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+Project Gutenberg Etext The Deserted Woman, by Honore de Balzac
+#64 in our series by Honore de Balzac
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+The Deserted Woman
+
+by Honore de Balzac
+
+Translated by Ellen Marriage
+
+May, 1999  [Etext #1729]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext The Deserted Woman, by Honore de Balzac
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+Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+and John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DESERTED WOMAN
+
+by HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+Translated By
+Ellen Marriage
+
+
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+To Her Grace the Duchesse d'Abrantes,
+from her devoted servant,
+Honore de Balzac.
+PARIS, August 1835.
+
+
+
+
+THE DESERTED WOMAN
+
+
+
+In the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to Lower Normandy
+a young man just recovering from an inflammatory complaint, brought on
+by overstudy, or perhaps by excess of some other kind. His
+convalescence demanded complete rest, a light diet, bracing air, and
+freedom from excitement of every kind, and the fat lands of Bessin
+seemed to offer all these conditions of recovery. To Bayeux, a
+picturesque place about six miles from the sea, the patient therefore
+betook himself, and was received with the cordiality characteristic of
+relatives who lead very retired lives, and regard a new arrival as a
+godsend.
+
+All little towns are alike, save for a few local customs. When M. le
+Baron Gaston de Nueil, the young Parisian in question, had spent two
+or three evenings in his cousin's house, or with the friends who made
+up Mme. de Sainte-Severe's circle, he very soon had made the
+acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to
+be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable
+stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many
+capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older
+day.
+
+First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded as
+incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the department, though
+no one has so much as heard of them a bare fifty leagues away. This
+species of royal family on a small scale is distantly, but
+unmistakably, connected with the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family,
+and related to the Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of
+the illustrious house is invariably a determined sportsman. He has no
+manners, crushes everybody else with his nominal superiority,
+tolerates the sub-prefect much as he submits to the taxes, and
+declines to acknowledge any of the novel powers created by the
+nineteenth century, pointing out to you as a political monstrosity the
+fact that the prime minister is a man of no birth. His wife takes a
+decided tone, and talks in a loud voice. She has had adorers in her
+time, but takes the sacrament regularly at Easter. She brings up her
+daughters badly, and is of the opinion that they will always be rich
+enough with their name.
+
+Neither husband nor wife has the remotest idea of modern luxury. They
+retain a livery only seen elsewhere on the stage, and cling to old
+fashions in plate, furniture, and equipages, as in language and manner
+of life. This is a kind of ancient state, moreover, that suits
+passably well with provincial thrift. The good folk are, in fact, the
+lords of the manor of a bygone age, /minus/ the quitrents and heriots,
+the pack of hounds and the laced coats; full of honor among
+themselves, and one and all loyally devoted to princes whom they only
+see at a distance. The historical house /incognito/ is as quaint a
+survival as a piece of ancient tapestry. Vegetating somewhere among
+them there is sure to be an uncle or a brother, a lieutenant-general,
+an old courtier of the Kings's, who wears the red ribbon of the order
+of Saint-Louis, and went to Hanover with the Marechal de Richelieu:
+and here you will find him like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet
+of the time of Louis Quinze.
+
+This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier,
+though of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a couple of
+months of every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous
+tone and short-lived contemporary crazes. Madame is a woman of
+fashion, though she looks rather conscious of her clothes, and is
+always behind the mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected
+by her neighbors. /Her/ plate is of modern fashion; she has "grooms,"
+Negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and what-not. Her oldest son drives a
+tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is entailed upon him), his
+younger brother is auditor to a Council of State. The father is well
+posted up in official scandals, and tells you anecdotes of Louis
+XVIII. and Madame du Cayla. He invests his money in the five per
+cents, and is careful to avoid the topic of cider, but has been known
+occasionally to fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the
+conjectural sums-total of the various fortunes of the department. He
+is a member of the Departmental Council, has his clothes from Paris,
+and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, he is a country
+gentleman who has fully grasped the significance of the Restoration,
+and is coining money at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure
+than that of the rival house; he takes the /Gazette/ and the /Debats/,
+the other family only read the /Quotidienne/.
+
+His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
+the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times
+they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy Lafontaine to
+the fable of the /Ass laden with Relics/. The good man's origin is
+distinctly plebeian.
+
+Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten or
+twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy or cavalry
+regiments, or nothing at all. Out on the roads, on horseback, they
+rank half-way between the cure bearing the sacraments and the tax
+collector on his rounds. Pretty nearly all of them have been in the
+Pages or in the Household Troops, and now are peaceably ending their
+days in a /faisance-valoir/, more interested in felling timber and the
+cider prospects than in the Monarchy.
+
+Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the cards are
+making, or over a game at backgammon, when they have exhausted the
+usual stock of /dots/, and have married everybody off according to the
+genealogies which they all know by heart. Their womenkind are haughty
+dames, who assume the airs of Court ladies in their basket chaises.
+They huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full dress; and
+twice a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet from Paris,
+brought as opportunity offers. Exemplary wives are they for the most
+part, and garrulous.
+
+These are the principal elements of aristocratic gentility, with a few
+outlying old maids of good family, spinsters who have solved the
+problem: given a human being, to remain absolutely stationary. They
+might be sealed up in the houses where you see them; their faces and
+their dresses are literally part of the fixtures of the town, and the
+province in which they dwell. They are its tradition, its memory, its
+quintessence, the /genius loci/ incarnate. There is something frigid
+and monumental about these ladies; they know exactly when to laugh and
+when to shake their heads, and every now and then give out some
+utterance which passes current as a witticism.
+
+A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Faubourg Saint-
+Germain, thanks to their money or their aristocratic leanings. But
+despite their forty years, the circle still say of them, "Young So-
+and-so has sound opinions," and of such do they make deputies. As a
+rule, the elderly spinsters are their patronesses, not without
+comment.
+
+Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three
+ecclesiastics, admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their wit;
+for these great nobles find their own society rather dull, and
+introduce the bourgeois element into their drawing-rooms, as a baker
+puts leaven into his dough.
+
+The sum-total contained by all heads put together consists of a
+certain quantity of antiquated notions; a few new inflections brewed
+in company of an evening being added from time to time to the common
+stock. Like sea-water in a little creek, the phrases which represent
+these ideas surge up daily, punctually obeying the tidal laws of
+conversation in their flow and ebb; you hear the hollow echo of
+yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, a year hence, and for evermore. On all
+things here below they pass immutable judgments, which go to make up a
+body of tradition into which no power of mortal man can infuse one
+drop of wit or sense. The lives of these persons revolve with the
+regularity of clockwork in an orbit of use and wont which admits of no
+more deviation or change than their opinions on matters religious,
+political, moral, or literary.
+
+If a stranger is admitted to the /cenacle/, every member of it in turn
+will say (not without a trace of irony), "You will not find the
+brilliancy of your Parisian society here," and proceed forthwith to
+criticise the life led by his neighbors, as if he himself were an
+exception who had striven, and vainly striven, to enlighten the rest.
+But any stranger so ill advised as to concur in any of their freely
+expressed criticism of each other, is pronounced at once to be an ill-
+natured person, a heathen, an outlaw, a reprobate Parisian "as
+Parisians mostly are."
+
+Before Gaston de Nueil made his appearance in this little world of
+strictly observed etiquette, where every detail of life is an
+integrant part of a whole, and everything is known; where the values
+of personalty and real estate is quoted like stocks on the vast sheet
+of the newspaper--before his arrival he had been weighed in the
+unerring scales of Bayeusaine judgment.
+
+His cousin, Mme. de Sainte-Severe, had already given out the amount of
+his fortune, and the sum of his expectations, had produced the family
+tree, and expatiated on the talents, breeding, and modesty of this
+particular branch. So he received the precise amount of attentions to
+which he was entitled; he was accepted as a worthy scion of a good
+stock; and, for he was but twenty-three, was made welcome without
+ceremony, though certain young ladies and mothers of daughters looked
+not unkindly upon him.
+
+He had an income of eighteen thousand livres from land in the valley
+of the Auge; and sooner or later his father, as in duty bound, would
+leave him the chateau of Manerville, with the lands thereunto
+belonging. As for his education, political career, personal qualities,
+and qualifications--no one so much as thought of raising the
+questions. His land was undeniable, his rentals steady; excellent
+plantations had been made; the tenants paid for repairs, rates, and
+taxes; the apple-trees were thirty-eight years old; and, to crown all,
+his father was in treaty for two hundred acres of woodland just
+outside the paternal park, which he intended to enclose with walls. No
+hopes of a political career, no fame on earth, can compare with such
+advantages as these.
