The Stepmother

Hortense Guizot became Maurice's stepmother a year after the festival at the plantation. For months she had been planning her strategy with the complicity of a dozen sisters, aunts, and cousins determined to resolve the drama of her spinsterhood, and of her father, enchanted with the prospect of attracting Valmorain to his henhouse. The Guizots had a smothering respectability but were not as rich as they tried to appear, and a union with Valmorain would have many advantages for them. At first Valmorain was not aware of the strategy being used to catch him; he believed that the Guizot family's attentions were directed toward Sancho, much younger and handsomer than he. When Sancho himself pointed out his error, Valmorain wanted to flee to another continent; he was very comfortable in his bachelor routines, and something as irreversible as matrimony frightened him.

"I scarcely know that demoiselle, I have seen her very little," he contended.

"Neither did you know my sister, and you married her," Sancho reminded him.

"And look at the trouble it caused me!"

"Bachelors always arouse suspicion, Toulouse. Hortense is a stupendous woman."

"If you like her so much, you marry her," Valmorain replied.

"The Guizots have already sniffed me over, brother-in-law. They know I am a poor devil with dissolute habits."

"Less dissolute than some others around here, Sancho. In any case, I do not plan to marry."

But the idea was planted, and in the following weeks he began to consider it, first as foolishness and then as a possibility. He was still young enough to have more children-he had always wanted a large family-and Hortense's voluptuousness seemed a good sign; she was a young woman ready for motherhood. He did not know that she shaved off her years; in fact, she was thirty.

Hortense was a Creole of impeccable lineage and good education; the Ursulines had taught her the basics of reading and writing, geography, history, domestic arts, embroidery, and catechism; she danced with grace and had a pleasant voice. No one doubted her virtue and she was generally well-liked; because of a gentleman's inability to sit his horse she was widowed before she was wed. The Guizots were pillars of tradition; the father had inherited a plantation and Hortense's two older brothers had a prestigious legal office, the only acceptable profession for that class. Hortense's family line compensated for her minimal dowry, and Valmorain wanted to be accepted in society, not so much for himself as to smooth the way for Maurice.

Trapped in the strong web woven by the women, Valmorain agreed to let Sancho lead him through the twists and turns of courtship, more subtle in New Orleans than in Saint-Domingue or Cuba, where he'd fallen in love with Eugenia. "For the moment, no gifts or messages for Hortense; concentrate on the mother. Her approval is essential," Sancho warned him. Marriageable girls were seldom seen in public and only a time or two at the opera, accompanied by the family en masse, because if seen out and about too often they would appear to be a little shady and could end up as spinsters looking after their sisters' children; however, Hortense had a little more freedom. She had passed the age of being "ripe"-between sixteen and twenty-four-and entered the category of a little "stale."

Sancho and the marriage arranging harpies saw that Valmorain and Hortense were invited to soirees, as the dinner and dancing events were called, of family and friends in the intimacy of the home, where they could exchange a few words, though never alone. Protocol forced Valmorain to announce his intentions promptly. Sancho went with him to speak with Monsieur Guizot, and in private they worked out the financial terms of the union, cordially but with absolute clarity. Shortly after, the agreement was celebrated with a dejeuner de fiancailles, a luncheon at which Valmorain handed a fashionable ring to his fiancee, a ruby surrounded with diamonds set in gold.

Pere Antoine, the most notable priest in Louisiana, married them on a Tuesday afternoon in the cathedral, the only witnesses the close Guizot relatives, a total of ninety-two persons. The bride wanted a private wedding. They entered the church escorted by the Gouverneur's guards, as was de rigueur, and Hortense shone in a pearl embroidered silk gown that had been worn by her grandmother, her mother, and several of her sisters. It was a little snug, even after the work of seamstresses. Following the ceremony, the bouquet of orange blossom and jasmine was sent to the nuns to place at the feet of the Virgin in the chapel. The reception took place in the Guizots' house, with an array of sumptuous dishes prepared by the same caterer Valmorain had hired for the festival at his plantation: pheasant stuffed with chestnuts, duck in marinade, crab blazing in liqueur, fresh oysters, fish of various kinds, turtle soup, cheeses brought from France, and more than forty desserts in addition to a wedding cake of French inspiration: an indestructible edifice of marzipan and dried fruit.

After the guests bid them good-bye, Hortense awaited her husband arrayed in a muslin gown, her blond hair loose across her shoulders, in her virginal chamber; her parents had replaced her bed with one with a canopy. In those years a great fuss was made over the bride's canopy: blue silk imitating a clear sky with a cloudless horizon and a profusion of plump cupids with bows and arrows, bunches of artificial flowers, and lace bows.

The newlyweds spent three days enclosed in that room, as custom demanded, attended by a pair of slaves who brought them food and removed chamber pots. It would have been disgraceful for the bride to appear in public, even in front of her family, as she was being initiated into the secrets of love. Suffocating with heat, bored in the closed space, with a headache from so many youthful capers at his age, and aware that outside the room a dozen relatives had their ears glued to the wall, Valmorain realized that he had married not only Hortense but the entire Guizot tribe. Finally on the fourth day he could emerge from that prison and escape with his wife to the plantation, where they would learn to know each other with more space and air. Just that week the summer season was beginning and everyone was fleeing the city.

Hortense never doubted that she would trap Valmorain. Even before the relentless procuresses swung into action she had ordered the nuns to embroider sheets with her and Valmorain's initials intertwined. The ones with the initials of the previous fiance, perfumed with lavender and kept for years in a hope chest, were not wasted; she simply had flowers embroidered over the letters and destined those sheets to guest rooms. As part of her dowry, she brought Denise, the slave who had served her since she was fifteen, the only one who knew how to dress her hair and iron her gowns to her pleasure, and another house slave her father gave her as a wedding present when she mentioned doubts about the majordomo on the Valmorain plantation. She wanted someone she could trust absolutely.

Sancho again asked Valmorain what he planned to do with Tete and Rosette, since the situation could not be hidden. Many whites kept their women of color, but always separate from the legal family. The case of a slave concubine was different. When the master married, the relationship was ended, and he had to give up the woman, who was sold or sent to the fields where the wife would not see her; having a lover and her daughter in the same house, as Valmorain intended to do, was unacceptable. The Guizot family, and Hortense herself, would understand that he had consoled himself with a slave during his years as a widower, but now the problem had to be resolved.

Hortense had seen Rosette dancing with Maurice at the country party and perhaps had suspicions, though Valmorain believed that in all the boisterous confusion she had not noticed much. "Don't be naive, brother-in-law, women have an instinct for these things," Sancho told him. On the day Hortense, accompanied by her court of sisters, came to inspect the house, Valmorain ordered Tete to disappear with Rosette until the end of the visit. He did not want to do anything hurried, he explained to Sancho. Faithful to his character, he preferred to postpone the decision and hope that things would work out on their own. He did not broach the subject with Hortense.