THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLASS GRISETTE
A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who
enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a
Parisian can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he
had been to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very
sensibly said to his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so
agreeable and satisfactory an existence. This opinion will oblige us
to give certain details on the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after
his wife had placed him in the position of a /deserted husband/. The
reader will then be enabled to understand the enormous difference
which our laws and our morals put between the two sexes in the same
situation. That which turns to misery for the woman turns to happiness
for the man. This contrast may inspire more than one young woman with
the determination to remain in her own home, and to struggle there,
like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as she may select) the most
aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.
Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an
only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife
of the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole
master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d'Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two
hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich
inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he
married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his
wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature
such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to
Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in
her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this
immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the
faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure
he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that
authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the
matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a
reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage
and the /petits journaux/, by his method of repeating them, and
applied them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had
served in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point
that women without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest
did not dare to contradict them.
This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the
convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously.
Thus without any taste of his own, he knew how to be the first to
adopt and the first to abandon a new fashion. Accused of nothing worse
than spending too much time at his toilet and wearing a corset, he
presented the type of those persons who displease no one by adopting
incessantly the ideas and the follies of everbody, and who, astride of
circumstance, never grow old.
As a husband, he was pitied; people thought Beatrix inexcusable for
deserting the best fellow on earth, and social jeers only touched the
woman. A member of all clubs, subscriber to all the absurdities
generated by patriotism or party spirit ill-understood (a compliance
which put him in the front rank /a propos/ of all such matters), this
loyal, brave, and very silly nobleman, whom unfortunately so many rich
men resemble, would naturally desire to distinguish himself by
adopting some fashionable mania. Consequently, he glorified his name
principally in being the sultan of a four-footed harem, governed by an
old English groom, which cost him monthly from four to five thousand
francs. His specialty was /running horses;/ he protected the equine
race and supported a magazine devoted to hippic questions; but, for
all that, he knew very little of the animals, and from shoes to
bridles he depended wholly on his groom,--all of which will
sufficiently explain to you that this semi-bachelor had nothing
actually of his own, neither mind, taste, position, or absurdity; even
his fortune came from his fathers. After having tasted the
displeasures of marriage he was so content to find himself once more a
bachelor that he said among his friends, "I was born with a caul"
(that is, to good luck).
Pleased above all things to be able to live without the costs of
making an appearance, to which husbands are constrained, his house, in
which since the death of his father nothing had been changed,
resembled those of masters who are travelling; he lived there little,
never dined, and seldom slept there. Here follows the reason for such
indifference.
After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the
kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around
happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain
Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du
Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,--of which
one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera
/galop/, "When one thinks that all /that/ is lodged and clothed and
lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!"--this world has
already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and
customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the
historian should proportion the number of such personages to the
diverse endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in
poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often
self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.
Madame Schontz, known at first under the name of La Petite-Aurelie, to
distinguish her from one of her rivals far less clever than herself,
belongs to the highest class of those women whose social utility
cannot be questioned by the prefect of the Seine, nor by those who are
interested in the welfare of the city of Paris. Certainly the Rat,
accused of demolishing fortunes which frequently never existed, might
better be compared to a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame
de Lorette quarter, far fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers
in fresh stucco, they have gone, towed by speculation, along the
heights of Montmartre, pitching their tents in those solitudes of
carved free-stone, the like of which adorns the European streets of
Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow, architectural steppes
where the wind rustles innumerable papers on which a void is divulged
by the words, /Apartments to let/.
The situation of these dames is determined by that which they take in
the apocryphal regions. If the house is near the line traced by the
rue de Provence, the woman has an income, her budget prospers; but if
she approaches the farther line of the Boulevard Exterieur or rises
towards the horrid town of Batignolles, she is without resources. When
Monsieur de Rochefide first encountered Madame Schontz, she lived on
the third floor of the only house that remained in the rue de Berlin;
thus she was camping on the border-land between misery and its
reverse. This person was not really named, as you may suppose, either
Schontz or Aurelie. She concealed the name of her father, an old
soldier of the Empire, that perennial colonel who always appears at
the dawn of all these feminine existences either as father or seducer.
Madame Schontz had received the gratuitous education of Saint-Denis,
where young girls are admirably brought up, but where, unfortunately,
neither husbands nor openings in life are offered to them when they
leave the school,--an admirable creation of the Emperor, which now
lacks but one thing, the Emperor himself!
"I shall be there, to provide for the daughters of my faithful
legions," he replied to a remark of one of his ministers, who foresaw
the future.
Napoleon had also said, "I shall be there!" for the members of the
Institute; to whom they had better give no salary than send them
eighty francs each month, a wage that is less than that of certain
clerks!
