“I swear to you, though you may be somewhat incredulous as to the state of my mind, that when you have put my little business clear and straight—I promise you, on my word as a living being, that I will think twice ere I incur the smallest expense. It is not possible for me to be miserly—it is a disgusting vice.”
Then, in a third letter:
“Eh! bon jour, my good friend; it is an age since I saw you or embraced you. When are you going to spend a morning with me? Do you know that I have learned a good deal of sense since the beginning of the year? Do you know that I intend to keep my word and commit hardly any foolish extravagance; and you will see that you will be very satisfied with poor Sophie. If you knew how many small debts I have discharged, you would be well content with your Sophie. I have not yet got into my den (at Port-à-l’Anglais), but so soon as I have, I should like to meet you, and talk over all this business at our leisure. If, in the meanwhile, you would like to come this evening and eat a truffled turkey, much bigger and a thousand times more of a dinde than I am, you will be welcome.”
In spite of these promises of amendment, we find her, shortly afterwards, writing to inform the worthy notary that an execution has been levied upon her for non-payment of her capitation tax and other dues, and to beg him to send her the sum of 196 livres to enable her to get rid of the emissaries of the law.
As time goes on, the letters multiply, all full of entreaties, excuses, promises, regrets, expostulations. She assures him that she cares nothing for money—one can well believe that—but has an intense desire to be free from debt. Then, when he shows a marked disinclination to make any further advances, she declares that not even on the stage of the Opera has she met with so inhuman, so hard-hearted, a monster. But the notary, annoyed at finding that her promises are never kept, and that, notwithstanding her protestations, she makes no change in her extravagant way of living, shuts himself up in his office and turns a deaf ear to her appeals. Sophie redoubles her entreaties, reiterates her vows of amendment, sends him epistles bedewed with her tears. All is in vain; petit père Alleaume remains inflexible.
In November 1780, Sophie’s daughter, Alexandrine, married a certain André de Murville, a young man of respectable middle-class family, who dabbled in literature. Alexandrine was, at this time, only in her fourteenth year; an ungainly, red-haired child, who seems to have inherited both her mother’s biting wit and—or, at least, so scandal asserted—her mother’s indifference to the conventions of morality.[60] For which reasons, Sophie was probably glad to be rid of her. The ceremony took place at Saint-Roch, and was attended by several worthy bourgeois couples, relatives of Murville, who must have been considerably shocked when Sophie, on being presented to them, remarked upon the strangeness of the circumstance that the mother of the bride should be the only unmarried lady present.[61]
For the next few years, we hear little of Sophie. She appears, like so many women of her class, to have endeavoured to find consolation in devotion, but soon gave up the attempt, protesting that the directors of conscience were worse than the directors of the Opera. By the bankruptcy of the Prince de Guéménée, in 1782, she lost a considerable part of her fortune—how we are not told—a disaster which probably accounts for the fact that she soon afterwards quitted Paris and took a little house at Clichy-la-Garenne, “with an acre of land, which, however, she did not cultivate.” Here, in 1785, she was joined by her daughter, whose marriage had turned out very unhappily, and who was now suing for a separation, on the ground of her husband’s cruelty.
In her plaint, which bears date October 19, 1795, Alexandrine declares that “since she had had the misfortune to espouse the sieur Murville, she had never known a moment’s peace”; that he had “several times struck her at the end of frightful scenes”; that she had been forced to make over to him all the moneys that had been settled upon her, and that she was now “sick, destitute, and in urgent need of medical assistance to prevent the loss of an eye, which her husband had grievously injured at the risk of killing her.”
In a second plaint, made the following year, she relates that, a few days after the birth of her first child, towards whose support he now refused to contribute, her husband had called her atrocious names, seized her violently by the right arm, “with such force as to leave a red mark,” and, finally, turned her out of the house, at one o’clock in the morning.
About the same time, the unhappy Alexandrine applied to the Minister of the King’s Household for admission to the Opera in the humble capacity of a chorus-singer; but, for some reason, her request does not appear to have been granted.