This period was paradise to poor Jean-Jacques, who acquired the easy habits of an animal existence, graced by a sort of monastic regularity. He slept very late in the morning; Flore, who was up at daybreak to buy provisions or do the work of the house, woke her master in time for him to find breakfast ready as soon as he was dressed. After breakfast, at about eleven o’clock, Jean-Jacques took a walk, chatted with anyone he met, came home by three o’clock to read the papers—that of the department, and a Paris paper, which he received three days after publication, greasy from thirty hands through which they had passed, dirty from the snuffy noses that smeared them, brown from the many tables they had lain on. Thus our bachelor got to the dinner-hour, and he spent as long a time as he could over it. Flore told him stories of the town, and all the current gossip she had picked up. By eight o’clock the lights were out. Early to bed is, in the country, a common form of saving in candles and firing, but it tends to stupefy folks by an abuse of bed; too much sleep deadens and stultifies the mind.
Such, for nine years, was the life of these two beings—a life at once busy and vacuous, of which the chief events were a few journeys to Bourges, to Vierzon, to Châteauroux, or even a little further, when neither Monsieur Héron nor the notaries of those towns had any mortgages to offer. Rouget invested his money in first mortgages at five percent, with substitution in favor of the wife when the lender should marry. He never advanced more than a third of the real value of the estate, and he had bills drawn to his order representing an additional two and a half percent, for dates at intervals during the loan. These were the rules impressed on him by his father. Usury, the drag on peasant ambitions, is eating up the land, and this charge of seven and a half percent seemed so reasonable, that Jean-Jacques Rouget could pick and choose; for the notaries, who extracted handsome commissions from the clients for whom they got money so cheap, would give the old fellow notice.
During these nine years, Flore gradually, insensibly, and without intending it, had acquired absolute dominion over her master. From the first she treated Jean-Jacques with great familiarity; then, without failing in respect, she gained the upper hand by such manifest superiority of intelligence and power, that he became his servant’s servant. This grown-up child went halfway to meet this dominion, by allowing himself to be so much waited on, that Flore treated him as a mother treats her son. And at last his feeling for her was that which makes a mother’s care necessary to a child. But there were other and far stronger bonds. In the first place, Flore managed all business matters, and carried on the house. Jean-Jacques relied on her so absolutely for every kind of stewardship that, without her, life would have seemed to him not difficult, but impossible. The woman had also become necessary to his existence; she humored all his fancies—she knew them so well! He liked to see the happy face that always smiled on him; the only face that ever had smiled on him, or that ever would smile on him! Her happiness, purely material, expressed by the common phrases that are the backbone of language in the households of le Berry, and expansive in her splendid person, was, in a way, the reflection of his own. The state into which Jean-Jacques collapsed when he saw Flore clouded by some little annoyance betrayed to the woman the extent of her power; and she, to secure it, would try to exert it. In women of that kind use always means abuse. La Rabouilleuse, no doubt, made her master play his part in some of the scenes that lie buried in the mystery of private life, and of which Otway has shown a specimen in the midst of his tragedy of Venice Preserved between the Senator and Aquilina—a scene that gives the magnificence of horror. And then Flore saw herself so secure in her empire, that she never thought of getting the old bachelor to marry her, unfortunately for him and for herself.
By the end of 1815, at the age of twenty-seven, Flore was in the fullest bloom of her beauty. Buxom and fair, as white-skinned
