Cousin Bette by Honore Balzac

Author:Honore Balzac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-04-03T05:00:00+00:00

‘What respectable life could give all this so quickly and with so little trouble?’ she had asked Lisbeth, as she put the finishing touches to her toilet.

Lisbeth was dining with Valérie on this occasion, in order to be able to say those things about her to Steinbock that a person cannot say about herself. Madame Marneffe, her face radiant with pleasure, made her entrance with modest grace, followed into the drawing-room by Bette, who, dressed in black and yellow, served as her foil, to use a studio term.

‘Good evening, Claude,’ she said, giving her hand to the distinguished former critic.

Claude Vignon, like so many others, had become a ‘politician’ – a word newly invented to denote an ambitious man in the first stages of his career. The ‘politician’ of 1840 more or less fills the place of the eighteenth-century ‘abbé’. No salon would be complete without its ‘politician’.

‘My dear, this is my cousin, Count Steinbock,’ said Lisbeth, introducing Wenceslas, whom Valérie apparently had not noticed.

‘Yes, I recognized Monsieur le Comte,’ replied Valérie with a gracious little inclination of the head to the artist. ‘I often used to see you in the rue du Doyenné. I had the pleasure of being present at your wedding. My dear,’ she turned to Lisbeth, ‘it would be difficult to forget your foster-child, even if one had only seen him once.… Monsieur Stidmann, how very good of you,’ she went on, bowing to the sculptor, ‘to have accepted my invitation at such short notice! You know, necessity is above the law! I knew that you were a friend of these two gentlemen, and as nothing is more chilling, more tedious, than a dinner at which the guests are strangers to one another, I begged your company for their sakes; but you will come on another occasion for mine, won’t you? Do say yes!’

And she turned aside for a few moments with Stidmann, her attention apparently wholly preoccupied with him.

In succession, Crevel, Baron Hulot, and a Deputy named Beauvisage were announced. This personage, a provincial Crevel, one of those people born to be one of a crowd, voted under the banner of Giraud, the Councillor of State, and Victorin Hulot. Those two politicians were anxious to create a nucleus of progressives in the solid mass of the Conservative party. Giraud was in the habit of coming occasionally in the evening to the rue Vanneau, and Madame Marneffe had hopes of also capturing Victorin Hulot; but the strait-laced barrister had so far found pretexts for refusing his father and father-in-law. To be seen in the house of the woman who was the cause of his mother’s tears would, it seemed to him, be a crime. Among the puritanical element in politics, Victorin Hulot held the same place as a pious woman among the devout.

Beauvisage, a former hosier of Arcis, was anxious to ‘pick up the Parisian style’. This out-of-touch back-bencher was at the rue Vanneau to acquire sophistication under the tutelage of the delicious, the ravishing, Madame

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