By the time that the quartermaster had fulfilled all the long and
dilatory formalities without which no French soldier can be married, he
was passionately in love with Juana di Mancini, and Juana had had time
to think of her coming destiny.
An awful destiny! Juana, who felt neither esteem nor love for Diard,
was bound to him forever, by a rash but necessary promise. The man was
neither handsome nor well-made. His manners, devoid of all distinction,
were a mixture of the worst army tone, the habits of his province, and
his own insufficient education. How could she love Diard, she, a young
girl all grace and elegance, born with an invincible instinct for luxury
and good taste, her very nature tending toward the sphere of the higher
social classes? As for esteeming him, she rejected the very thought
precisely because he had married her. This repulsion was natural. Woman
is a saintly and noble creature, but almost always misunderstood, and
nearly always misjudged because she is misunderstood. If Juana had loved
Diard she would have esteemed him. Love creates in a wife a new woman;
the woman of the day before no longer exists on the morrow. Putting on
the nuptial robe of a passion in which life itself is concerned, the
woman wraps herself in purity and whiteness. Reborn into virtue and
chastity, there is no past for her; she is all future, and should forget
the things behind her to relearn life. In this sense the famous words
which a modern poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused
with truth,--
“And Love remade me virgin.”
That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so
truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern
theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially
vaudevillist spirit of the pit.
So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless.
She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all
the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in
appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart’s legality, which
women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least
reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the
extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming
with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully
comprehended, both of them, the bitter thoughts those tears contained.
But they were silent: of what good were reproaches now; why look for
consolations? The deeper they were, the more they enlarged the wound.
One evening, Juana, stupid with grief, heard through the open door of
her little room, which the old couple had thought shut, a pitying moan
from her adopted mother.
“The child will die of grief.”
“Yes,” said Perez, in a shaking voice, “but what can we do? I cannot now
boast of her beauty and her chastity to Comte d’Arcos, to whom I hoped
to marry her.”
“But a single fault is not vice,” said the old woman, pitying as the
angels.
“Her mother gave her to this man,” said Perez.
“Yes, in a moment; without consulting the poor child!” cried Dona
Lagounia.
“She knew what she was doing.”
“But oh! into what hands our pearl is going!”
“Say no more, or I shall seek a quarrel with that Diard.”
“And that would only lead to other miseries.”
Hearing these dreadful words Juana saw the happy future she had lost by
her own wrongdoing. The pure and simple years of her quiet life would
have been rewarded by a brilliant existence such as she had fondly
dreamed,--dreams which had caused her ruin. To fall from the height of
Greatness to Monsieur Diard! She wept. At times she went nearly mad.
She floated for a while between vice and religion. Vice was a speedy
solution, religion a lifetime of suffering. The meditation was stormy
and solemn. The next day was the fatal day, the day for the marriage.
But Juana could still remain free. Free, she knew how far her misery
would go; married, she was ignorant of where it went or what it might
bring her.
Religion triumphed. Dona Lagounia stayed beside her child and prayed and
watched as she would have prayed and watched beside the dying.
“God wills it,” she said to Juana.
Nature gives to woman alternately a strength which enables her to suffer
and a weakness which leads her to resignation. Juana resigned herself;
and without restriction. She determined to obey her mother’s prayer,
and cross the desert of life to reach God’s heaven, knowing well that no
flowers grew for her along the way of that painful journey.
She married Diard. As for the quartermaster, though he had no grace in
Juana’s eyes, we may well absolve him. He loved her distractedly. The
Marana, so keen to know the signs of love, had recognized in that man
the accents of passion and the brusque nature, the generous impulses,
that are common to Southerners. In the paroxysm of her anger and her
distress she had thought such qualities enough for her daughter’s
happiness.
The first days of this marriage were apparently happy; or, to express
one of those latent facts, the miseries of which are buried by women
in the depths of their souls, Juana would not cast down her husband’s
joy,--a double role, dreadful to play, but to which, sooner or later,
all women unhappily married come. This is a history impossible to
recount in its full truth. Juana, struggling hourly against her nature,
a nature both Spanish and Italian, having dried up the source of her
tears by dint of weeping, was a human type, destined to represent
woman’s misery in its utmost expression, namely, sorrow undyingly
active; the description of which would need such minute observations
that to persons eager for dramatic emotions they would seem insipid.
This analysis, in which every wife would find some one of her own
sufferings, would require a volume to express them all; a fruitless,
hopeless volume by its very nature, the merit of which would consist in
faintest tints and delicate shadings which critics would declare to be
effeminate and diffuse. Besides, what man could rightly approach,
unless he bore another heart within his heart, those solemn and touching
elegies which certain women carry with them to their tomb; melancholies,
misunderstood even by those who cause them; sighs unheeded, devotions
unrewarded,--on earth at least,--splendid silences misconstrued;
vengeances withheld, disdained; generosities perpetually bestowed and
wasted; pleasures longed for and denied; angelic charities secretly
accomplished,--in short, all the religions of womanhood and its
inextinguishable love.
Juana knew that life; fate spared her nought. She was wholly a wife,
but a sorrowful and suffering wife; a wife incessantly wounded, yet
forgiving always; a wife pure as a flawless diamond,--she who had the
beauty and the glow of the diamond, and in that beauty, that glow, a
vengeance in her hand; for she was certainly not a woman to fear the
dagger added to her “dot.”
At first, inspired by a real love, by one of those passions which for
the time being change even odious characters and bring to light all that
may be noble in a soul, Diard behaved like a man of honor. He forced
Montefiore to leave the regiment and even the army corps, so that his
wife might never meet him during the time they remained in Spain.
Next, he petitioned for his own removal, and succeeded in entering the
Imperial Guard. He desired at any price to obtain a title, honors, and
consideration in keeping with his present wealth. With this idea in
his mind, he behaved courageously in one of the most bloody battles in
Germany, but, unfortunately, he was too severely wounded to remain in
the service. Threatened with the loss of a leg, he was forced to retire
on a pension, without the title of baron, without those rewards he hoped
to win, and would have won had he not been Diard.
