XXII 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 rivalsSuzanne

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.