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by Honore de Balzac

Katharine Prescott Wormeley

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz

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The Village Rector

by Honore de Balzac

Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Helene.

The tiniest boat is not launched upon the sea without the

protection of some living emblem or revered name, placed upon it

by the mariners. In accordance with this time-honored custom,

Madame, I pray you to be the protectress of this book now launched

upon our literary ocean; and may the Imperial name which the

Church has canonized and your devotion has doubly sanctified for

me guard it from perils.

De Balzac.

THE VILLAGE RECTOR

I

THE SAUVIATS

In the lower town of Limoges, at the corner of the rue de la Vieille-

Poste and the rue de la Cite might have been seen, a generation ago,

one of those shops which were scarcely changed from the period of the

middle-ages. Large tiles seamed with a thousand cracks lay on the soil

itself, which was damp in places, and would have tripped up those who

failed to observe the hollows and ridges of this singular flooring.

The dusty walls exhibited a curious mosaic of wood and brick, stones

and iron, welded together with a solidity due to time, possibly to

chance. For more than a hundred years the ceiling, formed of colossal

beams, bent beneath the weight of the upper stories, though it had

never given way under them. Built /en colombage/, that is to say, with

a wooden frontage, the whole facade was covered with slates, so put on

as to form geometrical figures,--thus preserving a naive image of the

burgher habitations of the olden time.

None of the windows, cased in wood and formerly adorned with carvings,

now destroyed by the action of the weather, had continued plumb; some

bobbed forward, others tipped backward, while a few seemed disposed to

fall apart; all had a compost of earth, brought from heaven knows

where, in the nooks and crannies hollowed by the rain, in which the

spring-tide brought forth fragile flowers, timid creeping plants, and

sparse herbage. Moss carpeted the roof and draped its supports. The

corner pillar, with its composite masonry of stone blocks mingled with

brick and pebbles, was alarming to the eye by reason of its curvature;

it seemed on the point of giving way under the weight of the house,

the gable of which overhung it by at least half a foot. The municipal

authorities and the commissioner of highways did, eventually, pull the

old building down, after buying it, to enlarge the square.

The pillar we have mentioned, placed at the angle of two streets, was

a treasure to the seekers for Limousin antiquities, on account of its

lovely sculptured niche in which was a Virgin, mutilated during the

Revolution. All visitors with archaeological proclivities found traces

of the stone sockets used to hold the candelabra in which public piety

lighted tapers or placed its /ex-votos/ and flowers.

At the farther end of the shop, a worm-eaten wooden staircase led to

the two upper floors which were in turn surmounted by an attic. The

house, backing against two adjoining houses, had no depth and derived

all its light from the front and side windows. Each floor had two

small chambers only, lighted by single windows, one looking out on the

rue de la Cite, the other on the rue de la Vieille-Poste.

In the middle-ages no artisan was better lodged. The house had

evidently belonged in those times to makers of halberds and battle-

axes, armorers in short, artificers whose work was not injured by

exposure to the open air; for it was impossible to see clearly within,

unless the iron shutters were raised from each side of the building;

where were also two doors, one on either side of the corner pillar, as

may be seen in many shops at the corners of streets. From the sill of

each door--of fine stone worn by the tread of centuries--a low wall

about three feet high began; in this wall was a groove or slot,

repeated above in the beam by which the wall of each facade was

supported. From time immemorial the heavy shutters had been rolled

along these grooves, held there by enormous iron bars, while the doors

were closed and secured in the same manner; so that these merchants

and artificers could bar themselves into their houses as into a

fortress.

Examining the interior, which, during the first twenty years of this

century, was encumbered with old iron and brass, tires of wheels,

springs, bells, anything in short which the destruction of buildings

afforded of old metals, persons interested in the relics of the old

town noticed signs of the flue of a forge, shown by a long trail of

soot,--a minor detail which confirmed the conjecture of archaeologists

as to the original use to which the building was put. On the first

floor (above the ground-floor) was one room and the kitchen; on the

floor above that were two bedrooms. The garret was used to put away

articles more choice and delicate than those that lay pell-mell about

the shop.

This house, hired in the first instance, was subsequently bought by a

man named Sauviat, a hawker or peddler who, from 1786 to 1793,

travelled the country over a radius of a hundred and fifty miles

around Auvergne, exchanging crockery of a common kind, plates, dishes,

glasses,--in short, the necessary articles of the poorest households,

--for old iron, brass, and lead, or any metal under any shape it might

lurk in. The Auvergnat would give, for instance, a brown earthenware

saucepan worth two sous for a pound of lead, two pounds of iron, a

broken spade or hoe or a cracked kettle; and being invariably the

judge of his own cause, he did the weighing.

At the close of his third year Sauviat added the hawking of tin and

copper ware to that of his pottery. In 1793 he was able to buy a

chateau sold as part of the National domain, which he at once pulled

to pieces. The profits were such that he repeated the process at

several points of the sphere in which he operated; later, these first

successful essays gave him the idea of proposing something of a like

nature on a larger scale to one of his compatriots who lived in Paris.

Thus it happened that the "Bande Noire," so celebrated for its

devastations, had its birth in the brain of old Sauviat, the peddler,

whom all Limoges afterward saw and knew for twenty-seven years in the

rickety old shop among his cracked bells and rusty bars, chains and

scales, his twisted leaden gutters, and metal rubbish of all kinds. We

must do him the justice to say that he knew nothing of the celebrity

or the extent of the association he originated; he profited by his own

idea only in proportion to the capital he entrusted to the since

famous firm of Bresac.

Tired of frequenting fairs and roaming the country, the Auvergnat

settled at Limoges, where he married, in 1797, the daughter of a

coppersmith, a widower, named Champagnac. When his father-in-law died

he bought the house in which he had been carrying on his trade of old-

iron dealer, after ceasing to roam the country as a peddler. Sauviat

was fifty years of age when he married old Champagnac's daughter, who

was herself not less than thirty. Neither handsome nor pretty, she was

nevertheless born in Auvergne, and the /patois/ seemed to be the

mutual attraction; also she had the sturdy frame which enables women

to bear hard work. In the first three years of their married life

Sauviat continued to do some peddling, and his wife accompanied him,

carrying iron or lead on her back, and leading the miserable horse and

cart full of crockery with which her husband plied a disguised usury.

Dark-skinned, high-colored, enjoying robust health, and showing when

she laughed a brilliant set of teeth, white, long, and broad as

almonds, Madame Sauviat had the hips and bosom of a woman made by

Nature expressly for maternity.

If this strong girl were not earlier married, the fault must be

attributed to the Harpagon "no dowry" her father practised, though he

never read Moliere. Sauviat was not deterred by the lack of dowry;

besides, a man of fifty can't make difficulties, not to speak of the

fact that such a wife would save him the cost of a servant. He added

nothing to the furniture of his bedroom where, from the day of his

wedding to the day he left the house, twenty years later, there was

never anything but a single four-post bed, with valance and curtains

of green serge, a chest, a bureau, four chairs, a table, and a

looking-glass, all collected from different localities. The chest

contained in its upper section pewter plates, dishes, etc., each

article dissimilar from the rest. The kitchen can be imagined from the

bedroom.

Neither husband nor wife knew how to read,--a slight defect of

education which did not prevent them from ciphering admirably and

doing a most flourishing business. Sauviat never bought any article

without the certainty of being able to sell it for one hundred per

cent profit. To relieve himself of the necessity of keeping books and

accounts, he bought and sold for cash only. He had, moreover, such a

perfect memory that the cost of any article, were it only a farthing,

remained in his mind year after year, together with its accrued

interest.

Except during the time required for her household duties, Madame

Sauviat was always seated in a rickety wooden chair placed against the

corner pillar of the building. There she knitted and looked at the

passers, watched over the old iron, sold and weighed it, and received

payment if Sauviat was away making purchases. When at home the husband

could be heard at daybreak pushing open his shutters; the household

dog rushed out into the street; and Madame Sauviat presently came out

to help her man in spreading upon the natural counter made by the low

walls on either side of the corner of the house on the two streets,

the multifarious collection of bells, springs, broken gunlocks, and

the other rubbish of their business, which gave a poverty-stricken

look to the establishment, though it usually contained as much as

twenty thousand francs' worth of lead, steel, iron, and other metals.

Never were the former peddler and his wife known to speak of their

fortune; they concealed its amount as carefully as a criminal hides a

crime; and for years they were suspected of shaving both gold and

silver coins. When Champagnac died the Sauviats made no inventory of

his property; but they rummaged, with the intelligence of rats, into

every nook and corner of the old man's house, left it as naked as a

corpse, and sold the wares it contained in their own shop.

Once a year, in December, Sauviat went to Paris in one of the public

conveyances. The gossips of the neighborhood concluded that in order

to conceal from others the amount of his fortune, he invested it

himself on these occasions. It was known later that, having been

connected in his youth with one of the most celebrated dealers in

metal, an Auvergnat like himself, who was living in Paris, Sauviat

placed his funds with the firm of Bresac, the mainspring and spine of

that famous association known by the name of the "Bande Noire," which,

as we have already said, took its rise from a suggestion made by

Sauviat himself.

Sauviat was a fat little man with a weary face, endowed by Nature with

a look of honesty which attracted customers and facilitated the sale

of goods. His straightforward assertions, and the perfect indifference

of his tone and manner, increased this impression. In person, his

naturally ruddy complexion was hardly perceptible under the black

metallic dust which powdered his curly black hair and the seams of a

face pitted with the small-pox. His forehead was not without dignity;

in fact, it resembled the well-known brow given by all painters to

Saint Peter, the man of the people, the roughest, but withal the

shrewdest, of the apostles. His hands were those of an indefatigable

worker,--large, thick, square, and wrinkled with deep furrows. His

chest was of seemingly indestructible muscularity. He never

relinquished his peddler's costume,--thick, hobnailed shoes; blue

stockings knit by his wife and hidden by leather gaiters; bottle-green

velveteen trousers; a checked waistcoat, from which depended the brass

key of his silver watch by an iron chain which long usage had polished

till it shone like steel; a jacket with short tails, also of

velveteen, like that of the trousers; and around his neck a printed

cotton cravat much frayed by the rubbing of his beard.

On Sundays and fete-days Sauviat wore a frock-coat of maroon cloth, so

well taken care of that two new ones were all he bought in twenty

years. The living of galley-slaves would be thought sumptuous in

comparison with that of the Sauviats, who never ate meat except on the

great festivals of the Church. Before paying out the money absolutely

needed for their daily subsistence, Madame Sauviat would feel in the

two pockets hidden between her gown and petticoat, and bring forth a

single well-scraped coin,--a crown of six francs, or perhaps a piece

of fifty-five sous,--which she would gaze at for a long time before

she could bring herself to change it. As a general thing the Sauviats

ate herrings, dried peas, cheese, hard eggs in salad, vegetables

seasoned in the cheapest manner. Never did they lay in provisions,

except perhaps a bunch of garlic or onions, which could not spoil and

cost but little. The small amount of wood they burned in winter they

bought of itinerant sellers day by day. By seven in winter, by nine in

summer, the household was in bed, and the shop was closed and guarded

by a huge dog, which got its living from the kitchens in the

neighborhood. Madame Sauviat used about three francs' worth of candles

in the course of the year.

