At these words, spoken in a gentle voice, the old man kissed his
daughter on both cheeks. That night the lovers slept as soundly as
Monsieur and Madame Guillaume.
Some few months after this memorable Sunday the high altar of Saint-Leu
was the scene of two very different weddings. Augustine and Theodore
appeared in all the radiance of happiness, their eyes beaming with love,
dressed with elegance, while a fine carriage waited for them. Virginie,
who had come in a good hired fly with the rest of the family, humbly
followed her younger sister, dressed in the simplest fashion like a
shadow necessary to the harmony of the picture. Monsieur Guillaume had
exerted himself to the utmost in the church to get Virginie married
before Augustine, but the priests, high and low, persisted in addressing
the more elegant of the two brides. He heard some of his neighbors
highly approving the good sense of Mademoiselle Virginie, who was
making, as they said, the more substantial match, and remaining faithful
to the neighborhood; while they fired a few taunts, prompted by envy of
Augustine, who was marrying an artist and a man of rank; adding, with a
sort of dismay, that if the Guillaumes were ambitious, there was an end
to the business. An old fan-maker having remarked that such a prodigal
would soon bring his wife to beggary, father Guillaume prided himself
_in petto_ for his prudence in the matter of marriage settlements. In
the evening, after a splendid ball, followed by one of those substantial
suppers of which the memory is dying out in the present generation,
Monsieur and Madame Guillaume remained in a fine house belonging to them
in the Rue du Colombier, where the wedding had been held; Monsieur
and Madame Lebas returned in their fly to the old home in the Rue
Saint-Denis, to steer the good ship Cat and Racket. The artist,
intoxicated with happiness, carried off his beloved Augustine, and
eagerly lifting her out of their carriage when it reached the Rue des
Trois-Freres, led her to an apartment embellished by all the arts.
The fever of passion which possessed Theodore made a year fly over the
young couple without a single cloud to dim the blue sky under which they
lived. Life did not hang heavy on the lovers’ hands. Theodore lavished
on every day inexhaustible _fioriture_ of enjoyment, and he delighted
to vary the transports of passion by the soft languor of those hours
of repose when souls soar so high that they seem to have forgotten all
bodily union. Augustine was too happy for reflection; she floated on
an undulating tide of rapture; she thought she could not do enough by
abandoning herself to sanctioned and sacred married love; simple and
artless, she had no coquetry, no reserves, none of the dominion which a
worldly-minded girl acquires over her husband by ingenious caprice; she
loved too well to calculate for the future, and never imagined that so
exquisite a life could come to an end. Happy in being her husband’s sole
delight, she believed that her inextinguishable love would always be
her greatest grace in his eyes, as her devotion and obedience would be
a perennial charm. And, indeed, the ecstasy of love had made her so
brilliantly lovely that her beauty filled her with pride, and gave her
confidence that she could always reign over a man so easy to kindle
as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus her position as a wife brought her no
knowledge but the lessons of love.
In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had
lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought of
acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she had
to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in them, no
doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement of speech;
but she used the language common to all women when they find themselves
plunged in passion, which seems to be their element. When, by chance,
Augustine expressed an idea that did not harmonize with Theodore’s, the
young artist laughed, as we laugh at the first mistakes of a foreigner,
though they end by annoying us if they are not corrected.
In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as delightful
as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for resuming his
work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their first child. He
saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts of the year when
a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time, he worked,
no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion in the
fashionable world. The house which he was best pleased to frequent
was that of the Duchesse de Carigliano, who had at last attracted the
celebrated artist to her parties. When Augustine was quite well again,
and her boy no longer required the assiduous care which debars a mother
from social pleasures, Theodore had come to the stage of wishing to know
the joys of satisfied vanity to be found in society by a man who shows
himself with a handsome woman, the object of envy and admiration.
To figure in drawing-rooms with the reflected lustre of her husband’s
fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to Augustine a new
harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of conjugal happiness.