Aurelie was really the daughter of the intrepid Colonel Schiltz, a
leader of those bold Alsacian guerillas who came near saving the
Emperor in the campaign of France. He died at Metz,--robbed, pillaged,
ruined. In 1814 Napoleon put the little Josephine Schiltz, then about
nine years old, at Saint-Denis. Having lost both father and mother and
being without a home and without resources, the poor child was not
dismissed from the institution on the second return of the Bourbons.
She was under-mistress of the school till 1827, but then her patience
gave way; her beauty seduced her. When she reached her majority
Josephine Schiltz, the Empress's goddaughter, was on the verge of the
adventurous life of a courtesan, persuaded to that doubtful future by
the fatal example of some of her comrades like herself without
resources, who congratulated themselves on their decision. She
substituted /on/ for /il/ in her father's name and placed herself
under the patronage of Saint-Aurelie.
Lively, witty, and well-educated, she committed more faults than her
duller companions, whose misdemeanors had invariably self-interest for
their base. After knowing various writers, poor but dishonest, clever
but deeply in debt; after trying certain rich men as calculating as
they were foolish; and after sacrificing solid interests to one true
love,--thus going through all the schools in which experience is
taught,--on a certain day of extreme misery, when, at Valentino's (the
first stage to Musard) she danced in a gown, hat, and mantle that were
all borrowed, she attracted the attention of Arthur de Rochefide, who
had come there to see the famous /galop/. Her cleverness instantly
captivated the man who at that time knew not what passion to devote
himself to. So that two years after his desertion by Beatrix, the
memory of whom often humiliated him, the marquis was not blamed by any
one for marrying, so to speak, in the thirteenth arrondissement, a
substitute for his wife.
Let us sketch the four periods of this happiness. It is necessary to
show that the theory of marriage in the thirteenth arrondissement
affects in like manner all who come within its rule.[*] Marquis in the
forties, sexagenary retired shopkeeper, quadruple millionnaire or
moderate-income man, great seigneur or bourgeois, the strategy of
passion (except for the differences inherent in social zones) never
varies. The heart and the money-box are always in the same exact and
clearly defined relation. Thus informed, you will be able to estimate
the difficulties the duchess was certain to encounter in her
charitable enterprise.
[*] Before 1859 there was no 13th arrondissement in Paris, hence the
saying.--TR.
Who knows the power in France of witty sayings upon ordinary minds, or
what harm the clever men who invent them have done? For instance, no
book-keeper could add up the figures of the sums remaining
unproductive and lost in the depths of generous hearts and
strong-boxes by that ignoble phrase, "/tirer une carotte!/"
The saying has become so popular that it must be allowed to soil this
page. Besides, if we penetrate within the 13th arrondissement, we are
forced to accept its picturesque patois. /Tirer une carotte/ has a
dozen allied meanings, but it suffices to give it here as: /To dupe/.
Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of
being /carotte/. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of
his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and he was,
therefore, very /rat/, to use another word of the same vocabulary. The
word /rat/, when applied to a young girl, means the guest or the one
entertained, but applied to a man it signifies the giver of the feast
who is niggardly.
Madame Schontz had too much sense and she knew men too well not to
conceive great hopes from such a beginning. Monsieur de Rochefide
allowed her five hundred francs a month, furnished for her, rather
shabbily, an apartment costing twelve hundred francs a year on a
second floor in the rue Coquenard, and set himself to study Aurelie's
character, while she, perceiving his object, gave him a character to
study. Consequently, Rochefide became happy in meeting with a woman of
noble nature. But he saw nothing surprising in that; her mother was a
Barnheim of Baden, a well-bred woman. Besides, Aurelie was so well
brought up herself! Speaking English, German, and Italian, she
possessed a thorough knowledge of foreign literatures. She could hold
her own against all second-class pianists. And, remark this! she
behaved about her talents like a well-bred woman; she never mentioned
them. She picked up a brush in a painter's studio, used it half
jestingly, and produced a head which caused general astonishment. For
mere amusement during the time she pined as under-mistress at
Saint-Denis, she had made some advance in the domain of the sciences,
but her subsequent life had covered these good seeds with a coating of
salt, and she now gave Arthur the credit of the sprouting of the
precious germs, re-cultivated for him.
Thus Aurelie began by showing a disinterestedness equal to her other
charms, which allowed this weak corvette to attach its grapnels
securely to the larger vessel. Nevertheless, about the end of the
first year, she made ignoble noises in the antechamber with her clogs,
coming in about the time when the marquis was awaiting her, and
hiding, as best she could, the draggled tail of an outrageously muddy
gown. In short, she had by this time so perfectly persuaded her /gros
papa/ that all her ambition, after so many ups and downs, was to
obtain honorably a comfortable little bourgeois existence, that, about
ten months after their first meeting, the second phase of happiness
declared itself.
