“But don’t you see, father, that it is this woman who wants your
fortune, and that she does not like us, and cannot like us?”
“Why, if you please?”
Once before, Count Ville-Handry had asked this question of his daughter
in almost the same words. Then she had not dared answer him; but now,
carried away by her bitterness at being insulted by a woman whom she
despised, she forgot every thing. She seized her father’s hand, and,
carrying him to a mirror, she said in a hoarse voice,--
“‘Why?’--you ask. Well, look there! look at yourself!”
If Count Ville-Handry had trusted nature, he would have looked like a
man of barely sixty, still quite robust and active. But he had allowed
art to spoil every thing. And this morning, with his few hairs, half
white, half dyed, with the rouge and the white paint of yesterday
cracked, and fallen away in places, he looked as if he had lived a few
thousand years.
Did he see himself as he really was,--hideous?
He certainly became livid; and coldly, for his excessive rage gave him
the appearance of composure, he said,--
“You are a wretch, Henrietta!”