AS early as the morrow, Octave commenced to occupy himself about Valérie. He studied her habits, and ascertained the hour when he would have a chance of meeting her on the stairs; and he arranged matters so that he could frequently go up to his room, taking advantage of his coming home to lunch at the Campardons’, and leaving “The Ladies’ Paradise” for a few minutes under some pretext or other. He soon noticed that, every day towards two o’clock, the young woman, who took her child to the Tuileries gardens, passed along the Rue Gaillon. Then he would stand at the door, wait till she came, and greet her with one of his handsome shopman’s smiles. At each of their meetings, Valérie politely inclined her head and passed on; but he perceived her dark glance to be full of passionate fire; he found encouragement in her ravaged complexion and in the supple swing of her gait.
His plan was already formed, the bold plan of a seducer used to cavalierly overcoming the virtue of shop-girls. It was simply a question of luring Valérie inside his room on the fourth floor; the staircase was always silent and deserted, no one would discover them up there; and he laughed at the thought of the architect’s moral admonitions; for taking a woman belonging to the house was not the same as bringing one into it.
One thing, however, made Octave uneasy. The passage separated the Pichons’ kitchen from their dining-room, and this obliged them to constantly have their door open. At nine o’clock in the morning, the husband started off for his office, and did not return home until about five in the evening; and, on alternate days of the week, he went out again after his dinner to do some bookkeeping, from eight to midnight. Besides this, though, the young woman, who was very reserved—almost wildly timid—would push her door to, directly she heard Octave’s footsteps. He never caught sight of more than her back, which always seemed to be flying away, with her light hair done up into a scanty chignon. Through that door kept discreetly ajar, he had, up till then, only beheld a small portion of the room: sad and clean looking furniture, linen of a dull whiteness in the grey light admitted through a window which he could not see, and the corner of a child’s crib inside an inner room; all the monotonous solitude of a wife occupied from morning to night with the recurring cares of a clerk’s home. Moreover, there was never a sound; the child seemed dumb and worn-out like the mother; one scarcely distinguished at times the soft murmur of some ballad which the latter would hum for hours together in an expiring voice. But Octave was none the less furious with the disdainful creature as he called her. She was playing the spy upon him perhaps. In any case, Valérie could never come up to him if the Pichons’ door was thus being continually opened.
He was just beginning to think that things were taking the right course. One Sunday when the husband was absent, he had manoeuvred in such a way as to be on the first-floor landing at the moment the young woman, wrapped in her dressing-gown, was leaving her sister-in-law’s to return to her own apartments; and she being obliged to speak to him, they had stood some minutes exchanging polite remarks. So he was hoping that next time she would ask him in. With a woman with such a temperament the rest would follow as a matter of course. That evening during dinner, there was some talk about Valérie at the Campardons’. Octave tried to draw the others out. But as Angèle was listening and casting sly glances at Lisa, who was handing round some leg of mutton and looking very serious, the parents at first did nothing but sing the young woman’s praises. Moreover, the architect always stood up for the respectability of the house, with the vain conviction of a tenant who seemed to obtain from it a regular certificate of his own gentility.
“Oh! my dear fellow, most respectable people. You saw them at the Josserands’. The husband is no fool; he is full of ideas, he will end by discovering something very grand. As for the wife, she has some style about her, as we artists say.”
Madame Campardon, who had been rather worse since the day before, and who was half reclining, though her illness did not prevent her eating thick underdone slices of meat, languidly murmured in her turn:
“That poor Monsieur Théophile, he is like me, he drags along. Ah! great praise is due to Valérie, for it is not lively always having by one a man trembling with fever, and whose infirmity usually makes him quarrelsome and unjust.”
During dessert, Octave, seated between the architect and his wife learnt more than he asked. They forgot Angèle, they spoke in hints, with glances which underlined the double meanings of the words; and, when they were at a loss for an expression, they bent towards him one after the other, and coarsely whispered the rest of the disclosure in his ear. In short, that Théophile was a stupid and impotent person, who deserved to be what his wife made him. As for Valérie, she was not worth much, she would have behaved just as badly even if her husband had been different, for with her, nature had so much the mastery. Moreover, no one was ignorant of the fact that, two months after her marriage, in despair at recognising that she would never have a child by her husband, and fearing she would lose her share of old Vabre’s fortune if Théophile happened to die, she had her little Camille got for her by a butcher’s man of the Rue Sainte-Anne.