The sober, toilsome life of these persons was brightened by one joy,

but that was a natural joy, and for it they made their only known

outlays. In May, 1802, Madame Sauviat gave birth to a daughter. She

was confined all alone, and went about her household work five days

later. She nursed her child in the open air, seated as usual in her

chair by the corner pillar, continuing to sell old iron while the

infant sucked. Her milk cost nothing, and she let her little daughter

feed on it for two years, neither of them being the worse for the long

nursing.

Veronique (that was the infant's name) became the handsomest child in

the Lower town, and every one who saw her stopped to look at her. The

neighbors then noticed for the first time a trace of feeling in the

old Sauviats, of which they had supposed them devoid. While the wife

cooked the dinner the husband held the little one, or rocked it to the

tune of an Auvergnat song. The workmen as they passed sometimes saw

him motionless gazing at Veronique asleep on her mother's knees. He

softened his harsh voice when he spoke to her, and wiped his hands on

his trousers before taking her up. When Veronique tried to walk, the

father bent his legs and stood at a little distance holding out his

arms and making little grimaces which contrasted funnily with the

rigid furrows of his stern, hard face. The man of iron, brass, and

lead became a being of flesh and blood and bones. If he happened to be

standing with his back against the corner pillar motionless, a cry

from Veronique would agitate him and send him flying over the mounds

of iron fragments to find her; for she spent her childhood playing

with the wreck of ancient castles heaped in the depths of that old

shop. There were other days on which she went to play in the street or

with the neighboring children; but even then her mother's eye was

always on her.

It is not unimportant to say here that the Sauviats were eminently

religious. At the very height of the Revolution they observed both

Sunday and fete-days. Twice Sauviat came near having his head cut off

for hearing mass from an unsworn priest. He was put in prison, being

justly accused of helping a bishop, whose life he saved, to fly the

country. Fortunately the old-iron dealer, who knew the ways of bolts

and bars, was able to escape; nevertheless he was condemned to death

by default, and as, by the bye, he never purged himself of that

contempt, he may be said to have died dead.

His wife shared his piety. The avariciousness of the household yielded

to the demands of religion. The old-iron dealers gave their alms

punctually at the sacrament and to all the collections in church. When

the vicar of Saint-Etienne called to ask help for his poor, Sauviat or

his wife fetched at once without reluctance or sour faces the sum they

thought their fair share of the parish duties. The mutilated Virgin on

their corner pillar never failed (after 1799) to be wreathed with

holly at Easter. In the summer season she was feted with bouquets kept

fresh in tumblers of blue glass; this was particularly the case after

the birth of Veronique. On the days of the processions the Sauviats

scrupulously hung their house with sheets covered with flowers, and

contributed money to the erection and adornment of the altar, which

was the pride and glory of the whole square.

Veronique Sauviat was, therefore, brought up in a Christian manner.

From the time she was seven years old she was taught by a Gray sister

from Auvergne to whom the Sauviats had done some kindness in former

times. Both husband and wife were obliging when the matter did not

affect their pockets or consume their time,--like all poor folk who

are cordially ready to be serviceable to others in their own way. The

Gray sister taught Veronique to read and write; she also taught her

the history of the people of God, the catechism, the Old and the New

Testaments, and a very little arithmetic. That was all; the worthy

sister thought it enough; it was in fact too much.

At nine years of age Veronique surprised the whole neighborhood with

her beauty. Every one admired her face, which promised much to the

pencil of artists who are always seeking a noble ideal. She was called

"the Little Virgin" and showed signs already of a fine figure and

great delicacy of complexion. Her Madonna-like face--for the popular

voice had well named her--was surrounded by a wealth of fair hair,

which brought out the purity of her features. Whoever has seen the

sublime Virgin of Titian in his great picture of the "Presentation" at

Venice, will know that Veronique was in her girlhood,--the same

ingenuous candor, the same seraphic astonishment in her eyes, the same

simple yet noble attitude, the same majesty of childhood in her

demeanor.

At eleven years of age she had the small-pox, and owed her life to the

care of Soeur Marthe. During the two months that their child was in

danger the Sauviats betrayed to the whole community the depth of their

tenderness. Sauviat no longer went about the country to sales; he

stayed in the shop, going upstairs and down to his daughter's room,

sitting up with her every night in company with his wife. His silent

anguish seemed so great that no one dared to speak to him; his

neighbors looked at him with compassion, but they only asked news of

Veronique from Soeur Marthe. During the days when the child's danger

reached a crisis, the neighbors and passers saw, for the first and

only time in Sauviat's life, tears in his eyes and rolling down his

hollow cheeks; he did not wipe them, but stood for hours as if

stupefied, not daring to go upstairs to his daughter's room, gazing

before him and seeing nothing, so oblivious of all things that any one

might have robbed him.

Veronique was saved, but her beauty perished. Her face, once

exquisitely colored with a tint in which brown and rose were

harmoniously mingled, came out from the disease with a myriad of pits

which thickened the skin, the flesh beneath it being deeply indented.

Even her forehead did not escape the ravages of the scourge; it turned

brown and looked as though it were hammered, like metal. Nothing can

be more discordant than brick tones of the skin surrounded by golden

hair; they destroy all harmony. These fissures in the tissues,

capriciously hollowed, injured the purity of the profile and the

delicacy of the lines of the face, especially that of the nose, the

Grecian form of which was lost, and that of the chin, once as

exquisitely rounded as a piece of white porcelain. The disease left

nothing unharmed except the parts it was unable to reach,--the eyes

and the teeth. She did not, however, lose the elegance and beauty of

her shape,--neither the fulness of its lines nor the grace and

suppleness of her waist. At fifteen Veronique was still a fine girl,

and to the great consolation of her father and mother, a good and

pious girl, busy, industrious, and domestic.

After her convalescence and after she had made her first communion,

her parents gave her the two chambers on the second floor for her own

particular dwelling. Sauviat, so course in his way of living for

himself and his wife, now had certain perceptions of what comfort

might be; a vague idea came to him of consoling his child for her

great loss, which, as yet, she did not comprehend. The deprivation of

that beauty which was once the pride and joy of those two beings made

Veronique the more dear and precious to them. Sauviat came home one

day, bearing a carpet he had chanced upon in some of his rounds, which

he nailed himself on Veronique's floor. For her he saved from the sale

of an old chateau the gorgeous bed of a fine lady, upholstered in red

silk damask, with curtains and chairs of the same rich stuff. He

furnished her two rooms with antique articles, of the true value of

which he was wholly ignorant. He bought mignonette and put the pots on

the ledge outside her window; and he returned from many of his trips

with rose trees, or pansies, or any kind of flower which gardeners or

tavern-keepers would give him.

If Veronique could have made comparisons and known the character, past

habits, and ignorance of her parents she would have seen how much

there was of affection in these little things; but as it was, she

simply loved them from her own sweet nature and without reflection.

The girl wore the finest linen her mother could find in the shops.

Madame Sauviat left her daughter at liberty to buy what materials she

liked for her gowns and other garments; and the father and mother were

proud of her choice, which was never extravagant. Veronique was

satisfied with a blue silk gown for Sundays and fete-days, and on

working-days she wore merino in winter and striped cotton dresses in

summer. On Sundays she went to church with her father and mother, and

took a walk after vespers along the banks of the Vienne or about the

environs. On other days she stayed at home, busy in filling worsted-

work patterns, the payment for which she gave to the poor,--a life of

simple, chaste, and exemplary principles and habits. She did some

reading together with her tapestry, but never in any books except

those lent to her by the vicar of Saint-Etienne, a priest whom Soeur

Marthe had first made known to her parents.

All the rules of the Sauviat's domestic economy were suspended in

favor of Veronique. Her mother delighted in giving her dainty things

to eat, and cooked her food separately. The father and mother still

ate their nuts and dry bread, their herrings and parched peas

fricasseed in salt butter, while for Veronique nothing was thought too

choice and good.

"Veronique must cost you a pretty penny," said a hatmaker who lived

opposite to the Sauviats and had designs on their daughter for his

son, estimating the fortune of the old-iron dealer at a hundred

thousand francs.

"Yes, neighbor, yes," Pere Sauviat would say; "if she asked me for ten

crowns I'd let her have them. She has all she wants; but she never

asks for anything; she is as gentle as a lamb."

Veronique was, as a matter of fact, absolutely ignorant of the value

of things. She had never wanted for anything; she never saw a piece of

gold till the day of her marriage; she had no money of her own; her

mother bought and gave her everything she needed and wished for; so

that even when she wanted to give alms to a beggar, the girl felt in

her mother's pocket for the coin.

"If that's so," remarked the hatmaker, "she can't cost you much."

"So you think, do you?" replied Sauviat. "You wouldn't get off under

forty crowns a year, I can tell you that. Why, her room, she has at

least a hundred crowns' worth of furniture in it! But when a man has

but one child, he doesn't mind. The little we own will all go to her."

"The little! Why, you must be rich, pere Sauviat! It is pretty nigh

forty years that you have been doing a business in which there are no

losses."

"Ha! I sha'n't go to the poorhouse for want of a thousand francs or

so!" replied the old-iron dealer.

From the day when Veronique lost the soft beauty which made her

girlish face the admiration of all who saw it, Pere Sauviat redoubled

in activity. His business became so prosperous that he now went to

Paris several times a year. Every one felt that he wanted to

compensate his daughter by force of money for what he called her "loss

of profit." When Veronique was fifteen years old a change was made in

the internal manners and customs of the household. The father and

mother went upstairs in the evenings to their daughter's apartment,

where Veronique would read to them, by the light of a lamp placed

behind a glass globe full of water, the "Vie des Saints," the "Lettres

Edifiantes," and other books lent by the vicar. Madame Sauviat knitted

stockings, feeling that she thus recouped herself for the cost of oil.

The neighbors could see through the window the old couple seated

motionless in their armchairs, like Chinese images, listening to their

daughter, and admiring her with all the powers of their contracted

minds, obtuse to everything that was not business or religious faith.

II

VERONIQUE

There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as

Veronique, but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have

surprised the angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.

