A thousand tendernesses, dear mamma. Ah! if my terrors are not delusions, Camille Maupin has sold me her fortune dearly. My affectionate respects to papa.

These letters give a perfect explanation of the secret relation between husband and wife. Sabine thought of a love marriage where Calyste saw only a marriage of expediency. The joys of the honey-moon had not altogether conformed to the legal requirements of the social system.

During the stay of the married pair in Brittany the work of restoring and furnishing the hotel du Guenic had been carried on by the celebrated architect Grindot, under the superintendence of Clotilde and the Duc and Duchesse de Grandlieu, all arrangements having been made for the return of the young household to Paris in December, 1838. Sabine installed herself in the rue de Bourbon with pleasure,—less for the satisfaction of playing mistress of a great household than for that of knowing what her family would think of her marriage.

Calyste, with easy indifference, was quite willing to let his sister-in-law Clotilde and his mother-in-law the duchess guide him in all matters of social life, and they were both very grateful for his obedience. He obtained the place in society which was due to his name, his fortune, and his alliance. The success of his wife, who was regarded as one of the most charming women in Paris, the diversions of high society, the duties to be fulfilled, the winter amusements of the great city, gave a certain fresh life to the happiness of the young household by producing a series of excitements and interludes. Sabine, considered happy by her mother and sister, who saw in Calyste's coolness an effect of his English education, cast aside her gloomy notions; she heard her lot so envied by many unhappily married women that she drove her terrors from her into the region of chimeras, until the time when her pregnancy gave additional guarantees to this neutral sort of union, guarantees which are usually augured well of by experienced women. In October, 1839, the young Baronne du Guenic had a son, and committed the mistake of nursing it herself, on the theory of most women in such cases. How is it possible, they think, not to be wholly the mother of the child of an idolized husband?

Toward the end of the following summer, in August, 1840, Sabine had nearly reached the period when the duty of nursing her first child would come to an end. Calyste, during his two years' residence in Paris, had completely thrown off that innocence of mind the charm of which had so adorned his earliest appearance in the world of passion. He was now the comrade of the young Duc Georges de Maufrigneuse, lately married, like himself, to an heiress, Berthe de Cinq-Cygne; of the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere, the Duc and Duchesse de Rhetore, the Duc and Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the habitues of his mother-in-law's salon; and he fully understood by this time the differences that separated Parisian life from the life of the provinces. Wealth has fatal hours, hours of leisure and idleness, which Paris knows better than all other capitals how to amuse, charm, and divert. Contact with those young husbands who deserted the noblest and sweetest of creatures for the delights of a cigar and whist, for the glorious conversations of a club, or the excitements of "the turf," undermined before long many of the domestic virtues of the young Breton noble. The motherly solicitude of a wife who is anxious not to weary her husband always comes to the support of the dissipations of young men. A wife is proud to see her husband return to her when she has allowed him full liberty of action.

One evening, on October of that year, to escape the crying of the newly weaned child, Calyste, on whose forehead Sabine could not endure to see a frown, went, urged by her, to the Varietes, where a new play was to be given for the first time. The footman whose business it was to engage a stall had taken it quite near to that part of the theatre which is called the avant-scene. As Calyste looked about him during the first interlude, he saw in one of the two proscenium boxes on his side, and not ten steps from him, Madame de Rochefide. Beatrix in Paris! Beatrix in public! The two thoughts flew through Calyste's heart like arrows. To see her again after nearly three years! How shall we depict the convulsion in the soul of this lover, who, far from forgetting the past, had sometimes substituted Beatrix for his wife so plainly that his wife had perceived it? Beatrix was light, life, motion, and the Unknown. Sabine was duty, dulness, and the expected. One became, in a moment, pleasure; the other, weariness. It was the falling of a thunderbolt.

From a sense of loyalty, the first thought of Sabine's husband was to leave the theatre. As he left the door of the orchestra stalls, he saw the door of the proscenium box half-open, and his feet took him there in spite of his will. The young Breton found Beatrix between two very distinguished men, Canalis and Raoul Nathan, a statesman and a man of letters. In the three years since Calyste had seen her, Madame de Rochefide was amazingly changed; and yet, although the transformation had seriously affected her as a woman, she was only the more poetic and the more attractive to Calyste. Until the age of thirty the pretty women of Paris ask nothing more of their toilet than clothing; but after they pass through the fatal portal of the thirties, they look for weapons, seductions, embellishments among their chiffons; out of these they compose charms, they find means, they take a style, they seize youth, they study the slightest accessory,—in a word, they pass from nature to art.

Madame de Rochefide had just come through the vicissitudes of a drama which, in this history of the manners and morals of France in the nineteenth century may be called that of the Deserted Woman. Deserted by Conti, she became, naturally, a great artist in dress, in coquetry, in artificial flowers of all kinds.

"Why is Conti not here?" inquired Calyste in a low voice of Canalis, after going through the commonplace civilities with which even the most solemn interviews begin when they take place publicly.

The former great poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, twice a cabinet minister, and now for the fourth time an orator in the Chamber, and aspiring to another ministry, laid a warning finger significantly on his lip. That gesture explained everything.

"I am happy to see you," said Beatrix, demurely. "I said to myself when I recognized you just now, before you saw me, that you at least would not disown me. Ah! my Calyste," she added in a whisper, "why did you marry?—and with such a little fool!"

As soon as a woman whispers in the ear of a new-comer and makes him sit beside her, men of the world find an immediate excuse for leaving the pair alone together.

"Come, Nathan," said Canalis, "Madame la marquise will, I am sure, allow me to go and say a word to d'Arthez, whom I see over there with the Princesse de Cadignan; it relates to some business in the Chamber to-morrow."

This well-bred departure gave Calyste time to recover from the shock he had just received; but he nearly lost both his strength and his senses once more, as he inhaled the perfume, to him entrancing though venomous, of the poem composed by Beatrix. Madame de Rochefide, now become bony and gaunt, her complexion faded and almost discolored, her eyes hollow with deep circles, had that evening brightened those premature ruins by the cleverest contrivances of the article Paris. She had taken it into her head, like other deserted women, to assume a virgin air, and recall by clouds of white material the maidens of Ossian, so poetically painted by Girodet. Her fair hair draped her elongated face with a mass of curls, among which rippled the rays of the foot-lights attracted by the shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was indeed a masterpiece of composition.

As for her pose, one word will suffice—it was worthy of the pains she had taken to arrange it. Her arms, now thin and hard, were scarcely visible within the puffings of her very large sleeves. She presented that mixture of false glitter and brilliant fabrics, of silken gauze and craped hair, of vivacity, calmness, and motion which goes by the term of the Je ne sais quoi. Everybody knows in what that consists, namely: great cleverness, some taste, and a certain composure of manner. Beatrix might now be called a decorative scenic effect, changed at will, and wonderfully manipulated. The presentation of this fairy effect, to which is added clever dialogue, turns the heads of men who are endowed by nature with frankness, until they become possessed, through the law of contrasts, by a frantic desire to play with artifice. It is false, though enticing; a pretence, but agreeable; and certain men adore women who play at seduction as others do at cards. And this is why: The desire of the man is a syllogism which draws conclusions from this external science as to the secret promises of pleasure. The inner consciousness says, without words: "A woman who can, as it were, create herself beautiful must have many other resources for love." And that is true. Deserted women are usually those who merely love; those who retain love know the art of loving. Now, though her Italian lesson had very cruelly maltreated the self-love and vanity of Madame de Rochefide, her nature was too instinctively artificial not to profit by it.

"It is not a question of loving a man," she was saying a few moments before Calyste had entered her box; "we must tease and harass him if we want to keep him. That's the secret of all those women who seek to retain you men. The dragons who guard treasures are always armed with claws and wings."

"I shall make a sonnet on that thought," replied Canalis at the very moment when Calyste entered the box.

