When Madame Josserand, preceded by her young ladies, left the evening party given by Madame Dambreville, who resided on a fourth floor in the Rue de Rivoli, at the corner of the Rue de l’Oratoire, she roughly slammed the street door, in the sudden outburst of a passion she had been keeping under for the past two hours. Berthe, her younger daughter, had again just gone and missed a husband.
“Well! what are you doing there?” said she angrily to the young girls, who were standing under the arcade and watching the cabs pass by. “Walk on! don’t have any idea we are going to ride! To waste another two francs, eh?”
And as Hortense, the elder, murmured:
“It will be pleasant, with this mud. My shoes will never recover it.”
“Walk on!” resumed the mother, all beside herself. “When you have no more shoes, you can stop in bed, that’s all. A deal of good it is, taking you out!”
Berthe and Hortense bowed their heads and turned into the Rue de l’Oratoire. They held their long skirts up as high as they could over their crinolines, squeezing their shoulders together and shivering under their thin opera-cloaks. Madame Josserand followed behind, wrapped in an old fur cloak made of Calabar skins, looking as shabby as cats’. All three, without bonnets, had their hair enveloped in lace wraps, head-dresses which caused the last passers-by to look back, surprised at seeing them glide along the houses, one by one, with bent backs, and their eyes fixed on the puddles. And the mother’s exasperation increased still more at the recollection of many similar returns home, for three winters past, hampered by their gay dresses, amidst the black mud of the streets and the jeers of belated blackguards. No, decidedly, she had had enough of dragging her young ladies about to the four corners of Paris, without daring to venture on the luxury of a cab, for fear of having to omit a dish from the morrow’s dinner!
“And she makes marriages!” said she out loud, returning to Madame Dambreville, and talking alone to ease herself, without even addressing her daughters, who had turned down the Rue Saint-Honoré. “They are pretty, her marriages! A lot of impertinent minxes, who come from no one knows where! Ah! if one was not obliged! It’s like her last success, that bride whom she brought out, to show us that it did not always fail; a fine specimen! a wretched child who had to be sent back to her convent for six months, after a little mistake, to be re-whitewashed!”
The young girls were crossing the Place du Palais-Royal, when a shower came on. It was a regular rout. They stopped, slipping, splashing, looking again at the vehicles passing empty along.
“Walk on!” cried the mother, pitilessly. “We are too near now; it is not worth two francs. And your brother Léon, who refused to leave with us for fear of having to pay for the cab! So much the better for him if he gets what he wants at that lady’s, but we can say that it is not at all decent. A woman who is over fifty and who only receives young men! An old nothing-much whom a high personage married to that fool Dambreville, appointing him head clerk!”
Hortense and Berthe trotted along in the rain, one before the other, without seeming to hear. When their mother thus eased herself, letting everything out, and forgetting the wholesome strictness with which she kept them, it was agreed that they should be deaf. Berthe, however, revolted on entering the gloomy and deserted Rue de l’Echelle.
“Oh, dear!” said she, “the heel of my shoe is coming off. I cannot go a step further!”
Madame Josserand’s wrath became terrible.
“Just walk on! Do I complain? Is it my place to be out in the street at such a time and in such weather? It would be different if you had a father like others! But no, the fine gentleman stays at home taking his ease. It is always my turn to drag you about; he would never accept the burden. Well! I declare to you that I have had enough of it. Your father may take you out in future if he likes; may the devil have me if ever again I accompany you to houses where I am plagued like that! A man who deceived me as to his capacities, and who has never yet procured me the least pleasure! Ah! good heavens! there is one I would not marry now, if it were to come over again!”
The young ladies no longer protested. They were already acquainted with this inexhaustible chapter of their mother’s blighted hopes. With their lace wraps drawn over their faces, their shoes sopping wet, they rapidly followed the Rue Sainte-Anne. But, in the Rue de Choiseul, at the very door of her house, a last humiliation awaited Madame Josserand: the Duveyriers’ carriage splashed her as it passed in.
On the stairs, the mother and the young ladies, worn out and enraged, recovered their gracefulness when they had to pass before Octave. Only, as soon as ever their door was closed behind them, they rushed through the dark apartment, knocking up against the furniture, and tumbled into the dining-room, where Monsieur Josserand was writing by the feeble light of a little lamp.
