XIX THE FIRST LIE OF A PIOUS DUCHESS

Calyste returned to his own house about two in the morning. After

waiting for him till half-past twelve, Sabine had gone to bed

overwhelmed with fatigue. She slept, although she was keenly

distressed by the laconic wording of her husband's note. Still, she

explained it. The true love of a woman invariably begins by explaining

all things to the advantage of the man beloved. Calyste was pressed

for time, she said.

The next morning the child was better; the mother's uneasiness

subsided, and Sabine came with a smiling face, and little Calyste on

her arm, to present him to his father before breakfast with the pretty

fooleries and senseless words which gay young mothers do and say. This

little scene gave Calyste the chance to maintain a countenance. He was

charming to his wife, thinking in his heart that he was a monster, and

he played like a child with Monsieur le chevalier; in fact he played

too well,he overdid the part; but Sabine had not reached the stage

at which a woman recognizes so delicate a distinction.

At breakfast, however, she asked him suddenly:

"What did you do yesterday?"

"Portenduere kept me to dinner," he replied, "and after that we went

to the club to play whist."

"That's a foolish life, my Calyste," said Sabine. "Young noblemen in

these days ought to busy themselves about recovering in the eyes of

the country the ground lost by their fathers. It isn't by smoking

cigars, playing whist, idling away their leisure, and saying insolent

things of parvenus who have driven them from their positions, not yet

by separating themselves from the masses whose soul and intellect and

providence they ought to be, that the nobility will exist. Instead of

being a party, you will soon be a mere opinion, as de Marsay said. Ah!

if you only knew how my ideas on this subject have enlarged since I

have nursed and cradled your child! I'd like to see that grand old

name of Guenic become once more historical!" Then suddenly plunging

her eyes into those of Calyste, who was listening to her with a

pensive air, she added: "Admit that the first note you ever wrote me

was rather stiff."

"I did not think of sending you word till I got to the club."

"But you wrote on a woman's note-paper; it had a perfume of feminine

elegance."

"Those club directors are such dandies!"

The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle

Mirouet, had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so

intimate that they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments.

The two young women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this

friendship by the delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and

confidences apropos of their first infants.

While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, "I must

warn Savinien," Sabine was thinking, "I am sure that paper bore a

coronet." This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and

Sabine scolded herself for having made it. Nevertheless, she resolved

to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night

before she had flung into her letter-box.

After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should

soon return. Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages

with one horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient

cabriolet of our ancestors. He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte's

house and begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of

fibbing in case Sabine should question the vicomtesse. Thence Calyste,

urging his coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order

to know how Beatrix had passed the rest of the night. He found that

unfortunate just from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting

with a very good appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel

ate her boiled eggs, and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold

service, a present from a monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed

a few ballads on /ideas/ of the lord, who afterwards published them as

his own!

Calyste listened entranced to the witty speeches of his idol, whose

great object was to amuse him, until she grew angry and wept when he

rose to leave her. He thought he had been there only half an hour, but

it was past three before he reached home. His handsome English horse,

a present from the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, was so bathed in sweat

that it looked as though it had been driven through the sea. By one of

those chances which all jealous women prepare for themselves, Sabine

was at a window which looked on the court-yard, impatient at Calyste's

non-return, uneasy without knowing why. The condition of the horse

with its foaming mouth surprised her.

"Where can he have come from?"

The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not

exactly consciousness, nor devil, nor angel; which sees, forebodes,

shows us the unseen, and creates belief in mental beings, creatures

born of our brains, going and coming and living in the world invisible

of ideas.

"Where do you come from, dear angel?" Sabine said to Calyste, meeting

him on the first landing of the staircase. "Abd-el-Kader is nearly

foundered. You told me you would be gone but a moment, and I have been

waiting for you these three hours."

"Well, well," thought Calyste, who was making progress in

dissimulation, "I must get out of it by a presentDear little

mother," he said aloud, taking her round the waist with more cajolery

than he would have used if he had not been conscious of guilt, "I see

that it is quite impossible to keep a secret, however innocent, from

the woman who loves us"

"Well, don't tell secrets on the staircase," she said, laughing. "Come

in."

In the middle of a salon which adjoined their bedroom, she caught

sight in a mirror of Calyste's face, on which, not aware that it could

be seen, he allowed his real feelings and his weariness to appear.

"Now for your secret?" she said, turning round.