This event, this wound, and his thwarted hopes contributed to change his
character. His Provencal energy, roused for a time, sank down. At first
he was sustained by his wife, in whom his efforts, his courage, his
ambition had induced some belief in his nature, and who showed herself,
what women are, tender and consoling in the troubles of life. Inspired
by a few words from Juana, the retired soldier came to Paris, resolved
to win in an administrative career a position to command respect, bury
in oblivion the quartermaster of the 6th of the line, and secure for
Madame Diard a noble title. His passion for that seductive creature
enabled him to divine her most secret wishes. Juana expressed nothing,
but he understood her. He was not loved as a lover dreams of being
loved; he knew this, and he strove to make himself respected, loved, and
cherished. He foresaw a coming happiness, poor man, in the patience and
gentleness shown on all occasions by his wife; but that patience, that
gentleness, were only the outward signs of the resignation which had
made her his wife. Resignation, religion, were they love? Often Diard
wished for refusal where he met with chaste obedience; often he would
have given his eternal life that Juana might have wept upon his bosom
and not disguised her secret thoughts behind a smiling face which lied
to him nobly. Many young men--for after a certain age men no longer
struggle--persist in the effort to triumph over an evil fate, the
thunder of which they hear, from time to time, on the horizon of their
lives; and when at last they succumb and roll down the precipice
of evil, we ought to do them justice and acknowledge these inward
struggles.
Like many men Diard tried all things, and all things were hostile to
him. His wealth enabled him to surround his wife with the enjoyments of
Parisian luxury. She lived in a fine house, with noble rooms, where she
maintained a salon, in which abounded artists (by nature no judges
of men), men of pleasure ready to amuse themselves anywhere, a few
politicians who swelled the numbers, and certain men of fashion, all
of whom admired Juana. Those who put themselves before the eyes of the
public in Paris must either conquer Paris or be subject to it. Diard’s
character was not sufficiently strong, compact, or persistent to
command society at that epoch, because it was an epoch when all men were
endeavoring to rise. Social classifications ready-made are perhaps a
great boon even for the people. Napoleon has confided to us the pains
he took to inspire respect in his court, where most of the courtiers had
been his equals. But Napoleon was Corsican, and Diard Provencal. Given
equal genius, an islander will always be more compact and rounded than
the man of terra firma in the same latitude; the arm of the sea which
separates Corsica from Provence is, in spite of human science, an ocean
which has made two nations.
Diard’s mongrel position, which he himself made still more questionable,
brought him great troubles. Perhaps there is useful instruction to be
derived from the almost imperceptible connection of acts which led to
the finale of this history.
In the first place, the sneerers of Paris did not see without malicious
smiles and words the pictures with which the former quartermaster
adorned his handsome mansion. Works of art purchased the night before
were said to be spoils from Spain; and this accusation was the revenge
of those who were jealous of his present fortune. Juana comprehended
this reproach, and by her advice Diard sent back to Tarragona all the
pictures he had brought from there. But the public, determined to see
things in the worst light, only said, “That Diard is shrewd; he has
sold his pictures.” Worthy people continued to think that those which
remained in the Diard salons were not honorably acquired. Some jealous
women asked how it was that a _Diard_ (!) had been able to marry so rich
and beautiful a young girl. Hence comments and satires without end, such
as Paris contributes. And yet, it must be said, that Juana met on
all sides the respect inspired by her pure and religious life, which
triumphed over everything, even Parisian calumny; but this respect
stopped short with her, her husband received none of it. Juana’s
feminine perception and her keen eye hovering over her salons, brought
her nothing but pain.
This lack of esteem was perfectly natural. Diard’s comrades, in spite of
the virtues which our imaginations attribute to soldiers, never forgave
the former quartermaster of the 6th of the line for becoming suddenly so
rich and for attempting to cut a figure in Paris. Now in Paris, from
the last house in the faubourg Saint-Germain to the last in the rue
Saint-Lazare, between the heights of the Luxembourg and the heights of
Montmartre, all that clothes itself and gabbles, clothes itself to
go out and goes out to gabble. All that world of great and small
pretensions, that world of insolence and humble desires, of envy and
cringing, all that is gilded or tarnished, young or old, noble of
yesterday or noble from the fourth century, all that sneers at a
parvenu, all that fears to commit itself, all that wants to demolish
power and worships power if it resists,--_all_ those ears hear, _all_
those tongues say, _all_ those minds know, in a single evening, where
the new-comer who aspires to honor among them was born and brought up,
and what that interloper has done, or has not done, in the course of his
life. There may be no court of assizes for the upper classes of society;
but at any rate they have the most cruel of public prosecutors, an
intangible moral being, both judge and executioner, who accuses and
brands. Do not hope to hide anything from him; tell him all yourself;
he wants to know all and he will know all. Do not ask what mysterious
telegraph it was which conveyed to him in the twinkling of an eye, at
any hour, in any place, that story, that bit of news, that scandal;
do not ask what prompts him. That telegraph is a social mystery;
no observer can report its effects. Of many extraordinary instances
thereof, one may suffice: The assassination of the Duc de Berry, which
occurred at the Opera-house, was related within ten minutes in the
Ile-Saint-Louis. Thus the opinion of the 6th of the line as to its
quartermaster filtered through society the night on which he gave his
first ball.
Diard was therefore debarred from succeeding in society. Henceforth his
wife alone had the power to make anything of him. Miracle of our strange
civilization! In Paris, if a man is incapable of being anything himself,
his wife, when she is young and clever, may give him other chances
for elevation. We sometimes meet with invalid women, feeble beings
apparently, who, without rising from sofas or leaving their chambers,
have ruled society, moved a thousand springs, and placed their husbands
where their ambition or their vanity prompted. But Juana, whose
childhood was passed in her retreat in Tarragona, knew nothing of the
vices, the meannesses, or the resources of Parisian society; she looked
at that society with the curiosity of a girl, but she learned from it
only that which her sorrow and her wounded pride revealed to her.
Juana had the tact of a virgin heart which receives impressions in
advance of the event, after the manner of what are called “sensitives.”
