A few days after Béatrix’s flight, Arthur de Rochefide—an only child after the death of his sister, the first wife of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, who left him no children—found himself master of the family mansion of the Rochefides, Rue d’Anjou-Saint-Honoré, and of two hundred thousand francs a year, left to him by his father. This fine fortune, added to that which he had when he married, raised his income, including his wife’s portion, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman of such a character as Mademoiselle des Touches had sketched to Calyste, such a fortune was happiness. While his wife was occupied with lovemaking and motherhood, Rochefide was enjoying his vast possessions, but he did not waste the money any more than he would waste his intelligence. His burly, good-natured conceit, amply satisfied with the reputation for being a fine man, to which he owed some success, entitling him, as he believed, to condemn women as a class, gave itself full play in the sphere of intellect. He was gifted with the sort of wit which may be termed refracting, by the way he repeated other person’s jests and witticisms from plays or the newspapers; he appropriated them as his own; he affected to ridicule them, caricaturing them in repetition, and using them as a formula of criticism; then his military high spirits—for he had served in the King’s Guard—lent spice to his conversation, so that dull women called him witty, and the rest dared not contradict them.
Arthur carried this system out in everything; he owed to nature the useful trick of being an imitator without being an ape; he could imitate quite seriously. And so, though he had no taste, he was always the first to take up and to drop a fashion. He was accused of giving too much time to his toilet, and of wearing stays; but he was a typical example of those men who, by accepting the notions and the follies of others, never offend anyone, who, always being up to date, never grow any older. They are the heroes of the second-rate.
This husband was pitied; Béatrix was held inexcusable for having run away from the best fellow in the world; ridicule fell only on the wife. This worthy, loyal, and very silly gentleman, a member of every club, a subscriber to every absurdity to which blundering patriotism and party-spirit gave rise, with a facile good-nature which brought him to the front on every occasion, was, of course, bent on glorifying himself by some fashionable hobby. His chief pride was to be the sultan of a four-footed seraglio, managed by an old English groom, and this kennel cost him from four to five thousand francs a month. His favorite fad was running horses; he patronized breeders, and paid the expenses of a paper in the racing interest; but he knew little about horses, and from the bridle to the shoes trusted to his groom. This is enough to show that this “grass-husband” had nothing of his own—neither wit, nor taste, nor position, nor even absurdities; and his fortune had come to him from his forefathers.
After having tasted all the annoyances of married life, he was so happy to find himself a bachelor again, that he would say among friends, “I was born to good luck!” He rejoiced especially in being able to live free of the expenses to which married folks are compelled; and his house, in which nothing had been altered since his father’s death, was in the state of a man’s home when he is traveling; he rarely went there, never fed there, and scarcely ever slept there.
This was the history of this neglect. After many love affairs, tired of women of fashion, who are indeed weariful enough, and who set too many dry thorn-hedges round the happiness they have to give, he had practically married Madame Schontz, a woman notorious in the world of Fanny Beaupré and Suzanne du Val-Noble, of Mariettes, Florentines, Jenny Cadines, and the like. This world—of which one of our draughtsmen wittily remarked, as he pointed to the whirl of an Opera ball, “When you think that all that mob is well housed, and dressed, and fed, you can form a good idea of what men are!”—this dangerous world has already been seen in this History of Manners in the typical figures of Florine and the famous Malaga (of A Daughter of Eve and “The Imaginary Mistress”); but to paint it faithfully, the historian would have to represent such persons in some numerical proportion to the variety of their strange individual lives, ending in poverty of the most hideous kind, in early death, in ease, in happy marriage, or sometimes in great wealth.
Madame Schontz, at first known as la Petite Aurélie, to distinguish her from a rival far less clever than herself, belonged to the higher class of these women on whose social uses no doubt can be thrown either by the Préfet of the Seine or by those who take an interest in the prosperity of the city of Paris. Certainly the “rats” accused of devouring fortunes, which are often imaginary, in some respects are more like a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame de Lorette quarter, fewer
