NEW YEAR’S DAY.
“Gentlemen of the Central Administration!”
“Directors of the Academy of the Fine Arts!”
“Gentlemen of the Academy of Medicine!”
In grand gala dress, with his short hose and sword by his side, the
chamberlain was announcing the arrivals in a mournful voice that
resounded through the solemn drawing-rooms. As he called out, lines
of black coats crossed the immense hall all red and gold and ranged
themselves in a half-circle before the Minister, who stood with his
back to the chimneypiece, having near him his Under-Secretary of State,
M. de la Calmette, and his chief of cabinet, his foppish attachés
and a few directors belonging to the Ministry such as Dansaert and
Béchut. His Excellency addressed compliments and congratulations for
the decorations and academic palms granted to some of those present,
according as each organization arrived and was presented by its dean
or president; then the organization turned right about and gave way to
another set, some bodies retiring whilst others arrived, causing no
little confusion at the doors of the hall.
For it was late; it was past one o’clock and each man was thinking of
the breakfast which was waiting for him at home. In the concert hall
which had been turned into a vestiary, impatient groups were looking at
their watches, buttoning their gloves, adjusting their white cravats
below their drawn faces; gaping and weariness, bad temper and hunger
were on every side. Roumestan himself felt the weariness of this
important day. He had lost his fine warmth of spirit shown at the same
time last year, his faith in the future and in reform, and he let his
little speeches off slowly, pierced through to his very marrow by the
cold, despite the radiators and the enormous flaming wood fire; indeed,
that little flaky snow which whirled about the panes of the windows
seemed to fall upon his light heart and congeal it even as it fell upon
the greensward of the garden.
“Gentlemen of the Comédie-Française!”
Closely shaved and solemn, distributing bows just as the fashion was
in the grand epoch, they posed themselves in majestic attitudes about
their dean, who in a cavernous voice presented the company, talked
about the endeavors and vows the company had made--“the” company,
without any epithet or qualifying word, just as we say “God” or as we
say “the” Bible--exactly as if no other company existed in the world
except that alone! And it must be said that poor Roumestan needs be
very much enfeebled if this same company could not excite his eloquence
and grand theatrical phrases, this company to which he himself seemed
to belong with his bluish chin, his jowls and his distinguished but
most conventional poses!
The fact was that for the last eight days, since the departure of
Rosalie, he was like a gambler who has lost his mascot; he was
frightened and suddenly felt himself inferior to his fortune and thus
ready to be crushed. Mediocrities who have been favored by chance
have such panics and nervous crises and they were increased in him by
the terrible scandal which was about to break out, the scandal of a
lawsuit for separation which the young wife insisted upon absolutely,
notwithstanding all his letters and visits, his grovelling prayers
and oaths. To keep up appearances it was said at the Ministry that
Mme. Roumestan had gone to live with her father because of the near
departure of Mme. Le Quesnoy and Hortense. But nobody was taken in
by that, and the luckless man saw his adventure reflected in pity or
curiosity or sarcasm from all these faces which were defiling before
him, as well as from certain broadly marked smiles and from various
shakes of the hand, a little more energetic than usual. There was not
a single one of the lowest employees who had come to the reception in
jacket and overcoat who was not thoroughly posted in this matter. Among
the offices couplets were circulating from mouth to mouth in which
Chambéry rhymed with Bachellery; more than one porter discontented with
his pay was humming one of these couplets within himself whilst making
a deep bow to his supreme chief.
Two o’clock! Still the organized bodies kept presenting themselves and
the snow kept deepening whilst the man with the chains over his uniform
introduced pell-mell and without any kind of order:
“Gentlemen of the School of Laws!”
“Gentlemen of the Conservatory of Music!”
“Directors of the Subsidized Theatres!”
By favor of seniority and his three failures Cadaillac arrived at the
head of this delegation. Roumestan longed far more to fall with fist
and foot upon the cynical _impresario_ whose nomination had occasioned
such serious embarrassment to him than to listen to the fine speech to
which the ferocious insolence of his look gave the lie and to answer
him with a forced compliment, half of which stuck in the big folds of
his cravat:
“Greatly touched, gentlemen ... _mn mn mn_ ... progress of art ... _mn
mn mn_ ... still better in the future....”
And the _impresario_ as he moved off:
“Poor old Numa--he’s got a charge of lead in his wing this time!”