+
+Whether out of malice or design, Mme. de Sainte-Severe omitted to
+mention that Gaston had an elder brother; nor did Gaston himself say a
+word about him. But, at the same time, it is true that the brother was
+consumptive, and to all appearance would shortly be laid in earth,
+lamented and forgotten.
+
+At first Gaston de Nueil amused himself at the expense of the circle.
+He drew, as it were, for his mental album, a series of portraits of
+these folk, with their angular, wrinkled faces, and hooked noses,
+their crotchets and ludicrous eccentricities of dress, portraits which
+possessed all the racy flavor of truth. He delighted in their
+"Normanisms," in the primitive quaintness of their ideas and
+characters. For a short time he flung himself into their squirrel's
+life of busy gyrations in a cage. Then he began to feel the want of
+variety, and grew tired of it. It was like the life of the cloister,
+cut short before it had well begun. He drifted on till he reached a
+crisis, which is neither spleen nor disgust, but combines all the
+symptoms of both. When a human being is transplanted into an
+uncongenial soil, to lead a starved, stunted existence, there is
+always a little discomfort over the transition. Then, gradually, if
+nothing removes him from his surroundings, he grows accustomed to
+them, and adapts himself to the vacuity which grows upon him and
+renders him powerless. Even now, Gaston's lungs were accustomed to the
+air; and he was willing to discern a kind of vegetable happiness in
+days that brought no mental exertion and no responsibilities. The
+constant stirring of the sap of life, the fertilizing influences of
+mind on mind, after which he had sought so eagerly in Paris, were
+beginning to fade from his memory, and he was in a fair way of
+becoming a fossil with these fossils, and ending his days among them,
+content, like the companions of Ulysses, in his gross envelope.
+
+One evening Gaston de Nueil was seated between a dowager and one of
+the vicars-general of the diocese, in a gray-paneled drawing-room,
+floored with large white tiles. The family portraits which adorned the
+walls looked down upon four card-tables, and some sixteen persons
+gathered about them, chattering over their whist. Gaston, thinking of
+nothing, digesting one of those exquisite dinners to which the
+provincial looks forward all through the day, found himself justifying
+the customs of the country.
+
+He began to understand why these good folk continued to play with
+yesterday's pack of cards and shuffle them on a threadbare tablecloth,
+and how it was that they had ceased to dress for themselves or others.
+He saw the glimmerings of something like a philosophy in the even
+tenor of their perpetual round, in the calm of their methodical
+monotony, in their ignorance of the refinements of luxury. Indeed, he
+almost came to think that luxury profited nothing; and even now, the
+city of Paris, with its passions, storms, and pleasures, was scarcely
+more than a memory of childhood.
+
+He admired in all sincerity the red hands, and shy, bashful manner of
+some young lady who at first struck him as an awkward simpleton,
+unattractive to the last degree, and surprisingly ridiculous. His doom
+was sealed. He had gone from the provinces to Paris; he had led the
+feverish life of Paris; and now he would have sunk back into the
+lifeless life of the provinces, but for a chance remark which reached
+his ear--a few words that called up a swift rush of such emotion as he
+might have felt when a strain of really good music mingles with the
+accompaniment of some tedious opera.
+
+"You went to call on Mme. de Beauseant yesterday, did you not?" The
+speaker was an elderly lady, and she addressed the head of the local
+royal family.
+
+"I went this morning. She was so poorly and depressed, that I could
+not persuade her to dine with us to-morrow."
+
+"With Mme. de Champignelles?" exclaimed the dowager with something
+like astonishment in her manner.
+
+"With my wife," calmly assented the noble. "Mme. de Beauseant is
+descended from the House of Burgundy, on the spindle side, 'tis true,
+but the name atones for everything. My wife is very much attached to
+the Vicomtesse, and the poor lady has lived alone for such a long
+while, that----"
+
+The Marquis de Champignelles looked round about him while he spoke
+with an air of cool unconcern, so that it was almost impossible to
+guess whether he made a concession to Mme. de Beauseant's misfortunes,
+or paid homage to her noble birth; whether he felt flattered to
+receive her in his house, or, on the contrary, sheer pride was the
+motive that led him to try to force the country families to meet the
+Vicomtesse.
+
+The women appeared to take counsel of each other by a glance; there
+was a sudden silence in the room, and it was felt that their attitude
+was one of disapproval.
+
+"Does this Mme. de Beauseant happen to be the lady whose adventure
+with M. d'Ajuda-Pinto made so much noise?" asked Gaston of his
+neighbor.
+
+"The very same," he was told. "She came to Courcelles after the
+marriage of the Marquis d'Ajuda; nobody visits her. She has, besides,
+too much sense not to see that she is in a false position, so she has
+made no attempt to see any one. M. de Champignelles and a few
+gentlemen went to call upon her, but she would see no one but M. de
+Champignelles, perhaps because he is a connection of the family. They
+are related through the Beauseants; the father of the present Vicomte
+married a Mlle. de Champignelles of the older branch. But though the
+Vicomtesse de Beauseant is supposed to be a descendant of the House of
+Burgundy, you can understand that we could not admit a wife separated
+from her husband into our society here. We are foolish enough still to
+cling to these old-fashioned ideas. There was the less excuse for the
+Vicomtesse, because M. de Beauseant is a well-bred man of the world,
+who would have been quite ready to listen to reason. But his wife is
+quite mad----" and so forth and so forth.
+
+M. de Nueil, still listening to the speaker's voice, gathered nothing
+of the sense of the words; his brain was too full of thick-coming
+fancies. Fancies? What other name can you give to the alluring charms
+of an adventure that tempts the imagination and sets vague hopes
+springing up in the soul; to the sense of coming events and mysterious
+felicity and fear at hand, while as yet there is no substance of fact
+on which these phantoms of caprice can fix and feed? Over these
+fancies thought hovers, conceiving impossible projects, giving in the
+germ all the joys of love. Perhaps, indeed, all passion is contained
+in that thought-germ, as the beauty, and fragrance, and rich color of
+the flower is all packed in the seed.
+
+M. de Nueil did not know that Mme. de Beauseant had taken refuge in
+Normandy, after a notoriety which women for the most part envy and
+condemn, especially when youth and beauty in some sort excuse the
+transgression. Any sort of celebrity bestows an inconceivable
+prestige. Apparently for women, as for families, the glory of the
+crime effaces the stain; and if such and such a noble house is proud
+of its tale of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and
+pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a
+happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be
+pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only pitiless to
+the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all
+intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we
+raise ourselves above other people's heads? The common herd of
+humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person who can rise
+above it, and is not over-particular as to the means by which they
+rise.
+
+It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston de Nueil at
+unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving for some interest
+in his life, or, in a word, that crowd of inexplicable impulses which,
+for want of a better name, we are wont to call "fatality," that drew
+him to Mme. de Beauseant.
+
+The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly before him
+with gracious thronging associations. She was a new world for him, a
+world of fears and hopes, a world to fight for and to conquer.
+Inevitably he felt the contrast between this vision and the human
+beings in the shabby room; and then, in truth, she was a woman; what
+woman had he seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation
+replaced thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried
+formality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming to be
+received or to pass current? The sound of Mme. de Beauseant's name
+revived a young man's dreams and wakened urgent desires that had lain
+dormant for a little.
+
+Gaston de Nueil was absent-minded and preoccupied for the rest of the
+evening. He was pondering how he might gain access to Mme. de
+Beauseant, and truly it was no very easy matter. She was believed to
+be extremely clever. But if men and women of parts may be captivated
+by something subtle or eccentric, they are also exacting, and can read
+all that lies below the surface; and after the first step has been
+taken, the chances of failure and success in the difficult task of
+pleasing them are about even. In this particular case, moreover, the
+Vicomtesse, besides the pride of her position, had all the dignity of
+her name. Her utter seclusion was the least of the barriers raised
+between her and the world. For which reasons it was well-nigh
+impossible that a stranger, however well born, could hope for
+admittance; and yet, the next morning found M. de Nueil taking his
+walks abroad in the direction of Courcelles, a dupe of illusions
+natural at his age. Several times he made the circuit of the garden
+walls, looking earnestly through every gap at the closed shutters or
+open windows, hoping for some romantic chance, on which he founded
+schemes for introducing himself into this unknown lady's presence,
+without a thought of their impracticability. Morning after morning was
+spent in this way to mighty purpose; but with each day's walk, that
+vision of a woman living apart from the world, of love's martyr buried
+in solitude, loomed larger in his thoughts, and was enshrined in his
+soul. So Gaston de Nueil walked under the walls of Courcelles, and
+some gardener's heavy footstep would set his heart beating high with
+hope.
