Bentley's Miscellany, Volume II

Beyond the door of the antechamber, however, which was opened by Mademoiselle de Courson in person, the corpulent footman did not penetrate. The young lady returned, in her mother's name, a civil answer of acknowledgment to their wealthy neighbour, stating that the infirmities of her mother's health rendered it impossible for them to receive visitors. The corpulent footman (despising these wretched people, – as wretched people who keep no establishment of servants ought to be despised by a corpulent footman,) immediately settled it in his own mind that the apartment was too shabby and littered to admit of receiving a gentleman of such far-famed respectability as the eminent banker of the Rue Bergère; that the Coursons' furniture was probably mean, – their fare meagre. The utmost stretch of his pampered imagination did not conjecture that their fare consisted of their furniture, – that ever since Madame's arrival with the truck, she had been dining on chairs and breakfasting on feather-beds. Not a soul in the house (except Guguste) had at present noticed that the meubles carried down and conveyed away "to be mended" never found their way back again.

Small as were the appetites of the third-floor, it is extremely difficult to feed and lodge two full-grown human beings upon a pension of forty pounds a-year; and, by the recent failure of the notary in whose hands the small funds of Madame de Courson were deposited, this was all that remained to support her and her daughter. On the discovery of their misfortune, indeed, Claire had undertaken to increase her own and her mother's daily bread by assiduous needle-work; but the constant attendance required by the poor and sorrowful invalid rendered it difficult for her daughter to fulfil her good intentions. Till the loss of their property, they had resided, in tolerable comfort, in cheerful rooms on the Quai Voltaire, assisted by an effective servant; but all this had been perforce resigned, – the best part of their goods was sold off, their wardrobe stript of its luxuries, and Claire was fully justified in undertaking, as she did, the service of the kitchen and pantry; for it was clear that their diet must henceforward consist of bread and water. Like most poor people, they were proud; and pride served to increase their privations. Madame de Courson, the widow of an officer, one of the victims of the Russian campaign, had never yet solicited a pecuniary favour from living mortal. She preferred working for her livelihood, or starving; that is, she preferred that her daughter should work for their livelihood, and consequently that they should starve together. It must be owned (par parenthèse) that the only favours tendered to her acceptance since she took up her domicile in the corner house, were Monsieur Boncœur's gift of apricot marmalade and loan of a journal, and poor Guguste's earnest entreaty to Mademoiselle, into whose acquaintance he had intruded by carrying up Madame de Courson's first and last batch of wood, to be permitted to black her shoes, and perform other little neighbourly offices of similar delicacy. When, however, the shoes grew thinner and thinner, without being replaced, his aid was more rarely accepted, and at length positively declined; and little Guguste, who was more a man of the world than the corpulent footman, justly concluded that Mademoiselle Claire did not like to expose her attempts at repairing the inevitable fissures to the comments of Monsieur Georges's lad of all work. Still, though tacitly dismissed from her service, the grey-eyed beauty never passed him on the stairs without a word or smile of recognition, even when her heart was sorest and countenance saddest; for Guguste had installed himself her friend. It remained to be seen whether the donor of the apricot marmalade would prove as true a one as the young shoeblack.

Be it not inferred, however, that the amiable attentions of the ragamuffin page were paid solely as a tribute to beauty; they were a tribute to beauty in distress. There were two other particles of the fair sex resident under the same roof, whom most lads of his age would have preferred to the grey-eyed nymph of the third-floor, viz. Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque, a pretty widow, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty years of age, (for in a well-dressed widow it is extremely difficult to determine a woman's age within ten years or so, – none but a lady's husband being admitted to investigate the case before she and Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque's coquettish waiting-maid, Mademoiselle Aglaé. But for neither of these divinities of the entresol had Guguste ever felt inspired with an inclination to wield the blacking-brush! Not that either the widow or the maid was at any moment guilty of a chaussure susceptible of such plebeian enchainement: – Madame la Baronne walked not only in silk attire, but silken shoes; while Ma'mselle Aglaé, like Lear's soldiers, was shod with felt, shuffling in slippers all the morning, and reserving prunella or satin for her visits, play-goings, and bals masqués.

