Poor Relations

"Mademoiselle Fischer living with a young man?" repeated the husband. "That is porter's gossip; do not speak so lightly of the cousin of a Councillor of State who can blow hot and cold in the office as he pleases. Now, come to dinner; I have been waiting for you since four o'clock."

Pretty – very pretty – Madame Marneffe, the natural daughter of Comte Montcornet, one of Napoleon's most famous officers, had, on the strength of a marriage portion of twenty thousand francs, found a husband in an inferior official at the War Office. Through the interest of the famous lieutenant-general – made marshal of France six months before his death – this quill-driver had risen to unhoped-for dignity as head-clerk of his office; but just as he was to be promoted to be deputy-chief, the marshal's death had cut off Marneffe's ambitions and his wife's at the root. The very small salary enjoyed by Sieur Marneffe had compelled the couple to economize in the matter of rent; for in his hands Mademoiselle Valerie Fortin's fortune had already melted away – partly in paying his debts, and partly in the purchase of necessaries for furnishing a house, but chiefly in gratifying the requirements of a pretty young wife, accustomed in her mother's house to luxuries she did not choose to dispense with. The situation of the Rue du Doyenne, within easy distance of the War Office, and the gay part of Paris, smiled on Monsieur and Madame Marneffe, and for the last four years they had dwelt under the same roof as Lisbeth Fischer.

Monsieur Jean-Paul-Stanislas Marneffe was one of the class of employes who escape sheer brutishness by the kind of power that comes of depravity. The small, lean creature, with thin hair and a starved beard, an unwholesome pasty face, worn rather than wrinkled, with red-lidded eyes harnessed with spectacles, shuffling in his gait, and yet meaner in his appearance, realized the type of man that any one would conceive of as likely to be placed in the dock for an offence against decency.

The rooms inhabited by this couple had the illusory appearance of sham luxury seen in many Paris homes, and typical of a certain class of household. In the drawing-room, the furniture covered with shabby cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes pretending to be Florentine bronze, the clumsy cast chandelier merely lacquered, with cheap glass saucers, the carpet, whose small cost was accounted for in advancing life by the quality of cotton used in the manufacture, now visible to the naked eye, – everything, down to the curtains, which plainly showed that worsted damask has not three years of prime, proclaimed poverty as loudly as a beggar in rags at a church door.

The dining-room, badly kept by a single servant, had the sickening aspect of a country inn; everything looked greasy and unclean.

Monsieur's room, very like a schoolboy's, furnished with the bed and fittings remaining from his bachelor days, as shabby and worn as he was, dusted perhaps once a week – that horrible room where everything was in a litter, with old socks hanging over the horsehair-seated chairs, the pattern outlined in dust, was that of a man to whom home is a matter of indifference, who lives out of doors, gambling in cafes or elsewhere.

Madame's room was an exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were situated in the part of the house which, on one side of the courtyard, joined the front half, looking out on the street, to the wing forming the inner side of the court backing against the adjoining property. Handsomely hung with chintz, furnished with rosewood, and thickly carpeted, they proclaimed themselves as belonging to a pretty woman – and indeed suggested the kept mistress. A clock in the fashionable style stood on the velvet-covered mantelpiece. There was a nicely fitted cabinet, and the Chinese flower-stands were handsomely filled. The bed, the toilet-table, the wardrobe with its mirror, the little sofa, and all the lady's frippery bore the stamp of fashion or caprice. Though everything was quite third-rate as to elegance or quality, and nothing was absolutely newer than three years old, a dandy would have had no fault to find but that the taste of all this luxury was commonplace. Art, and the distinction that comes of the choice of things that taste assimilates, was entirely wanting. A doctor of social science would have detected a lover in two or three specimens of costly trumpery, which could only have come there through that demi-god – always absent, but always present if the lady is married.

