Part 28 (1/2)
Of its princ.i.p.al figures, the most original, as you have already suspected, was that of Madame Soudry, whose personality, to be duly rendered, needs a minute and careful brush.
Madame Soudry, respectfully imitating Mademoiselle Laguerre, began by allowing herself a ”mere touch of rouge”; but this delicate tint had changed through force of habit to those vermilion patches picturesquely described by our ancestors as ”carriage-wheels.” The wrinkles growing deeper and deeper, it occurred to the ex-lady's-maid to fill them up with paint. Her forehead becoming unduly yellow, and the temples too s.h.i.+ny, she ”laid on” a little white, and renewed the veins of her youth with a tracery of blue. All this color gave an exaggerated liveliness to her eyes which were already tricksy enough, so that the mask of her face would seem to a stranger even more than fantastic, though her friends and acquaintances, accustomed to this fict.i.tious brilliancy, actually declared her handsome.
This ungainly creature, always decolletee, showed a bosom and a pair of shoulders that were whitened and polished by the same process employed upon her face; happily, for the sake of exhibiting her magnificent laces, she partially veiled the charms of these chemical products. She always wore the body of her dress stiffened with whalebone and made in a long point and garnished with knots of ribbon, even on the point! Her petticoats gave forth a creaking noise,--so much did the silk and the furbelows abound.
This attire, which deserves the name of apparel (a word that before long will be inexplicable), was, on the evening in question, of costly brocade,--for Madame Soudry possessed over a hundred dresses, each richer than the others, the remains of Mademoiselle Laguerre's enormous and splendid wardrobe, made over to fit Madame Soudry in the last fas.h.i.+on of the year 1808. Her blond wig, frizzed and powdered, sustained a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching those on her dress. If you will kindly imagine beneath this ultra-coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which a flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town, in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you remember the succinct statement recently made ”ex professo,” by one of the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her s.e.x beautiful by surrounding accessories.
As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by the magnificent gifts acc.u.mulated by her late mistress, which the ex-Benedictine called ”fructus belli.” Then she made the most of her ugliness by exaggerating it, and by a.s.suming that indescribable air and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which is known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or less mimics. She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings. At the top of her corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white, shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear mistress,--a jewel renowned throughout the department. Like the late dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the handle.
When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar, might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.
In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in gilded wood of the ”pied de b.i.+.c.he” pattern, it is not impossible to understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the house, ”The beautiful Madame Soulanges.” The mansion had actually become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.
If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she actually believed herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress, so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their belongings, by heart.
This back-stairs erudition gave to her conversation a flavor of ”oeil-de-boeuf”; her soubrette gossip pa.s.sed muster for courtly wit.
Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.
The woman found herself courted and wors.h.i.+pped by the society in which she lived, just as her mistress had been wors.h.i.+pped in former days. She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in after the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which came from dear mistress's cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.
These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it came to pa.s.s that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: ”Madame Soudry does the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her salon; she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says the witty thing, she makes you laugh. And what splendid silver! There is not another house like it short of Paris--”
The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret. It was a magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had literally stolen it. At Mademoiselle Laguerre's death she merely took it into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of their inheritance, never claimed it.
For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the _intimate friend_ of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term ”waiting-woman,”
and making believe that she had sacrificed herself to the singer as her friend and companion.
Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread even to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned supreme, in a way, over her husband.
The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself who kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to her in the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her beauty. But sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his happiness, he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his peccadilloes, he was forced to take as many precautions as the husband of a young and adoring wife; and it was not until very recently that he had been able to introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.
This portrait of the Queen of Soulanges may seem a little grotesque, but many specimens of the same kind could be found in the provinces at that period,--some more or less n.o.ble in blood, others belonging to the higher banking-circles, like the widow of a receiver-general in Touraine who still puts slices of veal upon her cheeks. This portrait, drawn from nature, would be incomplete without the diamonds in which it is set; without the surrounding courtiers, a sketch of whom is necessary, if only to explain how formidable such Lilliputians are, and who are the makers of public opinion in remote little towns. Let no one mistake me, however; there are many localities which, like Soulanges, are neither hamlets, villages, nor little towns, which have, nevertheless, the characteristics of all. The inhabitants are very different from those of the large and busy and vicious provincial cities. Country life influences the manners and morals of the smaller places, and this mixture of tints will be found to produce some truly original characters.
The most important personage after Madame Soudry was Lupin, the notary.
Though forty-five springs had bloomed for Lupin, he was still fresh and rosy, thanks to the plumpness which fills out the skin of sedentary persons; and he still sang ballads. Also, he retained the elegant evening dress of society warblers. He looked almost Parisian in his carefully-varnished boots, his sulphur-yellow waistcoats, his tight-fitting coats, his handsome silk cravats, his fas.h.i.+onable trousers. His hair was curled by the barber of Soulanges (the gossip of the town), and he maintained the att.i.tude of a man ”a bonne fortunes” by his liaison with Madame Sarcus, wife of Sarcus the rich, who was to his life, without too close a comparison, what the campaigns of Italy were to Napoleon. He alone of the leading society of Soulanges went to Paris, where he was received by the Soulanges family. It was enough to hear him talk to imagine the supremacy he wielded in his capacity as dandy and judge of elegance. He pa.s.sed judgment on all things by the use of three terms: ”out of date,” ”antiquated,” ”superannuated.”[*] A man, a woman, or a piece of furniture might be ”out of date”; next, by a greater degree of imperfection, ”antiquated”; but as to the last term, it was the superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was hopeless, but the third,--oh, better far never to have left the void of nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and trebly uttered: ”Charming!” was the positive of his admiration. ”Charming, charming!” made you feel you were safe; but after ”Charming, charming, charming!” the ladder might be discarded, for the heaven of perfection was attained.
[*] ”Croute,” ”crouton,” and ”croute-au-pot,”
untranslatable, and without equivalent in English. A ”croute” is the slang term for a man behind the age.--Tr.
The tabellion,--he called himself ”tabellion,” petty notary, and keeper of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),--the tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry, who had a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles. Hitherto the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios and hairy hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in favor of Lupin on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she thought her glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer; but, to Soudry's despair, the queen's adorers never carried their adoration so far as to threaten his rights.
Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen stockings, the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money during the Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic pa.s.sion for a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,--a young man named Bonnac, belonging to the second-cla.s.s society, where he played the same role that his master, the notary, played in the first.
Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on great occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel dressed in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders of a questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its natural place. ”Bebelle” candidly admitted that prudence forbade her wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of an inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest trace of that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who are women usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to the genus of invertebrate females. This alarming development of cellular tissue no doubt rea.s.sured Lupin on the subject of the platonic pa.s.sion of his fat wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle without raising a laugh.
”Your wife, what is she?” said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable to digest the fatal word ”superannuated,” applied to a piece of furniture he had just bought at a bargain.
”My wife is not like yours,” replied Lupin; ”she is not defined as yet.”
Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he had the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as large as that of Rigou.