XX

"What is the meaning of this illumination?" asked Theodore in glad

tones, as he came into her room.

Augustine skilfully seized the auspicious moment; she threw herself

into her husband's arms, and pointed to the portrait. The artist stood

rigid as a rock, and his eyes turned alternately on Augustine, on the

accusing dress. The frightened wife, half-dead, as she watched her

husband's changeful brow--that terrible brow--saw the expressive

furrows gathering like clouds; then she felt her blood curdling in her

veins when, with a glaring look, and in a deep hollow voice, he began

to question her:

"Where did you find that picture?"

"The Duchess de Carigliano returned it to me."

"You asked her for it?"

"I did not know that she had it."

The gentleness, or rather the exquisite sweetness of this angel's

voice, might have touched a cannibal, but not an artist in the

clutches of wounded vanity.

"It is worthy of her!" exclaimed the painter in a voice of thunder. "I

will be avenged!" he cried, striding up and down the room. "She shall

die of shame; I will paint her! Yes, I will paint her as Messalina

stealing out at night from the palace of Claudius."

"Theodore!" said a faint voice.

"I will kill her!"

"My dear----"

"She is in love with that little cavalry colonel, because he rides

well----"

"Theodore!"

"Let me be!" said the painter in a tone almost like a roar.

It would be odious to describe the whole scene. In the end the frenzy

of passion prompted the artist to acts and words which any woman not

so young as Augustine would have ascribed to madness.

At eight o'clock next morning Madame Guillaume, surprising her

daughter, found her pale, with red eyes, her hair in disorder, holding

a handkerchief soaked with tears, while she gazed at the floor strewn

with the torn fragments of a dress and the broken fragments of a large

gilt picture-frame. Augustine, almost senseless with grief, pointed to

the wreck with a gesture of deep despair.

"I don't know that the loss is very great!" cried the old mistress of

the Cat and Racket. "It was like you, no doubt; but I am told that

there is a man on the boulevard who paints lovely portraits for fifty

crowns."

"Oh, mother!"

"Poor child, you are quite right," replied Madame Guillaume, who

misinterpreted the expression of her daughter's glance at her. "True,

my child, no one ever can love you as fondly as a mother. My darling,

I guess it all; but confide your sorrows to me, and I will comfort

you. Did I not tell you long ago that the man was mad! Your maid has

told me pretty stories. Why, he must be a perfect monster!"

Augustine laid a finger on her white lips, as if to implore a moment's

silence. During this dreadful night misery had led her to that patient

resignation which in mothers and loving wives transcends in its

effects all human energy, and perhaps reveals in the heart of women

the existence of certain chords which God has withheld from men.

An inscription engraved on a broken column in the cemetery at

Montmartre states that Madame de Sommervieux died at the age of

twenty-seven. In the simple words of this epitaph one of the timid

creature's friends can read the last scene of a tragedy. Every year,

on the second of November, the solemn day of the dead, he never passes

this youthful monument without wondering whether it does not need a

stronger woman than Augustine to endure the violent embrace of genius?

"The humble and modest flowers that bloom in the valley," he reflects,

"perish perhaps when they are transplanted too near the skies, to the

region where storms gather and the sun is scorching."