Vanity Fair (112 page)

It was after this visit that Becky, who had paid her weekly bills,
Becky who had made herself agreeable to everybody in the house, who
smiled at the landlady, called the waiters "monsieur," and paid the
chambermaids in politeness and apologies, what far more than
compensated for a little niggardliness in point of money (of which
Becky never was free), that Becky, we say, received a notice to quit
from the landlord, who had been told by some one that she was quite
an unfit person to have at his hotel, where English ladies would not
sit down with her. And she was forced to fly into lodgings of which
the dulness and solitude were most wearisome to her.

Still she held up, in spite of these rebuffs, and tried to make a
character for herself and conquer scandal. She went to church very
regularly and sang louder than anybody there. She took up the cause
of the widows of the shipwrecked fishermen, and gave work and
drawings for the Quashyboo Mission; she subscribed to the Assembly
and WOULDN'T waltz. In a word, she did everything that was
respectable, and that is why we dwell upon this part of her career
with more fondness than upon subsequent parts of her history, which
are not so pleasant. She saw people avoiding her, and still
laboriously smiled upon them; you never could suppose from her
countenance what pangs of humiliation she might be enduring
inwardly.

Her history was after all a mystery. Parties were divided about
her. Some people who took the trouble to busy themselves in the
matter said that she was the criminal, whilst others vowed that she
was as innocent as a lamb and that her odious husband was in fault.
She won over a good many by bursting into tears about her boy and
exhibiting the most frantic grief when his name was mentioned, or
she saw anybody like him. She gained good Mrs. Alderney's heart in
that way, who was rather the Queen of British Boulogne and gave the
most dinners and balls of all the residents there, by weeping when
Master Alderney came from Dr. Swishtail's academy to pass his
holidays with his mother. "He and her Rawdon were of the same age,
and so like," Becky said in a voice choking with agony; whereas
there was five years' difference between the boys' ages, and no more
likeness between them than between my respected reader and his
humble servant. Wenham, when he was going abroad, on his way to
Kissingen to join Lord Steyne, enlightened Mrs. Alderney on this
point and told her how he was much more able to describe little
Rawdon than his mamma, who notoriously hated him and never saw him;
how he was thirteen years old, while little Alderney was but nine,
fair, while the other darling was dark—in a word, caused the lady
in question to repent of her good humour.

Whenever Becky made a little circle for herself with incredible
toils and labour, somebody came and swept it down rudely, and she
had all her work to begin over again. It was very hard; very hard;
lonely and disheartening.

There was Mrs. Newbright, who took her up for some time, attracted
by the sweetness of her singing at church and by her proper views
upon serious subjects, concerning which in former days, at Queen's
Crawley, Mrs. Becky had had a good deal of instruction. Well, she
not only took tracts, but she read them. She worked flannel
petticoats for the Quashyboos—cotton night-caps for the Cocoanut
Indians—painted handscreens for the conversion of the Pope and the
Jews—sat under Mr. Rowls on Wednesdays, Mr. Huggleton on Thursdays,
attended two Sunday services at church, besides Mr. Bawler, the
Darbyite, in the evening, and all in vain. Mrs. Newbright had
occasion to correspond with the Countess of Southdown about the
Warmingpan Fund for the Fiji Islanders (for the management of which
admirable charity both these ladies formed part of a female
committee), and having mentioned her "sweet friend," Mrs. Rawdon
Crawley, the Dowager Countess wrote back such a letter regarding
Becky, with such particulars, hints, facts, falsehoods, and general
comminations, that intimacy between Mrs. Newbright and Mrs. Crawley
ceased forthwith, and all the serious world of Tours, where this
misfortune took place, immediately parted company with the
reprobate. Those who know the English Colonies abroad know that we
carry with us us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces,
cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever
we settle down.

From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily. From Boulogne to
Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen to Tours—trying with all her
might to be respectable, and alas! always found out some day or
other and pecked out of the cage by the real daws.

