II

Lucien went down to L'Houmeau along the broad Promenade de Beaulieu,

the Rue du Minage, and Saint-Peter's Gate. It was the longest way

round, so you may be sure that Mme. de Bargeton's house lay on the

way. So delicious it was to pass under her windows, though she knew

nothing of his presence, that for the past two months he had gone

round daily by the Palet Gate into L'Houmeau.

Under the trees of Beaulieu he saw how far the suburb lay from the

city. The custom of the country, moreover, had raised other barriers

harder to surmount than the mere physical difficulty of the steep

flights of steps which Lucien was descending. Youth and ambition had

thrown the flying-bridge of glory across the gulf between the city and

the suburb, yet Lucien was as uneasy in his mind over his lady's

answer as any king's favorite who has tried to climb yet higher, and

fears that being over-bold he is like to fall. This must seem a dark

saying to those who have never studied the manners and customs of

cities divided into the upper and lower town; wherefore it is

necessary to enter here upon some topographical details, and this so

much the more if the reader is to comprehend the position of one of

the principal characters in the story--Mme. de Bargeton.

The old city of Angouleme is perched aloft on a crag like a sugar-

loaf, overlooking the plain where the Charente winds away through the

meadows. The crag is an outlying spur on the Perigord side of a long,

low ridge of hill, which terminates abruptly just above the road from

Paris to Bordeaux, so that the Rock of Angouleme is a sort of

promontory marking out the line of three picturesque valleys. The

ramparts and great gateways and ruined fortress on the summit of the

crag still remain to bear witness to the importance of this stronghold

during the Religious Wars, when Angouleme was a military position

coveted alike of Catholics and Calvinists, but its old-world strength

is a source of weakness in modern days; Angouleme could not spread

down to the Charente, and shut in between its ramparts and the steep

sides of the crag, the old town is condemned to stagnation of the most

fatal kind.

The Government made an attempt about this very time to extend the town

towards Perigord, building a Prefecture, a Naval School, and barracks

along the hillside, and opening up roads. But private enterprise had

been beforehand elsewhere. For some time past the suburb of L'Houmeau

had sprung up, a mushroom growth at the foot of the crag and along the

river-side, where the direct road runs from Paris to Bordeaux.

Everybody has heard of the great paper-mills of Angouleme, established

perforce three hundred years ago on the Charente and its branch

streams, where there was a sufficient fall of water. The largest State

factory of marine ordnance in France was established at Ruelle, some

six miles away. Carriers, wheelwrights, posthouses, and inns, every

agency for public conveyance, every industry that lives by road or

river, was crowded together in Lower Angouleme, to avoid the

difficulty of the ascent of the hill. Naturally, too, tanneries,

laundries, and all such waterside trades stood within reach of the

Charente; and along the banks of the river lay the stores of brandy

and great warehouses full of the water-borne raw material; all the

carrying trade of the Charente, in short, had lined the quays with

buildings.

So the Faubourg of L'Houmeau grew into a busy and prosperous city, a

second Angouleme rivaling the upper town, the residence of the powers

that be, the lords spiritual and temporal of Angouleme; though

L'Houmeau, with all its business and increasing greatness, was still a

mere appendage of the city above. The noblesse and officialdom dwelt

on the crag, trade and wealth remained below. No love was lost between

these two sections of the community all the world over, and in

Angouleme it would have been hard to say which of the two camps

detested the other the more cordially. Under the Empire the machinery

worked fairly smoothly, but the Restoration wrought both sides to the

highest pitch of exasperation.

Nearly every house in the upper town of Angouleme is inhabited by

noble, or at any rate by old burgher, families, who live independently

on their incomes--a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens

to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken

residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the

primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be

adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they are still

newcomers of yesterday.

Prefects, receivers-general, and various administrations that have

come and gone during the last forty years, have tried to tame the

ancient families perched aloft like wary ravens on their crag; the

said families were always willing to accept invitations to dinners and

dances; but as to admitting the strangers to their own houses, they

were inexorable. Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly,

marrying only among themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx

to keep out intruders. Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for

sending a boy to Paris, it was sending him, they thought to certain

ruin. Such sagacity will give a sufficient idea of the old-world

manners and customs of this society, suffering from thick-headed

Royalism, infected with bigotry rather than zeal, all stagnating

together, motionless as their town founded upon a rock. Yet Angouleme

enjoyed a great reputation in the provinces round about for its

educational advantages, and neighboring towns sent their daughters to

its boarding schools and convents.