Madame Schontz then obtained a fine apartment in the rue
Neuve-Saint-Georges. Arthur, who could no longer conceal the amount of
his fortune, gave her splendid furniture, a complete service of plate,
twelve hundred francs a month, a low carriage with one horse,--this,
however, was hired; but he granted a tiger very graciously. Madame
Schontz was not the least grateful for this munificence; she knew the
motive of her Arthur's conduct, and recognized the calculations of the
male /rat/. Sick of living at a restaurant, where the fare is usually
execrable, and where the least little /gourmet/ dinner costs sixty
francs for one, and two hundred francs if you invite three friends,
Rochefide offered Madame Schontz forty francs a day for his dinner and
that of a friend, everything included. Aurelie accepted.
Thus having made him take up all her moral letters of credit, drawn
one by one on Monsieur de Rochefide's comfort, she was listened to
with favor when she asked for five hundred francs more a month for her
dress, in order not to shame her /gros papa/, whose friends all
belonged to the Jockey Club.
"It would be a pretty thing," she said, "if Rastignac, Maxime de
Trailles, d'Esgrignon, La Roche-Hugon, Ronqueroles, Laginski,
Lenoncourt, found you with a sort of Madame Everard. Besides, have
confidence in me, papa, and you'll be the gainer."
In fact, Aurelie contrived to display new virtues in this second
phase. She laid out for herself a house-keeping role for which she
claimed much credit. She made, so she said, both ends meet at the
close of the month on two thousand five hundred francs without a debt,
--a thing unheard of in the faubourg Saint-Germain of the 13th
arrondissement,--and she served dinners infinitely superior to those
of Nucingen, at which exquisite wines were drunk at twelve francs a
bottle. Rochefide, amazed, and delighted to be able to invite his
friends to the house with economy, declared, as he caught her round
the waist,--
"She's a treasure!"
Soon after he hired one-third of a box at the Opera for her; next he
took her to first representations. Then he began to consult his
Aurelie, and recognized the excellence of her advice. She let him take
the clever sayings she said about most things for his own, and, these
being unknown to others, raised his reputation as an amusing man. He
now acquired the certainty of being loved truly, and for himself
alone. Aurelie refused to make the happiness of a Russian prince who
offered her five thousand francs a month.
"You are a lucky man, my dear marquis," cried old Prince Galathionne
as he finished his game of whist at the club. "Yesterday, after you
left us alone, I tried to get Madame Schontz away from you, but she
said: 'Prince, you are not handsomer, but you are a great deal older
than Rochefide; you would beat me, but he is like a father to me; can
you give me one-tenth of a reason why I should change? I've never had
the grand passion for Arthur that I once had for little fools in
varnished boots and whose debts I paid; but I love him as a wife loves
her husband when she is an honest woman.' And thereupon she showed me
the door."
This speech, which did not seem exaggerated, had the effect of greatly
increasing the state of neglect and degradation which reigned in the
hotel de Rochefide. Arthur now transported his whole existence and his
pleasures to Madame Schontz, and found himself well off; for at the
end of three years he had four hundred thousand francs to invest.
The third phase now began. Madame Schontz became the tenderest of
mothers to Arthur's son; she fetched him from school and took him back
herself; she overwhelmed with presents and dainties and pocket-money
the child who called her his "little mamma," and who adored her. She
took part in the management of Arthur's property; she made him buy
into the Funds when low, just before the famous treaty of London which
overturned the ministry of March 1st. Arthur gained two hundred
thousand francs by that transaction and Aurelie did not ask for a
penny of it. Like the gentleman that he was, Rochefide invested his
six hundred thousand francs in stock of the Bank of France and put
half of that sum in the name of Josephine Schiltz. A little house was
now hired in the rue de La Bruyere and given to Grindot, that great
decorative architect, with orders to make it a perfect bonbon-box.
Henceforth, Rochefide no longer managed his affairs. Madame Schontz
received the revenues and paid the bills. Become, as it were,
practically his wife, his woman of business, she justified the
position by making her /gros papa/ more comfortable than ever; she had
learned all his fancies, and gratified them as Madame de Pompadour
gratified those of Louis XV. In short, Madame Schontz reigned an
absolute mistress. She then began to patronize a few young men,
artists, men of letters, new-fledged to fame, who rejected both
ancients and moderns, and strove to make themselves a great reputation
by accomplishing little or nothing.
