Felicite’s tender love was preparing for Calyste a prosperous future. Being allied to the family of Grandlieu, the ducal branch of which was ending in five daughters for lack of a male heir, she had written to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, describing Calyste and giving his history, and also stating certain intentions of her own, which were as follows: She had lately sold her house in the rue du Mont-Blanc, for which a party of speculators had given her two millions five hundred thousand francs. Her man of business had since purchased for her a charming new house in the rue de Bourbon for seven hundred thousand francs; one million she intended to devote to the recovery of the du Guenic estates, and the rest of her fortune she desired to settle upon Sabine de Grandlieu. Felicite had long known the plans of the duke and duchess as to the settlement of their five daughters: the youngest was to marry the Vicomte de Grandlieu, the heir to their ducal title; Clotilde-Frederique, the second daughter, desired to remain unmarried, in memory of a man she had deeply loved, Lucien de Rubempre, while, at the same time, she did not wish to become a nun like her eldest sister; two of the remaining sisters were already married, and the youngest but one, the pretty Sabine, just twenty years old, was the only disposable daughter left. It was Sabine on whom Felicite resolved to lay the burden of curing Calyste’s passion for Beatrix.
During the journey to Paris Mademoiselle des Touches revealed to the baroness these arrangements. The new house in the rue de Bourbon was being decorated, and she intended it for the home of Sabine and Calyste if her plans succeeded.
The party had been invited to stay at the hotel de Grandlieu, where the baroness was received with all the distinction due to her rank as the wife of a du Guenic and the daughter of a British peer. Mademoiselle des Touches urged Calyste to see Paris, while she herself made the necessary inquiries about Beatrix (who had disappeared from the world, and was travelling abroad), and she took care to throw him into the midst of diversions and amusements of all kinds. The season for balls and fetes was just beginning, and the duchess and her daughters did the honors of Paris to the young Breton, who was insensibly diverted from his own thoughts by the movement and life of the great city. He found some resemblance of mind between Madame de Rochefide and Sabine de Grandlieu, who was certainly one of the handsomest and most charming girls in Parisian society, and this fancied likeness made him give to her coquetries a willing attention which no other woman could possibly have obtained from him. Sabine herself was greatly pleased with Calyste, and matters went so well that during the winter of 1837 the young Baron du Guenic, whose youth and health had returned to him, listened without repugnance to his mother when she reminded him of the promise made to his dying father and proposed to him a marriage with Sabine de Grandlieu. Still, while agreeing to fulfil his promise, he concealed within his soul an indifference to all things, of which the baroness alone was aware, but which she trusted would be conquered by the pleasures of a happy home.
On the day when the Grandlieu family and the baroness, accompanied by her relations who came from England for this occasion, assembled in the grand salon of the hotel de Grandlieu to sign the marriage contract, and Leopold Hannequin, the family notary, explained the preliminaries of that contract before reading it, Calyste, on whose forehead every one present might have noticed clouds, suddenly and curtly refused to accept the benefactions offered him by Mademoiselle des Touches. Did he still count on Felicite’s devotion to recover Beatrix? In the midst of the embarrassment and stupefaction of the assembled families, Sabine de Grandlieu entered the room and gave him a letter, explaining that Mademoiselle des Touches had requested her to give it to him on this occasion.
Calyste turned away from the company to the embrasure of a window and read as follows:—
“Let us now sign the contract,” said the young baron, returning to the assembled company.
The Abbe Grimont, to whom the honor of the conversion of this celebrated woman was attributed, became, soon after, vicar-general of the diocese.
The following week, after the marriage ceremony, which, according to the custom of many families of the faubourg Saint-Germain, was celebrated at seven in the morning at the church of Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Calyste and Sabine got into their pretty travelling-carriage, amid the tears, embraces, and congratulations of a score of friends, collected under the awning of the hotel de Grandlieu. The congratulations came from the four witnesses, and the men present; the tears were in the eyes of the Duchesse de Grandlieu and her daughter Clotilde, who both trembled under the weight of the same thought,—
“She is launched upon the sea of life! Poor Sabine! at the mercy of a man who does not marry entirely of his own free will.”
