LXV. Scène conjugale.

LXV

A Marital Scene.

At the Place Louis XV, the three young men had separated, that is to say, Morrel had taken the boulevards, Château-Renaud had taken the Pont de la Révolution, and Debray had followed the quay.

Morrel and Château-Renaud, in all probability, made their way to their domestic hearths, as is still said at the rostrum of the Chamber in well-turned speeches, and at the Théâtre de la rue Richelieu in well-written plays; but it was not so with Debray. Arriving at the Louvre gate, he turned left, crossed the Carrousel at a brisk trot, slipped through the rue Saint-Roch, emerged by the rue de la Michodière, and arrived at M. Danglars' door just as M. de Villefort's landau, having set him and his wife down at the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, was stopping to drop the baroness at her own house.

Debray, a familiar figure in the household, entered the courtyard first, threw the reins into the hands of a footman, then returned to the carriage door to receive Mme Danglars, to whom he offered his arm to regain her apartments.

Once the door was shut and the baroness and Debray were in the courtyard:

"What is the matter with you, Hermine?" said Debray. "And why did you feel faint at that story, or rather that fable, the count told?"

"Because I was in a horrible state this evening, my friend," the baroness replied.

"But no, Hermine," Debray rejoined, "you will not make me believe that. You were on the contrary in excellent spirits when you arrived at the count's. M. Danglars was somewhat sulky, it is true; but I know how little account you make of his ill humor. Someone has done something to you. Tell me about it; you know well that I will never suffer an impertinence to be done to you."

"You are mistaken, Lucien, I assure you," Mme Danglars resumed, "and things are as I have told you, plus the ill humor you noticed, and which I did not think worth mentioning to you."

It was evident that Mme Danglars was under the influence of one of those nervous irritations of which women often cannot give themselves an account, or that, as Debray had guessed, she had experienced some hidden shock that she would not confess to anyone. Being a man accustomed to recognizing vapors as one of the elements of feminine life, he did not insist further, awaiting the opportune moment, either for a new questioning, or for a confession _proprio motu_.

At the door of her chamber, the baroness met Mlle Cornélie. Mlle Cornélie was the baroness's trusted lady's maid.

"What is my daughter doing?" asked Mme Danglars.

"She studied all evening," Mlle Cornélie answered, "and then she went to bed."

"Yet it seems to me I hear her piano?"

"It is Mlle Louise d'Armilly who is playing music while mademoiselle is in bed."

"Very well," said Mme Danglars; "come and undress me."

They entered the bedroom. Debray stretched out on a large sofa, and Mme Danglars passed into her dressing room with Mlle Cornélie.

"My dear Monsieur Lucien," said Mme Danglars through the curtain of the dressing room, "you are always complaining that Eugénie does not honor you by addressing a word to you?"

"Madame," said Lucien, playing with the baroness's little dog, which, recognizing his quality as a friend of the house, was in the habit of lavishing a thousand caresses upon him, "I am not the only one to make such recriminations to you, and I believe I heard Morcerf complain the other day to yourself that he could not draw a single word from his fiancée."

"That is true," said Mme Danglars; "but I think one of these mornings all that will change, and you will see Eugénie come into your study."

"Into my study, mine?"

"That is to say, into the minister's."

"And why so?"

"To ask you for an engagement at the Opera! Truly, I have never seen such a craze for music: it is ridiculous for a person of the world!"

Debray smiled.

"Well," he said, "let her come with the baron's consent and yours, and we shall give her that engagement, and we shall try that it be according to her merit, though we are quite poor to pay so fine a talent as hers."

"Go, Cornélie," said Mme Danglars, "I no longer need you."

Cornélie disappeared, and, a moment after, Mme Danglars came out of her dressing room in a charming negligee, and came to sit near Lucien.

Then, pensive, she began to caress the little spaniel.

Lucien looked at her in silence for a moment.

"Come, Hermine," he said after a while, "answer frankly: something wounds you, does it not?"

"Nothing," the baroness replied.

And yet, as she was suffocating, she rose, tried to breathe, and went to look at herself in a mirror.

"I am frightful this evening," she said.

Debray was rising with a smile to reassure the baroness on this last point, when suddenly the door opened.

M. Danglars appeared; Debray sat down again.

At the noise of the door, Mme Danglars turned, and looked at her husband with an astonishment she did not even take the trouble to disguise.

"Good evening, madame," said the banker; "good evening, Monsieur Debray."

The baroness no doubt believed that this unforeseen visit signified something, like a desire to repair the bitter words that had escaped the baron during the day.

