"Saved! so you are really out of danger, mademoiselle!" exclaimed the maid with a cry of joy, as she closed the door upon the doctor, and, rushing to the bed on which her mistress lay, she began, in a frenzy of happiness and with a shower of kisses to embrace, together with the bed covers, the old woman's poor, emaciated body, which seemed, in the huge bed, as small as a child's.
The old woman took her head, silently, in both hands, pressed it against her heart, heaved a sigh, and muttered: "Ah, well! so I must live on!"
This took place in a small room, through the window of which could be seen a small patch of sky cut by three black iron pipes, various neighboring roofs, and in the distance, between two houses that almost touched, the leafless branch of a tree, whose trunk was invisible.
On the mantelpiece, in a mahogany box, was a square clock with a large dial, huge figures and bulky hands. Beside it, under glass covers, were two candlesticks formed by three silver swans twisting their necks around a golden quiver. Near the fireplace an easy chair à la Voltaire, covered with one of the pieces of tapestry of checker-board pattern, which little girls and old women make, extended its empty arms. Two little Italian landscapes, a flower piece in water-colors after Bertin, with a date in red ink at the bottom, and a few miniatures hung on the walls.
Upon the mahogany commode of an Empire pattern, a statue of Time in black bronze, running with his scythe in rest, served as a watch stand for a small watch with a monogram in diamonds upon blue enamel, surrounded with pearls. The floor was covered with a bright carpet with black and green stripes. The curtains at the bed and the window were of old-fashioned chintz with red figures upon a chocolate ground.
At the head of the bed, a portrait inclined over the invalid and seemed to gaze sternly at her. It represented a man with harsh features, whose face emerged from the high collar of a green satin coat, and a muslin cravat, with waving ends, tied loosely around the neck, in the style of the early years of the Revolution. The old woman in the bed resembled the portrait. She had the same bushy, commanding black eyebrows, the same aquiline nose, the same clearly marked lines of will, resolution and energy. The portrait seemed to cast a reflection upon her, as a father's face is reflected in his child's. But in hers the harshness of the features was softened by a gleam of rough kindliness, by an indefinable flame of sturdy devotion and masculine charity.
The light in the room was the light of an evening in early spring, about five o'clock, a light as clear as crystal and as white as silver, the cold, chaste, soft light, which fades away in the flush of the sunset passing into twilight. The sky was filled with that light of a new life, adorably melancholy, like the still naked earth, and so replete with pathos that it moves happy souls to tears.
"Well, well! my silly Germinie, weeping?" said the old woman, a moment later, withdrawing her hands which were moist with her maid's kisses.
"Oh! my dear, kind mademoiselle, I would like to weep like this all the time! it's so good! it brings my poor mother back before my eyes—and everything!—if you only knew!"
"Go on, go on," said her mistress, closing her eyes to listen, "tell me about it."
"Oh! my poor mother!" The maid paused a moment. Then, with the flood of words that gushes forth with tears of joy, she continued, as if, in the emotion and outpouring of her happiness, her whole childhood flowed back into her heart! "Poor woman! I can see her now the last time she went out to take me to mass, one 21st of January, I remember. In those days they read from the king's Testament. Ah! she suffered enough on my account, did mamma! She was forty-two years old, when I was born——papa made her cry a good deal! There were three of us before and there wasn't any too much bread in the house. And then he was proud as anything. If we'd had only a handful of peas in the house he would never have gone to the curé for help. Ah! we didn't eat bacon every day at our house. Never mind; for all that mamma loved me a little more and she always found a little fat or cheese in some corner to put on my bread. I wasn't five when she died. That was a bad thing for us all. I had a tall brother, who was white as a sheet, with a yellow beard—and good! you have no idea. Everybody loved him. They gave him all sorts of names. Some called him Boda—why, I don't know. Others called him Jesus Christ. Ah! he was a worker, he was! It didn't make any difference to him that his health was good for nothing; at daybreak he was always at his loom—for we were weavers, you must know—and he never put his shuttle down till night. And honest, too, if you knew! People came from all about to bring him their yarn, and without weighing it, too. He was a great friend of the schoolmaster, and he used to write the mottoes for the carnival. My father, he was a different sort: he'd work for a moment, or an hour, you know, and then he'd go off into the fields—and when he