At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the

woman she was eventually to become. She was of medium height, neither

her father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was charming in

its graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves laboriously

sought by painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature herself draws

so delicately with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye of artists

in spite of swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould themselves,

inevitably, upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural, Veronique set

these beauties of her form into relief by movements that were wholly

free from affectation. She brought out her "full and complete effect,"

if we may borrow that strong term from legal phraseology. She had the

plump arms of the Auvergnat women, the red and dimpled hand of a

barmaid, and her strong but well-shaped feet were in keeping with the

rest of her figure.

At times there seemed to pass within her a marvellous and delightful

phenomenon which promised to Love a woman concealed thus far from

every eye. This phenomenon was perhaps one cause of the admiration her

father and mother felt for her beauty, which they often declared to be

divine,--to the great astonishment of their neighbors. The first to

remark it were the priests of the cathedral and the worshippers with

her at the same altar. When a strong emotion took possession of

Veronique,--and the religious exaltation to which she yielded herself

on receiving the communion must be counted among the strongest

emotions of so pure and candid a young creature,--an inward light

seemed to efface for the moment all traces of the small-pox. The pure

and radiant face of her childhood reappeared in its pristine beauty.

Though slightly veiled by the thickened surface disease had laid

there, it shone with the mysterious brilliancy of a flower blooming

beneath the water of the sea when the sun is penetrating it. Veronique

was changed for a few moments; the Little Virgin reappeared and then

disappeared again, like a celestial vision. The pupils of her eyes,

gifted with the power of great expansion, widened until they covered

the whole surface of the blue iris except for a tiny circle. Thus the

metamorphose of the eye, which became as keen and vivid as that of an

eagle, completed the extraordinary change in the face. Was it the

storm of restrained passions; was it some power coming from the depths

of the soul, which enlarged the pupils in full daylight as they

sometimes in other eyes enlarge by night, darkening the azure of those

celestial orbs?

However that may be, it was impossible to look indifferently at

Veronique as she returned to her seat from the altar where she had

united herself with God,--a moment when she appeared to all the parish

in her primitive splendor. At such moments her beauty eclipsed that of

the most beautiful of women. What a charm was there for the man who

loved her, guarding jealously that veil of flesh which hid the woman's

soul from every eye,--a veil which the hand of love might lift for an

instant and then let drop over conjugal delights! Veronique's lips

were faultlessly curved and painted in the clear vermilion of her pure

warm blood. Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little

heavy, in the acceptation given by painters to that term,--a heaviness

which is, according to the relentless laws of physiognomy, the

indication of an almost morbid vehemence in passion. She had above her

brow, which was finely modelled and almost imperious, a magnificent

diadem of hair, voluminous, redundant, and now of a chestnut color.

From the age of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique's bearing

was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep

solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and

consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,--the progress

of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope

of feelings warmed and nurtured in a life so pure.

Those who looked up from their lower level as they passed along the

rue de la Cite might have seen, on all fine days, the daughter of the

Sauviats sitting at her open window, sewing, embroidering, or pricking

the needle through the canvas of her worsted-work, with a look that

was often dreamy. Her head was vividly defined among the flowers which

poetized the brown and crumbling sills of her casement windows with

their leaded panes. Sometimes the reflection of the red damask window-

curtains added to the effect of that head, already so highly colored;

like a crimson flower she glowed in the aerial garden so carefully

trained upon her window-sill.

The quaint old house possessed therefore something more quaint than

itself,--the portrait of a young girl worthy of Mieris, or Van Ostade,

or Terburg, or Gerard Douw, framed in one of those old, defaced, half

ruined windows the brushes of the old Dutch painters loved so well.

When some stranger, surprised or interested by the building, stopped

before it and gazed at the second story, old Sauviat would poke his

head beyond the overhanging projection, certain that he should see his

daughter at her window. Then he would retreat into the shop rubbing

his hands and saying to his wife in the Auvergne vernacular:--

"Hey! old woman; they're admiring your daughter!"

In 1820 an incident occurred in the simple uneventful life the girl

was leading, which might have had no importance in the life of any

other young woman, but which, in point of fact, did no doubt exercise

over Veronique's future a terrible influence.

On one of the suppressed church fete-days, when many persons went

about their daily labor, though the Sauviats scrupulously closed their

shop, attended mass, and took a walk, Veronique passed, on their way

to the fields, a bookseller's stall on which lay a copy of "Paul and

Virginia." She had a fancy to buy it for the sake of the engraving,

and her father paid a hundred sous for the fatal volume, which he put

into the pocket of his coat.

"Wouldn't it be well to show that book to Monsieur le vicaire before

you read it?" said her mother, to whom all printed books were a sealed

mystery.

"I thought of it," answered Veronique.

The girl passed the whole night reading the story,--one of the most

touching bits of writing in the French language. The picture of mutual

love, half Biblical and worthy of the earlier ages of the world,

ravaged her heart. A hand--was it divine or devilish?--raised the veil

which, till then, had hidden nature from her. The Little Virgin still

existing in the beautiful young girl thought on the morrow that her

flowers had never been so beautiful; she heard their symbolic

language, she looked into the depths of the azure sky with a fixedness

that was almost ecstasy, and tears without a cause rolled down her

cheeks.

In the life of all women there comes a moment when they comprehend

their destiny,--when their hitherto mute organization speaks

peremptorily. It is not always a man, chosen by some furtive

involuntary glance, who awakens their slumbering sixth sense; oftener

it is some unexpected sight, the aspect of scenery, the /coup d'oeil/

of religious pomp, the harmony of nature's perfumes, a rosy dawn

veiled in slight mists, the winning notes of some divinest music, or

indeed any unexpected motion within the soul or within the body. To

this lonely girl, buried in that old house, brought up by simple, half

rustic parents, who had never heard an unfit word, whose pure

unsullied mind had never known the slightest evil thought,--to the

angelic pupil of Soeur Marthe and the vicar of Saint-Etienne the

revelation of love, the life of womanhood, came from the hand of

genius through one sweet book. To any other mind the book would have

offered no danger; to her it was worse in its effects than an obscene

tale. Corruption is relative. There are chaste and virgin natures

which a single thought corrupts, doing all the more harm because no

thought of the duty of resistance has occurred.

The next day Veronique showed the book to the good priest, who

approved the purchase; for what could be more childlike and innocent

and pure than the history of Paul and Virginia? But the warmth of the

tropics, the beauty of the scenery, the almost puerile innocence of a

love that seemed so sacred had done their work on Veronique. She was

led by the sweet and noble achievement of its author to the worship of

the Ideal, that fatal human religion! She dreamed of a lover like

Paul. Her thoughts caressed the voluptuous image of that balmy isle.

Childlike, she named an island in the Vienne, below Limoges and nearly

opposite to the Faubourg Saint-Martial, the Ile de France. Her mind

lived there in the world of fancy all young girls construct,--a world

they enrich with their own perfections. She spent long hours at her

window, looking at the artisans or the mechanics who passed it, the

only men whom the modest position of her parents allowed her to think

of. Accustomed, of course, to the idea of eventually marrying a man of

the people, she now became aware of instincts within herself which

revolved from all coarseness.

In such a situation she naturally made many a romance such as young

girls are fond of weaving. She clasped the idea--perhaps with the

natural ardor of a noble and virgin imagination--of ennobling one of

those men, and of raising him to the height where her own dreams led

her. She may have made a Paul of some young man who caught her eye,

merely to fasten her wild ideas on an actual being, as the mists of a

damp atmosphere, touched by frost, crystallize on the branches of a

tree by the wayside. She must have flung herself deep into the abysses

of her dream, for though she often returned bearing on her brow, as if

from vast heights, some luminous reflections, oftener she seemed to

carry in her hand the flowers that grew beside a torrent she had

followed down a precipice.

On the warm summer evenings she would ask her father to take her on

his arm to the banks of the Vienne, where she went into ecstasies over

the beauties of the sky and fields, the glories of the setting sun, or

the infinite sweetness of the dewy evening. Her soul exhaled itself

thenceforth in a fragrance of natural poesy. Her hair, until then

simply wound about her head, she now curled and braided. Her dress

showed some research. The vine which was running wild and naturally

among the branches of the old elm, was transplanted, cut and trained

over a green and pretty trellis.

After the return of old Sauviat (then seventy years of age) from a

trip to Paris in December, 1822, the vicar came to see him one

evening, and after a few insignificant remarks he said suddenly:--

"You had better think of marrying your daughter, Sauviat. At your age

you ought not to put off the accomplishment of so important a duty."

"But is Veronique willing to be married?" asked the old man, startled.

"As you please, father," she said, lowering her eyes.

"Yes, we'll marry her!" cried stout Madame Sauviat, smiling.

"Why didn't you speak to me about it before I went to Paris, mother?"

said Sauviat. "I shall have to go back there."

Jerome-Baptiste Sauviat, a man in whose eyes money seemed to

constitute the whole of happiness, who knew nothing of love, and had

never seen in marriage anything but the means of transmitting property

to another self, had long sworn to marry Veronique to some rich

bourgeois,--so long, in fact, that the idea had assumed in his brain

the characteristics of a hobby. His neighbor, the hat-maker, who

possessed about two thousand francs a year, had already asked, on

behalf of his son, to whom he proposed to give up his hat-making

establishment, the hand of a girl so well known in the neighborhood

for her exemplary conduct and Christian principles. Sauviat had

politely refused, without saying anything to Veronique. The day after

the vicar--a very important personage in the eyes of the Sauviat

household--had mentioned the necessary of marrying Veronique, whose

confessor he was, the old man shaved and dressed himself as for a

fete-day, and went out without saying a word to his wife or daughter;

both knew very well, however, that the father was in search of a son-

in-law. Old Sauviat went to Monsieur Graslin.

Monsieur Graslin, a rich banker in Limoges, had, like Sauviat himself,

started from Auvergne without a penny; he came to Limoges to be a

porter, found a place as an office-boy in a financial house, and

there, like many other financiers, he made his way by dint of economy,

and also through fortunate circumstances. Cashier at twenty-five years

of age, partner ten years later, in the firm of Perret and Grossetete,

he ended by finding himself the head of the house, after buying out

the senior partners, both of whom retired into the country, leaving

him their funds to manage in the business at a low interest.

Pierre Graslin, then forty-seven years of age, was supposed to possess

about six hundred thousand francs. The estimate of his fortune had

lately increased throughout the department, in consequence of his

outlay in having built, in a new quarter of the town called the place

d'Arbres (thus assisting to give Limoges an improved aspect), a fine

house, the front of it being on a line with a public building with the

facade of which it corresponded. This house had now been finished six

months, but Pierre Graslin delayed furnishing it; it had cost him so

much that he shrank from the further expense of living in it. His

vanity had led him to transgress the wise laws by which he governed

his life. He felt, with the good sense of a business man, that the

interior of the house ought to correspond with the character of the

outside. The furniture, silver-ware, and other needful accessories to

the life he would have to lead in his new mansion would, he estimated,

cost him nearly as much as the original building. In spite, therefore,

of the gossip of tongues and the charitable suppositions of his

neighbors, he continued to live on in the damp, old, and dirty ground-

floor apartment in the rue Montantmanigne where his fortune had been

made. The public carped, but Graslin had the approval of his former

partners, who praised a resolution that was somewhat uncommon.

