Madame Victorin, who managed this large establishment with great housekeeping skill, due no doubt to Lisbeth’s teaching, had been obliged to employ a cook. The cook had to have a kitchen-maid. Kitchen-maids are ambitious creatures nowadays, intent on finding out the cook’s secrets, and they become cooks themselves as soon as they know how to blend a sauce. Kitchen-maids, therefore, are changed very frequently.
At the beginning of December 1845, Célestine engaged as kitchen-maid a plump Norman girl from Isigny, short, with solid red arms and a very ordinary face, as stupid as a play written to order; it was only reluctantly that she agreed to abandon the typical cotton bonnet worn by the girls of lower Normandy. This girl, as well-padded with fat as a wet-nurse, looked as if she would burst at any moment out of the cotton material which she draped round her bodice. One would have said that her ruddy face had been carved out of stone, so solid were its tanned contours. Naturally, no one in the house paid any attention to the arrival of this girl, called Agatha, the really cheeky kind of girl that comes up every day from the provinces to Paris. Agatha did not appeal much to the cook as, having served carters in a suburban inn where she had worked, she spoke very coarsely. Thus, instead of making a conquest of the chef and getting him to show her the great art of cookery, she was the object of his contempt. The cook was courting Louise, Countess Steinbock’s maid. And so the Norman girl, thinking she was ill-used, complained of her lot.
She was always sent out on some pretext or other when the chef was finishing off a dish or putting the last touches to a sauce.
‘I’m certainly out of luck,’ she said, ‘I’ll go somewhere else.’
Nevertheless she stayed on, though she had already asked twice to go.
One night, Adeline, woken by a strange sound, found that Hector was not in his bed beside hers, since, as is appropriate for old people, they slept in twin beds. She waited for an hour but the Baron did not return. Filled with alarm, dreading some tragic disaster, perhaps a stroke, she first went upstairs to the floor above, to the attics where the servants slept. She was attracted to Agatha’s room as much by the bright light streaming out of the half-open door as by the murmur of two voices.
She stopped, appalled at recognizing the Baron’s voice. Seduced by Agatha’s charms and by the calculated resistance of that frightful slut, he had been brought to the point of uttering these hateful words:
‘My wife hasn’t long to live, and if you like you can be a baroness.’
Adeline uttered a cry, dropped her candlestick, and fled.
Three days later, having received the last rites the previous evening, the Baroness was on her death-bed, surrounded by her weeping family.
Just before she died, she took her husband’s hand, pressed it, and whispered to him:
‘My dear, I had nothing but my life left to give you. In a moment you’ll be free and you’ll be able to make a Baroness Hulot.’
And they saw tears falling from the dead woman’s eyes, a sight that must be rare.
The fierce persistence of vice had conquered the patience of the angel who, on the brink of eternity, let slip the only words of reproach she had uttered in her whole life.
Baron Hulot left Paris three days after his wife’s funeral.
Eleven months later, Victorin learned indirectly of his father’s marriage to Mademoiselle Agatha Piquetard, which had taken place at Isigny on 1 February 1846.
‘Parents can oppose their children’s marriages, but children cannot prevent the follies of parents in their second childhood,’ said Maître Hulot to Maître Popinot, the second son of the former Minister of Commerce, who mentioned the marriage to him.