Marriage is not wholly made up of pleasures,—as fugitive in that relation as in all others; it involves compatibility of temper, physical sympathies, harmonies of character, which make of that social necessity an eternal problem. Marriageable daughters, as well as mothers, know the terms as well as the dangers of this lottery; and that is why women weep at a wedding while men smile; men believe that they risk nothing, while women know, or very nearly know, what they risk.
In another carriage, which preceded the married pair, was the Baronne du Guenic, to whom the duchess had said at parting,—
“You are a mother, though you have only had one son; try to take my place to my dear Sabine.”
On the box of the bridal carriage sat a chasseur, who acted as courier, and in the rumble were two waiting-maids. The four postilions dressed in their finest uniforms, for each carriage was drawn by four horses, appeared with bouquets on their breasts and ribbons on their hats, which the Duc de Grandlieu had the utmost difficulty in making them relinquish, even by bribing them with money. The French postilion is eminently intelligent, but he likes his fun. These fellows took their bribes and replaced their ribbons at the barrier.
“Well, good-bye, Sabine,” said the duchess; “remember your promise; write to me often. Calyste, I say nothing more to you, but you understand me.”
Clotilde, leaning on the youngest sister Athenais, who was smiling to the Vicomte de Grandlieu, cast a reflecting look through her tears at the bride, and followed the carriage with her eyes as it disappeared to the clacking of four whips, more noisy than the shots of a pistol gallery. In a few minutes the gay convoy had reached the esplanade of the Invalides, the barrier of Passy by the quay of the Pont d’Iena, and were fairly on the high-road to Brittany.
Is it not a singular thing that the artisans of Switzerland and Germany, and the great families of France and England should, one and all, follow the custom of setting out on a journey after the marriage ceremony? The great people shut themselves in a box which rolls along; the little people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods, banqueting at the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money lasts. A moralist is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer sense of modesty,—that which hides from the public eye and inaugurates the domestic hearth and bed in private, as to the worthy burghers of all lands, or that which withdraws from the family and exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads and in face of strangers. One would think that delicate souls might desire solitude and seek to escape both the world and their family. The love which begins a marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the choicest of arts, a treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.
Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride? How many women reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life? The first three letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising to some young brides and to many old women. All those who find themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband’s heart, do not, as Sabine did, discover this at once. But young girls of the faubourg Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind. Before marriage, they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons when they say to their daughters: “That is a motion that must not be made;” “Never laugh at such things;” “No lady ever flings herself on a sofa; she sits down quietly;” “Pray give up such detestable ways;” “My dear, that is a thing which is never done,” etc.
Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the training of their minds, by the habit of noble bearing, by natural good taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to use their opera-glasses. Sabine was a girl of this school, which was also that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This inborn sense of the fitness of things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as interesting a young woman as the heroine of the “Memoirs of two young Married Women.” Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of which we here give three or four, will show the qualities of her mind and temperament.
Guerande, April, 1838.
Your Sabine.
Guerande, May, 1838.
Guerande, May 15th.
Nantes, June, 1838.
August.
August 25th.
Guenic, September 18.
These letters give a perfect explanation of the secret relation between husband and wife. Sabine thought of a love marriage where Calyste saw only a marriage of expediency. The joys of the honey-moon had not altogether conformed to the legal requirements of the social system.
During the stay of the married pair in Brittany the work of restoring and furnishing the hotel du Guenic had been carried on by the celebrated architect Grindot, under the superintendence of Clotilde and the Duc and Duchesse de Grandlieu, all arrangements having been made for the return of the young household to Paris in December, 1838. Sabine installed herself in the rue de Bourbon with pleasure,—less for the satisfaction of playing mistress of a great household than for that of knowing what her family would think of her marriage.
