An hour later Montès, Cydalise, and Carabine, back from the Rocher de Cancale, entered Carabine’s little drawing-room in the Rue Saint-Georges.
The courtesan saw Madame Nourrisson sitting in an easy-chair by the fire.
‘Why, here’s my good aunt!’ she said.
‘Yes, my child. I’ve come myself to get my little allowance. You might forget me, although you have a kind heart, and I’ve bills to pay tomorrow. A clothes dealer is always hard up. Who’s that you’re dragging in after you? The gentleman looks thoroughly upset.’
The repulsive Madame Nourrisson, at this moment completely metamorphosed and looking like a kindly old lady, got up to kiss Carabine, one of the hundred or so courtesans she had launched in the horrible career of vice.
‘He’s an Othello who hasn’t made a mistake, and whom I have the honour to introduce to you; Monsieur le Baron Montès de Montéjanos.’
‘Oh, I know Monsieur by repute. They call you Combabus because you love only one woman. In Paris, that’s the same as if you had none at all. Well, is it by any chance the object of your love that’s troubling you? Madame Marneffe, Crevel’s woman? Well, my dear sir, you should thank your stars instead of blaming them…. She’s a good-for-nothing, that little woman. I know her goings-on!’
‘But that’s not the point,’ said Carabine as Madame Nourrisson kissed her and slipped a letter into her hand. ‘You don’t know the Brazilians. They’re swaggering fellows who are anxious to be stabbed through the heart! The more jealous they are, the more they want to be. This gentleman talks of slaughtering everybody, but he won’t slaughter anybody, because he’s in love. Anyway, I’ve brought Monsieur le Baron back here to give him proofs of his misfortune that I got from little Steinbock.’
Montès was drunk; he was listening as if the matter concerned somebody else. Carabine went to take off her velvet cape and read the facsimile of the following note:
‘My pet, he is going to have dinner at Popinot’s this evening, and will call for me at the Opera about eleven. I’ll leave the house about half past five and expect to find you at our paradise, where you’ll have dinner sent in from the Maison d’Or.* Dress so that you can take me on to the Opera. We’ll have four hours to ourselves. You must give me back this little note, not that your Valérie doesn’t trust you—I would give you my life, my fortune, and my honour—but I’m afraid of the tricks of chance.’
‘There you are, Baron. That’s the love letter sent this morning to the Comte de Steinbock. Read the address. The original has just been burned.’
Montès turned the piece of paper over and over, recognized the handwriting, and was struck by a sensible idea, which showed his distraught state of mind.
‘But tell me, what do you get out of tearing my heart to pieces, for you must have paid a lot to have this note in your hands long enough to get it lithographed?’ he asked, looking at Carabine.
‘You big fool!’ said Carabine at a sign from Madame Nourrisson. ‘Don’t you see poor Cydalise here? She’s a youngster of 16 who’s been so much in love with you for three months that she’s quite lost her appetite and is heartbroken because you haven’t yet given her even a casual glance.’
Cydalise put a handkerchief to her eyes and looked as if she were crying.
‘Although she looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, she’s furious at seeing the man she’s madly in love with, the dupe of a scheming bitch,’ continued Carabine, ‘and she’d kill Valérie …’
‘Oh, as to that,’ said the Brazilian, ‘that’s my business!’
‘Kill her? You, my dear boy?’ said Ma Nourrisson. ‘We don’t do that sort of thing here nowadays.’
‘Oh,’ replied Montès, ‘but I don’t belong to this country! I live in a region where I don’t give a rap for your laws, and if you give me proofs …’
‘But isn’t this note a proof, then?’
‘No,’ said the Brazilian, ‘I don’t believe in writing, I want to see …’
‘Oh, as for seeing,’ said Carabine, who understood perfectly a new sign from her pretended aunt, ‘well, we’ll enable you to see everything, my dear tiger, but on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Look at Cydalise.’
At a sign from Madame Nourrisson, Cydalise looked tenderly at the Brazilian.
‘Will you love her? Will you establish her in life?’ asked Carabine. ‘A woman as lovely as that is worth a house and a carriage. It would be monstrous to let her go about on foot. And she has … debts. How much do you owe?’ asked Carabine, pinching Cydalise’s arm.
