Guerande, July, 1838.
To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu:
Ah, my dear mamma! at the end of three months to know what it is
to be jealous! My heart completes its experience; I now feel the
deepest hatred and the deepest love! I am more than betrayed,--I
am not loved. How fortunate for me to have a mother, a heart on
which to cry out as I will!
It is enough to say to wives who are still half girls: “Here’s a
key rusty with memories among those of your palace; go everywhere,
enjoy everything, but keep away from Les Touches!” to make us
eager to go there hot-foot, our eyes shining with the curiosity of
Eve. What a root of bitterness Mademoiselle des Touches planted in
my love! Why did she forbid me to go to Les Touches? What sort of
happiness is mine if it depends on an excursion, on a visit to a
paltry house in Brittany? Why should I fear? Is there anything to
fear? Add to this reasoning of Mrs. Blue-Beard the desire that
nips all women to know if their power is solid or precarious, and
you’ll understand how it was that I said one day, with an
unconcerned little air:--
“What sort of place is Les Touches?”
“Les Touches belongs to you,” said my divine, dear mother-in-law.
“If Calyste had never set foot in Les Touches!”--cried my aunt
Zephirine, shaking her head.
“He would not be my husband,” I added.
“Then you know what happened there?” said my mother-in-law, slyly.
“It is a place of perdition!” exclaimed Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.
“Mademoiselle des Touches committed many sins there, for which she
is now asking the pardon of God.”
“But they saved the soul of that noble woman, and made the fortune
of a convent,” cried the Chevalier du Halga. “The Abbe Grimont
told me she had given a hundred thousand francs to the nuns of the
Visitation.”
“Should you like to go to Les Touches?” asked my mother-in-law.
“It is worth seeing.”
“No, no!” I said hastily.
Doesn’t this little scene read to you like a page out of some
diabolical drama?
It was repeated again and again under various pretexts. At last my
mother-in-law said to me: “I understand why you do not go to Les
Touches, and I think you are right.”
Oh! you must admit, mamma, that an involuntary, unconscious stab
like that would have decided you to find out if your happiness
rested on such a frail foundation that it would perish at a mere
touch. To do Calyste justice, he never proposed to me to visit
that hermitage, now his property. But as soon as we love we are
creatures devoid of common-sense, and this silence, this reserve
piqued me; so I said to him one day: “What are you afraid of at
Les Touches, that you alone never speak of the place?”
“Let us go there,” he replied.
So there I was _caught_,--like other women who want to be caught,
and who trust to chance to cut the Gordian knot of their
indecision. So to Les Touches we went.
It is enchanting, in a style profoundly artistic. I took delight
in that place of horror where Mademoiselle des Touches had so
earnestly forbidden me to go. Poisonous flowers are all charming;
Satan sowed them--for the devil has flowers as well as God; we
have only to look within our souls to see the two shared in the
making of us. What delicious acrity in a situation where I played,
not with fire, but--with ashes! I studied Calyste; the point was
to know if that passion was thoroughly extinct. I watched, as you
may well believe, every wind that blew; I kept an eye upon his
face as he went from room to room and from one piece of furniture
to another, exactly like a child who is looking for some hidden
thing. Calyste seemed thoughtful, but at first I thought that I
had vanquished the past. I felt strong enough to mention Madame de
Rochefide-whom in my heart I called la Rocheperfide. At last we
went to see the famous bush were Beatrix was caught when he flung
her into the sea that she might never belong to another man.
“She must be light indeed to have stayed there,” I said laughing.
Calyste kept silence, so I added, “We’ll respect the dead.”
Still Calyste was silent.
“Have I displeased you?” I asked.
“No; but cease to galvanize that passion,” he answered.
What a speech! Calyste, when he saw me all cast down by it,
redoubled his care and tenderness.
August.
I was, alas! at the edge of a precipice, amusing myself, like the
innocent heroines of all melodramas, by gathering flowers.
Suddenly a horrible thought rode full tilt through my happiness,
like the horse in the German ballad. I thought I saw that
Calyste’s love was increasing through his reminiscences; that he
was expending on _me_ the stormy emotions I revived by reminding
him of the coquetries of that hateful Beatrix,--just think of it!
that cold, unhealthy nature, so persistent yet so flabby,
something between a mollusk and a bit of coral, dares to call
itself Beatrix, _Beatrice!_
Already, dearest mother, I am forced to keep one eye open to
suspicion, when my heart is all Calyste’s; and isn’t it a great
catastrophe when the eye gets the better of the heart, and
suspicion at last finds itself justified? It came to pass in this
way:--
“This place is dear to me,” I said to Calyste one morning,
“because I owe my happiness to it; and so I forgive you for taking
me sometimes for another woman.”
The loyal Breton blushed, and I threw my arms around his neck. But
all the same I have left Les Touches, and never will I go back
there again.
The very strength of hatred which makes me long for Madame de
Rochefide’s death--ah, heavens! a natural death, pleurisy, or some
accident--makes me also understand to its fullest extent the power
of my love for Calyste. That woman has appeared to me to trouble
my sleep,--I see her in a dream; shall I ever encounter her
bodily? Ah! the postulant of the Visitation was right,--Les
Touches is a fatal spot; Calyste has there recovered his past
emotions, and they are, I see it plainly, more powerful than the
joys of our love. Ascertain, my dear mamma, if Madame de Rochefide
is in Paris, for if she is, I shall stay in Brittany. Poor
Mademoiselle des Touches might well repent of her share in our
marriage if she knew to what extent I am taken for our odious
rival! But this is prostitution! I am not myself; I am ashamed of
it all. A frantic desire seizes me sometimes to fly from Guerande
and those sands of Croisic.
August 25th.
I am determined to go and live in the ruins of the old chateau.
Calyste, worried by my restlessness, agrees to take me. Either he
knows life so little that he guesses nothing, or he _does_ know
the cause of my flight, in which case he cannot love me. I tremble
so with fear lest I find the awful certainty I seek that, like a
child, I put my hands before my eyes not to hear the explosion--
Oh, mother! I am not loved with the love that I feel in my heart.
Calyste is charming to me, that’s true! but what man, unless he
were a monster, would not be, as Calyste is, amiable and gracious
when receiving all the flowers of the soul of a young girl of
twenty, brought up by you, pure, loving, and beautiful, as many
women have said to you that I am.
Guenic, September 18.
Has he forgotten her? That’s the solitary thought which echoes
through my soul like a remorse. Ah! dear mamma, have all women to
struggle against memories as I do? None but innocent young men
should be married to pure young girls. But that’s a deceptive
Utopia; better have one’s rival in the past than in the future.
Ah! mother, pity me, though at this moment I am happy as a woman
who fears to lose her happiness and so clings fast to it,--one way
of killing it, says that profoundly wise Clotilde.
I notice that for the last five months I think only of myself,
that is, of Calyste. Tell sister Clotilde that her melancholy bits
of wisdom often recur to me. She is happy in being faithful to the
dead; she fears no rival. A kiss to my dear Athenais, about whom I
see Juste is beside himself. From what you told me in your last
letter it is evident he fears you will not give her to him.
Cultivate that fear as a precious product. Athenais will be
sovereign lady; but I who fear lest I can never win Calyste back
from himself shall always be a servant.
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.”