+
+He thought of writing to Mme. de Beauseant, but on mature
+consideration, what can you say to a woman whom you have never seen, a
+complete stranger? And Gaston had little self-confidence. Like most
+young persons with a plentiful crop of illusions still standing, he
+dreaded the mortifying contempt of silence more than death itself, and
+shuddered at the thought of sending his first tender epistle forth to
+face so many chances of being thrown on the fire. He was distracted by
+innumerable conflicting ideas. But by dint of inventing chimeras,
+weaving romances, and cudgeling his brains, he hit at last upon one of
+the hopeful stratagems that are sure to occur to your mind if you
+persevere long enough, a stratagem which must make clear to the most
+inexperienced woman that here was a man who took a fervent interest in
+her. The caprice of social conventions puts as many barriers between
+lovers as any Oriental imagination can devise in the most delightfully
+fantastic tale; indeed, the most extravagant pictures are seldom
+exaggerations. In real life, as in the fairy tales, the woman belongs
+to him who can reach her and set her free from the position in which
+she languishes. The poorest of calenders that ever fell in love with
+the daughter of the Khalif is in truth scarcely further from his lady
+than Gaston de Nueil from Mme. de Beauseant. The Vicomtesse knew
+absolutely nothing of M. de Nueil's wanderings round her house; Gaston
+de Nueil's love grew to the height of the obstacles to overleap; and
+the distance set between him and his extemporized lady-love produced
+the usual effect of distance, in lending enchantment.
+
+One day, confident in his inspiration, he hoped everything from the
+love that must pour forth from his eyes. Spoken words, in his opinion,
+were more eloquent than the most passionate letter; and, besides, he
+would engage feminine curiosity to plead for him. He went, therefore,
+to M. de Champignelles, proposing to employ that gentleman for the
+better success of his enterprise. He informed the Marquis that he had
+been entrusted with a delicate and important commission which
+concerned the Vicomtesse de Beauseant, that he felt doubtful whether
+she would read a letter written in an unknown handwriting, or put
+confidence in a stranger. Would M. de Champignelles, on his next
+visit, ask the Vicomtesse if she would consent to receive him--Gaston
+de Nueil? While he asked the Marquis to keep his secret in case of a
+refusal, he very ingeniously insinuated sufficient reasons for his own
+admittance, to be duly passed on to the Vicomtesse. Was not M. de
+Champignelles a man of honor, a loyal gentleman incapable of lending
+himself to any transaction in bad taste, nay, the merest suspicion of
+bad taste! Love lends a young man all the self-possession and astute
+craft of an old ambassador; all the Marquis' harmless vanities were
+gratified, and the haughty grandee was completely duped. He tried hard
+to fathom Gaston's secret; but the latter, who would have been greatly
+perplexed to tell it, turned off M. de Champignelles' adroit
+questioning with a Norman's shrewdness, till the Marquis, as a gallant
+Frenchman, complimented his young visitor upon his discretion.
+
+M. de Champignelles hurried off at once to Courcelles, with that
+eagerness to serve a pretty woman which belongs to his time of life.
+In the Vicomtesse de Beauseant's position, such a message was likely
+to arouse keen curiosity; so, although her memory supplied no reason
+at all that could bring M. de Nueil to her house, she saw no objection
+to his visit--after some prudent inquiries as to his family and
+condition. At the same time, she began by a refusal. Then she
+discussed the propriety of the matter with M. de Champignelles,
+directing her questions so as to discover, if possible, whether he
+knew the motives for the visit, and finally revoked her negative
+answer. The discussion and the discretion shown perforce by the
+Marquis had piqued her curiosity.
+
+M. de Champignelles had no mind to cut a ridiculous figure. He said,
+with the air of a man who can keep another's counsel, that the
+Vicomtesse must know the purpose of this visit perfectly well; while
+the Vicomtesse, in all sincerity, had no notion what it could be. Mme.
+de Beauseant, in perplexity, connected Gaston with people whom he had
+never met, went astray after various wild conjectures, and asked
+herself if she had seen this M. de Nueil before. In truth, no love-
+letter, however sincere or skilfully indited, could have produced so
+much effect as this riddle. Again and again Mme. de Beauseant puzzled
+over it.
+
+When Gaston heard that he might call upon the Vicomtesse, his rapture
+at so soon obtaining the ardently longed-for good fortune was mingled
+with singular embarrassment. How was he to contrive a suitable sequel
+to this stratagem?
+
+"Bah! I shall see /her/," he said over and over again to himself as he
+dressed. "See her, and that is everything!"
+
+He fell to hoping that once across the threshold of Courcelles he
+should find an expedient for unfastening this Gordian knot of his own
+tying. There are believers in the omnipotence of necessity who never
+turn back; the close presence of danger is an inspiration that calls
+out all their powers for victory. Gaston de Nueil was one of these.
+
+He took particular pains with his dress, imagining, as youth is apt to
+imagine, that success or failure hangs on the position of a curl, and
+ignorant of the fact that anything is charming in youth. And, in any
+case, such women as Mme. de Beauseant are only attracted by the charms
+of wit or character of an unusual order. Greatness of character
+flatters their vanity, promises a great passion, seems to imply a
+comprehension of the requirements of their hearts. Wit amuses them,
+responds to the subtlety of their natures, and they think that they
+are understood. And what do all women wish but to be amused,
+understood, or adored? It is only after much reflection on the things
+of life that we understand the consummate coquetry of neglect of dress
+and reserve at a first interview; and by the time we have gained
+sufficient astuteness for successful strategy, we are too old to
+profit by our experience.
+
+While Gaston's lack of confidence in his mental equipment drove him to
+borrow charms from his clothes, Madame de Beauseant herself was
+instinctively giving more attention to her toilette.
+
+"I would rather not frighten people, at all events," she said to
+herself as she arranged her hair.
+
+In M. de Nueil's character, person, and manner there was that touch of
+unconscious originality which gives a kind of flavor to things that
+any one might say or do, and absolves everything that they may choose
+to do or say. He was highly cultivated, he had a keen brain, and a
+face, mobile as his own nature, which won the goodwill of others. The
+promise of passion and tenderness in the bright eyes was fulfilled by
+an essentially kindly heart. The resolution which he made as he
+entered the house at Courcelles was in keeping with his frank nature
+and ardent imagination. But, bold has he was with love, his heart beat
+violently when he had crossed the great court, laid out like an
+English garden, and the man-servant, who had taken his name to the
+Vicomtesse, returned to say that she would receive him.
+
+"M. le Baron de Nueil."
+
+Gaston came in slowly, but with sufficient ease of manner; and it is a
+more difficult thing, be it said, to enter a room where there is but
+one woman, than a room that holds a score.
+
+A great fire was burning on the hearth in spite of the mild weather,
+and by the soft light of the candles in the sconces he saw a young
+woman sitting on a high-backed /bergere/ in the angle by the hearth.
+The seat was so low that she could move her head freely; every turn of
+it was full of grace and delicate charm, whether she bent, leaning
+forward, or raised and held it erect, slowly and languidly, as though
+it were a heavy burden, so low that she could cross her feet and let
+them appear, or draw them back under the folds of a long black dress.