came home he'd beat us, and beat us hard. He was like a madman; they said it was because he was consumptive. It was lucky my brother was there: he used to prevent my second sister from pulling my hair and hurting me, because she was jealous. He always took me by the hand to go and see them play skittles. In fact, he supported the family all alone. For my first communion he had the bells rung! Ah! he did a heap of work so that I should be like the others, in a little white dress with flounces and a little bag in my hand, such as they used to carry in those days. I didn't have any cap: I remember making myself a pretty little wreath of ribbons and the white pith you pull off when you strip reeds; there was lots of it in the places where we used to put the hemp to soak. That was one of my great days—that and the drawing lots for the pigs at Christmas—and the days when I went to help them tie up the vines; that was in June, you know. We had a little vineyard near Saint Hilaire. There was one very hard year in those days—do you remember it, mademoiselle?—the long frost of 1828 that ruined everything. It extended as far as Dijon and farther, too—people had to make bread from bran. My brother nearly killed himself with work. Father, who was always out of doors tramping about the fields, sometimes brought home a few mushrooms. It was pretty bad, all the same; we were hungry oftener than anything else. When I was out in the fields myself, I'd look around to see if anyone could see me, and then I'd crawl along softly on my knees, and when I was under a cow, I'd take off one of my sabots and begin to milk her. Bless me! I came near being caught at it! My oldest sister was out at service with the Mayor of Lenclos, and she sent home her wages—twenty-four francs—it was always as much as that. The second worked at dressmaking in bourgeois families; but they didn't pay the prices then that they do to-day; she worked from six in the morning till dark for eight sous. Out of that she wanted to put some by for a dress for the fête on Saint-Remi's day.—Ah! that's the way it is with us: there are many who live on two potatoes a day for six months so as to have a new dress for that day. Bad luck fell on us on all sides. My father died. We had to sell a small field, and a bit of a vineyard that yielded a cask of wine every year. The notaries don't work for nothing. When my brother was sick there was nothing to give him to drink but lees that we'd been putting water to for a year. And there wasn't any change of linen for him; all the sheets in the wardrobe, which had a golden cross on top of it in mother's time, had gone—and the cross too. More than that, before he was sick this time, my brother goes off to the fête at Clefmont. He hears someone say that my sister had gone wrong with the mayor she worked for; he falls on the men who said it, but he wasn't very strong. They were, though, and they threw him down, and when he was down, they kicked him with their wooden shoes, in the pit of the stomach. He was brought home to us for dead. The doctor put him on his feet again, though, and told us he was cured. But he could just drag himself along. I could see that he was going when he kissed me. When he was dead, poor dear boy, Cadet Ballard had to use all his strength to take me away from the body. The whole village, mayor and all, went to his funeral. As my sister couldn't keep her place with the mayor on account of the things he said to her, and had gone to Paris to find a place, my other sister went after her. I was left all alone. One of my mother's cousins then took me with her to Damblin; but I was all upset there; I cried all night long, and whenever I could run away I always went back to our house. Just to see the old vine at our door, from the end of the street, did me good! it put strength into my legs. The good people who had bought the house would keep me till someone came for me! they were always sure to find me there. At last they wrote to my sister in Paris that, if she didn't send for me to come and live with her, I wasn't likely to live long. It's a fact that I was just like wax. They put me in charge of the driver of a small wagon that went from Langres to Paris every month, and that's how I came to Paris. I was fourteen years old, then. I remember that I went to bed all dressed all the way, because they made me sleep in the common room. When I arrived I was covered with lice."
The old woman said nothing: she was comparing her own life with her servant's.
Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was born in 1782. She first saw the light in a mansion on Rue Royale and Mesdames de France were her sponsors in baptism. Her father was a close friend of the Comte d'Artois, in whose household he held an important post. He joined in all his hunting-parties, and was one of the few familiar spirits, in whose presence, at the mass preceding the hunt, he who was one day to be King Charles X. used to hurry the officiating priest by saying in an undertone: "Psit! psit! curé, swallow your Good Lord quickly!"