When these had left, the Minister and his comrades did honor to
the usual breakfast; but this meal which had been so gay and full
of effusion the year before was weighted down by the gloom of the
chief and bad temper on the part of his intimates, who were all of
them enraged with him on account of their own situations which he
had already begun to compromise. This scandalous lawsuit coming just
in the midst of the debate over Cadaillac would be sure to make
Roumestan impossible as a member of the cabinet. That very morning at
the reception in the Palace of the Élysées the Marshal had said two
words about it with the laconic and brutal eloquence natural to an old
cavalryman: “A dirty business!”
Without precisely having heard this speech from an august mouth, which
was murmured in Numa’s ear in an alcove, the gentlemen round him saw
very clearly their own fall coming behind that of their chief.
“Oh, women, women!” grunted the learned Béchut over his plate. M. de la
Calmette with his thirty years of official life grew melancholy as he
pondered over a retiring from office like unto Tircis, and below his
breath the long-legged Lappara amused himself by frightening Rochemaure
out of his wits:
“Viscount, we must look out for ourselves; we shall be decapitated
before eight days are over!”
After a toast had been given by the Minister to the New Year and his
dear collaborators, uttered with a shaky voice in which one heard
the tears, they separated. Méjean, who stayed to the last, walked
two or three times up and down beside his friend without having the
courage to say a single word; then he too left. Notwithstanding his
wish to keep by his side during that day a man like Méjean whose
straightforward nature forced his respect like a reproach uttered by
his own conscience, but at the same time sustained and reassured him,
Numa could not stand in the way of Méjean’s duty, which was to run his
round of visits and distribute good wishes and presents for the New
Year, any more than he could prevent his chamberlain from going back to
his family and unburdening himself of his sword and short-clothes.
What a howling solitude was that Ministry! It was like Sunday in
a factory with the boiler cold and silent. In all the departments
upstairs and downstairs, in his own cabinet, where he vainly attempted
to write, in his bed-chamber, which he began once more to fill with his
sobs, everywhere that little January snow was whirling about the big
windows, veiling the horizon and increasing the silence which was like
that of the Eastern steppes.
Oh, the misery of men in lofty positions!
A clock struck four and then another answered and then still others
replied through the vast desert of the palace until it seemed as if
there was nothing alive there except the hour. The idea of remaining
there till evening face to face with his wretchedness frightened him.
He felt that he must thaw himself a little with a bit of friendship
and tenderness. Steam radiators and warm-air registers and half trees
flaming in the chimneypiece did not constitute a hearth; for a moment
he thought of the Rue de Londres. But he had sworn to his lawyer--for
the lawyers were already at work--to keep quiet until the suit was
decided. All of a sudden a name flashed across his mind: “Bompard!
Why had he not come?” Generally he was observed to arrive the first
on mornings of feast-days, his arms full of bouquets and paper sacks
with candies for Rosalie, Hortense and Mme. Le Quesnoy, wearing on his
lips a smile which expressed his character of grandpapa or of Santa
Claus. Of course Roumestan paid the bill of these surprises, but friend
Bompard was possessed of imagination enough to forget that fact, and,
notwithstanding her antipathy, Rosalie could not help being touched
when she thought of the privations which the poor devil must have
undergone in order to be so generous.
“Suppose I go and get him and we dine together.”
He was reduced to that. He rang, took off his evening dress, all his
medals and orders and went out on foot by the Rue Bellechasse.
The quays and bridges were all white; but when he had crossed the
courtyard of the Carrousel neither ground nor air betrayed a trace
of snow. It disappeared under the wheels that crowded the street,
in the swarming myriads of the mob covering the sidewalks at the
shop-fronts and pushing round the offices of the omnibus lines. This
tumult of a feast-day evening, the calls of the coachmen, the shrill
cries of peddlers in the luminous confusion of the shop-fronts, where
the lilac-colored jets from the Jablochkoff burners extinguished the
twinkling yellow of the gas and the last reflections from the pale
afternoon, lulled the despair of Roumestan and dissolved it, as it
were, by means of the agitation of the street. Meantime he directed his
steps toward the Boulevard Poissonnière where the old Circassian, very
sedentary like all men of imagination, had lived for the last twenty
years, in fact since his arrival in Paris.
Nobody had ever seen the interior of Bompard’s home, of which
nevertheless he talked a good deal, as well as of his garden and his
artistic furniture, to complete which he haunted all the auctions at
the Hôtel Drouot.
“Do come to breakfast one of these days and eat a chop with me!”