She armed herself with a dignified air, and turning toward Lucien, without answering her husband:

"Read me something, Monsieur Debray," she said to him.

Debray, whom this visit had slightly alarmed at first, recovered his calm at the baroness's composure, and stretched his hand toward a book marked in the middle by a knife with a mother-of-pearl blade inlaid with gold.

"Pardon," said the banker, "but you will tire yourself, baroness, by sitting up so late; it is eleven o'clock, and M. Debray lives a good way off."

Debray remained struck with stupor, not that Danglars's tone was not perfectly calm and polite; but after all, beneath that calm and that politeness there pierced an unusual inclination to do something other that evening than his wife's will.

The baroness too was surprised, and testified her astonishment by a glance which would no doubt have given her husband pause, had her husband not had his eyes fixed on a newspaper, where he was searching for the closing price of the funds.

The result was that this proud glance was launched in vain, and completely missed its effect.

"Monsieur Lucien," said the baroness, "I declare to you that I have not the slightest desire to sleep, that I have a thousand things to tell you this evening, and that you are going to spend the night listening to me, were you to sleep standing."

"At your orders, madame," said Lucien phlegmatically.

"My dear Monsieur Debray," said the banker in his turn, "do not kill yourself, I beg you, listening to the follies of Mme Danglars tonight, for you will listen to them just as well tomorrow; but this evening is mine, I reserve it for myself, and I shall devote it, if you will permit, to discussing grave interests with my wife."

This time, the blow was so direct and fell so squarely, that it stunned Lucien and the baroness; both questioned each other with their eyes as if to draw from one another some support against this aggression; but the irresistible power of the master of the house triumphed and the victory remained with the husband.

"Do not at least believe that I am dismissing you, my dear Debray," Danglars continued; "no, not in the least: an unforeseen circumstance forces me to desire to have a conversation this very evening with the baroness; that happens rarely enough for me not to be held to account for it."

Debray stammered a few words, bowed, and went out, knocking against the corners like Nathan in _Athalie_.

"It is incredible," he said when the door was shut behind him, "how easily these husbands, whom we nevertheless find so ridiculous, get the better of us!"

Lucien gone, Danglars installed himself in his place on the sofa, closed the book left open, and, assuming a horribly pretentious pose, continued to play with the dog. But as the dog, who had not for him the same sympathy as for Debray, tried to bite him, he took it by the scruff of the neck and sent it, to the other side of the room, onto a lounging chair.

The animal gave a cry as it traversed the space; but, arrived at its destination, it cowered behind a cushion, and, stupefied at this treatment to which it was not accustomed, it kept still and motionless.

"Do you know, sir," said the baroness without flinching, "that you are making progress? Ordinarily you were merely boorish; this evening you are brutal."

"That is because I am in a worse humor this evening than usual," Danglars answered.

Hermine looked at the banker with supreme disdain. Ordinarily such glances exasperated the proud Danglars; but that evening he scarcely appeared to notice them.

"And what is your bad humor to me?" the baroness replied, irritated at her husband's impassiveness. "Do these things concern me? Keep your bad humors to yourself, or confine them to your offices; and since you have clerks whom you pay, vent your bad humors on them!"

"Not at all," answered Danglars; "you are mistaken in your advice, madame, and so I shall not follow it. My offices are my Pactolus, as I believe M. Desmoutiers says, and I will not trouble its course or disturb its calm. My clerks are honest men, who earn my fortune for me and whom I pay at a rate infinitely below what they deserve, if I estimate them by what they bring in; I shall therefore not get angry with them; those with whom I shall get angry are the people who eat my dinners, who break down my horses, and who ruin my cash box."

"And who are these people who ruin your cash box? Explain yourself more clearly, sir, I beg you."

"Oh! be easy, if I speak in riddles, I do not mean to keep you long from the answer," Danglars resumed. "The people who ruin my cash box are those who draw five hundred thousand francs from it in the space of one hour."

"I do not understand you, sir," said the baroness, trying at once to disguise the emotion in her voice and the redness of her face.

"You understand, on the contrary, perfectly well," said Danglars; "but if your ill will continues, I shall tell you that I have just lost seven hundred thousand francs on the Spanish loan."

"Ah! indeed," said the baroness with a sneer; "and is it I whom you hold responsible for this loss?"

"Why not?"

"Is it my fault if you have lost seven hundred thousand francs?"

"At any rate, it is not mine."