"adores,

With head uncover'd, the cosmetic powers;")

Madame la Baronne, with a fortune of thirty thousand francs, or twelve hundred pounds, per annum, would have passed in London for a widow of moderate means, and might perhaps have speculated on improving them by marriage. In Paris she passed for a rich one, and occupied herself with her own amusement. It is amazing how much pleasure may be purchased in that circumscript capital at the rate of one hundred pounds per month, particularly in the state of blessedness which is called single. Conscious of her advantage, Madame de Gimbecque was far from anxious to inscribe herself in the register of lodgers in the Rue Montmartre by double entry. France is peculiar in its views of wedded happiness. In England, what is called a well-assorted marriage implies parity of condition, and compatibility of temper; in Paris, it implies equality of fortune. Five thousand a-year proposes to five thousand a-year, – three hundred per annum to three hundred; not Lord Thomas to Miss Sophia, or plain Tom to pretty Sophy. Beauty, harp-playing, quadrilling, have nothing to do with it, – all is matter of arithmetic! If the match turn out ill, it is no fault of the matchmakers; all has been done according to Cocker.

Now Madame la Baronne, like most Frenchwomen, was a capital calculatress. She knew that, though Sophy and Tom are richer with six hundred a-year between them than Sophy with three and Tom with the same pittance, a pretty Madame de Gimbecque, between twenty-five and fifty years of age, is richer as a widow with thirty thousand francs per annum, than as the wife of a man of fashion with sixty. To espouse any man, unfashionable, was out of the question, – that is, any man unfashionable with an income only equal to her own. A Crœsus of any age or calling would have brought his own apology; and she would have added herself and her establishment to that of the respectable banker of the Rue Bergère at a moment's notice. But that consummation was past praying for. A Crœsus would require a Crœsa as his partner for life, as surely as the primitive lion trotted side by side with a lioness into Noah's ark; and Monsieur Boncœur, if matrimonially inclined, would demand hundreds of thousands per annum to amalgamate with his hundreds of thousands. The charming Adolphes and exquisite Amédées, meanwhile, frequenting Madame de Gimbecque's opera-box, or ambling by her side in the Bois de Boulogne, had either not an unmortgaged estate wherewith to pretend to her hand, or, if successful pretendants, would appropriate after marriage to their own gratification, not only their own thirty thousand, but three-fourths of hers. Very early in her widowhood Madame de Gimbecque came to this conclusion; and, on giving utterance at her toilet, as she threw off her widow's weeds, to her anti-matrimonial intention, they were confirmed by Mademoiselle Aglaé with so loud an "amen," that a by-stander might have supposed them two lay-nuns pronouncing vows of eternal celibacy.

Madame de Gimbecque, though thus egoistical in her calculations, was nevertheless a light-hearted, good-humoured little woman, who, if she did not go out of her way to do good, did all the good that lay in it. She had been born, bred, married, and widowed according to that matter-of-fact social system of the French which leaves no space for the expansion of the feelings. Nothing like affection had graced her parents' household, – nothing like affection had warmed her own. Her fifteen thousand francs per annum had been married to those of an ex-colonel of cuirassiers, thirty years her senior, who had pretty nearly scolded, sworn, smoked, and expectorated his pretty wife out of patience, when the sour little cherub who sits up aloft keeping watch over matrimonial destinies, took pity on the lady, and took the colonel to itself.

Marianne de Gimbecque, (then not between fifty and five-and-twenty, but between five-and-twenty and fifteen,) though an orphan as well as a widow, consoled herself as thoroughly as propriety would admit for this sudden bereavement. She had neither a tie nor a relative in the world; but what pretty Parisian with trente mille francs de rente can feel lonely, while there is an opera, a carnival, and a milliner's shop in existence!

The baroness speedily set about improving her solitary hours. She devoted herself to the cultivation of her charms, as an Englishwoman might have done to the cultivation of her mind. Her accomplishments as a cosmetician were really surprising; she studied the art as a branch of natural history; not a perfumer in Paris could have deceived her as to the ingredients of a wash, or chemical compounds of a pommade. She knew what acids would injure the enamel of her teeth, what astringents wither the smooth surface of her cheek, what spirituous infusions turn her sable locks to iron-grey or silver, as well as Berthollet or "Sromfridevé." She could tell what atmospheric changes enabled her to exchange blue ribbons for pink, without compromise of the becoming; and regulated by the phases of the moon her ebbs and flows between cap, hat, and turban.

