XIII

The fever of passion which possessed Theodore made a year fly over the

young couple without a single cloud to dim the blue sky under which

they lived. Life did not hang heavy on the lovers' hands. Theodore

lavished on every day inexhaustible /fioriture/ of enjoyment, and he

delighted to vary the transports of passion by the soft languor of

those hours of repose when souls soar so high that they seem to have

forgotten all bodily union. Augustine was too happy for reflection;

she floated on an undulating tide of rapture; she thought she could

not do enough by abandoning herself to sanctioned and sacred married

love; simple and artless, she had no coquetry, no reserves, none of

the dominion which a worldly-minded girl acquires over her husband by

ingenious caprice; she loved too well to calculate for the future, and

never imagined that so exquisite a life could come to an end. Happy in

being her husband's sole delight, she believed that her

inextinguishable love would always be her greatest grace in his eyes,

as her devotion and obedience would be a perennial charm. And, indeed,

the ecstasy of love had made her so brilliantly lovely that her beauty

filled her with pride, and gave her confidence that she could always

reign over a man so easy to kindle as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus

her position as a wife brought her no knowledge but the lessons of

love.

In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had

lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought of

acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she had

to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in them,

no doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement of

speech; but she used the language common to all women when they find

themselves plunged in passion, which seems to be their element. When,

by chance, Augustine expressed an idea that did not harmonize with

Theodore's, the young artist laughed, as we laugh at the first

mistakes of a foreigner, though they end by annoying us if they are

not corrected.

In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as

delightful as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for

resuming his work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their

first child. He saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts

of the year when a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time,

he worked, no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion

in the fashionable world. The house which he was best pleased to

frequent was that of the Duchesse de Carigliano, who had at last

attracted the celebrated artist to her parties. When Augustine was

quite well again, and her boy no longer required the assiduous care

which debars a mother from social pleasures, Theodore had come to the

stage of wishing to know the joys of satisfied vanity to be found in

society by a man who shows himself with a handsome woman, the object

of envy and admiration.

To figure in drawing-rooms with the reflected lustre of her husband's

fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to Augustine a new

harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of conjugal happiness.

She first wounded her husband's vanity when, in spite of vain efforts,

she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her language, and the

narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux's nature, subjugated for nearly

two years and a half by the first transports of love, now, in the calm

of less new possession, recovered its bent and habits, for a while

diverted from their channel. Poetry, painting, and the subtle joys of

imagination have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit. These

cravings of a powerful soul had not been starved in Theodore during

these two years; they had only found fresh pasture. As soon as the

meadows of love had been ransacked, and the artist had gathered roses

and cornflowers as the children do, so greedily that he did not see

that his hands could hold no more, the scene changed. When the painter

showed his wife the sketches for his finest compositions he heard her

exclaim, as her father had done, "How pretty!" This tepid admiration

was not the outcome of conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the

strength of love.

Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The only

sublime she knew was that of the heart. At last Theodore could not

resist the evidence of the cruel fact--his wife was insensible to

poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in

all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows; she walked

groveling in the world of reality, while his head was in the skies.

Common minds cannot appreciate the perennial sufferings of a being

who, while bound to another by the most intimate affections, is

obliged constantly to suppress the dearest flights of his soul, and to

thrust down into the void those images which a magic power compels him

to create. To him the torture is all the more intolerable because his

feeling towards his companion enjoins, as its first law, that they

should have no concealments, but mingle the aspirations of their

thought as perfectly as the effusions of their soul. The demands of

nature are not to be cheated. She is as inexorable as necessity, which

is, indeed, a sort of social nature. Sommervieux took refuge in the

peace and silence of his studio, hoping that the habit of living with

artists might mould his wife and develop in her the dormant germs of

lofty intelligence which some superior minds suppose must exist in

every being. But Augustine was too sincerely religious not to take

fright at the tone of artists. At the first dinner Theodore gave, she

heard a young painter say, with the childlike lightness, which to her

was unintelligible, and which redeems a jest from the taint of

profanity, "But, madame, your Paradise cannot be more beautiful than

Raphael's Transfiguration!--Well, and I got tired of looking at that."