“The more you make, the less you seem to have,” Gobenheim remarked one day.
“Water is so dear!” said she.
This unrevealed store was increased by the jewelry and diamonds which Aurélie would wear for a month and then sell, and by money given her for fancies she had forgotten. When she heard herself called rich, Madame Schontz would reply that, at present rates, three hundred thousand francs brought in twelve thousand francs, and that she had spent it all in the hard times of her life when Lousteau had been her lover.
Such method showed a plan; and Madame Schontz, you may be sure, had a plan. For the last two years she had been jealous of Madame du Bruel, and the desire to be married at the mairie and in church gnawed at her heart. Every social grade has its forbidden fruit, some little thing exaggerated by desire, till it seems as weighty as the globe. This ambition had, of course, its duplicate in the ambition of a second Arthur, whom watchfulness had entirely failed to discover. Bixiou would have it that the favorite was Léon de Lora; the painter believed that it was Bixiou, who was now past forty, and should be thinking of settling. Suspicion also fell on Victor de Vernisset, a young poet of the Canalis school, whose passion for Madame Schontz was a perfect madness; while the poet accused Stidmann, a sculptor, of being his favored rival. This artist, a very good-looking young man, worked for goldsmiths, for bronze dealers, and jewelers; he dreamed of being a Benvenuto Cellini. Claude Vignon, the young Comte de la Palférine, Gobenheim, Vermanton, a cynic philosopher, and other frequenters of this lively salon were suspected by turns, but all acquitted. No one was a match for Madame Schontz, not even Rochefide, who fancied she had a weakness for la Palférine, a clever youth; she was, in fact, virtuous in her own interests, and thought only of making a good match.
Only one man of equivocal repute was ever to be seen at Madame Schontz’s, and that was Couture, who had more than once been howled at on the Bourse; but Couture was one of Madame Schontz’s oldest friends, and she alone remained faithful to him. The false alarm of 1840 swept away this speculator’s last capital; he had trusted to the 1st of March Ministry; Aurélie, seeing that luck was against him, made Rochefide play for the other side. It was she who spoke of the last overthrow of this inventor of premiums and joint-stock companies as a Découture (unripping a rip).
Couture, delighted to find a knife and fork laid for him at Aurélie’s, and getting from Finot—the cleverest, or perhaps the luckiest of parvenus—a few thousand-franc notes now and then, was the only man shrewd enough to offer his name to Madame Schontz, who studied him to ascertain whether this bold speculator would have strength enough to make a political career for himself, and gratitude enough not to desert his wife. A man of about forty-three years old, and worn for his age, Couture did not redeem the ill-repute of his name by his birth; he had little to say of his progenitors. Madame Schontz was lamenting the rarity of men of business capacity, when one day Couture himself introduced to her a provincial gentleman who happened to be provided with the two handles by which women hold this sort of pitcher when they mean not to drop it.
A sketch of this personage will be a portrait of a certain type of young man of the day. A digression will, in this case, be history.
In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, the son of a President of the Chamber at the King’s Court of Caen, having lost his father about a year before, came from Alençon, throwing up his appointment as magistrate, in which, as he said, his father had made him waste his time, and settled in Paris. His intention now was to get on in the world by cutting a dash, a Norman scheme somewhat difficult of accomplishment, since he had scarcely eight thousand francs a year, his mother still being alive, and enjoying the life-interest of some fine house property in the heart of Alençon. This youth had already, in the course of various visits to Paris, tried his foot on the tight rope; he had discerned the weak point of the social stucco restoration of 1830, and meant to work on it for his own profit, following the lead of the sharpers of the middle class. To explain this, we must glance at one of the results of the new state of things.
Modern notions of equality, which in our day have assumed such extravagant proportions, have inevitably developed in private life—in a parallel line with political life—pride, conceit, and vanity, the three grand divisions of the social I. Fools wish to pass for clever men, clever men want to be men of talent, men of talent expect to be treated as geniuses: as to the geniuses, they are more reasonable; they consent to be regarded as no more than demigods. This tendency of the spirit of the time, which in the Chamber of Deputies makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous of the poet, prompts fools to run down clever men, clever men to run down men of talent, men of talent to run down those who are a few inches higher than themselves, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the throne itself, in short, everything and everybody that does not worship them unconditionally.
As soon as a nation is so impolitic as to overthrow recognized social superiority, it opens the sluice-gates, through which rushes forthwith a torrent of second-rate ambitions, the least of which would fain be first. According to the democrats, its aristocracy was a disease, but a definite and circumscribed disease; it has exchanged this for
