Malevola — Villette

On a thundery Thursday Madame Beck asks Lucy to buy wools and silks for the pupils' work. As Lucy draws the street-door bolt, Madame calls her back, as if the thought had just struck, and adds a basket of hothouse fruit. It is a fête gift for Madame Walravens at Numéro 3, Rue des Mages, in the old town. Lucy must put the basket into the old woman's own hands. She likes the long walk into the grim Basse-Ville, and she means to be indoors before the rain.

The address is a deserted square by the church of the Magi. An infirm priest has just left the house. A cantankerous servant in sabots would snatch the fruit and shut the door. The priest persuades her to let Lucy upstairs. In a gloomy salon a picture rolls back from the wall, and down a stone stair comes a tiny, neckless, hunchbacked old woman in blue brocade, a shawl too large for her, and jewels that are not false, a silver beard on her chin. Lucy names her Malevola, the evil fairy. Madame Walravens takes the basket, says she can buy fruit when she wants it, and mocks the congratulations. Thunder breaks over the house. Lucy waits on the cold stair until the priest, unwilling that a stranger should sit there, leads her into a little oratory that is more relic-room than boudoir.

While he whispers prayers, Lucy studies a portrait she had taken for a Madonna. Clearer light shows a young nun, pale and pleasing, not beautiful. Without looking up he says she was much beloved, gave herself to God, died young, and is still wept. The weeper is not the grandmother. It is the affianced lover whom Fate, Faith, and Death all refused. His tale is of a former pupil, once able to aspire to a well-dowered hand, whose banker father failed. Madame Walravens forbade the match. Justine Marie would not take a richer husband. She entered a convent and died in her noviciate. Years later her father the jeweller was ruined, and the grandmother and mother were left penniless. The same pupil housed them, would not let the old woman sell her jewels, sheltered his tutor and the servant Agnes, and gave three quarters of his income to their keep, so that marriage became impossible. He looks up once. Lucy sees the errand, the storm, the portrait, and the tale as beads on one rosary.

He asks where she lives. When she says the Rue Fossette, he claps his hands and names his pupil: Paul, professor of literature, benefactor of Madame Walravens, and still the lover of Justine Marie, dead these twenty years. Constancy, he says, is the essence of that nature. He himself is Père Silas. He remembers Lucy's confession, has not lost sight of her for a day, and envies heresy its prey. She walks home in a waterish sun, set on living and dying a Protestant, and wondering whether Rome cherishes such charity or puts it out at interest. Madame Beck brings wine, laughs at the little hunchback, and says the old woman hates her for loving cousin Paul. He cannot marry, Madame adds. He already carries Mère Walravens, Père Silas, Dame Agnes, and a troop of paupers, and he means to go to his pale Marie as pure as a lily. She tells Lucy to eat, and to forget the angels, the hunchbacks, and above all the professors.