The next day Calyste seemed to Beatrix just what he was: a perfect
and loyal gentleman without imagination or cleverness. In Paris, a man
called clever must have spontaneous brilliancy, as the fountains have
water; men of the world and Parisians in general are in that way very
clever. But Calyste loved too deeply, he was too much absorbed in his
own sentiments to perceive the change in Beatrix, and to satisfy her
need by displaying new resources. To her, he seemed pale indeed, after
the brilliancy of the night before, and he caused not the faintest
emotion to the hungry Beatrix. A great love is a credit opened to a
power so voracious that bankruptcy is sure to come sooner or later.
In spite of the fatigue of this day (the day when a woman is bored by a
lover) Beatrix trembled with fear at the thought of a possible meeting
between La Palferine and Calyste, a man of courage without assertion.
She hesitated to see the count again; but the knot of her hesitation was
cut by a decisive event.
Beatrix had taken the third of a box at the Opera, obscurely situated on
the lower tier for the purpose of not being much in sight. For the last
few days Calyste, grown bolder, had escorted the marquise to her box,
placing himself behind her, and timing their arrival at a late hour so
as to meet no one in the corridors. Beatrix, on these occasions, left
the box alone before the end of the last act, and Calyste followed at
a distance to watch over her, although old Antoine was always there to
attend his mistress. Maxime and La Palferine had studied this strategy,
which was prompted by respect for the proprieties, also by that desire
for concealment which characterizes the idolators of the little god,
and also, again, by the fear which oppresses all women who have been
constellations in the world and whom love has caused to fall from their
zodiacal eminence. Public humiliation is dreaded as an agony more cruel
than death itself. But, by a manoeuvre of Maxime’s, that blow to her
pride, that outrage which women secure of their rank in Olympus cast
upon others who have fallen from their midst, was now to descend on
Beatrix.
At a performance of “Lucia,” which ends, as every one knows, with one of
the finest triumphs of Rubini, Madame de Rochefide, whom Antoine had not
yet come to fetch, reached the peristyle of the opera-house by the lower
corridor just as the staircase was crowded by fashionable women ranged
on the stairs or standing in groups below it, awaiting the announcement
of their carriages. Beatrix was instantly recognized; whispers which
soon became a murmur arose in every group. In a moment the crowd
dispersed; the marquise was left alone like a leper. Calyste dared not,
seeing his wife on the staircase, advance to accompany her, though twice
she vainly cast him a tearful glance, a prayer, that he would come to
her. At that moment, La Palferine, elegant, superb, charming, left two
ladies with whom he had been talking, and came down to the marquise.
“Take my arm,” he said, bowing, “and walk proudly out. I will find your
carriage.”
“Will you come home with me and finish the evening?” she answered,
getting into her carriage and making room for him.
La Palferine said to his groom, “Follow the carriage of madame,” and
then he jumped into it beside her to the utter stupefaction of Calyste,
who stood for a moment planted on his two legs as if they were lead. It
was the sight of him standing thus, pale and livid, that caused Beatrix
to make the sign to La Palferine to enter her carriage. Doves can be
Robespierres in spite of their white wings. Three carriages reached the
rue de Chartres with thundering rapidity,--that of Calyste, that of the
marquise, and that of La Palferine.
“Oh! you here?” said Beatrix, entering her salon on the arm of the young
count, and finding Calyste, whose horse had outstripped those of the
other carriages.
“Then you know monsieur?” said Calyste, furiously.
“Monsieur le Comte de la Palferine was presented to me ten days ago
by Nathan,” she replied; “but you, monsieur, _you_ have known me four
years!--”
“And I am ready, madame,” said Charles-Edouard, “to make the Marquise
d’Espard repent to her third generation for being the first to turn away
from you.”
“Ah! it was _she_, was it?” cried Beatrix; “I will make her rue it.”
“To revenge yourself thoroughly,” said the young man in her ear, “you
ought to recover your husband; and I am capable of bringing him back to
you.”