"You have shown such heroism as a nurse," he said, "that the heir

presumptive of the Guenics is dearer to me than ever, and I wanted to

give you a surprise, precisely like any bourgeois of the rue Saint

Denis. They are finishing for you at this moment a dressing-table at

which true artists have worked, and my mother and aunt Zephirine have

contributed."

Sabine clasped him in her arms, and held him tightly to her breast

with her head on his neck, faint with the weight of happiness, not for

the piece of furniture, but for the dispersion of her first dark

doubt. It was one of those magnificent transports which can be

counted, and which no love, however excessive, can prodigally spend,

or life would be too soon burned out. Then, indeed, men should fall at

the feet of women to adore them, for such moments are sublime, moments

when the forces of the heart and intellect gush forth like the waters

of sculptured nymphs from their inclining urns. Sabine burst into

tears.

Suddenly as if bitten by a viper, she left Calyste, threw herself on a

sofa and fainted away, for the reaction of a chill to her glowing

heart came near to killing her. As she held Calyste in her arms, her

nose at his cravat, abandoned to her joy, she smelt the perfume of

that letter paper! Another woman's head had lain there, whose hair and

face had left that adulterous odor! She had just kissed the spot where

the kisses of her rival were still warm.

"What is the matter?" asked Calyste, after he had brought Sabine back

to consciousness by passing a damp cloth over her face and making her

smell salts.

"Fetch the doctor and my nurse, both! Yes, my milk has turned, I feel

it. They won't come at once unless you fetch them yourselfgo!"

Calyste, alarmed, rushed out. The moment Sabine heard the closing of

the porte-cochere she started up like a frightened doe, and walked

about the salon as if beside herself, crying out, "My God! my God! my

God!"

Those two words took the place of all ideas. The crisis she had seized

upon as a pretext in reality took place. The hairs of her head were

like so many red-hot needles heated in the fire of a nervous fever.

Her boiling blood seemed to her to mingle with her nerves and yet try

to issue from all her pores. She was blind for a few moments, and

cried aloud, "I am dying!"

At that terrible cry of the injured wife and mother her maid ran in.

After she was laid upon her bed and recovered both sight and mind, the

first act of her intelligence was to send the maid to her friend,

Madame de Portenduere. Sabine felt that her ideas were whirling in her

brain like straws at the will of a waterspout. "I saw," she said

later, "myriads all at once."

She rang for the footman and in the transport of her fever she found

strength to write the following letter, for she was mastered by one

mad desireto have certainty:

To Madame la Baronne du Guenic:

Dear Mamma,When you come to Paris, as you allow us to hope you

will, I shall thank you in person for the beautiful present by

which you and my aunt Zephirine and Calyste wish to reward me for

doing my duty. I was already well repaid by my own happiness in

doing it. I can never express the pleasure you have given me in

that beautiful dressing-table, but when you are with me I shall

try to do so. Believe me, when I array myself before that

treasure, I shall think, like the Roman matron, that my noblest

jewel is our little angel, etc.

She directed the letter to Guerande and gave it to the footman to

post.

When the Vicomtesse de Portenduere came, the shuddering chill of

reaction had succeeded in poor Sabine this first paroxysm of madness.

"Ursula, I think I am going to die," she said.

"What is the matter, dear?"

"Where did Savinien and Calyste go after they dined with you

yesterday?"

"Dined with me?" said Ursula, to whom her husband had said nothing,

not expecting such immediate inquiry. "Savinien and I dined alone

together and went to the Opera without Calyste."

"Ursula, dearest, in the name of your love for Savinien, keep silence

about what you have just said to me and what I shall now tell you. You

alone shall know why I dieI am betrayed! at the end of three years,

at twenty-two years of age!"

Her teeth chattered, her eyes were dull and frozen, her face had taken

on the greenish tinge of an old Venetian mirror.

"You! so beautiful! For whom?"

"I don't know yet. But Calyste has told me two lies. Do not pity me,

do not seem incensed, pretend ignorance and perhaps you can find out

who /she/ is through Savinien. Oh! that letter of yesterday!"

Trembling, shaking, she sprang from her bed to a piece of furniture

from which she took the letter.

"See," she said, lying down again, "the coronet of a marquise! Find

out if Madame de Rochefide has returned to Paris. Am I to have a heart

in which to weep and moan? Oh, dearest!to see one's beliefs, one's

poesy, idol, virtue, happiness, all, all in pieces, withered, lost! No

God in the sky! no love upon earth! no life in my heart! no anything!

I don't know if there's daylight; I doubt the sun. I've such anguish

in my soul I scarcely feel the horrible sufferings in my body.