She first wounded her husband’s vanity when, in spite of vain efforts,
she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her language, and the
narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux’s nature, subjugated for nearly two
years and a half by the first transports of love, now, in the calm of
less new possession, recovered its bent and habits, for a while diverted
from their channel. Poetry, painting, and the subtle joys of imagination
have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit. These cravings of a
powerful soul had not been starved in Theodore during these two years;
they had only found fresh pasture. As soon as the meadows of love had
been ransacked, and the artist had gathered roses and cornflowers as the
children do, so greedily that he did not see that his hands could
hold no more, the scene changed. When the painter showed his wife the
sketches for his finest compositions he heard her exclaim, as her father
had done, “How pretty!” This tepid admiration was not the outcome of
conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the strength of love.
Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The only
sublime she knew was that of the heart. At last Theodore could not
resist the evidence of the cruel fact--his wife was insensible to
poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in
all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows; she walked
groveling in the world of reality, while his head was in the skies.
Common minds cannot appreciate the perennial sufferings of a being
who, while bound to another by the most intimate affections, is obliged
constantly to suppress the dearest flights of his soul, and to thrust
down into the void those images which a magic power compels him to
create. To him the torture is all the more intolerable because his
feeling towards his companion enjoins, as its first law, that they
should have no concealments, but mingle the aspirations of their thought
as perfectly as the effusions of their soul. The demands of nature are
not to be cheated. She is as inexorable as necessity, which is, indeed,
a sort of social nature. Sommervieux took refuge in the peace and
silence of his studio, hoping that the habit of living with artists
might mould his wife and develop in her the dormant germs of lofty
intelligence which some superior minds suppose must exist in every
being. But Augustine was too sincerely religious not to take fright
at the tone of artists. At the first dinner Theodore gave, she heard
a young painter say, with the childlike lightness, which to her was
unintelligible, and which redeems a jest from the taint of profanity,
“But, madame, your Paradise cannot be more beautiful than Raphael’s
Transfiguration!--Well, and I got tired of looking at that.”
Thus Augustine came among this sparkling set in a spirit of distrust
which no one could fail to see. She was a restraint on their freedom.
Now an artist who feels restraint is pitiless; he stays away, or laughs
it to scorn. Madame Guillaume, among other absurdities, had an excessive
notion of the dignity she considered the prerogative of a married woman;
and Augustine, though she had often made fun of it, could not help a
slight imitation of her mother’s primness. This extreme propriety, which
virtuous wives do not always avoid, suggested a few epigrams in the
form of sketches, in which the harmless jest was in such good taste
that Sommervieux could not take offence; and even if they had been
more severe, these pleasantries were after all only reprisals from
his friends. Still, nothing could seem a trifle to a spirit so open as
Theodore’s to impressions from without. A coldness insensibly crept over
him, and inevitably spread. To attain conjugal happiness we must climb
a hill whose summit is a narrow ridge, close to a steep and slippery
descent: the painter’s love was falling down it. He regarded his wife as
incapable of appreciating the moral considerations which justified him
in his own eyes for his singular behavior to her, and believed himself
quite innocent in hiding from her thoughts she could not enter into,
and peccadilloes outside the jurisdiction of a _bourgeois_ conscience.
Augustine wrapped herself in sullen and silent grief. These unconfessed
feelings placed a shroud between the husband and wife which could not
fail to grow thicker day by day. Though her husband never failed in
consideration for her, Augustine could not help trembling as she saw
that he kept for the outer world those treasures of wit and grace that
he formerly would lay at her feet. She soon began to find sinister
meaning in the jocular speeches that are current in the world as to the
inconstancy of men. She made no complaints, but her demeanor conveyed
reproach.