The conversation, thus begun, went on till two in the morning, without
allowing Calyste, whose anger was again and again repressed by a look
from Beatrix, to say one word to her in private. La Palferine, though
he did not like Beatrix, showed a superiority of grace, good taste, and
cleverness equal to the evident inferiority of Calyste, who wriggled in
his chair like a worm cut in two, and actually rose three times as if
to box the ears of La Palferine. The third time that he made a dart
forward, the young count said to him, “Are you in pain, monsieur?” in a
manner which sent Calyste back to his chair, where he sat as rigid as a
mile-stone.
The marquise conversed with the ease of a Celimene, pretending to ignore
that Calyste was there. La Palferine had the cleverness to depart after
a brilliant witticism, leaving the two lovers to a quarrel.
Thus, by Maxime’s machinations, the fire of discord flamed in the
separate households of Monsieur and of Madame de Rochefide. The next
day, learning the success of this last scene from La Palferine at the
Jockey Club, where the young count was playing whist, Maxime went to
the hotel Schontz to ascertain with what success Aurelie was rowing her
boat.
“My dear,” said Madame Schontz, laughing at Maxime’s expression, “I am
at an end of my expedients. Rochefide is incurable. I end my career of
gallantry by perceiving that cleverness is a misfortune.”
“Explain to me that remark.”
“In the first place, my dear friend, I have kept Arthur for the last
week to a regimen of kicks on the shin and perpetual wrangling and
jarring; in short, all we have that is most disagreeable in our
business. ‘You are ill,’ he says to me with paternal sweetness, ‘for I
have been good to you always and I love you to adoration.’ ‘You are to
blame for one thing, my dear,’ I answered; ‘you bore me.’ ‘Well, if I
do, haven’t you the wittiest and handsomest young man in Paris to amuse
you?’ said the poor man. I was caught. I actually felt I loved him.”
“Ah!” said Maxime.
“How could I help it? Feeling is stronger than we; one can’t resist such
things. So I changed pedals. I began to entice my judicial wild-boar,
now turned like Arthur to a sheep; I gave him Arthur’s sofa. Heavens!
how he bored me. But, you understand, I had to have Fabien there to let
Arthur surprise us.”
“Well,” cried Maxime, “go on; what happened? Was Arthur furious?”
“You know nothing about it, my old fellow. When Arthur came in and
‘surprised’ us, Fabien and me, he retreated on the tips of his toes to
the dining-room, where he began to clear his throat, ‘broum, broum!’ and
cough, and knock the chairs about. That great fool of a Fabien, to whom,
of course, I can’t explain the whole matter, was frightened. There, my
dear Maxime, is the point we have reached.”
Maxime nodded his head, and played for a few moments with his cane.
“I have known such natures,” he said. “And the only way for you to do
is to pitch Arthur out of the window and lock the door upon him. This
is how you must manage it. Play that scene over again with Fabien; when
Arthur surprises you, give Fabien a glance Arthur can’t mistake; if he
gets angry, that will end the matter; if he still says, ‘broum, broum!’
it is just as good; you can end it a better way.”
“How?”
“Why, get angry, and say: ‘I believed you loved me, respected me; but I
see you’ve no feeling at all, not even jealousy,’--you know the tirade.
‘In a case like this, Maxime’ (bring me in) ‘would kill his man on the
spot’ (then weep). ‘And Fabien, he’ (mortify him by comparing him with
that fellow), ‘Fabien whom I love, Fabien would have drawn a dagger
and stabbed you to the heart. Ah, that’s what it is to love! Farewell,
monsieur; take back your house and all your property; I shall marry
Fabien; _he_ gives me his name; _he_ marries me in spite of his old
mother--but _you_--’”
“I see! I see!” cried Madame Schontz. “I’ll be superb! Ah! Maxime, there
will never be but one Maxime, just as there’s only one de Marsay.”
“La Palferine is better than I,” replied the Comte de Trailles,
modestly. “He’ll make his mark.”
