Cousin Bette Read Free Page A

succession on his successful-shopkeeper’s commonplace face. He was surveying himself in a glass above an old Empire clock, taking stock of himself, when the rustle of the Baroness’s silk dress warned him of her approach. He at once struck an attitude.
    The Baroness sat down on a little sofa that must certainly have been very pretty about the year 1809, and motioned Crevel to an armchair decorated with bronzed sphinx heads, from which the paint was scaling off, leaving the bare wood exposed in places.
    â€˜These precautions of yours, Madame, would be a delightfully promising sign for a…’
    â€˜A lover,’ she interrupted him.
    â€˜The word is weak,’ he said, placing his right hand on his heart, and rolling his eyes in a fashion that a woman nearly always finds comic when she meets them with no sympathy in her own. ‘A lover! A lover! Say rather – a man bewitched!’
    â€˜Listen, Monsieur Crevel,’ the Baroness went on, too much in earnest to feel like laughing. ‘You are fifty – that’s tenyears younger than Monsieur Hulot, I know; but if a woman is to commit follies at my age she has to have something to justify her: good looks, youth, celebrity, distinction, brilliant gifts to dazzle her to the point of making her oblivious of everything, even of her age. You may have an income of fifty thousand francs, but your age must be weighed in the balance against your fortune; and you have nothing that a woman needs.’
    â€˜And love?’ said the Captain, rising and coming towards her. ‘A love that…’
    â€˜No, Monsieur, infatuation!’ said the Baroness, interrupting him to try to put an end to this ridiculous scene.
    â€˜Yes, infatuation and love,’ he went on, ‘but something more than that too, a right…’
    â€˜A right!’ exclaimed Madame Hulot, suddenly impressive in her scorn, defiance, and indignation. ‘But if you go on in this strain, we shall never have done; and I did not ask you to come here to talk about something that has made you an unwelcome visitor in this house, in spite of the connexion between our two families.’
    â€˜I thought you did.…’
    â€˜What – again?’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you not see, Monsieur, by the detached and unconcerned way in which I speak of a lover and love and everything that is most indecorous on a woman’s lips, that I am perfectly certain of remaining virtuous? I am not afraid of anything, even of incurring suspicion by shutting myself in this room alone with you. Does a frail woman behave so? You know very well why I asked you to come!’
    â€˜No, Madame,’ Crevel replied, with a sudden chill in his manner. He pursed his lips and struck his pose.
    â€˜Well, I’ll be brief, and cut short the embarrassment this causes both of us,’ said the Baroness, looking him in the face.
    Crevel made an ironic bow, in which a man of his trade would have recognized the affected courtesy of a one-time commercial traveller.
    â€˜Our son has married your daughter…’
    â€˜And if that were to do again!…’
    â€˜The marriage would not take place,’ rejoined the Baroness,with spirit. ‘I have little doubt of it. All the same, you have no cause for complaint. My son is not only one of the leading lawyers in Paris, but a Deputy since last year, and he has made such a brilliant début in the Chamber that it seems likely that he will be in the Government before long. My son has been consulted twice in the drafting of important Bills, and if he wanted the post he could be Solicitor-General, representing the Government in the Court of Appeal, tomorrow. So that if you mean to imply that you have a son-in-law with no fortune…’
    â€˜A son-in-law whom I am obliged to keep,’ returned Crevel; ‘which seems to me worse, Madame. Of the five hundred thousand francs settled on my daughter as her dowry, two