XIX

In the midst of the storms of her passion Rosalie often listened to

the voice of conscience. Touched by the beautiful fidelity of these

two hearts, she had just said her prayers, telling herself that there

was nothing left to her but to be resigned, and to respect the

happiness of two beings worthy of each other, submissive to fate,

looking to God for everything, without allowing themselves any

criminal acts or wishes. She felt a better woman, and had a certain

sense of satisfaction after coming to this resolution, inspired by the

natural rectitude of youth. And she was confirmed in it by a girl's

idea: She was sacrificing herself for /him/.

"She does not know how to love," thought she. "Ah! if it were I--I

would give up everything to a man who loved me so.--To be loved!--

When, by whom shall I be loved? That little Monsieur de Soulas only

loves my money; if I were poor, he would not even look at me."

"Rosalie, my child, what are you thinking about? You are working

beyond the outline," said the Baroness to her daughter, who was making

worsted-work slippers for the Baron.

Rosalie spent the winter of 1834-35 torn by secret tumults; but in the

spring, in the month of April, when she reached the age of nineteen,

she sometimes thought that it would be a fine thing to triumph over a

Duchesse d'Argaiolo. In silence and solitude the prospect of this

struggle had fanned her passion and her evil thoughts. She encouraged

her romantic daring by making plan after plan. Although such

characters are an exception, there are, unfortunately, too many

Rosalies in the world, and this story contains a moral that ought to

serve them as a warning.

In the course of this winter Albert de Savarus had quietly made

considerable progress in Besancon. Confident of success, he now

impatiently awaited the dissolution of the Chamber. Among the men of

the moderate party he had won the suffrages of one of the makers of

Besancon, a rich contractor, who had very wide influence.

Wherever they settled the Romans took immense pains, and spent

enormous sums to have an unlimited supply of good water in every town

of their empire. At Besancon they drank the water from Arcier, a hill

at some considerable distance from Besancon. The town stands in a

horseshoe circumscribed by the river Doubs. Thus, to restore an

aqueduct in order to drink the same water that the Romans drank, in a

town watered by the Doubs, is one of those absurdities which only

succeed in a country place where the most exemplary gravity prevails.

If this whim could be brought home to the hearts of the citizens, it

would lead to considerable outlay; and this expenditure would benefit

the influential contractor.

Albert Savaron de Savarus opined that the water of the river was good

for nothing but to flow under the suspension bridge, and that the only

drinkable water was that from Arcier. Articles were printed in the

/Review/ which merely expressed the views of the commercial interest

of Besancon. The nobility and the citizens, the moderates and the

legitimists, the government party and the opposition, everybody, in

short, was agreed that they must drink the same water as the Romans,

and boast of a suspension bridge. The question of the Arcier water was

the order of the day at Besancon. At Besancon--as in the matter of the

two railways to Versailles--as for every standing abuse--there were

private interests unconfessed which gave vital force to this idea. The

reasonable folk in opposition to this scheme, who were indeed but few,

were regarded as old women. No one talked of anything but of Savaron's

two projects. And thus, after eighteen months of underground labor,

the ambitious lawyer had succeeded in stirring to its depths the most

stagnant town in France, the most unyielding to foreign influence, in

finding the length of its foot, to use a vulgar phrase, and exerting a

preponderant influence without stirring from his own room. He had

solved the singular problem of how to be powerful without being

popular.

In the course of this winter he won seven lawsuits for various priests

of Besancon. At moments he could breathe freely at the thought of his

coming triumph. This intense desire, which made him work so many

interests and devise so many springs, absorbed the last strength of

his terribly overstrung soul. His disinterestedness was lauded, and he

took his clients' fees without comment. But this disinterestedness

was, in truth, moral usury; he counted on a reward far greater to him

than all the gold in the world.

In the month of October 1834 he had brought, ostensibly to serve a

merchant who was in difficulties, with money lent him by Leopold

Hannequin, a house which gave him a qualification for election. He had

not seemed to seek or desire this advantageous bargain.