A fortune and a position like those of Pierre Graslin naturally

excited the greed of not a few in a small provincial city. During the

last ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been

intimated to Monsieur Graslin. But the bachelor state was so well

suited to a man who was busy from morning till night, overrun with

work, eager in the pursuit of money as a hunter for game, and always

tired out with his day's labor, that Graslin fell into none of the

traps laid for him by ambitious mothers who coveted so brilliant a

position for their daughters.

Graslin, another Sauviat in an upper sphere, did not spend more than

forty sous a day, and clothed himself no better than his under-clerk.

Two clerks and an office-boy sufficed him to carry on his business,

which was immense through the multiplicity of its details. One clerk

attended to the correspondence; the other had charge of the accounts;

but Pierre Graslin was himself the soul, and body too, of the whole

concern. His clerks, chosen from his own relations, were safe men,

intelligent and as well-trained in the work as himself. As for the

office-boy, he led the life of a truck horse,--up at five in the

morning at all seasons, and never getting to bed before eleven at

night.

Graslin employed a charwoman by the day, an old peasant from Auvergne,

who did his cooking. The brown earthenware off which he ate, and the

stout coarse linen which he used, were in keeping with the character

of his food. The old woman had strict orders never to spend more than

three francs daily for the total expenses of the household. The

office-boy was also man-of-all-work. The clerks took care of their own

rooms. The tables of blackened wood, the straw chairs half unseated,

the wretched beds, the counters and desks, in short, the whole

furniture of house and office was not worth more than a thousand

francs, including a colossal iron safe, built into the wall, before

which slept the man-of-all-work with two dogs at his feet.

Graslin did not often go into society, which, however, discussed him

constantly. Two or three times a year he dined with the receiver-

general, with whom his business brought him into occasional

intercourse. He also occasionally took a meal at the prefecture; for

he had been appointed, much to his regret, a member of the Council-

general of the department--"a waste of time," he remarked. Sometimes

his brother bankers with whom he had dealings kept him to breakfast or

dinner; and he was forced also to visit his former partners, who spent

their winters in Limoges. He cared so little to keep up his relations

to society that in twenty-five years Graslin had not offered so much

as a glass of water to any one. When he passed along the street

persons would nudge each other and say: "That's Monsieur Graslin";

meaning, "There's a man who came to Limoges without a penny and has

now acquired an enormous fortune." The Auvergnat banker was a model

which more than one father pointed out to his son, and wives had been

known to fling him in the faces of their husbands.

We can now understand the reasons that led a man who had become the

pivot of the financial machine of Limoges to repulse the various

propositions of marriage which parents never ceased to make to him.

The daughters of his partners, Messrs. Perret and Grossetete, were

married before Graslin was in a position to take a wife; but as each

of these ladies had young daughters, the wiseheads of the community

finally concluded that old Perret or old Grossetete had made an

arrangement with Graslin to wait for one of his granddaughters, and

thenceforth they left him alone.

Sauviat had watched the ascending career of his compatriot more

attentively and seriously than any one else. He had known him from the

time he first came to Limoges; but their respective positions had

changed so much, at least apparently, that their friendship, now

become merely superficial, was seldom freshened. Still, in his

relation as compatriot, Graslin never disdained to talk with Sauviat

when they chanced to meet. Both continued to keep up their early

/tutoiement/, but only in their native dialect. When the receiver-

general of Bourges, the youngest of the brothers Grossetete, married

his daughter in 1823 to the youngest son of Comte Fontaine, Sauviat

felt sure that the Grossetetes would never allow Graslin to enter

their family.

After his conference with the banker, Pere Sauviat returned home

joyously. He dined that night in his daughter's room, and after dinner

he said to his womenkind:--

"Veronique will be Madame Graslin."

"Madame Graslin!" exclaimed Mere Sauviat, astounded.

"Is it possible?" said Veronique, to whom Graslin was personally

unknown, and whose imagination regarded him very much as a Parisian

grisette would regard a Rothschild.

"Yes, it is settled," said old Sauviat solemnly. "Graslin will furnish

his house magnificently; he is to give our daughter a fine Parisian

carriage and the best horses to be found in the Limousin; he will buy

an estate worth five hundred thousand francs, and settle that and his

town-house upon her. Veronique will be the first lady in Limoges, the

richest in the department, and she can do what she pleases with

Graslin."

Veronique's education, her religious ideas, and her boundless

affection for her parents, prevented her from making a single

objection; it did not even cross her mind to think that she had been

disposed of without reference to her own will. On the morrow Sauviat

went to Paris, and was absent for nearly a week.

Pierre Graslin was, as can readily be imagined, not much of a talker;

he went straight and rapidly to deeds. A thing decided on was a thing

done. In February, 1822, a strange piece of news burst like a

thunderbolt on the town of Limoges. The hotel Graslin was being

handsomely furnished; carriers' carts came day after day from Paris,

and their contents were unpacked in the courtyard. Rumors flew about

the town as to the beauty and good taste of the modern or the antique

furniture as it was seen to arrive. The great firm of Odiot and

Company sent down a magnificent service of plate by the mail-coach.

Three carriages, a caleche, a coupe, and a cabriolet arrived, wrapped

in straw with as much care as if they were jewels.

"Monsieur Graslin is going to be married!"

These words were said by every pair of lips in Limoges in the course

of a single evening,--in the salons of the upper classes, in the

kitchens, in the shops, in the streets, in the suburbs, and before

long throughout the whole surrounding country. But to whom? No one

could answer. Limoges had a mystery.

III

MARRIAGE

On the return of old Sauviat Graslin paid his first evening visit at

half-past nine o'clock. Veronique was expecting him, dressed in her

blue silk gown and muslin guimpe, over which fell a collaret made of

lawn with a deep hem. Her hair was simply worn in two smooth bandeaus,

gathered into a Grecian knot at the back of her head. She was seated

on a tapestried chair beside her mother, who occupied a fine armchair

with a carved back, covered with red velvet (evidently the relic of

some old chateau), which stood beside the fireplace. A bright fire

blazed on the hearth. On the chimney-piece, at either side of an

antique clock, the value of which was wholly unknown to the Sauviats,

six wax candles in two brass sconces twisted like vine-shoots, lighted

the dark room and Veronique in all her budding prime. The old mother

was wearing her best gown.

From the silent street, at that tranquil hour, through the soft

shadows of the ancient stairway, Graslin appeared to the modest,

artless Veronique, her mind still dwelling on the sweet ideas which

Bernadin de Saint-Pierre had given her of love.

Graslin, who was short and thin, had thick black hair like the

bristles of a brush, which brought into vigorous relief a face as red

as that of a drunkard emeritus, and covered with suppurating pimples,

either bleeding or about to burst. Without being caused by eczema or

scrofula, these signs of a blood overheated by continual toil,

anxiety, and the lust of business, by wakeful nights, poor food, and a

sober life, seemed to partake of both these diseases. In spite of the

advice of his partners, his clerks, and his physician, the banker

would never compel himself to take the healthful precautions which

might have prevented, or would at least modify, this malady, which was

slight at first, but had greatly increased from year to year. He

wanted to cure it, and would sometimes take baths or drink some

prescribed potion; but, hurried along on the current of his business,

he soon neglected the care of his person. Sometimes he thought of

suspending work for a time, travelling about, and visiting the noted

baths for such diseases; but where is the hunter after millions who is

willing to stop short?

In that blazing furnace shone two gray eyes rayed with green lines

starting from the pupils, and speckled with brown spots,--two

implacable eyes, full of resolution, rectitude, and shrewd

calculation. Graslin's nose was short and turned up; he had a mouth

with thick lips, a prominent forehead, and high cheek-bones, coarse

ears with large edges discolored by the condition of his blood,--in

short, he was an ancient satyr in a black satin waistcoat, brown

frock-coat, and white cravat. His strong and vigorous shoulders, which

began life by bearing heavy burdens, were now rather bent; and beneath

this torso, unduly developed, came a pair of weak legs, rather badly

affixed to the short thighs. His thin and hairy hands had the crooked

fingers of those whose business it is to handle money. The habit of

quick decision could be seen in the way the eyebrows rose into a point

over each arch of the eye. Though the mouth was grave and pinched, its

expression was that of inward kindliness; it told of an excellent

nature, sunk in business, smothered possibly, though it might revive

by contact with a woman.

At this apparition Veronique's heart was violently agitated; blackness

came before her eyes; she thought she cried aloud; but she really sat

there mute, with fixed and staring gaze.

"Veronique, this is Monsieur Graslin," said old Sauviat.

Veronique rose, curtsied, dropped back into her chair, and looked at

her mother, who was smiling at the millionaire, seeming, as her father

did, so happy,--so happy that the poor girl found strength to hide her

surprise and her violent repulsion. During the conversation which then

took place something was said of Graslin's health. The banker looked

naively into the mirror, with bevelled edges in an ebony frame.

"Mademoiselle," he said, "I am not good-looking."

Thereupon he proceeded to explain the blotches on his face as the

result of his overworked life. He related how he had constantly

disobeyed his physician's advice; and remarked that he hoped to change

his appearance altogether when he had a wife to rule his household,

and take better care of him than he took of himself.

"Is a man married for his face, compatriot?" said Sauviat, giving the

other a hearty slap on the thigh.

Graslin's speech went straight to those natural feelings which, more

or less, fill the heart of every woman. The thought came into

Veronique's mind that her face, too, had been destroyed by a horrible

disease, and her Christian modesty rebuked her first impression.

Hearing a whistle in the street, Graslin went downstairs, followed by

Sauviat. They speedily returned. The office-boy had brought the first

bouquet, which was a little late in coming. When the banker exhibited

this mound of exotic flowers, the fragrance of which completely filled

the room, and offered it to his future wife, Veronique felt a rush of

conflicting emotions; she was suddenly plunged into the ideal and

fantastic world of tropical nature. Never before had she seen white

camelias, never had she smelt the fragrance of the Alpine cistus, the

Cape jessamine, the cedronella, the volcameria, the moss-rose, or any

of the divine perfumes which woo to love, and sing to the heart their

hymns of fragrance. Graslin left Veronique that night in the grasp of

such emotions.

From this time forth, as soon as all Limoges was sleeping, the banker

would slip along the walls to the Sauviats' house. There he would tap

gently on the window-shutter; the dog did not bark; old Sauviat came

down and let him in, and Graslin would then spend an hour or two with

Veronique in the brown room, where Madame Sauviat always served him a

true Auvergnat supper. Never did this singular lover arrive without a

bouquet made of the rarest flowers from the greenhouse of his old

partner, Monsieur Grossetete, the only person who as yet knew of the

approaching marriage. The man-of-all-work went every evening to fetch

the bunch, which Monsieur Grossetete made himself.