Campardon bent down and whispered a last time in Octave’s ear:
“Well! you know, my dear fellow, a hysterical woman!”
And he put into the word all the middle-class wantonness of an indelicacy combined with the blobber-lipped smile of a father of a family whose imagination, abruptly let loose, revels in licentiousness. The conversation then took a different turn, they were speaking of the Pichons, and words of praise were not stinted.
“Oh! they are indeed worthy people!” repeated Madame Campardon. “Sometimes, when Marie takes her little Lilitte out, I also let her take Angèle. And I assure you, Monsieur Mouret, I do not trust my daughter to everyone; I must be absolutely certain of the person’s morality. You love Marie very much, do you not, Angèle?”
“Yes, mamma,” answered the child.
The details continued. It was impossible to find a woman better brought up, or according to severer principles. And it was a pleasure to see how happy the husband was! Such a nice little home, and so clean, and a couple that adored each other, who never said one word louder than another!
“Besides, they would not be allowed to remain in the house, if they did not behave themselves properly,” said the architect gravely, forgetting his disclosures about Valérie. “We will only have respectable people here. On my word of honour! I would give notice, the day that my daughter ran the risk of meeting disreputable women on the stairs.”
That evening, he had secretly arranged to take cousin Gasparine to the Opéra-Comique. He therefore went and fetched his hat at once, talking of a business matter which would keep him out till very late. Rose though probably knew of the arrangement, for Octave heard her murmur, in her resigned and maternal voice, when her husband came to kiss her with his habitual effusive tenderness:
“Amuse yourself well, and do not catch cold on coming out.” On the morrow, Octave had an idea: it was to become acquainted with Madame Pichon, by rendering her a few neighbourly services; in this way, if she ever caught Valeric, she would keep her eyes shut. And an opportunity occurred that very day. Madame Pichon was in the habit of taking Lilitte, then eighteen months old, out in a little basket-work perambulator, which raised Monsieur Gourd’s ire; the doorkeeper would never permit it to be carried up the principal staircase, so that she had to take it up the servants’; and as the door of her apartment was too narrow, she had to remove the wheels every time, which was quite a job. It so happened that that day Octave was returning home, just as his neighbour, incommoded by her gloves, was giving herself a great deal of trouble to get the nuts off. When she felt him standing up behind her, waiting till the passage was clear, she quite lost her head, and her hands trembled.
“But, madame, why do you take all that trouble?” asked he at length. “It would be far simpler to put the perambulator at the end of the passage, behind my door.”
She did not reply, her excessive timidity kept her squatting there, without strength to rise; and, beneath the curtain of her bonnet, he beheld a hot blush invade the nape of her neck and her ears. Then he insisted:
“I assure you, madame, it will not inconvenience me in the least.”
Without waiting, he lifted up the perambulator and carried it in his easy way. She was obliged to follow him; but she remained so confused, so frightened by this important adventure in her uneventful every-day life, that she looked on, only able to stutter fragments of sentences.
“Dear me! sir, it is too much trouble—I feel quite ashamed—you will find it very awkward. My husband will be very pleased—”
And she entered her room and locked herself in, this time hermetically, with a sort of shame. Octave thought that she was stupid. The perambulator was a great deal in his way for it prevented him opening his door wide, and he had to slip into his room sideways. But his neighbour seemed to be won over, more especially as Monsieur Gourd consented to authorize the obstruction at that end of the passage, thanks to Campardon’s influence.
Every Sunday, Marie’s parents, Monsieur and Madame Vuillaume, came to spend the day. On the Sunday following, as Octave was going out, he beheld all the family seated taking their coffee, and he was discreetly hastening by, when the young woman, whispering quickly in her husband’s ear, the latter jumped up, saying:
“Excuse me, sir, I am always out, I have not yet had an opportunity of thanking you. But I wish to tell you how pleased I was—”
Octave protested. At length he was obliged to give in. Though he had already had his coffee, they made him accept another cup. They gave him the place of honour, between Monsieur and Madame Vuillaume. Opposite to him, on the other side of the round table, Marie was again thrown into one of those confused conditions which at any minute, without apparent cause, brought all the blood from her heart to her face. He watched her, never having seen her at his ease. But, as Trublot said, she was not his fancy: she seemed to him wretched and washed out, with her flat face and her thin hair, though her features were refined and pretty. When she recovered herself a little, she laughed lightly as she again talked of the perambulator, about which she found a great deal to say.
