“What can be the matter? What have I done to her?” Claire Fromont very
often wondered when she thought of Sidonie.
She was entirely ignorant of what had formerly taken place between her
friend and Georges at Savigny. Her own life was so upright, her mind
so pure, that it was impossible for her to divine the jealous,
mean-spirited ambition that had grown up by her side within the past
fifteen years. And yet the enigmatical expression in that pretty face
as it smiled upon her gave her a vague feeling of uneasiness which
she could not understand. An affectation of politeness, strange enough
between friends, was suddenly succeeded by an ill-dissembled anger, a
cold, stinging tone, in presence of which Claire was as perplexed as
by a difficult problem. Sometimes, too, a singular presentiment, the
ill-defined intuition of a great misfortune, was mingled with her
uneasiness; for all women have in some degree a kind of second sight,
and, even in the most innocent, ignorance of evil is suddenly illumined
by visions of extraordinary lucidity.
From time to time, as the result of a conversation somewhat longer
than usual, or of one of those unexpected meetings when faces taken by
surprise allow their real thoughts to be seen, Madame Fromont reflected
seriously concerning this strange little Sidonie; but the active, urgent
duties of life, with its accompaniment of affections and preoccupations,
left her no time for dwelling upon such trifles.
To all women comes a time when they encounter such sudden windings in
the road that their whole horizon changes and all their points of view
become transformed.
Had Claire been a young girl, the falling away of that friendship bit by
bit, as if torn from her by an unkindly hand, would have been a source
of great regret to her. But she had lost her father, the object of her
greatest, her only youthful affection; then she had married. The
child had come, with its thrice welcome demands upon her every moment.
Moreover, she had with her her mother, almost in her dotage, still
stupefied by her husband’s tragic death. In a life so fully occupied,
Sidonie’s caprices received but little attention; and it had hardly
occurred to Claire Fromont to be surprised at her marriage to Risler.
He was clearly too old for her; but, after all, what difference did it
make, if they loved each other?
As for being vexed because little Chebe had attained that lofty
position, had become almost her equal, her superior nature was incapable
of such pettiness. On the contrary, she would have been glad with all
her heart to know that that young wife, whose home was so near her
own, who lived the same life, so to speak, and had been her playmate
in childhood, was happy and highly esteemed. Being most kindly disposed
toward her, she tried to teach her, to instruct her in the ways of
society, as one might instruct an attractive provincial, who fell but
little short of being altogether charming.
Advice is not readily accepted by one pretty young woman from another.
When Madame Fromont gave a grand dinner-party, she took Madame Risler to
her bedroom, and said to her, smiling frankly in order not to vex her:
“You have put on too many jewels, my dear. And then, you know, with a
high dress one doesn’t wear flowers in the hair.” Sidonie blushed, and
thanked her friend, but wrote down an additional grievance against her
in the bottom of her heart.
In Claire’s circle her welcome was decidedly cold. The Faubourg
Saint-Germain has its pretensions; but do not imagine that the
Marais has none! Those wives and daughters of mechanics, of wealthy
manufacturers, knew little Chebe’s story; indeed, they would have
guessed it simply by her manner of making her appearance and by her
demeanor among them.
Sidonie’s efforts were unavailing. She retained the manners of a
shop-girl. Her slightly artificial amiability, sometimes too humble, was
as unpleasant as the spurious elegance of the shop; and her disdainful
attitudes recalled the superb airs of the head saleswomen in the great
dry-goods establishments, arrayed in black silk gowns, which they take
off in the dressing-room when they go away at night--who stare with an
imposing air, from the vantage-point of their mountains of curls, at the
poor creatures who venture to discuss prices.
She felt that she was being examined and criticised, and her modesty was
compelled to place itself upon a war footing. Of the names mentioned
in her presence, the amusements, the entertainments, the books of which
they talked to her, she knew nothing. Claire did her best to help her,
to keep her on the surface, with a friendly hand always outstretched;
but many of these ladies thought Sidonie pretty; that was enough to make
them bear her a grudge for seeking admission to their circle. Others,
proud of their husbands’ standing and of their wealth, could not invent
enough unspoken affronts and patronizing phrases to humiliate the little
parvenue.
Sidonie included them all in a single phrase: “Claire’s friends--that is
to say, my enemies!” But she was seriously incensed against but one.