“Failed!” cried Madame Josserand, letting herself fall on to a chair.
And, with a rough gesture, she tore the lace wrap from her head, threw her fur cloak on to the back of her chair, and appeared in a flaring dress trimmed with black satin and cut very low in the neck, looking enormous, her shoulders still beautiful, and resembling a mare’s shining flanks. Her square face, with its drooping cheeks and too big nose, expressed the tragic fury of a queen restraining herself from descending to the use of coarse, vulgar expressions.
“Ah!” said Monsieur Josserand simply, bewildered by this violent entrance.
He kept blinking his eyes and was seized with uneasiness. His wife positively crushed him when she displayed that giant throat, the full weight of which he seemed to feel on the nape of his neck. Dressed in an old thread-bare frock-coat which he was finishing to wear out at home, his face looking as though tempered and expunged by thirty-five years spent at an office desk, he watched her for a moment with his big lifeless blue eyes. Then, after thrusting his grey locks behind his ears, feeling very embarrassed and unable to find a word to say, he attempted to resume his work.
“But you do not seem to understand!” resumed Madame Josserand in a shrill voice. “I tell you that there is another marriage knocked on the head, and it is the fourth!”
“Yes, yes, I know, the fourth,” murmured he. “It is annoying, very annoying.”
And, to escape from his wife’s terrifying nudity, he turned towards his. daughters with a good-natured smile. They also were removing their lace wraps and their opera-cloaks; the elder one was in blue and the younger in pink; their dresses, too, free in cut and over-trimmed, were like a provocation. Hortense, with her sallow complexion, and her face spoilt by a nose like her mother’s, which gave her an air of disdainful obstinacy, had just turned twenty-three and looked twenty-eight; whilst Berthe, two years younger, retained all a child’s gracefulness, having, however, the same features, but more delicate and dazzlingly white, and only menaced with the coarse family mask after she entered the fifties.
“It will do no good if you go on looking at us for ever!” cried Madame Josserand. “And, for God’s sake, put your writing away; it worries my nerves!”
“But, my dear,” said he peacefully, “I am addressing wrappers.”
“Ah! yes, your wrappers at three francs a thousand! Is it with those three francs that you hope to marry your daughters?”
Beneath the feeble light of the little lamp, the table was indeed covered with large sheets of coarse paper, printed wrappers, the blanks of which Monsieur Josserand filled in for a largo publisher who had several periodicals. As his salary as cashier did not suffice, he passed whole nights at this unprofitable labour, working in secret, and seized with shame at the idea that any one might discover their penury.
“Three francs are three francs,” replied he in his slow, tired voice. “Those three francs will enable you to add ribbons to your dresses, and to offer some pastry to your guests on your Tuesdays at home.”
He regretted his words as soon as he had uttered them; for he felt that they struck Madame Josserand full in the heart, in the most sensitive part of her wounded pride. A rush of blood purpled her shoulders; she seemed on the point of breaking out into revengeful utterances; then, by an effort of dignity, she merely stammered, “Ah! good heavens! ah! good heavens!”
And she looked at her daughters; she magisterially crushed her husband beneath a shrug of her terrible shoulders, as much as to say, “Eh! you hear him? what an idiot!” The daughters nodded their heads. Then, seeing himself beaten, and laying down his pen with regret, the father opened the “Temps” newspaper, which he brought home every evening from his office.
“Is Saturnin asleep?” sharply inquired Madame Josserand, speaking of her younger son.
“Yes, long ago,” replied he. “I also sent Adèle to bed. And Léon, did you see him at the Dambrevilles’?”
“Of course! he sleeps there!” she let out in a cry of rancour which she was unable to restrain.
The father, surprised, naively added,
“Ah! you think so?”
Hortense and Berthe had become deaf again. They faintly smiled, however, affecting to be busy with their shoes, which were in a pitiful state. To create a diversion, Madame Josserand tried to pick another quarrel with Monsieur Josserand; she begged him to take his newspaper away every morning, not to leave it lying about in the room all day, as he had done with the previous number, for instance, a number containing the report of an abominable trial, which his daughters might have read. She well recognised there his want of morality.