It is easy to imagine the influence of the class sentiment which held

Angouleme aloof from L'Houmeau. The merchant classes are rich, the

noblesse are usually poor. Each side takes its revenge in scorn of the

other. The tradespeople in Angouleme espouse the quarrel. "He is a man

of L'Houmeau!" a shopkeeper of the upper town will tell you, speaking

of a merchant in the lower suburb, throwing an accent into the speech

which no words can describe. When the Restoration defined the position

of the French noblesse, holding out hopes to them which could only be

realized by a complete and general topsy-turvydom, the distance

between Angouleme and L'Houmeau, already more strongly marked than the

distance between the hill and plain, was widened yet further. The

better families, all devoted as one man to the Government, grew more

exclusive here than in any other part of France. "The man of

L'Houmeau" became little better than a pariah. Hence the deep,

smothered hatred which broke out everywhere with such ugly unanimity

in the insurrection of 1830 and destroyed the elements of a durable

social system in France. As the overweening haughtiness of the Court

nobles detached the provincial noblesse from the throne, so did these

last alienate the bourgeoisie from the royal cause by behavior that

galled their vanity in every possible way.

So "a man of L'Houmeau," a druggist's son, in Mme. de Bargeton's house

was nothing less than a little revolution. Who was responsible for it?

Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Beranger and

Chateaubriand. Davrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and

Michaud,--all the old and young illustrious names in literature in

short, Liberals and Royalists, alike must divide the blame among them.

Mme. de Bargeton loved art and letters, eccentric taste on her part, a

craze deeply deplored in Angouleme. In justice to the lady, it is

necessary to give a sketch of the previous history of a woman born to

shine, and left by unlucky circumstances in the shade, a woman whose

influence decided Lucien's career.

M. de Bargeton was the great-grandson of an alderman of Bordeaux named

Mirault, ennobled under Louis XIII. for long tenure of office. His

son, bearing the name of Mirault de Bargeton, became an officer in the

household troops of Louis XIV., and married so great a fortune that in

the reign of Louis XV. his son dropped the Mirault and was called

simply M. de Bargeton. This M. de Bargeton, the alderman's grandson,

lived up to his quality so strenuously that he ran through the family

property and checked the course of its fortunes. Two of his brothers

indeed, great-uncles of the present Bargeton, went into business

again, for which reason you will find the name of Mirault among

Bordeaux merchants at this day. The lands of Bargeton, in Angoumois in

the barony of Rochefoucauld, being entailed, and the house in

Angouleme, called the Hotel Bargeton, likewise, the grandson of M. de

Bargeton the Waster came in for these hereditaments; though the year

1789 deprived him of all seignorial rights save to the rents paid by

his tenants, which amounted to some ten thousand francs per annum. If

his grandsire had but walked in the ways of his illustrious

progenitors, Bargeton I. and Bargeton II., Bargeton V. (who may be

dubbed Bargeton the Mute by way of distinction) should by rights have

been born to the title of Marquis of Bargeton; he would have been

connected with some great family or other, and in due time he would

have been a duke and a peer of France, like many another; whereas, in

1805, he thought himself uncommonly lucky when he married Mlle.

Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, the daughter of a noble long

relegated to the obscurity of his manor-house, scion though he was of

the younger branch of one of the oldest families in the south of

France. There had been a Negrepelisse among the hostages of St. Louis.

The head of the elder branch, however, had borne the illustrious name

of d'Espard since the reign of Henri Quatre, when the Negrepelisse of

that day married an heiress of the d'Espard family. As for M. de

Negrepelisse, the younger son of a younger son, he lived upon his

wife's property, a small estate in the neighborhood of Barbezieux,

farming the land to admiration, selling his corn in the market

himself, and distilling his own brandy, laughing at those who

ridiculed him, so long as he could pile up silver crowns, and now and

again round out his estate with another bit of land.

Circumstances unusual enough in out-of-the-way places in the country

had inspired Mme. de Bargeton with a taste for music and reading.

