XXIII

ONE OF THE DISEASES OF THE AGE

Such conduct implied a plan, and Madame Schontz had, as you may well believe, a plan.  Jealous for the last two years of Madame du Bruel, she was consumed with the ambition to be married by church and mayor.  All social positions have their forbidden fruit, some little thing magnified by desire until it has become the weightiest thing in life.  This ambition of course involved a second Arthur; but no espial on the part of those about her had as yet discovered Rochefide’s secret rival.  Bixiou fancied he saw the favored one in Leon de Lora; the painter saw him in Bixiou, who had passed his fortieth year and ought to be making himself a fate of some kind.  Suspicions were also turned on Victor de Vernisset, a poet of the school of Canalis, whose passion for Madame Schontz was desperate; but the poet accused Stidmann, a young sculptor, of being his fortune rival.  This artist, a charming lad, worked for jewellers, for manufacturers in bronze and silver-smiths; he longed to be another Benvenuto Cellini.  Claude Vignon, the young Comte de la Palferine, Gobenheim, Vermanton a cynical philosopher, all frequenters of this amusing salon, were severally suspected, and proved innocent.  No one had fathomed Madame Schontz, certainly not Rochefide, who thought she had a penchant for the young and witty La Palferine; she was virtuous from self-interest and was wholly bent on making a good marriage.

Only one man of equivocal reputation was ever seen in Madame Schontz’s salon, namely Couture, who had more than once made his brother speculators howl; but Couture had been one of Madame Schontz’s earliest friends, and she alone remained faithful to him.  The false alarm of 1840 swept away the last vestige of this stock-gambler’s credit; Aurelie, seeing his run of ill-luck, made Rochefide play, as we have seen, in the other direction.  Thankful to find a place for himself at Aurelie’s table, Couture, to whom Finot, the cleverest or, if you choose, the luckiest of all parvenus, occasionally gave a note of a thousand francs, was alone wise and calculating enough to offer his hand and name to madame Schontz, who studied him to see if the bold speculator had sufficient power to make his way in politics and enough gratitude not to desert his wife.  Couture, a man about forty-three years of age, half worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant sonority of his name by birth; he said little of the authors of his days.

Madame Schontz was bemoaning to herself the rarity of eligible men, when Couture presented to her a provincial, supplied with the two handles by which women take hold of such pitchers when they wish to keep them.  To sketch this person will be to paint a portion of the youth of the day.  The digression is history.