The solitary young girl, so suddenly become a woman and a wife, saw
plainly that were she to attempt to compel society to respect her
husband, it must be after the manner of Spanish beggars, carbine in
hand. Besides, the multiplicity of the precautions she would have to
take, would they meet the necessity? Suddenly she divined society as,
once before, she had divined life, and she saw nothing around her but
the immense extent of an irreparable disaster. She had, moreover, the
additional grief of tardily recognizing her husband’s peculiar form
of incapacity; he was a man unfitted for any purpose that required
continuity of ideas. He could not understand a consistent part, such as
he ought to play in the world; he perceived it neither as a whole nor
in its gradations, and its gradations were everything. He was in one of
those positions where shrewdness and tact might have taken the place
of strength; when shrewdness and tact succeed, they are, perhaps, the
highest form of strength.
Now Diard, far from arresting the spot of oil on his garments left by
his antecedents, did his best to spread it. Incapable of studying the
phase of the empire in the midst of which he came to live in Paris, he
wanted to be made prefect. At that time every one believed in the genius
of Napoleon; his favor enhanced the value of all offices. Prefectures,
those miniature empires, could only be filled by men of great names, or
chamberlains of H.M. the emperor and king. Already the prefects were
a species of vizier. The myrmidons of the great man scoffed at Diard’s
pretensions to a prefecture, whereupon he lowered his demand to a
sub-prefecture. There was, of course, a ridiculous discrepancy between
this latter demand and the magnitude of his fortune. To frequent the
imperial salons and live with insolent luxury, and then to abandon that
millionaire life and bury himself as sub-prefect at Issoudun or Savenay
was certainly holding himself below his position. Juana, too late aware
of our laws and habits and administrative customs, did not enlighten her
husband soon enough. Diard, desperate, petitioned successively all the
ministerial powers; repulsed everywhere, he found nothing open to him;
and society then judged him as the government judged him and as he
judged himself. Diard, grievously wounded on the battlefield, was
nevertheless not decorated; the quartermaster, rich as he was, was
allowed no place in public life, and society logically refused him that
to which he pretended in its midst.
Finally, to cap all, the luckless man felt in his own home the
superiority of his wife. Though she used great tact--we might say velvet
softness if the term were admissible--to disguise from her husband this
supremacy, which surprised and humiliated herself, Diard ended by being
affected by it.
At a game of life like this men are either unmanned, or they grow the
stronger, or they give themselves to evil. The courage or the ardor of
this man lessened under the reiterated blows which his own faults dealt
to his self-appreciation, and fault after fault he committed. In the
first place he had to struggle against his own habits and character.
A passionate Provencal, frank in his vices as in his virtues, this man
whose fibres vibrated like the strings of a harp, was all heart to his
former friends. He succored the shabby and spattered man as readily as
the needy of rank; in short, he accepted everybody, and gave his hand in
his gilded salons to many a poor devil. Observing this on one occasion,
a general of the empire, a variety of the human species of which no
type will presently remain, refused his hand to Diard, and called him,
insolently, “my good fellow” when he met him. The few persons of really
good society whom Diard knew, treated him with that elegant, polished
contempt against which a new-made man has seldom any weapons. The
manners, the semi-Italian gesticulations, the speech of Diard, his
style of dress,--all contributed to repulse the respect which careful
observation of matters of good taste and dignity might otherwise obtain
for vulgar persons; the yoke of such conventionalities can only be cast
off by great and unthinkable powers. So goes the world.
These details but faintly picture the many tortures to which Juana was
subjected; they came upon her one by one; each social nature pricked her
with its own particular pin; and to a soul which preferred the thrust of
a dagger, there could be no worse suffering than this struggle in which
Diard received insults he did not feel and Juana felt those she did not
receive. A moment came, an awful moment, when she gained a clear and
lucid perception of society, and felt in one instant all the sorrows
which were gathering themselves together to fall upon her head. She
judged her husband incapable of rising to the honored ranks of the
social order, and she felt that he would one day descend to where his
instincts led him. Henceforth Juana felt pity for him.
The future was very gloomy for this young woman. She lived in constant
apprehension of some disaster. This presentiment was in her soul as
a contagion is in the air, but she had strength of mind and will to
disguise her anguish beneath a smile. Juana had ceased to think of
herself. She used her influence to make Diard resign his various
pretensions and to show him, as a haven, the peaceful and consoling life
of home. Evils came from society--why not banish it? In his home Diard
found peace and respect; he reigned there. She felt herself strong to
accept the trying task of making him happy,--he, a man dissatisfied with
himself. Her energy increased with the difficulties of life; she had all
the secret heroism necessary to her position; religion inspired her with
those desires which support the angel appointed to protect a Christian
soul--occult poesy, allegorical image of our two natures!
Diard abandoned his projects, closed his house to the world, and lived
in his home. But here he found another reef. The poor soldier had one of
those eccentric souls which need perpetual motion. Diard was one of
the men who are instinctively compelled to start again the moment they
arrive, and whose vital object seems to be to come and go incessantly,
like the wheels mentioned in Holy Writ. Perhaps he felt the need of
flying from himself. Without wearying of Juana, without blaming Juana,
his passion for her, rendered tranquil by time, allowed his natural
character to assert itself. Henceforth his days of gloom were more
frequent, and he often gave way to southern excitement. The more
virtuous a woman is and the more irreproachable, the more a man likes
to find fault with her, if only to assert by that act his legal
superiority. But if by chance she seems really imposing to him, he feels
the need of foisting faults upon her. After that, between man and wife,
trifles increase and grow till they swell to Alps.
But Juana, patient and without pride, gentle and without that bitterness
which women know so well how to cast into their submission, left Diard
no chance for planned ill-humor. Besides, she was one of those noble
creatures to whom it is impossible to speak disrespectfully; her glance,
in which her life, saintly and pure, shone out, had the weight of a
fascination. Diard, embarrassed at first, then annoyed, ended by feeling
that such high virtue was a yoke upon him. The goodness of his wife gave
him no violent emotions, and violent emotions were what he wanted. What
myriads of scenes are played in the depths of his souls, beneath the
cold exterior of lives that are, apparently, commonplace! Among these
dramas, lasting each but a short time, though they influence life so
powerfully and are frequently the forerunners of the great misfortune
doomed to fall on so many marriages, it is difficult to choose an
example. There was a scene, however, which particularly marked the
moment when in the life of this husband and wife estrangement began.