“La Palferine has tongue, but you have fist and loins. What weights
you’ve carried! what cuffs you’ve given!”
“La Palferine has all that, too; he is deep and he is educated, whereas
I am ignorant,” replied Maxime. “I have seen Rastignac, who has made
an arrangement with the Keeper of the Seals. Fabien is to be appointed
chief-justice at once, and officer of the Legion of honor after one
year’s service.”
“I shall make myself _devote_,” said Madame Schontz, accenting that
speech in a manner which obtained a nod of approbation from Maxime.
“Priests can do more than even we,” he replied sententiously.
“Ah! can they?” said Madame Schontz. “Then I may still find some one
in the provinces fit to talk to. I’ve already begun my role. Fabien
has written to his mother that grace has enlightened me; and he has
fascinated the good woman with my million and the chief-justiceship.
She consents that we shall live with her, and sends me her portrait, and
wants mine. If Cupid looked at hers he would die on the spot. Come,
go away, Maxime. I must put an end to my poor Arthur to-night, and it
breaks my heart.”
Two days later, as they met on the threshold of the Jockey Club,
Charles-Edouard said to Maxime, “It is done.”
The words, which contained a drama accomplished in part by vengeance,
made Maxime smile.
“Now come in and listen to Rochefide bemoaning himself; for you and
Aurelie have both touched goal together. Aurelie has just turned Arthur
out of doors, and now it is our business to get him a home. He must give
Madame du Ronceret three hundred thousand francs and take back his wife;
you and I must prove to him that Beatrix is superior to Aurelie.”
“We have ten days before us to do it in,” said Charles-Edouard, “and in
all conscience that’s not too much.”
“What will you do when the shell bursts?”
“A man has always mind enough, give him time to collect it; I’m superb
at that sort of preparation.”
The two conspirators entered the salon together, and found Rochefide
aged by two years; he had not even put on his corset, his beard had
sprouted, and all his elegance was gone.
“Well, my dear marquis?” said Maxime.
“Ah, my dear fellow, my life is wrecked.”
Arthur talked for ten minutes, and Maxime listened gravely, thinking
all the while of his own marriage, which was now to take place within a
week.
“My dear Arthur,” he replied at last; “I told you the only means I knew
to keep Aurelie, but you wouldn’t--”
“What was it?”
“Didn’t I advise you to go and sup with Antonia?”
“Yes, you did. But how could I? I love, and you, you only make love--”
“Listen to me, Arthur; give Aurelie three hundred thousand francs for
that little house, and I’ll promise to find some one to suit you better.
I’ll talk to you about it later, for there’s d’Ajuda making signs that
he wants to speak to me.”
And Maxime left the inconsolable man for the representative of a family
in need of consolation.
“My dear fellow,” said d’Ajuda in his ear, “the duchess is in despair.
Calyste is having his trunks packed secretly, and he has taken out a
passport. Sabine wants to follow them, surprise Beatrix, and maul her.
She is pregnant, and it takes the turn of murderous ideas; she has
actually and openly bought pistols.”
“Tell the duchess that Madame de Rochefide will not leave Paris, but
within a fortnight she will have left Calyste. Now, d’Ajuda, shake
hands. Neither you nor I have ever said, or known, or done anything
about this; we admire the chances of life, that’s all.”
“The duchess has already made me swear on the holy Gospels to hold my
tongue.”
“Will you receive my wife a month hence?”
“With pleasure.”
“Then every one, all round, will be satisfied,” said Maxime. “Only
remind the duchess that she must make that journey to Italy with the du
Guenics, and the sooner the better.”
For ten days Calyste was made to bear the weight of an anger all the
more invincible because it was in part the effect of a real passion.