With a single glance Beatrix divined the state of Calyste's heart; she saw the marks of the collar she had put upon him at Les Touches, still fresh and red. Calyste, however, wounded by the speech made to him about his wife, hesitated between his dignity as a husband, Sabine's defence, and a harsh word cast upon a heart which held such memories for him, a heart which he believed to be bleeding. The marquise observed his hesitation; she had made that speech expressly that she might know how far her empire over Calyste still extended. Seeing his weakness, she came at once to his succor to relieve his embarrassment.

"Well, dear friend, you find me alone," she said, as soon as the two gentlemen had left the box,—"yes, alone in the world!"

"You forget me!" said Calyste.

"You!" she replied, "but you are married. That was one of my griefs, among the many I have endured since I saw you last. Not only—I said to myself—do I lose love, but I have lost a friendship which I thought was Breton. Alas! we can make ourselves bear everything. Now I suffer less, but I am broken, exhausted! This is the first outpouring of my heart for a long, long time. Obliged to seem proud before indifferent persons, and arrogant as if I had never fallen in presence of those who pay court to me, and having lost my dear Felicite, there was no ear into which I could cast the words, I suffer! But to you I can tell the anguish I endured on seeing you just now so near to me. Yes," she said, replying to a gesture of Calyste's, "it is almost fidelity. That is how it is with misery; a look, a visit, a mere nothing is everything to us. Ah! you once loved me—you—as I deserved to be loved by him who has taken pleasure in trampling under foot the treasures I poured out upon him. And yet, to my sorrow, I cannot forget; I love, and I desire to be faithful to a past that can never return."

Having uttered this tirade, improvised for the hundredth time, she played the pupils of her eyes in a way to double the effect of her words, which seemed to be dragged from the depths of her soul by the violence of a torrent long restrained. Calyste, incapable of speech, let fall the tears that gathered in his eyes. Beatrix caught his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.

"Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend responds to the grief of his friend. We understand each other. No, don't add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen together,—innocently enough, before a thousand people! There, you see I am strong; adieu—"

She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman's rhetoric, an antithesis of action.

"Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who amuse me," she went on. "I live among artists, writers, in short the world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille—who may indeed have acted wisely. To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, 'I am too old for him!' that is ending like the martyrs,—and the best end too, if one cannot die a virgin."

She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had made upon her former adorer.

"But," said Calyste, "where can I go to see you?"

"I am hidden in the rue de Chartres opposite the Parc de Monceaux, in a little house suitable to my means; and there I cram my head with literature—but only for myself, to distract my thoughts; God keep me from the mania of literary women! Now go, leave me; I must not allow the world to talk of me; what will it not say on seeing us together! Adieu—oh! Calyste, my friend, if you stay another minute I shall burst into tears!"

Calyste withdrew, after holding out his hand to Beatrix and feeling for the second time that strange and deep sensation of a double pressure—full of seductive tingling.

"Sabine never knew how to stir my soul in that way," was the thought that assailed him in the corridor.

During the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not cast three straight glances at Calyste, but there were many sidelong looks which tore of the soul of the man now wholly thrown back into his first, repulsed love.

When the baron du Guenic reached home the splendor of his apartments made him think of the sort of mediocrity of which Beatrix had spoken, and he hated his wealth because it could not belong to that fallen angel. When he was told that Sabine had long been in bed he rejoiced to find himself rich in the possession of a night in which to live over his emotions. He cursed the power of divination which love had bestowed upon Sabine. When by chance a man is adored by his wife, she reads on his face as in a book; she learns every quiver of its muscles, she knows whence comes its calmness, she asks herself the reason of the slightest sadness, seeking to know if haply the cause is in herself; she studies the eyes; for her the eyes are tinted with the dominant thought,—they love or they do not love. Calyste knew himself to be the object of so deep, so naive, so jealous a worship that he doubted his power to compose a cautious face that should not betray the change in his moral being.

"How shall I manage to-morrow morning?" he said to himself as he went to sleep, dreading the sort of inspection to which Sabine would have recourse. When they came together at night, and sometimes during the day, Sabine would ask him, "Do you still love me?" or, "I don't weary you, do I?" Charming interrogations, varied according to the nature or the cleverness of women, which hide their anxieties either feigned or real.

To the surface of the noblest and purest hearts the mud and slime cast up by hurricanes must come. So on that morrow morning, Calyste, who certainly loved his child, quivered with joy on learning that Sabine feared the croup, and was watching for the cause of slight convulsions, not daring to leave her little boy. The baron made a pretext of business and went out, thus avoiding the home breakfast. He escaped as prisoners escape, happy in being afoot, and free to go by the Pont Louis XVI. and the Champs Elysees to a cafe on the boulevard where he had liked to breakfast when he was a bachelor.

What is there in love? Does Nature rebel against the social yoke? Does she need that impulse of her given life to be spontaneous, free, the dash of an impetuous torrent foaming against rocks of opposition and of coquetry, rather than a tranquil stream flowing between the two banks of the church and the legal ceremony? Has she her own designs as she secretly prepares those volcanic eruptions to which, perhaps, we owe great men?

It would be difficult to find a young man more sacredly brought up than Calyste, of purer morals, less stained by irreligion; and yet he bounded toward a woman unworthy of him, when a benign and radiant chance had given him for his wife a young creature whose beauty was truly aristocratic, whose mind was keen and delicate, a pious, loving girl, attached singly to him, of angelic sweetness, and made more tender still by love, a love that was passionate in spite of marriage, like his for Beatrix. Perhaps the noblest men retain some clay in their constitutions; the slough still pleases them. If this be so, the least imperfect human being is the woman, in spite of her faults and her want of reason. Madame de Rochefide, it must be said, amid the circle of poetic pretensions which surrounded her, and in spite of her fall, belonged to the highest nobility; she presented a nature more ethereal than slimy, and hid the courtesan she was meant to be beneath an aristocratic exterior. Therefore the above explanation does not fully account for Calyste's strange passion.

Perhaps we ought to look for its cause in a vanity so deeply buried in the soul that moralists have not yet uncovered that side of vice. There are men, truly noble, like Calyste, handsome as Calyste, rich, distinguished, and well-bred, who tire—without their knowledge, possibly—of marriage with a nature like their own; beings whose own nobleness is not surprised or moved by nobleness in others; whom grandeur and delicacy consonant with their own does not affect; but who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own superiority—if indeed they do not openly beg for praise. Calyste found nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers thus stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix. If great men have played before our eyes the Saviour's part toward the woman taken in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their generation than they?

Calyste reached the hour of two o'clock living on one sentence only, "I shall see her again!"—a poem which has often paid the costs of a journey of two thousand miles. He now went with a light step to the rue de Chartres, and recognized the house at once although he had never before seen it. Once there, he stood—he, the son-in-law of the Duc de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbons—at the foot of the staircase, stopped short by the interrogation of the old footman: "Monsieur's name?" Calyste felt that he ought to leave to Beatrix her freedom of action in receiving or not receiving him; and he waited, looking into the garden, with its walls furrowed by those black and yellow lines produced by rain upon the stucco of Paris.

Madame de Rochefide, like nearly all great ladies who break their chain, had left her fortune to her husband when she fled from him; she could not beg from her tyrant. Conti and Mademoiselle des Touches had spared Beatrix all the petty worries of material life, and her mother had frequently send her considerable sums of money. Finding herself now on her own resources, she was forced to an economy that was rather severe for a woman accustomed to every luxury. She had therefore gone to the summit of the hill on which lies the Parc de Monceaux, and there she had taken refuge in a "little house" formerly belonging to a great seigneur, standing on the street, but possessed of a charming garden, the rent of which did not exceed eighteen hundred francs. Still served by an old footman, a maid, and a cook from Alencon, who were faithful to her throughout her vicissitudes, her penury, as she thought it, would have been opulence to many an ambitious bourgeoise.