Nothing could be more artistically managed than the apartment of the little coquette. Nothing, by the way, is so easy to render coquettish as an entresol, which is, in fact, a series of boudoirs: saloons like those of Devonshire House, or a hall like that of Stafford, must be stately and ostentatious; the trickery of prettiness would be as much out of place in such places as rouge and pearl powder on the marble cheek of Michael Angelo's Moses. But a light airy entresol, or mezzonino story, whose windows, fronting the south, are shaded by Genoese awnings, overhanging balconies, filled with geraniums, heliotropes, and mignonette, – whose anteroom is painted blue stripewise, to represent a tent, and whose dining-room is varnished scagliola fashion, – whose drawing-room is of white and gold, the fauteuils and divans of yellow satin, the cabarets of pale Saxon blue porcelain, adorned with shepherds, shepherdesses, and garlands of carnations, – the consoles of varnished maple, white as snow, or as the single marble table, taillé en bloc, which sustains a scentless exotic in a vase of pale-green Sèvres, – whose boudoir is a tent of white muslin, drawn over dove-coloured gros de Naples, – whose bed-room is hung with cachemere spotted with palm-leaves, leading to a bath-room altogether spotless, and lined with mirrors; – such an entresol is a paradise for a Peri, (whose age is between twenty-five and fifty!) and such was the one inhabited in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre by Madame la Baronne de Gimbecque!

The household was concomitant. A page in a neat livery, a powdered-headed middle-aged sobriety of a maître d'hôtel, a chef of sufficient merit for a lady neither a dinner-giver nor dinner-devotee; and, to complete the measure, the soubrette, the waiting-maid, the spruce, cunning, pimpante, fringante, Mademoiselle Aglaé, with her embroidered cambric aprons and pink ribbons; – one pennyworth of waiting-maid to all this monstrous quantity of male-faction! The maître d'hôtel dusted the china, the page rubbed the floors, – everything but the lady's toilet being performed in France by slaves of the masculine gender. Monsieur Simon, the sober maître d'hôtel, and Lindor, the pert page, sometimes suggested to their mistress's mistress that an additional petticoat would be far more advantageous to the establishment than entertaining a workwoman fifteen days in the month for the care of the household linen; but the femme de chambre would not hear of it. She chose to be the sole Helen in Troy; and, though devoid of personal views on either page or butler, – the cook in his white paper casquette, or the coachman in his flaxen wig, – resolved to admit no rival near the throne of her soubrettish autocracy. It was quite plague enough to have the house frequented by Eugène de Marsan, (the handsome cousin-german of the ugly defunct ex-colonel of cuirassiers, Monsieur le Baron Nicodême de Gimbecque,) and Claude de Bercy, (the popular author of seventy-five successful vaudevilles,) without encumbering the little entresol (or its double entrance, double staircase, and corridor, appropriately named in Paris "of escape,") with such lumber as a chambermaid.

"Has Madame Oudot sent home my foulard peignoir?" demanded Madame la Baronne of her waiting-maid, as she lay reclining in her marble-bath, whose tepid warmth served to diffuse through the little room the aroma of the eau de Ninon which Mademoiselle Aglaé was sprinkling on the surface.

"Non, madame! Yet I was particular in making her promise it for yesterday, knowing that Madame expected a visit from Monsieur Eugène before she dressed to take her ride."

"Tiresome woman!" cried the lady in the bath, – an apostrophe which Aglaé of course applied to the unpunctual couturière. "Give me the new number of 'Le Bon Ton,' and in five minutes ring for my chocolate, and bring in my warm linen, – not sooner, or it will be cold before I am ready."

The waiting-maid obeyed; but finding on the marble slab in the corridor the Constitutionnel, damp from the press, she held it for a moment over the drying-basket of the bath-linen, and returned to her lady, taking the liberty, as she slowly paced the room, to cast an eye upon the news of the morning.

"Sacristie! ce cher Monsieur Boncœur! another audience of the king!" exclaimed Mademoiselle Aglaé, presenting the paper to her lady, who extended to receive it, a languid hand, humid with the perfumed exhalations of the bath.