Beatrix now experienced the love so brutally but faithfully described
to the Duchesse de Grandlieu by Maxime de Trailles. Perhaps no
well-organized beings exist who do not experience that terrible passion
once in the course of their lives. The marquise felt herself mastered by
a superior force,--by a young man on whom her rank and quality did not
impose, who, as noble as herself, regarded her with an eye both powerful
and calm, and from whom her greatest feminine arts and efforts could
with difficulty obtain even a smile of approval. In short, she was
oppressed by a tyrant who never left her that she did not fall
to weeping, bruised and wounded, yet believing herself to blame.
Charles-Edouard played upon Madame de Rochefide the same comedy Madame
de Rochefide had played on Calyste for the last six months.
Since her public humiliation at the Opera, Beatrix had never ceased to
treat Monsieur du Guenic on the basis of the following proposition:--
“You have preferred your wife and the opinion of the world to me. If you
wish to prove that you love me, sacrifice your wife and the world to me.
Abandon Sabine, and let us live in Switzerland, Italy, or Germany.”
Entrenched in that hard _ultimatum_, she established the blockade which
women declare by frigid glances, disdainful gestures, and a certain
fortress-like demeanor, if we may so call it. She thought herself
delivered from Calyste, supposing that he would never dare to break
openly with the Grandlieus. To desert Sabine, to whom Mademoiselle des
Touches had left her fortune, would doom him to penury.
But Calyste, half-mad with despair, had secretly obtained a passport,
and had written to his mother begging her to send him at once a
considerable sum of money. While awaiting the arrival of these funds he
set himself to watch Beatrix, consumed by the fury of Breton jealousy.
At last, nine days after the communication made by La Palferine to
Maxime at the club, Calyste, to whom his mother had forwarded thirty
thousand francs, went to Madame de Rochefide’s house with the firm
intention of forcing the blockade, driving away La Palferine, and
leaving Paris with his pacified angel. It was one of those horrible
alternatives in which women who have hitherto retained some little
respect for themselves plunge at once and forever into the degradations
of vice,--though it is possible to return thence to virtue. Until this
moment Madame de Rochefide had regarded herself as a virtuous woman in
heart, upon whom two passions had fallen; but to adore Charles-Edouard
and still let Calyste adore her, would be to lose her self-esteem,--for
where deception begins, infamy begins. She had given rights to Calyste,
and no human power could prevent the Breton from falling at her feet and
watering them with the tears of an absolute repentance. Many persons
are surprised at the glacial insensibility under which women extinguish
their loves. But if they did not thus efface their past, their lives
could have no dignity, they could never maintain themselves against the
fatal familiarity to which they had once submitted. In the entirely
new situation in which Beatrix found herself, she might have evaded the
alternatives presented to her by Calyste had La Palferine entered the
room; but the vigilance of her old footman, Antoine, defeated her.
Hearing a carriage stop before the door, she said to Calyste, “Here come
visitors!” and she rushed forward to prevent a scene.
Antoine, however, as a prudent man, had told La Palferine that Madame la
marquise was out.
When Beatrix heard from the old servant who had called and the answer
he had given, she replied, “Very good,” and returned to the salon,
thinking: “I will escape into a convent; I will make myself a nun.”
Calyste, meantime, had opened the window and seen his rival.
“Who came?” he said to Beatrix on her return.
“I don’t know; Antoine is still below.”
“It was La Palferine.”
“Possibly.”
“You love him, and that is why you are blaming and reproaching me; I saw
him!”
“You saw him?”
“I opened the window.”
Beatrix fell half fainting on the sofa. Then she negotiated in order
to gain time; she asked to have the journey postponed for a week, under
pretence of making preparations; inwardly resolving to turn Calyste off
in a way that she could satisfy La Palferine,--for such are the wretched
calculations and the fiery anguish concealed with these lives which have
left the rails along which the great social train rolls on.
When Calyste had left her, Beatrix felt so wretched, so profoundly
humiliated, that she went to bed; she was really ill; the violent
struggle which wrung her heart seemed to reach a physical reaction,
and she sent for the doctor; but at the same time she despatched to La
Palferine the following letter, in which she revenged herself on Calyste
with a sort of rage:--
To Monsieur le Comte de la Palferine.
