The Collection of Antiquities

Du Croisier, under stress of painful agitation, strode up and down his drawing-room; while his wife, in no less agitation, awaited the result of this exercise. Du Croisier at length rang the bell.

“I am not at home to any one to-night,” he said, when the man appeared; “shut the gates; and if any one calls, tell them that your mistress and I have gone into the country. We shall start directly after dinner, and dinner must be half an hour earlier than usual.”

The great news was discussed that evening in every drawing-room; little shopkeepers, working folk, beggars, the noblesse, the merchant class – the whole town, in short, was talking of the Comte d’Esgrignon’s arrest on a charge of forgery. The Comte d’Esgrignon would be tried in the Assize Court; he would be condemned and branded. Most of those who cared for the honor of the family denied the fact. At nightfall Chesnel went to Mme. Camusot and escorted the stranger to the Hotel d’Esgrignon. Poor Mlle. Armande was expecting him; she led the fair Duchess to her own room, which she had given up to her, for his lordship the Bishop occupied Victurnien’s chamber; and, left alone with her guest, the noble woman glanced at the Duchess with most piteous eyes.

“You owed help, indeed, madame, to the poor boy who ruined himself for your sake,” she said, “the boy to whom we are all of us sacrificing ourselves.”

The Duchess had already made a woman’s survey of Mlle. d’Esgrignon’s room; the cold, bare, comfortless chamber, that might have been a nun’s cell, was like a picture of the life of the heroic woman before her. The Duchess saw it all – past, present, and future – with rising emotion, felt the incongruity of her presence, and could not keep back the falling tears that made answer for her.

But in Mlle. Armande the Christian overcame Victurnien’s aunt. “Ah, I was wrong; forgive me, Mme. la Duchesse; you did not know how poor we were, and my nephew was incapable of the admission. And besides, now that I see you, I can understand all – even the crime!”

And Mlle. Armande, withered and thin and white, but beautiful as those tall austere slender figures which German art alone can paint, had tears too in her eyes.

“Do not fear, dear angel,” the Duchess said at last; “he is safe.”

“Yes, but honor? – and his career? Chesnel told me; the King knows the truth.”

“We will think of a way of repairing the evil,” said the Duchess.

Mlle. Armande went downstairs to the salon, and found the Collection of Antiquities complete to a man. Every one of them had come, partly to do honor to the Bishop, partly to rally round the Marquis; but Chesnel, posted in the antechamber, warned each new arrival to say no word of the affair, that the aged Marquis might never know that such a thing had been. The loyal Frank was quite capable of killing his son or du Croisier; for either the one or the other must have been guilty of death in his eyes. It chanced, strangely enough, that he talked more of Victurnien than usual; he was glad that his son had gone back to Paris. The King would give Victurnien a place before very long; the King was interesting himself at last in the d’Esgrignons. And his friends, their hearts dead within them, praised Victurnien’s conduct to the skies. Mlle. Armande prepared the way for her nephew’s sudden appearance among them by remarking to her brother that Victurnien would be sure to come to see them, and that he must be even then on his way.

“Bah!” said the Marquis, standing with his back to the hearth, “if he is doing well where he is, he ought to stay there, and not be thinking of the joy it would give his old father to see him again. The King’s service has the first claim.”

Scarcely one of those present heard the words without a shudder. Justice might give over a d’Esgrignon to the executioner’s branding iron. There was a dreadful pause. The old Marquise de Casteran could not keep back a tear that stole down over her rouge, and turned her head away to hide it.

Next day at noon, in the sunny weather, a whole excited population was dispersed in groups along the high street, which ran through the heart of the town, and nothing was talked of but the great affair. Was the Count in prison or was he not? – All at once the Comte d’Esgrignon’s well-known tilbury was seen driving down the Rue Saint-Blaise; it had evidently come from the Prefecture, the Count himself was on the box seat, and by his side sat a charming young man, whom nobody recognized. The pair were laughing and talking and in great spirits. They wore Bengal roses in their button-holes. Altogether, it was a theatrical surprise which words fail to describe.

At ten o’clock the court had decided to dismiss the charge, stating their very sufficient reasons for setting the Count at liberty, in a document which contained a thunderbolt for du Croisier, in the shape of an inasmuch that gave the Count the right to institute proceedings for libel. Old Chesnel was walking up the Grand Rue, as if by accident, telling all who cared to hear him that du Croisier had set the most shameful of snares for the d’Esgrignons’ honor, and that it was entirely owing to the forbearance and magnanimity of the family that he was not prosecuted for slander.