Mrs. Hook Eagles took her up at one of these places—a woman without
a blemish in her character and a house in Portman Square. She was
staying at the hotel at Dieppe, whither Becky fled, and they made
each other's acquaintance first at sea, where they were swimming
together, and subsequently at the table d'hote of the hotel. Mrs
Eagles had heard—who indeed had not?—some of the scandal of the
Steyne affair; but after a conversation with Becky, she pronounced
that Mrs. Crawley was an angel, her husband a ruffian, Lord Steyne
an unprincipled wretch, as everybody knew, and the whole case
against Mrs. Crawley an infamous and wicked conspiracy of that
rascal Wenham. "If you were a man of any spirit, Mr. Eagles, you
would box the wretch's ears the next time you see him at the Club,"
she said to her husband. But Eagles was only a quiet old gentleman,
husband to Mrs. Eagles, with a taste for geology, and not tall
enough to reach anybody's ears.

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 protegee, 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 dulness 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
menage began to quarrel and get into debt. Then she determined upon
a boarding-house 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 fly-blown 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 boarding-house 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 ecarte 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-cochere 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'hote and an ecarte table.
Second-rate dandies and roues, 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'hote,
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 ecarte tables, and wrote
home to their parents in Devonshire about their felicitous
introduction to foreign society.

Here, as at Paris, Becky was a boarding-house 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 ecarte 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 ecarte—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
vipere.

So our little wanderer went about setting up her tent in various
cities of Europe, as restless as Ulysses or Bampfylde Moore Carew.
Her taste for disrespectability grew more and more remarkable. She
became a perfect Bohemian ere long, herding with people whom it
would make your hair stand on end to meet.

There is no town of any mark in Europe but it has its little colony
of English raffs—men whose names Mr. Hemp the officer reads out
periodically at the Sheriffs' Court—young gentlemen of very good
family often, only that the latter disowns them; frequenters of
billiard-rooms and estaminets, patrons of foreign races and gaming-
tables. They people the debtors' prisons—they drink and swagger—
they fight and brawl—they run away without paying—they have duels
with French and German officers—they cheat Mr. Spooney at ecarte—
they get the money and drive off to Baden in magnificent britzkas—
they try their infallible martingale and lurk about the tables with
empty pockets, shabby bullies, penniless bucks, until they can
swindle a Jew banker with a sham bill of exchange, or find another
Mr. Spooney to rob. The alternations of splendour and misery which
these people undergo are very queer to view. Their life must be one
of great excitement. Becky—must it be owned?—took to this life,
and took to it not unkindly. She went about from town to town among
these Bohemians. The lucky Mrs. Rawdon was known at every play-
table in Germany. She and Madame de Cruchecassee kept house at
Florence together. It is said she was ordered out of Munich, and my
friend Mr. Frederick Pigeon avers that it was at her house at
Lausanne that he was hocussed at supper and lost eight hundred
pounds to Major Loder and the Honourable Mr. Deuceace. We are
bound, you see, to give some account of Becky's biography, but of
this part, the less, perhaps, that is said the better.

They say that, when Mrs. Crawley was particularly down on her luck,
she gave concerts and lessons in music here and there. There was a
Madame de Raudon, who certainly had a matinee musicale at Wildbad,
accompanied by Herr Spoff, premier pianist to the Hospodar of
Wallachia, and my little friend Mr. Eaves, who knew everybody and
had travelled everywhere, always used to declare that he was at
Strasburg in the year 1830, when a certain Madame Rebecque made her
appearance in the opera of the Dame Blanche, giving occasion to a
furious row in the theatre there. She was hissed off the stage by
the audience, partly from her own incompetency, but chiefly from the
ill-advised sympathy of some persons in the parquet, (where the
officers of the garrison had their admissions); and Eaves was
certain that the unfortunate debutante in question was no other than
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley.

She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this earth. When
she got her money she gambled; when she had gambled it she was put
to shifts to live; who knows how or by what means she succeeded? It
is said that she was once seen at St. Petersburg, but was summarily
dismissed from that capital by the police, so that there cannot be
any possibility of truth in the report that she was a Russian spy at
Toplitz and Vienna afterwards. I have even been informed that at
Paris she discovered a relation of her own, no less a person than
her maternal grandmother, who was not by any means a Montmorenci,
but a hideous old box-opener at a theatre on the Boulevards. The
meeting between them, of which other persons, as it is hinted
elsewhere, seem to have been acquainted, must have been a very
affecting interview. The present historian can give no certain
details regarding the event.