‘She’s worth what she’s worth,’ said Ma Nourrisson. ‘It’s enough that there’s a buyer.’
‘Listen,’ cried Montès, at last becoming aware of this wonderful masterpiece of feminine beauty, ‘will you show me Valérie?’
‘And the Comte de Steinbock into the bargain,’ said Madame Nourrisson.
The old woman had been watching the Brazilian for the last ten minutes and she saw in him the instrument tuned to the pitch of murder that she required. Seeing, too, that he was blinded enough not to pay any attention to those who were leading him on, she intervened.
‘Cydalise, my darling from Brazil, is my niece, so the matter concerns me a little. This whole mess can be cleared up in ten minutes, for it’s from one of my friends that Steinbock rents the furnished room where your Valérie is having her coffee, a queer kind of coffee but she calls it her coffee. So, lets come to an arrangement, Brazil! I love Brazil; it’s a hot country. What will you do for my niece?’
‘You old ostrich!’ said Montès, struck by the feathers on Ma Nourrisson’s hat. ‘You interrupted me. If you show me … show me Valérie and that artist together …’
‘As you’d like to be with her yourself,’ said Carabine. ‘That’s agreed.’
‘Well, I’ll take this Norman girl and carry her off …’
‘Where to?’ asked Carabine.
‘To Brazil!’ replied the Baron. I’ll make her my wife. My uncle has left me ten square leagues of land I can’t sell. That why I still own the place. I’ve got a hundred negroes there, nothing but negroes, negresses, and little negroes bought by my uncle.’
‘A slave-dealer’s nephew!’ said Carabine, making a face. ‘That has to be thought about. Cydalise, my child, do you like niggers?’
‘Come, let’s be serious, Carabine,’ said Ma Nourrisson. ‘Hang it all! The gentleman and I are talking business.’
‘If I take a Frenchwoman again, I want her all to myself,’ continued the Brazilian. ‘I warn you, Mademoiselle, I’m a king, but not a constitutional king; I’m a czar. I’ve bought all my subjects and no one can leave my kingdom, which is a hundred leagues from any other human habitation. Its interior is bordered by a country of savages and it is separated from the coast by a desert as extensive as your France.’
‘I prefer an attic here!’ said Carabine.
‘That’s what I thought,’ replied the Brazilian. ‘That’s why I sold all my estates and everything I owned in Rio de Janeiro to come back to Madame Marneffe.’
‘One doesn’t make journeys like that for nothing,’ said Madame Nourrisson. ‘You’re entitled to be loved for your own sake, especially as you’re very handsome. Oh, he is handsome!’ she said to Carabine.
‘Very handsome, more handsome than the Longjumeau postilion,’* replied the courtesan.
Cydalise took the Brazilian’s hand, but he disengaged it as politely as he could.
‘I came back to carry off Madame Marneffe,’ the Brazilian went on, resuming his tale, ‘and do you know why it took me three years to come back?’
‘No, savage,’ said Carabine.
‘Well, she told me so often that she wanted to live alone with me in some deserted spot.’
‘He’s not a savage any more,’ said Carabine, bursting out laughing. ‘He belongs to the tribe of civilized mugs.’
‘She told me that so often,’ said the Baron, untouched by the courtesan’s mocking laughter, ‘that I had a charming dwelling prepared for her in the middle of that huge estate. I’ve come back to France to fetch Valérie, and the night I saw her again …’
‘Saw her again is a polite expression,’ said Carabine. ‘I’ll remember it.’
‘She told me to wait till that miserable Marneffe died, and I agreed. At the same time I forgave her for accepting Hulot’s advances. I don’t know if the devil has put on petticoats, but from that moment she has given in to all my whims, to all my demands. Not for a minute, in fact, has she given me grounds for suspicion.’
‘Well, that’s a bit much!’ Carabine said to Madame Nourrisson.
Madame Nourrisson nodded in agreement.
‘My faith in that woman was equal to my love,’ Montes said, giving way to tears. ‘I nearly boxed the ears of everyone at table just now.’