Three years after her marriage this pretty young woman, who dashed past
in her handsome carriage, and lived in a sphere of glory and riches
to the envy of heedless folk incapable of taking a just view of the
situations of life, was a prey to intense grief. She lost her color; she
reflected; she made comparisons; then sorrow unfolded to her the first
lessons of experience. She determined to restrict herself bravely within
the round of duty, hoping that by this generous conduct she might
sooner or later win back her husband’s love. But it was not so. When
Sommervieux, fired with work, came in from his studio, Augustine did not
put away her work so quickly but that the painter might find his wife
mending the household linen, and his own, with all the care of a good
housewife. She supplied generously and without a murmur the money needed
for his lavishness; but in her anxiety to husband her dear Theodore’s
fortune, she was strictly economical for herself and in certain details
of domestic management. Such conduct is incompatible with the easy-going
habits of artists, who, at the end of their life, have enjoyed it so
keenly that they never inquire into the causes of their ruin.
It is useless to note every tint of shadow by which the brilliant hues
of their honeymoon were overcast till they were lost in utter blackness.
One evening poor Augustine, who had for some time heard her husband
speak with enthusiasm of the Duchesse de Carigliano, received from a
friend certain malignantly charitable warnings as to the nature of the
attachment which Sommervieux had formed for this celebrated flirt of
the Imperial Court. At one-and-twenty, in all the splendor of youth and
beauty, Augustine saw herself deserted for a woman of six-and-thirty.
Feeling herself so wretched in the midst of a world of festivity which
to her was a blank, the poor little thing could no longer understand
the admiration she excited, or the envy of which she was the object.
Her face assumed a different expression. Melancholy, tinged her features
with the sweetness of resignation and the pallor of scorned love. Ere
long she too was courted by the most fascinating men; but she remained
lonely and virtuous. Some contemptuous words which escaped her husband
filled her with incredible despair. A sinister flash showed her the
breaches which, as a result of her sordid education, hindered the
perfect union of her soul with Theodore’s; she loved him well enough to
absolve him and condemn herself. She shed tears of blood, and perceived,
too late, that there are _mesalliances_ of the spirit as well as of
rank and habits. As she recalled the early raptures of their union,
she understood the full extent of that lost happiness, and accepted the
conclusion that so rich a harvest of love was in itself a whole life,
which only sorrow could pay for. At the same time, she loved too truly
to lose all hope. At one-and-twenty she dared undertake to educate
herself, and make her imagination, at least, worthy of that she admired.
“If I am not a poet,” thought she, “at any rate, I will understand
poetry.”
Then, with all the strength of will, all the energy which every woman
can display when she loves, Madame de Sommervieux tried to alter her
character, her manners, and her habits; but by dint of devouring books
and learning undauntedly, she only succeeded in becoming less ignorant.
Lightness of wit and the graces of conversation are a gift of nature, or
the fruit of education begun in the cradle. She could appreciate
music and enjoy it, but she could not sing with taste. She understood
literature and the beauties of poetry, but it was too late to
cultivate her refractory memory. She listened with pleasure to social
conversation, but she could contribute nothing brilliant. Her religious
notions and home-grown prejudices were antagonistic to the complete
emancipation of her intelligence. Finally, a foregone conclusion against
her had stolen into Theodore’s mind, and this she could not conquer. The
artist would laugh, at those who flattered him about his wife, and his
irony had some foundation; he so overawed the pathetic young creature
that, in his presence, or alone with him, she trembled. Hampered by her
too eager desire to please, her wits and her knowledge vanished in one
absorbing feeling. Even her fidelity vexed the unfaithful husband, who
seemed to bid her do wrong by stigmatizing her virtue as insensibility.
Augustine tried in vain to abdicate her reason, to yield to her
husband’s caprices and whims, to devote herself to the selfishness of
his vanity. Her sacrifices bore no fruit. Perhaps they had both let
the moment slip when souls may meet in comprehension. One day the young
wife’s too sensitive heart received one of those blows which so strain
the bonds of feeling that they seem to be broken. She withdrew into
solitude. But before long a fatal idea suggested to her to seek counsel
and comfort in the bosom of her family.