That was the regular form of invitation which he scattered right and
left, but any one who took him at his word never found anybody at home;
he came up standing against signs left by the janitor, against bells
wrapped in paper or deprived of their wire. During an entire year
Lappara and Rochemaure obstinately continued to try to reach Bompard’s
rooms and overcome the extraordinary stratagems of the Provençal who
was guarding the mystery of his apartment--but all in vain. One day
he even took out some of the bricks near the front door in order to
be able to say across this species of barricade to the friends he had
invited:
“Awfully sorry, dear boys--we have had an escape of gas--everything
blown up last night!”
After having mounted numberless stories and wandered through long
corridors, tumbled over invisible steps and intruded upon veritable
assemblies of witches among the servants’ bedrooms, Roumestan, quite
blown from that arduous ascent, to which his legs of an illustrious man
were no longer equal, tumbled against a great big washbowl fastened to
the wall.
“Who’s there?” spoke out a well-known voice coming from far down the
throat.
The door opened slowly, weighed down by a clothes-rack upon which hung
the entire wardrobe of the lodger for winter and summer; the room was
small and Bompard did not lose the benefit of an eighth of an inch and
was compelled to keep his toilet table in the corridor. His friend
found him lying on a little iron bed, his brow decorated with a scarlet
head-dress, a sort of Dantesque cap which rose up in astonishment at
sight of the distinguished visitor.
“It can’t be you!”
“Are you ill?” said Roumestan.
“Ill? not much!”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“You see I am taking stock of things,” and then he added, to explain
his thought: “I have so many plans in my head, so many inventions! Now
and then I get dispersed and lose myself; it is only when I lie abed
that I can gather myself together a little.”
Roumestan looked about for a chair, but none was there except the
single one in use as a night table; it was covered with books and
newspapers and had a candlestick wobbling on top of them all. He sat
down on the foot of the bed.
“Why do we never see anything more of you?”
“Pshaw! you must be joking. After what happened I could not meet
your wife face to face. Just think a little! There I was right before
her, the codfish _à la brandade_ in my hand. It took a mighty lot of
coolness, I can tell you, not to let everything drop.”
“Rosalie is no longer at the Ministry,” said Numa quite overwhelmed.
“You astonish me; do you mean to say that it has not been arranged?”
And indeed it did not seem possible to him that Madame Numa, a person
of so much good sense ... for after all, what was all this business
anyhow? “Come now, just a mere fancy!”
The other interrupted him:
“You don’t understand her--she is an implacable woman--the perfect
image of her father--Northern race, my dear fellow--with them it is not
as it is with us, where the greatest anger evaporates in gesticulations
and threats and then there is nothing left and we face about. But they
keep everything in mind; it is terrible.”
He did not say that she had already forgiven him once before; and then,
in order to escape from his sorrowful thoughts:
“Get your clothes on; you must come and dine with me.”
While Bompard was making his toilet out in the corridor the Minister
looked about the mansard room lit by a little window like a
tobacco-box, over which the melting snow was running. Pity seized him
face to face with this penury, these damp rags, the whitewashed paper
and little stove worn with rust and fireless notwithstanding the
cold. And he asked himself, used as he was to the sumptuousness of his
palace, how people could live in such a place?
“Have you seen the _gardeen_?” cried Bompard joyfully from his basin.
His garden was the leafless tops of three plane-trees which could not
be seen unless one stood upon the solitary chair in the room.
“And my little museum?”
His museum he called a few ticketed knick-knacks upon a board, a
brick, a short pipe in brierwood, a rusty knife-blade and an ostrich
egg--but the brick came from the Alhambra, the sword had been used
in the vendettas of a famous Corsican bandit, the short pipe bore
an inscription, “Pipe of a Morocco criminal,” and finally the
ostrich egg represented the vanishing of a beautiful dream, all that
remained--along with a few laths and bits of plaster heaped in a
corner--of the famous Bompard Incubator and the scheme for artificial
hatching. But now, my dear boy, there is something much better on
hand--a marvellous scheme--millions in it--which he was not at liberty
to explain at present.
“What is it you are looking at? That?--That is my brevet of
membership--_bé_, yes, membership in the Aïoli.”
