Repertory of the Comedie Humaine-2 [130]
VITEL, born in 1776, Paris justice of the peace in 1845, an acquaintance of Doctor Poulain; was succeeded by Maitre Fraisier, a protege of the Camusot de Marvilles. [Cousin Pons.]
VITELOT, partner of Sonet, the marble-cutter; designed tombstones. He failed to obtain the contract for monuments to Marsay, the minister, and to Keller, the officer. It was given to Stidmann. The plans made by Vitelot having been retouched, were submitted to Wilhelm Schmucke for the grave of Sylvain Pons, who was buried in Pere-Lachaise. [Cousin Pons.]
VITELOT (Madame), wife of the preceding, severely rebuked an agent of the firm for bringing in as a customer W. Schmucke, heir-contestant to the Pons property. [Cousin Pons.]
VIVET (Madeleine), servant to the Camusot de Marvilles; during nearly twenty-five years was their feminine Maitre-Jacques. She tried in vain to gain Sylvain Pons for a husband, and thus to become their cousin. Madeleine Vivet, having failed in her matrimonial attempts, took a dislike for Pons, and persecuted him in a thousand ways. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life. Cousin Pons.]
VOLFGANG,[*] cashier of Baron du Saint-Empire, F. de Nucingen, when this well-known Parisian banker of rue Saint-Lazare fell madly in love with Esther van Gobseck, and when Jacques Falleix's discomfiture occurred. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]
[*] He lived on rue de L'Arcade, near rue des Mathurins, Paris.
VORDAC (Marquise de), born in 1769, mistress of the rich Lord Dudley; she had by him a son, Henry. To legitimize this child she arranged a marriage with Marsay, a bankrupt old gentleman of tarnished reputation. He demanded payment of the interest on a hundred thousand francs as a reward for his marriage, and he died without having known his wife. The widow of Marsay became by her second marriage the well- known Marquise de Vordac. She neglected her duties as mother until late in life, and paid no attention to Henri de Marsay except to propose Miss Stevens as a suitable wife for him. [The Thirteen.]
VULPATO (La), noble Venetian, very frequently present in Fenice; about 1820 tried to interest Emilio Memmi, Prince of Varese, and Massimilla Doni, Duchesse Cataneo, in each other. [Massimilla Doni.]
VYDER, anagram formed from d'Ervy, and one of the three names taken successively by Baron Hector Hulot d'Ervy, after deserting his wife. He hid under this assumed name, when he became a petition-writer in Paris, in the lower part of Petite Pologne, opposite rue de la Pepiniere, on Passage du Soleil, to-day called Galerie de Cherbourg. [Cousin Betty.]
W
WADMANN, an Englishman who owned, near the Marville estate in Normandie, a cottage and pasture-lands, which Madame Camusot de Marville talked of buying in 1845, when he was about to leave for England after twenty years' sojourn in France. [Cousin Pons.]
WAHLENFER or WALHENFER, wealthy German merchant who was murdered at the "Red Inn," near Andenach, Rhenish Prussia, October, 1799. The deed was done by Jean-Frederic Taillefer, then a surgeon and under- assistant-major in the French army, who suffered his comrade, Prosper Magnan, to be executed for the crime. Wahlenfer was a short, heavy-set man of rotund appearance, with frank and cordial manners. He was proprietor of a large pin-manufactory on the outskirts of Neuwied. He was from Aix-la-Chapelle. Possibly Wahlenfer was an assumed name. [The Red Inn.]
WALLENROD-TUSTALL-BARTENSTILD (Baron de), born in 1742, banker at Frankfort-on-the-Main; married in 1804, his only daughter, Bettina, to Charles Mignon de la Bastie, then only a lieutenant in the French army; died in 1814, following some disastrous speculations in cotton. [Modeste Mignon.]
WATSCHILDINE, a London firm which did business with F. de Nucingen, the banker. On a dark autumn evening in 1821, the cashier, Rodolphe Castanier, was surprised by the satanic John Melmoth, while he was in the act of forging the name of his employer on some letters of credit drawn on the Watschildine establishment. [Melmoth Reconciled.]
WATTEBLED, grocer in Soulanges, Bourgogne,