Perhaps it may also serve to explain the finale of this narrative.
Juana had two children, happily for her, two sons. The first was born
seven months after her marriage. He was called Juan, and he strongly
resembled his mother. The second was born about two years after her
arrival in Paris. The latter resembled both Diard and Juana, but more
particularly Diard. His name was Francisque. For the last five years
Francisque had been the object of Juana’s most tender and watchful care.
The mother was constantly occupied with that child; to him her prettiest
caresses; to him the toys, but to him, especially, the penetrating
mother-looks. Juana had watched him from his cradle; she had studied his
cries, his motions; she endeavored to discern his nature that she might
educate him wisely. It seemed at times as if she had but that one child.
Diard, seeing that the eldest, Juan, was in a way neglected, took him
under his own protection; and without inquiring even of himself whether
the boy was the fruit of that ephemeral love to which he owed his wife,
he made him his Benjamin.
Of all the sentiments transmitted to her through the blood of her
grandmothers which consumed her, Madame Diard accepted one alone,
--maternal love. But she loved her children doubly: first with the
noble violence of which her mother the Marana had given her the example;
secondly, with grace and purity, in the spirit of those social
virtues the practice of which was the glory of her life and her inward
recompense. The secret thought, the conscience of her motherhood, which
gave to the Marana’s life its stamp of untaught poesy, was to Juana an
acknowledged life, an open consolation at all hours. Her mother had
been virtuous as other women are criminal,--in secret; she had stolen a
fancied happiness, she had never really tasted it. But Juana, unhappy
in her virtue as her mother was unhappy in her vice, could enjoy at all
moments the ineffable delights which her mother had so craved and could
not have. To her, as to her mother, maternity comprised all earthly
sentiments. Each, from differing causes, had no other comfort in their
misery. Juana’s maternal love may have been the strongest because,
deprived of all other affections, she put the joys she lacked into the
one joy of her children; and there are noble passions that resemble
vice; the more they are satisfied the more they increase. Mothers and
gamblers are alike insatiable.
When Juana saw the generous pardon laid silently on the head of Juan by
Diard’s fatherly affection, she was much moved, and from the day when
the husband and wife changed parts she felt for him the true and deep
interest she had hitherto shown to him as a matter of duty only. If that
man had been more consistent in his life; if he had not destroyed
by fitful inconstancy and restlessness the forces of a true though
excitable sensibility, Juana would doubtless have loved him in the end.
Unfortunately, he was a type of those southern natures which are keen in
perceptions they cannot follow out; capable of great things over-night,
and incapable the next morning; often the victim of their own virtues,
and often lucky through their worst passions; admirable men in some
respects, when their good qualities are kept to a steady energy by some
outward bond. For two years after his retreat from active life Diard
was held captive in his home by the softest chains. He lived, almost in
spite of himself, under the influence of his wife, who made herself gay
and amusing to cheer him, who used the resources of feminine genius
to attract and seduce him to a love of virtue, but whose ability and
cleverness did not go so far as to simulate love.
At this time all Paris was talking of the affair of a captain in the
army who in a paroxysm of libertine jealousy had killed a woman. Diard,
on coming home to dinner, told his wife that the officer was dead. He
had killed himself to avoid the dishonor of a trial and the shame of
death upon the scaffold. Juana did not see at first the logic of
such conduct, and her husband was obliged to explain to her the fine
jurisprudence of French law, which does not prosecute the dead.
“But, papa, didn’t you tell us the other day that the king could
pardon?” asked Francisque.
“The king can give nothing but life,” said Juan, half scornfully.
Diard and Juana, the spectators of this little scene, were differently
affected by it. The glance, moist with joy, which his wife cast upon her
eldest child was a fatal revelation to the husband of the secrets of
a heart hitherto impenetrable. That eldest child was all Juana; Juana
comprehended him; she was sure of his heart, his future; she adored him,
but her ardent love was a secret between herself, her child, and God.
Juan instinctively enjoyed the seeming indifference of his mother in
presence of his father and brother, for she pressed him to her heart
when alone. Francisque was Diard, and Juana’s incessant care and
watchfulness betrayed her desire to correct in the son the vices of the
father and to encourage his better qualities. Juana, unaware that her
glance had said too much and that her husband had rightly interpreted
it, took Francisque in her lap and gave him, in a gentle voice still
trembling with the pleasure that Juan’s answer had brought her, a lesson
upon honor, simplified to his childish intelligence.
“That boy’s character requires care,” said Diard.
“Yes,” she replied simply.
“How about Juan?”
Madame Diard, struck by the tone in which the words were uttered, looked
at her husband.
“Juan was born perfect,” he added.
Then he sat down gloomily, and reflected. Presently, as his wife
continued silent, he added:--
“You love one of _your_ children better than the other.”
“You know that,” she said.
“No,” said Diard, “I did not know until now which of them you
preferred.”
“But neither of them have ever given me a moment’s uneasiness,” she
answered quickly.
“But one of them gives you greater joys,” he said, more quickly still.
“I never counted them,” she said.
“How false you women are!” cried Diard. “Will you dare to say that Juan
is not the child of your heart?”
“If that were so,” she said, with dignity, “do you think it a
misfortune?”
“You have never loved me. If you had chosen, I would have conquered
worlds for your sake. You know all that I have struggled to do in life,
supported by the hope of pleasing you. Ah! if you had only loved me!”
“A woman who loves,” said Juana, “likes to live in solitude, far from
the world, and that is what we are doing.”
“I know, Juana, that _you_ are never in the wrong.”
The words were said bitterly, and cast, for the rest of their lives
together, a coldness between them.
On the morrow of that fatal day Diard went back to his old companions
and found distractions for his mind in play. Unfortunately, he won
much money, and continued playing. Little by little, he returned to the
dissipated life he had formerly lived. Soon he ceased even to dine in
his own home.
Some months went by in the enjoyment of this new independence; he was
determined to preserve it, and in order to do so he separated himself
from his wife, giving her the large apartments and lodging himself in
the entresol. By the end of the year Diard and Juana only saw each other
in the morning at breakfast.
