The Lesser Bourgeoisie

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Thuillier, forced to make himself noticeable by other charms than
those of mind, learned to dance and to waltz in a way to be cited; he
was called "that handsome Thuillier"; he played billiards to
perfection; he knew how to cut out likenesses in black paper, and his
friend Colleville coached him so well that he was able to sing all the
ballads of the day. These various small accomplishments resulted in
that appearance of success which deceives youth and befogs it about
the future. Mademoiselle Thuillier, from 1806 to 1814, believed in her
brother as Mademoiselle d'Orleans believed in Louis-Philippe. She was
proud of Jerome; she expected to see him the director-general of his
department of the ministry, thanks to his successes in certain salons,
where, undoubtedly, he would never have been admitted but for the
circumstances which made society under the Empire a medley.

But the successes of "that handsome Thuillier" were usually of short
duration; women did not care to keep his devotion any more than he
desired to make his devotion eternal. He was really an unwilling Don
Juan; the career of a "beau" wearied him to the point of aging him;
his face, covered with lines like that of an old coquette, looked a
dozen years older than the registers made him. There remained to him
of all his successes in gallantry, a habit of looking at himself in
mirrors, of buttoning his coat to define his waist, and of posing in
various dancing attitudes; all of which prolonged, beyond the period
of enjoying his advantages, the sort of lease that he held on his
cognomen, "that handsome Thuillier."

The truth of 1806 has, however, become a fable, in 1826. He retains a
few vestiges of the former costume of the beaux of the Empire, which
are not unbecoming to the dignity of a former sub-director. He still
wears the white cravat with innumerable folds, wherein his chin is
buried, and the coquettish bow, formerly tied by the hands of beauty,
the two ends of which threaten danger to the passers to right and
left. He follows the fashions of former days, adapting them to his
present needs; he tips his hat on the back of his head, and wears
shoes and thread stockings in summer; his long-tailed coats remind one
of the well-known "surtouts" of the Empire; he has not yet abandoned
his frilled shirts and his white waistcoats; he still plays with his
Empire switch, and holds himself so erect that his back bends in. No
one, seeing Thuillier promenading on the boulevards, would take him
for the son of a man who cooked the breakfasts of the clerks at a
ministry and wore the livery of Louis XVI.; he resembles an imperial
diplomatist or a sub-prefect. Now, not only did Mademoiselle Thuillier
very innocently work upon her brother's weak spot by encouraging in
him an excessive care of his person, which, in her, was simply a
continuation of her worship, but she also provided him with family
joys, by transplanting to their midst a household which had hitherto
been quasi-collateral to them.

It was that of Monsieur Colleville, an intimate friend of Thuillier.
But before we proceed to describe Pylades let us finish with Orestes,
and explain why Thuillier--that handsome Thuillier--was left without a
family of his own--for the family, be it said, is non-existent without
children. Herein appears one of those deep mysteries which lie buried
in the arena of private life, a few shreds of which rise to the
surface at moments when the pain of a concealed situation grows
poignant. This concerns the life of Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier;
so far, we have seen only the life (and we may call it the public
life) of Jerome Thuillier.

Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, four years older than her brother,
had been utterly sacrificed to him; it was easier to give a career to
one than a "dot" to the other. Misfortune to some natures is a pharos,
which illumines to their eyes the dark low corners of social
existence. Superior to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte
had one of those natures which, under the hammer of persecution,
gather themselves together, become compact and powerfully resistant,
not to say inflexible. Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof
from the life of the household; choosing to make herself the sole
arbiter of her own fate. At fourteen years of age, she went to live
alone in a garret, not far from the ministry of finance, which was
then in the rue Vivienne, and also not far from the Bank of France,
then, and now, in the rue de la Vrilliere. There she bravely gave
herself up to a form of industry little known and the perquisite of a
few persons, which she obtained, thanks to the patrons of her father.
It consisted in making bags to hold coin for the Bank, the Treasury,
and the great financial houses. At the end of three years she employed
two workwomen. By investing her savings on the Grand-Livre, she found
herself, in 1814, the mistress of three thousand six hundred francs a
year, earned in fifteen years. As she spent little, and dined with her
father as long as he lived, and, as government securities were very
low during the last convulsions of the Empire, this result, which
seems at first sight exaggerated, explains itself.

