Cousin Bette by Honore Balzac Page B

recognized the voice of the female mentor to whose bullying he was so inured that tenderness from her always took him by surprise. Although Steinbock was twenty-nine, he appeared, as fair men sometimes do, to be five or six years younger; and anyone seeing his youthful face – although its bloom had vanished in the fatigues and hardships of exile – side by side with Mademoiselle Fischer’s lean, hard countenance, might have thought that Nature had made a mistake in assigning their sexes. He got up and flung himself into an old Louis XV easy chair upholstered in yellow Utrecht velvet, apparently ready to take a breather. The old maid then selected a greengage and gently offered it to her friend.
    â€˜Thank you,’ he said, taking the fruit.
    â€˜Are you tired?’ she asked, giving him another.
    â€˜I am not tired with work, but tired of life,’ he replied.
    â€˜What nonsense you talk!’ she said, somewhat tartly. ‘Haven’t you got a guardian angel to watch over you?’ she went on, offering him the sweetmeats and watching withpleasure as he ate them all. ‘You see, while I was at dinner at my cousin’s I was thinking of you.’
    â€˜I know,’ he said, turning a look at once caressing and plaintive on Lisbeth. ‘Without you I should have died long ago. But you know, my dear lady, artists need some distraction.…’
    â€˜Ah, so that’s what’s in your mind!’ she interrupted him, sharply, setting her hands on her hips and fixing him with kindling eyes. ‘You want to ruin your health in the stews of Paris, and end up like so many artists, dying in the workhouse! No, no, make a fortune for yourself first, and when you have money stacked away you can take your fun then, my child. You will have the wherewithal then, you libertine, to pay for the doctors as well as the pleasures!’
    Wenceslas Steinbock took this broadside, delivered with looks that searched him with their magnetic flame, and bowed his head. The most bitter-tongued of Mademoiselle Fischer’s detractors, watching even the beginning of this scene, would have acknowledged that the scandalous suggestions of the Olivier pair must be false. Everything in the tone, the gestures, and the looks of these two beings declared the purity of their life together. The old maid evinced the tender feeling of a dictatorial but sincere maternal affection. The young man submitted like a respectful son to a mother’s tyranny. This strange relationship appeared to be the result of a powerful will constantly acting upon a malleable nature, upon that inconsistency of the Slav temperament which allows Slavs to display heroic courage upon the battlefield and yet show an incredible lack of resolution in their conduct of ordinary life, a kind of flabbiness of the moral fibre whose causes might well be investigated by physiologists, for physiologists are to politics what entomologists are to agriculture.
    â€˜And what if I die before I get rich?’ Wenceslas asked gloomily.
    â€˜Die?’ exclaimed the spinster. ‘Oh, I won’t let you die! I have life enough for two, and I would give you my life-blood if it came to that.’
    As he listened to that frank, vehement declaration, tears rose to Steinbock’s eyes.
    â€˜Don’t he sad, my little Wenceslas,’ Lisbeth, touched in her turn, went on. ‘Do you know, I think my cousin Hortense thought your seal very nice. Now I’m going to set about getting your bronze group sold; you’ll be able to pay off your debt to me, and do what you like; you’ll be free! Come now, smile!’
    â€˜I shall never be able to pay off my debt to you, Mademoiselle,’ the poor exile replied.
    â€˜And why not?’ demanded the Vosges peasant, ready to take up the cudgels for the Livonian against herself.
    â€˜Because you have not only fed, housed, and cared for me in my need, you have given me strength! You have