XVIII THE END OF A HONEY-MOON

Guerande, July, 1838.

To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu:

Ah, my dear mamma! at the end of three months to know what it is

to be jealous! My heart completes its experience; I now feel the

deepest hatred and the deepest love! I am more than betrayed,I

am not loved. How fortunate for me to have a mother, a heart on

which to cry out as I will!

It is enough to say to wives who are still half girls: "Here's a

key rusty with memories among those of your palace; go everywhere,

enjoy everything, but keep away from Les Touches!" to make us

eager to go there hot-foot, our eyes shining with the curiosity of

Eve. What a root of bitterness Mademoiselle des Touches planted in

my love! Why did she forbid me to go to Les Touches? What sort of

happiness is mine if it depends on an excursion, on a visit to a

paltry house in Brittany? Why should I fear? Is there anything to

fear? Add to this reasoning of Mrs. Blue-Beard the desire that

nips all women to know if their power is solid or precarious, and

you'll understand how it was that I said one day, with an

unconcerned little air:

"What sort of place is Les Touches?"

"Les Touches belongs to you," said my divine, dear mother-in-law.

"If Calyste had never set foot in Les Touches!"cried my aunt

Zephirine, shaking her head.

"He would not be my husband," I added.

"Then you know what happened there?" said my mother-in-law, slyly.

"It is a place of perdition!" exclaimed Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel.

"Mademoiselle des Touches committed many sins there, for which she

is now asking the pardon of God."

"But they saved the soul of that noble woman, and made the fortune

of a convent," cried the Chevalier du Halga. "The Abbe Grimont

told me she had given a hundred thousand francs to the nuns of the

Visitation."

"Should you like to go to Les Touches?" asked my mother-in-law.

"It is worth seeing."

"No, no!" I said hastily.

Doesn't this little scene read to you like a page out of some

diabolical drama?

It was repeated again and again under various pretexts. At last my

mother-in-law said to me: "I understand why you do not go to Les

Touches, and I think you are right."

Oh! you must admit, mamma, that an involuntary, unconscious stab

like that would have decided you to find out if your happiness

rested on such a frail foundation that it would perish at a mere

touch. To do Calyste justice, he never proposed to me to visit

that hermitage, now his property. But as soon as we love we are

creatures devoid of common-sense, and this silence, this reserve

piqued me; so I said to him one day: "What are you afraid of at

Les Touches, that you alone never speak of the place?"

"Let us go there," he replied.

So there I was /caught/,like other women who want to be caught,

and who trust to chance to cut the Gordian knot of their

indecision. So to Les Touches we went.

It is enchanting, in a style profoundly artistic. I took delight

in that place of horror where Mademoiselle des Touches had so

earnestly forbidden me to go. Poisonous flowers are all charming;

Satan sowed themfor the devil has flowers as well as God; we

have only to look within our souls to see the two shared in the

making of us. What delicious acrity in a situation where I played,

not with fire, butwith ashes! I studied Calyste; the point was

to know if that passion was thoroughly extinct. I watched, as you

may well believe, every wind that blew; I kept an eye upon his

face as he went from room to room and from one piece of furniture

to another, exactly like a child who is looking for some hidden

thing. Calyste seemed thoughtful, but at first I thought that I

had vanquished the past. I felt strong enough to mention Madame de

Rochefide-whom in my heart I called la Rocheperfide. At last we

went to see the famous bush were Beatrix was caught when he flung

her into the sea that she might never belong to another man.

"She must be light indeed to have stayed there," I said laughing.

Calyste kept silence, so I added, "We'll respect the dead."

Still Calyste was silent.

"Have I displeased you?" I asked.

"No; but cease to galvanize that passion," he answered.

What a speech! Calyste, when he saw me all cast down by it,

redoubled his care and tenderness.

August.

I was, alas! at the edge of a precipice, amusing myself, like the

innocent heroines of all melodramas, by gathering flowers.

Suddenly a horrible thought rode full tilt through my happiness,

like the horse in the German ballad. I thought I saw that

Calyste's love was increasing through his reminiscences; that he

was expending on /me/ the stormy emotions I revived by reminding

him of the coquetries of that hateful Beatrix,just think of it!

that cold, unhealthy nature, so persistent yet so flabby,

something between a mollusk and a bit of coral, dares to call

itself Beatrix, /Beatrice!/

Already, dearest mother, I am forced to keep one eye open to

suspicion, when my heart is all Calyste's; and isn't it a great

catastrophe when the eye gets the better of the heart, and

suspicion at last finds itself justified? It came to pass in this

way:

"This place is dear to me," I said to Calyste one morning,

"because I owe my happiness to it; and so I forgive you for taking

me sometimes for another woman."

The loyal Breton blushed, and I threw my arms around his neck. But

all the same I have left Les Touches, and never will I go back

there again.