Like all gamblers, he had his alternations of loss and gain. Not
wishing to cut into the capital of his fortune, he felt the necessity
of withdrawing from his wife the management of their income; and the day
came when he took from her all she had hitherto freely disposed of
for the household benefit, giving her instead a monthly stipend. The
conversation they had on this subject was the last of their married
intercourse. The silence that fell between them was a true divorce;
Juana comprehended that from henceforth she was only a mother, and she
was glad, not seeking for the causes of this evil. For such an event is
a great evil. Children are conjointly one with husband and wife in the
home, and the life of her husband could not be a source of grief and
injury to Juana only.
As for Diard, now emancipated, he speedily grew accustomed to win and
lose enormous sums. A fine player and a heavy player, he soon became
celebrated for his style of playing. The social consideration he had
been unable to win under the Empire, he acquired under the Restoration
by the rolling of his gold on the green cloth and by his talent for
all games that were in vogue. Ambassadors, bankers, persons with
newly-acquired large fortunes, and all those men who, having sucked life
to the dregs, turn to gambling for its feverish joys, admired Diard at
their clubs,--seldom in their own houses,--and they all gambled with
him. He became the fashion. Two or three times during the winter he
gave a fete as a matter of social pride in return for the civilities he
received. At such times Juana once more caught a glimpse of the world of
balls, festivities, luxury, and lights; but for her it was a sort of
tax imposed upon the comfort of her solitude. She, the queen of these
solemnities, appeared like a being fallen from some other planet. Her
simplicity, which nothing had corrupted, her beautiful virginity of
soul, which her peaceful life restored to her, her beauty and her
true modesty, won her sincere homage. But observing how few women ever
entered her salons, she came to understand that though her husband
was following, without communicating its nature to her, a new line of
conduct, he had gained nothing actually in the world’s esteem.
Diard was not always lucky; far from it. In three years he had
dissipated three fourths of his fortune, but his passion for play gave
him the energy to continue it. He was intimate with a number of men,
more particularly with the roues of the Bourse, men who, since the
revolution, have set up the principle that robbery done on a large scale
is only a _smirch_ to the reputation,--transferring thus to financial
matters the loose principles of love in the eighteenth century. Diard
now became a sort of business man, and concerned himself in several of
those affairs which are called _shady_ in the slang of the law-courts.
He practised the decent thievery by which so many men, cleverly
masked, or hidden in the recesses of the political world, make their
fortunes,--thievery which, if done in the streets by the light of an oil
lamp, would see a poor devil to the galleys, but, under gilded ceilings
and by the light of candelabra, is sanctioned. Diard brought up,
monopolized, and sold sugars; he sold offices; he had the glory of
inventing the “man of straw” for lucrative posts which it was necessary
to keep in his own hands for a short time; he bought votes, receiving,
on one occasion, so much per cent on the purchase of fifteen
parliamentary votes which all passed on one division from the benches of
the Left to the benches of the Right. Such actions are no longer crimes
or thefts,--they are called governing, developing industry, becoming
a financial power. Diard was placed by public opinion on the bench of
infamy where many an able man was already seated. On that bench is the
aristocracy of evil. It is the upper Chamber of scoundrels of high life.
Diard was, therefore, not a mere commonplace gambler who is seen to be a
blackguard, and ends by begging. That style of gambler is no longer
seen in society of a certain topographical height. In these days bold
scoundrels die brilliantly in the chariot of vice with the trappings of
luxury. Diard, at least, did not buy his remorse at a low price; he made
himself one of these privileged men. Having studied the machinery of
government and learned all the secrets and the passions of the men in
power, he was able to maintain himself in the fiery furnace into which
he had sprung.
Madame Diard knew nothing of her husband’s infernal life. Glad of his
abandonment, she felt no curiosity about him, and all her hours were
occupied. She devoted what money she had to the education of her
children, wishing to make men of them, and giving them straight-forward
reasons, without, however, taking the bloom from their young
imaginations. Through them alone came her interests and her emotions;
consequently, she suffered no longer from her blemished life. Her
children were to her what they are to many mothers for a long period
of time,--a sort of renewal of their own existence. Diard was now an
accidental circumstance, not a participator in her life, and since he
had ceased to be the father and the head of the family, Juana felt
bound to him by no tie other than that imposed by conventional laws.
Nevertheless, she brought up her children to the highest respect for
paternal authority, however imaginary it was for them. In this she was
greatly seconded by her husband’s continual absence. If he had been much
in the home Diard would have neutralized his wife’s efforts. The boys
had too much intelligence and shrewdness not to have judged their
father; and to judge a father is moral parricide.
In the long run, however, Juana’s indifference to her husband wore
itself away; it even changed to a species of fear. She understood at
last how the conduct of a father might long weigh on the future of
her children, and her motherly solicitude brought her many, though
incomplete, revelations of the truth. From day to day the dread of some
unknown but inevitable evil in the shadow of which she lived became
more and more keen and terrible. Therefore, during the rare moments when
Diard and Juana met she would cast upon his hollow face, wan from nights
of gambling and furrowed by emotions, a piercing look, the penetration
of which made Diard shudder. At such times the assumed gaiety of her
husband alarmed Juana more than his gloomiest expressions of anxiety
when, by chance, he forgot that assumption of joy. Diard feared his wife
as a criminal fears the executioner. In him, Juana saw her children’s
shame; and in her Diard dreaded a calm vengeance, the judgment of that
serene brow, an arm raised, a weapon ready.
After fifteen years of marriage Diard found himself without resources.
He owed three hundred thousand francs and he could scarcely muster one
hundred thousand. The house, his only visible possession, was mortgaged
to its fullest selling value. A few days more, and the sort of prestige
with which opulence had invested him would vanish. Not a hand would be
offered, not a purse would be open to him. Unless some favorable event
occurred he would fall into a slough of contempt, deeper perhaps than
he deserved, precisely because he had mounted to a height he could
not maintain. At this juncture he happened to hear that a number of
strangers of distinction, diplomats and others, were assembled at the
watering-places in the Pyrenees, where they gambled for enormous sums,
and were doubtless well supplied with money.