‘I saw that quite clearly,’ said Carabine.
‘If I’m deceived, if that woman marries, if at this moment she’s in Steinbock’s arms, she has deserved a thousand deaths, and I’ll kill her as I’d crush a fly …’
‘And what about the police, my dear fellow?’ asked Madame Nourrisson with an old hag’s grin that made one’s flesh creep.
‘And the police commissioner and the judges and the assize court and the whole hullaballoo?’ said Carabine.
‘You’re a fool, my dear fellow,’ continued Madame Nourrisson, who wanted to find out the Brazilian’s plans for vengeance.
‘I’ll kill her,’ Montès repeated coldly. ‘Well, so you called me a savage! Do you think I’m going to imitate the stupidity of your compatriots who go and buy poison at the chemist’s? On the way to your house I thought about my vengeance, in case you were right about Valérie. One of my negroes carries with him the most deadly of animal poisons, a terrible disease which is more efficacious than a vegetable poison and which can be cured only in Brazil. I’ll get Cydalise to take it and she’ll give it to me. Then when death’s in the veins of Crevel and his wife, I’ll be beyond the Azores with your cousin. I’ll have her cured and I’ll make her my wife. We savages have our own way of doing things! Cydalise’, he said, looking at the Norman girl, ‘is the creature I need. How much does she owe?’
‘A hundred thousand francs,’ said Cydalise.
‘She doesn’t say much, but it’s to the point,’ Carabine whispered to Madame Nourrisson.
‘I’m going mad!’ the Brazilian exclaimed in a hollow voice, collapsing into an easy-chair. ‘It’ll be the death of me. But I want to see for myself, for it’s impossible! A lithographed note! How do I know it isn’t the work of a forger? Baron Hulot love Valérie?’ he said, remembering Josépha’s words. ‘But the proof that he didn’t love her is the fact that she’s still alive. I’ll not leave her alive for anyone, if she isn’t mine alone!’
Montès was terrifying to see and even more terrifying to hear. He was roaring and writhing; he broke everything he touched; the rosewood shattered like glass.
‘How he’s smashing everything up!’ said Carabine, looking at Nourrisson. ‘My dear fellow,’ she said, tapping the Brazilian on the arm, ‘Roland in a fury* is all very well in a poem, but in a flat it’s prosaic and expensive.’
‘My dear boy,’ said Ma Nourrisson, getting up and taking up her stance opposite the dejected Brazilian. ‘I’m of your persuasion. When one loves in a certain way, when one is hooked until death, life is answerabe for love. The one who breaks loose tears the whole thing up by the roots, causes total destruction. You have my esteem, my admiration, and my consent, above all for your line of action which is making me pro-negro. But you’re in love; you won’t go through with it.’
‘Me! If she’s a faithless hussy, I’ll
‘Come now, you talk too much, when all’s said and done,’ Madame Nourrisson went on, becoming her practical self once more. ‘A man who wants to avenge himself, who claims to behave like a savage, acts differently. To see your loved one in her paradise, you must take Cydalise and go in there, as if you’d been shown into the wrong room with your mistress as a result of a maid’s error. But don’t make a scene. If you want to be avenged, you must behave like a coward, look as if you’re in despair, and let yourself be hoodwinked by your mistress. Got the idea?’ said Madame Nourrisson, seeing the Brazilian surprised at such a subtle scheme.
‘Very well, ostrich,’ he replied. ‘Very well. … I understand.’
‘Goodbye, darling,’ said Madame Nourrisson to Carabine.
She motioned to Cydalise to go downstairs with Montes and remained alone with Carabine.
‘Now, my pet, I’m afraid of only one thing—that he’ll strangle her! That would put me in a fix. We must handle only quiet affairs. Oh, I think you’ve earned your Raphael picture, but they say it’s a Mignard.* But don’t worry; it’s much nicer. I’ve been told that the Raphaels were all black, while this picture is as pretty as a Girodet.’*
‘I only care about scoring over Josépha,’ cried Carabine, ‘and I don’t care if it’s with a Mignard or a Raphael. Do you know, that gold-digger was wearing such pearls this evening … you’d sell your soul for them!’