Monsieur de Varandeuil had made one of those marriages which were customary enough in his day: he had espoused a sort of actress, a singer, who, although she had no great talent, had made a success at the Concert Spirituel, beside Madame Todi, Madame Ponteuil and Madame Saint-Huberty. The little girl born of this marriage in 1782 was sickly and delicate, ugly of feature, with a nose even then large enough to be absurd, her father's nose in a face as thin as a man's wrist. She had nothing of what her parents' vanity would have liked her to have. After making a fiasco on the piano at the age of five, at a concert given by her mother in her salon, she was relegated to the society of the servants. Except for a moment in the morning, she never went near her mother, who always made her kiss her under the chin, so that she might not disturb her rouge. When the Revolution arrived, Monsieur de Varandeuil, thanks to the Comte d'Artois' patronage, was disburser of pensions. Madame de Varandeuil was traveling in Italy, whither she had ordered her physician to send her on the pretext of ill health, leaving her daughter and an infant son in her husband's charge. The absorbing anxiety of the times, the tempests threatening wealth and the families that handled wealth—Monsieur de Varandeuil's brother was a Farmer-General—left that very selfish and unloving father but little leisure to attend to the wants of his children. Thereupon, he began to be somewhat embarrassed pecuniarily. He left Rue Royale and took up his abode at the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais, belonging to his mother, who allowed him to install himself there. Events moved rapidly; one evening, in the early days of the guillotine, as he was walking along Rue Saint-Antoine, he heard a hawker in front of him, crying the journal: Aux Voleurs! Aux Voleurs! According to the usual custom of those days, he gave a list of the articles contained in the number he had for sale: Monsieur de Varandeuil heard his own name mingled with oaths and obscenity. He bought the paper and read therein a revolutionary denunciation of himself.
Some time after, his brother was arrested and detained at Hôtel Talaru with the other Farmers-General. His mother, in a paroxysm of terror, had foolishly sold the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais, where he was living, for the value of the mirrors: she was paid in assignats, and died of despair over the constant depreciation of the paper. Luckily Monsieur de Varandeuil obtained from the purchasers, who could find no tenants, leave to occupy the rooms formerly used by the stableboys. He took refuge there, among the outbuildings of the mansion, stripped himself of his name and posted at the door, as he was ordered to do, his family name of Roulot, under which he buried the De Varandeuil and the former courtier of the Comte d'Artois. He lived there alone, buried, forgotten, hiding his head, never going out, cowering in his hole, without servants, waited upon by his daughter, to whom he left everything. The Terror was to them a period of shuddering suspense, the breathless excitement of impending death. Every evening, the little girl went and listened at a grated window to the day's crop of condemnations, the List of Prize Winners in the Lottery of Saint Guillotine. She answered every knock at the door, thinking that they had come to take her father to the Place de la Révolution, whither her uncle had already been taken. The moment came when money, the money that was so scarce, no longer procured bread. It was necessary to go and get it, almost by force, at the doors of the bakeries; it was necessary to earn it by standing for hours in the cold, biting night air, in the crushing pressure of crowds of people; to stand in line from three o'clock in the morning. The father did not care to venture into that mass of humanity. He was afraid of being recognized, of compromising himself by one of those outbursts to which his impetuous nature would have given vent, no matter where he might be. Then, too, he recoiled from the fatigue and severity of the task. The little boy was still too small; he would have been crushed; so the duty of obtaining bread for three mouths each day fell to the daughter. She obtained it. With her little thin body, fairly lost in her father's knitted jacket, a cotton cap pulled down over her eyes, her limbs all huddled together to retain a little warmth, she would wait, shivering, her eyes aching with cold, amid the pushing and buffeting, until the baker's wife on Rue des Francs-Bourgeois placed in her hands a loaf which her little fingers, stiff with cold, could hardly hold. At last, this poor little creature, who returned day after day, with her pinched face and her emaciated, trembling body, moved the baker's wife to pity. With the kindness of heart of a woman of the people, she would send the coveted loaf to the little one by her boy as soon as she appeared in the long line. But one day, just as she put out her hand to take it, a woman, whose jealousy was aroused by this mark of favor and preference, dealt the child a kick with her wooden shoe which kept her in bed almost a month. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil bore the marks of the blow all her life.
