XV

So one morning she made her way towards the grotesque facade of the

humble, silent home where she had spent her childhood. She sighed as

she looked up at the sash-window, whence one day she had sent her

first kiss to him who now shed as much sorrow as glory on her life.

Nothing was changed in the cavern, where the drapery business had,

however, started on a new life. Augustine's sister filled her mother's

old place at the desk. The unhappy young woman met her brother-in-law

with his pen behind his ear; he hardly listened to her, he was so full

of business. The formidable symptoms of stock-taking were visible all

round him; he begged her to excuse him. She was received coldly enough

by her sister, who owed her a grudge. In fact, Augustine, in her

finery, and stepping out of a handsome carriage, had never been to see

her but when passing by. The wife of the prudent Lebas, imagining that

want of money was the prime cause of this early call, tried to keep up

a tone of reserve which more than once made Augustine smile. The

painter's wife perceived that, apart from the cap and lappets, her

mother had found in Virginie a successor who could uphold the ancient

honor of the Cat and Racket. At breakfast she observed certain changes

in the management of the house which did honor to Lebas' good sense;

the assistants did not rise before dessert; they were allowed to talk,

and the abundant meal spoke of ease without luxury. The fashionable

woman found some tickets for a box at the Francais, where she

remembered having seen her sister from time to time. Madame Lebas had

a cashmere shawl over her shoulders, of which the value bore witness

to her husband's generosity to her. In short, the couple were keeping

pace with the times. During the two-thirds of the day she spent there,

Augustine was touched to the heart by the equable happiness, devoid,

to be sure, of all emotion, but equally free from storms, enjoyed by

this well-matched couple. They had accepted life as a commercial

enterprise, in which, above all, they must do credit to the business.

Not finding any great love in her husband, Virginie had set to work to

create it. Having by degrees learned to esteem and care for his wife,

the time that his happiness had taken to germinate was to Joseph Lebas

a guarantee of its durability. Hence, when Augustine plaintively set

forth her painful position, she had to face the deluge of commonplace

morality which the traditions of the Rue Saint-Denis furnished to her

sister.

"The mischief is done, wife," said Joseph Lebas; "we must try to give

our sister good advice." Then the clever tradesman ponderously

analyzed the resources which law and custom might offer Augustine as a

means of escape at this crisis; he ticketed every argument, so to

speak, and arranged them in their degrees of weight under various

categories, as though they were articles of merchandise of different

qualities; then he put them in the scale, weighed them, and ended by

showing the necessity for his sister-in-law's taking violent steps

which could not satisfy the love she still had for her husband; and,

indeed, the feeling had revived in all its strength when she heard

Joseph Lebas speak of legal proceedings. Augustine thanked them, and

returned home even more undecided than she had been before consulting

them. She now ventured to go to the house in the Rue du Colombier,

intending to confide her troubles to her father and mother; for she

was like a sick man who, in his desperate plight, tries every

prescription, and even puts faith in old wives' remedies.

The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that

touched her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and

that to them was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had

gone their way like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting by

the chimney corner, they would talk over their disasters under the old

law of /maximum/, of their great investments in cloth, of the way they

had weathered bankruptcies, and, above all, the famous failure of

Lecocq, Monsieur Guillaume's battle of Marengo. Then, when they had

exhausted the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum total of

their most profitable stock-takings, and told each other old stories

of the Saint-Denis quarter. At two o'clock old Guillaume went to cast

an eye on the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way back he

called at all the shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where the

young proprietors hoped to inveigle the old draper into some risky

discount, which, as was his wont, he never refused point-blank. Two

good Normandy horses were dying of their own fat in the stables of the

big house; Madame Guillaume never used them but to drag her on Sundays

to high Mass at the parish church. Three times a week the worthy

couple kept open house. By the influence of his son-in-law

Sommervieux, Monsieur Guillaume had been named a member of the

consulting board for the clothing of the Army. Since her husband had

stood so high in office, Madame Guillaume had decided that she must

receive; her rooms were so crammed with gold and silver ornaments, and

furniture, tasteless but of undoubted value, that the simplest room in

the house looked like a chapel. Economy and expense seemed to be

struggling for the upper hand in every accessory. It was as though

Monsieur Guillaume had looked to a good investment, even in the

purchase of a candlestick. In the midst of this bazaar, where splendor

revealed the owner's want of occupation, Sommervieux's famous picture

filled the place of honor, and in it Monsieur and Madame Guillaume

found their chief consolation, turning their eyes, harnessed with eye-

glasses, twenty times a day on this presentment of their past life, to

them so active and amusing. The appearance of this mansion and these

rooms, where everything had an aroma of staleness and mediocrity, the

spectacle offered by these two beings, cast away, as it were, on a

rock far from the world and the ideas which are life, startled

Augustine; she could here contemplate the sequel of the scene of which

the first part had struck her at the house of Lebas--a life of stir

without movement, a mechanical and instinctive existence like that of

the beaver; and then she felt an indefinable pride in her troubles, as

she reflected that they had their source in eighteen months of such

happiness as, in her eyes, was worth a thousand lives like this; its

vacuity seemed to her horrible. However, she concealed this not very

charitable feeling, and displayed for her parents her newly-acquired

accomplishments of mind, and the ingratiating tenderness that love had

revealed to her, disposing them to listen to her matrimonial

grievances. Old people have a weakness for this kind of confidence.

Madame Guillaume wanted to know the most trivial details of that alien

life, which to her seemed almost fabulous. The travels of Baron da la

Houtan, which she began again and again and never finished, told her

nothing more unheard-of concerning the Canadian savages.