On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being
twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother
and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome,
then at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister,
clothed in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with
which she sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte's
eyes Jerome was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole
French Empire. To keep house for this cherished brother, to be
initiated into the secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his
handmaiden, his spaniel, was Brigitte's dream. She immolated herself
lovingly to an idol whose selfishness, always great, was enormously
increased by her self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her
fore-woman for fifteen thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier
in the rue d'Argenteuil, where she made herself the mother, protectress,
and servant of this spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural
caution of a girl who owed everything to her own discretion and her
own labor, concealed the amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing,
no doubt, the extravagance of a man of gallantry. She merely paid a
quota of six hundred francs a year to the expenses of the household,
and this, with her brother's eighteen hundred, enabled her to make
both ends meet at the end of the year.

From the first days of their coming together, Thuillier listened to
his sister as to an oracle; he consulted her in his trifling affairs,
kept none of his secrets from her, and thus made her taste the fruit
of despotism which was, in truth, the one little sin of her nature.
But the sister had sacrificed everything to the brother; she had
staked her all upon his heart; she lived by him only. Brigitte's
ascendancy over Jerome was singularly proved by the marriage which she
procured for him about the year 1814.

Seeing the tendency to enforced reduction which the new-comers to
power under the Restoration were beginning to bring about in the
government offices, and particularly since the return of the old
society which sought to ride over the bourgeoisie, Brigitte
understood, far better than her brother could explain it to her, the
social crisis which presently extinguished their common hopes. No more
successes for that handsome Thuillier in the salons of the nobles who
now succeeded the plebeians of the Empire!

Thuillier was not enough of a person to take up a politic opinion and
choose a party; he felt, as his sister did for him, the necessity of
profiting by the remains of his youth to make a settlement. In such a
situation, a sister as jealous of her power as Brigitte naturally
would, and ought, to marry her brother, to suit herself as well as to
suit him; for she alone could make him really happy, Madame Thuillier
being only an indispensable accessory to the obtaining of two or three
children. If Brigitte did not have an intellect quite the equal of her
will, at least she had the instinct of her despotism; without, it is
true, education, she marched straight before her, with the headstrong
determination of a nature accustomed to succeed. She had the genius of
housekeeping, a faculty for economy, a thorough understanding of how
to live, and a love for work. She saw plainly that she could never
succeed in marrying Jerome into a sphere above their own, where
parents might inquire into their domestic life and feel uneasy at
finding a mistress already reigning in the home. She therefore sought
in a lower grade for persons to dazzle, and found, almost beside her,
a suitable match.

The oldest usher at the Bank, a man named Lemprun, had an only
daughter, called Celeste. Mademoiselle Celeste Lemprun would inherit
the fortune of her mother, the only daughter of a rich farmer. This
fortune consisted of some acres of land in the environs of Paris,
which the old father still worked; besides this, she would have the
property of Lemprun himself, a man who had left the firms of Thelusson
and of Keller to enter the service of the Bank of France. Lemprun, now
the head of that service, enjoyed the respect and consideration of the
governors and auditors.

The Bank council, on hearing of the probable marriage of Celeste to an
honorable employee at the ministry of finance, promised a wedding
present of six thousand francs. This gift, added to twelve thousand
given by Pere Lemprun, and twelve thousand more from the maternal
grandfather, Sieur Galard, market-gardener at Auteuil, brought up the
dowry to thirty thousand francs. Old Galard and Monsieur and Madame
Lemprun were delighted with the marriage. Lemprun himself knew
Mademoiselle Thuillier, and considered her one of the worthiest and
most conscientious women in Paris. Brigitte then, for the first time,
allowed her investments on the Grand-Livre to shine forth, assuring
Lemprun that she should never marry; consequently, neither he nor his
wife, persons devoted to the main chance, would ever allow themselves
to find fault with Brigitte. Above all, they were greatly struck by
the splendid prospects of the handsome Thuillier, and the marriage
took place, as the conventional saying is, to the general
satisfaction.

