In 1815 Hulot followed the lead of the Prince de Wissembourg, his intimate friend, and became one of the officers who organized the improvised troops whose rout brought the Napoleonic cycle to a close at Waterloo.  In 1816 the Baron was one of the men best hated by the Feltre administration, and was not reinstated in the Commissariat till 1823, when he was needed for the Spanish war.  In 1830 he took office as the fourth wheel of the coach, at the time of the levies, a sort of conscription made by Louis Philippe on the old Napoleonic soldiery.  From the time when the younger branch ascended the throne, having taken an active part in bringing that about, he was regarded as an indispensable authority at the War Office.  He had already won his Marshal’s baton, and the King could do no more for him unless by making him minister or a peer of France.

From 1818 till 1823, having no official occupation, Baron Hulot had gone on active service to womankind.  Madame Hulot dated her Hector’s first infidelities from the grand finale of the Empire.  Thus, for twelve years the Baroness had filled the part in her household of prima donna assoluta, without a rival.  She still could boast of the old-fashioned, inveterate affection which husbands feel for wives who are resigned to be gentle and virtuous helpmates; she knew that if she had a rival, that rival would not subsist for two hours under a word of reproof from herself; but she shut her eyes, she stopped her ears, she would know nothing of her husband’s proceedings outside his home.  In short, she treated her Hector as a mother treats a spoilt child.

Three years before the conversation reported above, Hortense, at the Theatre des Varietes, had recognized her father in a lower tier stage-box with Jenny Cadine, and had exclaimed: 

“There is papa!”

“You are mistaken, my darling; he is at the Marshal’s,” the Baroness replied.

She too had seen Jenny Cadine; but instead of feeling a pang when she saw how pretty she was, she said to herself, “That rascal Hector must think himself very lucky.”

She suffered nevertheless; she gave herself up in secret to rages of torment; but as soon as she saw Hector, she always remembered her twelve years of perfect happiness, and could not find it in her to utter a word of complaint.  She would have been glad if the Baron would have taken her into his confidence; but she never dared to let him see that she knew of his kicking over the traces, out of respect for her husband.  Such an excess of delicacy is never met with but in those grand creatures, daughters of the soil, whose instinct it is to take blows without ever returning them; the blood of the early martyrs still lives in their veins.  Well-born women, their husbands’ equals, feel the impulse to annoy them, to mark the points of their tolerance, like points at billiards, by some stinging word, partly in the spirit of diabolical malice, and to secure the upper hand or the right of turning the tables.