Calyste went up a staircase the steps of which were well pumiced and the landings filled with flowering plants. On the first floor the old servant opened, in order to admit the baron into the apartment, a double door of red velvet with lozenges of red silk studded with gilt nails. Silk and velvet furnished the rooms through which Calyste passed. Carpets in grave colors, curtains crossing each other before the windows, portieres, in short all things within contrasted with the mean external appearance of the house, which was ill-kept by the proprietor. Calyste awaited Beatrix in a salon of sober character, where all the luxury was simple in style. This room, hung with garnet velvet heightened here and there with dead-gold silken trimmings, the floor covered with a dark red carpet, the windows resembling conservatories, with abundant flowers in the jardinieres, was lighted so faintly that Calyste could scarcely see on a mantel-shelf two cases of old celadon, between which gleamed a silver cup attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and brought from Italy by Beatrix. The furniture of gilded wood with velvet coverings, the magnificent consoles, on one of which was a curious clock, the table with its Persian cloth, all bore testimony to former opulence, the remains of which had been well applied. On a little table Calyste saw jewelled knick-knacks, a book in course of reading, in which glittered the handle of a dagger used as a paper-cutter—symbol of criticism! Finally, on the walls, ten water-colors richly framed, each representing one of the diverse bedrooms in which Madame de Rochefide's wandering life had led her to sojourn, gave the measure of what was surely superior impertinence.

The rustle of a silk dress announced the poor unfortunate, who appeared in a studied toilet which would certainly have told a roue that his coming was awaited. The gown, made like a wrapper to show the line of a white bosom, was of pearl-gray moire with large open sleeves, from which issued the arms covered with a second sleeve of puffed tulle, divided by straps and trimmed with lace at the wrists. The beautiful hair, which the comb held insecurely, escaped from a cap of lace and flowers.

"Already!" she said, smiling. "A lover could not have shown more eagerness. You must have secrets to tell me, have you not?"

And she posed herself gracefully on a sofa, inviting Calyste by a gesture to sit beside her. By chance (a selected chance, possibly, for women have two memories, that of angels and that of devils) Beatrix was redolent of the perfume which she used at Les Touches during her first acquaintance with Calyste. The inhaling of this scent, contact with that dress, the glance of those eyes, which in the semi-darkness gathered the light and returned it, turned Calyste's brain. The luckless man was again impelled to that violence which had once before almost cost Beatrix her life; but this time the marquise was on the edge of a sofa, not on that of a rock; she rose to ring the bell, laying a finger on his lips. Calyste, recalled to order, controlled himself, all the more because he saw that Beatrix had no inimical intention.

"Antoine, I am not at home—for every one," she said. "Put some wood on the fire. You see, Calyste, that I treat you as a friend," she continued with dignity, when the old man had left the room; "therefore do not treat me as you would a mistress. I have two remarks to make to you. In the first place, I should not deny myself foolishly to any man I really loved; and secondly, I am determined to belong to no other man on earth, for I believed, Calyste, that I was loved by a species of Rizzio, whom no engagement trammelled, a man absolutely free, and you see to what that fatal confidence has led me. As for you, you are now under the yoke of the most sacred of duties; you have a young, amiable, delightful wife; moreover, you are a father. I should be, as you are, without excuse—we should be two fools—"

"My dear Beatrix, all these reasons vanish before a single word—I have never loved but you on earth, and I was married against my will."

"Ah! a trick played upon us by Mademoiselle des Touches," she said, smiling.

Three hours passed, during which Madame de Rochefide held Calyste to the consideration of conjugal faith, pointing out to him the horrible alternative of an utter renunciation of Sabine. Nothing else could reassure her, she said, in the dreadful situation to which Calyste's love would reduce her. Then she affected to regard the sacrifice of Sabine as a small matter, she knew her so well!

"My dear child," she said, "that's a woman who fulfils all the promises of her girlhood. She is a Grandlieu, to be sure, but she's as brown as her mother the Portuguese, not to say yellow, and as dry and stiff as her father. To tell the truth, your wife will never go wrong; she's a big boy who can take care of herself. Poor Calyste! is that the sort of woman you needed? She has fine eyes, but such eyes are very common in Italy and in Spain and Portugal. Can any woman be tender with bones like hers. Eve was fair; brown women descend from Adam, blondes come from the hand of God, which left upon Eve his last thought after he had created her."

About six o'clock Calyste, driven to desperation, took his hat to depart.

"Yes, go, my poor friend," she said; "don't give her the annoyance of dining without you."

Calyste stayed. At his age it was so easy to snare him on his worst side.

"What! you dare to dine with me?" said Beatrix, playing a provocative amazement. "My poor food does not alarm you? Have you enough independence of soul to crown me with joy by this little proof of your affection?"

"Let me write a note to Sabine; otherwise she will wait dinner for me till nine o'clock."

"Here," said Beatrix, "this is the table at which I write."

She lighted the candles herself, and took one to the table to look over what he was writing.

"My dear Sabine—"

"'My dear'?—can you really say that your wife is still dear to you?" she asked, looking at him with a cold eye that froze the very marrow of his bones. "Go,—you had better go and dine with her."

"I dine at a restaurant with some friends."

"A lie. Oh, fy! you are not worthy to be loved either by her or by me. Men are all cowards in their treatment of women. Go, monsieur, go and dine with your dear Sabine."

Calyste flung himself back in his arm-chair and became as pale as death. Bretons possess a courage of nature which makes them obstinate under difficulties. Presently the young baron sat up, put his elbow on the table, his chin in his hand, and looked at the implacable Beatrix with a flashing eye. He was so superb that a Northern or a Southern woman would have fallen at his feet saying, "Take me!" But Beatrix, born on the borders of Normandy and Brittany, belonged to the race of Casterans; desertion had developed in her the ferocity of the Frank, the spitefulness of the Norman; she wanted some terrible notoriety as a vengeance, and she yielded to no weakness.

"Dictate what I ought to write," said the luckless man. "But, in that case—"

"Well, yes!" she said, "you shall love me then as you loved me at Guerande. Write: I dine out; do not expect me."

"What next?" said Calyste, thinking something more would follow.

"Nothing; sign it. Good," she said, darting on the note with restrained joy. "I will send it by a messenger."

"And now," cried Calyste, rising like a happy man.

"Ah! I have kept, I believe, my freedom of action," she said, turning away from him and going to the fireplace, where she rang the bell. "Here, Antoine," she said, when the old footman entered, "send this note to its address. Monsieur dines here."



XIX. THE FIRST LIE OF A PIOUS DUCHESS

Calyste returned to his own house about two in the morning. After waiting for him till half-past twelve, Sabine had gone to bed overwhelmed with fatigue. She slept, although she was keenly distressed by the laconic wording of her husband's note. Still, she explained it. The true love of a woman invariably begins by explaining all things to the advantage of the man beloved. Calyste was pressed for time, she said.

The next morning the child was better; the mother's uneasiness subsided, and Sabine came with a smiling face, and little Calyste on her arm, to present him to his father before breakfast with the pretty fooleries and senseless words which gay young mothers do and say. This little scene gave Calyste the chance to maintain a countenance. He was charming to his wife, thinking in his heart that he was a monster, and he played like a child with Monsieur le chevalier; in fact he played too well,—he overdid the part; but Sabine had not reached the stage at which a woman recognizes so delicate a distinction.

At breakfast, however, she asked him suddenly:—

"What did you do yesterday?"

"Portenduere kept me to dinner," he replied, "and after that we went to the club to play whist."

"That's a foolish life, my Calyste," said Sabine. "Young noblemen in these days ought to busy themselves about recovering in the eyes of the country the ground lost by their fathers. It isn't by smoking cigars, playing whist, idling away their leisure, and saying insolent things of parvenus who have driven them from their positions, not yet by separating themselves from the masses whose soul and intellect and providence they ought to be, that the nobility will exist. Instead of being a party, you will soon be a mere opinion, as de Marsay said. Ah! if you only knew how my ideas on this subject have enlarged since I have nursed and cradled your child! I'd like to see that grand old name of Guenic become once more historical!" Then suddenly plunging her eyes into those of Calyste, who was listening to her with a pensive air, she added: "Admit that the first note you ever wrote me was rather stiff."