“Well, are we going to bed?” asked Hortense. “I am hungry.”
“Oh! and I too!” said Berthe. “I am famishing.”
“What! you are hungry!” cried Madame Josserand beside herself. “Did you not eat any cake there, then? What a couple of geese! You should have eaten some! I did.”
The young ladies resisted. They were hungry, they were feeling quite ill. So the mother accompanied them to the kitchen, to see if they could discover anything. The father at once returned stealthily to his wrappers. He well knew that, without them, every little luxury in the home would have disappeared; and that was why, in spite of the scorn and unjust quarrels, he obstinately remained till daybreak engaged in this secret work, happy like the worthy man he was whenever he fancied that an extra piece of lace would hook a rich husband. As they were already stinting the food, without managing to save sufficient for the dresses and the Tuesday receptions, he resigned himself to his martyr-like labour, dressed in rags, whilst the mother and daughters wandered from drawing-room to drawing-room with flowers in their hair.
“What a stench there is here!” cried Madame Josserand on entering the kitchen. “To think that I can never get that slut Adèle to leave the window slightly open! She pretends that the room is so very cold in the morning.”
She went and opened the window, and from the narrow courtyard separating the kitchens there rose an icy dampness, the unsavoury odour of a musty cellar. The candle which Berthe had lighted caused colossal shadows of naked shoulders to dance upon the wall.
“And what a state the place is in!” continued Madame Josserand, sniffing about, and poking her nose into all the dirty corners. “She has not scrubbed her table for a fortnight. Here are plates which have been waiting to be washed since the day before yesterday. On my word, it is disgusting! And her sink, just look! smell it now, smell her sink!”
Her rage was lashing itself. She tumbled the crockery about with her arms white with rice powder and bedecked with gold bangles; she trailed her flaring dress amidst the grease stains, catching it in cooking utensils thrown under the tables, risking her hardly earned luxury amongst the vegetable parings. At last, the discovery of a notched knife made her anger break all bounds.
“I will turn her into the street to-morrow morning!”
“You will be no better off,” quietly remarked Hortense. “We are never able to keep anyone. This is the first who has stayed three months. The moment they begin to get a little decent and know how to make melted butter, off they go.”
Madame Josserand bit her lips. As a matter of fact, Adèle alone, stupid and lousy, and only lately arrived from her native Brittany, could put up with the ridiculously vain penury of these middle-class people, who took advantage of her ignorance and her slovenliness to half starve her. Twenty times already, on account of a comb found on the bread or of some abominable stew which gave them all the colic, they had talked of sending her about her business; then, they had resigned themselves to putting up with her, in the presence of the difficulty of replacing her, for the pilferers themselves declined to be engaged, to enter that hole, where even the lumps of sugar were counted.
“I can’t discover anything!” murmured Berthe, who was rummaging a cupboard.
The shelves had the melancholy emptiness and the false luxury of families where inferior meat is purchased, so as to be able to put flowers on the table. All that was lying about were some white and gold porcelain plates, perfectly empty, a crumb-brush, the silver-plated handle of which was all tarnished, and some cruets without a drain of oil or vinegar in them; there was not a forgotten crust, not a morsel of dessert, not a fruit, nor a sweet, nor a remnant of cheese. One could feel that Adèle’s hunger never satisfied, lapped up the rare dribblets of sauce which her betters left at the bottoms of the dishes, to the extent of rubbing the gilt off.
“But she has gone and eaten all the rabbit!” cried Madame Josserand.
“True,” said Hortense, “there was the tail piece. Ah! no, here it is. It would have surprised me if she had dared. I shall stick to it, you know. It is cold, but it is better than nothing!”
Berthe, on her side, was rummaging about, but without result. At length her hand encountered a bottle, in which her mother had diluted the contents of an old pot of jam, so as to manufacture some red currant syrup for her evening parties. She poured herself out half a glass, saying:
“Ah! an idea! I will soak some bread in this, as it is all there is!”
But Madame Josserand, all anxiety, looked at her sternly.
“Pray, don’t restrain yourself, fill your glass whilst you are about it. It will be quite sufficient if I offer water to the ladies and gentlemen to-morrow, will it not?”
