Cousin Betty Part 74

"That is my poor Valerie's last jest; that is all herself!" said Lisbeth in tears.

Lisbeth thought it her duty to go into Crevel's room, where she found Victorin and his wife sitting about a yard away from the stricken man's bed.

"Lisbeth," said he, "they will not tell me what state my wife is in; you have just seen her--how is she?"

"She is better; she says she is saved," replied Lisbeth, allowing herself this play on the word to soothe Crevel's mind.

"That is well," said the Mayor. "I feared lest I had been the cause of her illness. A man is not a traveler in perfumery for nothing; I had blamed myself.--If I should lose her, what would become of me? On my honor, my children, I worship that woman."

He sat up in bed and tried to a.s.sume his favorite position.

"Oh, Papa!" cried Celestine, "if only you could be well again, I would make friends with my stepmother--I make a vow!"

"Poor little Celestine!" said Crevel, "come and kiss me."

Victorin held back his wife, who was rushing forward.

"You do not know, perhaps," said the lawyer gently, "that your disease is contagious, monsieur."

"To be sure," replied Crevel. "And the doctors are quite proud of having rediscovered in me some long lost plague of the Middle Ages, which the Faculty has had cried like lost property--it is very funny!"

"Papa," said Celestine, "be brave, and you will get the better of this disease."

"Be quite easy, my children; Death thinks twice of it before carrying off a Mayor of Paris," said he, with monstrous composure. "And if, after all, my district is so unfortunate as to lose a man it has twice honored with its suffrages--you see, what a flow of words I have!--Well, I shall know how to pack up and go. I have been a commercial traveler; I am experienced in such matters. Ah! my children, I am a man of strong mind."

"Papa, promise me to admit the Church--"

"Never," replied Crevel. "What is to be said? I drank the milk of Revolution; I have not Baron Holbach's wit, but I have his strength of mind. I am more _Regence_ than ever, more Musketeer, Abbe Dubois, and Marechal de Richelieu! By the Holy Poker!--My wife, who is wandering in her head, has just sent me a man in a gown--to me! the admirer of Beranger, the friend of Lisette, the son of Voltaire and Rousseau.--The doctor, to feel my pulse, as it were, and see if sickness had subdued me--'You saw Monsieur l'Abbe?' said he.--Well, I imitated the great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor--see, like this," and he turned to show three-quarters face, like his portrait, and extended his hand authoritatively--"and I said:

"The slave was here, He showed his order, but he nothing gained.

"_His order_ is a pretty jest, showing that even in death Monsieur le President de Montesquieu preserved his elegant wit, for they had sent him a Jesuit. I admire that pa.s.sage--I cannot say of his life, but of his death--the pa.s.sage--another joke!--The pa.s.sage from life to death--the Pa.s.sage Montesquieu!"

Victorin gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering whether folly and vanity were not forces on a par with true greatness of soul. The causes that act on the springs of the soul seem to be quite independent of the results. Can it be that the fort.i.tude which upholds a great criminal is the same as that which a Champcenetz so proudly walks to the scaffold?

By the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after dreadful sufferings; and Crevel followed her within two days. Thus the marriage-contract was annulled. Crevel was heir to Valerie.

On the very day after the funeral, the friar called again on the lawyer, who received him in perfect silence. The monk held out his hand without a word, and without a word Victorin Hulot gave him eighty thousand-franc notes, taken from a sum of money found in Crevel's desk.

Young Madame Hulot inherited the estate of Presles and thirty thousand francs a year.

Madame Crevel had bequeathed a sum of three hundred thousand francs to Baron Hulot. Her scrofulous boy Stanislas was to inherit, at his majority, the Hotel Crevel and eighty thousand francs a year.

Among the many n.o.ble a.s.sociations founded in Paris by Catholic charity, there is one, originated by Madame de la Chanterie, for promoting civil and religious marriages between persons who have formed a voluntary but illicit union. Legislators, who draw large revenues from the registration fees, and the Bourgeois dynasty, which benefits by the notary's profits, affect to overlook the fact that three-fourths of the poorer cla.s.s cannot afford fifteen francs for the marriage-contract. The pleaders, a sufficiently vilified body, gratuitously defend the cases of the indigent, while the notaries have not as yet agreed to charge nothing for the marriage-contract of the poor. As to the revenue collectors, the whole machinery of Government would have to be dislocated to induce the authorities to relax their demands. The registrar's office is deaf and dumb.