So one morning she made her way towards the grotesque facade of the
humble, silent home where she had spent her childhood. She sighed as she
looked up at the sash-window, whence one day she had sent her first kiss
to him who now shed as much sorrow as glory on her life. Nothing was
changed in the cavern, where the drapery business had, however, started
on a new life. Augustine’s sister filled her mother’s old place at the
desk. The unhappy young woman met her brother-in-law with his pen behind
his ear; he hardly listened to her, he was so full of business. The
formidable symptoms of stock-taking were visible all round him; he
begged her to excuse him. She was received coldly enough by her sister,
who owed her a grudge. In fact, Augustine, in her finery, and stepping
out of a handsome carriage, had never been to see her but when passing
by. The wife of the prudent Lebas, imagining that want of money was the
prime cause of this early call, tried to keep up a tone of reserve which
more than once made Augustine smile. The painter’s wife perceived that,
apart from the cap and lappets, her mother had found in Virginie a
successor who could uphold the ancient honor of the Cat and Racket. At
breakfast she observed certain changes in the management of the house
which did honor to Lebas’ good sense; the assistants did not rise before
dessert; they were allowed to talk, and the abundant meal spoke of ease
without luxury. The fashionable woman found some tickets for a box at
the Francais, where she remembered having seen her sister from time to
time. Madame Lebas had a cashmere shawl over her shoulders, of which
the value bore witness to her husband’s generosity to her. In short, the
couple were keeping pace with the times. During the two-thirds of the
day she spent there, Augustine was touched to the heart by the equable
happiness, devoid, to be sure, of all emotion, but equally free from
storms, enjoyed by this well-matched couple. They had accepted life as
a commercial enterprise, in which, above all, they must do credit to the
business. Not finding any great love in her husband, Virginie had set to
work to create it. Having by degrees learned to esteem and care for his
wife, the time that his happiness had taken to germinate was to Joseph
Lebas a guarantee of its durability. Hence, when Augustine plaintively
set forth her painful position, she had to face the deluge of
commonplace morality which the traditions of the Rue Saint-Denis
furnished to her sister.
“The mischief is done, wife,” said Joseph Lebas; “we must try to give
our sister good advice.” Then the clever tradesman ponderously analyzed
the resources which law and custom might offer Augustine as a means
of escape at this crisis; he ticketed every argument, so to speak, and
arranged them in their degrees of weight under various categories, as
though they were articles of merchandise of different qualities; then he
put them in the scale, weighed them, and ended by showing the necessity
for his sister-in-law’s taking violent steps which could not satisfy the
love she still had for her husband; and, indeed, the feeling had
revived in all its strength when she heard Joseph Lebas speak of
legal proceedings. Augustine thanked them, and returned home even more
undecided than she had been before consulting them. She now ventured
to go to the house in the Rue du Colombier, intending to confide her
troubles to her father and mother; for she was like a sick man who, in
his desperate plight, tries every prescription, and even puts faith in
old wives’ remedies.
The old people received their daughter with an effusiveness that touched
her deeply. Her visit brought them some little change, and that to them
was worth a fortune. For the last four years they had gone their way
like navigators without a goal or a compass. Sitting by the chimney
corner, they would talk over their disasters under the old law of
_maximum_, of their great investments in cloth, of the way they had
weathered bankruptcies, and, above all, the famous failure of Lecocq,
Monsieur Guillaume’s battle of Marengo. Then, when they had exhausted
the tale of lawsuits, they recapitulated the sum total of their most
profitable stock-takings, and told each other old stories of the
Saint-Denis quarter. At two o’clock old Guillaume went to cast an eye on
the business at the Cat and Racket; on his way back he called at all the
shops, formerly the rivals of his own, where the young proprietors hoped
to inveigle the old draper into some risky discount, which, as was his
wont, he never refused point-blank. Two good Normandy horses were dying
of their own fat in the stables of the big house; Madame Guillaume never
used them but to drag her on Sundays to high Mass at the parish church.