Graslin made about fifty such visits in two months; each time, besides

the flowers, he brought with him some rich present,--rings, a watch, a

gold chain, a work-box, etc. These inconceivable extravagances must be

explained, and a word suffices. Veronique's dowry, promised by her

father, consisted of nearly the whole of old Sauviat's property,

namely, seven hundred and fifty thousand francs. The old man retained

an income of eight thousand francs derived from the Funds, bought for

him originally for sixty thousand francs in assignats by his

correspondent Brezac, to whom, at the time of his imprisonment, he had

confided that sum, and who kept it for him safely. These sixty

thousand francs in assignats were the half of Sauviat's fortune at the

time he came so near being guillotined. Brezac was also, at the same

time, the faithful repository of the rest, namely, seven hundred louis

d'or (an enormous sum at that time in gold), with which old Sauviat

began his business once more as soon as he recovered his liberty. In

thirty years each of those louis d'or had been transformed into a

bank-note for a thousand francs, by means of the income from the

Funds, of Madame Sauviat's inheritance from her father, old

Champagnac, and of the profits accruing from the business and the

accumulated interest thereon in the hands of the Brezac firm. Brezac

himself had a loyal and honest friendship for Sauviat,--such as all

Auvergnats are apt to feel for one another.

So, whenever Sauviat passed the front of the Graslin mansion he had

said to himself, "Veronique shall live in that fine palace." He knew

very well that no girl in all the department would have seven hundred

and fifty thousand francs as a marriage portion, besides the

expectation of two hundred and fifty thousand more. Graslin, his

chosen son-in-law, would therefore infallibly marry Veronique; and so,

as we have seen, it came about.

Every evening Veronique had her fresh bunch of flowers, which on the

morrow decked her little salon and was carefully concealed from the

neighbors. She admired the beautiful jewels, the pearls and diamonds,

the bracelets, the rubies, gifts which assuredly gratify all the

daughters of Eve. She thought herself less plain when she wore them.

She saw her mother happy in the marriage, and she had no other point

of view from which to make comparisons. She was, moreover, totally

ignorant of the duties or the purpose of marriage. She heard the

solemn voice of the vicar of Saint-Etienne praising Graslin to her as

a man of honor, with whom she would lead an honorable life. Thus it

was that Veronique consented to receive Monsieur Graslin as her future

husband.

When it happens that in a life so withdrawn from the world, so

solitary as that of Veronique, a single person enters it every day,

that person cannot long remain indifferent; either he is hated, and

the aversion, justified by a deepening knowledge of his character,

renders him intolerable, or the habit of seeing bodily defects dims

the eye to them. The mind looks about for compensations; his

countenance awakens curiosity; its features brighten; fleeting

beauties appear in it. At last the inner, hidden beneath the outer,

shows itself. Then, when the first impressions are fairly overcome,

the attachment felt is all the stronger, because the soul clings to it

as its own creation. That is love. And here lies the reason of those

passions conceived by beautiful things for other beings apparently

ugly. The outward aspect, forgotten by affection, is no longer seen in

a creature whose soul is deeply valued. Besides this, beauty, so

necessary to a woman, takes many strange aspects in man; and there is

as much diversity of feeling among women about the beauty of men as

there is among men about the beauty of women. So, after deep

reflection and much debating with herself, Veronique gave her consent

to the publication of the banns.

From that moment all Limoges rang with this inexplicable affair,--

inexplicable because no one knew the secret of it, namely, the

immensity of the dowry. Had that dowry been known Veronique could have

chosen a husband where she pleased; but even so, she might have made a

mistake.

Graslin was thought to be much in love. Upholsterers came from Paris

to fit up the house. Nothing was talked of in Limoges but the profuse

expenditures of the banker. The value of the chandeliers was

calculated; the gilding of the walls, the figures on the clocks, all

were discussed; the jardinieres, the caloriferes, the objects of

luxury and novelty, nothing was left unnoticed. In the garden of the

hotel Graslin, above the icehouse, was an aviary, and all the

inhabitants of the town were presently surprised by the sight of rare

birds,--Chinese pheasants, mysterious breeds of ducks. Every one

flocked to see them. Monsieur and Madame Grossetete, an old couple who

were highly respected in Limoges, made several visits to the Sauviats,

accompanied by Graslin. Madame Grossetete, a most excellent woman,

congratulated Veronique on her happy marriage. Thus the Church, the

family, society, and all material things down to the most trivial,

made themselves accomplices to bring about this marriage.

In the month of April the formal invitations to the wedding were

issued to all Graslin's friends and acquaintance. On a fine spring

morning a caleche and a coupe, drawn by Limousin horses chosen by

Monsieur Grossetete, drew up at eleven o'clock before the shop of the

iron-dealer, bringing, to the great excitement of the neighborhood,

the former partners of the bridegroom and the latter's two clerks. The

street was lined with spectators, all anxious to see the Sauviats'

daughter, on whose beautiful hair the most renowned hairdresser in

Limoges had placed the bridal wreath and a costly veil of English

lace. Veronique wore a gown of simple white muslin. A rather imposing

assemblage of the most distinguished women in the society of the town

attended the wedding in the cathedral, where the bishop, knowing the

religious fervor of the Sauviats, deigned to marry Veronique himself.

The bride was very generally voted plain.

She entered her new house, and went from one surprise to another. A

grand dinner was to precede the ball, to which Graslin had invited

nearly all Limoges. The dinner, given to the bishop, the prefect, the

judge of the court, the attorney-general, the mayor, the general, and

Graslin's former partners with their wives, was a triumph for the

bride, who, like all other persons who are simple and natural, showed

charms that were not expected in her. Neither of the bridal pair could

dance; Veronique continued therefore to do the honors to her guests,

and to win the esteem and good graces of nearly all the persons who

were presented to her, asking Grossetete, who took an honest liking to

her, for information about the company. She made no mistakes and

committed no blunders. It was during this evening that the two former

partners of the banker announced the amount of the dowry (immense for

Limousin) given by the Sauviats to their daughter. At nine o'clock the

old iron-dealer returned home and went to bed, leaving his wife to

preside over the bride's retiring. It was said by everyone throughout

the town that Madame Graslin was very plain, though well made.

Old Sauviat now wound up his business and sold his house in town. He

bought a little country-place on the left bank of the Vienne between

Limoges and Cluzeau, ten minutes' walk from the suburb of Saint-

Martial, where he intended to finish his days tranquilly with his

wife. The old couple had an apartment in the hotel Graslin and always

dined once or twice a week with their daughter, who, as often, made

their house in the country the object of her walks.

This enforced rest almost killed old Sauviat. Happily, Graslin found a

means of occupying his father-in-law. In 1823 the banker was forced to

take possession of a porcelain manufactory, to the proprietors of

which he had advanced large sums, which they found themselves unable

to repay except by the sale of their factory, which they made to him.

By the help of his business connections and by investing a large

amount of property in the concern, Graslin made it one of the finest

manufactories of Limoges ware in the town. Afterwards he resold it at

a fine profit; meantime he placed it under the superintendence of his

father-in-law, who, in spite of his seventy-two years, counted for

much in the return of prosperity to the establishment, who himself

renewed his youth in the employment. Graslin was then able to attend

to his legitimate business of banking without anxiety as to the

manufactory.

Sauviat died in 1827 from an accident. While taking account of stock

he fell into a /charasse/,--a sort of crate with an open grating in

which the china was packed; his leg was slightly injured, so slightly

that he paid no attention to it; gangrene set in; he would not consent

to amputation, and therefore died. The widow gave up about two hundred

and fifty thousand francs which came to her from Sauviat's estate,

reserving only a stipend of two hundred francs a month, which amply

sufficed for her wants. Graslin bound himself to pay her that sum

duly. She kept her little house in the country, and lived there alone

without a servant and against the remonstrances of her daughter, who

could not induce her to alter this determination, to which she clung

with the obstinacy peculiar to old persons. Madame Sauviat came nearly

every day into Limoges to see her daughter, and the latter still

continued to make her mother's house, from which was a charming view

of the river, the object of her walks. From the road leading to it

could be seen that island long loved by Veronique and called by her

the Ile de France.

In order not to complicate our history of the Graslin household with

the foregoing incidents, we have thought it best to end that of the

Sauviats by anticipating events, which are moreover useful as

explaining the private and hidden life which Madame Graslin now led.

The old mother, noticing that Graslin's miserliness, which returned

upon him, might hamper her daughter, was for some time unwilling to

resign the property left to her by her husband. But Veronique, unable

to imagine a case in which a woman might desire the use of her own

property, urged it upon her mother with reasons of great generosity,

and out of gratitude to Graslin for restoring to her the liberty and

freedom of a young girl. But this is anticipating.

The unusual splendor which accompanied Graslin's marriage had

disturbed all his habits and constantly annoyed him. The mind of the

great financier was a very small one. Veronique had had no means of

judging the man with whom she was to pass her life. During his fifty-

five visits he had let her see nothing but the business man, the

indefatigable worker, who conceived and sustained great enterprises,

and analyzed public affairs, bringing them always to the crucial test

of the Bank. Fascinated by the million offered to him by Sauviat, he

showed himself generous by calculation. Carried away by the interests

of his marriage and by what he called his "folly," namely, the house

which still goes by the name of the hotel Graslin, he did things on a

large scale. Having bought horses, a caleche, and a coupe, he

naturally used them to return the wedding visits and go to those

dinners and balls, called the "retours de noces," which the heads of

the administration and the rich families of Limoges gave to the newly

married pair. Under this impulsion, which carried him entirely out of

his natural sphere, Graslin sent to Paris for a man-cook and took a

reception day. For a year he kept the pace of a man who possesses a

fortune of sixteen hundred thousand francs, and he became of course

the most noted personage in Limoges. During this year he generously

put into his wife's purse every month twenty-five gold pieces of

twenty francs each.

Society concerned itself much about Veronique from the day of her

marriage, for she was a boon to its curiosity, which has little to

feed on in the provinces. Veronique was all the more studied because

she had appeared in the social world like a phenomenon; but once

there, she remained always simple and modest, in the attitude of a

person who is observing habits, customs, manners, things unknown to

her, and endeavoring to conform to them. Already voted ugly but well-

shaped, she was now declared kindly but stupid. She was learning so

many things, she had so much to hear and to see that her looks and

speech did certainly give some reason for this judgment. She showed a

sort of torpor which resembled lack of mind. Marriage, that hard

calling, as she said, for which the Church, the Code, and her mother

exhorted her to resignation and obedience, under pain of transgressing

all human laws and causing irreparable evil, threw her into a dazed

and dizzy condition, which amounted sometimes to a species of inward

delirium.