+
+The Vicomtesse made as if she would lay the book that she was reading
+on a small, round stand; but as she did so, she turned towards M. de
+Nueil, and the volume, insecurely laid upon the edge, fell to the
+ground between the stand and the sofa. This did not seem to disconcert
+her. She looked up, bowing almost imperceptibly in response to his
+greeting, without rising from the depths of the low chair in which she
+lay. Bending forwards, she stirred the fire briskly, and stooped to
+pick up a fallen glove, drawing it mechanically over her left hand,
+while her eyes wandered in search of its fellow. The glance was
+instantly checked, however, for she stretched out a thin, white, all-
+but-transparent right hand, with flawless ovals of rose-colored nail
+at the tips of the slender, ringless fingers, and pointed to a chair
+as if to bid Gaston be seated. He sat down, and she turned her face
+questioningly towards him. Words cannot describe the subtlety of the
+winning charm and inquiry in that gesture; deliberate in its
+kindliness, gracious yet accurate in expression, it was the outcome of
+early education and of a constant use and wont of the graciousness of
+life. These movements of hers, so swift, so deft, succeeded each other
+by the blending of a pretty woman's fastidious carelessness with the
+high-bred manner of a great lady.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant stood out in such strong contrast against the
+automatons among whom he had spent two months of exile in that out-of-
+the-world district of Normandy, that he could not but find in her the
+realization of his romantic dreams; and, on the other hand, he could
+not compare her perfections with those of other women whom he had
+formerly admired. Here in her presence, in a drawing-room like some
+salon in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, full of costly trifles lying
+about upon the tables, and flowers and books, he felt as if he were
+back in Paris. It was a real Parisian carpet beneath his feet, he saw
+once more the high-bred type of Parisienne, the fragile outlines of
+her form, her exquisite charm, her disdain of the studied effects
+which did so much to spoil provincial women.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant had fair hair and dark eyes, and the pale complexion
+that belongs to fair hair. She held up her brow nobly like some fallen
+angel, grown proud through the fall, disdainful of pardon. Her way of
+gathering her thick hair into a crown of plaits above the broad,
+curving lines of the bandeaux upon her forehead, added to the
+queenliness of her face. Imagination could discover the ducal coronet
+of Burgundy in the spiral threads of her golden hair; all the courage
+of her house seemed to gleam from the great lady's brilliant eyes,
+such courage as women use to repel audacity or scorn, for they were
+full of tenderness for gentleness. The outline of that little head, so
+admirably poised above the long, white throat, the delicate, fine
+features, the subtle curves of the lips, the mobile face itself, wore
+an expression of delicate discretion, a faint semblance of irony
+suggestive of craft and insolence. Yet it would have been difficult to
+refuse forgiveness to those two feminine failings in her; for the
+lines that came out in her forehead whenever her face was not in
+repose, like her upward glances (that pathetic trick of manner), told
+unmistakably of unhappiness, of a passion that had all but cost her
+her life. A woman, sitting in the great, silent salon, a woman cut off
+from the rest of the world in this remote little valley, alone, with
+the memories of her brilliant, happy, and impassioned youth, of
+continual gaiety and homage paid on all sides, now replaced by the
+horrors of the void--was there not something in the sight to strike
+awe that deepened with reflection? Consciousness of her own value
+lurked in her smile. She was neither wife nor mother, she was an
+outlaw; she had lost the one heart that could set her pulses beating
+without shame; she had nothing from without to support her reeling
+soul; she must even look for strength from within, live her own life,
+cherish no hope save that of forsaken love, which looks forward to
+Death's coming, and hastens his lagging footsteps. And this while life
+was in its prime. Oh! to feel destined for happiness and to die--never
+having given nor received it! A woman too! What pain was this! These
+thoughts flashing across M. de Nueil's mind like lightning, left him
+very humble in the presence of the greatest charm with which woman can
+be invested. The triple aureole of beauty, nobleness, and misfortune
+dazzled him; he stood in dreamy, almost open-mouthed admiration of the
+Vicomtesse. But he found nothing to say to her.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant, by no means displeased, no doubt, by his surprise,
+held out her hand with a kindly but imperious gesture; then, summoning
+a smile to her pale lips, as if obeying, even yet, the woman's impulse
+to be gracious:
+
+"I have heard from M. de Champignelles of a message which you have
+kindly undertaken to deliver, monsieur," she said. "Can it be
+from----"
+
+With that terrible phrase Gaston understood, even more clearly than
+before, his own ridiculous position, the bad taste and bad faith of
+his behavior towards a woman so noble and so unfortunate. He reddened.
+The thoughts that crowded in upon him could be read in his troubled
+eyes; but suddenly, with the courage which youth draws from a sense of
+its own wrongdoing, he gained confidence, and very humbly interrupted
+Mme. de Beauseant.
+
+"Madame," he faltered out, "I do not deserve the happiness of seeing
+you. I have deceived you basely. However strong the motive may have
+been, it can never excuse the pitiful subterfuge which I used to gain
+my end. But, madame, if your goodness will permit me to tell you----"
+
+The Vicomtesse glanced at M. de Nueil, haughty disdain in her whole
+manner. She stretched her hand to the bell and rang it.
+
+"Jacques," she said, "light this gentleman to the door," and she
+looked with dignity at the visitor.
+
+She rose proudly, bowed to Gaston, and then stooped for the fallen
+volume. If all her movements on his entrance had been caressingly
+dainty and gracious, her every gesture now was no less severely
+frigid. M. de Nueil rose to his feet, but he stood waiting. Mme. de
+Beauseant flung another glance at him. "Well, why do you not go?" she
+seemed to say.
+
+There was such cutting irony in that glance that Gaston grew white as
+if he were about to faint. Tears came into his eyes, but he would not
+let them fall, and scorching shame and despair dried them. He looked
+back at Madame de Beauseant, and a certain pride and consciousness of
+his own worth was mingled with his humility; the Vicomtesse had a
+right to punish him, but ought she to use her right? Then he went out.
+
+As he crossed the ante-chamber, a clear head, and wits sharpened by
+passion, were not slow to grasp the danger of his situation.
+
+"If I leave this house, I can never come back to it again," he said to
+himself. "The Vicomtesse will always think of me as a fool. It is
+impossible that a woman, and such a woman, should not guess the love
+that she has called forth. Perhaps she feels a little, vague,
+involuntary regret for dismissing me so abruptly.--But she could not
+do otherwise, and she cannot recall her sentence. It rests with me to
+understand her."
+
+At that thought Gaston stopped short on the flight of steps with an
+exclamation; he turned sharply, saying, "I have forgotten something,"
+and went back to the salon. The lackey, all respect for a baron and
+the rights of property, was completely deceived by the natural
+utterance, and followed him. Gaston returned quietly and unannounced.
+The Vicomtesse, thinking that the intruder was the servant, looked up
+and beheld M. de Nueil.
+
+"Jacques lighted me to the door," he said, with a half-sad smile which
+dispelled any suspicion of jest in those words, while the tone in
+which they were spoken went to the heart. Mme. de Beauseant was
+disarmed.
+
+"Very well, take a seat," she said.
+
+Gaston eagerly took possession of a chair. His eyes were shining with
+happiness; the Vicomtesse, unable to endure the brilliant light in
+them, looked down at the book. She was enjoying a delicious, ever new
+sensation; the sense of a man's delight in her presence is an
+unfailing feminine instinct. And then, besides, he had divined her,
+and a woman is so grateful to the man who has mastered the apparently
+capricious, yet logical, reasoning of her heart; who can track her
+thought through the seemingly contradictory workings of her mind, and
+read the sensations, shy or bold, written in fleeting red, a
+bewildering maze of coquetry and self-revelation.
+
+"Madame," Gaston exclaimed in a low voice, "my blunder you know, but
+you do not know how much I am to blame. If you only knew what joy it
+was to----"
+
+"Ah! take care," she said, holding up one finger with an air of
+mystery, as she put out her hand towards the bell.
+
+The charming gesture, the gracious threat, no doubt called up some sad
+thought, some memory of the old happy time when she could be wholly
+charming and gentle without an afterthought; when the gladness of her
+heart justified every caprice, and put charm into every least
+movement. The lines in her forehead gathered between her brows, and
+the expression of her face grew dark in the soft candle-light. Then
+looking across at M. de Nueil gravely but not unkindly, she spoke like
+a woman who deeply feels the meaning of every word.
+
+"This is all very ridiculous! Once upon a time, monsieur, when
+thoughtless high spirits were my privilege, I should have laughed
+fearlessly over your visit with you. But now my life is very much
+changed. I cannot do as I like, I am obliged to think. What brings you
+here? Is it curiosity? In that case I am paying dearly for a little
+fleeting pleasure. Have you fallen /passionately/ in love already with
+a woman whom you have never seen, a woman with whose name slander has,
+of course, been busy? If so, your motive in making this visit is based
+on disrespect, on an error which accident brought into notoriety."
+
+She flung her book down scornfully upon the table, then, with a
+terrible look at Gaston, she went on: "Because I once was weak, must
+it be supposed that I am always weak? This is horrible, degrading. Or
+have you come here to pity me? You are very young to offer sympathy
+with heart troubles. Understand this clearly, sir, that I would rather
+have scorn than pity. I will not endure compassion from any one."
+
+There was a brief pause.
+
+"Well, sir," she continued (and the face that she turned to him was
+gentle and sad), "whatever motive induced this rash intrusion upon my
+solitude, it is very painful to me, you see. You are too young to be
+totally without good feeling, so surely you will feel that this
+behavior of yours is improper. I forgive you for it, and, as you see,
+I am speaking of it to you without bitterness. You will not come here
+again, will you? I am entreating when I might command. If you come to
+see me again, neither you nor I can prevent the whole place from
+believing that you are my lover, and you would cause me great
+additional annoyance. You do not mean to do that, I think."