"I did not think of sending you word till I got to the club."

"But you wrote on a woman's note-paper; it had a perfume of feminine elegance."

"Those club directors are such dandies!"

The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle Mirouet, had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so intimate that they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments. The two young women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this friendship by the delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and confidences apropos of their first infants.

While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, "I must warn Savinien," Sabine was thinking, "I am sure that paper bore a coronet." This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and Sabine scolded herself for having made it. Nevertheless, she resolved to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night before she had flung into her letter-box.

After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should soon return. Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages with one horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient cabriolet of our ancestors. He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte's house and begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of fibbing in case Sabine should question the vicomtesse. Thence Calyste, urging his coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order to know how Beatrix had passed the rest of the night. He found that unfortunate just from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting with a very good appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel ate her boiled eggs, and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold service, a present from a monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed a few ballads on ideas of the lord, who afterwards published them as his own!

Calyste listened entranced to the witty speeches of his idol, whose great object was to amuse him, until she grew angry and wept when he rose to leave her. He thought he had been there only half an hour, but it was past three before he reached home. His handsome English horse, a present from the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, was so bathed in sweat that it looked as though it had been driven through the sea. By one of those chances which all jealous women prepare for themselves, Sabine was at a window which looked on the court-yard, impatient at Calyste's non-return, uneasy without knowing why. The condition of the horse with its foaming mouth surprised her.

"Where can he have come from?"

The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not exactly consciousness, nor devil, nor angel; which sees, forebodes, shows us the unseen, and creates belief in mental beings, creatures born of our brains, going and coming and living in the world invisible of ideas.

"Where do you come from, dear angel?" Sabine said to Calyste, meeting him on the first landing of the staircase. "Abd-el-Kader is nearly foundered. You told me you would be gone but a moment, and I have been waiting for you these three hours."

"Well, well," thought Calyste, who was making progress in dissimulation, "I must get out of it by a present—Dear little mother," he said aloud, taking her round the waist with more cajolery than he would have used if he had not been conscious of guilt, "I see that it is quite impossible to keep a secret, however innocent, from the woman who loves us—"

"Well, don't tell secrets on the staircase," she said, laughing. "Come in."

In the middle of a salon which adjoined their bedroom, she caught sight in a mirror of Calyste's face, on which, not aware that it could be seen, he allowed his real feelings and his weariness to appear.

"Now for your secret?" she said, turning round.

"You have shown such heroism as a nurse," he said, "that the heir presumptive of the Guenics is dearer to me than ever, and I wanted to give you a surprise, precisely like any bourgeois of the rue Saint Denis. They are finishing for you at this moment a dressing-table at which true artists have worked, and my mother and aunt Zephirine have contributed."

Sabine clasped him in her arms, and held him tightly to her breast with her head on his neck, faint with the weight of happiness, not for the piece of furniture, but for the dispersion of her first dark doubt. It was one of those magnificent transports which can be counted, and which no love, however excessive, can prodigally spend, or life would be too soon burned out. Then, indeed, men should fall at the feet of women to adore them, for such moments are sublime, moments when the forces of the heart and intellect gush forth like the waters of sculptured nymphs from their inclining urns. Sabine burst into tears.

Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing heart came near to killing her. As she held Calyste in her arms, her nose at his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of that letter paper! Another woman's head had lain there, whose hair and face had left that adulterous odor! She had just kissed the spot where the kisses of her rival were still warm.

"What is the matter?" asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back to consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her smell salts.

"Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both! Yes, my milk has turned, I feel it. They won't come at once unless you fetch them yourself—go!"

Calyste, alarmed, rushed out. The moment Sabine heard the closing of the porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked about the salon as if beside herself, crying out, "My God! my God! my God!"

Those two words took the place of all ideas. The crisis she had seized upon as a pretext in reality took place. The hairs of her head were like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever. Her boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try to issue from all her pores. She was blind for a few moments, and cried aloud, "I am dying!"

At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in. After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend, Madame de Portenduere. Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her brain like straws at the will of a waterspout. "I saw," she said later, "myriads all at once."

She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one mad desire—to have certainty:—

To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:

Dear Mamma,—When you come to Paris, as you allow us to hope you will, I shall thank you in person for the beautiful present by which you and my aunt Zephirine and Calyste wish to reward me for doing my duty. I was already well repaid by my own happiness in doing it. I can never express the pleasure you have given me in that beautiful dressing-table, but when you are with me I shall try to do so. Believe me, when I array myself before that treasure, I shall think, like the Roman matron, that my noblest jewel is our little angel, etc.

She directed the letter to Guerande and gave it to the footman to post.

When the Vicomtesse de Portenduere came, the shuddering chill of reaction had succeeded in poor Sabine this first paroxysm of madness.

"Ursula, I think I am going to die," she said.

"What is the matter, dear?"

"Where did Savinien and Calyste go after they dined with you yesterday?"

"Dined with me?" said Ursula, to whom her husband had said nothing, not expecting such immediate inquiry. "Savinien and I dined alone together and went to the Opera without Calyste."

"Ursula, dearest, in the name of your love for Savinien, keep silence about what you have just said to me and what I shall now tell you. You alone shall know why I die—I am betrayed! at the end of three years, at twenty-two years of age!"

Her teeth chattered, her eyes were dull and frozen, her face had taken on the greenish tinge of an old Venetian mirror.

"You! so beautiful! For whom?"

"I don't know yet. But Calyste has told me two lies. Do not pity me, do not seem incensed, pretend ignorance and perhaps you can find out who she is through Savinien. Oh! that letter of yesterday!"

Trembling, shaking, she sprang from her bed to a piece of furniture from which she took the letter.

"See," she said, lying down again, "the coronet of a marquise! Find out if Madame de Rochefide has returned to Paris. Am I to have a heart in which to weep and moan? Oh, dearest!—to see one's beliefs, one's poesy, idol, virtue, happiness, all, all in pieces, withered, lost! No God in the sky! no love upon earth! no life in my heart! no anything! I don't know if there's daylight; I doubt the sun. I've such anguish in my soul I scarcely feel the horrible sufferings in my body. Happily, the baby is weaned; my milk would have poisoned him."

At that idea the tears began to flow from Sabine's eyes which had hitherto been dry.

Pretty Madame de Portenduere, holding in her hand the fatal letter, the perfume of which Sabine again inhaled, was at first stupefied by this true sorrow, shocked by this agony of love, without as yet understanding it, in spite of Sabine's incoherent attempts to relate the facts. Suddenly Ursula was illuminated by one of those ideas which come to none but sincere friends.

"I must save her!" she thought to herself. "Trust me, Sabine," she cried. "Wait for my return; I will find out the truth."

"Ah! in my grave I'll love you," exclaimed Sabine.

The viscountess went straight to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, pledged her to secrecy, and then explained to her fully her daughter's situation.

"Madame," she said as she ended, "do you not think with me, that in order to avoid some fatal illness—perhaps, I don't know, even madness—we had better confide the whole truth to the doctor, and invent some tale to clear that hateful Calyste and make him seem for the time being innocent?"

"My dear child," said the duchess, who was chilled to the heart by this confidence, "friendship has given you for the moment the experience of a woman of my age. I know how Sabine loves her husband; you are right, she might become insane."

"Or lose her beauty, which would be worse," said the viscountess.

"Let us go to her!" cried the duchess.

Fortunately they arrived a few moments before the famous accoucheur, Dommanget, the only one of the two men of science whom Calyste had been able to find.

"Ursula has told me everything," said the duchess to her daughter, "and you are mistaken. In the first place, Madame de Rochefide is not in Paris. As for what your husband did yesterday, my dear, I can tell you that he lost a great deal of money at cards, so that he does not even know how to pay for your dressing-table."

"But that?" said Sabine, holding out to her mother the fatal letter.

"That!" said the duchess, laughing; "why, that is written on the Jockey Club paper; everybody writes nowadays on coroneted paper; even our stewards will soon be titled."