He determined to go at once to the Pyrenees; but he would not leave his
wife in Paris, lest some importunate creditor might reveal to her the
secret of his horrible position. He therefore took her and the two
children with him, refusing to allow her to take the tutor and scarcely
permitting her to take a maid. His tone was curt and imperious; he
seemed to have recovered some energy. This sudden journey, the cause of
which escaped her penetration, alarmed Juana secretly. Her husband made
it gaily. Obliged to occupy the same carriage, he showed himself day
by day more attentive to the children and more amiable to their
mother. Nevertheless, each day brought Juana dark presentiments, the
presentiments of mothers who tremble without apparent reason, but who
are seldom mistaken when they tremble thus. For them the veil of the
future seems thinner than for others.
At Bordeaux, Diard hired in a quiet street a quiet little house, neatly
furnished, and in it he established his wife. The house was at the
corner of two streets, and had a garden. Joined to the neighboring house
on one side only, it was open to view and accessible on the other three
sides. Diard paid the rent in advance, and left Juana barely enough
money for the necessary expenses of three months, a sum not exceeding
a thousand francs. Madame Diard made no observation on this unusual
meanness. When her husband told her that he was going to the
watering-places and that she would stay at Bordeaux, Juana offered no
difficulty, and at once formed a plan to teach the children Spanish
and Italian, and to make them read the two masterpieces of the two
languages. She was glad to lead a retired life, simply and naturally
economical. To spare herself the troubles of material life, she arranged
with a “traiteur” the day after Diard’s departure to send in their
meals. Her maid then sufficed for the service of the house, and she thus
found herself without money, but her wants all provided for until her
husband’s return. Her pleasures consisted in taking walks with the
children. She was then thirty-three years old. Her beauty, greatly
developed, was in all its lustre. Therefore as soon as she appeared,
much talk was made in Bordeaux about the beautiful Spanish stranger. At
the first advances made to her Juana ceased to walk abroad, and confined
herself wholly to her own large garden.
Diard at first made a fortune at the baths. In two months he won three
hundred thousand dollars, but it never occurred to him to send any money
to his wife; he kept it all, expecting to make some great stroke of
fortune on a vast stake. Towards the end of the second month the Marquis
de Montefiore appeared at the same baths. The marquis was at this time
celebrated for his wealth, his handsome face, his fortunate marriage
with an Englishwoman, and more especially for his love of play. Diard,
his former companion, encountered him, and desired to add his spoils to
those of others. A gambler with four hundred thousand francs in hand is
always in a position to do as he pleases. Diard, confident in his luck,
renewed acquaintance with Montefiore. The latter received him very
coldly, but nevertheless they played together, and Diard lost every
penny that he possessed, and more.
“My dear Montefiore,” said the ex-quartermaster, after making a tour
of the salon, “I owe you a hundred thousand francs; but my money is in
Bordeaux, where I have left my wife.”
Diard had the money in bank-bills in his pocket; but with the
self-possession and rapid bird’s-eye view of a man accustomed to catch
at all resources, he still hoped to recover himself by some one of the
endless caprices of play. Montefiore had already mentioned his intention
of visiting Bordeaux. Had he paid his debt on the spot, Diard would
have been left without the power to take his revenge; a revenge at cards
often exceeds the amount of all preceding losses. But these burning
expectations depended on the marquis’s reply.
“Wait, my dear fellow,” said Montefiore, “and we will go together to
Bordeaux. In all conscience, I am rich enough to-day not to wish to take
the money of an old comrade.”
Three days later Diard and Montefiore were in Bordeaux at a gambling
table. Diard, having won enough to pay his hundred thousand francs, went
on until he had lost two hundred thousand more on his word. He was gay
as a man who swam in gold. Eleven o’clock sounded; the night was superb.
Montefiore may have felt, like Diard, a desire to breathe the open air
and recover from such emotions in a walk. The latter proposed to the
marquis to come home with him to take a cup of tea and get his money.
“But Madame Diard?” said Montefiore.
“Bah!” exclaimed the husband.
They went down-stairs; but before taking his hat Diard entered the
dining-room of the establishment and asked for a glass of water. While
it was being brought, he walked up and down the room, and was able,
without being noticed, to pick up one of those small sharp-pointed steel
knives with pearl handles which are used for cutting fruit at dessert.
“Where do you live?” said Montefiore, in the courtyard, “for I want to
send a carriage there to fetch me.”
Diard told him the exact address.
“You see,” said Montefiore, in a low voice, taking Diard’s arm, “that as
long as I am with you I have nothing to fear; but if I came home alone
and a scoundrel were to follow me, I should be profitable to kill.”
“Have you much with you?”
“No, not much,” said the wary Italian, “only my winnings. But they would
make a pretty fortune for a beggar and turn him into an honest man for
the rest of his life.”
Diard led the marquis along a lonely street where he remembered to have
seen a house, the door of which was at the end of an avenue of trees
with high and gloomy walls on either side of it. When they reached this
spot he coolly invited the marquis to precede him; but as if the latter
understood him he preferred to keep at his side. Then, no sooner were
they fairly in the avenue, then Diard, with the agility of a tiger,
tripped up the marquis with a kick behind the knees, and putting a foot
on his neck stabbed him again and again to the heart till the blade of
the knife broke in it. Then he searched Montefiore’s pockets, took his
wallet, money, everything. But though he had taken the Italian unawares,
and had done the deed with lucid mind and the quickness of a pickpocket,
Montefiore had time to cry “Murder! Help!” in a shrill and piercing
voice which was fit to rouse every sleeper in the neighborhood. His last
sighs were given in those horrible shrieks.
Diard was not aware that at the moment when they entered the avenue a
crowd just issuing from a theatre was passing at the upper end of the
street. The cries of the dying man reached them, though Diard did his
best to stifle the noise by setting his foot firmly on Montefiore’s
neck. The crowd began to run towards the avenue, the high walls of which
appeared to echo back the cries, directing them to the very spot where
the crime was committed. The sound of their coming steps seemed to beat
on Diard’s brain. But not losing his head as yet, the murderer left
the avenue and came boldly into the street, walking very gently, like a
spectator who sees the inutility of trying to give help. He even turned
round once or twice to judge of the distance between himself and the
crowd, and he saw them rushing up the avenue, with the exception of one
man, who, with a natural sense of caution, began to watch Diard.
