M. and Mme. Mauperin were in their bed-room. The clock had just struck midnight, gravely and slowly, as though to emphasize the solemnity of that confidential and conjugal moment which is both the tÊte-À-tÊte of wedded life and the secret council of the household—that moment of transformation and magic which is both bourgeois and diabolic, and which reminds one of that story of the woman metamorphosed into a cat. The shadow of the bed falls mysteriously over the wife, and as she lies down there is a sort of charm about her. Something of the bewitchments of a mistress come to her at this instant. Her will seems to be roused there by the side of the marital will which is dormant. She sits up, scolds, sulks, teases, struggles. She has caresses and scratches for the man. The pillow confers on her its force, her strength comes to her with the night.

Mme. Mauperin was putting her hair in papers in front of the glass, which was lighted by a single candle. She was in her skirt and dressing-jacket. Her stout figure, above which her little arms kept moving as if she were crowning herself, threw on the wall a fantastic outline of a woman of fifty in deshabille, and on the paper at the end of the room could be seen wavering about one of those corpulent shadows which one could imagine Hoffman and Daumier sketching from the back of the beds of old married couples. M. Mauperin was already lying down.

"Louis!" said Mme. Mauperin.

"Well?" answered M. Mauperin, with that accent of indifference, regret, and weariness of a man who, with his eyes still open, is beginning to enjoy the delight of the horizontal position.

"Oh, if you are asleep——"

"I am not asleep. What is it?"

"Oh, nothing. I think RenÉe behaved most improperly this evening; that's all. Did you notice?"

"No, I wasn't paying any attention."

"It's just a whim. There isn't the least reason in it. Hasn't she said anything to you? Do you know anything? I'm nowhere—with all your mysteries and secrets. I'm always the last to know about things. It's quite different with you—you are told everything. It's very fortunate that I was not born jealous, don't you think so?"

M. Mauperin pulled the sheet up over his shoulder without answering.

"You certainly are asleep," continued Mme. Mauperin in the sharp, disappointed tone of a woman who is expecting a parry for her attack.

"I told you I wasn't asleep."

"Then you surely don't understand. Oh, these intelligent men—it's curious. It concerns you though, too; it's your business quite as much as mine. This is another marriage fallen through—do you understand? A marriage that was most suitable—money—good family—everything. I know what these hesitations mean. We may as well give up all idea of it. Henri was talking to me about it this evening; the young man hadn't said anything to him; of course, he's too well-bred for that. But Henri is quite persuaded that he's drawing out of it. One can always tell in matters of this kind; people have a way of——"

"Well, let him draw out of it then; what do you want me to say?" M. Mauperin sat straight up and put his two hands on his thighs. "Let him go. There are plenty of young men like Reverchon; he is not unique, we can find others; while girls like my daughter——"

"Good heavens! Your daughter—your daughter!"

"You don't do her justice, ThÉrÈse."

"I? Oh, yes, I do; but I see her as she is and not with your eyes. She has her faults, and great faults, too, which you have encouraged—yes, you. She is as heedless and full of freaks as a child of ten. If you imagine that it doesn't worry me—her unreasonableness, her uncertain moods, and so many other absurdities ever since we have been trying to get her married! And then her way of criticising every one to whom we introduce her. She is terrible at interviews of this kind. This makes about the tenth man she has sent about his business."

At Mme. Mauperin's last words a gleam of paternal vanity lighted up M. Mauperin's face.

"Yes, yes," he said, smiling at the remembrance, "the fact is she is diabolically witty. Do you recollect her words about that poor Prefect: 'Oh, he's a regular old cock!' I remember how she said it directly she saw him."

"It really is very funny, and above all very fit and proper. Jokes of this kind will help her to get married, take my word for it. Such things will induce other men to come forward, don't you think so? I am quite certain that RenÉe must have a reputation for being a terror. A little more of her precious wit and you will see what proposals you will get for your daughter! I married Henriette so easily! RenÉe is my cross."

M. Mauperin had picked up his snuff-box from the table by the side of the bed and appeared to be intent on turning it round between his thumb and first finger.

"Well," continued Mme. Mauperin, "it's her own lookout. When she is thirty, when she has refused every one, and there is no one left who wants her, in spite of all her wit, her good qualities and everything else, she will have time to reflect a little—and you will, too."