On the evening of that famous day, after the Marquis d’Esgrignon had gone to bed, the Count, Mlle. Armande, and the Chevalier were left with the handsome young page, now about to return to Paris. The charming cavalier’s sex could not be hidden from the Chevalier, and he alone, besides the three officials and Mme. Camusot, knew that the Duchess had been among them.

“The house is saved,” began Chesnel, “but after this shock it will take a hundred years to rise again. The debts must be paid now; you must marry an heiress, M. le Comte, there is nothing left for you to do.”

“And take her where you may find her,” said the Duchess.

“A second mesalliance!” exclaimed Mlle. Armande.

The Duchess began to laugh.

“It is better to marry than to die,” she said. As she spoke she drew from her waistcoat pocket a tiny crystal phial that came from the court apothecary.

Mlle. Armande shrank away in horror. Old Chesnel took the fair Maufrigneuse’s hand, and kissed it without permission.

“Are you all out of your minds here?” continued the Duchess. “Do you really expect to live in the fifteenth century when the rest of the world has reached the nineteenth? My dear children, there is no noblesse nowadays; there is no aristocracy left! Napoleon’s Code Civil made an end of the parchments, exactly as cannon made an end of feudal castles. When you have some money, you will be very much more of nobles than you are now. Marry anybody you please, Victurnien, you will raise your wife to your rank; that is the most substantial privilege left to the French noblesse. Did not M. de Talleyrand marry Mme. Grandt without compromising his position? Remember that Louis XIV. took the Widow Scarron for his wife.”

“He did not marry her for her money,” interposed Mlle. Armande.

“If the Comtesse d’Esgrignon were one du Croisier’s niece, for instance, would you receive her?” asked Chesnel.

“Perhaps,” replied the Duchess; “but the King, beyond all doubt, would be very glad to see her. – So you do not know what is going on in the world?” continued she, seeing the amazement in their faces. “Victurnien has been in Paris; he knows how things go there. We had more influence under Napoleon. Marry Mlle. Duval, Victurnien; she will be just as much Marquise d’Esgrignon as I am Duchesse de Maufrigneuse.”

“All is lost – even honor!” said the Chevalier, with a wave of the hand.

“Good-bye, Victurnien,” said the Duchess, kissing her lover on the forehead; “we shall not see each other again. Live on your lands; that is the best thing for you to do; the air of Paris is not at all good for you.”

“Diane!” the young Count cried despairingly.

“Monsieur, you forget yourself strangely,” the Duchess retorted coolly, as she laid aside her role of man and mistress, and became not merely an angel again, but a duchess, and not only a duchess, but Moliere’s Celimene.

The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse made a stately bow to these four personages, and drew from the Chevalier his last tear of admiration at the service of le beau sexe.

“How like she is to the Princess Goritza!” he exclaimed in a low voice.

Diane had disappeared. The crack of the postilion’s whip told Victurnien that the fair romance of his first love was over. While peril lasted, Diane could still see her lover in the young Count; but out of danger, she despised him for the weakling that he was.

Six months afterwards, Camusot received the appointment of assistant judge at Paris, and later he became an examining magistrate. Goodman Blondet was made a councillor to the Royal-Court; he held the post just long enough to secure a retiring pension, and then went back to live in his pretty little house. Joseph Blondet sat in his father’s seat at the court till the end of his days; there was not the faintest chance of promotion for him, but he became Mlle. Blandereau’s husband; and she, no doubt, is leading to-day, in the little flower-covered brick house, as dull a life as any carp in a marble basin. Michu and Camusot also received the Cross of the Legion of Honor, while Blondet became an Officer. As for M. Sauvager, deputy public prosecutor, he was sent to Corsica, to du Croisier’s great relief; he had decidedly no mind to bestow his niece upon that functionary.

Du Croisier himself, urged by President du Ronceret, appealed from the finding of the Tribunal to the Court-Royal, and lost his cause. The Liberals throughout the department held that little d’Esgrignon was guilty; while the Royalists, on the other hand, told frightful stories of plots woven by “that abominable du Croisier” to compass his revenge. A duel was fought indeed; the hazard of arms favored du Croisier, the young Count was dangerously wounded, and his antagonist maintained his words. This affair embittered the strife between the two parties; the Liberals brought it forward on all occasions. Meanwhile du Croisier never could carry his election, and saw no hope of marrying his niece to the Count, especially after the duel.