"Once and for all, sir," the baroness said sharply, "I have told you never to speak to me of the cash box; it is a language I learned neither from my parents nor in the house of my first husband."

"I should think not indeed," said Danglars; "they hadn't a penny, either of them."

"All the more reason that I should not have learned the jargon of the bank from them, which here tears my ears from morning to night; this noise of coins counted and recounted is odious to me, and I know nothing more disagreeable than the sound of your voice."

"Truly," said Danglars, "how strange! And I who had believed that you took the liveliest interest in my operations!"

"I! And who could have made you believe such a folly?"

"Yourself."

"Ah! indeed!"

"Certainly."

"I should very much like you to tell me on what occasion."

"Oh! my God! it is easy. In the month of February last, you spoke to me first of the Haitian funds, you had dreamed that a vessel entered the port of Le Havre, and that this vessel brought the news that a payment which was believed deferred to the Greek calends was about to be made. I know the lucidity of your sleep; I therefore had bought up, at a low figure, all the coupons I could find of the Haitian debt, and I gained four hundred thousand francs, of which one hundred thousand were religiously handed over to you. You did with them what you wished; that is no concern of mine.

"In March, it was a matter of a railway concession. Three companies presented themselves, offering equal guarantees. You told me that your instinct—and though you profess yourself a stranger to speculation, I believe on the contrary your instinct very developed on certain matters—you told me that your instinct made you believe the privilege would be given to the company called the Southern.

"I had myself entered at once for two thirds of the shares of that company. The privilege was in effect granted to it; as you had foreseen, the shares tripled in value, and I pocketed a million, on which two hundred fifty thousand francs were handed over to you as pin money. How did you employ those two hundred fifty thousand francs?

"But where are you driving at, sir?" cried the baroness, all aflutter with vexation and impatience.

"Patience, madame, I am coming to it."

"It is fortunate!"

"In April, you went to dine at the minister's; they talked of Spain, and you overheard a secret conversation; it was a question of the expulsion of don Carlos; I bought Spanish funds. The expulsion did take place, and I gained six hundred thousand francs the day Charles V recrossed the Bidassoa. On those six hundred thousand francs, you received fifty thousand crowns; they were yours, you disposed of them at your fancy, and I do not ask you to account for them; but it is none the less true that you received five hundred thousand livres this year.

"Well, after, sir?"

"Ah! yes, after! Well, it is just after that that things go wrong."

"You have ways of saying... truly..."

"They convey my meaning, that is all I need.... After, it was three days ago, that 'after.' Three days ago, then, you talked politics with M. Debray, and you thought you saw from his words that don Carlos had re-entered Spain; then I sell my stock, the news spreads, there is a panic, I no longer sell, I give away; the next day, it turns out the news was false, and that to this false news I have lost seven hundred thousand francs!"

"Well?"

"Well, since I give you a quarter when I gain, it is therefore a quarter that you owe me when I lose; a quarter of seven hundred thousand francs is a hundred seventy-five thousand francs."

"But what you tell me is extravagant, and I do not see, truly, how you mix M. Debray's name into all this story."

"Because if you do not by chance have the hundred seventy-five thousand francs I claim, you will borrow them from your friends, and M. Debray is among your friends."

"Fie!" cried the baroness.

"Oh! no gestures, no cries, no modern drama, madame, or you will force me to tell you that I see here M. Debray sneering near the five hundred thousand livres you counted out to him this year, and saying to himself that he has at last found what the cleverest gamblers could never discover, that is to say, a roulette where one wins without staking, and where one does not lose when one loses."

The baroness would have exploded.

"Wretch!" said she, "would you dare say that you did not know what you dare reproach me with today?"

"I do not tell you that I knew, I do not tell you that I did not know; I tell you: observe my conduct for the four years that you have no longer been my wife and that I have no longer been your husband, and you will see if it has always been consistent with itself. Some time before our rupture, you wished to study music with that famous barytone who debuted with such success at the Théâtre-Italien; I, I wished to study dancing with that dancer who had made such a reputation in London. That cost me, as much for you as for me, about a hundred thousand francs. I said nothing, because there must be harmony in households. A hundred thousand francs for the man and the woman to know thoroughly dancing and music is not too dear. Soon, here you take a disgust for singing, and the idea comes to you to study diplomacy with a secretary of the minister; I let you study. You understand: what is it to me, since you pay for the lessons you take from your own purse? But today, I notice that you draw on mine, and that your apprenticeship may cost me seven hundred thousand francs a month. Halt there! madame, for this cannot go on. Either the diplomat shall give lessons... gratis, and I shall tolerate him, or he shall never set foot in my house again; do you hear, madame?"