The two partners had no suspicion of what was taking place between their
wives. Risler, continually engrossed in his press, sometimes remained
at his draughting-table until midnight. Fromont passed his days abroad,
lunched at his club, was almost never at the factory. He had his reasons
for that.
Sidonie’s proximity disturbed him. His capricious passion for her, that
passion that he had sacrificed to his uncle’s last wishes, recurred too
often to his memory with all the regret one feels for the irreparable;
and, conscious that he was weak, he fled. His was a pliable nature,
without sustaining purpose, intelligent enough to appreciate his
failings, too weak to guide itself. On the evening of Risler’s
wedding--he had been married but a few months himself--he had
experienced anew, in that woman’s presence, all the emotion of the
stormy evening at Savigny. Thereafter, without self-examination, he
avoided seeing her again or speaking with her. Unfortunately, as they
lived in the same house, as their wives saw each other ten times a
day, chance sometimes brought them together; and this strange thing
happened--that the husband, wishing to remain virtuous, deserted his
home altogether and sought distraction elsewhere.
Claire was not astonished that it was so. She had become accustomed,
during her father’s lifetime, to the constant comings and goings of a
business life; and during her husband’s absences, zealously performing
her duties as wife and mother, she invented long tasks, occupations of
all sorts, walks for the child, prolonged, peaceful tarryings in the
sunlight, from which she would return home, overjoyed with the little
one’s progress, deeply impressed with the gleeful enjoyment of all
infants in the fresh air, but with a touch of their radiance in the
depths of her serious eyes.
Sidonie also went out a great deal. It often happened, toward night,
that Georges’s carriage, driving through the gateway, would compel
Madame Risler to step hastily aside as she was returning in a gorgeous
costume from a triumphal promenade. The boulevard, the shop-windows, the
purchases, made after long deliberation as if to enjoy to the full the
pleasure of purchasing, detained her very late. They would exchange a
bow, a cold glance at the foot of the staircase; and Georges would hurry
into his apartments, as into a place of refuge, concealing beneath a
flood of caresses, bestowed upon the child his wife held out to him, the
sudden emotion that had seized him.
Sidonie, for her part, seemed to have forgotten everything, and to have
retained no other feeling but contempt for that weak, cowardly creature.
Moreover, she had many other things to think about.
Her husband had just had a piano placed in her red salon, between the
windows.
After long hesitation she had decided to learn to sing, thinking that
it was rather late to begin to play the piano; and twice a week Madame
Dobson, a pretty, sentimental blonde, came to give her lessons from
twelve o’clock to one. In the silence of the neighborhood the a-a-a and
o-oo, persistently prolonged, repeated again and again, with windows
open, gave the factory the atmosphere of a boarding-school.
And it was in reality a schoolgirl who was practising these exercises,
an inexperienced, wavering little soul, full of unconfessed longings,
with everything to learn and to find out in order to become a real
woman. But her ambition confined itself to a superficial aspect of
things.
“Claire Fromont plays the piano; I will sing. She is considered a
refined and distinguished woman, and I intend that people shall say the
same of me.”
Without a thought of improving her education, Sidonie passed her life
running about among milliners and dressmakers. “What are people going
to wear this winter?” was her cry. She was attracted by the gorgeous
displays in the shop-windows, by everything that caught the eye of the
passers-by.
The one thing that Sidonie envied Claire more than all else was the
child, the luxurious plaything, beribboned from the curtains of its
cradle to its nurse’s cap. She did not think of the sweet, maternal
duties, demanding patience and self-abnegation, of the long rockings
when sleep would not come, of the laughing awakenings sparkling with
fresh water. No! she saw in the child naught but the daily walk. It is
such a pretty sight, the little bundle of finery, with floating ribbons
and long feathers, that follows young mothers through the crowded
streets.
When she wanted company she had only her parents or her husband. She
preferred to go out alone. The excellent Risler had such an absurd way
of showing his love for her, playing with her as if she were a doll,
pinching her chin and her cheek, capering about her, crying, “Hou! hou!”
or staring at her with his great, soft eyes like an affectionate and
grateful dog. That senseless love, which made of her a toy, a
mantel ornament, made her ashamed. As for her parents, they were an
embarrassment to her in presence of the people she wished to know, and
immediately after her marriage she almost got rid of them by hiring a
little house for them at Montrouge. That step had cut short the frequent
invasions of Monsieur Chebe and his long frock-coat, and the endless
visits of good Madame Chebe, in whom the return of comfortable
circumstances had revived former habits of gossip and of indolence.