+
+She said no more, but looked at him with a great dignity which abashed
+him.
+
+"I have done wrong, madame," he said, with deep feeling in his voice,
+"but it was through enthusiasm and thoughtlessness and eager desire of
+happiness, the qualities and defects of my age. Now, I understand that
+I ought not to have tried to see you," he added; "but, at the same
+time, the desire was a very natural one"--and, making an appeal to
+feeling rather than to the intellect, he described the weariness of
+his enforced exile. He drew a portrait of a young man in whom the
+fires of life were burning themselves out, conveying the impression
+that here was a heart worthy of tender love, a heart which,
+notwithstanding, had never known the joys of love for a young and
+beautiful woman of refinement and taste. He explained, without
+attempting to justify, his unusual conduct. He flattered Mme. de
+Beauseant by showing that she had realized for him the ideal lady of a
+young man's dream, the ideal sought by so many, and so often sought in
+vain. Then he touched upon his morning prowlings under the walls of
+Courcelles, and his wild thoughts at the first sight of the house,
+till he excited that vague feeling of indulgence which a woman can
+find in her heart for the follies committed for her sake.
+
+An impassioned voice was speaking in the chill solitude; the speaker
+brought with him a warm breath of youth and the charms of a carefully
+cultivated mind. It was so long since Mme. de Beauseant had felt
+stirred by real feeling delicately expressed, that it affected her
+very strongly now. In spite of herself, she watched M. de Nueil's
+expressive face, and admired the noble countenance of a soul, unbroken
+as yet by the cruel discipline of the life of the world, unfretted by
+continual scheming to gratify personal ambition and vanity. Gaston was
+in the flower of his youth, he impressed her as a man with something
+in him, unaware as yet of the great career that lay before him. So
+both these two made reflections most dangerous for their peace of
+mind, and both strove to conceal their thoughts. M. de Nueil saw in
+the Vicomtesse a rare type of woman, always the victim of her
+perfections and tenderness; her graceful beauty is the least of her
+charms for those who are privileged to know the infinite of feeling
+and thought and goodness in the soul within; a woman whose instinctive
+feeling for beauty runs through all the most varied expressions of
+love, purifying its transports, turning them to something almost holy;
+wonderful secret of womanhood, the exquisite gift that Nature so
+seldom bestows. And the Vicomtesse, on her side, listening to the ring
+of sincerity in Gaston's voice, while he told of his youthful
+troubles, began to understand all that grown children of five-and-
+twenty suffer from diffidence, when hard work has kept them alike from
+corrupting influences and intercourse with men and women of the world
+whose sophistical reasoning and experience destroys the fair qualities
+of youth. Here was the ideal of a woman's dreams, a man unspoiled as
+yet by the egoism of family or success, or by that narrow selfishness
+which blights the first impulses of honor, devotion, self-sacrifice,
+and high demands of self; all the flowers so soon wither that enrich
+at first the life of delicate but strong emotions, and keep alive the
+loyalty of the heart.
+
+But these two, once launched forth into the vast of sentiment, went
+far indeed in theory, sounding the depths in either soul, testing the
+sincerity of their expressions; only, whereas Gaston's experiments
+were made unconsciously, Mme. de Beauseant had a purpose in all that
+she said. Bringing her natural and acquired subtlety to the work, she
+sought to learn M. de Nueil's opinions by advancing, as far as she
+could do so, views diametrically opposed to her own. So witty and so
+gracious was she, so much herself with this stranger, with whom she
+felt completely at ease, because she felt sure that they should never
+meet again, that, after some delicious epigram of hers, Gaston
+exclaimed unthinkingly:
+
+"Oh! madame, how could any man have left you?"
+
+The Vicomtesse was silent. Gaston reddened, he thought that he had
+offended her; but she was not angry. The first deep thrill of delight
+since the day of her calamity had taken her by surprise. The skill of
+the cleverest /roue/ could not have made the impression that M. de
+Nueil made with that cry from the heart. That verdict wrung from a
+young man's candor gave her back innocence in her own eyes, condemned
+the world, laid the blame upon the lover who had left her, and
+justified her subsequent solitary drooping life. The world's
+absolution, the heartfelt sympathy, the social esteem so longed for,
+and so harshly refused, nay, all her secret desires were given her to
+the full in that exclamation, made fairer yet by the heart's sweetest
+flatteries and the admiration that women always relish eagerly. He
+understood her, understood all, and he had given her, as if it were
+the most natural thing in the world, the opportunity of rising higher
+through her fall. She looked at the clock.
+
+"Ah! madame, do not punish me for my heedlessness. If you grant me but
+one evening, vouchsafe not to shorten it."
+
+She smiled at the pretty speech.
+
+"Well, as we must never meet again," she said, "what signifies a
+moment more or less? If you were to care for me, it would be a pity."
+
+"It is too late now," he said.
+
+"Do not tell me that," she answered gravely. "Under any other
+circumstances I should be very glad to see you. I will speak frankly,
+and you will understand how it is that I do not choose to see you
+again, and ought not to do so. You have too much magnanimity not to
+feel that if I were so much as suspected of a second trespass, every
+one would think of me as a contemptible and vulgar woman; I should be
+like other women. A pure and blameless life will bring my character
+into relief. I am too proud not to endeavor to live like one apart in
+the world, a victim of the law through my marriage, man's victim
+through my love. If I were not faithful to the position which I have
+taken up, then I should deserve all the reproach that is heaped upon
+me; I should be lowered in my own eyes. I had not enough lofty social
+virtue to remain with a man whom I did not love. I have snapped the
+bonds of marriage in spite of the law; it was wrong, it was a crime,
+it was anything you like, but for me the bonds meant death. I meant to
+live. Perhaps if I had been a mother I could have endured the torture
+of a forced marriage of suitability. At eighteen we scarcely know what
+is done with us, poor girls that we are! I have broken the laws of the
+world, and the world has punished me; we both did rightly. I sought
+happiness. Is it not a law of our nature to seek for happiness? I was
+young, I was beautiful . . . I thought that I had found a nature as
+loving, as apparently passionate. I was loved indeed; for a little
+while . . ."
+
+She paused.
+
+"I used to think," she said, "that no one could leave a woman in such
+a position as mine. I have been forsaken; I must have offended in some
+way. Yes, in some way, no doubt, I failed to keep some law of our
+nature, was too loving, too devoted, too exacting--I do not know. Evil
+days have brought light with them! For a long while I blamed another,
+now I am content to bear the whole blame. At my own expense, I have
+absolved that other of whom I once thought I had a right to complain.
+I had not the art to keep him; fate has punished me heavily for my
+lack of skill. I only knew how to love; how can one keep oneself in
+mind when one loves? So I was a slave when I should have sought to be
+a tyrant. Those who know me may condemn me, but they will respect me
+too. Pain has taught me that I must not lay myself open to this a
+second time. I cannot understand how it is that I am living yet, after
+the anguish of that first week of the most fearful crisis in a woman's
+life. Only from three years of loneliness would it be possible to draw
+strength to speak of that time as I am speaking now. Such agony,
+monsieur, usually ends in death; but this--well, it was the agony of
+death with no tomb to end it. Oh! I have known pain indeed!"
+
+The Vicomtesse raised her beautiful eyes to the ceiling; and the
+cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which a stranger might
+not hear. When a woman is afraid to look at her interlocutor, there is
+in truth no gentler, meeker, more accommodating confidant than the
+cornice. The cornice is quite an institution in the boudoir; what is
+it but the confessional, /minus/ the priest?
+
+Mme. de Beauseant was eloquent and beautiful at that moment; nay,
+"coquettish," if the word were not too heavy. By justifying herself
+and love, she was stimulating every sentiment in the man before her;
+nay, more, the higher she set the goal, the more conspicuous it grew.
+At last, when her eyes had lost the too eloquent expression given to
+them by painful memories, she let them fall on Gaston.
+
+"You acknowledge, do you not, that I am bound to lead a solitary,
+self-contained life?" she said quietly.
+
+So sublime was she in her reasoning and her madness, that M. de Nueil
+felt a wild longing to throw himself at her feet; but he was afraid of
+making himself ridiculous, so he held his enthusiasm and his thoughts
+in check. He was afraid, too, that he might totally fail to express
+them, and in no less terror of some awful rejection on her part, or of
+her mockery, an apprehension which strikes like ice to the most fervid
+soul. The revulsion which led him to crush down every feeling as it
+sprang up in his heart cost him the intense pain that diffident and
+ambitious natures experience in the frequent crises when they are
+compelled to stifle their longings. And yet, in spite of himself, he
+broke the silence to say in a faltering voice:
+
+"Madame, permit me to give way to one of the strongest emotions of my
+life, and own to all that you have made me feel. You set the heart in
+me swelling high! I feel within me a longing to make you forget your
+mortifications, to devote my life to this, to give you love for all
+who ever have given you wounds or hate. But this is a very sudden
+outpouring of the heart, nothing can justify it to-day, and I ought
+not----"
+
+"Enough, monsieur," said Mme. de Beauseant; "we have both of us gone
+too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a refusal which I am
+compelled to give, I meant to soften it and not to elicit homage.