My Friend,--Come and see me; I am in despair. Antoine sent you
away when your arrival would have put an end to one of the most
horrible nightmares of my life and delivered me from a man I hate,
and whom I trust never to see again. I love you only in this
world, and I can never again love any one but you, though I have
the misfortune not to please you as I fain would--
She wrote four pages which, beginning thus, ended in an exaltation too
poetic for typography, in which she compromised herself so completely
that the letter closed with these words: “Am I sufficiently at your
mercy? Ah! nothing will cost me anything if it only proves to you how
much you are loved.” And she signed the letter, a thing she had never
done for Conti or Calyste.
The next day, at the hour when La Palferine called, Beatrix was in her
bath, and Antoine begged him to wait. He, in his turn, saw Calyste
sent away; for du Guenic, hungry for love, came early. La Palferine was
standing at the window, watching his rival’s departure, when Beatrix
entered the salon.
“Ah! Charles,” she cried, expecting what had happened, “you have ruined
me!”
“I know it, madame,” replied La Palferine, tranquilly. “You have sworn
to love me alone; you have offered to give me a letter in which you
will write your motives for destroying yourself, so that, in case of
infidelity, I may poison you without fear of human justice,--as if
superior men needed to have recourse to poison for revenge! You have
written to me: ‘Nothing will cost me anything if it only proves to
you how much you are loved.’ Well, after that, I find a contradiction
between those words and your present remark that I have ruined you. I
must know now if you have had the courage to break with du Guenic.”
“Ah! you have your revenge upon him in advance,” she cried, throwing
her arms around his neck. “Henceforth, you and I are forever bound
together.”
“Madame,” said the prince of Bohemia, coldly, “if you wish me for your
friend, I consent; but on one condition only.”
“Condition!” she exclaimed.
“Yes; the following condition. You must be reconciled to Monsieur de
Rochefide; you must recover the honor of your position; you must return
to your handsome house in the due d’Anjou and be once more one of the
queens of Paris. You can do this by making Rochefide play a part in
politics, and putting into your own conduct the persistency which Madame
d’Espard has displayed. That is the situation necessary for the woman to
whom I do the honor to give myself.”
“But you forget that Monsieur de Rochefide’s consent is necessary.”
“Oh, my dear child,” said La Palferine, “we have arranged all that; I
have given my word of honor as a gentleman that you are worth all the
Schontzes of the quartier Saint-Georges, and you must fulfil my pledge.”
For the next week Calyste went every day to Madame de Rochefide’s door,
only to be refused by Antoine, who said with a studied face, “Madame is
ill.”
From there Calyste hurried to La Palferine’s lodging, where the valet
answered, “Monsieur le comte is away, hunting.” Each time this happened
the Breton baron left a letter for La Palferine.
On the ninth day Calyste received a line from La Palferine, making an
appointment to receive him. He hurried to his lodgings and found the
count, but in company with Maxime de Trailles, to whom the young _roue_
no doubt wished to give proof of his _savoir-faire_ by making him a
witness of this scene.
“Monsieur le baron,” began Charles-Edouard, tranquilly, “here are the
six letters you have done me the honor to write to me. They are, as you
see, safe and sound; they have not been unsealed. I knew in advance what
they were likely to contain, having learned that you have been seeking
me since the day when I looked at you from the window of a house from
which you had looked at me on the previous day. I thought I had better
ignore all mistaken provocations. Between ourselves, I am sure you have
too much good taste to be angry with a woman for no longer loving you.
It is always a bad means of recovering her to seek a quarrel with the
one preferred. But, in the present case, your letters have a radical
fault, a nullity, as the lawyers say. You have too much good sense, I
am sure, to complain of a husband who takes back his wife. Monsieur de
Rochefide has felt that the position of the marquise was undignified.
You will, therefore, no longer find Madame de Rochefide in the rue de
Chartres, but--six months hence, next winter--in the hotel de Rochefide.