"You are really a remarkable man," said the Abbe de Grancey, who, of

course, had watched and understood the lawyer. The Vicar-General had

come to introduce to him a Canon who needed his professional advice.

"You are a priest who has taken the wrong turning." This observation

struck Savarus.

Rosalie, on her part, had made up her mind, in her strong girl's head,

to get Monsieur de Savarus into the drawing-room and acquainted with

the society of the Hotel de Rupt. So far she had limited her desires

to seeing and hearing Albert. She had compounded, so to speak, and a

composition is often no more than a truce.

Les Rouxey, the inherited estate of the Wattevilles, was worth just

ten thousand francs a year; but in other hands it would have yielded a

great deal more. The Baron in his indifference--for his wife was to

have, and in fact had, forty thousand francs a year--left the

management of les Rouxey to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the

Wattevilles named Modinier. Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and his

wife wished to go out of the town, they went to les Rouxey, which is

very picturesquely situated. The chateau and the park were, in fact,

created by the famous Watteville, who in his active old age was

passionately attached to this magnificent spot.

Between two precipitous hills--little peaks with bare summits known as

the great and the little Rouxey--in the heart of a ravine where the

torrents from the heights, with the Dent de Vilard at their head, come

tumbling to join the lovely upper waters of the Doubs, Watteville had

a huge dam constructed, leaving two cuttings for the overflow. Above

this dam he made a beautiful lake, and below it two cascades; and

these, uniting a few yards below the falls, formed a lovely little

river to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, and these two hills

he enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a retreat on the dam,

which he widened to two acres by accumulating above it all the soil

which had to be removed to make a channel for the river and the

irrigation canals.

When the Baron de Watteville thus obtained the lake above his dam he

was owner of the two hills, but not of the upper valley thus flooded,

through which there had been at all times a right-of-way to where it

ends in a horseshoe under the Dent de Vilard. But this ferocious old

man was so widely dreaded, that so long as he lived no claim was urged

by the inhabitants of Riceys, the little village on the further side

of the Dent de Vilard. When the Baron died, he left the slopes of the

two Rouxey hills joined by a strong wall, to protect from inundation

the two lateral valleys opening into the valley of Rouxey, to the

right and left at the foot of the Dent de Vilard. Thus he died the

master of the Dent de Vilard.

His heirs asserted their protectorate of the village of Riceys, and so

maintained the usurpation. The old assassin, the old renegade, the old

Abbe Watteville, ended his career by planting trees and making a fine

road over the shoulder of one of the Rouxey hills to join the

highroad. The estate belonging to this park and house was extensive,

but badly cultivated; there were chalets on both hills and neglected

forests of timber. It was all wild and deserted, left to the care of

nature, abandoned to chance growths, but full of sublime and

unexpected beauty. You may now imagine les Rouxey.

It is unnecessary to complicate this story by relating all the

prodigious trouble and the inventiveness stamped with genius, by which

Rosalie achieved her end without allowing it to be suspected. It is

enough to say that it was in obedience to her mother that she left

Besancon in the month of May 1835, in an antique traveling carriage

drawn by a pair of sturdy hired horses, and accompanied her father to

les Rouxey.

To a young girl love lurks in everything. When she rose, the morning

after her arrival, Mademoiselle de Watteville saw from her bedroom

window the fine expanse of water, from which the light mists rose like

smoke, and were caught in the firs and larches, rolling up and along

the hills till they reached the heights, and she gave a cry of

admiration.

"They loved by the lakes! /She/ lives by a lake! A lake is certainly

full of love!" she thought.

A lake fed by snows has opalescent colors and a translucency that

makes it one huge diamond; but when it is shut in like that of les

Rouxey, between two granite masses covered with pines, when silence

broods over it like that of the Savannas or the Steppes, then every

one must exclaim as Rosalie did.

"We owe that," said her father, "to the notorious Watteville."

"On my word," said the girl, "he did his best to earn forgiveness. Let

us go in a boat to the further end; it will give us an appetite for

breakfast."