The conduct of Madame Schontz, a triumph of tactics, ought to reveal
to you her superiority. In the first place, these ten or a dozen young
fellows amused Arthur; they supplied him with witty sayings and clever
opinions on all sorts of topics, and did not put in doubt the fidelity
of the mistress; moreover, they proclaimed her a woman who was
eminently intelligent. These living advertisements, these
perambulating articles, soon set up Madame Schontz as the most
agreeable woman to be found in the borderland which separates the
thirteenth arrondissement from the twelve others. Her rivals--Suzanne
Gaillard, who, in 1838, had won the advantage over her of becoming a
wife married in legitimate marriage, Fanny Beaupre, Mariette, Antonia
--spread calumnies that were more than droll about the beauty of those
young men and the complacent good-nature with which Monsieur de
Rochefide welcomed them. Madame Schontz, who could distance, as she
said, by three /blagues/ the wit of those ladies, said to them one
night at a supper given by Nathan to Florine, after recounting her
fortune and her success, "Do as much yourselves!"--a speech which
remained in their memory.
It was during this period that Madame Schontz made Arthur sell his
race-horses, through a series of considerations which she no doubt
derived from the critical mind of Claude Vignon, one of her
/habitues/.
"I can conceive," she said one night, after lashing the horses for
some time with her lively wit, "that princes and rich men should set
their hearts on horse-flesh, but only for the good of the country, not
for the paltry satisfactions of a betting man. If you had a stud farm
on your property and could raise a thousand or twelve hundred horses,
and if all the horses of France and of Navarre could enter into one
great solemn competition, it would be fine; but you buy animals as the
managers of theatres trade in artists; you degrade an institution to a
gambling game; you make a Bourse of legs, as you make a Bourse of
stocks. It is unworthy. Don't you spend sixty thousand francs
sometimes merely to read in the newspapers: 'Lelia, belonging to
Monsieur de Rochefide beat by a length Fleur-de-Genet the property of
Monsieur le Duc de Rhetore'? You had much better give that money to
poets, who would carry you in prose and verse to immortality, like the
late Montyon."
By dint of being prodded, the marquis was brought to see the
hollowness of the turf; he realized that economy of sixty thousand
francs; and the next year Madame Schontz remarked to him,--
"I don't cost you anything now, Arthur."
Many rich men envied the marquis and endeavored to entice Madame
Schontz away from him, but like the Russian prince they wasted their
old age.
"Listen to me," she said to Finot, now become immensely rich. "I am
certain that Rochefide would forgive me a little passion if I fell in
love with any one, but one doesn't leave a marquis with a kind heart
like that for a /parvenu/ like you. You couldn't keep me in the
position in which Arthur has placed me; he has made me half a wife and
a lady, and that's more than you could do even if you married me."
This was the last nail which clinched the fetters of that happy
galley-slave, for the speech of course reached the ears for which it
was intended.
The fourth phase had begun, that of /habit/, the final victory in
these plans of campaign, which make the women of this class say of a
man, "I hold him!" Rochefide, who had just bought the little hotel in
the name of Mademoiselle Josephine Schiltz (a trifle of eighty
thousand francs), had reached, at the moment the Duchesse de Grandlieu
was forming plans about him, the stage of deriving vanity from his
mistress (whom he now called Ninon II.), by vaunting her scrupulous
honesty, her excellent manners, her education, and her wit. He had
merged his own defects, merits, tastes, and pleasures in Madame
Schontz, and he found himself at this period of his life, either from
lassitude, indifference, or philosophy, a man unable to change, who
clings to wife or mistress.
We may understand the position won in five years by Madame Schontz
from the fact that presentation at her house had to be proposed some
time before it was granted. She refused to receive dull rich people
and smirched people; and only departed from this rule in favor of
certain great names of the aristocracy.
"They," she said, "have a right to be stupid because they are
well-bred."
She possessed ostensibly the three hundred thousand francs which
Rochefide had given her, and which a certain good fellow, a broker
named Gobenheim (the only man of that class admitted to her house)
invested and reinvested for her. But she manipulated for herself
secretly a little fortune of two hundred thousand francs, the result
of her savings for the last three years and of the constant movement
of the three hundred thousand francs,--for she never admitted the
possession of more than that known sum.
"The more you make, the less you get rich," said Gobenheim to her one
day.
"Water is so dear," she answered.
This secret hoard was increased by jewels and diamonds, which Aurelie
wore a month and then sold. When any one called her rich, Madame
Schontz replied that at the rate of interest in the Funds three
hundred thousand francs produced only twelve thousand, and she had
spent as much as that in the hardest days of her life.