During that month, the whole family would have died of starvation, had it not been for a supply of rice, which one of their acquaintances, the Comtesse d'Auteuil, had had the forethought to lay aside, and which she consented to share with the father and the two children.
Thus, Monsieur de Varandeuil escaped the Revolutionary Tribunal by burying himself in obscurity. He escaped it also by reason of the fact that the accounts of his administration of his office were still unsettled, as he had had the good fortune to procure the postponement of the settlement from month to month. Then, too, he kept suspicion at bay by his personal animosity toward some great personages at court, and by the hatred of the queen which many retainers of the king's brothers had conceived. Whenever he had occasion to speak of that wretched woman, he used violent, bitter, insulting words, uttered in such a passionate, sincere tone that they almost made him appear as an enemy of the royal family; so that those to whom he was simply Citizen Roulot looked upon him as a good patriot, and those who knew his former name almost excused him for having been what he had been: a noble, the friend of a prince of the blood, and a place holder.
The Republic had reached the epoch of patriotic suppers, those repasts of a whole street in the street; Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, in her confused, terrified reminiscences of those days, could still see the tables on Rue Pavée, with their legs in the streams of the blood of September flowing from La Force! It was at one of these suppers that Monsieur de Varandeuil conceived a scheme that completely assured his immunity. He informed two of his neighbors at table, devoted patriots both, one of whom was on intimate terms with Chaumette, that he was in great embarrassment because his daughter had been privately baptized only, so that she had no civil status, and said that he would be very happy if Chaumette would have her entered on the registers of the municipality and honor her with a name selected by him from the Republican calendar of Greece or Rome. Chaumette at once arranged a meeting with this father, who had reached so high a level, as they said in those days. During the interview Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was taken into a closet where she found two women who were instructed to satisfy themselves as to her sex, and she showed them her breast. They then escorted her to the great Salle des Declarations, and there, after a metaphorical allocution, Chaumette baptized her Sempronie; a name which habit was destined to fasten upon Mademoiselle de Varandeuil and which she never abandoned.
Somewhat protected and reassured by that episode, the family passed through the terrible days preceding the fall of Robespierre. At last came the ninth Thermidor and deliverance. But poverty was none the less a pressing fact in the Varandeuil household. They had not lived through the bitter days of the Revolution, they were not to live through the wretched days of the Directory without unhoped-for succor, money sent by Providence by the hand of Folly. The father and the two children could hardly have existed without the income from four shares in the Vaudeville, an investment which Monsieur de Varandeuil was happily inspired to make in 1791, and which proved to be the best of all possible investments in those years of death, when people felt the need of forgetting death every evening—in those days of supreme agony, when everyone wished to laugh his last laugh at the latest song. Soon these shares, added to the amount of some outstanding claims that were paid, provided the family with something more than bread. They thereupon left the eaves of the Hôtel du Petit-Charolais and took a small suite in the Marais, on Rue du Chaume.
No change took place, however, in the habits of the household. The daughter continued to wait upon her father and brother. Monsieur de Varandeuil had gradually become accustomed to see in her only the woman indicated by her costume and by the work that she did. The father's eyes did not care to recognize a daughter in that servant's garb and in her performance of menial occupations. She was no longer a person with his blood in her veins or who had the honor to belong to him: she was a servant; and his selfishness confirmed him so fully in that idea and in his harsh treatment of her, he found that filial, affectionate, respectful service,—which cost nothing at all, by the way,—so convenient, that it cost him a bitter pang to give it up later, when a little more money mended the family fortunes: battles had to be fought to induce him to take a maid to fill his child's place and to relieve the girl from the most humiliating domestic labor.
