Beatrix

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!”

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.