The dinner, four hours behind time, to which the husband, wife, and child sat down, betrayed the financial straits in which the household found itself, for the table is the surest thermometer for gauging the income of a Parisian family. Vegetable soup made with the water haricot beans had been boiled in, a piece of stewed veal and potatoes sodden with water by way of gravy, a dish of haricot beans, and cheap cherries, served and eaten in cracked plates and dishes, with the dull-looking and dull-sounding forks of German silver – was this a banquet worthy of this pretty young woman? The Baron would have wept could he have seen it. The dingy decanters could not disguise the vile hue of wine bought by the pint at the nearest wineshop. The table-napkins had seen a week's use. In short, everything betrayed undignified penury, and the equal indifference of the husband and wife to the decencies of home. The most superficial observer on seeing them would have said that these two beings had come to the stage when the necessity of living had prepared them for any kind of dishonor that might bring luck to them. Valerie's first words to her husband will explain the delay that had postponed the dinner by the not disinterested devotion of the cook.

"Samanon will only take your bills at fifty per cent, and insists on a lien on your salary as security."

So poverty, still unconfessed in the house of the superior official, and hidden under a stipend of twenty-four thousand francs, irrespective of presents, had reached its lowest stage in that of the clerk.

"You have caught on with the chief," said the man, looking at his wife.

"I rather think so," replied she, understanding the full meaning of his slang expression.

"What is to become of us?" Marneffe went on. "The landlord will be down on us to-morrow. And to think of your father dying without making a will! On my honor, those men of the Empire all think themselves as immortal as their Emperor."

"Poor father!" said she. "I was his only child, and he was very fond of me. The Countess probably burned the will. How could he forget me when he used to give us as much as three or four thousand-franc notes at once, from time to time?"

"We owe four quarters' rent, fifteen hundred francs. Is the furniture worth so much? That is the question, as Shakespeare says."

"Now, good-bye, ducky!" said Valerie, who had only eaten a few mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted all the gravy for a brave soldier just home from Algiers. "Great evils demand heroic remedies."

"Valerie, where are you off to?" cried Marneffe, standing between his wife and the door.

"I am going to see the landlord," she replied, arranging her ringlets under her smart bonnet. "You had better try to make friends with that old maid, if she really is your chief's cousin."

The ignorance in which the dwellers under one roof can exist as to the social position of their fellow-lodgers is a permanent fact which, as much as any other, shows what the rush of Paris life is. Still, it is easily conceivable that a clerk who goes early every morning to his office, comes home only to dinner, and spends every evening out, and a woman swallowed up in a round of pleasures, should know nothing of an old maid living on the third floor beyond the courtyard of the house they dwell in, especially when she lives as Mademoiselle Fischer did.

Up in the morning before any one else, Lisbeth went out to buy her bread, milk, and live charcoal, never speaking to any one, and she went to bed with the sun; she never had a letter or a visitor, nor chatted with her neighbors. Here was one of those anonymous, entomological existences such as are to be met with in many large tenements where, at the end of four years, you unexpectedly learn that up on the fourth floor there is an old man lodging who knew Voltaire, Pilatre de Rozier, Beaujon, Marcel, Mole, Sophie Arnould, Franklin, and Robespierre. What Monsieur and Madame Marneffe had just said concerning Lisbeth Fischer they had come to know, in consequence, partly, of the loneliness of the neighborhood, and of the alliance, to which their necessities had led, between them and the doorkeepers, whose goodwill was too important to them not to have been carefully encouraged.

Now, the old maid's pride, silence, and reserve had engendered in the porter and his wife the exaggerated respect and cold civility which betray the unconfessed annoyance of an inferior. Also, the porter thought himself in all essentials the equal of any lodger whose rent was no more than two hundred and fifty francs. Cousin Betty's confidences to Hortense were true; and it is evident that the porter's wife might be very likely to slander Mademoiselle Fischer in her intimate gossip with the Marneffes, while only intending to tell tales.

When Lisbeth had taken her candle from the hands of worthy Madame Olivier the portress, she looked up to see whether the windows of the garret over her own rooms were lighted up. At that hour, even in July, it was so dark within the courtyard that the old maid could not get to bed without a light.