You flung yourself rather heedlessly into the midst of a reconciliation
between husband and wife,--which you provoked yourself by not saving
Madame de Rochefide from the humiliation to which she was subjected at
the Opera. On coming away, the marquise, to whom I had already carried
certain amicable proposals from her husband, took me up in her carriage,
and her first words were, ‘Bring Arthur back to me!’”
“Ah! yes,” cried Calyste, “she was right; I was wanting in true
devotion.”
“Unhappily, monsieur, Rochefide was living with one of those atrocious
women, Madame Schontz, who had long been expecting him to leave her.
She had counted on Madame de Rochefide’s failure in health, and expected
some day to see herself marquise; finding her castles in the air thus
scattered, she determined to revenge herself on husband and wife. Such
women, monsieur, will put out one of their own eyes to put out two of
their enemy. La Schontz, who has just left Paris, has put out six! If I
had had the imprudence to love the marquise, Madame Schontz would have
put out eight. You see now that you are in need of an oculist.”
Maxime could not help smiling at the change that came over Calyste’s
face; which turned deadly pale as his eyes were opened to his situation.
“Would you believe, Monsieur le baron, that that unworthy woman has
given her hand to the man who furnished the means for her revenge? Ah!
these women! You can understand now why Arthur and his wife should
have retired for a time to their delightful little country-house at
Nogent-sur-Marne. They’ll recover their eyesight there. During their
stay in the country the hotel de Rochefide is to be renovated, and the
marquise intends to display on her return a princely splendor. When a
woman so noble, the victim of conjugal love, finds courage to return to
her duty, the part of a man who adores her as you do, and admires her as
I admire her, is to remain her friend although we can do nothing
more. You will excuse me, I know, for having made Monsieur le Comte de
Trailles a witness of this explanation; but I have been most anxious to
make myself perfectly clear throughout. As for my own sentiments, I
am, above all, desirous to say to you, that although I admire Madame
de Rochefide for her intellect, she is supremely displeasing to me as a
woman.”
“And so end our noblest dreams, our celestial loves!” said Calyste,
dumfounded by so many revelations and disillusionments.
“Yes, in the serpent’s tail,” said Maxime, “or, worse still, in the vial
of an apothecary. I never knew a first love that did not end foolishly.
Ah! Monsieur le baron, all that man has of the divine within him finds
its food in heaven only. That is what justifies the lives of us _roues_.
For myself, I have pondered this question deeply; and, as you know, I
was married yesterday. I shall be faithful to my wife, and I advise you
to return to Madame du Guenic,--but not for three months. Don’t regret
Beatrix; she is the model of a vain and empty nature, without strength,
coquettish for self-glorification only, a Madame d’Espard without her
profound political capacity, a woman without heart and without head,
floundering in evil. Madame de Rochefide loves Madame de Rochefide only.
She would have parted you from Madame du Guenic without the possibility
of return, and then she would have left you in the lurch without
remorse. In short, that woman is as incomplete for vice as she is for
virtue.”
“I don’t agree with you, Maxime,” said La Palferine. “I think she will
make the most delightful mistress of a salon in all Paris.”
Calyste went away, after shaking hands with Charles-Edouard and Maxime
and thanking them for having pricked his illusions.
Three days later, the Duchesse de Grandlieu, who had not seen her
daughter Sabine since the morning when this conference took place, went
to the hotel du Guenic early in the day and found Calyste in his
bath, with Sabine beside him working at some adornment for the future
_layette_.
“What has happened to you, my children?” asked the excellent duchess.
“Nothing but good, dear mamma,” replied Sabine, raising her eyes,
radiant with happiness, to her mother; “we have been playing the fable
of ‘The Two Pigeons,’ that is all.”
Calyste held out his hand to his wife, and pressed hers so tenderly with
a look so eloquent, that she said in a whisper to the duchess,--
“I am loved, mother, and forever!”