A month after the decision of the Tribunal was confirmed in the Court-Royal, Chesnel died, exhausted by the dreadful strain, which had weakened and shaken him mentally and physically. He died in the hour of victory, like some old faithful hound that has brought the boar to bay, and gets his death on the tusks. He died as happily as might be, seeing that he left the great House all but ruined, and the heir in penury, bored to death by an idle life, and without a hope of establishing himself. That bitter thought and his own exhaustion, no doubt, hastened the old man’s end. One great comfort came to him as he lay amid the wreck of so many hopes, sinking under the burden of so many cares – the old Marquis, at his sister’s entreaty, gave him back all the old friendship. The great lord came to the little house in the Rue du Bercail, and sat by his old servant’s bedside, all unaware how much that servant had done and sacrificed for him. Chesnel sat upright, and repeated Simeon’s cry. – The Marquis allowed them to bury Chesnel in the castle chapel; they laid him crosswise at the foot of the tomb which was waiting for the Marquis himself, the last, in a sense, of the d’Esgrignons.

And so died one of the last representatives of that great and beautiful thing, Service; giving to that often discredited word its original meaning, the relation between feudal lord and servitor. That relation, only to be found in some out-of-the-way province, or among a few old servants of the King, did honor alike to a noblesse that could call forth such affection, and to a bourgeoisie that could conceive it. Such noble and magnificent devotion is no longer possible among us. Noble houses have no servitors left; even as France has no longer a King, nor an hereditary peerage, nor lands that are bound irrevocably to an historic house, that the glorious names of the nation may be perpetuated. Chesnel was not merely one of the obscure great men of private life; he was something more – he was a great fact. In his sustained self-devotion is there not something indefinably solemn and sublime, something that rises above the one beneficent deed, or the heroic height which is reached by a moment’s supreme effort? Chesnel’s virtues belong essentially to the classes which stand between the poverty of the people on the one hand, and the greatness of the aristocracy on the other; for these can combine homely burgher virtues with the heroic ideals of the noble, enlightening both by a solid education.

Victurnien was not well looked upon at Court; there was no more chance of a great match for him, nor a place. His Majesty steadily refused to raise the d’Esgrignons to the peerage, the one royal favor which could rescue Victurnien from his wretched position. It was impossible that he should marry a bourgeoise heiress in his father’s lifetime, so he was bound to live on shabbily under the paternal roof with memories of his two years of splendor in Paris, and the lost love of a great lady to bear him company. He grew moody and depressed, vegetating at home with a careworn aunt and a half heart-broken father, who attributed his son’s condition to a wasting malady. Chesnel was no longer there.

The Marquis died in 1830. The great d’Esgrignon, with a following of all the less infirm noblesse from the Collection of Antiquities, went to wait upon Charles X. at Nonancourt; he paid his respects to his sovereign, and swelled the meagre train of the fallen king. It was an act of courage which seems simple enough to-day, but, in that time of enthusiastic revolt, it was heroism.

“The Gaul has conquered!” These were the Marquis’ last words.

By that time du Croisier’s victory was complete. The new Marquis d’Esgrignon accepted Mlle. Duval as his wife a week after his old father’s death. His bride brought him three millions of francs for du Croisier and his wife settled the reversion of their fortunes upon her in the marriage-contract. Du Croisier took occasion to say during the ceremony that the d’Esgrignon family was the most honorable of all the ancient houses in France.

Some day the present Marquis d’Esgrignon will have an income of more than a hundred thousand crowns. You may see him in Paris, for he comes to town every winter and leads a jolly bachelor life, while he treats his wife with something more than the indifference of the grand seigneur of olden times; he takes no thought whatever for her.

“As for Mlle. d’Esgrignon,” said Emile Blondet, to whom all the detail of the story is due, “if she is no longer like the divinely fair woman whom I saw by glimpses in my childhood, she is decidedly, at the age of sixty-seven, the most pathetic and interesting figure in the Collection of Antiquities. She queens it among them still. I saw her when I made my last journey to my native place in search of the necessary papers for my marriage. When my father knew who it was that I had married, he was struck dumb with amazement; he had not a word to say until I told him that I was a prefect.

“‘You were born to it,’ he said, with a smile.

“As I took a walk around the town, I met Mlle. Armande. She looked taller than ever. I looked at her, and thought of Marius among the ruins of Carthage. Had she not outlived her creed, and the beliefs that had been destroyed? She is a sad and silent woman, with nothing of her old beauty left except the eyes, that shine with an unearthly light. I watched her on her way to mass, with her book in her hand, and could not help thinking that she prayed to God to take her out of the world.”

LES JARDIES, July 1837.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy

Note: The Old Maid is a companion piece to The Collection of Antiquities. In other Addendum appearances they are combined under the title of The Jealousies of a Country Town.

Blondet (Judge)