"Oh, you may be quite easy, Monsieur Steinbock is in his room. He has not been out even," said Madame Olivier, with meaning.

Lisbeth made no reply. She was still a peasant, in so far that she was indifferent to the gossip of persons unconnected with her. Just as a peasant sees nothing beyond his village, she cared for nobody's opinion outside the little circle in which she lived. So she boldly went up, not to her own room, but to the garret; and this is why. At dessert she had filled her bag with fruit and sweets for her lover, and she went to give them to him, exactly as an old lady brings home a biscuit for her dog.

She found the hero of Hortense's dreams working by the light of a small lamp, of which the light was intensified by the use of a bottle of water as a lens – a pale young man, seated at a workman's bench covered with a modeler's tools, wax, chisels, rough-hewn stone, and bronze castings; he wore a blouse, and had in his hand a little group in red wax, which he gazed at like a poet absorbed in his labors.

"Here, Wenceslas, see what I have brought you," said she, laying her handkerchief on a corner of the table; then she carefully took the sweetmeats and fruit out of her bag.

"You are very kind, mademoiselle," replied the exile in melancholy tones.

"It will do you good, poor boy. You get feverish by working so hard; you were not born to such a rough life."

Wenceslas Steinbock looked at her with a bewildered air.

"Eat – come, eat," said she sharply, "instead of looking at me as you do at one of your images when you are satisfied with it."

On being thus smacked with words, the young man seemed less puzzled, for this, indeed, was the female Mentor whose tender moods were always a surprise to him, so much more accustomed was he to be scolded.

Though Steinbock was nine-and-twenty, like many fair men, he looked five or six years younger; and seeing his youth, though its freshness had faded under the fatigue and stress of life in exile, by the side of that dry, hard face, it seemed as though Nature had blundered in the distribution of sex. He rose and threw himself into a deep chair of Louis XV. pattern, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, as if to rest himself. The old maid took a greengage and offered it to him.

"Thank you," said he, taking the plum.

"Are you tired?" said she, giving him another.

"I am not tired with work, but tired of life," said he.

"What absurd notions you have!" she exclaimed with some annoyance. "Have you not had a good genius to keep an eye on you?" she said, offering him the sweetmeats, and watching him with pleasure as he ate them all. "You see, I thought of you when dining with my cousin."

"I know," said he, with a look at Lisbeth that was at once affectionate and plaintive, "but for you I should long since have ceased to live. But, my dear lady, artists require relaxation – "

"Ah! there we come to the point!" cried she, interrupting him, her hands on her hips, and her flashing eyes fixed on him. "You want to go wasting your health in the vile resorts of Paris, like so many artisans, who end by dying in the workhouse. No, no, make a fortune, and then, when you have money in the funds, you may amuse yourself, child; then you will have enough to pay for the doctor and for your pleasure, libertine that you are."

Wenceslas Steinbock, on receiving this broadside, with an accompaniment of looks that pierced him like a magnetic flame, bent his head. The most malignant slanderer on seeing this scene would at once have understood that the hints thrown out by the Oliviers were false. Everything in this couple, their tone, manner, and way of looking at each other, proved the purity of their private live. The old maid showed the affection of rough but very genuine maternal feeling; the young man submitted, as a respectful son yields to the tyranny of a mother. The strange alliance seemed to be the outcome of a strong will acting constantly on a weak character, on the fluid nature peculiar to the Slavs, which, while it does not hinder them from showing heroic courage in battle, gives them an amazing incoherency of conduct, a moral softness of which physiologists ought to try to detect the causes, since physiologists are to political life what entomologists are to agriculture.

"But if I die before I am rich?" said Wenceslas dolefully.

"Die!" cried she. "Oh, I will not let you die. I have life enough for both, and I would have my blood injected into your veins if necessary."

Tears rose to Steinbock's eyes as he heard her vehement and artless speech.

"Do not be unhappy, my little Wenceslas," said Lisbeth with feeling. "My cousin Hortense thought your seal quite pretty, I am sure; and I will manage to sell your bronze group, you will see; you will have paid me off, you will be able to do as you please, you will soon be free. Come, smile a little!"