“Jules, if you had only seen Monsieur Mouret carry it in his arms. Ah well! it did not take long!”
Pichon again uttered his thanks. He was tall and thin, with a doleful look about him, already subdued to the routine of office life, his dull eyes full of the apathetic resignation displayed by circus horses.
“Pray say no more about it!” Octave ended by observing, “it is really not worth while. Madame, your coffee is exquisite. I have never drunk any like it.”
She blushed again, and so much that her hands even became quite rosy.
“Do not spoil her, sir,” said Monsieur Vuillaume gravely, “Her coffee is good, but there is better. And you see how proud she has become at once!”
“Pride is worth nothing,” declared Madame Vuillaume. “We have always taught her to be modest.”
They were both of them little and dried up, very old, and with dark-looking countenances; the wife wore a tight black dress, and the husband a thin frock-coat, on which only the mark of a big red ribbon was to be seen.
“Sir,” resumed the latter, “I was decorated at the age of sixty, on the day I was pensioned off, after having been for thirty-nine years employed at the Ministry of Public Instruction. Well! sir, on that day I dined the same as on other days, and did not let pride interfere with any of my habits. The Cross was due to me, I knew it. I was simply filled with gratitude.” His life was perfectly clear, he wished every one to know it. After twenty-five years’ service, he had been promoted to four thousand francs. His pension, therefore, was two thousand. But he had had to re-engage himself in a subordinate position at fifteen hundred francs, as they had had their little Marie late in life when Madame Vuillaume was no longer expecting either son or daughter. Now that the child was established in life, they were living on the pension, by pinching themselves, in the Rue Durantin at Montmartre, where things were cheaper.
“I am sixty-three,” said he, in conclusion, “and that is all about it, and that is all about it, son-in-law!”
Pichon looked at him in a silent and weary way, his eyes fixed on his red ribbon. Yes, it would be his own story if luck favoured him. He was the last born of a greengrocer who had spent the entire worth of her shop in her anxiety to make her son take a degree, just because all the neighbourhood said he was very intelligent; and she had died bankrupt eight days before his triumph at the Sorbonne. After three years of hardships at his uncle’s, he had had the unexpected luck of getting a berth at the Ministry, which was to lead him to everything, and on the strength of which he had already married.
“When one does one’s duty, the government does the same,” murmured he, mechanically reckoning that he still had thirty-six years to wait before obtaining the right to wear a piece of red ribbon and to enjoy a pension of two thousand francs.
Then he turned towards Octave.
“You see, sir, it is the children who are such a heavy weight.”
“No doubt,” said Madame Vuillaume. “If we had had another we should never have made both ends meet. Therefore, remember Jules, what I insisted upon when I gave you Marie: one child and no more, or else we shall quarrel! It is only workpeople who have children like fowls lay eggs, without troubling themselves as to what it will cost them. It is true that they turn the youngsters out on to the streets, like flocks of animals, which make me feel sick when I pass by.”
Octave had looked at Marie, thinking that this delicate subject would make her cheeks crimson; but she remained pale, approving her mother’s words with ingenuous serenity. He was feeling awfully bored, and did not know how to retire. In the little cold dining-room these people thus spent their afternoon, slowly muttering a few words every five minutes, and always about their own affairs. Even dominoes disturbed them too much.
Madame Vuillaume now explained her notions. At the end of a long silence, which left all four of them in no way embarrassed as though they had felt the necessity of rearranging their ideas, she resumed:
“You have no child, sir? It will come in time. Ah! it is a responsibility, especially for a mother! When my little one was born I was forty-nine, sir, an age when luckily one knows how to behave. A boy will get on anyhow, but a girl! And I have the consolation of knowing that I have done my duty, oh, yes!”