“There he is! there he is!” cried the people, who had entered the avenue
as soon as they saw Montefiore stretched out near the door of the empty
house.
As soon as that clamor rose, Diard, feeling himself well in the advance,
began to run or rather to fly, with the vigor of a lion and the bounds
of a deer. At the other end of the street he saw, or fancied he saw, a
mass of persons, and he dashed down a cross street to avoid them. But
already every window was open, and heads were thrust forth right and
left, while from every door came shouts and gleams of light. Diard kept
on, going straight before him, through the lights and the noise; and
his legs were so actively agile that he soon left the tumult behind him,
though without being able to escape some eyes which took in the
extent of his course more rapidly than he could cover it. Inhabitants,
soldiers, gendarmes, every one, seemed afoot in the twinkling of an eye.
Some men awoke the commissaries of police, others stayed by the body
to guard it. The pursuit kept on in the direction of the fugitive, who
dragged it after him like the flame of a conflagration.
Diard, as he ran, had all the sensations of a dream when he heard a
whole city howling, running, panting after him. Nevertheless, he kept
his ideas and his presence of mind. Presently he reached the wall of the
garden of his house. The place was perfectly silent, and he thought he
had foiled his pursuers, though a distant murmur of the tumult came to
his ears like the roaring of the sea. He dipped some water from a brook
and drank it. Then, observing a pile of stones on the road, he hid
his treasure in it; obeying one of those vague thoughts which come to
criminals at a moment when the faculty to judge their actions under all
bearings deserts them, and they think to establish their innocence by
want of proof of their guilt.
That done, he endeavored to assume a placid countenance; he even tried
to smile as he rapped softly on the door of his house, hoping that no
one saw him. He raised his eyes, and through the outer blinds of one
window came a gleam of light from his wife’s room. Then, in the midst of
his trouble, visions of her gentle life, spent with her children, beat
upon his brain with the force of a hammer. The maid opened the door,
which Diard hastily closed behind him with a kick. For a moment he
breathed freely; then, noticing that he was bathed in perspiration,
he sent the servant back to Juana and stayed in the darkness of the
passage, where he wiped his face with his handkerchief and put his
clothes in order, like a dandy about to pay a visit to a pretty woman.
After that he walked into a track of the moonlight to examine his hands.
A quiver of joy passed over him as he saw that no blood stains were on
them; the hemorrhage from his victim’s body was no doubt inward.
But all this took time. When at last he mounted the stairs to Juana’s
room he was calm and collected, and able to reflect on his position,
which resolved itself into two ideas: to leave the house, and get to the
wharves. He did not _think_ these ideas, he _saw_ them written in fiery
letters on the darkness. Once at the wharves he could hide all day,
return at night for his treasure, then conceal himself, like a rat,
in the hold of some vessel and escape without any one suspecting
his whereabouts. But to do all this, money, gold, was his first
necessity,--and he did not possess one penny.
The maid brought a light to show him up.
“Felicie,” he said, “don’t you hear a noise in the street, shouts,
cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me.”
His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a table, reading
aloud to Francisque and Juan from a Spanish Cervantes, while the boys
followed her pronunciation of the words from the text. They all three
stopped and looked at Diard, who stood in the doorway with his hands in
his pockets; overcome, perhaps, by finding himself in this calm scene,
so softly lighted, so beautiful with the faces of his wife and children.
It was a living picture of the Virgin between her son and John.
“Juana, I have something to say to you.”
“What has happened?” she asked, instantly perceiving from the livid
paleness of her husband that the misfortune she had daily expected was
upon them.
“Oh, nothing; but I want to speak to you--to you, alone.”
And he glanced at his sons.
“My dears, go to your room, and go to bed,” said Juana; “say your
prayers without me.”
The boys left the room in silence, with the incurious obedience of
well-trained children.
“My dear Juana,” said Diard, in a coaxing voice, “I left you with very
little money, and I regret it now. Listen to me; since I relieved you
of the care of our income by giving you an allowance, have you not, like
other women, laid something by?”
“No,” replied Juana, “I have nothing. In making that allowance you did
not reckon the costs of the children’s education. I don’t say that to
reproach you, my friend, only to explain my want of money. All that you
gave me went to pay masters and--”
“Enough!” cried Diard, violently. “Thunder of heaven! every instant is
precious! Where are your jewels?”
“You know very well I have never worn any.”
“Then there’s not a sou to be had here!” cried Diard, frantically.
“Why do you shout in that way?” she asked.
“Juana,” he replied, “I have killed a man.”
Juana sprang to the door of her children’s room and closed it; then she
returned.
“Your sons must hear nothing,” she said. “With whom have you fought?”
“Montefiore,” he replied.
“Ah!” she said with a sigh, “the only man you had the right to kill.”
“There were many reasons why he should die by my hand. But I can’t lose
time--Money, money! for God’s sake, money! I may be pursued. We did not
fight. I--I killed him.”
“Killed him!” she cried, “how?”
“Why, as one kills anything. He stole my whole fortune and I took it
back, that’s all. Juana, now that everything is quiet you must go down
to that heap of stones--you know the heap by the garden wall--and get
that money, since you haven’t any in the house.”
“The money that you stole?” said Juana.
“What does that matter to you? Have you any money to give me? I tell you
I must get away. They are on my traces.”
“Who?”
“The people, the police.”
Juana left the room, but returned immediately.
“Here,” she said, holding out to him at arm’s length a jewel, “that is
Dona Lagounia’s cross. There are four rubies in it, of great value, I
have been told. Take it and go--go!”
“Felicie hasn’t come back,” he cried, with a sudden thought. “Can she
have been arrested?”
Juana laid the cross on the table, and sprang to the windows that looked
on the street. There she saw, in the moonlight, a file of soldiers
posting themselves in deepest silence along the wall of the house. She
turned, affecting to be calm, and said to her husband:--
“You have not a minute to lose; you must escape through the garden. Here
is the key of the little gate.”
As a precaution she turned to the other windows, looking on the garden.