Happily, the baby is weaned; my milk would have poisoned him."

At that idea the tears began to flow from Sabine's eyes which had

hitherto been dry.

Pretty Madame de Portenduere, holding in her hand the fatal letter,

the perfume of which Sabine again inhaled, was at first stupefied by

this true sorrow, shocked by this agony of love, without as yet

understanding it, in spite of Sabine's incoherent attempts to relate

the facts. Suddenly Ursula was illuminated by one of those ideas which

come to none but sincere friends.

"I must save her!" she thought to herself. "Trust me, Sabine," she

cried. "Wait for my return; I will find out the truth."

"Ah! in my grave I'll love you," exclaimed Sabine.

The viscountess went straight to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, pledged

her to secrecy, and then explained to her fully her daughter's

situation.

"Madame," she said as she ended, "do you not think with me, that in

order to avoid some fatal illnessperhaps, I don't know, even madness

we had better confide the whole truth to the doctor, and invent some

tale to clear that hateful Calyste and make him seem for the time

being innocent?"

"My dear child," said the duchess, who was chilled to the heart by

this confidence, "friendship has given you for the moment the

experience of a woman of my age. I know how Sabine loves her husband;

you are right, she might become insane."

"Or lose her beauty, which would be worse," said the viscountess.

"Let us go to her!" cried the duchess.

Fortunately they arrived a few moments before the famous /accoucheur/,

Dommanget, the only one of the two men of science whom Calyste had

been able to find.

"Ursula has told me everything," said the duchess to her daughter,

"and you are mistaken. In the first place, Madame de Rochefide is not

in Paris. As for what your husband did yesterday, my dear, I can tell

you that he lost a great deal of money at cards, so that he does not

even know how to pay for your dressing-table."

"But /that?/" said Sabine, holding out to her mother the fatal letter.

"That!" said the duchess, laughing; "why, that is written on the

Jockey Club paper; everybody writes nowadays on coroneted paper; even

our stewards will soon be titled."

The prudent mother threw the unlucky paper into the fire as she spoke.

When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the duchess, who had given

instructions to the servants, was at once informed. She left Sabine to

the care of Madame de Portenduere and stopped the /accoucheur/ and

Calyste in the salon.

"Sabine's life is at stake, monsieur," she said to Calyste; "you have

betrayed her for Madame de Rochefide."

Calyste blushed, like a girl still respectable, detected in a fault.

"And," continued the duchess, "as you do not know how to deceive, you

have behaved in such a clumsy manner that Sabine has guessed the

truth. But I have for the present repaired your blunder. You do not

wish the death of my daughter, I am sureAll this, Monsieur

Dommanget, will put you on the track of her real illness and its

cause. As for you, Calyste, an old woman like me understands your

error, though she does not pardon it. Such pardons can only be brought

by a lifetime of after happiness. If you wish me to esteem you, you

must, in the first place, save my daughter; next, you must forget

Madame de Rochefide; she is only worth having once. Learn to lie; have

the courage of a criminal, and his impudence. I have just told a lie

myself, and I shall have to do hard penance for that mortal sin."

She then told the two men the lies she had invented. The clever

physician sitting at the bedside of his patient studied in her

symptoms the means of repairing the ill, while he ordered measures the

success of which depended on great rapidity of execution. Calyste

sitting at the foot of the bed strove to put into his glance an

expression of tenderness.

"So it was play which put those black circles round your eyes?" Sabine

said to him in a feeble voice.

The words made the doctor, the mother, and the viscountess tremble,

and they all three looked at one another covertly. Calyste turned as

red as a cherry.

"That's what comes of nursing a child," said Dommanget brutally, but

cleverly. "Husbands are lonely when separated from their wives, and

they go to the club and play. But you needn't worry over the thirty

thousand francs which Monsieur le baron lost last night"

"Thirty thousand francs!" cried Ursula, in a silly tone.

"Yes, I know it," replied Dommanget. "They told me this morning at the

house of the young Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was

Monsieur de Trailles who won that money from you," he added, turning

to Calyste. "Why do you play with such men? Frankly, monsieur le

baron, I can well believe you are ashamed of it."

Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious duchess, the young viscountess, a

happy woman, and the old /accoucheur/, a confirmed egotist, all three

lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste

understood the greatness of the danger, and two heavy tears rolled

from his eyes and completely deceived Sabine.