Three times a week the worthy couple kept open house. By the influence
of his son-in-law Sommervieux, Monsieur Guillaume had been named a
member of the consulting board for the clothing of the Army. Since her
husband had stood so high in office, Madame Guillaume had decided
that she must receive; her rooms were so crammed with gold and silver
ornaments, and furniture, tasteless but of undoubted value, that the
simplest room in the house looked like a chapel. Economy and expense
seemed to be struggling for the upper hand in every accessory. It was as
though Monsieur Guillaume had looked to a good investment, even in the
purchase of a candlestick. In the midst of this bazaar, where splendor
revealed the owner’s want of occupation, Sommervieux’s famous picture
filled the place of honor, and in it Monsieur and Madame Guillaume found
their chief consolation, turning their eyes, harnessed with eye-glasses,
twenty times a day on this presentment of their past life, to them so
active and amusing. The appearance of this mansion and these rooms,
where everything had an aroma of staleness and mediocrity, the spectacle
offered by these two beings, cast away, as it were, on a rock far from
the world and the ideas which are life, startled Augustine; she could
here contemplate the sequel of the scene of which the first part had
struck her at the house of Lebas--a life of stir without movement, a
mechanical and instinctive existence like that of the beaver; and then
she felt an indefinable pride in her troubles, as she reflected that
they had their source in eighteen months of such happiness as, in her
eyes, was worth a thousand lives like this; its vacuity seemed to her
horrible. However, she concealed this not very charitable feeling, and
displayed for her parents her newly-acquired accomplishments of mind,
and the ingratiating tenderness that love had revealed to her, disposing
them to listen to her matrimonial grievances. Old people have a weakness
for this kind of confidence. Madame Guillaume wanted to know the most
trivial details of that alien life, which to her seemed almost fabulous.
The travels of Baron da la Houtan, which she began again and again and
never finished, told her nothing more unheard-of concerning the Canadian
savages.
“What, child, your husband shuts himself into a room with naked women!
And you are so simple as to believe that he draws them?”
As she uttered this exclamation, the grandmother laid her spectacles
on a little work-table, shook her skirts, and clasped her hands on her
knees, raised by a foot-warmer, her favorite pedestal.
“But, mother, all artists are obliged to have models.”
“He took good care not to tell us that when he asked leave to marry
you. If I had known it, I would never had given my daughter to a man who
followed such a trade. Religion forbids such horrors; they are immoral.
And at what time of night do you say he comes home?”
“At one o’clock--two----”
The old folks looked at each other in utter amazement.
“Then he gambles?” said Monsieur Guillaume. “In my day only gamblers
stayed out so late.”
Augustine made a face that scorned the accusation.
“He must keep you up through dreadful nights waiting for him,” said
Madame Guillaume. “But you go to bed, don’t you? And when he has lost,
the wretch wakes you.”
“No, mamma, on the contrary, he is sometimes in very good spirits. Not
unfrequently, indeed, when it is fine, he suggests that I should get up
and go into the woods.”
“The woods! At that hour? Then have you such a small set of rooms that
his bedroom and his sitting-room are not enough, and that he must run
about? But it is just to give you cold that the wretch proposes such
expeditions. He wants to get rid of you. Did one ever hear of a man
settled in life, a well-behaved, quiet man galloping about like a
warlock?”
“But, my dear mother, you do not understand that he must have excitement
to fire his genius. He is fond of scenes which----”
“I would make scenes for him, fine scenes!” cried Madame Guillaume,
interrupting her daughter. “How can you show any consideration to such a
man? In the first place, I don’t like his drinking water only; it is not
wholesome. Why does he object to see a woman eating? What queer notion
is that! But he is mad. All you tell us about him is impossible. A man
cannot leave his home without a word, and never come back for ten days.
And then he tells you he has been to Dieppe to paint the sea. As if
any one painted the sea! He crams you with a pack of tales that are too
absurd.”