Calyste, with easy indifference, was quite willing to let his sister-in-law Clotilde and his mother-in-law the duchess guide him in all matters of social life, and they were both very grateful for his obedience. He obtained the place in society which was due to his name, his fortune, and his alliance. The success of his wife, who was regarded as one of the most charming women in Paris, the diversions of high society, the duties to be fulfilled, the winter amusements of the great city, gave a certain fresh life to the happiness of the young household by producing a series of excitements and interludes. Sabine, considered happy by her mother and sister, who saw in Calyste’s coolness an effect of his English education, cast aside her gloomy notions; she heard her lot so envied by many unhappily married women that she drove her terrors from her into the region of chimeras, until the time when her pregnancy gave additional guarantees to this neutral sort of union, guarantees which are usually augured well of by experienced women. In October, 1839, the young Baronne du Guenic had a son, and committed the mistake of nursing it herself, on the theory of most women in such cases. How is it possible, they think, not to be wholly the mother of the child of an idolized husband?
Toward the end of the following summer, in August, 1840, Sabine had nearly reached the period when the duty of nursing her first child would come to an end. Calyste, during his two years’ residence in Paris, had completely thrown off that innocence of mind the charm of which had so adorned his earliest appearance in the world of passion. He was now the comrade of the young Duc Georges de Maufrigneuse, lately married, like himself, to an heiress, Berthe de Cinq-Cygne; of the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere, the Duc and Duchesse de Rhetore, the Duc and Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the habitues of his mother-in-law’s salon; and he fully understood by this time the differences that separated Parisian life from the life of the provinces. Wealth has fatal hours, hours of leisure and idleness, which Paris knows better than all other capitals how to amuse, charm, and divert. Contact with those young husbands who deserted the noblest and sweetest of creatures for the delights of a cigar and whist, for the glorious conversations of a club, or the excitements of “the turf,” undermined before long many of the domestic virtues of the young Breton noble. The motherly solicitude of a wife who is anxious not to weary her husband always comes to the support of the dissipations of young men. A wife is proud to see her husband return to her when she has allowed him full liberty of action.
One evening, on October of that year, to escape the crying of the newly weaned child, Calyste, on whose forehead Sabine could not endure to see a frown, went, urged by her, to the Varietes, where a new play was to be given for the first time. The footman whose business it was to engage a stall had taken it quite near to that part of the theatre which is called the avant-scene. As Calyste looked about him during the first interlude, he saw in one of the two proscenium boxes on his side, and not ten steps from him, Madame de Rochefide. Beatrix in Paris! Beatrix in public! The two thoughts flew through Calyste’s heart like arrows. To see her again after nearly three years! How shall we depict the convulsion in the soul of this lover, who, far from forgetting the past, had sometimes substituted Beatrix for his wife so plainly that his wife had perceived it? Beatrix was light, life, motion, and the Unknown. Sabine was duty, dulness, and the expected. One became, in a moment, pleasure; the other, weariness. It was the falling of a thunderbolt.
From a sense of loyalty, the first thought of Sabine’s husband was to leave the theatre. As he left the door of the orchestra stalls, he saw the door of the proscenium box half-open, and his feet took him there in spite of his will. The young Breton found Beatrix between two very distinguished men, Canalis and Raoul Nathan, a statesman and a man of letters. In the three years since Calyste had seen her, Madame de Rochefide was amazingly changed; and yet, although the transformation had seriously affected her as a woman, she was only the more poetic and the more attractive to Calyste. Until the age of thirty the pretty women of Paris ask nothing more of their toilet than clothing; but after they pass through the fatal portal of the thirties, they look for weapons, seductions, embellishments among their chiffons; out of these they compose charms, they find means, they take a style, they seize youth, they study the slightest accessory,—in a word, they pass from nature to art.
Madame de Rochefide had just come through the vicissitudes of a drama which, in this history of the manners and morals of France in the nineteenth century may be called that of the Deserted Woman. Deserted by Conti, she became, naturally, a great artist in dress, in coquetry, in artificial flowers of all kinds.
“Why is Conti not here?” inquired Calyste in a low voice of Canalis, after going through the commonplace civilities with which even the most solemn interviews begin when they take place publicly.