Fortunately, the discovery of another of Adèle’s evil doings interrupted her reprimand. She was still turning about, searching for crimes, when she caught sight of a volume on the table; and then occurred a supreme explosion.
“Oh! the beast! she has again brought my Lamartine into the kitchen!”
It was a copy of “Jocelyn.” She took it up and rubbed it hard, as though dusting it; and she kept repeating that she had twenty times forbidden her to leave it lying about in that way, to write her accounts upon. Berthe and Hortense, meanwhile, had shared the little piece of bread which remained; then carrying their suppers away with them, they said that they would undress first. The mother gave the icy cold stove a last glance, and returned to the dining-room, tightly holding her Lamartine beneath the massive flesh of her arm.
Monsieur Josserand continued writing. He trusted that his wife would be satisfied with crushing him with a glance of contempt as she crossed the room to go to bed. But she again dropped on to a chair, facing him, and looked at him fixedly without speaking. He felt this look, and was seized with such uneasiness, that his pen kept sputtering on the flimsy wrapper paper.
“So it was you who prevented Adèle making a cream for tomorrow evening?” said she at length.
He raised his head in amazement.
“I, my dear!”
“Oh! you will again deny it, as you always do. Then, why has she not made the cream I ordered? You know very well that before our party to-morrow Uncle Bachelard is coming to dinner, it is his saint’s-day, which is very awkward, happening as it does on my reception day. If there is no cream, we must have an ice, and that will be another five francs squandered!”
He did not attempt to exculpate himself. Not daring to resume his work, he began to play with his penholder. There was a brief pause.
“To-morrow morning,” resumed Madame Josserand, “you will oblige me by calling on the Campardons and reminding them very politely, if you can, that we are expecting to see them in the evening. Their young man arrived this afternoon. Ask them to bring him with them. Do you understand? I wish him to come.”
“What young man?”
“A young man; it would take too long to explain everything to you. I have obtained all necessary information about him. I am obliged to try everything, as you leave your daughters entirely to me, like a bundle of rubbish, without occupying yourself about marrying them any more than about marrying the Grand Turk.”
The thought revived her anger.
“You see, I contain myself, but it is more, oh! it is more than I can stand! Say nothing, sir, say nothing, or really my anger will get the better of me.”
He said nothing, but she vented her wrath upon him all the same.
“It has become unbearable! I warn you, that one of these mornings I shall go off, and leave you here with your two idiotic daughters. Was I born to live such a skinflint life as this? Always cutting farthings into four, never even having a decent pair of boots, and not being able to receive my friends decently! And all that through your fault! Ah! do not shake your head, do not exasperate me more than I am already! Yes, your fault! You deceived me, sir, basely deceived me. One should not marry a woman, when one is decided to let her want for everything. You played the boaster, you pretended you had a fine future before you, you were the friend of your employer’s sons, of those brothers Bemheim, who, since, have merely made a fool of you. What! You dare to pretend that they have not made a fool of you! But you ought to be their partner by now? It is you who made their business what it is, one of the first glass-houses in Paris, and you have remained their cashier, a subordinate, a hireling. Really! you have no spirit; hold your tongue.”
“I get eight thousand francs a year,” murmured the cashier. “It is a very good berth.”
“A good berth, after more than thirty years’ labour?” resumed Madame Josserand. “They grind you down, and you are delighted. Do you know what I would have done, had I been in your place? well! I would have put the business into my pocket twenty times over. It was so easy. I saw it when I married you, and since then I have never ceased advising you to do so. But it required some initiative and intelligence; it was a question of not going to sleep on your leather-covered stool, like a blockhead.”
“Come,” interrupted Monsieur Josserand, “are you going to reproach me now with being honest?”
She jumped up, and advanced towards him, flourishing her Lamartine.
“Honest! in what way do you mean? Begin by being honest towards me. Others do not count till afterwards, I hope! And I repeat, sir, it is not honest to take a young girl in, pretending to be ambitious to become rich some day, and then to end by losing what little wits you had in looking after somebody else’s cashbox. On my word, I was nicely swindled! Ah! if it were to happen over again, and if I had only known your family!”
She was walking violently about. He could not restrain a slight sign of impatience, in spite of his great desire for peace.
“You would do better to go to bed, Eléonore,” said he. “It is past one o’clock, and I assure you this work is pressing. My family has done you no harm, so do not speak of it.”