The prudent mother threw the unlucky paper into the fire as she spoke.

When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the duchess, who had given instructions to the servants, was at once informed. She left Sabine to the care of Madame de Portenduere and stopped the accoucheur and Calyste in the salon.

"Sabine's life is at stake, monsieur," she said to Calyste; "you have betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide."

Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.

"And," continued the duchess, "as you do not know how to deceive, you have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the truth. But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not wish the death of my daughter, I am sure—All this, Monsieur Dommanget, will put you on the track of her real illness and its cause. As for you, Calyste, an old woman like me understands your error, though she does not pardon it. Such pardons can only be brought by a lifetime of after happiness. If you wish me to esteem you, you must, in the first place, save my daughter; next, you must forget Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth having once. Learn to lie; have the courage of a criminal, and his impudence. I have just told a lie myself, and I shall have to do hard penance for that mortal sin."

She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her symptoms the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the success of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste sitting at the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an expression of tenderness.

"So it was play which put those black circles round your eyes?" Sabine said to him in a feeble voice.

The words made the doctor, the mother, and the viscountess tremble, and they all three looked at one another covertly. Calyste turned as red as a cherry.

"That's what comes of nursing a child," said Dommanget brutally, but cleverly. "Husbands are lonely when separated from their wives, and they go to the club and play. But you needn't worry over the thirty thousand francs which Monsieur le baron lost last night—"

"Thirty thousand francs!" cried Ursula, in a silly tone.

"Yes, I know it," replied Dommanget. "They told me this morning at the house of the young Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was Monsieur de Trailles who won that money from you," he added, turning to Calyste. "Why do you play with such men? Frankly, monsieur le baron, I can well believe you are ashamed of it."

Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious duchess, the young viscountess, a happy woman, and the old accoucheur, a confirmed egotist, all three lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste understood the greatness of the danger, and two heavy tears rolled from his eyes and completely deceived Sabine.

"Monsieur," she said, sitting up in bed and looking angrily at Dommanget, "Monsieur du Guenic can lose thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand francs if it pleases him, without any one having a right to think it wrong or read him a lesson. It is far better that Monsieur de Trailles should win his money than that we should win Monsieur de Trailles'."

Calyste rose, took his wife round the neck, kissed her on both cheeks and whispered:—

"Sabine, you are an angel!"

Two days later the young wife was thought to be out of danger, and the next day Calyste was at Madame de Rochefide's making a merit of his infamy.

"Beatrix," he said, "you owe me happiness. I have sacrificed my poor little wife to you; she has discovered all. That fatal paper on which you made me write, bore your name and your coronet, which I never noticed—I saw but you! Fortunately the 'B' was by chance effaced. But the perfume you left upon me and the lies in which I involved myself like a fool have betrayed my happiness. Sabine nearly died of it; her milk went to the head; erysipelas set in, and possibly she may bear the marks for the rest of her days."

As Beatrix listened to this tirade her face was due North, icy enough to freeze the Seine had she looked at it.

"So much the better," she said; "perhaps it will whiten her for you."

And Beatrix, now become as hard as her bones, sharp as her voice, harsh as her complexion, continued a series of atrocious sarcasms in the same tone. There is no greater blunder than for a man to talk of his wife, if she is virtuous, to his mistress, unless it be to talk of his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife. But Calyste had not received that species of Parisian education which we must call the politeness of the passions. He knew neither how to lie to his wife, nor how to tell his mistress the truth,—two apprenticeships a man in his position must make in order to manage women. He was therefore compelled to employ all the power of passion to obtain from Beatrix a pardon which she forced him to solicit for two hours; a pardon refused by an injured angel who raised her eyes to the ceiling that she might not see the guilty man, and who put forth reasons sacred to marquises in a voice quivering with tears which were furtively wiped with the lace of her handkerchief.

"To speak to me of your wife on the very day after my fall!" she cried. "Why did you not tell me she is a pearl of virtue? I know she thinks you handsome; pure depravity! I, I love your soul! for let me tell you, my friend, you are ugly compared to many shepherds on the Campagna of Rome," etc., etc.

Such speeches may surprise the reader, but they were part of a system profoundly meditated by Beatrix in this her third incarnation,—for at each passion a woman becomes another being and advances one step more into profligacy, the only word which properly renders the effect of the experience given by such adventures. Now, the Marquise de Rochefide had sat in judgment on herself before the mirror. Clever women are never deceived about themselves; they count their wrinkles, they assist at the birth of their crow's-feet, they know themselves by heart, and even own it by the greatness of their efforts at preservation. Therefore to struggle successfully against a splendid young woman, to carry away from her six triumphs a week, Beatrix had recourse to the knowledge and the science of courtesans. Without acknowledging to herself the baseness of this plan, led away to the employment of such means by a Turkish passion for Calyste's beauty, she had resolved to make him think himself unpleasant, ugly, ill-made, and to behave as if she hated him. No system is more fruitful with men of a conquering nature. To such natures the presence of repugnance to be vanquished is the renewal of the triumph of the first day on all succeeding days. And it is something even better. It is flattery in the guise of dislike. A man then says to himself, "I am irresistible," or "My love is all-powerful because it conquers her repugnance." If you deny this principle, divined by all coquettes and courtesans throughout all social zones, you may as well reject all seekers after knowledge, all delvers into secrets, repulsed through years in their duel with hidden causes. Beatrix added to the use of contempt as a moral piston, a constant comparison of her own poetic, comfortable home with the hotel du Guenic. All deserted wives who abandon themselves in despair, neglect also their surroundings, so discouraged are they. On this, Madame de Rochefide counted, and presently began an underhand attack on the luxury of the faubourg Saint-Germain, which she characterized as stupid.

The scene of reconciliation, in which Beatrix made Calyste swear and reswear hatred to the wife, who, she said, was playing comedy, took place in a perfect bower where she played off her graces amid ravishing flowers, and rare plants of the costliest luxury. The science of nothings, the trifles of the day, she carried to excess. Fallen into a mortifying position through Conti's desertion, Beatrix was determined to have, at any rate, the fame which unprincipled conduct gives. The misfortune of the poor young wife, a rich and beautiful Grandlieu, should be her pedestal.



XX. A SHORT TREATISE ON CERTAINTY: BUT NOT FROM PASCAL'S POINT OF VIEW

When a woman returns to ordinary life after the nursing of her first child she reappears in the world embellished and charming. This phase of maternity, while it rejuvenates the women of a certain age, gives to young women a splendor of freshness, a gay activity, a brio of mere existence,—if it is permissible to apply to the body a word which Italy has discovered for the mind. In trying to return to the charming habits of the honeymoon, Sabine discovered that her husband was not the former Calyste. Again she observed him, unhappy girl, instead of resting securely in her happiness. She sought for the fatal perfume, and smelt it. This time she no longer confided in her friend, nor in the mother who had so charitably deceived her. She wanted certainty, and Certainty made no long tarrying. Certainty is never wanting, it is like the sun; and presently shades are asked for to keep it out. It is, in matters of the heart, a repetition of the fable of the woodman calling upon Death,—we soon ask Certainty to leave us blind.

One morning, about two weeks after the first crisis, Sabine received this terrible letter:—

Guerande.

To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:

My dear Daughter,—Your aunt Zephirine and I are lost in conjectures about the dressing-table of which you tell us in your letter. I have written to Calyste about it, and I beg you to excuse our ignorance. You can never doubt our hearts, I am sure. We are piling up riches for you here. Thanks to the advice of Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel on the management of your property, you will find yourself within a few years in possession of a considerable capital without losing any of your income.

Your letter, dear child as dearly loved as if I had borne you in my bosom and fed you with my milk, surprised me by its brevity, and above all by your silence about my dearest little Calyste. You told me nothing of the great Calyste either; but then, I know that he is happy, etc.

Sabine wrote across this letter these words, "Noble Brittany does not always lie." She then laid the paper on Calyste's desk.

