Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (best summer books .txt) 📗

The Eagles then patronized Mrs. Rawdon, took her to live with her at her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador’s wife because she would not receive her protégée, and did all that lay in woman’s power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long. It was the same routine every day, the same dullness and comfort, the same drive over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening, the same Blair’s Sermon of a Sunday night⁠—the same opera always being acted over and over again; Becky was dying of weariness, when, luckily for her, young Mr. Eagles came from Cambridge, and his mother, seeing the impression which her little friend made upon him, straightway gave Becky warning.

Then she tried keeping house with a female friend; then the double ménage began to quarrel and get into debt. Then she determined upon a boardinghouse existence and lived for some time at that famous mansion kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies and flyblown beauties who frequented her landlady’s salons. Becky loved society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an opium-eater without his dram, and she was happy enough at the period of her boardinghouse life. “The women here are as amusing as those in May Fair,” she told an old London friend who met her, “only, their dresses are not quite so fresh. The men wear cleaned gloves, and are sad rogues, certainly, but they are not worse than Jack This and Tom That. The mistress of the house is a little vulgar, but I don’t think she is so vulgar as Lady ⸻” and here she named the name of a great leader of fashion that I would die rather than reveal. In fact, when you saw Madame de Saint Amour’s rooms lighted up of a night, men with plaques and cordons at the écarté tables, and the women at a little distance, you might fancy yourself for a while in good society, and that Madame was a real countess. Many people did so fancy, and Becky was for a while one of the most dashing ladies of the Countess’s salons.

But it is probable that her old creditors of 1815 found her out and caused her to leave Paris, for the poor little woman was forced to fly from the city rather suddenly, and went thence to Brussels.

How well she remembered the place! She grinned as she looked up at the little entresol which she had occupied, and thought of the Bareacres family, bawling for horses and flight, as their carriage stood in the porte-cochère of the hotel. She went to Waterloo and to Laeken, where George Osborne’s monument much struck her. She made a little sketch of it. “That poor Cupid!” she said; “how dreadfully he was in love with me, and what a fool he was! I wonder whether little Emmy is alive. It was a good little creature; and that fat brother of hers. I have his funny fat picture still among my papers. They were kind simple people.”

At Brussels Becky arrived, recommended by Madame de Saint Amour to her friend, Madame la Comtesse de Borodino, widow of Napoleon’s General, the famous Count de Borodino, who was left with no resource by the deceased hero but that of a table d’hôte and an écarté table. Second-rate dandies and roués, widow-ladies who always have a lawsuit, and very simple English folks, who fancy they see “Continental society” at these houses, put down their money, or ate their meals, at Madame de Borodino’s tables. The gallant young fellows treated the company round to champagne at the table d’hôte, rode out with the women, or hired horses on country excursions, clubbed money to take boxes at the play or the opera, betted over the fair shoulders of the ladies at the écarté tables, and wrote home to their parents in Devonshire about their felicitous introduction to foreign society.

Here, as at Paris, Becky was a boardinghouse queen, and ruled in select pensions. She never refused the champagne, or the bouquets, or the drives into the country, or the private boxes; but what she preferred was the écarté at night⁠—and she played audaciously. First she played only for a little, then for five-franc pieces, then for Napoleons, then for notes: then she would not be able to pay her month’s pension: then she borrowed from the young gentlemen: then she got into cash again and bullied Madame de Borodino, whom she had coaxed and wheedled before: then she was playing for ten sous at a time, and in a dire state of poverty: then her quarter’s allowance would come in, and she would pay off Madame de Borodino’s score and would once more take the cards against Monsieur de Rossignol, or the Chevalier de Raff.

When Becky left Brussels, the sad truth is that she owed three months’ pension to Madame de Borodino, of which fact, and of the gambling, and of the drinking, and of the going down on her knees to the Reverend Mr. Muff, Ministre Anglican, and borrowing money of him, and of her coaxing and flirting with Milor Noodle, son of Sir Noodle, pupil of the Rev. Mr. Muff, whom she used to take into her private room, and of whom she won large sums at écarté⁠—of which fact, I say, and of a hundred of her other knaveries, the Countess de Borodino informs every English person who stops at her establishment, and announces that Madame Rawdon was no better than a vipère.

So our little wanderer went about setting up her tent in various cities of Europe, as restless as Ulysses or