+Coquetry only suits a happy woman. Believe me, we must remain
+strangers to each other. At a later day you will know that ties which
+must inevitably be broken ought not to be formed at all."
+
+She sighed lightly, and her brows contracted, but almost immediately
+grew clear again.
+
+"How painful it is for a woman to be powerless to follow the man she
+loves through all the phases of his life! And if that man loves her
+truly, his heart must surely vibrate with pain to the deep trouble in
+hers. Are they not twice unhappy?"
+
+There was a short pause. Then she rose smiling.
+
+"You little suspected, when you came to Courcelles, that you were to
+hear a sermon, did you?"
+
+Gaston felt even further than at first from this extraordinary woman.
+Was the charm of that delightful hour due after all to the coquetry of
+the mistress of the house? She had been anxious to display her wit. He
+bowed stiffly to the Vicomtesse, and went away in desperation.
+
+On the way home he tried to detect the real character of a creature
+supple and hard as a steel spring; but he had seen her pass through so
+many phases, that he could not make up his mind about her. The tones
+of her voice, too, were ringing in his ears; her gestures, the little
+movements of her head, and the varying expression of her eyes grew
+more gracious in memory, more fascinating as he thought of them. The
+Vicomtesse's beauty shone out again for him in the darkness; his
+reviving impressions called up yet others, and he was enthralled anew
+by womanly charm and wit, which at first he had not perceived. He fell
+to wandering musings, in which the most lucid thoughts grow refractory
+and flatly contradict each other, and the soul passes through a brief
+frenzy fit. Youth only can understand all that lies in the dithyrambic
+outpourings of youth when, after a stormy siege, of the most frantic
+folly and coolest common-sense, the heart finally yields to the
+assault of the latest comer, be it hope, or despair, as some
+mysterious power determines.
+
+At three-and-twenty, diffidence nearly always rules a man's conduct;
+he is perplexed with a young girl's shyness, a girl's trouble; he is
+afraid lest he should express his love ill, sees nothing but
+difficulties, and takes alarm at them; he would be bolder if he loved
+less, for he has no confidence in himself, and with a growing sense of
+the cost of happiness comes a conviction that the woman he loves
+cannot easily be won; perhaps, too, he is giving himself up too
+entirely to his own pleasure, and fears that he can give none; and
+when, for his misfortune, his idol inspires him with awe, he worships
+in secret and afar, and unless his love is guessed, it dies away. Then
+it often happens that one of these dead early loves lingers on, bright
+with illusions in many a young heart. What man is there but keeps
+within him these virgin memories that grow fairer every time they rise
+before him, memories that hold up to him the ideal of perfect bliss?
+Such recollections are like children who die in the flower of
+childhood, before their parents have known anything of them but their
+smiles.
+
+So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a mood fraught
+with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt that Mme. de Beauseant
+was one of the conditions of his existence, and that death would be
+preferable to life without her. He was still young enough to feel the
+tyrannous fascination which fully-developed womanhood exerts over
+immature and impassioned natures; and, consequently, he was to spend
+one of those stormy nights when a young man's thoughts travel from
+happiness to suicide and back again--nights in which youth rushes
+through a lifetime of bliss and falls asleep from sheer exhaustion.
+Fateful nights are they, and the worst misfortune that can happen is
+to awake a philosopher afterwards. M. de Nueil was far too deeply in
+love to sleep; he rose and betook to inditing letters, but none of
+them were satisfactory, and he burned them all.
+
+
+
+The next day he went to Courcelles to make the circuit of her garden
+walls, but he waited till nightfall; he was afraid that she might see
+him. The instinct that led him to act in this way arose out of so
+obscure a mood of the soul, that none but a young man, or a man in
+like case, can fully understand its mute ecstasies and its vagaries,
+matter to set those people who are lucky enough to see life only in
+its matter-of-fact aspect shrugging their shoulders. After painful
+hesitation, Gaston wrote to Mme. de Beauseant. Here is the letter,
+which may serve as a sample of the epistolary style peculiar to
+lovers, a performance which, like the drawings prepared with great
+secrecy by children for the birthdays of father or mother, is found
+insufferable by every mortal except the recipients:--
+
+  "MADAME,--Your power over my heart, my soul, myself, is so great
+  that my fate depends wholly upon you to-day. Do not throw this
+  letter into the fire; be so kind as to read it through. Perhaps
+  you may pardon the opening sentence when you see that it is no
+  commonplace, selfish declaration, but that it expresses a simple
+  fact. Perhaps you may feel moved, because I ask for so little, by
+  the submission of one who feels himself so much beneath you, by
+  the influence that your decision will exercise upon my life. At my
+  age, madame, I only know how to love, I am utterly ignorant of
+  ways of attracting and winning a woman's love, but in my own heart
+  I know raptures of adoration of her. I am irresistibly drawn to
+  you by the great happiness that I feel through you; my thoughts
+  turn to you with the selfish instinct which bids us draw nearer to
+  the fire of life when we find it. I do not imagine that I am
+  worthy of you; it seems impossible that I, young, ignorant, and
+  shy, could bring you one-thousandth part of the happiness that I
+  drink in at the sound of your voice and the sight of you. For me
+  you are the only woman in the world. I cannot imagine life without
+  you, so I have made up my mind to leave France, and to risk my
+  life till I lose it in some desperate enterprise, in the Indies,
+  in Africa, I care not where. How can I quell a love that knows no
+  limits save by opposing to it something as infinite? Yet, if you
+  will allow me to hope, not to be yours, but to win your
+  friendship, I will stay. Let me come, not so very often, if you
+  require it, to spend a few such hours with you as those stolen
+  hours of yesterday. The keen delight of that brief happiness to be
+  cut short at the least over-ardent word from me, will suffice to
+  enable me to endure the boiling torrent in my veins. Have I
+  presumed too much upon your generosity by this entreaty to suffer
+  an intercourse in which all the gain is mine alone? You could find
+  ways of showing the world, to which you sacrifice so much, that I
+  am nothing to you; you are so clever and so proud! What have you
+  to fear? If I could only lay bare my heart to you at this moment,
+  to convince you that it is with no lurking afterthought that I
+  make this humble request! Should I have told you that my love was
+  boundless, while I prayed you to grant me friendship, if I had any
+  hope of your sharing this feeling in the depths of my soul? No,
+  while I am with you, I will be whatever you will, if only I may be
+  with you. If you refuse (as you have the power to refuse), I will
+  not utter one murmur, I will go. And if, at a later day, any other
+  woman should enter into my life, you will have proof that you were
+  right; but if I am faithful till death, you may feel some regret
+  perhaps. The hope of causing you a regret will soothe my agony,
+  and that thought shall be the sole revenge of a slighted
+  heart. . . ."
+
+Only those who have passed through all the exceeding tribulations of
+youth, who have seized on all the chimeras with two white pinions, the
+nightmare fancies at the disposal of a fervid imagination, can realize
+the horrors that seized upon Gaston de Nueil when he had reason to
+suppose that his ultimatum was in Mme. de Beauseant's hands. He saw
+the Vicomtesse, wholly untouched, laughing at his letter and his love,
+as those can laugh who have ceased to believe in love. He could have
+wished to have his letter back again. It was an absurd letter. There
+were a thousand and one things, now that he came to think of it, that
+he might have said, things infinitely better and more moving than
+those stilted phrases of his, those accursed, sophisticated,
+pretentious, fine-spun phrases, though, luckily, the punctuation had
+been pretty bad and the lines shockingly crooked. He tried not to
+think, not to feel; but he felt and thought, and was wretched. If he
+had been thirty years old, he might have got drunk, but the innocence
+of three-and-twenty knew nothing of the resources of opium nor of the
+expedients of advanced civilization. Nor had he at hand one of those
+good friends of the Parisian pattern who understand so well how to say
+/Poete, non dolet!/ by producing a bottle of champagne, or alleviate
+the agony of suspense by carrying you off somewhere to make a night of
+it. Capital fellows are they, always in low water when you are in
+funds, always off to some watering-place when you go to look them up,
+always with some bad bargain in horse-flesh to sell you; it is true,
+that when you want to borrow of them, they have always just lost their
+last louis at play; but in all other respects they are the best
+fellows on earth, always ready to embark with you on one of the steep
+down-grades where you lose your time, your soul, and your life!
