Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

Tears of shame hanging to Madame Hulot's long lashes checked the National Guardsman. He stopped short, and forgot his attitude.

"To proceed," said he. "We became intimate, the Baron and I, through the two hussies. The Baron, like all bad lots, is very pleasant, a thoroughly jolly good fellow. Yes, he took my fancy, the old rascal. He could be so funny!--Well, enough of those reminiscences. We got to be like brothers. The scoundrel--quite Regency in his notions--tried indeed to deprave me altogether, preached Saint-Simonism as to women, and all sorts of lordly ideas; but, you see, I was fond enough of my girl to have married her, only I was afraid of having children.

"Then between two old daddies, such friends as--as we were, what more natural than that we should think of our children marrying each other? --Three months after his son had married my Celestine, Hulot--I don't know how I can utter the wretch's name! he has cheated us both, madame --well, the villain did me out of my little Josepha. The scoundrel knew that he was supplanted in the heart of Jenny Cadine by a young lawyer and by an artist--only two of them!--for the girl had more and more of a howling success, and he stole my sweet little girl, a perfect darling--but you must have seen her at the opera; he got her an engagement there. Your husband is not so well behaved as I am. I am ruled as straight as a sheet of music-paper. He had dropped a good deal of money on Jenny Cadine, who must have cost him near on thirty thousand francs a year. Well, I can only tell you that he is ruining himself outright for Josepha.

"Josepha, madame, is a Jewess. Her name is Mirah, the anagram of Hiram, an Israelite mark that stamps her, for she was a foundling picked up in Germany, and the inquiries I have made prove that she is the illegitimate child of a rich Jew banker. The life of the theatre, and, above all, the teaching of Jenny Cadine, Madame Schontz, Malaga, and Carabine, as to the way to treat an old man, have developed, in the child whom I had kept in a respectable and not too expensive way of life, all the native Hebrew instinct for gold and jewels--for the golden calf.