Silent and self-contained, she listened as much to herself as she did

to others. Feeling within her the most violent "difficulty of

existing," to use an expression of Fontenelle's, which was constantly

increasing, she became terrified at herself. Nature resisted the

commands of the mind, the body denied the will. The poor creature,

caught in the net, wept on the breast of that great Mother of the poor

and the afflicted,--she went for comfort to the Church; her piety

redoubled, she confided the assaults of the demon to her confessor;

she prayed to heaven for succor. Never, at any period of her life, did

she fulfil her religious duties with such fervor. The despair of not

loving her husband flung her violently at the foot of the altar, where

divine and consolatory voices urged her to patience. She was patient,

she was gentle, and she continued to live on, hoping always for the

happiness of maternity.

"Did you notice Madame Graslin this morning?" the women would say to

each other. "Marriage doesn't agree with her; she is actually green."

"Yes," some of them would reply; "but would you give your daughter to

a man like Graslin? No woman could marry him with impunity."

Now that Graslin was married, all the mothers who had courted him for

ten years past pursued him with sarcasms.

Veronique grew visibly thinner and really ugly; her eyes looked weary,

her features coarsened, her manner was shy and awkward; she acquired

that air of cold and melancholy rigidity for which the ultra-pious are

so often blamed. Her skin took on a grayish tone; she dragged herself

languidly about during this first year of married life, ordinarily so

brilliant for a young wife. She tried to divert her mind by reading,

profiting by the liberty of married women to read what they please.

She read the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of Lord Byron, the

works of Schiller and of Goethe, and much else of modern and also

ancient literature. She learned to ride a horse, and to dance and to

draw. She painted water-colors and made sepia sketches, turning

ardently to all those resources which women employ to bear the

weariness of their solitude. She gave herself that second education

which most women derive from a man, but which she derived from herself

only.

The natural superiority of a free, sincere spirit, brought up, as it

were in a desert and strengthened by religion, had given her a sort of

untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world

she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her,

and she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could

she see the passion of which she read. Love was in her heart, like

seeds in the earth, awaiting the action of the sun. Her deep

melancholy, caused by constant meditation on herself, brought her back

by hidden by-ways to the brilliant dreams of her girlish days. Many a

time she must have lived again that old romantic poem, making herself

both the actor and the subject of it. Again she saw that island bathed

in light, flowery, fragrant, caressing to her soul. Often her pallid

eyes wandered around a salon with piercing curiosity. The men were all

like Graslin. She studied them, and then she seemed to question their

wives; but nothing on the faces of those women revealed an inward

anguish like to hers, and she returned home sad and gloomy and

distressed about herself. The authors she had read in the morning

answered to the feelings in her soul; their thoughts pleased her; but

at night she heard only empty words, not even presented in a lively

way,--dull, empty, foolish conversations in petty local matters, or

personalities of no interest to her. She was often surprised at the

heat displayed in discussions which concerned no feeling or sentiment

--to her the essence of existence, the soul of life.

Often she was seen with fixed eyes, mentally absorbed, thinking no

doubt of the days of her youthful ignorance spent in that chamber full

of harmonies now forever passed away. She felt a horrible repugnance

against dropping into the gulf of pettiness in which the women among

whom she lived were floundering. This repugnance, stamped on her

forehead, on her lips, and ill-disguised, was taken for the insolence

of a parvenue. Madame Graslin began to observe on all faces a certain

coldness; she felt in all remarks an acrimony, the causes of which

were unknown to her, for she had no intimate friend to enlighten or

advise her. Injustice, which angers little minds, brings loftier souls

to question themselves, and communicates a species of humility to

them. Veronique condemned herself, endeavoring to see her own faults.

She tried to be affable; they called her false. She grew more gentle

still; they said she was a hypocrite, and her pious devotion helped on

the calumny. She spent money, gave dinners and balls, and they taxed

her with pride.

Unsuccessful in all these attempts, unjustly judged, rebuffed by the

petty and tormenting pride which characterizes provincial society,

where each individual is armed with pretensions and their attendant

uneasiness, Madame Graslin fell back into utter solitude. She returned

with eagerness to the arms of the Church. Her great soul, clothed with

so weak a flesh, showed her the multiplied commandments of Catholicism

as so many stones placed for protection along the precipices of life,

so many props brought by charitable hands to sustain human weakness on

its weary way; and she followed, with greater rigor than ever, even

the smallest religious practices.

On this the liberals of the town classed Madame Graslin among the

/devotes/, the ultras. To the different animosities Veronique had

innocently acquired, the virulence of party feeling now added its

periodical exasperation. But as this ostracism took nothing really

from her, she quietly left society and lived in books which offered

her such infinite resources. She meditated on what she read, she

compared systems, she widened immeasurably the horizons of her

intellect and the extent of her education; in this way she opened the

gates of her soul to curiosity.

During this period of resolute study, in which religion supported and

maintained her mind, she obtained the friendship of Monsieur

Grossetete, one of those old men whose mental superiority grows rusty

in provincial life, but who, when they come in contact with an eager

mind, recover something of their former brilliancy. The good man took

an earnest interest in Veronique, who, to reward him for the

flattering warmth of heart which old men show to those they like,

displayed before him, and for the first time in her life, the

treasures of her soul and the acquirements of her mind, cultivated so

secretly, and now full of blossom. An extract from a letter written by

her about this time to Monsieur Grossetete will show the condition of

the mind of a woman who was later to give signal proofs of a firm and

lofty nature:--

"The flowers you sent me for the ball were charming, but they

suggested harsh reflections. Those pretty creatures gathered by

you, and doomed to wilt upon my bosom to adorn a fete, made me

think of others that live and die unseen in the depths of your

woods, their fragrance never inhaled by any one. I asked myself

why I was dancing there, why I was decked with flowers, just as I

ask God why he has placed me to live in this world.

"You see, my friend, all is a snare to the unhappy; the smallest

matter brings the sick mind back to its woes; but the greatest

evil of certain woes is the persistency which makes them a fixed

idea pervading our lives. A constant sorrow ought rather to be a

divine inspiration. You love flowers for themselves, whereas I

love them as I love to listen to fine music. So, as I was saying,

the secret of a mass of things escapes me. You, my old friend, you

have a passion,--that of the horticulturist. When you return to

town inspire me with that taste, so that I may rush to my

greenhouse with eager feet, as you go to yours to watch the

development of your plants, to bud and bloom with them, to admire

what you create,--the new colors, the unexpected varieties, which

expand and grow beneath your eyes by the virtue of your care.

"My greenhouse, the one I watch, is filled with suffering souls.

The miseries I try to lessen sadden my heart; and when I take them

upon myself, when, after finding some young woman without clothing

for her babe, some old man wanting bread, I have supplied their

needs, the emotions their distress and its relief have caused me

do not suffice my soul. Ah, friend, I feel within me untold powers

--for evil, possibly,--which nothing can lower, which the sternest

commands of our religion are unable to abase! Sometimes, when I go

to see my mother, walking alone among the fields, I want to cry

aloud, and I do so. It seems to me that my body is a prison in

which some evil genius is holding a shuddering creature while

awaiting the mysterious words which are to burst its obstructive

form.

"But that comparison is not a just one. In me it seems to be the

body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul,

books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some

anguish which shall destroy the enervating peace of my existence?

"Oh, if some sentiment, some mania that I could cultivate, does

not come into my life, I feel I shall sink at last into the gulf

where all ideas are dulled, where character deteriorates, motives

slacken, virtues lose their backbone, and all the forces of the

soul are scattered,--a gulf in which I shall no longer be the

being Nature meant me to be!

"This is what my bitter complainings mean. But do not let them

hinder you from sending me those flowers. Your friendship is so

soothing and so full of loving kindness that it has for the last

few months almost reconciled me to myself. Yes, it makes me happy

to have you cast a glance upon my soul, at once so barren and so

full of bloom; and I am thankful for every gentle word you say to

one who rides the phantom steed of dreams, and returns worn-out."

At the end of the third year of his married life, Graslin, observing

that his wife no longer used her horses, and finding a good market for

them, sold them. He also sold the carriages, sent away the coachman,

let the bishop have his man-cook, and contented himself with a woman.

He no longer gave the monthly sum to his wife, telling her that he

would pay all bills. He thought himself the most fortunate of husbands

in meeting no opposition whatever to these proceedings from the woman

who had brought him a million of francs as a dowry. Madame Graslin,

brought up from childhood without ever seeing money, or being made to

feel that it was an indispensable element in life, deserved no praise

whatever for this apparent generosity. Graslin even noticed in a

corner of the secretary all the sums he had ever given her, less the

money she had bestowed in charity or spent upon her dress, the cost of

which was much lessened by the profusion of her wedding trousseau.

Graslin boasted of Veronique to all Limoges as being a model wife. He

next regretted the money spent on the house, and he ordered the

furniture to be all packed away or covered up. His wife's bedroom,

dressing-room, and boudoir were alone spared from these protective

measures; which protect nothing, for furniture is injured just as much

by being covered up as by being left uncovered. Graslin himself lived

almost entirely on the ground-floor of the house, where he had his

office, and resumed his old business habits with avidity. He thought

himself an excellent husband because he went upstairs to breakfast and

dined with his wife; but his unpunctuality was so great that it was

not more than ten times a month that he began a meal with he; he had

exacted, out of courtesy, that she should never wait for him.

Veronique did, however, always remain in the room while her husband

took his meals, serving him herself, that she might at least perform

voluntarily some of the visible obligations of a wife.

The banker, to whom the things of marriage were very indifferent, and

who had seen nothing in his wife but seven hundred and fifty thousand

francs, had never once perceived Veronique's repugnance to him. Little

by little he now abandoned Madame Graslin for his business. When he

wished to put a bed in the room adjoining his office on the ground-

floor, Veronique hastened to comply with the request. So that three

years after their marriage these two ill-assorted beings returned to

their original estate, each equally pleased and happy to do so. The

moneyed man, possessing eighteen hundred thousand francs, returned

with all the more eagerness to his old avaricious habits because he

had momentarily quitted them. His two clerks and the office-boy were

better lodged and rather better fed, and that was the only difference

between the present and the past. His wife had a cook and maid (two

indispensable servants); but except for the actual necessities of

life, not a penny left his coffers for his household.

Happy in the turn which things were now taking, Veronique saw in the

evident satisfaction of the banker the absolution for this separation

which she would never have asked for herself. She had no conception

that she was as disagreeable to Graslin as Graslin was repulsive to

her. This secret divorce made her both sad and joyful. She had always

looked to motherhood for an interest in life; but up to this time

(1828) the couple had had no prospect of a family.