In the shadow of the trees she saw the gleam of the silver lace on the
hats of a body of gendarmes; and she heard the distant mutterings of
a crowd of persons whom sentinels were holding back at the end of the
streets up which curiosity had drawn them. Diard had, in truth, been
seen to enter his house by persons at their windows, and on their
information and that of the frightened maid-servant, who was arrested,
the troops and the people had blocked the two streets which led to the
house. A dozen gendarmes, returning from the theatre, had climbed the
walls of the garden, and guarded all exit in that direction.
“Monsieur,” said Juana, “you cannot escape. The whole town is here.”
Diard ran from window to window with the useless activity of a captive
bird striking against the panes to escape. Juana stood silent and
thoughtful.
“Juana, dear Juana, help me! give me, for pity’s sake, some advice.”
“Yes,” said Juana, “I will; and I will save you.”
“Ah! you are always my good angel.”
Juana left the room and returned immediately, holding out to Diard, with
averted head, one of his own pistols. Diard did not take it. Juana heard
the entrance of the soldiers into the courtyard, where they laid down
the body of the murdered man to confront the assassin with the sight of
it. She turned round and saw Diard white and livid. The man was nearly
fainting, and tried to sit down.
“Your children implore you,” she said, putting the pistol beneath his
hand.
“But--my good Juana, my little Juana, do you think--Juana! is it so
pressing?--I want to kiss you.”
The gendarmes were mounting the staircase. Juana grasped the pistol,
aimed it at Diard, holding him, in spite of his cries, by the throat;
then she blew his brains out and flung the weapon on the ground.
At that instant the door was opened violently. The public prosecutor,
followed by an examining judge, a doctor, a sheriff, and a posse of
gendarmes, all the representatives, in short, of human justice, entered
the room.
“What do you want?” asked Juana.
“Is that Monsieur Diard?” said the prosecutor, pointing to the dead body
bent double on the floor.
“Yes, monsieur.”
“Your gown is covered with blood, madame.”
“Do you not see why?” replied Juana.
She went to the little table and sat down, taking up the volume of
Cervantes; she was pale, with a nervous agitation which she nevertheless
controlled, keeping it wholly inward.
“Leave the room,” said the prosecutor to the gendarmes.
Then he signed to the examining judge and the doctor to remain.
“Madame, under the circumstances, we can only congratulate you on the
death of your husband,” he said. “At least he has died as a soldier
should, whatever crime his passions may have led him to commit. His act
renders negatory that of justice. But however we may desire to spare you
at such a moment, the law requires that we should make an exact report
of all violent deaths. You will permit us to do our duty?”
“May I go and change my dress?” she asked, laying down the volume.
“Yes, madame; but you must bring it back to us. The doctor may need it.”
“It would be too painful for madame to see me operate,” said the doctor,
understanding the suspicions of the prosecutor. “Messieurs,” he added,
“I hope you will allow her to remain in the next room.”
The magistrates approved the request of the merciful physician,
and Felicie was permitted to attend her mistress. The judge and the
prosecutor talked together in a low voice. Officers of the law are
very unfortunate in being forced to suspect all, and to imagine evil
everywhere. By dint of supposing wicked intentions, and of comprehending
them, in order to reach the truth hidden under so many contradictory
actions, it is impossible that the exercise of their dreadful functions
should not, in the long run, dry up at their source the generous
emotions they are constrained to repress. If the sensibilities of the
surgeon who probes into the mysteries of the human body end by growing
callous, what becomes of those of the judge who is incessantly compelled
to search the inner folds of the soul? Martyrs to their mission,
magistrates are all their lives in mourning for their lost illusions;
crime weighs no less heavily on them than on the criminal. An old man
seated on the bench is venerable, but a young judge makes a thoughtful
person shudder. The examining judge in this case was young, and he felt
obliged to say to the public prosecutor,--
“Do you think that woman was her husband’s accomplice? Ought we to take
her into custody? Is it best to question her?”
The prosecutor replied, with a careless shrug of his shoulders,--
“Montefiore and Diard were two well-known scoundrels. The maid evidently
knew nothing of the crime. Better let the thing rest there.”
The doctor performed the autopsy, and dictated his report to the
sheriff. Suddenly he stopped, and hastily entered the next room.
“Madame--” he said.
Juana, who had removed her bloody gown, came towards him.
“It was you,” he whispered, stooping to her ear, “who killed your
husband.”
“Yes, monsieur,” she replied.
The doctor returned and continued his dictation as follows,--
“And, from the above assemblage of facts, it appears evident that the
said Diard killed himself voluntarily and by his own hand.”
“Have you finished?” he said to the sheriff after a pause.
“Yes,” replied the writer.
The doctor signed the report. Juana, who had followed him into the room,
gave him one glance, repressing with difficulty the tears which for an
instant rose into her eyes and moistened them.
“Messieurs,” she said to the public prosecutor and the judge, “I am a
stranger here, and a Spaniard. I am ignorant of the laws, and I know
no one in Bordeaux. I ask of you one kindness: enable me to obtain a
passport for Spain.”
“One moment!” cried the examining judge. “Madame, what has become of the
money stolen from the Marquis de Montefiore?”
“Monsieur Diard,” she replied, “said something to me vaguely about a
heap of stones, under which he must have hidden it.”
“Where?”
“In the street.”
The two magistrates looked at each other. Juana made a noble gesture and
motioned to the doctor.
“Monsieur,” she said in his ear, “can I be suspected of some infamous
action? I! The pile of stones must be close to the wall of my garden. Go
yourself, I implore you. Look, search, find that money.”
The doctor went out, taking with him the examining judge, and together
they found Montefiore’s treasure.
Within two days Juana had sold her cross to pay the costs of a journey.
On her way with her two children to take the diligence which would carry
her to the frontiers of Spain, she heard herself being called in the
street. Her dying mother was being carried to a hospital, and through
the curtains of her litter she had seen her daughter. Juana made the
bearers enter a porte-cochere that was near them, and there the last
interview between the mother and the daughter took place. Though the two
spoke to each other in a low voice, Juan heard these parting words,--
“Mother, die in peace; I have suffered for you all.”