Authors: Elizabeth Gaskell
"I sat with her constantly for many days; but she never spoke of Clement.
She forced herself to talk of the little occurrences of Parisian society
in former days: she tried to be conversational and agreeable, and to
betray no anxiety or even interest in the object of Clement's journey;
and, as far as unremitting efforts could go, she succeeded. But the
tones of her voice were sharp and yet piteous, as if she were in constant
pain; and the glance of her eye hurried and fearful, as if she dared not
let it rest on any object.
"In a week we heard of Clement's safe arrival on the French coast. He
sent a letter to this effect by the captain of the smuggler, when the
latter returned. We hoped to hear again; but week after week elapsed,
and there was no news of Clement. I had told Lord Ludlow, in Madame de
Crequy's presence, as he and I had arranged, of the note I had received
from her son, informing us of his landing in France. She heard, but she
took no notice, and evidently began to wonder that we did not mention any
further intelligence of him in the same manner before her; and daily I
began to fear that her pride would give way, and that she would
supplicate for news before I had any to give her.
"One morning, on my awakening, my maid told me that Madame de Crequy had
passed a wretched night, and had bidden Medlicott (whom, as understanding
French, and speaking it pretty well, though with that horrid German
accent, I had put about her) request that I would go to madame's room as
soon as I was dressed.
"I knew what was coming, and I trembled all the time they were doing my
hair, and otherwise arranging me. I was not encouraged by my lord's
speeches. He had heard the message, and kept declaring that he would
rather be shot than have to tell her that there was no news of her son;
and yet he said, every now and then, when I was at the lowest pitch of
uneasiness, that he never expected to hear again: that some day soon we
should see him walking in and introducing Mademoiselle de Crequy to us.
"However at last I was ready, and go I must.
"Her eyes were fixed on the door by which I entered. I went up to the
bedside. She was not rouged,—she had left it off now for several
days,—she no longer attempted to keep up the vain show of not feeling,
and loving, and fearing.
"For a moment or two she did not speak, and I was glad of the respite.
"'Clement?' she said at length, covering her mouth with a handkerchief
the minute she had spoken, that I might not see it quiver.
"'There has been no news since the first letter, saying how well the
voyage was performed, and how safely he had landed—near Dieppe, you
know,' I replied as cheerfully as possible. 'My lord does not expect
that we shall have another letter; he thinks that we shall see him soon.'
"There was no answer. As I looked, uncertain whether to do or say more,
she slowly turned herself in bed, and lay with her face to the wall; and,
as if that did not shut out the light of day and the busy, happy world
enough, she put out her trembling hands, and covered her face with her
handkerchief. There was no violence: hardly any sound.
"I told her what my lord had said about Clement's coming in some day, and
taking us all by surprise. I did not believe it myself, but it was just
possible,—and I had nothing else to say. Pity, to one who was striving
so hard to conceal her feelings, would have been impertinent. She let me
talk; but she did not reply. She knew that my words were vain and idle,
and had no root in my belief; as well as I did myself.
"I was very thankful when Medlicott came in with Madame's breakfast, and
gave me an excuse for leaving.
"But I think that conversation made me feel more anxious and impatient
than ever. I felt almost pledged to Madame de Crequy for the fulfilment
of the vision I had held out. She had taken entirely to her bed by this
time: not from illness, but because she had no hope within her to stir
her up to the effort of dressing. In the same way she hardly cared for
food. She had no appetite,—why eat to prolong a life of despair? But
she let Medlicott feed her, sooner than take the trouble of resisting.
"And so it went on,—for weeks, months—I could hardly count the time, it
seemed so long. Medlicott told me she noticed a preternatural
sensitiveness of ear in Madame de Crequy, induced by the habit of
listening silently for the slightest unusual sound in the house.
Medlicott was always a minute watcher of any one whom she cared about;
and, one day, she made me notice by a sign madame's acuteness of hearing,
although the quick expectation was but evinced for a moment in the turn
of the eye, the hushed breath—and then, when the unusual footstep turned
into my lord's apartments, the soft quivering sigh, and the closed
eyelids.
"At length the intendant of the De Crequy estates—the old man, you will
remember, whose information respecting Virginie de Crequy first gave
Clement the desire to return to Paris,—came to St. James's Square, and
begged to speak to me. I made haste to go down to him in the
housekeeper's room, sooner than that he should be ushered into mine, for
fear of madame hearing any sound.
"The old man stood—I see him now—with his hat held before him in both
his hands; he slowly bowed till his face touched it when I came in. Such
long excess of courtesy augured ill. He waited for me to speak.