They were without information concerning Madame de Varandeuil, who had refused to join her husband at Paris during the early years of the Revolution; at last they learned that she had married again in Germany, producing, as a certificate of her husband's death, the death certificate of his guillotined brother, the baptismal name having been changed. The girl grew up, therefore, abandoned, without affection, with no mother except a woman dead to her family, whom her father taught her to despise. Her childhood was passed in constant anxiety, in the privations that wear life away, in the fatigue resulting from labor that exhausted the strength of a sickly child, in an expectation of death that became, at last, an impatient longing to die: there had been hours when that girl of thirteen was tempted to do as many women did in those days—to open the door and rush into the street, crying: Vive le roi! in order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation of her childhood with less tragic motives of weariness. She had to submit to the ill humor, the exactions, the bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her father, which had been hitherto somewhat curbed and restrained by the great tempest of the time. She was still doomed to undergo the fatigues and humiliations of a servant. She remained alone with her father, kept down and humbled, shut out from his arms and his kisses, her heart heavy with grief because she longed to love and had nothing to love. She was beginning to suffer from the cold void that is formed about a woman by an unattractive, unfascinating girlhood, by a girlhood devoid of beauty and sympathetic charm. She could see that she aroused a sort of compassion with her long nose, her yellow complexion, her angular figure, her thin body. She felt that she was ugly, and that her ugliness was made repulsive by her miserable costumes, her dismal, woolen dresses which she made herself, her father paying for the material only after much grumbling: she could not induce him to make her a small allowance for her toilet until she was thirty-five.
How sad and bitter and lonely for her was her life with that morose, sour old man, who was always scolding and complaining at home, affable only in society, and who left her every evening to go to the great houses that were reopened under the Directory and at the beginning of the Empire! Only at very long intervals did he take her out, and when he did, it was always to that everlasting Vaudeville, where he had boxes. Even on those rare occasions, his daughter was terrified. She trembled all the time that she was with him; she was afraid of his violent disposition, of the tone of the old régime that his outbreaks of wrath had retained, of the facility with which he would raise his cane at an insolent remark from the canaille. On almost every occasion there were scenes with the manager, wordy disputes with people in the pit, and threats of personal violence to which she put an end by lowering the curtain of the box. The same thing was kept up in the street, even in the cab, with the driver, who would refuse to carry them at Monsieur de Varandeuil's price and would keep them waiting one hour, two hours without moving; sometimes would unharness his horse in his wrath and leave him in the vehicle with his daughter who would vainly implore him to submit and pay the price demanded.
Considering that these diversions should suffice for Sempronie, and having, moreover, a jealous desire to have her all to himself and always under his hand, Monsieur de Varandeuil allowed her to form no intimacies with anybody. He did not take her into society; he did not take her to the houses of their kinsfolk who returned after the emigration, except on days of formal receptions or family gatherings. He kept her closely confined to the house: not until she was forty did he consider that she was old enough to be allowed to go out alone. Thus, the girl had no friendship, no connection of any sort to lean upon; indeed, she no longer had her younger brother with her, as he had gone to the United States and enlisted in the American navy.
She was forbidden by her father to marry, he did not admit that she would allow herself even to think of marrying and deserting him; all the suitors who might have come forward he fought and rejected in advance, in order not to leave his daughter the courage to speak to him on the subject, if the occasion should ever arise.
Meanwhile our victories were stripping Italy of her treasures. The masterpieces of Rome, Florence and Venice were hurrying to Paris. Italian art was at a premium. Collectors no longer took pride in any paintings but those of the Italian school. Monsieur de Varandeuil saw an opening for a fortune in this change of taste. He, also, had fallen a victim to the artistic dilettantism which was one of the refined passions of the nobility before the Revolution. He had lived in the society of artists and collectors; he admired pictures. It occurred to him to collect a gallery of Italian works and then to sell them. Paris was still overrun with the objects of art sold and scattered under the Terror. Monsieur de Varandeuil began to walk back and forth through the streets—they were the markets for large canvases in those days,—and at every step he made a discovery; every day he purchased something. Soon the small apartment was crowded with old, black paintings, so large for the most part that the walls would not hold them with their frames, with the result that there was no room for the furniture. These were christened Raphael, Vinci, or Andrea del Sarto; there were none but chefs d'œuvre, and the father would keep his daughter standing in front of them hours at a time, forcing his admiration upon her, wearying her with his ecstatic flights. He would ascend from epithet to epithet, would work himself into a state of intoxication, of delirium, and would end by thinking that he was negotiating with an imaginary purchaser, would dispute with him over the price of a masterpiece, and would cry out: "A hundred thousand francs for my Rosso! yes, monsieur, a hundred thousand francs!" His daughter, dismayed by the large amount of money that those great, ugly things, in which there were so many nude men, deducted from the housekeeping supply, ventured upon remonstrance and tried to check such ruinous extravagance. Monsieur de Varandeuil lost his temper, waxed wroth like a man who was ashamed to find one of his blood so deficient in taste, and told her that that was her fortune and that she would see later if he was an old fool. At last she induced him to realize. The sale took place; it was a failure, one of the most complete shipwrecks of illusions that the glazed hall of the Hôtel Bullion has ever seen. Stung to the quick, furious with rage at this blow, which not only involved pecuniary loss and a serious inroad upon his little fortune, but was also a direct denial of his claims to connoisseurship, a slap at his knowledge of art delivered upon the cheek of his Raphaels, Monsieur de Varandeuil informed his daughter that they were too poor to remain in Paris and that they must go into the provinces to live. Having been cradled and reared in an epoch little adapted to inspire a love of country life in women, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil tried vainly to combat her father's resolution: she was obliged to go with him wherever he chose to go, and, by leaving Paris, to lose the society and friendship of two young kinswomen, to whom, in their too infrequent interviews, she had partly given her confidence, and whose hearts she had felt reaching out to her as to an older sister.