Then the Church, too, receives a duty on marriages. In France the Church depends largely on such revenues; even in the House of G.o.d it traffics in chairs and kneeling stools in a way that offends foreigners; though it cannot have forgotten the anger of the Saviour who drove the money-changers out of the Temple. If the Church is so loath to relinquish its dues, it must be supposed that these dues, known as Vestry dues, are one of its sources of maintenance, and then the fault of the Church is the fault of the State.

The co-operation of these conditions, at a time when charity is too greatly concerned with the negroes and the petty offenders discharged from prison to trouble itself about honest folks in difficulties, results in the existence of a number of decent couples who have never been legally married for lack of thirty francs, the lowest figure for which the Notary, the Registrar, the Mayor and the Church will unite two citizens of Paris. Madame de la Chanterie's fund, founded to restore poor households to their religious and legal status, hunts up such couples, and with all the more success because it helps them in their poverty before attacking their unlawful union.

As soon as Madame Hulot had recovered, she returned to her occupations.

And then it was that the admirable Madame de la Chanterie came to beg that Adeline would add the legalization of these voluntary unions to the other good works of which she was the instrument.

One of the Baroness' first efforts in this cause was made in the ominous-looking district, formerly known as la Pet.i.te Pologne--Little Poland--bounded by the Rue du Rocher, Rue de la Pepiniere, and Rue de Miromenil. There exists there a sort of offshoot of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. To give an idea of this part of the town, it is enough to say that the landlords of some of the houses tenanted by working men without work, by dangerous characters, and by the very poor employed in unhealthy toil, dare not demand their rents, and can find no bailiffs bold enough to evict insolvent lodgers. At the present time speculating builders, who are fast changing the aspect of this corner of Paris, and covering the waste ground lying between the Rue d'Amsterdam and the Rue Faubourg-du-Roule, will no doubt alter the character of the inhabitants; for the trowel is a more civilizing agent than is generally supposed. By erecting substantial and handsome houses, with porters at the doors, by bordering the streets with footwalks and shops, speculation, while raising the rents, disperses the squalid cla.s.s, families bereft of furniture, and lodgers that cannot pay. And so these districts are cleared of such objectionable residents, and the dens vanish into which the police never venture but under the sanction of the law.

In June 1844, the purlieus of the Place de Laborde were still far from inviting. The genteel pedestrian, who by chance should turn out of the Rue de la Pepiniere into one of those dreadful side-streets, would have been dismayed to see how vile a bohemia dwelt cheek by jowl with the aristocracy. In such places as these, haunted by ignorant poverty and misery driven to bay, flourish the last public letter-writers who are to be found in Paris. Wherever you see the two words "Ecrivain Public"

written in a fine copy hand on a sheet of letter-paper stuck to the window pane of some low entresol or mud-splashed ground-floor room, you may safely conclude that the neighborhood is the lurking place of many unlettered folks, and of much vice and crime, the outcome of misery; for ignorance is the mother of all sorts of crime. A crime is, in the first instance, a defect of reasoning powers.

While the Baroness had been ill, this quarter, to which she was a minor Providence, had seen the advent of a public writer who settled in the Pa.s.sage du Soleil--Sun Alley--a spot of which the name is one of the ant.i.theses dear to the Parisian, for the pa.s.sage is especially dark.

This writer, supposed to be a German, was named Vyder, and he lived on matrimonial terms with a young creature of whom he was so jealous that he never allowed her to go anywhere excepting to some honest stove and flue-fitters, in the Rue Saint-Lazare, Italians, as such fitters always are, but long since established in Paris. These people had been saved from a bankruptcy, which would have reduced them to misery, by the Baroness, acting in behalf of Madame de la Chanterie. In a few months comfort had taken the place of poverty, and Religion had found a home in hearts which once had cursed Heaven with the energy peculiar to Italian stove-fitters. So one of Madame Hulot's first visits was to this family.