There was a pause. Mme. Mauperin gave M. Mauperin time enough to imagine that she had finished, and then changing her tone she began again:

"I want to speak to you, too, about your son——"

Hereupon M. Mauperin, whose head had been bent while his wife was talking, looked up, and there was a half smile of mischievous humour on his face. In the upper as well as the lower middle class there is a certain maternal love capable of rising to the height of passion and of sinking to mere idolatry. There are mothers who in their affection and love will fall down and worship their son. Theirs is not that maternal love which veils its own weaknesses, which defends its rights, is jealous of its duties, which is careful about the hierarchy and discipline of the family, and which commands respect and consideration. The child, brought near to his mother by all kinds of familiarity, receives from her attentions which are more like homage, and caresses in which there is a certain amount of servility. All the mother's dreams are centred in him, for he is not only the heir but the whole future of the family. Through him the family will reap the benefits of wealth, of all the improvements and progressive rise of the bourgeoisie from one generation to another. The mother revels in the thought of what he is and what he will be. She loves him and is glorified herself in him. She dedicates all her ambitions to him and worships him. This son appears to her a superior being, and she is amazed that he should have been born of her; she seems to feel the mingled pride and humility of the mother of a god.

Mme. Mauperin was a typical example of one of these mothers of modern middle-class life. The merits, the features, the intellect of her son were for her those of a divinity. His whole person, his accomplishments, everything he said and everything he did, all was sacred to her. She would spend her time in contemplation of him; she saw no one else when he was there. It seemed to her as though the whole world began and ended in her son. He was in her eyes perfection itself, the most intelligent, the handsomest, and, above all, the most distinguished of men. He was short-sighted and wore an eye-glass, but she would not even own that he was near-sighted.

When he was there she watched him talk, sit down or walk about, and she would smile at him when his back was turned. She liked the very creases of his coat. When he was not there she would lean back for a few minutes in her arm-chair and some reminiscence of infinite sweetness would gradually brighten and soften her face. It was as though light, restfulness, and peace had suddenly come to her; her expression was joyous at such times, her eyes were looking at something in the past, her heart was living over again some happy moment, and if any one spoke to her she seemed to wake up out of a dream.

It was in a certain measure hereditary, this intense maternal love. Mme. Mauperin came of a race which had always loved its sons with a warm, violent, and almost frenzied love. The mothers in her family had been mothers with a vengeance. There was a story told of her grandmother in the Haute-Marne. It was said that she had disfigured a child with a burning coal who had been considered handsomer than her own boy.

At the time of her son's first ailments Mme. Mauperin had almost lost her reason; she had hated all children who were well, and had hoped that God would kill them if her son died. Once when he had been seriously ill she had been forty-eight nights without going to bed, and her legs had swelled with fatigue. When he was about again he had been allowed anything and everything. If any one came to complain to her that he had been fighting with the village children she would say feelingly: "Poor little dear!" As the boy grew up his mother's spirit preceded him on his walk through life, strewing his pathway with hope as he emerged into manhood. She thought of all the heiresses in the neighbourhood whose age would be suitable to his. She used to imagine him visiting at all the country-houses, and she saw him on horseback, riding to the meet in a red coat. She used to be fairly dazzled by all her dreams of the future.

Then came the time when he went away to college, the time when she had to separate from him. Mme. Mauperin struggled for three months to keep her son, to have him educated at home by a tutor, but M. Mauperin was resolute on this score. All that Mme. Mauperin could obtain from him was the permission to select the college for her son. She chose one with the mildest discipline possible, one of those colleges for the children of wealthy parents, where there is no severity, where the boys are allowed to eat pastry when they are taking their walks, and where the professors believe in more theatrical rehearsals than punishments. During the seven years he was there, Mme. Mauperin never missed a single day going from Saint-Denis to see him during the recreation hour. Rain, cold, fatigue, illness, nothing prevented her. In the parlour or in the courtyard the other mothers pointed her out to each other. The boy would kiss her, take the cakes she had brought him, and then, telling her he had a lesson to finish learning, he would hurry back to his games. It was quite enough for his mother, though, for she had seen him and he was well. She was always thinking about his health. He was weighed down with flannel, and in the holidays she fed him well with meat, giving him all the gravy from underdone beef so that he should grow strong and tall. She bought him a small mat to sit on at school because the forms were so hard. There were separate bed-rooms for the pupils, and Mme. Mauperin furnished her son's like a man's room. At twelve years of age he had a rosewood dressing-table and chest of drawers of his own. The boy became a young man, the young man left college, and Mme. Mauperin's passion for him increased with all that satisfaction which a mother feels in a tall son when his looks begin to change and his beard makes its first appearance. Forgetting all about the tradespeople whose bills she had paid, she was amazed at the style in which her son dressed, at his boots, and the way in which he did his hair. There was a certain elegance of taste in everything that he liked, in his luxurious habits, in his ways, and in his whole life, to which she bowed down in astonishment and delight, as though she herself were not the mainspring of it all and his cashier. Her son's valet did not seem to her like an ordinary domestic; his horse was not merely a horse, it was her son's horse. When her son went out she gave orders that she should be told so that she might have the satisfaction of seeing him get into the carriage and drive away.