"Doubtless about his title," she replied.

"Title!" inquired the waiting-maid, fearing she might be about to forfeit the envied distinction of belonging to the only household of quality in the hotel.

"Didn't I tell you that our neighbour overhead had purchased the estate of D'Offémont, and was trying to obtain the royal sanction to assume the name? Ay, exactly: the King, I perceive, has created him a baron; not D'Offémont, however, – he is to be Baron de Boncœur. What people this government does ennoble!"

"Monsieur Boncœur has one of the greatest names in the monied world," remonstrated the waiting-woman: "he is mayor of his arrondissement, and marguiller of the parish."

"He may be beadle or drum-major, for anything I know or care," said Madame de Gimbecque with sublime contempt; "but I am convinced that in the time of the elder branch he would never have shaken the dust from his feet in the palace of the Tuileries. Ha! – a critique on Claude's new play. Pray remind me, by and by, to send to Monsieur de Bercy the note-case wadded with vitiver I have been embroidering for him. Voyons! 'Sophie de Melcour, a drama in three acts. We regret – a-hem! – feeble – diffuse – flat – a-hem! – dialogue full of platitudes – characters full of exaggeration – style stilted – catastrophe contemptible – false taste – corrupt morality.' (This must have been written by some particular friend!) 'We cannot take our leave of Monsieur de Bercy without counselling him to turn his mind to some other branch of literary occupation than the stage, for which the bent of his genius evidently disqualifies this pains-taking but ill-judging young man.' Bah! – Eugène de Marsan's doing, I am convinced! He knows I dote upon theatrical entertainments; he knows that I bespoke half-a-dozen boxes to give éclat to Monsieur de Bercy's piece, and thinks to disgust me by this disparagement. Eugène does not know me; he does not appreciate the generosity of woman's nature! His abuse of poor Claude's play has put me more in conceit with it than ever. Certainly the style of 'Sophie de Melcour' is rather stilted, and nobody can deny the exaggeration of the characters. I expected that the catastrophe would cause the damnation of the piece; and as to the dialogue, I could scarcely sit it out without a yawn. Aglaé! on second thoughts, Monsieur de Marsan is going out of town, and has been plaguing me for the last six months for some little trifle of my own work. I will give him the vitiver pocket-book: there will be plenty of time hereafter to get up another for Monsieur de Bercy. People so devoted to letters have no time to think of embroidered pocket-books. I dare say Bercy would like one bought at the Petit Dunquerque twice as well. There is no more sentiment in him than in one of his own farces."

Mademoiselle Aglaé was of the same opinion. The Constitutionnel having decided that Claude's seventy-sixth vaudeville was not to run, she decided that the author of the vaudeville was also at a stand-still. The loss of his droits d'auteur, which would probably deprive her of the gold chain and cross promised by her lady's love, determined his forfeiture of the embroidered note-case!

While the sacred mysteries of the toilet are proceeding in the bath-room, let us take a peep at the equivocal gentleman of the third-floor; no longer arrayed in velvet or sparkling with solitaires, but engirt in a scanty, washed-out printed calico dressing-gown, torn in the button-holes, and short enough to display at the open wristbands the sleeves of a dirty checked shirt, covering a yellow shrivelled skin, apparently washed out, like the calico. A pair of flannel drawers, yellow as arnotto, covered his shrunk shanks; a pair of old shoes, cut down into agonizing slippers, his stockingless feet; while, enfranchised from the spruce, lustrous toupet adorning his brows when exposed to day's or gas-light's garish eye, his mean, narrow, Emperor-of-Austrian forehead recedes into a bare crown, whose denuded ugliness adds thirty years to the age of the full-dressed sallier-forth of the night before. Even his mouth – that critical verifier of age – is strangely oldened; for his set of Desirabodes is still freshening in a glass of water on the chimney-piece, while the mumbling, toothless gums, fallen on each other, allow the lanky sallow cheeks to collapse, like the sides of a half-empty balloon.