Calyste found the letter and read it. Seeing Sabine's sentence and recognizing her handwriting he flung the letter into the fire, determined to pretend that he had never received it. Sabine spent a whole week in an agony the secrets of which are known only to angelic or solitary souls whom the wing of the bad angel has never overshadowed. Calyste's silence terrified her.

"I, who ought to be all gentleness, all pleasure to him, I have displeased him, wounded him! My virtue has made itself hateful. I have no doubt humiliated my idol," she said to herself. These thoughts plowed furrows in her heart. She wanted to ask pardon for her fault, but Certainty let loose upon her other proofs. Grown bold and insolent, Beatrix wrote to Calyste at his own home; Madame du Guenic received the letter, and gave it to her husband without opening it, but she said to him, in a changed voice and with death in her soul: "My friend, that letter is from the Jockey Club; I recognize both the paper and the perfume."

Calyste colored, and put the letter into his pocket.

"Why don't you read it?"

"I know what it is about."

The young wife sat down. No longer did fever burn her, she wept no more; but madness such as, in feeble beings, gives birth to miracles of crime, madness which lays hands on arsenic for themselves or for their rivals, possessed her. At this moment little Calyste was brought in, and she took him in her arms to dance him. The child, just awakened, sought the breast beneath the gown.

"He remembers,—he, at any rate," she said in a low voice.

Calyste went to his own room to read his letter. When he was no longer present the poor young woman burst into tears, and wept as women weep when they are all alone.

Pain, as well as pleasure, has its initiation. The first crisis, like that in which poor Sabine nearly succumbed, returns no more than the first fruits of other things return. It is the first wedge struck in the torture of the heart; all others are expected, the shock to the nerves is known, the capital of our forces has been already drawn upon for vigorous resistance. So Sabine, sure of her betrayal, spent three hours with her son in her arms beside the fire in a way that surprised herself, when Gasselin, turned into a footman, came to say:—

"Madame is served."

"Let monsieur know."

"Monsieur does not dine at home, Madame la baronne."

Who knows what torture there is for a young woman of twenty-three in finding herself alone in the great dining-room of an old mansion, served by silent servants, under circumstances like these?

"Order the carriage," she said suddenly; "I shall go to the Opera."

She dressed superbly; she wanted to exhibit herself alone and smiling like a happy woman. In the midst of her remorse for the addition she had made to Madame de Rochefide's letter she had resolved to conquer, to win back Calyste by loving kindness, by the virtues of a wife, by the gentleness of the paschal lamb. She wished, also, to deceive all Paris. She loved,—loved as courtesans and as angels love, with pride, with humility. But the opera chanced to be "Otello." When Rubini sang Il mio cor si divide, she rushed away. Music is sometimes mightier than actor or poet, the two most powerful of all natures, combined. Savinien de Portenduere accompanied Sabine to the peristyle and put her in the carriage without being able to understand this sudden flight.

Madame du Guenic now entered a phase of suffering which is peculiar to the aristocracy. Envious, poor, and miserable beings,—when you see on the arms of such women golden serpents with diamond heads, necklaces clasped around their necks, say to yourselves that those vipers sting, those slender bonds burn to the quick through the delicate flesh. All such luxury is dearly bought. In situations like that of Sabine, women curse the pleasures of wealth; they look no longer at the gilding of their salons; the silk of the divans is jute in their eyes, exotic flowers are nettles, perfumes poison, the choicest cookery scrapes their throat like barley-bread, and life becomes as bitter as the Dead Sea.

Two or three examples may serve to show this reaction of luxury upon happiness; so that all those women who have endured it may behold their own experience.

Fully aware now of this terrible rivalry, Sabine studied her husband when he left the house, that she might divine, if possible, the future of his day. With what restrained fury does a woman fling herself upon the red-hot spikes of that savage martyrdom! What delirious joy if she could think he did not go to the rue de Chartres! Calyste returned, and then the study of his forehead, his hair, his eyes, his countenance, his demeanor, gave a horrible interest to mere nothings, to observations pursued even to matters of toilet, in which a woman loses her self-respect and dignity. These fatal investigations, concealed in the depths of her heart, turn sour and rot the delicate roots from which should spring to bloom the azure flowers of sacred confidence, the golden petals of the One only love, with all the perfumes of memory.

One day Calyste looked about him discontentedly; he had stayed at home! Sabine made herself caressing and humble, gay and sparkling.

"You are vexed with me, Calyste; am I not a good wife? What is there here that displeases you?" she asked.

"These rooms are so cold and bare," he replied; "you don't understand arranging things."

"Tell me what is wanting."

"Flowers."

"Ah!" she thought to herself, "Madame de Rochefide likes flowers."

Two days later, the rooms of the hotel du Guenic had assumed another aspect. No one in Paris could flatter himself to have more exquisite flowers than those that now adorned them.

Some time later Calyste, one evening after dinner, complained of the cold. He twisted about in his chair, declaring there was a draught, and seemed to be looking for something. Sabine could not at first imagine what this new fancy signified, she, whose house possessed a calorifere which heated the staircases, antechambers, and passages. At last, after three days' meditation, she came to the conclusion that her rival probably sat surrounded by a screen to obtain the half-lights favorable to faded faces; so Sabine had a screen, but hers was of glass and of Israelitish splendor.

"From what quarter will the next storm come?" she said to herself.

These indirect comparisons with his mistress were not yet at an end. When Calyste dined at home he ate his dinner in a way to drive Sabine frantic; he would motion to the servants to take away his plates after pecking at two or three mouthfuls.

"Wasn't it good?" Sabine would ask, in despair at seeing all the pains she had taken in conference with her cook thrown away.

"I don't say that, my angel," replied Calyste, without anger; "I am not hungry, that is all."

A woman consumed by a legitimate passion, who struggles thus, falls at last into a fury of desire to get the better of her rival, and often goes too far, even in the most secret regions of married life. So cruel, burning, and incessant a combat in the obvious and, as we may call them, exterior matters of a household must needs become more intense and desperate in the things of the heart. Sabine studied her attitudes, her toilets; she took heed about herself in all the infinitely little trifles of love.

The cooking trouble lasted nearly a month. Sabine, assisted by Mariotte and Gasselin, invented various little vaudeville schemes to ascertain the dishes which Madame de Rochefide served to Calyste. Gasselin was substituted for Calyste's groom, who had fallen conveniently ill. This enabled Gasselin to consort with Madame de Rochefide's cook, and before long, Sabine gave Calyste the same fare, only better; but still he made difficulties.

"What is wanting now?" she said.

"Oh, nothing," he answered, looking round the table for something he did not find.

"Ah!" exclaimed Sabine, as she woke the next morning, "Calyste wanted some of those Indian sauces they serve in England in cruets. Madame de Rochefide accustoms him to all sorts of condiments."

She bought the English cruets and the spiced sauces; but it soon became impossible for her to make such discoveries in all the preparations invented by her rival.

This period lasted some months; which is not surprising when we remember the sort of attraction presented by such a struggle. It is life. And that is preferable, with its wounds and its anguish, to the gloomy darkness of disgust, to the poison of contempt, to the void of abdication, to that death of the heart which is called indifference. But all Sabine's courage abandoned her one evening when she appeared in a toilet such as women are inspired to wear in the hope of eclipsing a rival, and about which Calyste said, laughing:—

"In spite of all you can do, Sabine, you'll never be anything but a handsome Andalusian."

"Alas!" she said, dropping on a sofa, "I may never make myself a blonde, but I know if this continues I shall soon be thirty-five years old."

She refused to go to the Opera as she intended, and chose to stay at home the whole evening. But once alone she pulled the flowers from her hair and stamped upon them; she tore off the gown and scarf and trampled them underfoot, like a goat caught in the tangle of its tether, which struggles till death comes. Then she went to bed.