“Ah! and why, pray? Your family is no more sacred than another, I suppose. Every one at Clermont knows that your father, after selling his business of solicitor, let himself be ruined by a servant. You might have seen your daughters married long ago, had he not taken up with a strumpet when over seventy. There is another who has swindled me!”
Monsieur Josserand turned pale. He replied in a trembling voice, which rose higher as he went on:
“Listen, do not let us throw our relations at each other’s heads. Your father never paid me your dowry, the thirty thousand francs he promised.”
“Eh? what? thirty thousand francs!”
“Exactly; don’t pretend to be surprised. And if my father met with misfortunes, yours behaved in a most disgraceful way towards us. I was never able to find out clearly what he left. There were all sorts of underhand dealings, so that the school in the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor should remain with your sister’s husband, that shabby usher who no longer recognises us now. We were robbed as though in a wood.”
Madame Josserand, now ghastly white, was choking with rage before her husband’s inconceivable revolt.
“Do not say a word against papa! For forty years he was a credit to instruction. Go and talk of the Bachelard Academy in the neighbourhood of the Panthéon! And as for my sister and my brother-in-law, they are what they are. They have robbed me, I know; but it is not for you to say so. I will not permit it, understand that! Do I speak to you of your sister, who eloped with an officer? Oh! you have indeed some nice relations!”
“An officer who married her, madame. There is uncle Bachelard, too, your brother, a man totally destitute of all morality—”
“But you are becoming cracked, sir! He is rich, he earns what he pleases as a commission merchant, and he has promised to provide Berthe’s dowry. Do you then respect nothing?”
“Ah! yes, provide Berthe’s dowry! Will you bet that he will give a sou, and that we shall not have had to put up with his nasty habits for nothing? He makes me feel ashamed of him every time he comes here. A liar, a rake, a person who takes advantage of the situation, who for fifteen years past, seeing us all on our knees before his fortune, has been taking me every Saturday to spend two hours in his office, to go over his books! It saves him five francs. We have never yet been favoured with a single present from him.”
Madame Josserand, catching her breath, was wrapped for a moment in thought. Then she uttered this last cry:
“And you have a nephew in the police, sir!”
A fresh pause ensued. The light from the little lamp was becoming dimmer, wrappers were flying about beneath Monsieur Josserand’s feverish gestures; and he looked his wife full in the face—his wife in her low neck dress—determined to say everything, and quivering with courage.
“With eight thousand francs a year one can do many things,” resumed he. “You are always complaining. But you should not have arranged your housekeeping on a footing superior to our means. It is your mania for receiving and for paying visits, of having your at homes, of giving tea and pastry—“?
She did not let him finish.
“Now we have come to it! Shut me up in a box at once. Reproach me for not walking out as naked as my hand. And your daughters, sir, who will marry them if we never see any one? We don’t see many people as it is. It does well to sacrifice oneself, to be judged afterwards with such meanness of heart!”
“We have all of us, madame, sacrificed ourselves. Léon had to make way for his sisters; and he left the house to earn his own living without any assistance from us. As for Saturnin, poor child, he does not even know how to read. And I deny myself everything; I pass my nights—”
“Why did you have daughters then, sir? You are surely not going to reproach them with their education, I hope? Any other man in your place would be proud of Hortense’s diploma and of Berthe’s talents. The dear child again delighted every one this evening with her waltz, the ‘Banks of the Oise,’ and her last painting will certainly enchant our guests to-morrow. But you, sir, you are not even a father; you would have sent your children to take cows to grass, instead of sending them to school.”
“Well! I took out an assurance for Berthe’s benefit Was it not you, madame, who, when the fourth payment became due, made use of the money to cover the drawing-room furniture? And, since then, you have even negotiated the premiums that had been paid.”
“Of course! as you leave us to die of hunger. Ah! you may indeed bite your fingers, if your daughters become old maids.”
“Bite my fingers! But, Jove’s thunder! it is you who frighten the likely men away, with your dresses and your ridiculous parties!”
Never before had Monsieur Josserand gone so far. Madame Josserand, suffocating, stammered forth the words: “I—I ridiculous!” when the door opened. Hortense and Berthe were returning, in their petticoats and little calico jackets, their hair let down, and their feet in old slippers.
