From the year 1799, the calculating heads of Issoudun said that old Rouget had thirty thousand francs a year. After his wife’s death the doctor still led a dissolute life, but with more method, so to speak, and in the privacy of home-life.
The doctor, a man of strong will, died in 1805. God knows what the good people of Issoudun had then to tell of the man’s doings, and what stories were current of his horrible private life. Jean-Jacques Rouget, whom his father had of late kept tightly in hand, having discerned him to be a fool, remained unmarried for sufficient reasons, of which the explanation will form an important part of this story. His celibacy was in part the doctor’s fault, as will be seen later.
It is now necessary to consider the results of the vengeance visited by the father on the daughter, whom he did not recognize as his, though you may take it for certain that she was his legitimate offspring. Nobody at Issoudun had observed one of those singular coincidences which make heredity a sort of maze in which science loses herself. Agathe was very like Doctor Rouget’s mother. Just as gout is commonly observed to skip a generation, and to be transmitted from grandfather to grandson, so, not unfrequently, a likeness does the same as the gout.
Thus Agathe’s eldest child, who was like his mother, in character resembled his grandfather, Doctor Rouget. We will leave the solution of this problem also to the twentieth century, with that of the nomenclature of microscopic organisms, and our grandchildren will perhaps write as much more nonsense as our learned Societies have already produced on this obscure question.
Agathe Rouget, was universally admired for one of those faces which, like that of Mary, the mother of the Lord, are forever virginal, even after marriage. Her portrait, still hanging in Bridau’s studio, shows a perfectly oval face, spotlessly fair, without even a freckle, notwithstanding her golden hair. More than one artist, seeing the pure brow, the delicate nose, the shapely ear, the long lashes to eyes of the deepest blue, and infinitely mild—a face, in short, that is the embodiment of placidity—asks the great painter to this day, “Is that copied from one of Raphael’s heads?”
No man ever made a better choice than did the Republican official when he married this girl. Agathe was the ideal housewife, trained by a country life, and never parted from her mother. She was pious without bigotry, and had no learning but such as the Church allows to women. And she was a perfect wife in the vulgar sense of the word; indeed, her ignorance of life involved her in more than one misfortune. The epitaph on the Roman matron, “She wrought needlework, and kept the house,” is an excellent account of her pure, simple, and quiet life.
At the time of the Consulate, Bridau attached himself fanatically to Napoleon, who made him head of a department of state in 1804, a year before Rouget’s death. Rich with a salary of twelve thousand francs and very handsome presents, Bridau cared not at all for the disgraceful proceedings by which the estate was wound up at Issoudun, and Agathe got nothing. Six months before his death old Rouget had sold part of his estate to his son, to whom he secured the remainder, in part by deed of gift, and in part as his direct heir. An advance on her prospective inheritance of a hundred thousand francs secured under her marriage settlement represented Agathe’s share of her father’s and mother’s fortune.
Bridau idolized the Emperor. He devoted himself with the zeal of a fanatic to carrying out the vast conceptions of this modern demigod, who, finding everything in France in ruins, set to work to reconstruct everything. His subordinate never said, “Stay, enough.” Schemes, drafts, reports, précis, he undertook the heaviest burdens, so happy was he to assist the Emperor. He loved him as a man, he adored him as a sovereign, and would never endure the slightest criticism of his deeds or his schemes.
From 1804 to 1808 the official resided in a large and handsome apartment on the Quai Voltaire, close to his office and the Tuileries. A cook and a manservant composed the establishment in the days of Madame Bridau’s splendor. Agathe, always up the first, went to market, followed by her cook; while the man did the rooms she superintended the breakfast. Bridau never went to the office before eleven o’clock. As long as they both lived his wife found every day the same pleasure in preparing for him a perfect breakfast, the only meal he ate with enjoyment. All the year round, whatever the weather might be, Agathe watched her husband from the window on his way to the office, and never drew her head in till he disappeared round the corner of the Rue du Bac. She cleared the table herself, and looked round the rooms; then she dressed and played with the children, or took them for a walk, or received visitors till her husband returned. When the head-clerk brought home pressing work she would sit by his table in his study, as mute as a statue, and knitting as she watched him at work, sitting up as long as he did, and going to bed a few minutes before he went.
Sometimes they went to the play, sitting in the official box. On such occasions the pair dined at a restaurant; and the scene it presented always afforded Madame Bridau the keen delight it gives to persons unfamiliar with Paris. Compelled, not unfrequently, to accept invitations to the huge formal dinners given to her husband as head of a department, and chief clerk of