The former great poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, twice a cabinet minister, and now for the fourth time an orator in the Chamber, and aspiring to another ministry, laid a warning finger significantly on his lip. That gesture explained everything.
“I am happy to see you,” said Beatrix, demurely. “I said to myself when I recognized you just now, before you saw me, that you at least would not disown me. Ah! my Calyste,” she added in a whisper, “why did you marry?—and with such a little fool!”
As soon as a woman whispers in the ear of a new-comer and makes him sit beside her, men of the world find an immediate excuse for leaving the pair alone together.
“Come, Nathan,” said Canalis, “Madame la marquise will, I am sure, allow me to go and say a word to d’Arthez, whom I see over there with the Princesse de Cadignan; it relates to some business in the Chamber to-morrow.”
This well-bred departure gave Calyste time to recover from the shock he had just received; but he nearly lost both his strength and his senses once more, as he inhaled the perfume, to him entrancing though venomous, of the poem composed by Beatrix. Madame de Rochefide, now become bony and gaunt, her complexion faded and almost discolored, her eyes hollow with deep circles, had that evening brightened those premature ruins by the cleverest contrivances of the article Paris. She had taken it into her head, like other deserted women, to assume a virgin air, and recall by clouds of white material the maidens of Ossian, so poetically painted by Girodet. Her fair hair draped her elongated face with a mass of curls, among which rippled the rays of the foot-lights attracted by the shining of a perfumed oil. Her white brow sparkled. She had applied an imperceptible tinge of rouge to her cheeks, upon the faded whiteness of a skin revived by bran and water. A scarf so delicate in texture that it made one doubt if human fingers could have fabricated such gossamer, was wound about her throat to diminish its length, and partly conceal it; leaving imperfectly visible the treasures of the bust which were cleverly enclosed in a corset. Her figure was indeed a masterpiece of composition.
As for her pose, one word will suffice—it was worthy of the pains she had taken to arrange it. Her arms, now thin and hard, were scarcely visible within the puffings of her very large sleeves. She presented that mixture of false glitter and brilliant fabrics, of silken gauze and craped hair, of vivacity, calmness, and motion which goes by the term of the Je ne sais quoi. Everybody knows in what that consists, namely: great cleverness, some taste, and a certain composure of manner. Beatrix might now be called a decorative scenic effect, changed at will, and wonderfully manipulated. The presentation of this fairy effect, to which is added clever dialogue, turns the heads of men who are endowed by nature with frankness, until they become possessed, through the law of contrasts, by a frantic desire to play with artifice. It is false, though enticing; a pretence, but agreeable; and certain men adore women who play at seduction as others do at cards. And this is why: The desire of the man is a syllogism which draws conclusions from this external science as to the secret promises of pleasure. The inner consciousness says, without words: “A woman who can, as it were, create herself beautiful must have many other resources for love.” And that is true. Deserted women are usually those who merely love; those who retain love know the art of loving. Now, though her Italian lesson had very cruelly maltreated the self-love and vanity of Madame de Rochefide, her nature was too instinctively artificial not to profit by it.
“It is not a question of loving a man,” she was saying a few moments before Calyste had entered her box; “we must tease and harass him if we want to keep him. That’s the secret of all those women who seek to retain you men. The dragons who guard treasures are always armed with claws and wings.”
“I shall make a sonnet on that thought,” replied Canalis at the very moment when Calyste entered the box.
With a single glance Beatrix divined the state of Calyste’s heart; she saw the marks of the collar she had put upon him at Les Touches, still fresh and red. Calyste, however, wounded by the speech made to him about his wife, hesitated between his dignity as a husband, Sabine’s defence, and a harsh word cast upon a heart which held such memories for him, a heart which he believed to be bleeding. The marquise observed his hesitation; she had made that speech expressly that she might know how far her empire over Calyste still extended. Seeing his weakness, she came at once to his succor to relieve his embarrassment.
“Well, dear friend, you find me alone,” she said, as soon as the two gentlemen had left the box,—“yes, alone in the world!”
“You forget me!” said Calyste.