During the Revolution one Abbe Niollant, the Abbe Roze's best pupil,

found a hiding-place in the old manor-house of Escarbas, and brought

with him his baggage of musical compositions. The old country

gentleman's hospitality was handsomely repaid, for the Abbe undertook

his daughter's education. Anais, or Nais, as she was called must

otherwise have been left to herself, or, worse still, to some coarse-

minded servant-maid. The Abbe was not only a musician, he was well and

widely read, and knew both Italian and German; so Mlle. de Negrepelise

received instruction in those tongues, as well as in counterpoint. He

explained the great masterpieces of the French, German, and Italian

literatures, and deciphered with her the music of the great composers.

Finally, as time hung heavy on his hands in the seclusion enforced by

political storms, he taught his pupil Latin and Greek and some

smatterings of natural science. A mother might have modified the

effects of a man's education upon a young girl, whose independent

spirit had been fostered in the first place by a country life. The

Abbe Niollant, an enthusiast and a poet, possessed the artistic

temperament in a peculiarly high degree, a temperament compatible with

many estimable qualities, but prone to raise itself above bourgeois

prejudices by the liberty of its judgments and breadth of view. In

society an intellect of this order wins pardon for its boldness by its

depth and originality; but in private life it would seem to do

positive mischief, by suggesting wanderings from the beaten track. The

Abbe was by no means wanting in goodness of heart, and his ideas were

therefore the more contagious for this high-spirited girl, in whom

they were confirmed by a lonely life. The Abbe Niollant's pupil

learned to be fearless in criticism and ready in judgement; it never

occurred to her tutor that qualities so necessary in a man are

disadvantages in a woman destined for the homely life of a house-

mother. And though the Abbe constantly impressed it upon his pupil

that it behoved her to be the more modest and gracious with the extent

of her attainments, Mlle. de Negrepelisse conceived an excellent

opinion of herself and a robust contempt for ordinary humanity. All

those about her were her inferiors, or persons who hastened to do her

bidding, till she grew to be as haughty as a great lady, with none of

the charming blandness and urbanity of a great lady. The instincts of

vanity were flattered by the pride that the poor Abbe took in his

pupil, the pride of an author who sees himself in his work, and for

her misfortune she met no one with whom she could measure herself.

Isolation is one of the greatest drawbacks of a country life. We lose

the habit of putting ourselves to any inconvenience for the sake of

others when there is no one for whom to make the trifling sacrifices

of personal effort required by dress and manner. And everything in us

shares in the change for the worse; the form and the spirit

deteriorate together.

With no social intercourse to compel self-repression, Mlle. de

Negrepelisse's bold ideas passed into her manner and the expression of

her face. There was a cavalier air about her, a something that seems

at first original, but only suited to women of adventurous life. So

this education, and the consequent asperities of character, which

would have been softened down in a higher social sphere, could only

serve to make her ridiculous at Angouleme so soon as her adorers

should cease to worship eccentricities that charm only in youth.

As for M. de Negrepelisse, he would have given all his daughter's

books to save the life of a sick bullock; and so miserly was he, that

he would not have given her two farthings over and above the allowance

to which she had a right, even if it had been a question of some

indispensable trifle for her education.

In 1802 the Abbe died, before the marriage of his dear child, a

marriage which he, doubtless, would never have advised. The old father

found his daughter a great care now that the Abbe was gone. The high-

spirited girl, with nothing else to do, was sure to break into

rebellion against his niggardliness, and he felt quite unequal to the

struggle. Like all young women who leave the appointed track of

woman's life, Nais had her own opinions about marriage, and had no

great inclination thereto. She shrank from submitting herself, body

and soul, to the feeble, undignified specimens of mankind whom she had

chanced to meet. She wished to rule, marriage meant obedience; and

between obedience to coarse caprices and a mind without indulgence for

her tastes, and flight with a lover who should please her, she would

not have hesitated for a moment.

M. de Negrepelisse maintained sufficient of the tradition of birth to

dread a mesalliance. Like many another parent, he resolved to marry

his daughter, not so much on her account as for his own peace of mind.

A noble or a country gentleman was the man for him, somebody not too

clever, incapable of haggling over the account of the trust; stupid

enough and easy enough to allow Nais to have her own way, and

disinterested enough to take her without a dowry. But where to look

for a son-in-law to suit father and daughter equally well, was the

problem. Such a man would be the phoenix of sons-in-law.