Every day she was more and more taken up with this son. She had no diversions, nothing to occupy her imagination; she did not read, and had grown old living with a husband who had brought her no love and whom she had always felt to be quite apart from her, engrossed as he had ever been in his studies, politics, and business. She had no one left with her but a daughter to whom she had never given her whole heart, and so she had ended by devoting her life to Henri's interests and putting all her vanity into his future. And her one thought—the thought which occupied every hour of her days and nights, her fixed idea—was the marriage of this adored son. She wanted him to marry well, to make a match which should be rich enough and brilliant enough to make up to her and repay her for all the dulness and obscurity of her own existence, for her life of economy and solitude, for all her own privations as wife and mother.

"Do you even know your son's age, M. Mauperin?" continued Mme. Mauperin.

"Henri, why, my dear, Henri must be—He was born in 1826, wasn't he?"

"Oh, that's just like a father to ask! Yes, 1826, the 12th of July, 1826."

"Well, then, he is twenty-nine. Fancy that now, he is twenty-nine!"

"And you fold your arms and take things easily! You don't trouble in the least about his future! You say, 'Fancy that now, he's twenty-nine'—just like that, quite calmly! Any other man would stir himself and look round. Henri isn't like his sister, he wants to marry. Have you ever thought of finding a suitable match for him—a wife? Oh, dear, no, not any more than for the King of Prussia, of course not! It's just the same as it was for your elder daughter. I should like to know what you did towards that marriage? Whether she found any one or not, it appeared to be all the same to you. How I did have to urge you on to do anything in the matter! Oh, you can wipe your hands of that marriage; your daughter's happiness can't weigh much on your conscience, I should think! If I had not been there you would have found a husband like M. Davarande, shouldn't you? A model husband, who adores Henriette—and such a gentleman!"

Mme. Mauperin blew out the candle and got into bed by the side of M. Mauperin, who had turned over with his face towards the wall.

"Yes," she went on, stretching herself out full length under the sheets, "a model husband! Do you imagine that there are many sons-in-law who would be so attentive to us? He would do anything to give us pleasure. You invite him to dinner and give him meat on fasting-days and he never says a word. Then, too, he is so obliging. I wanted to match some wools for my tapestry-work the other day——"

"My dear, what is it we were talking about? I must tell you that I should like to get a bit of sleep to-night. You began with your daughter, and now you've started the chapter of M. Davarande's perfections. I know that chapter—there's enough to last till to-morrow morning. Come now, you want your son to marry, don't you? That's it, isn't it? Well, I'm quite willing—let's get him married."

"Just as though I could count on you for getting him married! A lot of trouble you'll go to about it; you are the right sort of man to inconvenience yourself for anything."

"Oh, come, come, my dear, that's unjust. It seems to me that about a fortnight ago I showed you what I was capable of. To go and listen to the dullest of operas, to eat ices at night, which is a thing I detest, and to talk about the weather with a provincial man who shouted about his daughter's dowry on the boulevards. If you don't call that inconveniencing myself! I suppose you'll say it didn't come to anything? Was it my fault, though, if the gentleman wanted 'a handsome, manly husband,' as he put it, for his daughter? Is it my fault and mine only if our son has not the frame of a Hercules?"

"M. Mauperin——"

"Oh, yes, it is, of course. I am to blame for everything, according to you. You would make me pass everywhere for a selfish——"

"Oh, you are like all men!"

"Thank you on behalf of them all."

"No, it's in your character—it's no good blaming you. It's only the mothers who worry. Ah, if you were only like I am; if at every instant you were thinking of what might happen to a young man. I know Henri is sensible; but a young man's fancy is so quickly caught. It might be some worthless creature—some bad lot—one never knows—such things happen every day. I should go mad! What do you say to sounding Mme. RosiÈres? Shall we?"

There was no reply, and Mme. Mauperin was obliged to resign herself to silence. She turned over and over, but could not sleep until daylight appeared.

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