Monsieur de Varandeuil hired a small house at L'Isle-Adam. There he was near familiar scenes, in the atmosphere of what was formerly a little court, close at hand to two or three châteaux, whose owners he knew, and which were beginning to throw open their doors once more. Then, too, since the Revolution a little community of well-to-do bourgeois, rich shopkeepers, had settled upon this territory which once belonged to the Contis. The name of Monsieur de Varandeuil sounded very grand in the ears of all those good people. They bowed very low to him, they contended for the honor of entertaining him, they listened respectfully, almost devoutly, to the stories he told of society as it was. And thus, flattered, caressed, honored as a relic of Versailles, he had the place of honor and the prestige of a lord among them. When he dined with Madame Mutel, a former baker, who had forty thousand francs a year, the hostess left the table, silk dress and all, to go and fry the oyster plants herself: Monsieur de Varandeuil did not like them except as she cooked them. But Monsieur de Varandeuil's decision to go into retirement at L'Isle-Adam was mainly due, not to the pleasant surroundings there, but to a project that he had formed. He had gone thither to obtain leisure for a monumental work. That which he had been unable to do for the honor and glory of Italian art by his collection, he proposed to do by his pen. He had learned a little Italian with his wife; he took it into his head to present Vasari's Lives of the Painters to the French public, to translate it with the assistance of his daughter, who, when she was very small, had heard her mother's maid speak Italian and had retained a few words. He plunged the girl into Vasari, he locked up her time and her thoughts in grammars, dictionaries, commentaries, all the works of all the scholiasts of Italian art, kept her bending double over the ungrateful toil, the ennui and labor of translating Italian words, groping in the darkness of her imperfect knowledge. The whole burden of the book fell upon her; when he had laid out her task, he would leave her tête-à-tête with the volumes bound in white vellum, to go and ramble about the neighborhood, paying visits, gambling at some château or dining among the bourgeois of his acquaintance, to whom he would complain pathetically of the laborious effort that the vast undertaking of his translation entailed upon him. He would return home, listen to the reading of the translation made during the day, make comments and critical remarks, and upset a sentence to give it a different meaning, which his daughter would eliminate again when he had gone; then he would resume his walks and jaunts, like a man who has well earned his leisure, walking very erect, with his hat under his arm and dainty pumps on his feet, enjoying himself, the sky and the trees and Rousseau's God, gentle to all nature and loving to the plants. From time to time fits of impatience, common to children and old men, would overtake him; he would demand a certain number of pages for the next day, and would compel his daughter to sit up half the night.
Two or three years passed in this labor, in which Sempronie's eyes were ruined at last. She lived entombed in her father's Vasari, more entirely alone than ever, holding aloof through innate, haughty repugnance from the bourgeois ladies of L'Isle-Adam and their manners à la Madame Angot, and too poorly clad to visit at the châteaux. For her, there was no pleasure, no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned by her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He tore up the flowers that she planted secretly in the garden. He would have nothing there but vegetables and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced the Convention to convert the Tuileries into a potato field. Her only enjoyment was when her father, at very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of her two young friends for a week—a week which would have been seven days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her father embittered its joys, its diversions, its fêtes, with his always threatening outbreaks, his ill-humor always armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about trifles—a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked for to place in her friend's room, a dish for her dinner, or a place to which she wished to take her.