The governor of the Bank and the secretary were the bride's witnesses;
Monsieur de la Billardiere, director of Thuillier's department, and
Monsieur Rabourdin, head of the office, being those of the groom. Six
days after the marriage old Lemprun was the victim of a daring robbery
which made a great noise in the newspapers of the day, though it was
quickly forgotten during the events of 1815. The guilty parties having
escaped detection, Lemprun wished to make up the loss; but the Bank
agreed to carry the deficit to its profit and loss account;
nevertheless, the poor old man actually died of the grief this affair
had caused him. He regarded it as an attack upon his aged honor.

Madame Lemprun then resigned all her property to her daughter, Madame
Thuillier, and went to live with her father at Auteuil until he died
from an accident in 1817. Alarmed at the prospect of having to manage
or lease the market-garden and the farm of her father, Madame Lemprun
entreated Brigitte, whose honesty and capacity astonished her, to wind
up old Galard's affairs, and to settle the property in such a way that
her daughter should take possession of everything, securing to her
mother fifteen hundred francs a year and the house at Auteuil. The
landed property of the old farmer was sold in lots, and brought in
thirty thousand francs. Lemprun's estate had given as much more, so
that Madame Thuillier's fortune, including her "dot," amounted in 1818
to ninety thousand francs. Joining the revenue of this property to
that of the brother and sister, the Thuillier household had an income,
in 1818, amounting to eleven thousand francs, managed by Brigitte
alone on her sole responsibility. It is necessary to begin by stating
this financial position, not only to prevent objections but to rid the
drama of difficulties.

Brigitte began, from the first, by allowing her brother five hundred
francs a month, and by sailing the household boat at the rate of five
thousand francs a year. She granted to her sister-in-law fifty francs
a month, explaining to her carefully that she herself was satisfied
with forty. To strengthen her despotism by the power of money,
Brigitte laid by the surplus of her own funds. She made, so it was
said in business offices, usurious loans by means of her brother, who
appeared as a money-lender. If, between the years 1813 and 1830,
Brigitte had capitalized sixty thousand francs, that sum can be
explained by the rise in the Funds, and there is no need to have
recourse to accusations more or less well founded, which have nothing
to do with our present history.

From the first days of the marriage, Brigitte subdued the unfortunate
Madame Thuillier with a touch of the spur and a jerk of the bit, both
of which she made her feel severely. A further display of tyranny was
useless; the victim resigned herself at once. Celeste, thoroughly
understood by Brigitte, a girl without mind or education, accustomed
to a sedentary life and a tranquil atmosphere, was extremely gentle by
nature; she was pious in the fullest acceptation of the word; she
would willingly have expiated by the hardest punishments the
involuntary wrong of giving pain to her neighbor. She was utterly
ignorant of life; accustomed to be waited on by her mother, who did
the whole service of the house, for Celeste was unable to make much
exertion, owing to a lymphatic constitution which the least toil
wearied. She was truly a daughter of the people of Paris, where
children, seldom handsome, and of no vigor, the product of poverty and
toil, of homes without fresh air, without freedom of action, without
any of the conveniences of life, meet us at every turn.

At the time of the marriage, Celeste was seen to be a little woman,
fair and faded almost to sickliness, fat, slow, and silly in the
countenance. Her forehead, much too large and too prominent, suggested
water on the brain, and beneath that waxen cupola her face, noticeably
too small and ending in a point like the nose of a mouse, made some
people fear she would become, sooner or later, imbecile. Her eyes,
which were light blue, and her lips, always fixed in a smile, did not
contradict that idea. On the solemn occasion of her marriage she had
the manner, air, and attitude of a person condemned to death, whose
only desire is that it might all be over speedily.

"She is rather round," said Colleville to Thuillier.

Brigitte was just the knife to cut into such a nature, to which her
own formed the strongest contrast. Mademoiselle Thuillier was
remarkable for her regular and correct beauty, but a beauty injured by
toil which, from her very childhood, had bent her down to painful,
thankless tasks, and by the secret privations she imposed upon herself
in order to amass her little property. Her complexion, early
discolored, had something the tint of steel. Her brown eyes were
framed in brown; on the upper lip was a brown floss like a sort of
smoke. Her lips were thin, and her imperious forehead was surmounted
by hair once black, now turning to chinchilla. She held herself as
straight as the fairest beauty; but all things else about her showed
the hardiness of her life, the deadening of her natural fire, the cost
of what she was!