"Monsieur," she said, sitting up in bed and looking angrily at

Dommanget, "Monsieur du Guenic can lose thirty, fifty, a hundred

thousand francs if it pleases him, without any one having a right to

think it wrong or read him a lesson. It is far better that Monsieur de

Trailles should win his money than that we should win Monsieur de

Trailles'."

Calyste rose, took his wife round the neck, kissed her on both cheeks

and whispered:

"Sabine, you are an angel!"

Two days later the young wife was thought to be out of danger, and the

next day Calyste was at Madame de Rochefide's making a merit of his

infamy.

"Beatrix," he said, "you owe me happiness. I have sacrificed my poor

little wife to you; she has discovered all. That fatal paper on which

you made me write, bore your name and your coronet, which I never

noticedI saw but you! Fortunately the 'B' was by chance effaced. But

the perfume you left upon me and the lies in which I involved myself

like a fool have betrayed my happiness. Sabine nearly died of it; her

milk went to the head; erysipelas set in, and possibly she may bear

the marks for the rest of her days."

As Beatrix listened to this tirade her face was due North, icy enough

to freeze the Seine had she looked at it.

"So much the better," she said; "perhaps it will whiten her for you."

And Beatrix, now become as hard as her bones, sharp as her voice,

harsh as her complexion, continued a series of atrocious sarcasms in

the same tone. There is no greater blunder than for a man to talk of

his wife, if she is virtuous, to his mistress, unless it be to talk of

his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife. But Calyste had not

received that species of Parisian education which we must call the

politeness of the passions. He knew neither how to lie to his wife,

nor how to tell his mistress the truth,two apprenticeships a man in

his position must make in order to manage women. He was therefore

compelled to employ all the power of passion to obtain from Beatrix a

pardon which she forced him to solicit for two hours; a pardon refused

by an injured angel who raised her eyes to the ceiling that she might

not see the guilty man, and who put forth reasons sacred to marquises

in a voice quivering with tears which were furtively wiped with the

lace of her handkerchief.

"To speak to me of your wife on the very day after my fall!" she

cried. "Why did you not tell me she is a pearl of virtue? I know she

thinks you handsome; pure depravity! I, I love your soul! for let me

tell you, my friend, you are ugly compared to many shepherds on the

Campagna of Rome," etc., etc.

Such speeches may surprise the reader, but they were part of a system

profoundly meditated by Beatrix in this her third incarnation,for at

each passion a woman becomes another being and advances one step more

into profligacy, the only word which properly renders the effect of

the experience given by such adventures. Now, the Marquise de

Rochefide had sat in judgment on herself before the mirror. Clever

women are never deceived about themselves; they count their wrinkles,

they assist at the birth of their crow's-feet, they know themselves by

heart, and even own it by the greatness of their efforts at

preservation. Therefore to struggle successfully against a splendid

young woman, to carry away from her six triumphs a week, Beatrix had

recourse to the knowledge and the science of courtesans. Without

acknowledging to herself the baseness of this plan, led away to the

employment of such means by a Turkish passion for Calyste's beauty,

she had resolved to make him think himself unpleasant, ugly, ill-made,

and to behave as if she hated him. No system is more fruitful with men

of a conquering nature. To such natures the presence of repugnance to

be vanquished is the renewal of the triumph of the first day on all

succeeding days. And it is something even better. It is flattery in

the guise of dislike. A man then says to himself, "I am irresistible,"

or "My love is all-powerful because it conquers her repugnance." If

you deny this principle, divined by all coquettes and courtesans

throughout all social zones, you may as well reject all seekers after

knowledge, all delvers into secrets, repulsed through years in their

duel with hidden causes. Beatrix added to the use of contempt as a

moral piston, a constant comparison of her own poetic, comfortable

home with the hotel du Guenic. All deserted wives who abandon

themselves in despair, neglect also their surroundings, so discouraged

are they. On this, Madame de Rochefide counted, and presently began an

underhand attack on the luxury of the faubourg Saint-Germain, which

she characterized as stupid.

The scene of reconciliation, in which Beatrix made Calyste swear and

reswear hatred to the wife, who, she said, was playing comedy, took

place in a perfect bower where she played off her graces amid

ravishing flowers, and rare plants of the costliest luxury. The

science of nothings, the trifles of the day, she carried to excess.

Fallen into a mortifying position through Conti's desertion, Beatrix

was determined to have, at any rate, the fame which unprincipled

conduct gives. The misfortune of the poor young wife, a rich and

beautiful Grandlieu, should be her pedestal.