+
+At length M. de Nueil received a missive through the instrumentality
+of Jacques, a letter that bore the arms of Burgundy on the scented
+seal, a letter written on vellum notepaper.
+
+He rushed away at once to lock himself in, and read and re-read /her/
+letter:--
+
+  "You are punishing me very severely, monsieur, both for the
+  friendliness of my effort to spare you a rebuff, and for the
+  attraction which intellect always has for me. I put confidence in
+  the generosity of youth, and you have disappointed me. And yet, if
+  I did not speak unreservedly (which would have been perfectly
+  ridiculous), at any rate I spoke frankly of my position, so that
+  you might imagine that I was not to be touched by a young soul. My
+  distress is the keener for my interest in you. I am naturally
+  tender-hearted and kindly, but circumstances force me to act
+  unkindly. Another woman would have flung your letter, unread, into
+  the fire; I read it, and I am answering it. My answer will make it
+  clear to you that while I am not untouched by the expression of
+  this feeling which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am
+  still far from sharing it, and the step which I am about to take
+  will show you still more plainly that I mean what I say. I wish
+  besides, to use, for your welfare, that authority, as it were,
+  which you give me over your life; and I desire to exercise it this
+  once to draw aside the veil from your eyes.
+
+  "I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely two-and-
+  twenty. You yourself cannot know what your thoughts will be at my
+  age. The vows that you make so lightly to-day may seem a very
+  heavy burden to you then. I am quite willing to believe that at
+  this moment you would give me your whole life without a regret,
+  you would even be ready to die for a little brief happiness; but
+  at the age of thirty experience will take from you the very power
+  of making daily sacrifices for my sake, and I myself should feel
+  deeply humiliated if I accepted them. A day would come when
+  everything, even Nature, would bid you leave me, and I have
+  already told you that death is preferable to desertion. Misfortune
+  has taught me to calculate; as you see, I am arguing perfectly
+  dispassionately. You force me to tell you that I have no love for
+  you; I ought not to love, I cannot, and I will not. It is too late
+  to yield, as women yield, to a blind unreasoning impulse of the
+  heart, too late to be the mistress whom you seek. My consolations
+  spring from God, not from earth. Ah, and besides, with the
+  melancholy insight of disappointed love, I read hearts too clearly
+  to accept your proffered friendship. It is only instinct. I
+  forgive the boyish ruse, for which you are not responsible as yet.
+  In the name of this passing fancy of yours, for the sake of your
+  career and my own peace of mind, I bid you stay in your own
+  country; you must not spoil a fair and honorable life for an
+  illusion which, by its very nature, cannot last. At a later day,
+  when you have accomplished your real destiny, in the fully
+  developed manhood that awaits you, you will appreciate this answer
+  of mine, though to-day it may be that you blame its hardness. You
+  will turn with pleasure to an old woman whose friendship will
+  certainly be sweet and precious to you then; a friendship untried
+  by the extremes of passion and the disenchanting processes of
+  life; a friendship which noble thoughts and thoughts of religion
+  will keep pure and sacred. Farewell; do my bidding with the
+  thought that your success will bring a gleam of pleasure into my
+  solitude, and only think of me as we think of absent friends."
+
+Gaston de Nueil read the letter, and wrote the following lines:--
+
+  "MADAME,--If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of
+  becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit
+  that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as
+  you bid me; the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only
+  be absolved by death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not
+  fear to carry a remorse all through your own----"
+
+When the man returned from his errand, M. de Nueil asked him with whom
+he left the note?
+
+"I gave it to Mme. la Vicomtesse herself, sir; she was in her carriage
+and just about to start."
+
+"For the town?"
+
+"I don't think so, sir. Mme. la Vicomtesse had post-horses."
+
+"Ah! then she is going away," said the Baron.
+
+"Yes, sir," the man answered.
+
+Gaston de Nueil at once prepared to follow Mme. de Beauseant. She led
+the way as far as Geneva, without a suspicion that he followed. And
+he? Amid the many thoughts that assailed him during that journey, one
+all-absorbing problem filled his mind--"Why did she go away?" Theories
+grew thickly on such ground for supposition, and naturally he inclined
+to the one that flattered his hopes--"If the Vicomtesse cares for me,
+a clever woman would, of course, choose Switzerland, where nobody
+knows either of us, in preference to France, where she would find
+censorious critics."
+
+An impassioned lover of a certain stamp would not feel attracted to a
+woman clever enough to choose her own ground; such women are too
+clever. However, there is nothing to prove that there was any truth in
+Gaston's supposition.
+
+The Vicomtesse took a small house by the side of the lake. As soon as
+she was installed in it, Gaston came one summer evening in the
+twilight. Jacques, that flunkey in grain, showed no sign of surprise,
+and announced /M. le Baron de Nueil/ like a discreet domestic well
+acquainted with good society. At the sound of the name, at the sight
+of its owner, Mme. de Beauseant let her book fall from her hands; her
+surprise gave him time to come close to her, and to say in tones that
+sounded like music in her ears:
+
+"What a joy it was to me to take the horses that brought you on this
+journey!"
+
+To have the inmost desires of the heart so fulfilled! Where is the
+woman who could resist such happiness as this? An Italian woman, one
+of those divine creatures who, psychologically, are as far removed
+from the Parisian as if they lived at the Antipodes, a being who would
+be regarded as profoundly immoral on this side of the Alps, an Italian
+(to resume) made the following comment on some French novels which she
+had been reading. "I cannot see," she remarked, "why these poor lovers
+take such a time over coming to an arrangement which ought to be the
+affair of a single morning." Why should not the novelist take a hint
+from this worthy lady, and refrain from exhausting the theme and the
+reader? Some few passages of coquetry it would certainly be pleasant
+to give in outline; the story of Mme. de Beauseant's demurs and sweet
+delayings, that, like the vestal virgins of antiquity, she might fall
+gracefully, and by lingering over the innocent raptures of first love
+draw from it its utmost strength and sweetness. M. de Nueil was at an
+age when a man is the dupe of these caprices, of the fence which women
+delight to prolong; either to dictate their own terms, or to enjoy the
+sense of their power yet longer, knowing instinctively as they do that
+it must soon grow less. But, after all, these little boudoir
+protocols, less numerous than those of the Congress of London, are too
+small to be worth mention in the history of this passion.
+
+For three years Mme. de Beauseant and M. de Nueil lived in the villa
+on the lake of Geneva. They lived quite alone, received no visitors,
+caused no talk, rose late, went out together upon the lake, knew, in
+short, the happiness of which we all of us dream. It was a simple
+little house, with green shutters, and broad balconies shaded with
+awnings, a house contrived of set purpose for lovers, with its white
+couches, soundless carpets, and fresh hangings, everything within it
+reflecting their joy. Every window looked out on some new view of the
+lake; in the far distance lay the mountains, fantastic visions of
+changing color and evanescent cloud; above them spread the sunny sky,
+before them stretched the broad sheet of water, never the same in its
+fitful changes. All their surroundings seemed to dream for them, all
+things smiled upon them.
+
+Then weighty matters recalled M. de Nueil to France. His father and
+brother died, and he was obliged to leave Geneva. The lovers bought
+the house; and if they could have had their way, they would have
+removed the hills piecemeal, drawn off the lake with a siphon, and
+taken everything away with them.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant followed M. de Nueil. She realized her property, and
+bought a considerable estate near Manerville, adjoining Gaston's
+lands, and here they lived together; Gaston very graciously giving up
+Manerville to his mother for the present in consideration of the
+bachelor freedom in which she left him.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant's estate was close to a little town in one of the
+most picturesque spots in the valley of the Auge. Here the lovers
+raised barriers between themselves and social intercourse, barriers
+which no creature could overleap, and here the happy days of
+Switzerland were lived over again. For nine whole years they knew
+happiness which it serves no purpose to describe; happiness which may
+be divined from the outcome of the story by those whose souls can
+comprehend poetry and prayer in their infinite manifestations.
+
+All this time Mme. de Beauseant's husband, the present Marquis (his
+father and elder brother having died), enjoyed the soundest health.
+There is no better aid to life than a certain knowledge that our
+demise would confer a benefit on some fellow-creature. M. de Beauseant
+was one of those ironical and wayward beings who, like holders of
+life-annuities, wake with an additional sense of relish every morning
+to a consciousness of good health. For the rest, he was a man of the
+world, somewhat methodical and ceremonious, and a calculator of
+consequences, who could make a declaration of love as quietly as a
+lackey announces that "Madame is served."