To Brigitte, Celeste was simply a fortune to lay hold of, a future
mother to rule, one more subject in her empire. She soon reproached
her for being _weak_, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous
old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in
her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the languid
inertness of the feeble creature. Celeste, ashamed to see her
sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to
help her, and fell ill in consequence. Instantly, Brigitte was devoted
to her, nursed her like a beloved sister, and would say, in presence of
Thuillier: "You haven't any strength, my child; you must never do
anything again." She showed up Celeste's incapacity by that display of
sympathy with which strength, seeming to pity weakness, finds means to
boast of its own powers.

But, as all despotic natures liking to exercise their strength are
full of tenderness for physical sufferings, Brigitte took such real
care of her sister-in-law as to satisfy Celeste's mother when she came
to see her daughter. After Madame Thuillier recovered, however, she
called her, in Celeste's hearing, "a helpless creature, good for
nothing!" which sent the poor thing crying to her room. When Thuillier
found her there, drying her eyes, he excused her sister, saying:--

"She is an excellent woman, but rather hasty; she loves you in her own
way; she behaves just so with me."

Celeste, remembering the maternal care of her sister-in-law during her
illness, forgave the wound. Brigitte always treated her brother as the
king of the family; she exalted him to Celeste, and made him out an
autocrat, a Ladislas, an infallible pope. Madame Thuillier having lost
her father and grandfather, and being well-nigh deserted by her
mother, who came to see her on Thursdays only (she herself spending
Sundays at Auteuil in summer), had no one left to love except her
husband, and she did love him,--in the first place, because he was her
husband, and secondly, because he still remained to her "that handsome
Thuillier." Besides, he sometimes treated her like a wife, and all
these reasons together made her adore him. He seemed to her all the
more perfect because he often took up her defence and scolded his
sister, not from any real interest in his wife, but for pure
selfishness, and in order to have peace in the household during the
very few moments that he stayed there.

In fact, that handsome Thuillier was never at home except at dinner,
after which meal he went out, returning very late at night. He went to
balls and other social festivities by himself, precisely as if he were
still a bachelor. Thus the two women were always alone together.
Celeste insensibly fell into a passive attitude, and became what
Brigitte wanted her,--a helot. The Queen Elizabeth of the household
then passed from despotism to a sort of pity for the poor victim who
was always sacrificed. She ended by softening her haughty ways, her
cutting speech, her contemptuous tones, as soon as she was certain
that her sister-in-law was completely under the yoke. When she saw the
wounds it made on the neck of her victim, she took care of her as a
thing of her own, and Celeste entered upon happier days. Comparing the
end with the beginning, she even felt a sort of love for her torturer.
To gain some power of self-defence, to become something less a cipher
in the household, supported, unknown to herself, by her own means, the
poor helot had but a single chance, and that chance never came to her.

Celeste had no child. This barrenness, which, from month to month,
brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of
Brigitte's scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit
for nothing, not even to bear children. The old maid, who had longed
to love her brother's child as if it were her own, was unable, for
years, to reconcile herself to this irremediable sterility.

At the time when our history begins, namely, in 1840, Celeste, then
forty-six years old, had ceased to weep; she now had the certainty of
never being a mother. And here is a strange thing. After twenty-five
years of this life, in which victory had ended by first dulling and
then breaking its own knife, Brigitte loved Celeste as much as Celeste
loved Brigitte. Time, ease, and the perpetual rubbing of domestic
life, had worn off the angles and smoothed the asperities; Celeste's
resignation and lamb-like gentleness had brought, at last, a serene
and peaceful autumn. The two women were still further united by the
one sentiment that lay within them, namely, their adoration for the
lucky and selfish Thuillier.

Moreover, these two women, both childless, had each, like all women
who have vainly desired children, fallen in love with a child. This
fictitious motherhood, equal in strength to a real motherhood, needs
an explanation which will carry us to the very heart of our drama, and
will show the reason of the new occupation which Mademoiselle
Thuillier provided for her brother.



