This was the sad story which Pierrotin never could have guessed, not even after questioning the gatekeeper’s wife, as he sometimes did—for the woman knew nothing beyond the fact that the Claparts’ rent was but two hundred and fifty francs; that they only had a woman in to help for a few hours in the morning; that Madame would sometimes do her own little bit of washing, and paid for every letter as it came as if she were afraid to let the account stand.
There is no such thing—or rather, there is very rarely such a thing—as a criminal who is bad all through. How much more rare it must be to find a man who is dishonest all through! He may make up his accounts to his own advantage rather than his master’s, or pull as much hay as possible to his end of the manger; but even while making a little fortune by illicit means, few men deny themselves the luxury of some good action. If only out of curiosity, as a contrast, or perhaps by chance, every man has known his hour of generosity; he may speak of it as a mistake, and never repeat it; still, once or twice in his life, he will have sacrificed to well-doing, as the veriest lout will sacrifice to the Graces. If Moreau’s sins can be forgiven him, will it not be for the sake of his constancy in helping a poor woman of whose favors he had once been proud, and under whose roof he had found refuge in danger?
This woman, famous at the time of the Directoire for her connection with one of the five kings of the day, married, under his powerful patronage, a contractor, who made millions, and then was ruined by Napoleon in 1802. This man, named Husson, was driven mad by his sudden fall from opulence to poverty; he threw himself into the Seine, leaving his handsome wife expecting a child. Moreau, who was on very intimate terms with Madame Husson, was at the time under sentence of death, so he could not marry the widow, and was in fact obliged to leave France for a time. Madame Husson, only two-and-twenty, in her utter poverty, married an official named Clapart, a young man of twenty-seven—a man of promise, it was said. Heaven preserve women from handsome men of promise! In those days officials rose rapidly from humble beginnings, for the Emperor had an eye for capable men. But Clapart, vulgarly handsome indeed, had no brains. Believing Madame Husson to be very rich, he had affected a great passion; he was simply a burden to her, never able, either then or later, to satisfy the habits she had acquired in her days of opulence. Clapart filled—badly enough—a small place in the Exchequer Office at a salary of not more than eighteen hundred francs a year.
When Moreau came back to be with the Comte de Sérizy and heard of Madame Husson’s desperate plight, he succeeded, before his own marriage, in getting her a place as woman of the bedchamber in attendance on Madame, the Emperor’s mother. But in spite of such powerful patronage, Clapart could never get on; his incapacity was too immediately obvious.
In 1815 the brilliant Aspasia of the Directory, ruined by the Emperor’s overthrow, was left with nothing to live on but the salary of twelve hundred francs attached to a clerkship in the Municipal Offices, which the Comte de Sérizy’s influence secured for Clapart. Moreau, now the only friend of a woman whom he had known as the possessor of millions, obtained for Oscar Husson a half-scholarship held by the Municipality of Paris in the Collège Henri IV, and he sent to the Rue de la Cerisaie, by Pierrotin, all he could decently offer to the impoverished lady.
Oscar was his mother’s one hope, her very life. The only fault to be found with the poor woman was her excessive fondness for this boy—his stepfather’s utter aversion. Oscar was, unluckily, gifted with a depth of silliness which his mother could never suspect, in spite of Clapart’s ironical remarks. This silliness—or, to be accurate, this bumptiousness—disturbed Monsieur Moreau so greatly that he had begged Madame Clapart to send the lad to him for a month that he might judge for himself what line of life he would prove fit for. The steward had some thought of introducing Oscar one day to the Count as his successor.
But, to give God and the Devil their due, it may here be observed as an excuse for Oscar’s preposterous conceit, that he had been born under the roof of the Emperor’s mother; in his earliest years his eyes had been dazzled by Imperial splendor. His impressible imagination had no doubt retained the memory of those magnificent spectacles, and an image of that golden time of festivities, with a dream of seeing them again. The boastfulness common to schoolboys, all possessed by desire to shine at the expense of their fellows, had in him been exaggerated by those memories of his childhood; and at home perhaps his mother was rather too apt to recall with complacency the days when she had been a queen of Paris under the Directory. Oscar, who had just finished his studies, had, no doubt, often been obliged to assert himself as superior to the humiliations which the pupils who pay are always ready to inflict on the “charity boys” when the scholars are not physically strong enough to impress them with their superiority.
This mixture of departed splendor and faded beauty, of affection resigned to poverty, of hope founded on this son, and maternal blindness, with the heroic endurance of suffering, made this mother one of the sublime figures which in Paris deserve the notice of the observer.
Pierrotin, who, of course, could not know how truly Moreau was attached to this woman, and she, on her part,