This club of the Aïoli had for its purpose the bringing together once
a month of all the Southerners living in Paris, in order to eat a
dinner cooked with garlic, a way of never losing either the fragrance
or the accent of home. It was a tremendous organization--a President
of Honor, Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Seniors, Questors, Treasurers,
all furnished with their diplomas as members brave with silver
streamers, and the flower of the leek as decoration upon rose-colored
paper. This precious document was displayed on the wall alongside
of advertisements of every sort of color, sales of houses, railway
placards and so forth, which Bompard liked to have always under his
nose, in order, as he ingenuously remarked, “to do his liver good.”
There might one read: “Château to sell, one hundred and fifty hectares,
meadows, hunting, river, pond full of fish.... Lovely little property
in Touraine, vineyards, luzernes, mill-on-the-Cize.... Round trip
through Switzerland, through Italy, to Lago Maggiore, to the Borromean
Islands....” These things excited him just as much as if he had had
fine landscapes in oil hanging on the wall. He believed he was in these
places--and he was there!
“By Jove!” said Roumestan with a shade of envy of this wretched
believer in chimeras, so happy in his rags--“You have a tremendous
imagination. Come, are you ready? Let’s get down. It is frightfully
cold up here.”
After a few turns through the brilliant streets across the jolly mob of
the boulevards the two friends settled themselves down in the heady,
radiating warmth of a little room in a big restaurant, in front of
oysters and a bottle of Château-Yquem very carefully uncorked.
“To your health, my comrade--I pray that it may be good and happy
forever.”
“_Té!_ why it’s a fact,” said Bompard; “we haven’t kissed each other
yet.”
Across the table they gave each other a hug with moistened eyes and
Roumestan felt himself quite gay again, despite the wrinkled and
swarthy hide of the Circassian. Ever since morning he had wanted
to kiss somebody. Besides, think of all the years they had known
each other--thirty years of their life in front of them on that
tablecloth--and through the vapor rising from delicate dishes and over
the straw wrappers of delicious wines they recalled their days of
youth, their fraternal recollections, races and picnics, saw once more
their own boyish faces and interlarded their effusions with words in
dialect which brought them still closer together.
“_T’en souvénès, digo?_” (I say, do you remember?)
In a room near by could be heard a noise of high laughter and little
screams.
“To the devil with females,” said Roumestan; “there is nothing worth
while but friendship!”
And then they drank to each other once more; nevertheless their talk
turned in another direction: “And how about the little girl?” asked
Bompard, winking his eye. “How is she getting on?”
“O, of course, I have not seen her again, you know.”
“Of course not, of course not,” said the other turning suddenly very
serious and putting on a solemn face.
Presently a piano behind the partition began to play scraps of waltzes,
fashionable quadrilles and bars of music from operettas, now crazy and
now languid. They stopped talking in order to listen, pulling off the
withered grapes, and Numa, all of whose sensations appeared to have two
faces and to be swung upon a pivot, began to think about his wife and
his child and his lost happiness. So he must needs unbosom himself at
the top of his voice with his elbows on the table.
“Eleven years of intimacy, trust and tenderness--all that flashed
away and vanished in a minute! how can it be possible? ah, Rosalie,
Rosalie--”
No one could ever know what she had been to him, and he himself had not
thoroughly understood it until after her departure. Such an upright
spirit, such a straightforward heart! And what shoulders and what arms!
No little gingerbread doll like little Bachellery; something full and
amber-tinted and delicate--
“Besides, don’t you see, my dear comrade, there’s no denying that when
we are young we need surprises and adventures--meetings in a hurry,
sharpened by the fear of being caught, staircases one comes down on all
fours with one’s boots in one’s arms--all that is part of love. But at
our age what we desire above everything else is peace and what the
philosophers call security in pleasure. It is only marriage which can
give you that.”
He jumped up all of a sudden, threw down his napkin: “Off with us,
_té!_”
“And we are going--?” asked the impassible Bompard.
“To walk by under her window just as I did twelve years ago--to this,
my dear boy, is he reduced, the grand Master of the University--”
Under the arcaded way of the Place Royale, whose square garden covered
with snow formed a white quadrilateral within its iron fence, these two
friends walked up and down for a long while, spying out in the broken
sky-line formed by the Louis XIII roofs, chimneys and balconies the
lofty windows of the Hôtel Le Quesnoy.
“To think that she is over there,” sighed Roumestan, “so near to me,
and yet I may not see her!”
Bompard was shivering with his feet in the mud and did not appreciate
very greatly this sentimental excursion; in order to bring it to a
close he used strategy, and knowing well that Numa was a soft one, in
deadly fear of the slightest illness:
“I’m afraid you’ll catch cold, Numa,” insinuated he like the traitor he
was.
