Cousin Bette Read Free Page B

hundred thousand have gone heaven knows where! In paying your fine son’s debts, in buying high-class furniture for his house, a house worth five hundred thousand francs that brings in barely fifteen thousand because he occupies the best part of it himself, and on which he still owes two hundred and sixty thousand francs – the rent from it barely covers the interest on the debt. This year I have had to give my daughter something like twenty thousand francs to enable her to make ends meet. And my son-in-law who, they say, was making thirty thousand francs in the law-courts is going to throw that up for the Chamber.…’
    â€˜That, Monsieur Crevel, is a side issue, quite beside the point. But, to have done with it, if my son gets into office, if he has you made Officer of the Legion of Honour and Municipal Councillor of Paris, as a retired perfume-seller you will not have much to complain of.’
    â€˜Ah! now we have it, Madame! I am a tradesman, a shopkeeper, a former retailer of almond paste, eau-de-Portugal, cephalic oil for hair troubles. I must consider myself highly honoured to have married my only daughter to the son of Monsieur le Baron Hulot d’Ervy. My daughter will be a Baroness. That’s Regency, that’s Louis XV, that belongs to the Oeil-de-Boeuf ante-room at Versailles! All very fine… I love Célestine as a man cannot help loving his only child. I love her so much that rather than give her brothers and sisters I have put up with all the inconveniences of being a widowerin Paris – and in my prime, Madame! – but you may take it from me that although I may dote on my daughter I do not intend to make a hole in my capital for your son, whose expenses seem to an old businessman like myself to need some explanation.’
    â€˜Monsieur, you see that Monsieur Popinot, who was once a druggist in the rue des Lombards, is Minister of Commerce now, at this very moment.…’
    â€˜A friend of mine, Madame!’ said the ex-perfumer. ‘For I, Célestin Crevel, once head salesman to old César Birotteau, bought the business of the said Birotteau, Popinot’s father-in-law, Popinot being just an ordinary assistant in the business; and he himself reminds me of the fact, for he is not stuck-up – I’ll say that for him – with people in good positions, worth sixty thousand francs a year.’
    â€˜Well, Monsieur, so the ideas that you describe as
Regency
are not in fashion now, in times when people accept a man on his personal merits; which is what you did when you married your daughter to my son.’
    â€˜And you don’t know how that marriage came about!’ exclaimed Crevel. ‘Ah! confound this bachelor life! If it had not been for my libertine ways my Célestine would be the Vicomtesse Popinot today!’
    â€˜But let me repeat, let’s have no recriminations over what is done!’ the Baroness said, with emphasis. ‘We have to talk of the reasons I have to protest about your strange conduct. My daughter Hortense had an opportunity to marry. The marriage depended entirely upon you, and I believed I could rely on your generosity. I thought that you would be fair to a woman whose heart has never held any image but her husband’s, that you would have realized how necessary it was for her not to receive a man who might compromise her, and that you would have been eager, out of regard for the family with which you have allied your own, to promote Hortense’s marriage with Councillor Lebas.… And you, Monsieur, have wrecked the marriage.’
    â€˜Madame,’ replied the retired perfume-seller, ‘I acted like an honest man. I was asked whether the two hundred thousand francs of Mademoiselle Hortense’s dowry would be paid. Ireplied in these words precisely: “I would not answer for it. My son-in-law, on whom the Hulot family settled that sum on his marriage, had debts, and I believe that if