Then, she explained her plan of education, in short sentences. Honesty first. No playing on the stairs, the little one always kept at home and watched closely, for children think of nothing but evil. The doors and windows shut, never any draughts, which bring the wicked things of the street with them. Out of doors, never leave go of the child’s hand, teach it to keep its eyes lowered to avoid seeing anything wrong. With regard to religion, it should not be overdone, just sufficient as a moral restraint. Then, when she has grown up, engage teachers instead of sending her to school, where the innocent ones are corrupted; and assist also at the lessons, see that she does not learn what she should not know, hide all newspapers of course, and keep the bookcase locked.
“A young person always knows too much,” declared the old lady coming to an end.
Whilst her mother spoke, Marie kept her eyes vaguely fixed on space. She once more beheld the little convent-like lodging, those narrow rooms in the Rue Durantin, where she was not even allowed to lean out of a window. It was one prolonged childhood, all sorts of prohibitions which she did not understand, lines which her mother inked out on their fashion paper, the black marks of which made her blush, lessons purified to such an extent that even her teachers were embarrassed when she questioned them. A very gentle childhood, however, the soft warm growth of a greenhouse, a waking dream in which the words uttered by the tongue, and the facts of every day life acquired ridiculous meanings. And, even at that hour as she gazed vacantly, and was filled with these recollections, a childish smile hovered about her lips, as though she had remained in ignorance spite even of her marriage.
“You will believe me if you like, sir,” said Monsieur Vuillaume, “but my daughter had not read a single novel when she was past eighteen. Is it not true, Marie?”
“Yes, papa.”
“I have George Sand’s works very handsomely bound,” he continued, “and in spite of her mother’s fears I decided, a few months before her marriage, to permit her to read ‘André,’ a perfectly innocent work, full of imagination, and which elevates the soul. I am for a liberal education. Literature has certainly its rights. The book produced an extraordinary effect upon her, sir. She cried all night in her sleep: which proves that there is nothing like a pure imagination to understand genius.”
“It is so beautiful!” murmured the young woman, her eyes sparkling.
But Pichon having enunciated this theory: no novels before marriage, and as many as one likes afterwards—Madame Vuillaume shook her head. She never read, and was none the worse for it. Then, Marie gently spoke of her loneliness.
“Well! I sometimes take up a book. Jules chooses them for me at the library in the Passage Choiseul. If I only played the piano!”
For some time past, Octave had felt the necessity of saying something.
“What! madame,” exclaimed he, “you do not play!”
A slight awkwardness ensued. The parents talked of a succession of unfortunate circumstances, not wishing to admit that they had not been willing to incur the expense. Madame Vuillaume, moreover, affirmed, that Marie sang in tune from her birth; when she was a child she knew all sorts of very pretty ballads, she had only to hear the tunes once to remember them; and the mother spoke of a song about Spain, the story of a captive weeping for her lover, which the child gave out with an expression that would draw tears from the hardest hearts. But Marie remained disconsolate. She let this cry escape her, as she extended her hand in the direction of the inner room, where her little one was sleeping:
“Ah! I swear that Lilitte shall learn to play the piano, even though I have to make the greatest sacrifices!”
“Think first of bringing her up as we brought you up,” said Madame Vuillaume, severely. “I certainly do not condemn music, it develops one’s feelings. But, above all, watch over your daughter, keep every foul breath from her, strive that she may preserve her innocence.”
She started off again, giving even more weight to religion, settling the number of times to go to confess each month, naming the masses that it was absolutely necessary to attend, all from the point of view of propriety. Then Octave, unable to bear any more of it, talked of an appointment which obliged him to go out. He had a singing in his ears, he felt that this conversation would continue in a like manner until the evening. And he hastened away, leaving the Vuillaumes and the Pichons telling one another, around the same cups of coffee slowly emptied, what they told each other every Sunday. As he was bowing a last time, Marie, suddenly and without any reason, became scarlet.