XXI. THE WICKEDNESS OF A GOOD WOMAN

Playing for these terrible stakes Sabine grew thin; grief consumed her; but she never for a moment forsook the role she had imposed upon herself. Sustained by a sort of fever, her lips drove back into her throat the bitter words that pain suggested; she repressed the flashing of her glorious dark eyes, and made them soft even to humility. But her failing health soon became noticeable. The duchess, an excellent mother, though her piety was becoming more and more Portuguese, recognized a moral cause in the physically weak condition in which Sabine now took satisfaction. She knew the exact state of the relation between Beatrix and Calyste; and she took great pains to draw her daughter to her own house, partly to soothe the wounds of her heart, but more especially to drag her away from the scene of her martyrdom. Sabine, however, maintained the deepest silence for a long time about her sorrows, fearing lest some one might meddle between herself and Calyste. She declared herself happy! At the height of her misery she recovered her pride, and all her virtues.

But at last, after some months during which her sister Clotilde and her mother had caressed and petted her, she acknowledged her grief, confided her sorrows, cursed life, and declared that she saw death coming with delirious joy. She begged Clotilde, who was resolved to remain unmarried, to be a mother to her little Calyste, the finest child that any royal race could desire for heir presumptive.

One evening, as she sat with her young sister Athenais (whose marriage to the Vicomte de Grandlieu was to take place at the end of Lent), and with Clotilde and the duchess, Sabine gave utterance to the supreme cries of her heart's anguish, excited by the pangs of a last humiliation.

"Athenais," she said, when the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu departed at eleven o'clock, "you are going to marry; let my example be a warning to you. Consider it a crime to display your best qualities; resist the pleasure of adorning yourself to please Juste. Be calm, dignified, cold; measure the happiness you give by that which you receive. This is shameful, but it is necessary. Look at me. I perish through my best qualities. All that I know was fine and sacred and grand within me, all my virtues, were rocks on which my happiness is wrecked. I have ceased to please because I am not thirty-six years old. In the eyes of some men youth is thought an inferiority. There is nothing to imagine on an innocent face. I laugh frankly, and that is wrong; to captivate I ought to play off the melancholy half-smile of the fallen angel, who wants to hide her yellowing teeth. A fresh complexion is monotonous; some men prefer their doll's wax made of rouge and spermaceti and cold cream. I am straightforward; but duplicity is more pleasing. I am loyally passionate, as an honest woman may be, but I ought to be manoeuvring, tricky, hypocritical, and simulate a coldness I have not,—like any provincial actress. I am intoxicated with the happiness of having married one of the most charming men in France; I tell him, naively, how distinguished he is, how graceful his movements are, how handsome I think him; but to please him I ought to turn away my head with pretended horror, to love nothing with real love, and tell him his distinction is mere sickliness. I have the misfortune to admire all beautiful things without setting myself up for a wit by caustic and envious criticism of whatever shines from poesy and beauty. I don't seek to make Canalis and Nathan say of me in verse and prose that my intellect is superior. I'm only a poor little artless child; I care only for Calyste. Ah! if I had scoured the world like her, if I had said as she has said, 'I love,' in every language of Europe, I should be consoled, I should be pitied, I should be adored for serving the regal Macedonian with cosmopolitan love! We are thanked for our tenderness if we set it in relief against our vice. And I, a noble woman, must teach myself impurity and all the tricks of prostitutes! And Calyste is the dupe of such grimaces! Oh, mother! oh, my dear Clotilde! I feel that I have got my death-blow. My pride is only a sham buckler; I am without defence against my misery; I love my husband madly, and yet to bring him back to me I must borrow the wisdom of indifference."

"Silly girl," whispered Clotilde, "let him think you will avenge yourself—"

"I wish to die irreproachable and without the mere semblance of doing wrong," replied Sabine. "A woman's vengeance should be worthy of her love."

"My child," said the duchess to her daughter, "a mother must of course see life more coolly than you can see it. Love is not the end, but the means, of the Family. Do not imitate that poor Baronne de Macumer. Excessive passion is unfruitful and deadly. And remember, God sends us afflictions with knowledge of our needs. Now that Athenais' marriage is arranged, I can give all my thoughts to you. In fact, I have already talked of this delicate crisis in your life with your father and the Duc de Chaulieu, and also with d'Ajuda; we shall certainly find means to bring Calyste back to you."

"There is always one resource with the Marquise de Rochefide," remarked Clotilde, smiling, to her sister; "she never keeps her adorers long."

"D'Ajuda, my darling," continued the duchess, "was Monsieur de Rochefide's brother-in-law. If our dear confessor approves of certain little manoeuvres to which we must have recourse to carry out a plan which I have proposed to your father, I can guarantee to you the recovery of Calyste. My conscience is repugnant to the use of such means, and I must first submit them to the judgment of the Abbe Brossette. We shall not wait, my child, till you are in extremis before coming to your relief. Keep a good heart! Your grief to-night is so bitter that my secret escapes me; but it is impossible for me not to give you a little hope."

"Will it make Calyste unhappy?" asked Sabine, looking anxiously at the duchess.

"Oh, heavens! shall I ever be as silly as that!" cried Athenais, naively.

"Ah, little girl, you know nothing of the precipices down which our virtue flings us when led by love," replied Sabine, making a sort of moral revelation, so distraught was she by her woe.

The speech was uttered with such incisive bitterness that the duchess, enlightened by the tone and accent and look of her daughter, felt certain there was some hidden trouble.

"My dears, it is midnight; come, go to bed," she said to Clotilde and Athenais, whose eyes were shining.

"In spite of my thirty-five years I appear to be de trop," said Clotilde, laughing. While Athenais kissed her mother, Clotilde leaned over Sabine and said in her ear: "You will tell what it is? I'll dine with you to-morrow. If my mother's conscience won't let her act, I—I myself will get Calyste out of the hands of the infidels."

"Well, Sabine," said the duchess, taking her daughter into her bedroom, "tell me, what new trouble is there, my child?"

"Mamma, I am lost!"

"But how?"

"I wanted to get the better of that horrible woman—I conquered for a time—I am pregnant again—and Calyste loves her so that I foresee a total abandonment. When she hears of it she will be furious. Ah! I suffer such tortures that I cannot endure them long. I know when he is going to her, I know it by his joy; and his peevishness tells me as plainly when he leaves her. He no longer troubles himself to conceal his feelings; I have become intolerable to him. She has an influence over him as unhealthy as she is herself in soul and body. You'll see! she will exact from him, as the price of forgiveness, my public desertion, a rupture like her own; she will take him away from me to Switzerland or Italy. He is beginning now to say it is ridiculous that he knows nothing of Europe. I can guess what those words mean, flung out in advance. If Calyste is not cured of her in three months I don't know what he may become; but as for me, I will kill myself."

"But your soul, my unhappy child? Suicide is a mortal sin."

"Don't you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved the child of that woman more than mine—Oh! that's the end of my patience and all my resignation."

She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in her heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like that iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay,—it supports, it is a force.

"Come, go home, dear sufferer. In view of such misery the abbe will surely give me absolution for the venial sins which the deceits of the world compel us to commit. Leave me now, my daughter," she said, going to her prie-Dieu. "I must pray to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin for you, with special supplication. Good-bye, my dear Sabine; above all things, do not neglect your religious duties if you wish us to succeed."

"And if we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste has killed within me the holy fervor of love,—killed it by sickening me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!"

The next day, about two in the afternoon, one of the vicars of the faubourg Saint-Germain appointed to a vacant bishopric in 1840 (an office refused by him for the third time), the Abbe Brossette, one of the most distinguished priests in Paris, crossed the court-yard of the hotel de Grandlieu, with a step which we must needs call the ecclesiastical step, so significant is it of caution, mystery, calmness, gravity, and dignity. He was a thin little man about fifty years of age, with a face as white as that of an old woman, chilled by priestly austerities, and hollowed by all the sufferings which he espoused. Two black eyes, ardent with faith yet softened by an expression more mysterious than mystical, animated that truly apostolical face. He was smiling as he mounted the steps of the portico, so little did he believe in the enormity of the cases about which his penitent sent for him; but as the hand of the duchess was an open palm for charity, she was worth the time which her innocent confessions stole from the more serious miseries of the parish.

