Volume III Part 15 (1/2)
”Yes, and it is astonis.h.i.+ng how happy the good are! But you have finally got rid of that scoundrel of a husband?”
”I hope so, for he did not leave me until he had sold my bedstead, and the cradle of my two little children. But I think he wished to do something worse.”
”What do you mean?”
”I say him, but it was rather this bad woman who urged him; it is on that account I speak of it. 'I say,' one day he said to me, 'when in a family there is a pretty girl of fifteen like ours, it is very stupid not to make use of her beauty.'”
”Oh! good! I understand. After having sold the clothes, he wished to sell the body.”
”When he said that, Fortune, my blood boiled; and, to be just, I made him blush with shame at my reproaches: and as this bad woman wished to meddle in our quarrel by a.s.serting that my husband could do with his daughter as he pleased, I treated her so badly, the wretch, that my husband beat me, and since that time I have not seen them.”
”Look here, Jeanne, there are folks condemned to ten years' imprisonment, who would not have done like your husband; at least, they only despoil strangers.”
”At bottom he is not wicked, look you; it is bad company at the taverns which has ruined him.”
”Yes, he would not harm a child; but to a grown person it is different.”
”What would you have? One must take life as it comes. At least, my husband gone, I had no longer any fear of being lamed by any blow. I took fresh courage. Not having anything to purchase a mattress with, for before all one must eat and pay rent, and my poor daughter Catherine and myself could hardly earn together forty sous a day, my two other children being too young to work--for want of a mattress we slept upon a straw bed, made with straw that we picked up at the door of a packer in our street.”
”And I have squandered my earnings!”
”How could you know my trouble, since I did not tell you? Well, we doubled our work, Catherine and I. Poor child, if you knew how virtuous, and industrious, and good she is! always with her eyes on mine to know what I wish her to do; never a complaint, and yet--she has already seen so much misery, although only fifteen! Ah, it is a great consolation, Fortune to have such a child,” said Jeanne, wiping her eyes.
”It is just your own picture, I see; you should have this consolation, at least.”
”I a.s.sure you that it is more on her account that I complain than on my own; for, do you see, the last two months she has not stopped working for a moment; once every week she goes out to wash at the boats near the Pont-au Change, at three sous the hour, the few clothes my husband left us: all the rest of the time at the stake like a poor dog. True, misfortune came to her too soon; I knew well enough that it must come; but at least their are some who have one or two years of tranquillity. That which has also caused me much sorrow in all this, Fortune, is, that I could give you no a.s.sistance in anything; yet I will try.”
”Do you think I would accept? On the contrary, I'll ask a sou for each pair of ears that listens to my stories; I will ask two, or they will have to do without Pique-Vinaigre's romances, and that will help you a little in your housekeeping. But why don't you go into lodgings? Then your husband can't sell anything.”
”In lodgings? Why, only reflect, we are four; they would ask us at least twenty sous a days; how much would remain for our living! while our room only costs us fifty francs a year.”
”That is true, my girl,” said Pique-Vinaigre, with bitter irony; ”work, break your back to fix up your room a little; as soon as you get something, your husband will rob you again, and some fine day he will sell your daughter as he has sold your clothes.”
”Oh! before that he must kill me!--my poor Catherine!”
”He will not kill you, and he will sell your poor Catherine. He is your husband, is he not? He is the head of the family, as your lawyer told you, as long as you are not separated by law, and as you have not five hundred francs to give for that, you must be resigned; your husband has the right to take his daughter from you, and where he pleases. Once he and his mistress have a hankering after this poor little child, they will have her.”
”But, if this infamy was possible, would there be any justice?”
”Justice,” said Pique-Vinaigre, with a burst of sardonic laughter, ”is like meat; it is too dear for the poor to eat. Only, understand me, if it is in question to send them to Melun, to put them in the pillory, or throw them into the galleys, it is another affair; they give them this justice _gratis_. If they cut their throats, it is again _gratis_--always _gratis_. Ta-a-a-ake your tickets!” added Pique-Vinaigre, imitating a mountebank; ”it is not ten sous, two sous, one you, a centime that it will cost you. No, ladies and gentlemen, it will cost you the trifle of nothing at all; it suits every one's pockets; you have only to furnish the _head_--the cutting and curling are at the expense of the government. Here is justice _gratis_. But the justice which would prevent an honest mother of a family from being beaten and despoiled by a vagabond of a husband, who wishes to make money out of his daughter, this kind of justice costs five hundred francs; you must give it up, my poor Jeanne.”
”Fortune,” said the unhappy mother, bursting into tears, ”you kill me!”
”And does it not kill me to think of your lot, and that of your family, and seeing that I can do nothing? I seem always gay; but do not be deceived; I have two kinds of gayety, Jeanne; my gayety gay, and my gayety sad. I have neither the strength nor the courage to be bad, angry, nor malicious, as others are, that always pa.s.ses over with me in words more or less farcical.
My cowardice and my weakness of body have prevented me from becoming worse than I am. It needed the chance of this lonely hut, where there was neither cat, nor, above all, a dog, to have urged me to steal. And then, again, it chanced to be a fine moonlight night; for alone, and in the dark, I am as cowardly as the devil!”
”That is what I have always said, my poor Fortune, that you are better than you think. Thus I hope the judges will have pity on you.”
”Pity on me? a returned criminal? reckon on it! After that, I don't wish it; to be here, there, or elsewhere, all the same to me; and then, you are right, I am not wicked; and those who are, I hate them, after my fas.h.i.+on, by making fun of them; you must think that, from relating stories where, to please my audience, I make it come out that those who torment others from pure cruelty receive, in the end, their pay, I become accustomed to feel as I relate.”
”Do these people like stories, my brother? I should not have thought it.”