Cousin Bette by Honore Balzac

social science would have deduced the existence of a lover from some of the useless, highly ornamental knick-knacks, which in the home of a married woman could only have come from the demi-god, whose power is invisible but ever present.
    The dinner that husband, wife, and child sat down to – the dinner that had been kept since four o’clock – would have revealed this family’s financial straits, for the table is the most reliable thermometer of the fortunes of Parisian households. Soup made from potherbs and the water from boiled beans, a piece of veal with potatoes, swamped in brownish water by way of gravy, a dish of beans, and cherries of inferior quality, all served and eaten from chipped plates and dishes, with forks and spoons of nickel’s mean unringing metal – was that a menu worthy of such a pretty woman? The Baron would have wept to see it. The dull carafes did nothing to improve the harsh colour of wine bought by the litre from the wine-merchant on the corner. The table-napkins had been in use for a week. Everything, in sum, betrayed a graceless poverty, an indifferent lack of care for the family on the part of both husband and wife. The most unnoticing observer, seeing them, would have said to himself that the dismal moment had come, for these two creatures, when the necessity of eating makes people look about them for some piece of luck which, by fair means or foul, may be induced to come their way.
    Valérie’s first words to her husband, indeed, will explain the delay in serving dinner, which had been kept back for her, probably by a self-interested devotion on the part of the cook.
    â€˜Samanon will only take your bills of exchange at fifty per cent, and wants part of your salary assigned to him as security.’
    Financial distress, which could still be concealed in the household of the Departmental Chief in the Ministry of War, who was cushioned against it by a salary of twenty-four thousand francs plus bonuses, had plainly reached its last stage in the case of the clerk.
    â€˜You have
made
my chief,’ said the husband, looking at his wife.
    â€˜I believe I have,’ she replied, without blinking at the expression, borrowed from stage-door slang.
    â€˜What are we to do?’ Marneffe went on. ‘The landlord is all set to seize our things tomorrow. And your father must needs go and die without making a will! Upon my word, thoseEmpire fellows all believe that they’re immortal like their Emperor.’
    â€˜Poor Father,’ she said. ‘I was the only child he had, and he was very fond of me! The Countess must have burned the will. How could he possibly have forgotten me, when he always used to give us two or three thousand-franc notes at a time?’
    â€˜We owe four quarters’ rent, fifteen hundred francs! Is our furniture worth that? “That is the question”, as Shakespeare says.’
    â€˜Well, good-bye, my pet,’ said Valérie, who had taken only a couple of mouthfuls of the veal, from which the maid had extracted the juices for a gallant soldier back from Algiers. ‘Desperate situations require desperate remedies!’
    â€˜Valérie, where are you going?’ cried Marneffe, moving to stand between his wife and the door.
    â€˜I’m going to see our landlord,’ she answered, as she arranged her ringlets under her charming hat. ‘And you had better try to get on the right side of that old maid, if she really is the Director’s cousin.’
    The ignorance of one another’s social position in which tenants of the same house live is something constantly noted, and shows clearly how people are borne along in the swift current of existence in Paris. It is easy to understand, however, that a civil servant who leaves early every morning for his office, returns home for dinner, and goes out every evening, and a wife addicted to the gaieties of Paris, may know nothing of how an old maid lives on