Such was the unsophisticated man of the individual whose "getting-up" (as Claude de Bercy would have called it) for public representation was one of the miracles of the Palais Royal; a bazaar which, like the pedlar from the fair Lavinian shore, hath "complexions in its pack," and youth and beauty per yard, per ell, or per ounce, exposed in all its plate-glass windows. It was, as we have already stated, usually half-past seven of an evening when the full-dressed effort of art started forth along the Boulevards; it was as invariably three o'clock in the morning, minus a quarter, when it returned again to lay aside its adornments, and subside into the lean and slippered pantaloon. Ma'mselle Berthe had been three hours snoring when, with a patent key, he nightly let himself in, to deposit his Desirabodes, false fronts, whiskers, and calves on his dressing-table; and in the secretaire beside it realities of a more solid nature: bags of silver pieces, rouleaux of golden ones, and now and then a flimsy I O U from some English flat, or an I O U addressed by the Bank of England to millions of English flats, which he rarely ensnugged within the secret-paper-drawer of his bonheur du jour without pronouncing a benediction over its senseless form, varying in intensity of expression, indeed, according as the document happened to be accompanied by bags of silver or rouleaux of gold. When wholly unaccompanied, – sole trophy of his midnight gains, – the fiendish expression of the little mummy's puckered visage deepened into downright demonism.

Meanwhile it was the morning duty of the sour femme de confiance to summon the shattered remains of humanity, which she called master, to breakfast. But let it not be inferred from the squalid nature of his personal costume that the board of Monsieur Georges was spread penuriously: his outward man regarded the gratification of others; his inward regarded his own. The colour of his dressing-gown tended not a jot to his selfish enjoyment; but the amber coffee and smoking cream, the spongy bread and présalé butter, the slices of hard saucisson d'Arles and tender côtelettes à la minute in their silver réchaud, regarded exclusively his own five senses. It was to ensure to his daily use these sweeteners of human existence that the chevalier d'industrie toiled in his loathsome calling from eight o'clock to two per night; it was to ensure them hot and hot, and upon the most moderate terms, that he bore with the angular and acid female who presided over his domestic arrangements the remaining eighteen hours of the twenty-four. A younger and fairer femme de ménage would have exacted a nicer toilet, and the daintiest half of the dainties wherewith it was her duty to provide his table. But the chissie not only calculated the weight of provisions to be consumed to the thirty-second fraction of an ounce, but was content to eat the drumsticks of the chickens, the wings of the woodcocks, as well as to support the unsightly spectacle of his bald head and nauseous costume.

"Of what were you disputing last night with the old witch, Madame Grégoire, when I passed the porter's lodge?" demanded Monsieur Georges of the perpendicular shrew seated opposite to him, as he swallowed to his own share the twentieth of the two dozen oysters of Murênes provided for their breakfast.

"I only stepped in to pay her the twenty francs for Guguste's monthly board."

"But what was there in that to beget a squabble?" demanded the toothless man, in the mumbling chuckle which nothing but long custom enabled his housekeeper to understand. "Had she a complaint to make against the lad?"

"No one has complaints to make of him but you," said Ma'mselle Berthe, (forgetting her own venomous impeachment concerning the coffee and cream.) "We disputed because Madame Grégoire, like an ill-conditioned woman as she is, presumed to insult me."

"And what then? – you can make her étrennes pay for it."

"You can: but what compensation will it be to me that you diminish her New-year's gift from twenty francs to ten? She had the impudence to ask me to have an eye to the people on the third-floor! As if I was paid to do the spy-work of the propriétaire!"

"And who are the people on the third-floor?" demanded Monsieur Georges, who knew and cared very little for the proceedings of any house save the one under government licence in the Rue de Richelieu, amid the blaze of whose Corcel lamps, and glare of whose gilded cornices, he had the honour nightly to assist in fleecing the disloyal subjects of Louis Philippe and the greenhorn foreign visitors to his realms.

"How should I know?"

"Because Madame Grégoire, doubtless, informed you."

"She told me it was a lady and her daughter, about whom she had her doubts."

"What doubts? – that they were disreputable people?"

"Bah! – that they were beggars!"

"Then why don't the landlord get rid of them?"

"How can he? – they pay their rent."

"Then what did she want you to find out?"

"How the young lady employs herself of a morning, and why the mamma did not choose to receive the visits of that excellent man Monsieur le Baron de Boncœur."