for Wenceslas. A failure as an artist, he became such a perfect lover in Madame Marneffe’s hands that he was for her what she had been for Baron Hulot.
Valérie held her slippers in one hand, the other was in Steinbock’s, her head resting on his shoulder.
A conversation made up of broken phrases, such as the one they engaged in after Crevel’s departure, is like those long literary works of our time with title-pages bearing the words: Copyright reserved. Such a masterpiece of intimate poetry naturally brought to the artist’s lips a regret expressed with some bitterness.
‘Oh, what a pity I got married,’ said Wenceslas, ‘for if I had waited, as Lisbeth told me to, I could marry you now.’
‘Only a Pole could want to turn a devoted mistress into a wife,’ exclaimed Valérie. ‘To exchange love for duty! Pleasure for boredom!’
‘I know how fickle you are,’ replied Steinbock. ‘Haven’t I heard you talking to Lisbeth about Baron Montès, that Brazilian?’
‘Do you want to get rid of him for me?’ said Valérie.
‘That would be the only way to prevent you from seeing him,’ replied the ex-sculptor.
‘You should know, darling,’ Valérie replied, “that I was treating him gently, so as to make a husband of him, for I tell you everything! The promises I’ve made to that Brazilian!—Oh, long before I knew you,’ she said in reply to a gesture from Wenceslas. ‘Well, those promises, which he’s using now as weapons to torment me with, force me to marry almost secretly; for if he learns that I’m marrying Crevel, he’s quite capable of … of killing me!’
‘Oh, as for that fear!’ said Steinbock with a contemptuous gesture which meant that that danger was insignificant for a woman loved by a Pole.
It is worth noting that in matters of courage, there is not a trace of boastfulness in Poles, for they are truly and unquestionably brave.
‘And that fool of a Crevel, who wants to give a party and is indulging his taste for penny-pinching ostentation at my wedding, puts me in an awkward situation; I don’t know how to get out of it.’
Valérie could not admit to the man she adored, that since the dismissal of Baron Hulot, Baron Henri Montès had succeeded to the privilege of visiting her at any hour of the night, and that, for all her cleverness, she still had not found an excuse for a quarrel in which the Brazilian would believe that he was entirely in the wrong.
She knew only too well the Baron’s almost primitive nature, which was quite like Lisbeth’s, so that she could not but tremble as she thought of the Moor of Rio de Janeiro.*
At the sound of carriage wheels, Steinbock, whose arm had been round Valérie’s waist, left her side and picked up a newspaper; he appeared to be completely absorbed in it while, with great concentration, Valérie was embroidering slippers for her future husband.
‘How they slander her!’ Lisbeth whispered to Crevel at the door, indicating this tableau to him. ‘Look at her hair! Is it in disarray? To hear Victorin, you could have surprised two turtle-doves in their nest.’
‘My dear Lisbeth,’ said Crevel, striking his pose, ‘to turn an Aspasia* into a Lucretia,* one has only to inspire a passion in her.’
‘Haven’t I always told you that women love fat libertines like you?’ replied Lisbeth.
‘Anyway, she’d be very ungrateful if she didn’t,’ continued Crevel, ‘for I’ve spent a lot of money on this place. Only Grindot and I know how much.’
And he pointed to the staircase.
In the decoration of the house which Crevel looked on as his own, Grindot had tried to vie with Cleretti, the fashionable architect to whom the Duc d’Hérouville had entrusted the decoration of Josépha’s villa.
But Crevel, incapable of understanding the arts, had wanted, like all bourgeois, to spend a fixed sum, specified in advance. Limited by an estimate, Grindot found it impossible to realize his architectural dream.