IV

THE HISTORY OF MANY MARRIED WOMEN IN THE PROVINCES

So now, in her magnificent house and envied for her wealth by all the

town, Madame Graslin recovered the solitude of her early years in her

father's house, less the glow of hope and the youthful joys of

ignorance. She lived among the ruins of her castles in the air,

enlightened by sad experience, sustained by religious faith, occupied

by the care of the poor, whom she loaded with benefits. She made

clothes for the babies, gave mattresses and sheets to those who slept

on straw; she went among the poor herself, followed by her maid, a

girl from Auvergne whom her mother procured for her, and who attached

herself body and soul to her mistress. Veronique made an honorable spy

of her, sending her to discover the places where suffering could be

stilled, poverty softened.

This active benevolence, carried on with strict attention to religious

duties, was hidden in the deepest secrecy and directed by the various

rectors in the town, with whom Veronique had a full understanding in

all her charitable deeds, so as not to suffer the money so needed for

unmerited misfortunes to fall into the hands of vice. It was during

this period of her life that she won a friendship quite as strong and

quite as precious as that of old Grossetete. She became the beloved

lamb of a distinguished priest, who was persecuted for his true

merits, which were wholly misunderstood, one of the two grand-vicars

of the diocese, named the Abbe Dutheil.

This priest belonged to the portion of the French clergy who incline

toward certain concessions, who would be glad to associate the Church

with the people's interests, and so enable it to regain, through the

application of true evangelical doctrine, its former influence over

the masses, which it might then draw to closer relations with the

monarchy. Whether it was that the Abbe Dutheil recognized the

impossibility of enlightening the court of Rome and the higher clergy

on this point, or that he had consented to sacrifice his own opinions

to those of his superiors, it is certain that he remained within the

limits of the strictest orthodoxy, being very well aware that any

manifestation of his principles at the present time would deprive him

of all chance of the episcopate.

This eminent priest united in himself great Christian modesty and a

noble character. Without pride or ambition he remained at his post and

did his duty in the midst of perils. The liberals of the town were

ignorant of the motives of his conduct; they claimed him as being of

their opinions and considered him a patriot,--a word which meant

revolutionist in Catholic minds. Loved by his inferiors, who dared

not, however, proclaim his merits, feared by his equals who kept watch

upon him, he was a source of embarrassment to the bishop. His virtues

and his knowledge, envied, no doubt, prevented persecution; it was

impossible to complain of him, though he criticized frankly the

political blunders by which both the throne and the clergy mutually

compromised themselves. He often foretold results, but vainly,--like

poor Cassandra, who was equally cursed before and after the disaster

she predicted. Short of a revolution the Abbe Dutheil was likely to

remain as he was, one of those stones hidden in the foundation wall on

which the edifice rests. His utility was recognized and they left him

in his place, like many other solid minds whose rise to power is the

terror of mediocrities. If, like the Abbe de Lamennais, he had taken

up his pen he would doubtless, like him, have been blasted by the

court of Rome.

The Abbe Dutheil was imposing in appearance. His exterior revealed the

underlying of a profound nature always calm and equable on the

surface. His tall figure and its thinness did not detract from the

general effect of his lines, which recalled those by which the genius

of Spanish painters delights to represent the great monastic

meditators, and those selected at a later period by Thorwaldsen for

the Apostles. The long, almost rigid folds of the face, in harmony

with those of his vestment, had the charm which the middle-ages bring

into relief in the mystical statues placed beside the portals of their

churches. Gravity of thought, word, and accent, harmonized in this man

and became him well. Seeing his dark eyes hollowed by austerities and

surrounded by a brown circle; seeing, too, his forehead, yellow as

some old stone, his head and hands almost fleshless, men desired to

hear the voice and the instructions which issued from his lips. This

purely physical grandeur which accords with moral grandeur, gave this

priest a somewhat haughty and disdainful air, which was instantly

counteracted to an observer by his modesty and by his speech, though

it did not predispose others in his favor. In some more elevated

station these advantages would have obtained that necessary ascendancy

over the masses which the people willingly allow to men who are thus

endowed. But superiors will not forgive their inferiors for possessing

the externals of greatness, nor for displaying that majesty so prized

by the ancients but so often lacking to the administrators of modern

power.

By one of those strange freaks of circumstance which are never

accounted for, the other vicar-general, the Abbe de Grancour, a stout

little man with a rosy complexion and blue eyes, whose opinions were

diametrically opposed to those of the Abbe Dutheil, liked to be in the

latter's company, although he never testified this liking enough to

put himself out of the good graces of the bishop, to whom he would

have sacrificed everything. The Abbe de Grancour believed in the merit

of his colleague, recognized his talents, secretly accepted his

doctrines, and condemned them openly; for the little priest was one of

those men whom superiority attracts and intimidates,--who dislike it

and yet cultivate it. "He would embrace me and condemn me," the Abbe

Dutheil said of him. The Abbe de Grancour had neither friends nor

enemies; he was therefore likely to live and die a vicar-general. He

said he was drawn to visit Madame Graslin by the desire of counselling

so religious and benevolent a person; and the bishop approved of his

doing so,--Monsieur de Grancour's real object being to spend a few

evenings with the Abbe Dutheil in Veronique's salon.

The two priests now came pretty regularly to see Madame Graslin, and

make her a sort of report about her poor and discuss the best means of

succoring and improving them. But Monsieur Graslin had now begun to

tighten his purse-strings, having made the discovery, in spite of the

innocent deceptions of his wife and her maid, that the money he paid

did not go solely for household expenses and for dress. He was angry

when he found out how much money his wife's charities cost him; he

called the cook to account, inquired into all the details of the

housekeeping, and showed what a grand administrator he was by

practically proving that his house could be splendidly kept for three

thousand francs a year. Then he put his wife on an allowance of a

hundred francs a month, and boasted of his liberality in so doing. The

office-boy, who liked flowers, was made to take care of the garden on

Sundays. Having dismissed the gardener, Graslin used the greenhouse to

store articles conveyed to him as security for loans. He let the birds

in the aviary die for want of care, to avoid the cost of their food

and attendance. And he even took advantage of a winter when there was

no ice, to give up his icehouse and save the expense of filling it.

By 1828 there was not a single article of luxury in the house which he

had not in some way got rid of. Parsimony reigned unchecked in the

hotel Graslin. The master's face, greatly improved during the three

years spent with his wife (who induced him to follow his physician's

advice), now became redder, more fiery, more blotched than before.

Business had taken such proportions that it was necessary to promote

the boy-of-all-work to the position of cashier, and to find some stout

Auvergnat for the rougher service of the hotel Graslin.

Thus, four years after her marriage, this very rich woman could not

dispose of a single penny by her own will. The avarice of her husband

succeeded the avarice of her parents. Madame Graslin had never

understood the necessity of money until the time came when her

benevolence was checked.

By the beginning of the year 1828 Veronique had entirely recovered the

blooming health which had given such beauty to the innocent young girl

sitting at her window in the old house in the rue de la Cite; but by

this time she had acquired a fine literary education, and was fully

able to think and to speak. An excellent judgment gave real depth to

her words. Accustomed now to the little things of life, she wore the

fashions of the period with infinite grace. When she chanced about

this time to visit a salon she found herself--not without a certain

inward surprise--received by all with respectful esteem. These changed

feelings and this welcome were due to the two vicars-general and to

old Grossetete. Informed by them of her noble hidden life, and the

good deeds so constantly done in their midst, the bishop and a few

influential persons spoke of Madame Graslin as a flower of true piety,

a violet fragrant with virtues; in consequence of which, one of those

strong reactions set in, unknown to Veronique, which are none the less

solid and durable because they are long in coming. This change in

public opinion gave additional influence to Veronique's salon, which

was now visited by all the chief persons in the society of the town,

in consequence of certain circumstances we shall now relate.

Toward the close of this year the young Vicomte de Grandville was sent

as deputy solicitor to the courts of Limoges. He came preceded by a

reputation always given to Parisians in the provinces. A few days

after his arrival, during a soiree at the prefecture, he made answer

to a rather foolish question, that the most able, intelligent, and

distinguished woman he had met in the town was Madame Graslin.

"Perhaps you think her the handsomest also?" said the wife of the

receiver-general.

"I cannot think so in your presence, madame," he replied, "and

therefore I am in doubt. Madame Graslin possesses a beauty which need

inspire no jealousy, for it seldom shows itself: she is only beautiful

to those she loves; you are beautiful to all the world. When Madame

Graslin's soul is moved by true enthusiasm, it sheds an expression

upon her face which changes it completely. Her countenance is like a

landscape,--dull in winter, glorious in summer; but the world will

always see it in winter. When she talks with friends on some literary

or philosophical topic, or on certain religious questions which

interest her, she is roused into appearing suddenly an unknown woman

of marvellous beauty."

This declaration, which was caused by observing the phenomenon that

formerly made Veronique so beautiful on her return from the holy

table, made a great noise in Limoges, where for a time the young

deputy, to whom the place of the /procureur-general/ was said to be

promised, played a leading part. In all provincial towns a man who

rises a trifle above others becomes, for a period more or less

protracted, the object of a liking which resembles enthusiasm, and

which usually deceives the object of this ephemeral worship. It is to

this social caprice that we owe so many local geniuses, soon ignored

and their false reputations mortified. The men whom women make the

fashion in this way are oftener strangers than compatriots.

In this particular case the admirers of the Vicomte de Grandville were

not mistaken; he was in truth a superior man. Madame Graslin was the

only woman he found in Limoges with whom he could exchange ideas and

keep up a varied conversation. A few months after his arrival,

attracted by the increasing charm of Veronique's manners and

conversation, he proposed to the Abbe Dutheil, and a few other of the

remarkable men in Limoges, to meet in the evenings at Madame Graslin's

house and play whist. At this time Madame Graslin was at home five

evenings in the week to visitors, reserving two free days, as she

said, for herself.

When Madame Graslin had thus gathered about her the distinguished men

we have mentioned, others were not sorry to give themselves the

reputation of cleverness by seeking to join the same society.

Veronique also received three or four of the distinguished officers of

the garrison and staff; but the freedom of mind displayed by her

guests, and the tacit discretion enjoined by the manners of the best

society, made her extremely cautious as to the admission of those who

now vied with each other to obtain her invitations.

The other women in this provincial society were not without jealousy

in seeing Madame Graslin surrounded by the most agreeable and

distinguished men in the town; but by this time Veronique's social

power was all the stronger because it was exclusive; she accepted the

intimacy of four or five women only, and these were strangers in

Limoges who had come from Paris with their husbands, and who held in

horror the petty gossip of provincial life. If any one outside of this

little clique of superior persons came in to make a visit, the

conversation immediately changed, and the habitues of the house talked

commonplace.