“You!” she replied, “but you are married. That was one of my griefs, among the many I have endured since I saw you last. Not only—I said to myself—do I lose love, but I have lost a friendship which I thought was Breton. Alas! we can make ourselves bear everything. Now I suffer less, but I am broken, exhausted! This is the first outpouring of my heart for a long, long time. Obliged to seem proud before indifferent persons, and arrogant as if I had never fallen in presence of those who pay court to me, and having lost my dear Felicite, there was no ear into which I could cast the words, I suffer! But to you I can tell the anguish I endured on seeing you just now so near to me. Yes,” she said, replying to a gesture of Calyste’s, “it is almost fidelity. That is how it is with misery; a look, a visit, a mere nothing is everything to us. Ah! you once loved me—you—as I deserved to be loved by him who has taken pleasure in trampling under foot the treasures I poured out upon him. And yet, to my sorrow, I cannot forget; I love, and I desire to be faithful to a past that can never return.”
Having uttered this tirade, improvised for the hundredth time, she played the pupils of her eyes in a way to double the effect of her words, which seemed to be dragged from the depths of her soul by the violence of a torrent long restrained. Calyste, incapable of speech, let fall the tears that gathered in his eyes. Beatrix caught his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.
“Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend responds to the grief of his friend. We understand each other. No, don’t add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen together,—innocently enough, before a thousand people! There, you see I am strong; adieu—”
She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman’s rhetoric, an antithesis of action.
“Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who amuse me,” she went on. “I live among artists, writers, in short the world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille—who may indeed have acted wisely. To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, ‘I am too old for him!’ that is ending like the martyrs,—and the best end too, if one cannot die a virgin.”
She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had made upon her former adorer.
“But,” said Calyste, “where can I go to see you?”
“I am hidden in the rue de Chartres opposite the Parc de Monceaux, in a little house suitable to my means; and there I cram my head with literature—but only for myself, to distract my thoughts; God keep me from the mania of literary women! Now go, leave me; I must not allow the world to talk of me; what will it not say on seeing us together! Adieu—oh! Calyste, my friend, if you stay another minute I shall burst into tears!”
Calyste withdrew, after holding out his hand to Beatrix and feeling for the second time that strange and deep sensation of a double pressure—full of seductive tingling.
“Sabine never knew how to stir my soul in that way,” was the thought that assailed him in the corridor.
During the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not cast three straight glances at Calyste, but there were many sidelong looks which tore of the soul of the man now wholly thrown back into his first, repulsed love.
When the baron du Guenic reached home the splendor of his apartments made him think of the sort of mediocrity of which Beatrix had spoken, and he hated his wealth because it could not belong to that fallen angel. When he was told that Sabine had long been in bed he rejoiced to find himself rich in the possession of a night in which to live over his emotions. He cursed the power of divination which love had bestowed upon Sabine. When by chance a man is adored by his wife, she reads on his face as in a book; she learns every quiver of its muscles, she knows whence comes its calmness, she asks herself the reason of the slightest sadness, seeking to know if haply the cause is in herself; she studies the eyes; for her the eyes are tinted with the dominant thought,—they love or they do not love. Calyste knew himself to be the object of so deep, so naive, so jealous a worship that he doubted his power to compose a cautious face that should not betray the change in his moral being.
“How shall I manage to-morrow morning?” he said to himself as he went to sleep, dreading the sort of inspection to which Sabine would have recourse. When they came together at night, and sometimes during the day, Sabine would ask him, “Do you still love me?” or, “I don’t weary you, do I?” Charming interrogations, varied according to the nature or the cleverness of women, which hide their anxieties either feigned or real.
To the surface of the noblest and purest hearts the mud and slime cast up by hurricanes must come. So on that morrow morning, Calyste, who certainly loved his child, quivered with joy on learning that Sabine feared the croup, and was watching for the cause of slight convulsions, not daring to leave her little boy. The baron made a pretext of business and went out, thus avoiding the home breakfast. He escaped as prisoners escape, happy in being afoot, and free to go by the Pont Louis XVI. and the Champs Elysees to a cafe on the boulevard where he had liked to breakfast when he was a bachelor.
