XXIII ONE OF THE DISEASES OF THE AGE

Such conduct implied a plan, and Madame Schontz had, as you may well

believe, a plan. Jealous for the last two years of Madame du Bruel,

she was consumed with the ambition to be married by church and mayor.

All social positions have their forbidden fruit, some little thing

magnified by desire until it has become the weightiest thing in life.

This ambition of course involved a second Arthur; but no espial on the

part of those about her had as yet discovered Rochefide's secret

rival. Bixiou fancied he saw the favored one in Leon de Lora; the

painter saw him in Bixiou, who had passed his fortieth year and ought

to be making himself a fate of some kind. Suspicions were also turned

on Victor de Vernisset, a poet of the school of Canalis, whose passion

for Madame Schontz was desperate; but the poet accused Stidmann, a

young sculptor, of being his fortune rival. This artist, a charming

lad, worked for jewellers, for manufacturers in bronze and silver-

smiths; he longed to be another Benvenuto Cellini. Claude Vignon, the

young Comte de la Palferine, Gobenheim, Vermanton a cynical

philosopher, all frequenters of this amusing salon, were severally

suspected, and proved innocent. No one had fathomed Madame Schontz,

certainly not Rochefide, who thought she had a penchant for the young

and witty La Palferine; she was virtuous from self-interest and was

wholly bent on making a good marriage.

Only one man of equivocal reputation was ever seen in Madame Schontz's

salon, namely Couture, who had more than once made his brother

speculators howl; but Couture had been one of Madame Schontz's

earliest friends, and she alone remained faithful to him. The false

alarm of 1840 swept away the last vestige of this stock-gambler's

credit; Aurelie, seeing his run of ill-luck, made Rochefide play, as

we have seen, in the other direction. Thankful to find a place for

himself at Aurelie's table, Couture, to whom Finot, the cleverest or,

if you choose, the luckiest of all parvenus, occasionally gave a note

of a thousand francs, was alone wise and calculating enough to offer

his hand and name to madame Schontz, who studied him to see if the

bold speculator had sufficient power to make his way in politics and

enough gratitude not to desert his wife. Couture, a man about forty-

three years of age, half worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant

sonority of his name by birth; he said little of the authors of his

days.

Madame Schontz was bemoaning to herself the rarity of eligible men,

when Couture presented to her a provincial, supplied with the two

handles by which women take hold of such pitchers when they wish to

keep them. To sketch this person will be to paint a portion of the

youth of the day. The digression is history.

In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, son of a chief-justice of the Royal court

at Caen (who had lately died), left his native town of Alencon,

resigning his judgeship (a position in which his father had compelled

him, he said, to waste his time), and came to Paris, with the

intention of making a noise there,a Norman idea, difficult to

realize, for he could scarcely scrape together eight thousand francs a

year; his mother still being alive and possessing a life-interest in a

valuable estate in Alencon. This young man had already, during

previous visits to Paris, tried his rope, like an acrobat, and had

recognized the great vice of the social replastering of 1830. He meant

to turn it to his own profit, following the example of the longest

heads of the bourgeoisie. This requires a rapid glance on one of the

effects of the new order of things.

Modern equality, unduly developed in our day, has necessarily

developed in private life, on a line parallel with political life, the

three great divisions of the social /I;/ namely, pride, conceit, and

vanity. Fools wish to pass for wits; wits want to be thought men of

talent; men of talent wish to be treated as men of genius; as for men

of genius, they are more reasonable; they consent to be only demigods.

This tendency of the public mind of these days, which, in the Chamber,

makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator

jealous of the writer, leads fools to disparage wits, wits to

disparage men of talent, men of talent to disparage those who outstrip

them by an inch or two, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the

throne, or whatever does not adore them unconditionally. So soon as a

nation has, in a very unstatesmanlike spirit, pulled down all

recognized social superiorities, she opens the sluice through which

rushes a torrent of secondary ambitions, the meanest of which resolves

to lead. She had, so democrats declare, an evil in her aristocracy;

but a defined and circumscribed evil; she exchanges it for a dozen

armed and contending aristocraciesthe worst of all situations. By

proclaiming the equality of all, she has promulgated a declaration of

the rights of Envy. We inherit to-day the saturnalias of the

Revolution transferred to the domain, apparently peaceful, of the

mind, of industry, of politics; it now seems that reputations won by

toil, by services rendered, by talent, are privileges granted at the

expense of the masses. Agrarian law will spread to the field of glory.

Never, in any age, have men demanded the affixing of their names on

the nation's posters for reasons more puerile. Distinction is sought

at any price, by ridicule, by an affectation of interest in the cause

of Poland, in penitentiaries, in the future of liberated galley-

slaves, in all the little scoundrels above and below twelve years, and

in every other social misery. These diverse manias create fictitious

dignities, presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries of societies,

the number of which is greater than that of the social questions they

seek to solve. Society on its grand scale has been demolished to make

a million of little ones in the image of the defunct. These parasitic

organizations reveal decomposition; are they not the swarming of

maggots in the dead body? All these societies are the daughters of one

mother, Vanity. It is not thus that Catholic charity or true

beneficence proceeds; /they/ study evils in wounds and cure them; they

don't perorate in public meetings upon deadly ills for the pleasure of

perorating.

Fabien du Ronceret, without being a superior man, had divined, by the

exercise of that greedy common-sense peculiar to a Norman, the gain he

could derive from this public vice. Every epoch has its character

which clever men make use of. Fabien's mind, though not clever, was

wholly bent on making himself talked about.

