And finally, pains in his legs. 'Moitte is still very tiresome, with his leg that's supposed to be wasting away. He treated me to his moans and groans yesterday, before going to sleep, and I slept badly He complains of pains he hardly feels, if at all, for he eats and sleeps extremely well What a man! What a man!'
Actually, Mme Moitte was in far worse health than her husband, as the doctors were soon to realize, and much of her neurasthenia may be attributed to this cause. The neurasthenia was undeniable, it could even be termed chronic, for our heroine's lamentations represent a large part of her daily confidences. Floods of tears at every moment, and why, if you please? Because she had just been reading Mala, because she had mislaid a handkerchief or lost a game of cards; because Louise had said something unkind, had put on her 'pompous airs', or, when sent to buy provisions, had not brought back the right kind of meat.
The poor girl was the first to suffer under these jeremiads, which only too often proved infectious. c \ had a scene with Louise because I'd pointed out to her that she wasn't very attentive. She cried enough to give an angel a swollen face/
Another day: C I had an altercation with Louise about her harsh, words to me when I remarked that none of the young ladies left any milk for the cats. She took such offence that I shed floods or tears/ If all the riverside dwellers of the Quai Malaquais were afflicted with the same sensibility, it is not to be wondered at that the Seine was sometimes seriously flooded,
Mme Moitte's irritability did not prevent the two women from loving each other most tenderly. Sudden fits of temper were only to be expected in such a large household, with Madame determined to do everything herself, without neglecting the education of the four little pupils. Up to 1806 she had managed without a maidservant. A man of the name of Laurent Bringuier, keeper of the Desaix monument, came to polish the floors, brush his master's clothes and do the rough work of the apartment for the sum of twenty-four francs a month. But the poor man died, and the family was obliged to look for other help.
The tradesmen had at first nothing very promising to suggest. 'The butcher's wife was full of the depravity of maidservants', writes Mme Moitte sadly. A few days later, however, the fruiterer suggested a 'treasure 3 of the name of Ursule, who was engaged - but soon returned her apron because she considered it inadmissable that she should be accompanied on her errands. No doubt her profits on the marketing were to be made on the quiet.
Another candidate presented herself. Opinions were reserved. £ Catherine is not at all good-looking and seems very stupid. I hardly think her capable of understanding anything/ She took the situation, however, but chose to consider the wine nasty and her apron too small. She broke the crockery, forgot to say * Madame' when speaking to her employer, and had an exaggerated fondness for the pleasures of the Carnival.
On Shrove Tuesday the wine merchant who had his shop on the ground floor of the house got up a little dance. Catherine was given permission to go to it, with strict orders to return at midnight. *We two Moittes went to bed. Louise stayed up till one in the morning to fetch Catherine, who wouldn't come up and made an awful scene because she wanted to stay on at the dance. We had to get the doorkeeper.
Moitte got up, to make her go to bed or else to turn her out. At last she went to bed, and Louise locked her in and went to bed herself soon after. It made us all ill/
Having had enough of young maids, Mme Moitte now engaged a person of mature age answering to the name of Mme Carre. She was treated with consideration, and even allowed to bring her caged canary with her, for she adored birds. As ill luck would have it, she also loved wine. 'When Louise came into our room in the morning she told us Mme Carre had got drunk last night. We were much surprised and upset/ A further discovery, no less unpleasant, revealed that she was a fly-by-night; she was found one night, hugging the waUs of the Rue de Seine, with a candlestick in her hand, burning her employers' candles at both ends.
Evidently the maids of the First Empire were no better than ours of today, so this domestic question, the housewife's eternal nightmare, supposed to date only from yesterday, probably goes back to die suppression of slavery.
As though all these worries were not enough, the Moittes were soon to be faced with troubles of another kind. An intrigue was about to be enacted under their roof, of which Louise would be the victim. A case of breach of promise.
No mention has been made so far of a friend of the family, Taunay junior, who collaborated in Moitte's work, and was a cousin of his wife's. Between the latter and the young sculptor somewhat tender relations had probably existed in the past. The Diary is understandably silent on this point, but certain sketches in the margins — a vase with the last remains of incense burning in it, guarded by two faithful dogs; a sentence let fall by Taunay: 'You are the first woman I loved', and finally when one day Mme Moitte fell seriously ill, the need she felt to confess her sins to the cure of Saint-Severin and to describe them with 'all the details of the crime', all give reason to suppose that some fifteen years earlier one cousin, still pretty, and the other, still a tyro, may have carried the family spirit beyond fitting limits.
All this, of course, had ceased to be anything but ancient history. Mme Moitte was now fifty-nine, Taunay thirty-seven, and as the men of his generation were less indulgent than we are towards the autumn of a woman's life, her former gallant looked upon her as a dowager. As a pupil of her husband, however, he had remained an intimate of the household. He not only dined at the Quai Malaquais nearly every day, but he soon took up his abode there, in a little room specially done up for his use.
He might have wished for greater independence; he may have considered that his employer made Mm do a lot of work and paid him badly for it, and that his cousin was going too far in keeping back the little money he earned, under pretext of settling his tailor's bills and preventing him from making a fool of himself. When he wanted to redeem his watch from the pawnbroker's he was obliged to ask for an advance of twenty-four francs, which hardly suggests opulence. If he stayed out after eleven at night he was spied on like a schoolboy. Drawbacks of family life, which in spite of all its good sides has always something of a cloistral regime about it. But Taunay had good reasons for putting up with it: he had an intrigue at home, this time, with Louise.
What with their games of lotto in the winter, and of battledore and shuttlecock in the summer, on the lawns of the Ranelagh, the two young people had formed a liking for each other. One evening when they had all gone to dine at the little house at Passy that the family had taken for the season, Mme Moitte suggested a walk round the garden, and took the arm of her former admirer. "Louise was the subject of our conversation; it turned out that he is in love with her/
The poor lady's reactions are fairly easy to imagine: surprise, a little chagrin, but at the same time a certain pleasure. Though it may not be pleasant to find oneself promoted to the rank of mother-in-law when one has known better things, it is nevertheless a means of survival in the sentimental sphere, a sort of honorary membership of the heart. Many of our novelists have made a study of this particular case. We may therefore believe that Mme Moitte would willingly have agreed to the marriage if she had been sure that it would make the girl happy. But she thought exactly the opposite. One could not be acquainted with this strange young man and not realize that he had an abominable character.