The Southerner was struck with fear, and they quickly returned to the
carriage.
* * * * *
She was there indeed, in that same drawing-room where he had seen her
for the first time. The furniture was just the same and held the same
place, having reached that age when furniture, like temperaments,
cannot be renewed. Scarcely were there a few more faded folds in
the fawn-colored hangings and a film over the dull reflections from
the mirrors like that one sees on deserted ponds which nothing ever
touches. The faces of the two old people under the two-branched
candlesticks at the card-table in company with their usual partners
showed likewise a little of the wear and tear of life. Madame Le
Quesnoy’s features were puffy and drooping as if the fibre had been
taken out of them, and the President’s pallor was still more pallid and
still prouder was the revolt that he preserved in the bitter blue of
his eyes. Seated near a big arm-chair, the cushions of which were still
crushed down by a light weight, her sister having gone to bed, Rosalie
continued in a low voice that reading aloud which she had been giving a
moment before for the benefit of her sister, reading on in a low voice
through the silence of whist broken by the half-words and interjections
of the players.
It was a book belonging to her youth, one of those poets of nature whom
her father had taught her to love. And she perceived the whole past of
her life as a young girl rising up from the pure white of the stanzas
as well as the fresh and penetrating impression of the books one has
read first in life.
_La belle aurait pu sans souci
Manger ses fraises loin d’ici
Au bord d’une claire fontaine
Avec un joyeux moissonneur
Qui l’aurait prise sur son cœur,
Elle aurait eu bien moins de peine._
(In happy ease that damsel fair
Her berries might have eaten where
A fountain plashes o’er a stone;
Some harvester at noontide rest
Had clasped her to his stalwart breast--
Ah! far less woe would she have known.)
The book slipped from her hands upon her knees, the last two lines
re-echoing their mournful song to the very depths of her being,
recalling to her the wretchedness which for one moment she had forgot.
There lies the cruelty that poets exercise; they lull and appease you,
but then with one word they envenom again the wound which they were by
way of healing.
She saw herself as she was in that same place twelve years before when
Numa paid his addresses to her with great big bouquets of roses; when,
clothed with her twenty years and the wish to be beautiful for his
sake, from that very window she watched him coming, just as one watches
one’s own destiny. In every corner of the house there remained echoes
of his warm and tender voice, so ready to lie. If one looked a moment
among the music scattered about the piano one would find the duos which
they sang together; everything which surrounded her seemed accomplices
of the disaster in her failure of a life. She thought of what that
life might have been by the side of an honest man and loyal comrade,
not brilliant and ambitious, but enjoying a simple and hidden existence
in which they would have courageously borne all bitternesses and all
sorrow to the very end of their days.
“_Elle aurait eu bien moins de peine._” (Ah, far less woe would she
have known.)
She had plunged so deep into her dream that when the whist party ended
and her parents’ old friends had left, almost without her remarking it,
answering mechanically the friendly and pitying farewells that each
one gave her, she failed to perceive that the President, instead of
conducting his friends to the front door as had been his habit every
evening, no matter what the time or season, was marching up and down
the drawing-room. At last he stopped before her and put a question to
her in a voice which caused her all of a sudden to tremble:
“Well, my child, where are you in this matter? have you made up your
mind?”
“Why, dear father, I am exactly where I was before.”
He seated himself beside her, took her hand and attempted to do the
persuasive:
“I have been to see your husband ... he consents to everything ... you
can live here with me the entire time that your mother and sister shall
be away, and even afterwards if your anger against him still continues.
But I tell you again, this suit for separation is impossible! I do
hope that you will not insist upon it.”
Rosalie tossed her head.
“My dear father, you do not understand that man. He will employ all
his cunning to surround me and get me back again, make me his dupe, a
voluntary dupe, who has accepted an undignified and degraded existence.
Your daughter is not a woman of that sort. I demand a complete and
irreparable rupture, openly announced to all the world.”
From the card-table where she sat ranging the cards and markers Mme. Le
Quesnoy, without turning round, gently interposed:
“Forgive, my child, forgive.”
“O yes, that is easy to say when one has a husband as upright and loyal
as yours, when one never has known the suffocating effect of lies and
treason, drawing their plots about one. He is a hypocrite, I tell you.
He has his Chambéry morality and his morality of the Rue de Londres.
His words and his acts are never in accord--two ways of speech, two
faces--all the seductive and catlike nature of his race--in a word, the
man of the South!”
