I
About half-past five one afternoon at the end of June when the sun
was shining warm and bright into the large courtyard, a very elegant
victoria with two beautiful black horses drew up in front of the
mansion.
The Comtesse de Mascaret came down the steps just as her husband, who
was coming home, appeared in the carriage entrance. He stopped for a
few moments to look at his wife and turned rather pale. The countess was
very beautiful, graceful and distinguished looking, with her long oval
face, her complexion like yellow ivory, her large gray eyes and her
black hair; and she got into her carriage without looking at him,
without even seeming to have noticed him, with such a particularly
high-bred air, that the furious jealousy by which he had been devoured
for so long again gnawed at his heart. He went up to her and said: “You
are going for a drive?”
She merely replied disdainfully: “You see I am!”
“In the Bois de Boulogne?”
“Most probably.”
“May I come with you?”
“The carriage belongs to you.”
Without being surprised at the tone in which she answered him, he got
in and sat down by his wife's side and said: “Bois de Boulogne.” The
footman jumped up beside the coachman, and the horses as usual pranced
and tossed their heads until they were in the street. Husband and
wife sat side by side without speaking. He was thinking how to begin a
conversation, but she maintained such an obstinately hard look that he
did not venture to make the attempt. At last, however, he cunningly,
accidentally as it were, touched the countess' gloved hand with his own,
but she drew her arm away with a movement which was so expressive of
disgust that he remained thoughtful, in spite of his usual authoritative
and despotic character, and he said: “Gabrielle!”
“What do you want?”
“I think you are looking adorable.”
She did not reply, but remained lying back in the carriage, looking
like an irritated queen. By that time they were driving up the Champs
Elysees, toward the Arc de Triomphe. That immense monument, at the end
of the long avenue, raised its colossal arch against the red sky and the
sun seemed to be descending on it, showering fiery dust on it from the
sky.
The stream of carriages, with dashes of sunlight reflected in the silver
trappings of the harness and the glass of the lamps, flowed on in a
double current toward the town and toward the Bois, and the Comte de
Mascaret continued: “My dear Gabrielle!”
Unable to control herself any longer, she replied in an exasperated
voice: “Oh! do leave me in peace, pray! I am not even allowed to have
my carriage to myself now.” He pretended not to hear her and continued:
“You never have looked so pretty as you do to-day.”
Her patience had come to an end, and she replied with irrepressible
anger: “You are wrong to notice it, for I swear to you that I will never
have anything to do with you in that way again.”
The count was decidedly stupefied and upset, and, his violent nature
gaining the upper hand, he exclaimed: “What do you mean by that?” in a
tone that betrayed rather the brutal master than the lover. She replied
in a low voice, so that the servants might not hear amid the deafening
noise of the wheels: “Ah! What do I mean by that? What do I mean by
that? Now I recognize you again! Do you want me to tell everything?”
“Yes.”
“Everything that has weighed on my heart since I have been the victim of
your terrible selfishness?”
He had grown red with surprise and anger and he growled between his
closed teeth: “Yes, tell me everything.”
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a big red beard, a handsome
man, a nobleman, a man of the world, who passed as a perfect husband and
an excellent father, and now, for the first time since they had started,
she turned toward him and looked him full in the face: “Ah! You will
hear some disagreeable things, but you must know that I am prepared for
everything, that I fear nothing, and you less than any one to-day.”
He also was looking into her eyes and was already shaking with rage as
he said in a low voice: “You are mad.”
“No, but I will no longer be the victim of the hateful penalty of
maternity, which you have inflicted on me for eleven years! I wish to
take my place in society as I have the right to do, as all women have
the right to do.”
He suddenly grew pale again and stammered: “I do not understand you.”
“Oh! yes; you understand me well enough. It is now three months since I
had my last child, and as I am still very beautiful, and as, in spite of
all your efforts you cannot spoil my figure, as you just now perceived,
when you saw me on the doorstep, you think it is time that I should
think of having another child.”
“But you are talking nonsense!”
“No, I am not, I am thirty, and I have had seven children, and we have
been married eleven years, and you hope that this will go on for ten
years longer, after which you will leave off being jealous.”
He seized her arm and squeezed it, saying: “I will not allow you to talk
to me like that much longer.”
“And I shall talk to you till the end, until I have finished all I have
to say to you, and if you try to prevent me, I shall raise my voice so
that the two servants, who are on the box, may hear. I only allowed you
to come with me for that object, for I have these witnesses who will
oblige you to listen to me and to contain yourself, so now pay attention
to what I say. I have always felt an antipathy to you, and I have always
let you see it, for I have never lied, monsieur. You married me in spite
of myself; you forced my parents, who were in embarrassed circumstances,
to give me to you, because you were rich, and they obliged me to marry
you in spite of my tears.