Ever since that afternoon, Octave hastened past the Pichons’ door whenever he heard the slow tones of Monsieur and Madame Vuillaume on a Sunday. Moreover, he was entirely absorbed in his conquest of Valérie. In spite of the fiery glances of which he thought himself the object, she maintained an inexplicable reserve; and in that he fancied he saw the play of a coquette. He even met her one day, as though by chance, in the Tuileries gardens, when she quietly began to talk of a storm of the day before; which finally convinced him that she was devilish smart. And he was constantly on the staircase, watching for an opportunity of entering her apartments, decided if necessary upon being positively rude.
Now, every time that he passed her, Marie smiled and blushed. They exchanged the greetings of good neighbours. One morning, at lunch-time, as he brought her up a letter, which Monsieur Gourd had given him, to avoid having to go up the four flights of stairs himself, he found her in a sad way: she had seated Lilitte in her chemise on the round table, and was trying to dress her again.
“What is the matter?” asked the young man.
“Why, this child!” replied she. “I foolishly took her things off, because she was complaining. And now I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do!”
He looked at her in surprise. She was turning a skirt over and over, looking for the hooks. Then, she added:
“You see, her father always helps me to dress her in the morning before he goes out. I can never manage it by myself. It bothers me, it annoys me.”
The child, meanwhile, tired of being in her chemise and frightened by the sight of Octave, was struggling and tumbling about on the table.
“Take care!” cried he, “she will fall.”
It was quite a catastrophe. Marie looked as though she dare not touch her child’s naked limbs. She continued contemplating her, with the surprise of a virgin, amazed at having been able to produce such a thing. However, assisted by Octave, who quieted the little one, she succeeded in dressing her again.
“How will you manage when you have a dozen?” asked he, laughing.
“But we shall never have any more!” answered she in a fright.
Then, he joked: she was wrong to be so sure, a child comes so easily?
“No! no!” repeated she obstinately. “You heard what mamma said, the other day. She forbade Jules to have any more. You do not know her; it would lead to endless quarrels, if another came.”
Octave was amused by the quiet way in which she discussed this question. He drew her out, without, however, succeeding in embarrassing her. She, moreover, did as her husband wished. No doubt, she loved children; had she been allowed to desire others, she would not have said no. And, beneath this complacency, which was restricted to her mother’s commands, the indifference of a woman whose maternity was still slumbering could be recognized. Lilitte occupied her like her home, which she looked after through duty. When she had washed up the breakfast things and taken the child for her walk, she continued her former young girl’s existence, of a somnolent emptiness, lulled by the vague expectation of a joy which never came. Octave having remarked that she must feel very dull, being always alone, she seemed surprised: no, she was never dull, the days passed somehow or other, without her knowing, when she went to bed, how she had employed her time. Then, on Sundays, she sometimes went out with her husband; or her parents called, or else she read. If reading did not give her headaches, she would have read from morning till night, now that she was allowed to read everything.
“What is really annoying,” resumed she, “is that they have scarcely anything at the library in the Passage Choiseul. For instance, I wanted ‘André,’ to read it again, because it made me cry so much the other time. Well! their copy has been stolen. Besides that, my father refuses to lend me his, because Lilitte might tear the pictures.”
“But,” said Octave, “my friend Campardon has all George Sand’s works. I will ask him to lend me ‘André’ for you.”
She blushed, and her eyes sparkled. He was really too kind! And, when he left her, she stood before Lilitte, her arms hanging down by her sides, without an idea in her head, in the attitude which she maintained for whole afternoons together. She detested sewing, she did crochet work, always the same piece, which she left lying about the room.
Octave brought her the book on the morrow, a Sunday. Pichon had had to go out, to leave his card on one of his superiors. And, as the young man found her dressed for walking, she having just been on some errand in the neighbourhood, he asked her out of curiosity whether she had been to church, having the idea that she was religious. She answered no. Before marrying her off, her mother used to take her regularly to mass. During the six first months of her married life, she continued going through force of habit, with the constant fear of being too late. Then, she scarcely knew why, after missing a few times, she left off going altogether. Her husband detested priests, and her mother never even mentioned them now. Octave’s question, however, disturbed her, as though it had awakened within her things that had been long buried beneath the idleness of her existence.
“I must go to Saint-Roch one of these mornings,” said she. “An occupation gone always leaves a void behind it.”