She was pleased at the scene that presented itself to her eyes at the back of the house where these worthy folks lived in the Rue Saint-Lazare, not far from the Rue du Rocher. High above the stores and workshops, now well filled, where toiled a swarm of apprentices and workmen--all Italians from the valley of Domo d'Ossola--the master's family occupied a set of rooms, which hard work had blessed with abundance. The Baroness was hailed like the Virgin Mary in person.

After a quarter of an hour's questioning, Adeline, having to wait for the father to inquire how his business was prospering, pursued her saintly calling as a spy by asking whether they knew of any families needing help.

"Ah, dear lady, you who could save the d.a.m.ned from h.e.l.l!" said the Italian wife, "there is a girl quite near here to be saved from perdition."

"A girl well known to you?" asked the Baroness.

"She is the granddaughter of a master my husband formerly worked for, who came to France in 1798, after the Revolution, by name Judici. Old Judici, in Napoleon's time, was one of the princ.i.p.al stove-fitters in Paris; he died in 1819, leaving his son a fine fortune. But the younger Judici wasted all his money on bad women; till, at last, he married one who was sharper than the rest, and she had this poor little girl, who is just turned fifteen."

"And what is wrong with her?" asked Adeline, struck by the resemblance between this Judici and her husband.

"Well, madame, this child, named Atala, ran away from her father, and came to live close by here with an old German of eighty at least, named Vyder, who does odd jobs for people who cannot read and write. Now, if this old sinner, who bought the child of her mother, they say for fifteen hundred francs, would but marry her, as he certainly has not long to live, and as he is said to have some few thousand of francs a year--well, the poor thing, who is a sweet little angel, would be out of mischief, and above want, which must be the ruin of her."

"Thank you very much for the information. I may do some good, but I must act with caution.--Who is the old man?"

"Oh! madame, he is a good old fellow; he makes the child very happy, and he has some sense too, for he left the part of town where the Judicis live, as I believe, to s.n.a.t.c.h the child from her mother's clutches. The mother was jealous of her, and I dare say she thought she could make money out of her beauty and make a _mademoiselle_ of the girl.

"Atala remembered us, and advised her gentleman to settle near us; and as the good man sees how decent we are, he allows her to come here. But get them married, madame, and you will do an action worthy of you. Once married, the child will be independent and free from her mother, who keeps an eye on her, and who, if she could make money by her, would like to see her on the stage, or successful in the wicked life she meant her to lead."

"Why doesn't the old man marry her?"

"There was no necessity for it, you see," said the Italian. "And though old Vyder is not a bad old fellow, I fancy he is sharp enough to wish to remain the master, while if he once got married--why, the poor man is afraid of the stone that hangs round every old man's neck."

"Could you send for the girl to come here?" said Madame Hulot. "I should see her quietly, and find out what could be done--"

The stove-fitter's wife signed to her eldest girl, who ran off. Ten minutes later she returned, leading by the hand a child of fifteen and a half, a beauty of the Italian type. Mademoiselle Judici inherited from her father that ivory skin which, rather yellow by day, is by artificial light of lily-whiteness; eyes of Oriental beauty, form, and brilliancy, close curling lashes like black feathers, hair of ebony hue, and that native dignity of the Lombard race which makes the foreigner, as he walks through Milan on a Sunday, fancy that every porter's daughter is a princess.

Atala, told by the stove-fitter's daughter that she was to meet the great lady of whom she had heard so much, had hastily dressed in a black silk gown, a smart little cape, and neat boots. A cap with a cherry-colored bow added to the brilliant effect of her coloring. The child stood in an att.i.tude of artless curiosity, studying the Baroness out of the corner of her eye, for her palsied trembling puzzled her greatly.

Adeline sighed deeply as she saw this jewel of womanhood in the mire of prost.i.tution, and determined to rescue her to virtue.

"What is your name, my dear?"

"Atala, madame."