CHAPTER III

COLLEVILLE

Thuillier had entered the ministry of finance as supernumerary at the
same time as Colleville, who has been mentioned already as his
intimate friend. In opposition to the well-regulated, gloomy household
of Thuillier, social nature had provided that of Colleville; and if it
is impossible not to remark that this fortuitous contrast was scarcely
moral, we must add that, before deciding that point, it would be well
to wait for the end of this drama, unfortunately too true, for which
the present historian is not responsible.

Colleville was the only son of a talented musician, formerly first
violin at the Opera under Francoeur and Rebel, who related, at least
six times a month during his lifetime, anecdotes concerning the
representations of the "Village Seer"; and mimicked Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, taking him off to perfection. Colleville and Thuillier were
inseparable friends; they had no secrets from each other, and their
friendship, begun at fifteen years of age, had never known a cloud up
to the year 1839. The former was one of those employees who are
called, in the government offices, pluralists. These clerks are
remarkable for their industry. Colleville, a good musician, owed to
the name and influence of his father a situation as first clarionet at
the Opera-Comique, and so long as he was a bachelor, Colleville, who
was rather richer than Thuillier, shared his means with his friend.
But, unlike Thuillier, Colleville married for love a Mademoiselle
Flavie, the natural daughter of a celebrated danseuse at the Opera;
her reputed father being a certain du Bourguier, one of the richest
contractors of the day. In style and origin, Flavie was apparently
destined for a melancholy career, when Colleville, often sent to her
mother's apartments, fell in love with her and married her. Prince
Galathionne, who at that time was "protecting" the danseuse, then
approaching the end of her brilliant career, gave Flavie a "dot" of
twenty thousand francs, to which her mother added a magnificent
trousseau. Other friends and opera-comrades sent jewels and
silver-ware, so that the Colleville household was far richer in
superfluities than in capital. Flavie, brought up in opulence, began
her married life in a charming apartment, furnished by her mother's
upholsterer, where the young wife, who was full of taste for art and
for artists, and possessed a certain elegance, ruled, a queen.

Madame Colleville was pretty and piquant, clever, gay, and graceful;
to express her in one sentence,--a charming creature. Her mother, the
danseuse, now forty-three years old, retired from the stage and went
to live in the country,--thus depriving her daughter of the resources
derived from her wasteful extravagance. Madame Colleville kept a very
agreeable but extremely free and easy household. From 1816 to 1826 she
had five children. Colleville, a musician in the evening, kept the
books of a merchant from seven to nine in the morning, and by ten
o'clock he was at his ministry. Thus, by blowing into a bit of wood by
night, and writing double-entry accounts in the early morning, he
managed to eke out his earnings to seven or eight thousand francs a
year.

Madame Colleville played the part of a "comme il faut" woman; she
received on Wednesdays, gave a concert once a month and a dinner every
fortnight. She never saw Colleville except at dinner and at night,
when he returned about twelve o'clock, at which hour she was
frequently not at home herself. She went to the theatres, where boxes
were sometimes given to her; and she would send word to Colleville to
come and fetch her from such or such a house, where she was supping
and dancing. At her own house, guests found excellent cheer, and her
society, though rather mixed, was very amusing; she received and
welcomed actresses, artists, men of letters, and a few rich men.
Madame Colleville's elegance was on a par with that of Tullia, the
leading prima-donna, with whom she was intimate; but though the
Collevilles encroached on their capital and were often in difficulty
by the end of the month, Flavie was never in debt.

Colleville was very happy; he still loved his wife, and he made
himself her best friend. Always received by her with affectionate
smiles and sympathetic pleasure, he yielded readily to the
irresistible grace of her manners. The vehement activity with which he
pursued his three avocations was a part of his natural character and
temperament. He was a fine stout man, ruddy, jovial, extravagant, and
full of ideas. In ten years there was never a quarrel in his
household. Among business men he was looked upon, in common with all
artists, as a scatter-brained fellow; and superficial persons thought
that the constant hurry of this hard worker was only the restless
coming and going of a busybody.