And, on the pale face of this late child, born of parents too old, there appeared the unhealthy regret of another existence, dreamed of once upon a time, in the land of chimeras. She could conceal nothing, everything was reflected in her face, beneath her skin, which had the softness and the transparency accompanying an attack of chlorosis. Then, she gave way to her feelings, and caught hold of Octave’s hands with a familiar gesture.
“Ah! let me thank you for having brought me this book! Come to-morrow after lunch. I will return it to you and tell you the effect that it produced on me. It will be amusing, will it not?”
On leaving her, Octave thought that she was funny all the same. She was beginning to interest him, he contemplated speaking to Pichon so as to make him rouse her up a bit; for the little woman, most decidedly, only wanted a shaking. It so happened that on the morrow he came across the clerk just as he was going off, and he accompanied him part of the way, at the risk of being late himself at “The Ladies’ Paradise.” But Pichon seemed to him to be even more benumbed than his wife, full of manias in their early stage, and entirely occupied with the dread of getting mud on his shoes in wet weather. He walked on his toes, and continually talked of the second head-clerk of his office. Octave, who was only animated by fraternal intentions in the matter, ended by leaving him in the Rue Saint-Honoré, after advising him to take Marie to the theatre frequently.
“Whatever for?” asked Pichon in amazement.
“Because it is good for women. It makes them nicer.”
“Ah! you really think so?”
He promised to give the matter his attention, and crossed the street, eyeing the cabs with terror, the only thing in life which worried him being the fear of getting splashed.
At lunch-time, Octave knocked at the Pichons’ door for the book. Marie was reading, her elbows on the table, her hands buried in her dishevelled hair. She had just eaten an egg cooked in a tin pan which was lying in the centre of the hastily laid table without any cloth. Lilitte, forgotten on the floor, was sleeping with her nose on the pieces of a plate which she had no doubt broken.
“Well?”
Marie did not answer at once. She was still wrapped in her morning dressing-gown, which, from the buttons being torn off, displayed her throat, in all the disorder of a woman just risen from her bed.
“I have scarcely read a hundred pages,” she ended by saying. “My parents came yesterday.”
And she spoke in a painful tone of voice, with a sourness about her mouth. When she was younger, she longed to live in the midst of the woods. She was for ever dreaming that she met a huntsman who was sounding his horn. He approached her and knelt down. This took place in a copse, very far away, where roses were blooming like in a park. Then, suddenly, they had been married, and afterwards lived there, wandering about till eternity. She, very happy, wished for nothing more; he, as tender and submissive as a slave, was continually at her feet.
“I had a talk with your husband this morning,” said Octave. “You do not go out enough, and I have persuaded him to take you to the theatre.”
But she shook her head, turning pale and shivering. A silence ensued. She again beheld the narrow dining-room with its cold light. Jules’s image, sullen and correct, had suddenly cast a shadow over the huntsman of the romance whom she had been imagining, and the sound of whose horn in the distance again rang in her ears. Every now and then she listened: perhaps he was coming. Her husband had never taken her feet in his hands to kiss them; he had never either knelt beside her to tell her he adored her. Yet, she loved him well; but she was surprised that love did not contain more sweetness.
“What stifles me, you know,” resumed she, returning to the book, “is when there are passages in novels about the characters telling one another of their love.”
Octave then sat down. He wished to laugh, not caring for such sentimental trifling.
“I detest a lot of phrases,” said he. “When two persons adore each other, the best thing is to prove it at once.”
But she did not seem to understand, her eyes remained undimmed. He stretched out his hand, slightly touching hers, and leant over so close to her to observe a passage in the book that his breath warmed her shoulder through the open dressing-gown; yet she remained insensible. Then, he rose up, full of a contempt mingled with pity. As he was leaving, she said:
“I read very slowly, I shall not have finished it before tomorrow. It will be amusing to-morrow! Look in during the evening.”
He certainly had no designs upon her, and yet he felt indignant. He conceived a singular friendship for this young couple who exasperated him, they seemed to take life so stupidly. And the idea came to him of rendering them a service in spite of them; he would take them out to dinner, make them tipsy, and then amuse himself by pushing them into each other’s arms. When such fits of kindness got hold of him, he, who would not have lent ten francs, delighted in flinging his money out of the window, to bring two lovers together and give them