“So you bought me, and as soon as I was in your power, as soon as I had
become your companion, ready to attach myself to you, to forget your
coercive and threatening proceedings, in order that I might only
remember that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it
might be possible for me to love you, you became jealous, you, as no man
has ever been before, with the base, ignoble jealousy of a spy, which
was as degrading to you as it was to me. I had not been married eight
months when you suspected me of every perfidiousness, and you even
told me so. What a disgrace! And as you could not prevent me from being
beautiful and from pleasing people, from being called in drawing-rooms
and also in the newspapers one of the most beautiful women in Paris, you
tried everything you could think of to keep admirers from me, and you
hit upon the abominable idea of making me spend my life in a constant
state of motherhood, until the time should come when I should disgust
every man. Oh, do not deny it. I did not understand it for some time,
but then I guessed it. You even boasted about it to your sister, who
told me of it, for she is fond of me and was disgusted at your boorish
coarseness.
“Ah! Remember how you have behaved in the past! How for eleven years you
have compelled me to give up all society and simply be a mother to your
children. And then you would grow disgusted with me and I was sent into
the country, the family chateau, among fields and meadows. And when I
reappeared, fresh, pretty and unspoiled, still seductive and constantly
surrounded by admirers, hoping that at last I should live a little more
like a rich young society woman, you were seized with jealousy again,
and you began once more to persecute me with that infamous and hateful
desire from which you are suffering at this moment by my side. And it is
not the desire of possessing me--for I should never have refused myself
to you, but it is the wish to make me unsightly.
“And then that abominable and mysterious thing occurred which I was a
long time in understanding (but I grew sharp by dint of watching your
thoughts and actions): You attached yourself to your children with all
the security which they gave you while I bore them. You felt affection
for them, with all your aversion to me, and in spite of your ignoble
fears, which were momentarily allayed by your pleasure in seeing me lose
my symmetry.
“Oh! how often have I noticed that joy in you! I have seen it in your
eyes and guessed it. You loved your children as victories, and not
because they were of your own blood. They were victories over me, over
my youth, over my beauty, over my charms, over the compliments which
were paid me and over those that were whispered around me without being
paid to me personally. And you are proud of them, you make a parade of
them, you take them out for drives in your break in the Bois de
Boulogne and you give them donkey rides at Montmorency. You take them
to theatrical matinees so that you may be seen in the midst of them,
so that the people may say: 'What a kind father' and that it may be
repeated----”
He had seized her wrist with savage brutality, and he squeezed it so
violently that she was quiet and nearly cried out with the pain and he
said to her in a whisper:
“I love my children, do you hear? What you have just told me is
disgraceful in a mother. But you belong to me; I am master--your
master--I can exact from you what I like and when I like--and I have the
law-on my side.”
He was trying to crush her fingers in the strong grip of his large,
muscular hand, and she, livid with pain, tried in vain to free them from
that vise which was crushing them. The agony made her breathe hard and
the tears came into her eyes. “You see that I am the master and the
stronger,” he said. When he somewhat loosened his grip, she asked him:
“Do you think that I am a religious woman?”
He was surprised and stammered “Yes.”
“Do you think that I could lie if I swore to the truth of anything to
you before an altar on which Christ's body is?”
“No.”
“Will you go with me to some church?”
“What for?”
“You shall see. Will you?”
“If you absolutely wish it, yes.”
She raised her voice and said: “Philippe!” And the coachman, bending
down a little, without taking his eyes from his horses, seemed to
turn his ear alone toward his mistress, who continued: “Drive to St.
Philippe-du-Roule.” And the-victoria, which had reached the entrance of
the Bois de Boulogne returned to Paris.
Husband and wife did not exchange a word further during the drive, and
when the carriage stopped before the church Madame de Mascaret jumped
out and entered it, followed by the count, a few yards distant. She
went, without stopping, as far as the choir-screen, and falling on her
knees at a chair, she buried her face in her hands. She prayed for a
long time, and he, standing behind her could see that she was crying.
She wept noiselessly, as women weep when they are in great, poignant
grief. There was a kind of undulation in her body, which ended in a
little sob, which was hidden and stifled by her fingers.
But the Comte de Mascaret thought that the situation was lasting too
long, and he touched her on the shoulder. That contact recalled her to
herself, as if she had been burned, and getting up, she looked straight
into his eyes. “This is what I have to say to you. I am afraid of
nothing, whatever you may do to me. You may kill me if you like. One
of your children is not yours, and one only; that I swear to you before
God, who hears me here. That was the only revenge that was possible for
me in return for all your abominable masculine tyrannies, in return for
the penal servitude of childbearing to which you have condemned me. Who
was my lover? That you never will know! You may suspect every one, but
you never will find out. I gave myself to him, without love and without
pleasure, only for the sake of betraying you, and he also made me a
mother. Which is the child? That also you never will know. I have seven;
try to find out! I intended to tell you this later, for one has not
avenged oneself on a man by deceiving him, unless he knows it. You have
driven me to confess it today. I have now finished.”
She hurried through the church toward the open door, expecting to hear
behind her the quick step: of her husband whom she had defied and to be
knocked to the ground by a blow of his fist, but she heard nothing and
reached her carriage. She jumped into it at a bound, overwhelmed with
anguish and breathless with fear. So she called out to the coachman:
“Home!” and the horses set off at a quick trot.