"My dear fellow, a man must make himself talked about, if he wants to

be anything," he said, on parting from the king of Alencon, a certain

du Bousquier, a friend of his father. "In six months I shall be better

known than you are!"

It was thus that Fabien interpreted the spirit of his age; he did not

rule it, he obeyed it. He made his debut in Bohemia, a region in the

moral topography of Paris where he was known as "The Heir" by reason

of certain premeditated prodigalities. Du Ronceret had profited by

Couture's follies for the pretty Madame Cadine, for whom, during his

ephemeral opulence, he had arranged a delightful ground-floor

apartment with a garden in the rue Blanche. The Norman, who wanted his

luxury ready-made, bought Couture's furniture and all the improvements

he was forced to leave behind him,a kiosk in the garden, where he

smoked, a gallery in rustic wood, with India mattings and adorned with

potteries, through which to reach the kiosk if it rained. When the

Heir was complimented on his apartment, he called it his /den/. The

provincial took care not to say that Grindot, the architect, had

bestowed his best capacity upon it, as did Stidmann on the carvings,

and Leon de Lora on the paintings, for Fabien's crowning defect was

the vanity which condescends to lie for the sake of magnifying the

individual self.

The Heir complimented these magnificences by a greenhouse which he

built along a wall with a southern exposure,not that he loved

flowers, but he meant to attack through horticulture the public notice

he wanted to excite. At the present moment he had all but attained his

end. Elected vice-president of some sort of floral society presided

over by the Duc de Vissembourg, brother of the Prince de Chiavari,

youngest son of the late Marechal Vernon, he adorned his coat with the

ribbon of the Legion of honor on the occasion of an exhibition of

products, the opening speech at which, delivered by him, and bought of

Lousteau for five hundred francs, was boldly pronounced to be his own

brew. He also made himself talked about by a flower, given to him by

old Blondet of Alencon, father of Emile Blondet, which he presented to

the horticultural world as the product of his own greenhouse.

But this success was nothing. The Heir, who wished to be accepted as a

wit, had formed a plan of consorting with clever celebrities and so

reflecting their fame,a plan somewhat hard to execute on a basis of

an exchequer limited to eight thousand francs a year. With this end in

view, Fabien du Ronceret had addressed himself again and again,

without success, to Bixiou, Stidmann, and Leon de Lora, asking them to

present him to Madame Schontz, and allow him to take part in that

menageria of lions of all kinds. Failing in those directions he

applied to Couture, for whose dinners he had so often paid that the

late speculator felt obliged to prove categorically to Madame Schontz

that she ought to acquire such an original, if it was only to make him

one of those elegant footmen without wages whom the mistresses of

households employ to do errands, when servants are lacking.

In the course of three evenings Madame Schontz read Fabien like a book

and said to herself,

"If Couture does not suit me, I am certain of saddling that one. My

future can go on two legs now."

This queer fellow whom everybody laughed at was really the chosen one,

chosen, however, with an intention which made such preference

insulting. The choice escaped all public suspicion by its very

improbability. Madame Schontz intoxicated Fabien with smiles given

secretly, with little scenes played on the threshold when she bade him

good-night, if Monsieur de Rochefide stayed behind. She often made

Fabien a third with Arthur in her opera-box and at first

representations; this she excused by saying he had done her such or

such a service and she did not know how else to repay him. Men have a

natural conceit as common to them as to women,that of being loved

exclusively. Now of all flattering passions there is none more prized

than that of a Madame Schontz, for the man she makes the object of a

love she calls "from the heart," in distinction from another sort of

love. A woman like Madame Schontz, who plays the great lady, and whose

intrinsic value is real, was sure to be an object of pride to Fabien,

who fell in love with her to the point of never presenting himself

before her eyes except in full dress, varnished boots, lemon-kid

gloves, embroidered shirt and frill, waistcoat more or less

variegated,in short, with all the external symptoms of profound

worship.

A month before the conference of the duchess and her confessor, Madame

Schontz had confided the secret of her birth and her real name to

Fabien, who did not in the least understand the motive of the

confidence. A fortnight later, Madame Schontz, surprised at this want

of intelligence, suddenly exclaimed to herself:

"Heavens! how stupid I am! he expects me to love him for himself."

Accordingly the next day she took the Heir in her /caleche/ to the

Bois, for she now had two little carriages, drawn by two horses. In

the course of this public /tete-a-tete/ she opened the question of her

future, and declared that she wished to marry.

"I have seven hundred thousand francs," she said, "and I admit to you

that if I could find a man full of ambition, who knew how to

understand my character, I would change my position; for do you know

what is the dream of my life? To become a true bourgeoise, enter an

honorable family, and make my husband and children truly happy."

The Norman would fain be "distinguished" by Madame Schontz, but as for

marrying her, that folly seemed debatable to a bachelor of thirty-

eight whom the revolution of July had made a judge. Seeing his

hesitation, Madame Schontz made the Heir the butt of her wit, her

jests, and her disdain, and turned to Couture. Within a week, the

latter, whom she put upon the scent of her fortune, had offered his

hand, and heart, and future,three things of about the same value.

The manoeuvres of Madame Schontz had reached this stage of proceeding,

when Madame de Grandlieu began her inquiries into the life and habits

of the Beatrix of the Place Saint-Georges.