“Ah, well! it is too cold in our room!” said Berthe shivering. “The food freezes in your mouth. Here, at least, there has been a fire this evening.”
And both dragging their chairs along the floor, seated themselves close to the stove, which still retained a little warmth. Hortense held her rabbit bone in the tips of her fingers, and was skilfully picking it. Berthe dipped pieces of bread in her glass of syrup. The parents, however, were so excited that they did not even appear to notice their arrival. They continued:
“Ridiculous—ridiculous, sir! I shall not be ridiculous again! Let my head be cut off if I wear out another pair of gloves in trying to get them husbands. It is your turn now! And try not to be more ridiculous than I have been!”
“I daresay, madame, now that you have exhibited them and compromised them everywhere! Whether you marry them or whether you don’t, I don’t care a button!”
“And I care less, Monsieur Josserand! I care so little that I will bundle them out into the street if you aggravate me much more. And if you have a mind to, you can follow them, the door is open. Ah, heavens! what a good riddance!”
The young ladies quietly listened, used to these lively recriminations. They were still eating, their little jackets dropping from their shoulders, and their bare skin gently rubbing against the lukewarm earthenware of the stove; and they looked charming in this undress, with their youth and their hearty appetites and their eyes heavy with sleep.
“You are very foolish to quarrel,” at length observed Hortense, with her mouth full. “Mamma only spoils her temper, and papa will be ill again to-morrow at his office. It seems to me that we are old enough to be able to find husbands for ourselves.”
This created a diversion. The father, thoroughly exhausted, made a feint of returning to his wrappers; and he sat with his nose over the paper, unable to write, his hands trembling violently. The mother, who had been moving about the room like an escaped lioness, went and planted herself in front of Hortense.
“If you are speaking for yourself,” cried she, “you are a great ninny! Your Verdier will never marry you.”
“That is my business,” boldly replied the young girl.
After having contemptuously refused five or six suitors, a little clerk, the son of a tailor, and other young fellows whose prospects she did not consider good enough, she had ended by setting her cap at a barrister, whom she had met at the Dambrevilles’, and who was already turned forty. She considered him very clever, and destined to make a name in the world. But the misfortune was that for fifteen years past Verdier had been living with a mistress, who in the neighbourhood even passed for his wife. She knew of this, though, and by no means let it trouble her.
“My child,” said the father, raising his head once more, “I begged you not to think of this marriage. You know the situation.”
She stopped sucking her bone, and said with an air of impatience:
“What of it? Verdier has promised me he will leave her. She is a fool.”
“You are wrong, Hortense, to speak in that way. And if he should also leave you one day to return to her whom you would have caused him to abandon?”
“That is my business,” sharply retorted the young woman.
Berthe listened, fully acquainted with this matter, the contingencies of which she discussed daily with her sister. She was, besides, like her father, all in favour of the poor woman, whom it was proposed to turn out into the street, after having performed a wife’s duties for fifteen years. But Madame Josserand intervened.
“Leave off, do! those wretched women always end by returning to the gutter. Only, it is Verdier who will never bring himself to leave her. He is fooling you, my dear. In your place, I would not wait a second for him; I would try and find some one else.”
Hortense’s voice became sourer still, whilst two livid spots appeared on her cheeks.
“Mamma, you know how I am. I want him, and I will have him. I will never marry any one else, even though he kept me waiting a hundred years.”
The mother shrugged her shoulders.
“And you call others fools!”
But the young girl rose up, quivering with rage.
“Here! don’t go pitching into me!” cried she. “I have finished my rabbit. I prefer to go to bed. As you are unable to find us husbands, you must let us find them in our own way.”
And she withdrew, violently slamming the door behind her.
Madame Josserand turned majestically towards her husband, and uttered this profound remark:
“That, sir, is the result of your bringing up!”
Monsieur Josserand did not protest; he was occupied in dotting his thumb nail with ink, whilst waiting till they allowed him to resume his writing. Berthe, who had eaten her bread, dipped a finger in the glass to finish up her syrup. She felt comfortable, with her back nice and warm, and did not hurry herself, being undesirous of encountering her sister’s quarrelsome tem