Part 74 (1/2)

”That is my poor Valerie's last jest; that is all herself!” said Lisbeth in tears.

Lisbeth thought it her duty to go into Crevel's room, where she found Victorin and his wife sitting about a yard away from the stricken man's bed.

”Lisbeth,” said he, ”they will not tell me what state my wife is in; you have just seen her--how is she?”

”She is better; she says she is saved,” replied Lisbeth, allowing herself this play on the word to soothe Crevel's mind.

”That is well,” said the Mayor. ”I feared lest I had been the cause of her illness. A man is not a traveler in perfumery for nothing; I had blamed myself.--If I should lose her, what would become of me? On my honor, my children, I wors.h.i.+p that woman.”

He sat up in bed and tried to a.s.sume his favorite position.

”Oh, Papa!” cried Celestine, ”if only you could be well again, I would make friends with my stepmother--I make a vow!”

”Poor little Celestine!” said Crevel, ”come and kiss me.”

Victorin held back his wife, who was rus.h.i.+ng forward.

”You do not know, perhaps,” said the lawyer gently, ”that your disease is contagious, monsieur.”

”To be sure,” replied Crevel. ”And the doctors are quite proud of having rediscovered in me some long lost plague of the Middle Ages, which the Faculty has had cried like lost property--it is very funny!”

”Papa,” said Celestine, ”be brave, and you will get the better of this disease.”

”Be quite easy, my children; Death thinks twice of it before carrying off a Mayor of Paris,” said he, with monstrous composure. ”And if, after all, my district is so unfortunate as to lose a man it has twice honored with its suffrages--you see, what a flow of words I have!--Well, I shall know how to pack up and go. I have been a commercial traveler; I am experienced in such matters. Ah! my children, I am a man of strong mind.”

”Papa, promise me to admit the Church--”

”Never,” replied Crevel. ”What is to be said? I drank the milk of Revolution; I have not Baron Holbach's wit, but I have his strength of mind. I am more _Regence_ than ever, more Musketeer, Abbe Dubois, and Marechal de Richelieu! By the Holy Poker!--My wife, who is wandering in her head, has just sent me a man in a gown--to me! the admirer of Beranger, the friend of Lisette, the son of Voltaire and Rousseau.--The doctor, to feel my pulse, as it were, and see if sickness had subdued me--'You saw Monsieur l'Abbe?' said he.--Well, I imitated the great Montesquieu. Yes, I looked at the doctor--see, like this,” and he turned to show three-quarters face, like his portrait, and extended his hand authoritatively--”and I said:

”The slave was here, He showed his order, but he nothing gained.

”_His order_ is a pretty jest, showing that even in death Monsieur le President de Montesquieu preserved his elegant wit, for they had sent him a Jesuit. I admire that pa.s.sage--I cannot say of his life, but of his death--the pa.s.sage--another joke!--The pa.s.sage from life to death--the Pa.s.sage Montesquieu!”

Victorin gazed sadly at his father-in-law, wondering whether folly and vanity were not forces on a par with true greatness of soul. The causes that act on the springs of the soul seem to be quite independent of the results. Can it be that the fort.i.tude which upholds a great criminal is the same as that which a Champcenetz so proudly walks to the scaffold?

By the end of the week Madame Crevel was buried, after dreadful sufferings; and Crevel followed her within two days. Thus the marriage-contract was annulled. Crevel was heir to Valerie.

On the very day after the funeral, the friar called again on the lawyer, who received him in perfect silence. The monk held out his hand without a word, and without a word Victorin Hulot gave him eighty thousand-franc notes, taken from a sum of money found in Crevel's desk.

Young Madame Hulot inherited the estate of Presles and thirty thousand francs a year.

Madame Crevel had bequeathed a sum of three hundred thousand francs to Baron Hulot. Her scrofulous boy Stanislas was to inherit, at his majority, the Hotel Crevel and eighty thousand francs a year.

Among the many n.o.ble a.s.sociations founded in Paris by Catholic charity, there is one, originated by Madame de la Chanterie, for promoting civil and religious marriages between persons who have formed a voluntary but illicit union. Legislators, who draw large revenues from the registration fees, and the Bourgeois dynasty, which benefits by the notary's profits, affect to overlook the fact that three-fourths of the poorer cla.s.s cannot afford fifteen francs for the marriage-contract. The pleaders, a sufficiently vilified body, gratuitously defend the cases of the indigent, while the notaries have not as yet agreed to charge nothing for the marriage-contract of the poor. As to the revenue collectors, the whole machinery of Government would have to be dislocated to induce the authorities to relax their demands. The registrar's office is deaf and dumb.

Then the Church, too, receives a duty on marriages. In France the Church depends largely on such revenues; even in the House of G.o.d it traffics in chairs and kneeling stools in a way that offends foreigners; though it cannot have forgotten the anger of the Saviour who drove the money-changers out of the Temple. If the Church is so loath to relinquish its dues, it must be supposed that these dues, known as Vestry dues, are one of its sources of maintenance, and then the fault of the Church is the fault of the State.

The co-operation of these conditions, at a time when charity is too greatly concerned with the negroes and the petty offenders discharged from prison to trouble itself about honest folks in difficulties, results in the existence of a number of decent couples who have never been legally married for lack of thirty francs, the lowest figure for which the Notary, the Registrar, the Mayor and the Church will unite two citizens of Paris. Madame de la Chanterie's fund, founded to restore poor households to their religious and legal status, hunts up such couples, and with all the more success because it helps them in their poverty before attacking their unlawful union.

As soon as Madame Hulot had recovered, she returned to her occupations.