"'Have you any intelligence?' I inquired. He had been often to the house
before, to ask if we had received any news; and once or twice I had seen
him, but this was the first time he had begged to see me.
"'Yes, madame,' he replied, still standing with his head bent down, like
a child in disgrace.
"'And it is bad!' I exclaimed.
"'It is bad.' For a moment I was angry at the cold tone in which my
words were echoed; but directly afterwards I saw the large, slow, heavy
tears of age falling down the old man's cheeks, and on to the sleeves of
his poor, threadbare coat.
"I asked him how he had heard it: it seemed as though I could not all at
once bear to hear what it was. He told me that the night before, in
crossing Long Acre, he had stumbled upon an old acquaintance of his; one
who, like himself had been a dependent upon the De Crequy family, but had
managed their Paris affairs, while Flechier had taken charge of their
estates in the country. Both were now emigrants, and living on the
proceeds of such small available talents as they possessed. Flechier, as
I knew, earned a very fair livelihood by going about to dress salads for
dinner parties. His compatriot, Le Febvre, had begun to give a few
lessons as a dancing-master. One of them took the other home to his
lodgings; and there, when their most immediate personal adventures had
been hastily talked over, came the inquiry from Flechier as to Monsieur
de Crequy
"'Clement was dead—guillotined. Virginie was dead—guillotined.'
"When Flechier had told me thus much, he could not speak for sobbing; and
I, myself, could hardly tell how to restrain my tears sufficiently, until
I could go to my own room and be at liberty to give way. He asked my
leave to bring in his friend Le Febvre, who was walking in the square,
awaiting a possible summons to tell his story. I heard afterwards a good
many details, which filled up the account, and made me feel—which brings
me back to the point I started from—how unfit the lower orders are for
being trusted indiscriminately with the dangerous powers of education. I
have made a long preamble, but now I am coming to the moral of my story."
My lady was trying to shake off the emotion which she evidently felt in
recurring to this sad history of Monsieur de Crequy's death. She came
behind me, and arranged my pillows, and then, seeing I had been
crying—for, indeed, I was weak-spirited at the time, and a little served
to unloose my tears—she stooped down, and kissed my forehead, and said
"Poor child!" almost as if she thanked me for feeling that old grief of
hers.
"Being once in France, it was no difficult thing for Clement to get into
Paris. The difficulty in those days was to leave, not to enter. He came
in dressed as a Norman peasant, in charge of a load of fruit and
vegetables, with which one of the Seine barges was freighted. He worked
hard with his companions in landing and arranging their produce on the
quays; and then, when they dispersed to get their breakfasts at some of
the estaminets near the old Marche aux Fleurs, he sauntered up a street
which conducted him, by many an odd turn, through the Quartier Latin to a
horrid back alley, leading out of the Rue l'Ecole de Medecine; some
atrocious place, as I have heard, not far from the shadow of that
terrible Abbaye, where so many of the best blood of France awaited their
deaths. But here some old man lived, on whose fidelity Clement thought
that he might rely. I am not sure if he had not been gardener in those
very gardens behind the Hotel Crequy where Clement and Urian used to play
together years before. But whatever the old man's dwelling might be,
Clement was only too glad to reach it, you may be sure, he had been kept
in Normandy, in all sorts of disguises, for many days after landing in
Dieppe, through the difficulty of entering Paris unsuspected by the many
ruffians who were always on the look-out for aristocrats.
"The old gardener was, I believe, both faithful and tried, and sheltered
Clement in his garret as well as might be. Before he could stir out, it
was necessary to procure a fresh disguise, and one more in character with
an inhabitant of Paris than that of a Norman carter was procured; and
after waiting in-doors for one or two days, to see if any suspicion was
excited, Clement set off to discover Virginie.
"He found her at the old concierge's dwelling. Madame Babette was the
name of this woman, who must have been a less faithful—or rather,
perhaps, I should say, a more interested—friend to her guest than the
old gardener Jaques was to Clement.