And then, losing her head as her anger exploded, she said:
“Besides, I had already forgiven him once. Yes, two years after my
marriage. I never told you about it, I have never spoken to a single
person. I was very unhappy; and then we only remained together because
of an oath he made me.--But he only lives on perjuries! And now it is
completely at an end, completely at an end!”
The President did not insist further, but slowly rose and went over to
his wife. There was a whispering together and something like a debate,
surprising enough between that authoritative man and this humble,
annihilated creature: “You must tell her.... Yes, yes, I want you to
tell her....” Without adding another word M. Le Quesnoy left the room
and his sonorous regular step, his step of every evening, could be
heard mounting the solitary vaulted stairs, through all the solemn
spaces of the grand drawing-room.
“Come here,” said her mother to the daughter with a tender gesture,
“nearer to me, still nearer.”
She would never dare to tell her aloud; and even when they were so
close and heart was beating against heart, she still hesitated:
“Listen, dear; it is he who demands it--he wants me to tell you that
your destiny is the destiny of all women, and that even your mother has
not escaped it.”
Rosalie was overwhelmed with that secret confided to her which she had
divined in a flash at the first words of her mother, whilst her old
and very dear voice broken with tears could hardly articulate the very
sorrowful, very sorrowful story, similar in every way to her own--the
crime of her husband from the earliest years of their housekeeping,
just as if the motto of these wretched coupled beings must be “Deceive
me or else I deceive thee!”--the man hastening to begin the evil in
order to maintain his superior rank.
“Enough, enough, Mamma. Oh, how you are hurting me!”
This father whom she so admired, whom she placed far above any other
man, this sterlingly honest and firm magistrate! But what kind of
creatures were men, anyhow? At the North and down South, all were
alike, traitors and perjurers. She who had not wept a tear because of
the treason of her husband now felt herself invaded by a flood of hot
tears because of this humiliation of her father.... And so they were
counting upon this, were they? to make her yield! No, a hundred times
no; she would never forgive. Ha, ha! so that was marriage, was it? Very
well; dishonor and disdain upon marriage then! What cared she for fear
of scandal and the proprieties of the world, since it was a rivalry as
to who should treat them with the most contempt?
Her mother, taking her in her arms and pressing her against her heart,
endeavored to soften the revolt of this young conscience wounded in all
its beliefs, in its dearest superstitions; she caressed her gently as
if she were rocking a child:
“Yes, yes, you will forgive. You will do as I did--you see it is our
destiny. Ah, I also had a terrible bitterness in me during the first
moments and a great longing to throw myself out of the window. But
I thought of my child, my poor little Andrew who was just coming to
life, who since then grew up and died, loving and respecting all his
family. So you too will pardon in order that your child shall have the
same happy tranquillity which my own courage secured to you, so that he
shall not be one of those half-orphans whom parents share between them,
whom they bring up in hatred and disdain to one and the other. You
will also remember that your father and mother have already suffered
tremendously and that other bitter sorrows are menacing them now--”
She stopped short, suffocated by feeling, and then in a solemn accent:
“My daughter, all sorrows become softened and all wounds are capable of
being cured. There is only one sorrow which is irreparable and that is
the death of the person we love.”
In the failure of her agitated forces that followed these last words
Rosalie felt the figure of her mother grow in grandeur by as much
as her father had lost greatness in her eyes. She even reproached
herself for having so long misunderstood the sublime and resigned
self-abnegation concealed beneath that apparent feebleness which was
the result of bitter blows. Thus it came about that for her mother’s
sake, for her mother’s sake alone, she renounced the lawsuit in revenge
of her outraged rights, and renounced it in gentle words, almost as
if asking pardon: “Only do not insist that I go back to him--I should
be too ashamed. I will accompany my sister to the South. Afterwards,
later, we shall see.”
The President came back again, and when he saw the enthusiasm with
which the old mother was throwing her arms about the neck of her child
he understood that their cause was won.
“Thank you, my daughter,” he murmured, very much touched. Then after
a little hesitation he approached Rosalie for the usual kiss of
good-night. But the brow which ordinarily was so tenderly offered moved
aside and his kiss lost itself in her hair.
“Good-night, father.”
He said nothing in return, but went away hanging his head with a
convulsive shudder in his high shoulders. He who during his life had
accused so many people, had condemned so many--he, the First Magistrate
of France, had found a judge in his turn.