At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
a good bargain though!” And the old man roared with honest laughter,
encouraged by the champagne, which he sent round with a liberal hand.
The band that covered the young artist’s eyes was so thick that he
thought his future parents amiable. He was not above enlivening them
by a few jests in the best taste. So he too pleased every one. In the
evening, when the drawing-room, furnished with what Madame Guillaume
called “everything handsome,” was deserted, and while she flitted
from the table to the chimney-piece, from the candelabra to the tall
candlesticks, hastily blowing out the wax-lights, the worthy draper, who
was always clear-sighted when money was in question, called Augustine to
him, and seating her on his knee, spoke as follows:--
“My dear child, you shall marry your Sommervieux since you insist; you
may, if you like, risk your capital in happiness. But I am not going to
be hoodwinked by the thirty thousand francs to be made by spoiling good
canvas. Money that is lightly earned is lightly spent. Did I not hear
that hare-brained youngster declare this evening that money was made
round that it might roll. If it is round for spendthrifts, it is flat
for saving folks who pile it up. Now, my child, that fine gentleman
talks of giving you carriages and diamonds! He has money, let him spend
it on you; so be it. It is no concern of mine. But as to what I can give
you, I will not have the crown-pieces I have picked up with so much toil
wasted in carriages and frippery. Those who spend too fast never grow
rich. A hundred thousand crowns, which is your fortune, will not buy
up Paris. It is all very well to look forward to a few hundred thousand
francs to be yours some day; I shall keep you waiting for them as long
as possible, by Gad! So I took your lover aside, and a man who managed
the Lecocq bankruptcy had not much difficulty in persuading the artist
to marry under a settlement of his wife’s money on herself. I will keep
an eye on the marriage contract to see that what he is to settle on you
is safely tied up. So now, my child, I hope to be a grandfather, by Gad!
I will begin at once to lay up for my grandchildren; but swear to me,
here and now, never to sign any papers relating to money without my
advice; and if I go soon to join old Father Chevrel, promise to consult
young Lebas, your brother-in-law.”
“Yes, father, I swear it.”
At these words, spoken in a gentle voice, the old man kissed his
daughter on both cheeks. That night the lovers slept as soundly as
Monsieur and Madame Guillaume.
Some few months after this memorable Sunday the high altar of Saint-Leu
was the scene of two very different weddings. Augustine and Theodore
appeared in all the radiance of happiness, their eyes beaming with love,
dressed with elegance, while a fine carriage waited for them. Virginie,
who had come in a good hired fly with the rest of the family, humbly
followed her younger sister, dressed in the simplest fashion like a
shadow necessary to the harmony of the picture. Monsieur Guillaume had
exerted himself to the utmost in the church to get Virginie married
before Augustine, but the priests, high and low, persisted in addressing
the more elegant of the two brides. He heard some of his neighbors
highly approving the good sense of Mademoiselle Virginie, who was
making, as they said, the more substantial match, and remaining faithful
to the neighborhood; while they fired a few taunts, prompted by envy of
Augustine, who was marrying an artist and a man of rank; adding, with a
sort of dismay, that if the Guillaumes were ambitious, there was an end
to the business. An old fan-maker having remarked that such a prodigal
would soon bring his wife to beggary, father Guillaume prided himself
_in petto_ for his prudence in the matter of marriage settlements. In
the evening, after a splendid ball, followed by one of those substantial
suppers of which the memory is dying out in the present generation,
Monsieur and Madame Guillaume remained in a fine house belonging to them
in the Rue du Colombier, where the wedding had been held; Monsieur
and Madame Lebas returned in their fly to the old home in the Rue
Saint-Denis, to steer the good ship Cat and Racket. The artist,
intoxicated with happiness, carried off his beloved Augustine, and
eagerly lifting her out of their carriage when it reached the Rue des
Trois-Freres, led her to an apartment embellished by all the arts.
The fever of passion which possessed Theodore made a year fly over the
young couple without a single cloud to dim the blue sky under which they
lived. Life did not hang heavy on the lovers’ hands. Theodore lavished
on every day inexhaustible _fioriture_ of enjoyment, and he delighted
to vary the transports of passion by the soft languor of those hours
of repose when souls soar so high that they seem to have forgotten all
bodily union. Augustine was too happy for reflection; she floated on
an undulating tide of rapture; she thought she could not do enough by
abandoning herself to sanctioned and sacred married love; simple and
artless, she had no coquetry, no reserves, none of the dominion which a
worldly-minded girl acquires over her husband by ingenious caprice; she
loved too well to calculate for the future, and never imagined that so
exquisite a life could come to an end. Happy in being her husband’s sole
delight, she believed that her inextinguishable love would always be
her greatest grace in his eyes, as her devotion and obedience would be
a perennial charm. And, indeed, the ecstasy of love had made her so
brilliantly lovely that her beauty filled her with pride, and gave her
confidence that she could always reign over a man so easy to kindle
as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus her position as a wife brought her no
knowledge but the lessons of love.