What is there in love? Does Nature rebel against the social yoke? Does she need that impulse of her given life to be spontaneous, free, the dash of an impetuous torrent foaming against rocks of opposition and of coquetry, rather than a tranquil stream flowing between the two banks of the church and the legal ceremony? Has she her own designs as she secretly prepares those volcanic eruptions to which, perhaps, we owe great men?
It would be difficult to find a young man more sacredly brought up than Calyste, of purer morals, less stained by irreligion; and yet he bounded toward a woman unworthy of him, when a benign and radiant chance had given him for his wife a young creature whose beauty was truly aristocratic, whose mind was keen and delicate, a pious, loving girl, attached singly to him, of angelic sweetness, and made more tender still by love, a love that was passionate in spite of marriage, like his for Beatrix. Perhaps the noblest men retain some clay in their constitutions; the slough still pleases them. If this be so, the least imperfect human being is the woman, in spite of her faults and her want of reason. Madame de Rochefide, it must be said, amid the circle of poetic pretensions which surrounded her, and in spite of her fall, belonged to the highest nobility; she presented a nature more ethereal than slimy, and hid the courtesan she was meant to be beneath an aristocratic exterior. Therefore the above explanation does not fully account for Calyste’s strange passion.
Perhaps we ought to look for its cause in a vanity so deeply buried in the soul that moralists have not yet uncovered that side of vice. There are men, truly noble, like Calyste, handsome as Calyste, rich, distinguished, and well-bred, who tire—without their knowledge, possibly—of marriage with a nature like their own; beings whose own nobleness is not surprised or moved by nobleness in others; whom grandeur and delicacy consonant with their own does not affect; but who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own superiority—if indeed they do not openly beg for praise. Calyste found nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers thus stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix. If great men have played before our eyes the Saviour’s part toward the woman taken in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their generation than they?
Calyste reached the hour of two o’clock living on one sentence only, “I shall see her again!”—a poem which has often paid the costs of a journey of two thousand miles. He now went with a light step to the rue de Chartres, and recognized the house at once although he had never before seen it. Once there, he stood—he, the son-in-law of the Duc de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbons—at the foot of the staircase, stopped short by the interrogation of the old footman: “Monsieur’s name?” Calyste felt that he ought to leave to Beatrix her freedom of action in receiving or not receiving him; and he waited, looking into the garden, with its walls furrowed by those black and yellow lines produced by rain upon the stucco of Paris.
Madame de Rochefide, like nearly all great ladies who break their chain, had left her fortune to her husband when she fled from him; she could not beg from her tyrant. Conti and Mademoiselle des Touches had spared Beatrix all the petty worries of material life, and her mother had frequently send her considerable sums of money. Finding herself now on her own resources, she was forced to an economy that was rather severe for a woman accustomed to every luxury. She had therefore gone to the summit of the hill on which lies the Parc de Monceaux, and there she had taken refuge in a “little house” formerly belonging to a great seigneur, standing on the street, but possessed of a charming garden, the rent of which did not exceed eighteen hundred francs. Still served by an old footman, a maid, and a cook from Alencon, who were faithful to her throughout her vicissitudes, her penury, as she thought it, would have been opulence to many an ambitious bourgeoise.
Calyste went up a staircase the steps of which were well pumiced and the landings filled with flowering plants. On the first floor the old servant opened, in order to admit the baron into the apartment, a double door of red velvet with lozenges of red silk studded with gilt nails. Silk and velvet furnished the rooms through which Calyste passed. Carpets in grave colors, curtains crossing each other before the windows, portieres, in short all things within contrasted with the mean external appearance of the house, which was ill-kept by the proprietor. Calyste awaited Beatrix in a salon of sober character, where all the luxury was simple in style. This room, hung with garnet velvet heightened here and there with dead-gold silken trimmings, the floor covered with a dark red carpet, the windows resembling conservatories, with abundant flowers in the jardinieres, was lighted so faintly that Calyste could scarcely see on a mantel-shelf two cases of old celadon, between which gleamed a silver cup attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and brought from Italy by Beatrix. The furniture of gilded wood with velvet coverings, the magnificent consoles, on one of which was a curious clock, the table with its Persian cloth, all bore testimony to former opulence, the remains of which had been well applied. On a little table Calyste saw jewelled knick-knacks, a book in course of reading, in which glittered the handle of a dagger used as a paper-cutter—symbol of criticism! Finally, on the walls, ten water-colors richly framed, each representing one of the diverse bedrooms in which Madame de Rochefide’s wandering life had led her to sojourn, gave the measure of what was surely superior impertinence.