"I can never repay you, mademoiselle," said the exile.

"And why not?" asked the peasant woman, taking the Livonian's part against herself.

"Because you not only fed me, lodged me, cared for me in my poverty, but you also gave me strength. You have made me what I am; you have often been stern, you have made me very unhappy – "

"I?" said the old maid. "Are you going to pour out all your nonsense once more about poetry and the arts, and to crack your fingers and stretch your arms while you spout about the ideal, and beauty, and all your northern madness? – Beauty is not to compare with solid pudding – and what am I! – You have ideas in your brain? What is the use of them? I too have ideas. What is the good of all the fine things you may have in your soul if you can make no use of them? Those who have ideas do not get so far as those who have none, if they don't know which way to go.

"Instead of thinking over your ideas you must work. – Now, what have you done while I was out?"

"What did your pretty cousin say?"

"Who told you she was pretty?" asked Lisbeth sharply, in a tone hollow with tiger-like jealousy.

"Why, you did."

"That was only to see your face. Do you want to go trotting after petticoats? You who are so fond of women, well, make them in bronze. Let us see a cast of your desires, for you will have to do without the ladies for some little time yet, and certainly without my cousin, my good fellow. She is not game for your bag; that young lady wants a man with sixty thousand francs a year – and has found him!

"Why, your bed is not made!" she exclaimed, looking into the adjoining room. "Poor dear boy, I quite forgot you!"

The sturdy woman pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and remade the artist's little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This mixture of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps accounts for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she regarded as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based on its alternations of good and evil?

If the Livonian had happened to meet Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth Fischer, he would have found a protectress whose complaisance must have led him into some boggy or discreditable path, where he would have been lost. He would certainly never have worked, nor the artist have been hatched out. Thus, while he deplored the old maid's grasping avarice, his reason bid him prefer her iron hand to the life of idleness and peril led by many of his fellow-countrymen.

This was the incident that had given rise to the coalition of female energy and masculine feebleness – a contrast in union said not to be uncommon in Poland.

In 1833 Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes worked into the night when business was good, at about one o'clock one morning perceived a strong smell of carbonic acid gas, and heard the groans of a dying man. The fumes and the gasping came from a garret over the two rooms forming her dwelling, and she supposed that a young man who had but lately come to lodge in this attic – which had been vacant for three years – was committing suicide. She ran upstairs, broke in the door by a push with her peasant strength, and found the lodger writhing on a camp-bed in the convulsions of death. She extinguished the brazier; the door was open, the air rushed in, and the exile was saved. Then, when Lisbeth had put him to bed like a patient, and he was asleep, she could detect the motives of his suicide in the destitution of the rooms, where there was nothing whatever but a wretched table, the camp-bed, and two chairs.

On the table lay a document, which she read:

"I am Count Wenceslas Steinbock, born at Prelia, in Livonia.

"No one is to be accused of my death; my reasons for killing myself are, in the words of Kosciusko, Finis Polonioe!

"The grand-nephew of a valiant General under Charles XII. could not beg. My weakly constitution forbids my taking military service, and I yesterday saw the last of the hundred thalers which I had brought with me from Dresden to Paris. I have left twenty-five francs in the drawer of this table to pay the rent I owe to the landlord.

"My parents being dead, my death will affect nobody. I desire that my countrymen will not blame the French Government. I have never registered myself as a refugee, and I have asked for nothing; I have met none of my fellow-exiles; no one in Paris knows of my existence.

"I am dying in Christian beliefs. May God forgive the last of the Steinbocks!

Mademoiselle Fischer, deeply touched by the dying man's honesty, opened the drawer and found the five five-franc pieces to pay his rent.

"Poor young man!" cried she. "And with no one in the world to care about him!"

She went downstairs to fetch her work, and sat stitching in the garret, watching over the Livonian gentleman.

When he awoke his astonishment may be imagined on finding a woman sitting by his bed; it was like the prolongation of a dream. As she sat there, covering aiguillettes with gold thread, the old maid had resolved to take charge of the poor youth whom she admired as he lay sleeping.