At L'Isle-Adam Monsieur de Varandeuil had hired a servant, who almost immediately became his mistress. A child was born of this connection, and the father, in his cynical indifference, was shameless enough to have it brought up under his daughter's eyes. As the years rolled on the woman acquired a firm foothold in the house. She ended by ruling the household, father and daughter alike. The day came when Monsieur de Varandeuil chose to have her sit at his table and be served by Sempronie. That was too much. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil rebelled under the insult, and drew herself up to the full height of her indignation. Secretly, silently, in misery and isolation, harshly treated by the people and the things about her, the girl had built up a resolute, straightforward character; tears had tempered instead of softening it. Beneath filial docility and humility, beneath passive obedience, beneath apparent gentleness of disposition, she concealed a character of iron, a man's strength of will, one of those hearts which nothing bends and which never bend themselves. When her father demanded that she lower herself to that extent, she reminded him that she was his daughter, she reviewed her whole life, cast, in a flood of words, the shame and the reproach of it in his face, and concluded by informing him that if that woman did not leave the house that very evening, she would leave it, and that she should have no difficulty in living, thank God! wherever she might go, with the simple tastes he had forced upon her. The father, thunderstruck and bewildered by this revolt, yielded and dismissed the servant; but he retained a dastardly sort of rancor against his daughter on account of the sacrifice she had extorted from him. His spleen betrayed itself in sharp, aggressive words, ironical thanks and bitter smiles. Sempronie's only revenge was to attend to his wants more thoroughly, more gently, more patiently than ever. Her devotion was destined to be subjected to one final test; the old man had a stroke of apoplexy which left him with one whole side of his body stiff and dead, lame in one leg, and asleep so far as his intelligence was concerned, although keenly conscious of his misfortune and of his dependence upon his daughter. Thereupon, all the evil that lay dormant in the depths of his nature was aroused and let loose. His selfishness amounted to ferocity. Under the torment of his suffering and his weakness, he became a sort of malevolent madman. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil devoted her days and her nights to the invalid, who seemed to hate her for her attentions, to be humiliated by her care as if it implied generosity and forgiveness, to suffer torments at seeing always by his side, indefatigable and kindly, that image of duty. But what a life it was! She had to contend against the miserable man's incurable ennui, to be always ready to bear him company, to lead him about and support him all day long. She must play cards with him when he was at home, and not let him win or lose too much. She must combat his wishes, his gormandizing tendencies, take dishes away from him, and, in connection with everything that he wanted, endure complaints, reproaches, insults, tears, mad despair, and the outbursts of childish anger in which helpless old men indulge. And this lasted ten years! ten years, during which Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had no other recreation, no other consolation than to pour out all the tenderness and warmth of a maternal affection upon one of her two young friends, recently married,—her chick, as she called her. It was Mademoiselle de Varandeuil's delight to go and pass a short time every fortnight in that happy household. She would kiss the pretty child, already in its cradle and asleep for the night when she arrived; she would dine at racing speed; at dessert she would send for a carriage and would hasten away like a tardy schoolboy. But in the last years of her father's life she could not even obtain permission to dine out: the old man would no longer sanction such a long absence and kept her almost constantly beside him, repeating again and again that he was well aware that it was not amusing to take care of an infirm old man like himself, but that she would soon be rid of him. He died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no words but these for her who had been his daughter nearly forty years: "I know that you never loved me!"
Two years before her father's death, Sempronie's brother had returned from America. He brought with him a colored woman who had nursed him through the yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he had had by the woman before marrying her. Although she was imbued with the ideas of the old régime as to the blacks, and although she looked upon that ignorant creature, with her negro jargon, her grin like a wild beast's and her skin that left grease stains upon her clothing, as no better than a monkey, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil combated her father's horror and unwillingness to receive his daughter-in-law; and she it was who induced him, in the last days of his life, to allow her brother to present his wife to him. When her father was dead she reflected that her brother's household was all that remained of the family.