The rustle of a silk dress announced the poor unfortunate, who appeared in a studied toilet which would certainly have told a roue that his coming was awaited. The gown, made like a wrapper to show the line of a white bosom, was of pearl-gray moire with large open sleeves, from which issued the arms covered with a second sleeve of puffed tulle, divided by straps and trimmed with lace at the wrists. The beautiful hair, which the comb held insecurely, escaped from a cap of lace and flowers.
“Already!” she said, smiling. “A lover could not have shown more eagerness. You must have secrets to tell me, have you not?”
And she posed herself gracefully on a sofa, inviting Calyste by a gesture to sit beside her. By chance (a selected chance, possibly, for women have two memories, that of angels and that of devils) Beatrix was redolent of the perfume which she used at Les Touches during her first acquaintance with Calyste. The inhaling of this scent, contact with that dress, the glance of those eyes, which in the semi-darkness gathered the light and returned it, turned Calyste’s brain. The luckless man was again impelled to that violence which had once before almost cost Beatrix her life; but this time the marquise was on the edge of a sofa, not on that of a rock; she rose to ring the bell, laying a finger on his lips. Calyste, recalled to order, controlled himself, all the more because he saw that Beatrix had no inimical intention.
“Antoine, I am not at home—for every one,” she said. “Put some wood on the fire. You see, Calyste, that I treat you as a friend,” she continued with dignity, when the old man had left the room; “therefore do not treat me as you would a mistress. I have two remarks to make to you. In the first place, I should not deny myself foolishly to any man I really loved; and secondly, I am determined to belong to no other man on earth, for I believed, Calyste, that I was loved by a species of Rizzio, whom no engagement trammelled, a man absolutely free, and you see to what that fatal confidence has led me. As for you, you are now under the yoke of the most sacred of duties; you have a young, amiable, delightful wife; moreover, you are a father. I should be, as you are, without excuse—we should be two fools—”
“My dear Beatrix, all these reasons vanish before a single word—I have never loved but you on earth, and I was married against my will.”
“Ah! a trick played upon us by Mademoiselle des Touches,” she said, smiling.
Three hours passed, during which Madame de Rochefide held Calyste to the consideration of conjugal faith, pointing out to him the horrible alternative of an utter renunciation of Sabine. Nothing else could reassure her, she said, in the dreadful situation to which Calyste’s love would reduce her. Then she affected to regard the sacrifice of Sabine as a small matter, she knew her so well!
“My dear child,” she said, “that’s a woman who fulfils all the promises of her girlhood. She is a Grandlieu, to be sure, but she’s as brown as her mother the Portuguese, not to say yellow, and as dry and stiff as her father. To tell the truth, your wife will never go wrong; she’s a big boy who can take care of herself. Poor Calyste! is that the sort of woman you needed? She has fine eyes, but such eyes are very common in Italy and in Spain and Portugal. Can any woman be tender with bones like hers. Eve was fair; brown women descend from Adam, blondes come from the hand of God, which left upon Eve his last thought after he had created her.”
About six o’clock Calyste, driven to desperation, took his hat to depart.
“Yes, go, my poor friend,” she said; “don’t give her the annoyance of dining without you.”
Calyste stayed. At his age it was so easy to snare him on his worst side.
“What! you dare to dine with me?” said Beatrix, playing a provocative amazement. “My poor food does not alarm you? Have you enough independence of soul to crown me with joy by this little proof of your affection?”
“Let me write a note to Sabine; otherwise she will wait dinner for me till nine o’clock.”