"I have seen a miniature of Virginie, which a French lady of quality
happened to have in her possession at the time of her flight from Paris,
and which she brought with her to England unwittingly; for it belonged to
the Count de Crequy, with whom she was slightly acquainted. I should
fancy from it, that Virginie was taller and of a more powerful figure for
a woman than her cousin Clement was for a man. Her dark-brown hair was
arranged in short curls—the way of dressing the hair announced the
politics of the individual, in those days, just as patches did in my
grandmother's time; and Virginie's hair was not to my taste, or according
to my principles: it was too classical. Her large, black eyes looked out
at you steadily. One cannot judge of the shape of a nose from a full-
face miniature, but the nostrils were clearly cut and largely opened. I
do not fancy her nose could have been pretty; but her mouth had a
character all its own, and which would, I think, have redeemed a plainer
face. It was wide, and deep set into the cheeks at the corners; the
upper lip was very much arched, and hardly closed over the teeth; so that
the whole face looked (from the serious, intent look in the eyes, and the
sweet intelligence of the mouth) as if she were listening eagerly to
something to which her answer was quite ready, and would come out of
those red, opening lips as soon as ever you had done speaking, and you
longed to know what she would say.
"Well: this Virginie de Crequy was living with Madame Babette in the
conciergerie of an old French inn, somewhere to the north of Paris, so,
far enough from Clement's refuge. The inn had been frequented by farmers
from Brittany and such kind of people, in the days when that sort of
intercourse went on between Paris and the provinces which had nearly
stopped now. Few Bretons came near it now, and the inn had fallen into
the hands of Madame Babette's brother, as payment for a bad wine debt of
the last proprietor. He put his sister and her child in, to keep it
open, as it were, and sent all the people he could to occupy the half-
furnished rooms of the house. They paid Babette for their lodging every
morning as they went out to breakfast, and returned or not as they chose,
at night. Every three days, the wine-merchant or his son came to Madame
Babette, and she accounted to them for the money she had received. She
and her child occupied the porter's office (in which the lad slept at
nights) and a little miserable bed-room which opened out of it, and
received all the light and air that was admitted through the door of
communication, which was half glass. Madame Babette must have had a kind
of attachment for the De Crequys—her De Crequys, you
understand—Virginie's father, the Count; for, at some risk to herself,
she had warned both him and his daughter of the danger impending over
them. But he, infatuated, would not believe that his dear Human Race
could ever do him harm; and, as long as he did not fear, Virginie was not
afraid. It was by some ruse, the nature of which I never heard, that
Madame Babette induced Virginie to come to her abode at the very hour in
which the Count had been recognized in the streets, and hurried off to
the Lanterne. It was after Babette had got her there, safe shut up in
the little back den, that she told her what had befallen her father. From
that day, Virginie had never stirred out of the gates, or crossed the
threshold of the porter's lodge. I do not say that Madame Babette was
tired of her continual presence, or regretted the impulse which made her
rush to the De Crequy's well-known house—after being compelled to form
one of the mad crowds that saw the Count de Crequy seized and hung—and
hurry his daughter out, through alleys and backways, until at length she
had the orphan safe in her own dark sleeping-room, and could tell her
tale of horror: but Madame Babette was poorly paid for her porter's work
by her avaricious brother; and it was hard enough to find food for
herself and her growing boy; and, though the poor girl ate little enough,
I dare say, yet there seemed no end to the burthen that Madame Babette
had imposed upon herself: the De Crequys were plundered, ruined, had
become an extinct race, all but a lonely friendless girl, in broken
health and spirits; and, though she lent no positive encouragement to his
suit, yet, at the time, when Clement reappeared in Paris, Madame Babette
was beginning to think that Virginie might do worse than encourage the
attentions of Monsieur Morin Fils, her nephew, and the wine merchant's
son. Of course, he and his father had the entree into the conciergerie
of the hotel that belonged to them, in right of being both proprietors
and relations. The son, Morin, had seen Virginie in this manner. He was
fully aware that she was far above him in rank, and guessed from her
whole aspect that she had lost her natural protectors by the terrible
guillotine; but he did not know her exact name or station, nor could he
persuade his aunt to tell him. However, he fell head over ears in love
with her, whether she were princess or peasant; and though at first there
was something about her which made his passionate love conceal itself
with shy, awkward reserve, and then made it only appear in the guise of
deep, respectful devotion; yet, by-and-by,—by the same process of
reasoning, I suppose, that his aunt had gone through even before him—Jean
Morin began to let Hope oust Despair from his heart. Sometimes he
thought—perhaps years hence—that solitary, friendless lady, pent up in
squalor, might turn to him as to a friend and comforter—and then—and
then—. Meanwhile Jean Morin was most attentive to his aunt, whom he had
rather slighted before. He would linger over the accounts; would bring
her little presents; and, above all, he made a pet and favourite of
Pierre, the little cousin, who could tell him about all the ways of going
on of Mam'selle Cannes, as Virginie was called. Pierre was thoroughly
aware of the drift and cause of his cousin's inquiries; and was his
ardent partisan, as I have heard, even before Jean Morin had exactly
acknowledged his wishes to himself.