To M. de Negrepelisse pondering over the eligible bachelors of the

province with these double requirements in his mind. M. de Bargeton

seemed to be the only one who answered to this description. M. de

Bargeton, aged forty, considerably shattered by the amorous

dissipations of his youth, was generally held to be a man of

remarkably feeble intellect; but he had just the exact amount of

commonsense required for the management of his fortune, and breeding

sufficient to enable him to avoid blunders or blatant follies in

society in Angouleme. In the bluntest manner M. de Negrepelisse

pointed out the negative virtues of the model husband designed for his

daughter, and made her see the way to manage him so as to secure her

own happiness. So Nais married the bearer of arms, two hundred years

old already, for the Bargeton arms are blazoned thus: the first or,

three attires gules; the second, three ox's heads cabossed, two and

one, sable; the third, barry of six, azure and argent, in the first,

six shells or, three, two, and one. Provided with a chaperon, Nais

could steer her fortunes as she chose under the style of the firm, and

with the help of such connections as her wit and beauty would obtain

for her in Paris. Nais was enchanted by the prospect of such liberty.

M. de Bargeton was of the opinion that he was making a brilliant

marriage, for he expected that in no long while M. de Negrepelisse

would leave him the estates which he was rounding out so lovingly; but

to an unprejudiced spectator it certainly seemed as though the duty of

writing the bridegroom's epitaph might devolve upon his father-in-law.

By this time Mme. de Bargeton was thirty-six years old and her husband

fifty-eight. The disparity in age was the more startling since M. de

Bargeton looked like a man of seventy, whereas his wife looked

scarcely half her age. She could still wear rose-color, and her hair

hanging loose upon her shoulders. Although their income did not exceed

twelve thousand francs, they ranked among the half-dozen largest

fortunes in the old city, merchants and officials excepted; for M. and

Mme. de Bargeton were obliged to live in Angouleme until such time as

Mme. de Bargeton's inheritance should fall in and they could go to

Paris. Meanwhile they were bound to be attentive to old M. de

Negrepelisse (who kept them waiting so long that his son-in-law in

fact predeceased him), and Nais' brilliant intellectual gifts, and the

wealth that lay like undiscovered ore in her nature, profited her

nothing, underwent the transforming operation of Time and changed to

absurdities. For our absurdities spring, in fact, for the most part,

from the good in us, from some faculty or quality abnormally

developed. Pride, untempered by intercourse with the great world

becomes stiff and starched by contact with petty things; in a loftier

moral atmosphere it would have grown to noble magnanimity. Enthusiasm,

that virtue within a virtue, forming the saint, inspiring the devotion

hidden from all eyes and glowing out upon the world in verse, turns to

exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow existence for its object.

Far away from the centres of light shed by great minds, where the air

is quick with thought, knowledge stands still, taste is corrupted like

stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the

infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the

secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial life.

The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest

natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be great, and women

who would have been charming if they had fallen under the forming

influence of greater minds, are balked of their lives.