The hotel Graslin thus became an oasis where intelligent minds found

relaxation and relief from the dulness of provincial life; where

persons connected with the government could express themselves freely

on politics without fear of having their words taken down and

repeated; where all could satirize that which provoked satire, and

where each individual abandoned his professional trammels and yielded

himself up to his natural self.

So, after being the most obscure young girl in all Limoges, considered

ugly, dull, and vacant, Madame Graslin, at the beginning of the year

1828, was regarded as one of the leading personages in the town, and

the most noted woman in society. No one went to see her in the

mornings, for all knew her habits of benevolence and the regularity of

her religious observances. She always went to early mass so as not to

delay her husband's breakfast, for which, however, there was no fixed

hour, though she never failed to be present and to serve it herself.

Graslin had trained his wife to this little ceremony. He continued to

praise her on all occasions; he thought her perfect; she never asked

him for anything; he could pile up louis upon louis, and spread his

investments over a wide field of enterprise through his relations with

the Brezacs; he sailed with a fair wind and well freighted over the

ocean of commerce,--his intense business interest keeping him in the

still, though half-intoxicated, frenzy of gamblers watching events on

the green table of speculation.

During this happy period, and until the beginning of the year 1829,

Madame Graslin attained, in the eyes of her friends, to a degree of

beauty that was really extraordinary, the reasons of which they were

unable to explain. The blue of the iris expanded like a flower,

diminishing the dark circle of the pupil, and seeming to float in a

liquid and languishing light that was full of love. Her forehead,

illumined by thoughts and memories of happiness, was seen to whiten

like the zenith before the dawn, and its lines were purified by an

inward fire. Her face lost those heated brown tones which betoken a

disturbance of the liver,--that malady of vigorous constitutions, or

of persons whose soul is distressed and whose affections are thwarted.

Her temples became adorably fresh and pure; gleams of the celestial

face of a Raffaelle showed themselves now and then in hers,--a face

hitherto obscured by the malady of grief, as the canvas of the great

master is encrusted by time. Her hands seemed whiter; her shoulders

took on an exquisite fulness; her graceful, animated movements gave to

her supple figure its utmost charm.

The Limoges women accused her of being in love with Monsieur de

Grandville, who certainly paid her assiduous attention, to which

Veronique opposed all the barriers of a conscientious resistance. The

viscount professed for her one of those respectful attachments which

did not blind the habitual visitors of her salon. The priests and men

of sense saw plainly that this affection, which was love on the part

of the young man, did not go beyond the permissible line in Madame

Graslin. Weary at last of a resistance based on religious principle,

the Vicomte de Grandville consoled himself (to the knowledge of his

intimates) with other and easier friendships; which did not, however,

lessen his constant admiration and worship of the beautiful Madame

Graslin,--such was the term by which she was designated in 1829.

The most clear-sighted among those who surrounded her attributed the

change which rendered Veronique increasingly charming to her friends

to the secret delight which all women, even the most religious, feel

when they see themselves courted; and to the satisfaction of living at

last in a circle congenial to her mind, where the pleasure of

exchanging ideas and the happiness of being surrounded by intelligent

and well-informed men and true friends, whose attachment deepened day

by day, had dispersed forever the weary dulness of her life.

Perhaps, however, closer, more perceptive or sceptical observers were

needed than those who frequented the hotel Graslin, to detect the

barbaric grandeur, the plebeian force of the People which lay deep-

hidden in her soul. If sometimes her friends surprised her in a torpor

of meditation either gloomy or merely pensive, they knew she bore upon

her heart the miseries of others, and had doubtless that morning been

initiated in some fresh sorrow, or had penetrated to some haunt where

vices terrify the soul with their candor.

The viscount, now promoted to be /procureur-general/, would

occasionally blame her for certain unintelligent acts of charity by

which, as he knew from his secret police-reports, she had given

encouragement to criminal schemes.

"If you ever want money for any of your paupers, let me be a sharer in

your good deeds," said old Grossetete, taking Veronique's hand.

"Ah!" she replied with a sigh, "it is impossible to make everybody

rich."

At the beginning of this year an event occurred which was destined to

change the whole interior life of this woman and to transform the

splendid expression of her countenance into something far more

interesting in the eyes of painters.

Becoming uneasy about his health, Graslin, to his wife's despair, no

longer desired to live on the ground-floor. He returned to the

conjugal chamber and allowed himself to be nursed. The news soon

spread throughout Limoges that Madame Graslin was pregnant. Her

sadness, mingled with joy, struck the minds of her friends, who then

for the first time perceived that in spite of her virtues she had been

happy in the fact of living separate from her husband. Perhaps she had

hoped for some better fate ever since the time when, as it was known,

the attorney-general had declined to marry the richest heiress in the

place, in order to keep his loyalty to her.

From this suggestion there grew up in the minds of the profound

politicians who played their whist at the hotel Graslin a belief that

the viscount and the young wife had based certain hopes on the ill-

health of the banker which were now frustrated. The great agitations

which marked this period of Veronique's life, the anxieties which a

first childbirth causes in every woman, and which, it is said,

threatens special danger when she is past her first youth, made her

friends more attentive than ever to her; they vied with each other in

showing her those little kindnesses which proved how warm and solid

their affection really was.

V

TASCHERON

It was in this year that Limoges witnessed a terrible event and the

singular drama of the Tascheron trial, in which the young Vicomte de

Grandville displayed the talents which afterwards made him /procureur-

general/.

An old man living in a lonely house in the suburb of Saint-Etienne was

murdered. A large fruit-garden lay between the road and the house,

which was also separated from the adjoining fields by a pleasure-

garden, at the farther end of which were several old and disused

greenhouses. In front of the house a rapid slope to the river bank

gave a view of the Vienne. The courtyard, which also sloped downward,

ended at a little wall, from which small columns rose at equal

distances united by a railing, more, however, for ornament than

protection, for the bars of the railing were of painted wood.

The old man, named Pingret, noted for his avarice, lived with a single

woman-servant, a country-girl who did all the work of the house. He

himself took care of his espaliers, trimmed his trees, gathered his

fruit, and sent it to Limoges for sale, together with early

vegetables, in the raising of which he excelled.

The niece of this old man, and his sole heiress, married to a

gentleman of small means living in Limoges, a Madame des Vanneaulx,

had again and again urged her uncle to hire a man to protect the

house, pointing out to him that he would thus obtain the profits of

certain uncultivated ground where he now grew nothing but clover. But

the old man steadily refused. More than once a discussion on the

subject had cut into the whist-playing of Limoges. A few shrewd heads

declared that the old miser buried his gold in that clover-field.

"If I were Madame des Vanneaulx," said a wit, "I shouldn't torment my

uncle about it; if somebody murders him, why, let him be murdered! I

should inherit the money."

Madame des Vanneaulx, however, wanted to keep her uncle, after the

manner of the managers of the Italian Opera, who entreat their popular

tenor to wrap up his throat, and give him their cloak if he happens to

have forgotten his own. She had sent old Pingret a fine English

mastiff, which Jeanne Malassis, the servant-woman brought back the

next day saying:--

"Your uncle doesn't want another mouth to feed."

The result proved how well-founded were the niece's fears. Pingret was

murdered on a dark night, in the middle of his clover-field, where he

may have been adding a few coins to a buried pot of gold. The servant-

woman, awakened by the struggle, had the courage to go to the

assistance of the old miser, and the murderer was under the necessity

of killing her to suppress her testimony. This necessity, which

frequently causes murderers to increase the number of their victims,

is an evil produced by the fear of the death penalty.

This double murder was attended by curious circumstances which told as

much for the prosecution as for the defence. After the neighbors had

missed seeing the little old Pingret and his maid for a whole morning

and had gazed at his house through the wooden railings as they passed

it, and seen that, contrary to custom, the doors and windows were

still closed, an excitement began in the Faubourg Saint-Etienne which

presently reached the rue de la Cloche, where Madame des Vanneaulx

resided.

The niece was always in expectation of some such catastrophe, and she

at once notified the officers of the law, who went to the house and

broke in the gate. They soon discovered in a clover patch four holes,

and near two of these holes lay the fragments of earthenware pots,

which had doubtless been full of gold the night before. In the other

two holes, scarcely covered up, were the bodies of old Pingret and

Jeanne Malassis, who had been buried with their clothes on. The poor

girl had run to her master's assistance in her night-gown, with bare

feet.

While the /procureur-du-roi/, the commissary of police, and the

examining magistrate were gathering all particulars for the basis of

their action, the luckless des Vanneaulx picked up the broken pots and

calculated from their capacity the sum lost. The magistrates admitted

the correctness of their calculations and entered the sum stolen on

their records as, in all probability, a thousand gold coins to each

pot. But were these coins forty-eight or forty, twenty-four or twenty

francs in value? All expectant heirs in Limoges sympathized with the

des Vanneaulx. The Limousin imagination was greatly stirred by the

spectacle of the broken pots. As for old Pingret, who often sold

vegetables himself in the market, lived on bread and onions, never

spent more than three hundred francs a year, obliged and disobliged no

one, and had never done one atom of good in the suburb of Saint-

Etienne where he lived, his death did not excite the slightest regret.

Poor Jeanne Malassis' heroism, which the old miser, had she saved him,

would certainly not have rewarded, was thought rash; the number of

souls who admired it was small in comparison with those who said: "For

my part, I should have stayed in my bed."

The police found neither pen nor ink wherewith to write their report

in the bare, dilapidated, cold, and dismal house. Observing persons

and the heir might then have noticed a curious inconsistency which may

be seen in certain misers. The dread the little old man had of the

slightest outlay showed itself in the non-repaired roof which opened

its sides to the light and the rain and snow; in the cracks of the

walls; in the rotten doors ready to fall at the slightest shock; in

the windows, where the broken glass was replaced by paper not even

oiled. All the windows were without curtains, the fireplaces without

mirrors or andirons; the hearth was garnished with one log of wood and

a few little sticks almost caked with the soot which had fallen down

the chimney. There were two rickety chairs, two thin couches, a few

cracked pots and mended plates, a one-armed armchair, a dilapidated

bed, the curtains of which time had embroidered with a bold hand, a

worm-eaten secretary where the miser kept his seeds, a pile of linen

thickened by many darns, and a heap of ragged garments, which existed

only by the will of their master; he being dead they dropped into

shreds, powder, chemical dissolution, in fact I know not into what

form of utter ruin, as soon as the heir or the officers of the law

laid rough hands upon them; they disappeared as if afraid of being

publicly sold.

The population at Limoges was much concerned for these worthy des

Vanneaulx, who had two children; and yet, no sooner did the law lay

hands upon the reputed doer of the crime than the guilty personage

absorbed attention, became a hero, and the des Vanneaulx were

relegated into a corner of the picture.

Toward the end of March Madame Graslin began to feel some of those

pains which precede a first confinement and cannot be concealed. The

inquiry as to