The very strength of hatred which makes me long for Madame de

Rochefide's deathah, heavens! a natural death, pleurisy, or some

accidentmakes me also understand to its fullest extent the power

of my love for Calyste. That woman has appeared to me to trouble

my sleep,I see her in a dream; shall I ever encounter her

bodily? Ah! the postulant of the Visitation was right,Les

Touches is a fatal spot; Calyste has there recovered his past

emotions, and they are, I see it plainly, more powerful than the

joys of our love. Ascertain, my dear mamma, if Madame de Rochefide

is in Paris, for if she is, I shall stay in Brittany. Poor

Mademoiselle des Touches might well repent of her share in our

marriage if she knew to what extent I am taken for our odious

rival! But this is prostitution! I am not myself; I am ashamed of

it all. A frantic desire seizes me sometimes to fly from Guerande

and those sands of Croisic.

August 25th.

I am determined to go and live in the ruins of the old chateau.

Calyste, worried by my restlessness, agrees to take me. Either he

knows life so little that he guesses nothing, or he /does/ know

the cause of my flight, in which case he cannot love me. I tremble

so with fear lest I find the awful certainty I seek that, like a

child, I put my hands before my eyes not to hear the explosion

Oh, mother! I am not loved with the love that I feel in my heart.

Calyste is charming to me, that's true! but what man, unless he

were a monster, would not be, as Calyste is, amiable and gracious

when receiving all the flowers of the soul of a young girl of

twenty, brought up by you, pure, loving, and beautiful, as many

women have said to you that I am.

Guenic, September 18.

Has he forgotten her? That's the solitary thought which echoes

through my soul like a remorse. Ah! dear mamma, have all women to

struggle against memories as I do? None but innocent young men

should be married to pure young girls. But that's a deceptive

Utopia; better have one's rival in the past than in the future.

Ah! mother, pity me, though at this moment I am happy as a woman

who fears to lose her happiness and so clings fast to it,one way

of killing it, says that profoundly wise Clotilde.

I notice that for the last five months I think only of myself,

that is, of Calyste. Tell sister Clotilde that her melancholy bits

of wisdom often recur to me. She is happy in being faithful to the

dead; she fears no rival. A kiss to my dear Athenais, about whom I

see Juste is beside himself. From what you told me in your last

letter it is evident he fears you will not give her to him.

Cultivate that fear as a precious product. Athenais will be

sovereign lady; but I who fear lest I can never win Calyste back

from himself shall always be a servant.

A thousand tendernesses, dear mamma. Ah! if my terrors are not

delusions, Camille Maupin has sold me her fortune dearly. My

affectionate respects to papa.

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 sufficeit 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 onlyI said

to myselfdo 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 meyouas 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 Camillewho 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

literaturebut 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!

Adieuoh! 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

pressurefull 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 tirewithout their knowledge,

possiblyof 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

superiorityif 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 stoodhe, the son-in-law of the

Duc de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbonsat 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-cuttersymbol 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 homefor 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 excusewe should be two fools"

"My dear Beatrix, all these reasons vanish before a single wordI

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."

"Here," said Beatrix, "this is the table at which I write."

She lighted the candles herself, and took one to the table to look

over what he was writing.

"/My dear Sabine/"

"'My dear'?can you really say that your wife is still dear to you?"

she asked, looking at him with a cold eye that froze the very marrow

of his bones. "Go,you had better go and dine with her."

"/I dine at a restaurant with some friends./"

"A lie. Oh, fy! you are not worthy to be loved either by her or by me.

Men are all cowards in their treatment of women. Go, monsieur, go and

dine with your dear Sabine."

Calyste flung himself back in his arm-chair and became as pale as

death. Bretons possess a courage of nature which makes them obstinate

under difficulties. Presently the young baron sat up, put his elbow on

the table, his chin in his hand, and looked at the implacable Beatrix

with a flashing eye. He was so superb that a Northern or a Southern

woman would have fallen at his feet saying, "Take me!" But Beatrix,

born on the borders of Normandy and Brittany, belonged to the race of

Casterans; desertion had developed in her the ferocity of the Frank,

the spitefulness of the Norman; she wanted some terrible notoriety as

a vengeance, and she yielded to no weakness.

"Dictate what I ought to write," said the luckless man. "But, in that

case"

"Well, yes!" she said, "you shall love me then as you loved me at

Guerande. Write: /I dine out; do not expect me./"

"What next?" said Calyste, thinking something more would follow.

"Nothing; sign it. Good," she said, darting on the note with

restrained joy. "I will send it by a messenger."

"And now," cried Calyste, rising like a happy man.

"Ah! I have kept, I believe, my freedom of action," she said, turning

away from him and going to the fireplace, where she rang the bell.

"Here, Antoine," she said, when the old footman entered, "send this

note to its address. Monsieur dines here."