As soon as the young Count was fully awake, Lisbeth talked to give him courage, and questioned him to find out how he might make a living. Wenceslas, after telling his story, added that he owed his position to his acknowledged talent for the fine arts. He had always had a preference for sculpture; the necessary time for study had, however, seemed to him too long for a man without money; and at this moment he was far too weak to do any hard manual labor or undertake an important work in sculpture. All this was Greek to Lisbeth Fischer. She replied to the unhappy man that Paris offered so many openings that any man with will and courage might find a living there. A man of spirit need never perish if he had a certain stock of endurance.

"I am but a poor girl myself, a peasant, and I have managed to make myself independent," said she in conclusion. "If you will work in earnest, I have saved a little money, and I will lend you, month by month, enough to live upon; but to live frugally, and not to play ducks and drakes with or squander in the streets. You can dine in Paris for twenty-five sous a day, and I will get you your breakfast with mine every day. I will furnish your rooms and pay for such teaching as you may think necessary. You shall give me formal acknowledgment for the money I may lay out for you, and when you are rich you shall repay me all. But if you do not work, I shall not regard myself as in any way pledged to you, and I shall leave you to your fate."

"Ah!" cried the poor fellow, still smarting from the bitterness of his first struggle with death, "exiles from every land may well stretch out their hands to France, as the souls in Purgatory do to Paradise. In what other country is such help to be found, and generous hearts even in such a garret as this? You will be everything to me, my beloved benefactress; I am your slave! Be my sweetheart," he added, with one of the caressing gestures familiar to the Poles, for which they are unjustly accused of servility.

"Oh, no; I am too jealous, I should make you unhappy; but I will gladly be a sort of comrade," replied Lisbeth.

"Ah, if only you knew how I longed for some fellow-creature, even a tyrant, who would have something to say to me when I was struggling in the vast solitude of Paris!" exclaimed Wenceslas. "I regretted Siberia, whither I should be sent by the Emperor if I went home. – Be my Providence! – I will work; I will be a better man than I am, though I am not such a bad fellow!"

"Will you do whatever I bid you?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Well, then, I will adopt you as my child," said she lightly. "Here I am with a son risen from the grave. Come! we will begin at once. I will go out and get what I want; you can dress, and come down to breakfast with me when I knock on the ceiling with the broomstick."

That day, Mademoiselle Fischer made some inquiries, at the houses to which she carried her work home, as to the business of a sculptor. By dint of many questions she ended by hearing of the studio kept by Florent and Chanor, a house that made a special business of casting and finishing decorative bronzes and handsome silver plate. Thither she went with Steinbock, recommending him as an apprentice in sculpture, an idea that was regarded as too eccentric. Their business was to copy the works of the greatest artists, but they did not teach the craft. The old maid's persistent obstinacy so far succeeded that Steinbock was taken on to design ornament. He very soon learned to model ornament, and invented novelties; he had a gift for it.

Five months after he was out of his apprenticeship as a finisher, he made acquaintance with Stidmann, the famous head of Florent's studios. Within twenty months Wenceslas was ahead of his master; but in thirty months the old maid's savings of sixteen years had melted entirely. Two thousand five hundred francs in gold! – a sum with which she had intended to purchase an annuity; and what was there to show for it? A Pole's receipt! And at this moment Lisbeth was working as hard as in her young days to supply the needs of her Livonian.

When she found herself the possessor of a piece of paper instead of her gold louis, she lost her head, and went to consult Monsieur Rivet, who for fifteen years had been his clever head-worker's friend and counselor. On hearing her story, Monsieur and Madame Rivet scolded Lisbeth, told her she was crazy, abused all refugees whose plots for reconstructing their nation compromised the prosperity of the country and the maintenance of peace; and they urged Lisbeth to find what in trade is called security.

"The only hold you have over this fellow is on his liberty," observed Monsieur Rivet.

Monsieur Achille Rivet was assessor at the Tribunal of Commerce.