The difference between Josépha’s house and the one in the Rue Barbet was that which exists between things with an individual character and those which are commonplace. The objects one admired in Josépha’s establishment could be seen nowhere else; the gleaming ornaments in Crevel’s could be bought anywhere. These two types of luxury are separated from each other by a river of millions. A unique mirror is worth six thousand francs, a mirror invented by a manufacturer who sells as many copies of it as he can, costs five hundred francs. A genuine Boule* chandelier will fetch up to three thousand francs at a public auction; the same chandelier, moulded, can be produced for a thousand to twelve hundred francs. The one is, in antiques, what a picture by Raphael is in painting; the other is a copy. What do you think a copy of a Raphael is worth?
So Crevel’s house was a magnificent example of the luxury of fools, while Josépha’s was the finest example of an artist’s dwelling.
‘War is declared,’ said Crevel, going up to his wife-to-be.
‘Go and fetch Monsieur Berthier,’ she said to the footman, ‘and don’t come back without him. If you’d been successful, dear old thing,’ she said, putting her arms round Crevel, ‘we’d have delayed my happiness and had a brilliant party. But when a whole family is opposed to a marriage, my dear, decorum requires that it should be unostentatious, especially when the bride is a widow.’
‘On the contrary, I want to make a display of luxury in Louis XVI style,’ said Crevel, who for some time had been finding the eighteenth century tame. ‘I’ve ordered new carriages. There’s the bridegroom’s carriage and the bride’s, two elegant coupés, a barouche, and a ceremonial coach with a superb box that trembles like Madame Hulot.’
‘Oh, I want! So you’re not my lamb any more? No, no, my pet, you’ll do what I want. We’ll sign the contract here privately, this evening. Then on Wednesday, we’ll get married officially, as people really do marry, on the sly, as my poor mother used to say. We’ll go on foot, dressed very simply, to the church, where there’ll be a low mass. Our witnesses will be Stidmann, Steinbock, Vignon, and Massol, all bright fellows who’ll be at the town hall as if by chance and who’ll put up with listening to a mass for our sakes. Your colleague will marry us, as an exceptional case, at nine in the morning. The mass is at ten o’clock, so we’ll be back here for lunch at half past eleven. I’ve promised our guests that we won’t get up from table till the evening. We’ll have Bixiou, your old colleague from Birotteau’s place, du Tillet, Lousteau, Vernisset, Léon de Lora, Vernou, the cream of witty fellows, who won’t know we’re married. We’ll bamboozle them. We’ll get a little tight and Lisbeth will be of the party. I want her to learn about marriage. Bixiou must make advances to her … and enlighten her.’
For two hours, Madame Marneffe rattled off nonsense that led Crevel to this wise reflection: ‘How can such a high-spirited woman be depraved? Frivolous, yes. But perverse … it’s not possible!’
‘What did your children say about me?’ Valérie asked Crevel at a moment when she held him close to her on her sofa. ‘Lots of horrors?’
‘They claim that you are guilty of an immoral love for Wenceslas, you, who are virtue itself!’ replied Crevel.
‘Of course I love my little Wenceslas,’ cried Valérie, calling the artist to her side, taking his head in her hands, and kissing him on the forehead. ‘Poor boy, with no one to help him and no money, scorned by a carrot-haired giraffe! What do you expect, Crevel? Wenceslas is my poet and I love him in broad daylight as if he were my child. Those virtuous women see evil everywhere and in everything. Oh, that sort, couldn’t they even sit beside a man without doing wrong? But I’m like a spoilt child who’s never been refused anything; sweets don’t excite me any more. Poor women, I pity them! And who ran me down like that?’
‘Victorin,’ said Crevel.
‘Well, why didn’t you shut that legal parrot’s beak with the tale of his mama’s two hundred thousand francs?’
‘Oh, the Baroness had fled,’ said Lisbeth.
‘Let them beware, Lisbeth,’ said Madame Marneffe, frowning. ‘Either they’ll receive me at their home, and in style, and visit their stepmother, the lot of them, or I’ll bring them down lower than the Baron. Tell them that from me. In the end, I’m resolved to turn nasty. Upon my word, I think evil is the scythe that cuts down good.’