When the vicar was announced the duchess rose, and made a few steps toward him in the salon,—a distinction she granted only to cardinals, bishops, simple priests, duchesses older then herself, and persons of royal blood.

"My dear abbe," she said, pointing to a chair and speaking in a low voice, "I need the authority of your experience before I throw myself into a rather wicked intrigue, although it is one which must result in great good; and I desire to know from you whether I shall make hindrances to my own salvation in the course I propose to follow."

"Madame la duchesse," replied the abbe, "do not mix up spiritual things with worldly things; they are usually irreconcilable. In the first place, what is this matter?"

"You know that my daughter Sabine is dying of grief; Monsieur du Guenic has left her for Madame de Rochefide."

"It is very dreadful, very serious; but you know what our dear Saint Francois de Sales says on that subject. Remember too how Madame Guyon complained of the lack of mysticism in the proofs of conjugal love; she would have been very willing to see her husband with a Madame de Rochefide."

"Sabine is only too gentle; she is almost too completely a Christian wife; but she has not the slightest taste for mysticism."

"Poor young woman!" said the abbe, maliciously. "What method will you take to remedy the evil?"

"I have committed the sin, my dear director, of thinking how to launch upon Madame de Rochefide a little man, very self-willed and full of the worst qualities, who will certainly induce her to dismiss my son-in-law."

"My daughter," replied the abbe, stroking his chin, "we are not now in the confessional; I am not obliged to make myself your judge. From the world's point of view, I admit that the result would be decisive—"

"The means seem to me odious," she said.

"Why? No doubt the duty of a Christian woman is to withdraw a sinning woman from an evil path, rather than push her along it; but when a woman has advanced upon that path as far as Madame de Rochefide, it is not the hand of man, but that of God, which recalls such a sinner; she needs a thunderbolt."

"Father," replied the duchess, "I thank you for your indulgence; but the thought has occurred to me that my son-in-law is brave and a Breton. He was heroic at the time of the rash affair of that poor MADAME. Now, if the young fellow who undertook to make Madame de Rochefide love him were to quarrel with Calyste, and a duel should ensue—"

"You have thought wisely, Madame la duchesse; and it only proves that in crooked paths you will always find rocks of stumbling."

"I have discovered a means, my dear abbe, to do a great good; to withdraw Madame de Rochefide from the fatal path in which she now is; to restore Calyste to his wife, and possibly to save from hell a poor distracted creature."

"In that case, why consult me?" asked the vicar, smiling.

"Ah!" replied the duchess, "Because I must permit myself some rather nasty actions—"

"You don't mean to rob anybody?"

"On the contrary, I shall apparently have to spend a great deal of money."

"You will not calumniate, or—"

"Oh! oh!"

"—injure your neighbor?"

"I don't know about that."

"Come, tell me your plan," said the abbe, now becoming curious.

"Suppose, instead of driving out one nail by another,—this is what I thought at my prie-Dieu after imploring the Blessed Virgin to enlighten me,—I were to free Calyste by persuading Monsieur de Rochefide to take back his wife? Instead of lending a hand to evil for the sake of doing good to my daughter, I should do one great good by another almost as great—"

The vicar looked at the Portuguese lady, and was pensive.

"That is evidently an idea that came to you from afar," he said, "so far that—"

"I have thanked the Virgin for it," replied the good and humble duchess; "and I have made a vow—not counting a novena—to give twelve hundred francs to some poor family if I succeed. But when I communicated my plan to Monsieur de Grandlieu he began to laugh, and said: 'Upon my honor, at your time of life I think you women have a devil of your own.'"

"Monsieur le duc made as a husband the same reply I was about to make when you interrupted me," said the abbe, who could not restrain a smile.

"Ah! Father, if you approve of the idea, will you also approve of the means of execution? It is necessary to do to a certain Madame Schontz (a Beatrix of the quartier Saint-Georges) what I proposed to do to Madame de Rochefide."

"I am certain that you will not do any real wrong," said the vicar, cleverly, not wishing to hear any more, having found the result so desirable. "You can consult me later if you find your conscience muttering," he added. "But why, instead of giving that person in the rue Saint-Georges a fresh occasion for scandal, don't you give her a husband?"

"Ah! my dear director, now you have rectified the only bad thing I had in my plan. You are worthy of being an archbishop, and I hope I shall not die till I have had the opportunity of calling you Your Eminence."

"I see only one difficulty in all this," said the abbe.

"What is that?"

"Suppose Madame de Rochefide chooses to keep your son-in-law after she goes back to her husband?"

"That's my affair," replied the duchess; "when one doesn't often intrigue, one does so—"

"Badly, very badly," said the abbe. "Habit is necessary for everything. Try to employ some of those scamps who live by intrigue, and don't show your own hand."

"Ah! monsieur l'abbe, if I make use of the means of hell, will Heaven help me?"

"You are not at confession," repeated the abbe. "Save your child."

The worthy duchess, delighted with her vicar, accompanied him to the door of the salon.



XXII. THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLASS GRISETTE

A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a Parisian can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he had been to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very sensibly said to his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so agreeable and satisfactory an existence. This opinion will oblige us to give certain details on the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after his wife had placed him in the position of a deserted husband. The reader will then be enabled to understand the enormous difference which our laws and our morals put between the two sexes in the same situation. That which turns to misery for the woman turns to happiness for the man. This contrast may inspire more than one young woman with the determination to remain in her own home, and to struggle there, like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as she may select) the most aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.

Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife of the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d'Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage and the petits journaux, by his method of repeating them, and applied them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had served in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point that women without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest did not dare to contradict them.

This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously. Thus without any taste of his own, he knew how to be the first to adopt and the first to abandon a new fashion. Accused of nothing worse than spending too much time at his toilet and wearing a corset, he presented the type of those persons who displease no one by adopting incessantly the ideas and the follies of everbody, and who, astride of circumstance, never grow old.

As a husband, he was pitied; people thought Beatrix inexcusable for deserting the best fellow on earth, and social jeers only touched the woman. A member of all clubs, subscriber to all the absurdities generated by patriotism or party spirit ill-understood (a compliance which put him in the front rank a propos of all such matters), this loyal, brave, and very silly nobleman, whom unfortunately so many rich men resemble, would naturally desire to distinguish himself by adopting some fashionable mania. Consequently, he glorified his name principally in being the sultan of a four-footed harem, governed by an old English groom, which cost him monthly from four to five thousand francs. His specialty was running horses; he protected the equine race and supported a magazine devoted to hippic questions; but, for all that, he knew very little of the animals, and from shoes to bridles he depended wholly on his groom,—all of which will sufficiently explain to you that this semi-bachelor had nothing actually of his own, neither mind, taste, position, or absurdity; even his fortune came from his fathers. After having tasted the displeasures of marriage he was so content to find himself once more a bachelor that he said among his friends, "I was born with a caul" (that is, to good luck).

Pleased above all things to be able to live without the costs of making an appearance, to which husbands are constrained, his house, in which since the death of his father nothing had been changed, resembled those of masters who are travelling; he lived there little, never dined, and seldom slept there. Here follows the reason for such indifference.

After various amorous adventures, bored by women of fashion of the kind who are truly bores, and who plant too many thorny hedges around happiness, he had married after a fashion, as we shall see, a certain Madame Schontz, celebrated in the world of Fanny Beaupre, Susanne du Val-Noble, Florine, Mariette, Jenny Cadine, etc. This world,—of which one of our artists wittily remarked at the frantic moment of an opera galop, "When one thinks that all that is lodged and clothed and lives well, what a fine idea it gives us of mankind!"—this world has already irrupted elsewhere into this history of French manners and customs of the nineteenth century; but to paint it with fidelity, the historian should proportion the number of such personages to the diverse endings of their strange careers, which terminate either in poverty under its most hideous aspect, or by premature death often self-inflicted, or by lucky marriages, occasionally by opulence.