In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had
lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought of
acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she had
to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in them, no
doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement of speech;
but she used the language common to all women when they find themselves
plunged in passion, which seems to be their element. When, by chance,
Augustine expressed an idea that did not harmonize with Theodore’s, the
young artist laughed, as we laugh at the first mistakes of a foreigner,
though they end by annoying us if they are not corrected.
In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as delightful
as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for resuming his
work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their first child. He
saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts of the year when
a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time, he worked,
no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion in the
fashionable world. The house which he was best pleased to frequent
was that of the Duchesse de Carigliano, who had at last attracted the
celebrated artist to her parties. When Augustine was quite well again,
and her boy no longer required the assiduous care which debars a mother
from social pleasures, Theodore had come to the stage of wishing to know
the joys of satisfied vanity to be found in society by a man who shows
himself with a handsome woman, the object of envy and admiration.
To figure in drawing-rooms with the reflected lustre of her husband’s
fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to Augustine a new
harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of conjugal happiness.
She first wounded her husband’s vanity when, in spite of vain efforts,
she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her language, and the
narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux’s nature, subjugated for nearly two
years and a half by the first transports of love, now, in the calm of
less new possession, recovered its bent and habits, for a while diverted
from their channel. Poetry, painting, and the subtle joys of imagination
have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit. These cravings of a
powerful soul had not been starved in Theodore during these two years;
they had only found fresh pasture. As soon as the meadows of love had
been ransacked, and the artist had gathered roses and cornflowers as the
children do, so greedily that he did not see that his hands could
hold no more, the scene changed. When the painter showed his wife the
sketches for his finest compositions he heard her exclaim, as her father
had done, “How pretty!” This tepid admiration was not the outcome of
conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the strength of love.
Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The only
sublime she knew was that of the heart. At last Theodore could not
resist the evidence of the cruel fact--his wife was insensible to
poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in
all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows; she walked
groveling in the world of reality, while his head was in the skies.
Common minds cannot appreciate the perennial sufferings of a being
who, while bound to another by the most intimate affections, is obliged
constantly to suppress the dearest flights of his soul, and to thrust
down into the void those images which a magic power compels him to
create. To him the torture is all the more intolerable because his
feeling towards his companion enjoins, as its first law, that they
should have no concealments, but mingle the aspirations of their thought
as perfectly as the effusions of their soul. The demands of nature are
not to be cheated. She is as inexorable as necessity, which is, indeed,
a sort of social nature. Sommervieux took refuge in the peace and
silence of his studio, hoping that the habit of living with artists
might mould his wife and develop in her the dormant germs of lofty
intelligence which some superior minds suppose must exist in every
being. But Augustine was too sincerely religious not to take fright
at the tone of artists. At the first dinner Theodore gave, she heard
a young painter say, with the childlike lightness, which to her was
unintelligible, and which redeems a jest from the taint of profanity,
“But, madame, your Paradise cannot be more beautiful than Raphael’s
Transfiguration!--Well, and I got tired of looking at that.”
Thus Augustine came among this sparkling set in a spirit of distrust
which no one could fail to see. She was a restraint on their freedom.
Now an artist who feels restraint is pitiless; he stays away, or laughs
it to scorn. Madame Guillaume, among other absurdities, had an excessive
notion of the dignity she considered the prerogative of a married woman;
and Augustine, though she had often made fun of it, could not help a
slight imitation of her mother’s primness. This extreme propriety, which
virtuous wives do not always avoid, suggested a few epigrams in the
form of sketches, in which the harmless jest was in such good taste
that Sommervieux could not take offence; and even if they had been
more severe, these pleasantries were after all only reprisals from
his friends. Still, nothing could seem a trifle to a spirit so open as
Theodore’s to impressions from without. A coldness insensibly crept over
him, and inevitably spread. To attain conjugal happiness we must climb
a hill whose summit is a narrow ridge, close to a steep and slippery
descent: the painter’s love was falling down it. He regarded his wife as
incapable of appreciating the moral considerations which justified him
in his own eyes for his singular behavior to her, and believed himself
quite innocent in hiding from her thoughts she could not enter into,
and peccadilloes outside the jurisdiction of a _bourgeois_ conscience.