Sidonie would have been very glad to rid herself of the Delobelles in
the same way, for their proximity annoyed her. But the Marais was a
central location for the old actor, because the boulevard theatres were
so near; then, too, Desiree, like all sedentary persons, clung to the
familiar outlook, and her gloomy courtyard, dark at four o’clock in
winter, seemed to her like a friend, like a familiar face which the sun
lighted up at times as if it were smiling at her. As she was unable
to get rid of them, Sidonie had adopted the course of ceasing to visit
them.
In truth, her life would have been lonely and depressing enough, had
it not been for the distractions which Claire Fromont procured for her.
Each time added fuel to her wrath. She would say to herself:
“Must everything come to me through her?”
And when, just at dinner-time, a box at the theatre or an invitation
for the evening was sent to her from the floor below, while she was
dressing, overjoyed at the opportunity to exhibit herself, she thought
of nothing but crushing her rival. But such opportunities became more
rare as Claire’s time was more and more engrossed by her child. When
Grandfather Gardinois came to Paris, however, he never failed to bring
the two families together. The old peasant’s gayety, for its freer
expansion, needed little Sidonie, who did not take alarm at his
jests. He would take them all four to dine at Philippe’s, his favorite
restaurant, where he knew all the patrons, the waiters and the steward,
would spend a lot of money, and then take them to a reserved box at the
Opera-Comique or the Palais-Royal.
At the theatre he laughed uproariously, talked familiarly with the
box-openers, as he did with the waiters at Philippe’s, loudly demanded
footstools for the ladies, and when the performance was over insisted
on having the topcoats and fur wraps of his party first of all, as if he
were the only three-million parvenu in the audience.
For these somewhat vulgar entertainments, from which her husband usually
excused himself, Claire, with her usual tact, dressed very plainly and
attracted no attention. Sidonie, on the contrary, in all her finery, in
full view of the boxes, laughed with all her heart at the grandfather’s
anecdotes, happy to have descended from the second or third gallery, her
usual place in the old days, to that lovely proscenium box, adorned with
mirrors, with a velvet rail that seemed made expressly for her light
gloves, her ivory opera-glass, and her spangled fan. The tawdry glitter
of the theatre, the red and gold of the hangings, were genuine splendor
to her. She bloomed among them like a pretty paper flower in a filigree
jardiniere.
One evening, at the performance of a successful play at the
Palais-Royal, among all the noted women who were present, painted
celebrities wearing microscopic hats and armed with huge fans, their
rouge-besmeared faces standing out from the shadow of the boxes in the
gaudy setting of their gowns, Sidonie’s behavior, her toilette, the
peculiarities of her laugh and her expression attracted much attention.
All the opera-glasses in the hall, guided by the magnetic current that
is so powerful under the great chandeliers, were turned one by one upon
the box in which she sat. Claire soon became embarrassed, and modestly
insisted upon changing places with her husband, who, unluckily, had
accompanied them that evening.
Georges, youthful and elegant, sitting beside Sidonie, seemed
her natural companion, while Risler Allie, always so placid and
self-effacing, seemed in his proper place beside Claire Fromont, who in
her dark clothes suggested the respectable woman incog. at the Bal de
l’Opera.
Upon leaving the theatre each of the partners offered his arm to his
neighbor. A box-opener, speaking to Sidonie, referred to Georges as
“your husband,” and the little woman beamed with delight.
“Your husband!”
That simple phrase was enough to upset her and set in motion a multitude
of evil currents in the depths of her heart. As they passed through the
corridors and the foyer, she watched Risler and Madame “Chorche” walking
in front of them. Claire’s refinement of manner seemed to her to be
vulgarized and annihilated by Risler’s shuffling gait. “How ugly he must
make me look when we are walking together!” she said to herself. And her
heart beat fast as she thought what a charming, happy, admired couple
they would have made, she and this Georges Fromont, whose arm was
trembling beneath her own.
Thereupon, when the blue-lined carriage drove up to the door of the
theatre, she began to reflect, for the first time, that, when all was
said, Claire had stolen her place and that she would be justified in
trying to recover it.