Here was Mme. de Bargeton, for instance, smiting the lyre for every

trifle, and publishing her emotions indiscriminately to her circle. As

a matter of fact, when sensations appeal to an audience of one, it is

better to keep them to ourselves. A sunset certainly is a glorious

poem; but if a woman describes it, in high-sounding words, for the

benefit of matter-of-fact people, is she not ridiculous? There are

pleasures which can only be felt to the full when two souls meet, poet

and poet, heart and heart. She had a trick of using high-sounding

phrases, interlarded with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff

ingeniously nicknamed tartines by the French journalist, who furnishes

a daily supply of the commodity for a public that daily performs the

difficult feat of swallowing it. She squandered superlatives

recklessly in her talk, and the smallest things took giant

proportions. It was at this period of her career that she began to

type-ize, individualize, synthesize, dramatize, superiorize, analyze,

poetize, angelize, neologize, tragedify, prosify, and colossify--you

must violate the laws of language to find words to express the new-

fangled whimsies in which even women here and there indulge. The heat

of her language communicated itself to the brain, and the dithyrambs

on her lips were spoken out of the abundance of her heart. She

palpitated, swooned, and went into ecstasies over anything and

everything, over the devotion of a sister of Charity, and the

execution of the brothers Fauchet, over M. d'Arlincourt's Ipsiboe,

Lewis' Anaconda, or the escape of La Valette, or the presence of mind

of a lady friend who put burglars to flight by imitating a man's

voice. Everything was heroic, extraordinary, strange, wonderful, and

divine. She would work herself into a state of excitement,

indignation, or depression; she soared to heaven, and sank again,

gazed at the sky, or looked to earth; her eyes were always filled with

tears. She wore herself out with chronic admiration, and wasted her

strength on curious dislikes. Her mind ran on the Pasha of Janina; she

would have liked to try conclusions with him in his seraglio, and had

a great notion of being sewn in a sack and thrown into the water. She

envied that blue-stocking of the desert, Lady Hester Stanhope; she

longed to be a sister of Saint Camilla and tend the sick and die of

yellow fever in a hospital at Barcelona; 'twas a high, a noble

destiny! In short, she thirsted for any draught but the clear spring

water of her own life, flowing hidden among green pastures. She adored

Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or

dramatic career. Her tears were ready to flow for every misfortune;

she sang paeans for every victory. She sympathized with the fallen

Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali, massacring the foreign usurpers of

Egypt. In short, any kind of genius was accommodated with an aureole,

and she was fully persuaded that gifted immortals lived on incense and

light.

A good many people looked upon her as a harmless lunatic, but in these

extravagances of hers a keener observer surely would have seen the

broken fragments of a magnificent edifice that had crumbled into ruin

before it was completed, the stones of a heavenly Jerusalem--love, in

short, without a lover. And this was indeed the fact.

The story of the first eighteen years of Mme. de Bargeton's married

life can be summed up in a few words. For a long while she lived upon

herself and distant hopes. Then, when she began to see that their

narrow income put the longed-for life in Paris quite out of the

question, she looked about her at the people with whom her life must

be spent, and shuddered at her loneliness. There was not a single man

who could inspire the madness to which women are prone when they

despair of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present, and

with no outlook for the future. She had nothing to look for, nothing

to expect from chance, for there are lives in which chance plays no

part. But when the Empire was in the full noonday of glory, and

Napoleon was sending the flower of his troops to the Peninsula, her

disappointed hopes revived. Natural curiosity prompted her to make an

effort to see the heroes who were conquering Europe in obedience to a

word from the Emperor in the order of the day; the heroes of a modern

time who outdid the mythical feats of paladins of old. The cities of

France, however avaricious or refractory, must perforce do honor to

the Imperial Guard, and mayors and prefects went out to meet them with

set speeches as if the conquerors had been crowned kings. Mme. de

Bargeton went to a ridotto given to the town by a regiment, and fell

in love with an officer of a good family, a sub-lieutenant, to whom

the crafty Napoleon had given a glimpse of the baton of a Marshal of

France. Love, restrained, greater and nobler than the ties that were

made and unmade so easily in those days, was consecrated coldly by the

hands of death. On the battlefield of Wagram a shell shattered the

only record of Mme. de Bargeton's young beauty, a portrait worn on the

heart of the Marquis of Cante-Croix. For long afterwards she wept for

the young soldier, the colonel in his second campaign, for the heart

hot with love and glory that set a letter from Nais above Imperial

favor. The pain of those days cast a veil of sadness over her face, a

shadow that only vanished at the terrible age when a woman first

discovers with dismay that the best years of her life are over, and

she has had no joy of them; when she sees her roses wither, and the

longing for love is revived again with the desire to linger yet for a

little on the last smiles of youth. Her nobler qualities dealt so many

wounds to her soul at the moment when the cold of the provinces seized

upon her. She would have died of grief like the ermine if by chance

she had been sullied by contact with those men whose thoughts are bent

on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride

saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so

much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the

emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life,

can make but one choice; marriage and society became a cloister for

Anais. She lived by poetry as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the

famous foreign books published in France for the first time between

1815 and 1821, the great essayists, M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre

(those two eagles of thought)--all the lighter French literature, in

short, that appeared during that sudden outburst of first vigorous

growth might bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility

of mind or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree,

lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted

manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental

over-refinements; she queened it with her foibles, after the usual

fashion of those who allow their courtiers to adore them.

This was Mme. de Bargeton's past life, a dreary chronicle which must

be given if Lucien's position with regard to the lady is to be

comprehensible. Lucien's introduction came about oddly enough. In the

previous winter a newcomer had brought some interest into Mme. de

Bargeton's monotonous life. The place of controller of excise fell

vacant, and M. de Barante appointed a man whose adventurous life was a

sufficient passport to the house of the sovereign lady who had her

share of feminine curiosity.