"Oh! this is too much, sir!" cried Hermine, suffocated; "and you exceed the bounds of the ignoble."

"But," said Danglars, "I see with pleasure that you have not remained below them, and that you have voluntarily obeyed that axiom of the code: 'The wife must follow her husband.'"

"Insults!"

"You are right: let us stop our recriminations, and reason coldly. I have never, myself, meddled in your affairs save for your good; do likewise. My cash box is no concern of yours, you say? Very well; operate on yours, but neither fill nor empty mine. Besides, who knows if all this is not a political Jarnac blow; if the minister, furious at seeing me in the opposition, and jealous of the popular sympathies I stir up, is not in league with M. Debray to ruin me?"

"How probable!"

"But of course; who ever saw that... a false telegraphic news, that is to say the impossible, or nearly; quite different signs given by the two telegraphs!... It is done on purpose for me, truly."

"Sir," said the baroness humbly, "you are not ignorant, it seems to me, that that employee was dismissed, that they even spoke of prosecuting him, that the order had been given to arrest him, and that that order would have been executed had he not withdrawn from the first searches by a flight which proves his madness or his guilt.... It is an error."

"Yes, which makes fools laugh, which gives the minister a bad night, which makes the secretaries of state blacken paper, but which costs me seven hundred thousand francs."

"But, sir," said Hermine suddenly, "since all this, according to you, comes from M. Debray, why, instead of saying all this directly to M. Debray, do you come to tell it to me? Why accuse the man and take it out on the woman?"

"Do I know M. Debray, I?" said Danglars. "Do I wish to know him? Do I wish to know he gives advice? Do I wish to follow it? Do I gamble? No, it is you who do all that, and not I!"

"But it seems to me that since you profit by it..."

Danglars shrugged his shoulders.

"Foolish creatures, truly, are these women who think themselves geniuses because they have conducted one or ten intrigues so as not to be posted all over Paris! But think: even had you hidden your irregularities from your husband himself, which is the A.B.C. of the art, because most of the time husbands do not wish to see, you would be but a pale copy of what half your friends, women of the world, do. But it is not so with me; I have seen and always seen; for some sixteen years, you have hidden a thought from me perhaps, but not a step, not an action, not a fault. While you, on your side, applauded your own cleverness and firmly believed you were deceiving me: what has resulted? It is that, thanks to my pretended ignorance, from M. de Villefort to M. Debray, there is not one of your friends who has not trembled before me. There is not one who has not treated me as master of the house, my only claim near you; there is not one, in short, who has dared tell you of me what I tell you myself today. I permit you to make me odious, but I shall prevent you from making me ridiculous, and above all I forbid you positively and beyond all else from ruining me."

Until the moment the name of Villefort was pronounced, the baroness had kept up a fairly good front; but at that name she had grown pale, and rising as if moved by a spring, she had stretched out her arms as if to conjure an apparition, and taken three steps toward her husband as if to tear from him the end of the secret he did not know or that perhaps, by some odious calculation such as were almost all Danglars's calculations, he did not wish to let entirely escape.

"M. de Villefort! what does that mean! what do you mean?"

"That means, madame, that M. de Nargonne, your first husband, being neither a philosopher nor a banker, or perhaps being both, and seeing that there was no profit to be drawn from a king's attorney, died of grief or of anger at having found you pregnant by six months after an absence of nine. I am brutal, not only do I know it, but I boast of it: it is one of my means of success in my commercial operations. Why, instead of killing, did he let himself be killed? Because he had no cash box to save. But I, I owe myself to my cash box. M. Debray, my associate, makes me lose seven hundred thousand francs; let him bear his share of the loss, and we shall continue our affairs; otherwise, let him go bankrupt to me for those hundred seventy-five thousand livres, and do what bankrupts do, let him disappear. Eh, my God! he is a charming fellow, I know it, when his news is accurate; but when it is not, there are fifty in the world who are worth more than he."

Mme Danglars was overwhelmed; yet she made a supreme effort to reply to this last attack. She fell into an armchair, thinking of Villefort, of the scene at dinner, of that strange series of misfortunes which for some days had been falling one by one upon her house and changing the padded calm of her household into scandalous debates. Danglars did not even look at her, though she did all she could to faint. He pulled the bedroom door shut without adding a single word and went back to his own rooms; so that Mme Danglars, on recovering from her half-swoon, could believe she had had a bad dream.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”