+
+This brief biographical notice of his lordship the Marquis de
+Beauseant is given to explain the reasons why it was impossible for
+the Marquise to marry M. de Nueil.
+
+So, after a nine years' lease of happiness, the sweetest agreement to
+which a woman ever put her hand, M. de Nueil and Mme. de Beauseant
+were still in a position quite as natural and quite as false as at the
+beginning of their adventure. And yet they had reached a fatal crisis,
+which may be stated as clearly as any problem in mathematics.
+
+Mme. la Comtesse de Nueil, Gaston's mother, a strait-laced and
+virtuous person, who had made the late Baron happy in strictly legal
+fashion would never consent to meet Mme. de Beauseant. Mme. de
+Beauseant quite understood that the worthy dowager must of necessity
+be her enemy, and that she would try to draw Gaston from his
+unhallowed and immoral way of life. The Marquise de Beauseant would
+willingly have sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she
+could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M.
+de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy
+estate, where he was making plantations and improvements. She would
+not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women
+always wish for their husbands, and even for their lovers.
+
+A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a
+rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the
+neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was
+obliged to go thither. These various personages being to each other as
+the terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light
+on the appalling problem which Mme. de Beauseant had been trying for
+the past month to solve:--
+
+  "My beloved angel, it seems like nonsense, does it not, to write
+  to you when there is nothing to keep us apart, when a caress so
+  often takes the place of words, and words too are caresses? Ah,
+  well, no, love. There are some things that a woman cannot say when
+  she is face to face with the man she loves; at the bare thought of
+  them her voice fails her, and the blood goes back to her heart;
+  she has no strength, no intelligence left. It hurts me to feel
+  like this when you are near me, and it happens often. I feel that
+  my heart should be wholly sincere for you; that I should disguise
+  no thought, however transient, in my heart; and I love the sweet
+  carelessness, which suits me so well, too much to endure this
+  embarrassment and constraint any longer. So I will tell you about
+  my anguish--yes, it is anguish. Listen to me! do not begin with
+  the little 'Tut, tut, tut,' that you use to silence me, an
+  impertinence that I love, because anything from you pleases me.
+  Dear soul from heaven, wedded to mine, let me first tell you that
+  you have effaced all memory of the pain that once was crushing the
+  life out of me. I did not know what love was before I knew you.
+  Only the candor of your beautiful young life, only the purity of
+  that great soul of yours, could satisfy the requirements of an
+  exacting woman's heart. Dear love, how very often I have thrilled
+  with joy to think that in these nine long, swift years, my
+  jealousy has not been once awakened. All the flowers of your soul
+  have been mine, all your thoughts. There has not been the faintest
+  cloud in our heaven; we have not known what sacrifice is; we have
+  always acted on the impulses of our hearts. I have known
+  happiness, infinite for a woman. Will the tears that drench this
+  sheet tell you all my gratitude? I could wish that I had knelt to
+  write the words!--Well, out of this felicity has arisen torture
+  more terrible than the pain of desertion. Dear, there are very
+  deep recesses in a woman's heart; how deep in my own heart, I did
+  not know myself until to-day, as I did not know the whole extent
+  of love. The greatest misery which could overwhelm us is a light
+  burden compared with the mere thought of harm for him whom we
+  love. And how if we cause the harm, is it not enough to make one
+  die? . . . This is the thought that is weighing upon me. But
+  it brings in its train another thought that is heavier far, a
+  thought that tarnishes the glory of love, and slays it, and turns
+  it into a humiliation which sullies life as long as it lasts. You
+  are thirty years old; I am forty. What dread this difference in
+  age calls up in a woman who loves! It is possible that, first of
+  all unconsciously, afterwards in earnest, you have felt the
+  sacrifices that you have made by renouncing all in the world for
+  me. Perhaps you have thought of your future from the social point
+  of view, of the marriage which would, of course, increase your
+  fortune, and give you avowed happiness and children who would
+  inherit your wealth; perhaps you have thought of reappearing in
+  the world, and filling your place there honorably. And then, if
+  so, you must have repressed those thoughts, and felt glad to
+  sacrifice heiress and fortune and a fair future to me without my
+  knowledge. In your young man's generosity, you must have resolved
+  to be faithful to the vows which bind us each to each in the sight
+  of God. My past pain has risen up before your mind, and the misery
+  from which you rescued me has been my protection. To owe your love
+  to your pity! The thought is even more painful to me than the fear
+  of spoiling your life for you. The man who can bring himself to
+  stab his mistress is very charitable if he gives her her deathblow
+  while she is happy and ignorant of evil, while illusions are in
+  full blossom. . . . Yes, death is preferable to the two thoughts
+  which have secretly saddened the hours for several days. To-day,
+  when you asked 'What ails you?' so tenderly, the sound of your
+  voice made me shiver. I thought that, after your wont, you were
+  reading my very soul, and I waited for your confidence to come,
+  thinking that my presentiments had come true, and that I had
+  guessed all that was going on in your mind. Then I began to think
+  over certain little things that you always do for me, and I
+  thought I could see in you the sort of affection by which a man
+  betrays a consciousness that his loyalty is becoming a burden. And
+  in that moment I paid very dear for my happiness. I felt that
+  Nature always demands the price for the treasure called love.
+  Briefly, has not fate separated us? Can you have said, 'Sooner or
+  later I must leave poor Claire; why not separate in time?' I read
+  that thought in the depths of your eyes, and went away to cry by
+  myself. Hiding my tears from you! the first tears that I have shed
+  for sorrow for these ten years; I am too proud to let you see
+  them, but I did not reproach you in the least.
+
+  "Yes, you are right. I ought not to be so selfish as to bind your
+  long and brilliant career to my so-soon out-worn life. . . . And
+  yet--how if I have been mistaken? How if I have taken your love
+  melancholy for a deliberation? Oh, my love, do not leave me in
+  suspense; punish this jealous wife of yours, but give her back the
+  sense of her love and yours; the whole woman lies in that--that
+  consciousness sanctifies everything.
+
+  "Since your mother came, since you paid a visit to Mlle. de
+  Rodiere, I have been gnawed by doubts dishonoring to us both. Make
+  me suffer for this, but do not deceive me; I want to know
+  everything that your mother said and that you think! If you have
+  hesitated between some alternative and me, I give you back your
+  liberty. . . . I will not let you know what happens to me; I will
+  not shed tears for you to see; only--I will not see you again.
+  . . . Ah! I cannot go on, my heart is breaking . . . . . . . . . .
+  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I have been sitting
+  benumbed and stupid for some moments. Dear love, I do not find
+  that any feeling of pride rises against you; you are so kind-
+  hearted, so open; you would find it impossible to hurt me or to
+  deceive me; and you will tell me the truth, however cruel it may
+  be. Do you wish me to encourage your confession? Well, then, heart
+  of mine, I shall find comfort in a woman's thought. Has not the
+  youth of your being been mine, your sensitive, wholly gracious,
+  beautiful, and delicate youth? No woman shall find henceforth the
+  Gaston whom I have known, nor the delicious happiness that he has
+  given me. . . . No; you will never love again as you have loved,
+  as you love me now; no, I shall never have a rival, it is
+  impossible. There will be no bitterness in my memories of our
+  love, and I shall think of nothing else. It is out of your power
+  to enchant any woman henceforth by the childish provocations, the
+  charming ways of a young heart, the soul's winning charm, the
+  body's grace, the swift communion of rapture, the whole divine
+  cortege of young love, in fine.
+
+  "Oh, you are a man now, you will obey your destiny, weighing and
+  considering all things. You will have cares, and anxieties, and
+  ambitions, and concerns that will rob /her/ of the unchanging
+  smile that made your lips fair for me. The tones that were always
+  so sweet for me will be troubled at times; and your eyes that
+  lighted up with radiance from heaven at the sight of me, will
+  often be lustreless for /her/. And besides, as it is impossible to
+  love you as I love you, you will never care for that woman as you
+  have cared for me. She will never keep a constant watch over
+  herself as I have done; she will never study your happiness at
+  every moment with an intuition which has never failed me. Ah, yes,
+  the man, the heart and soul, which I shall have known will exist
+  no longer. I shall bury him deep in my memory, that I may have the
+  joy of him still; I shall live happy in that fair past life of
+  ours, a life hidden from all but our inmost selves.
+
+  "Dear treasure of mine, if all the while no least thought of
+  liberty has risen in your mind, if my love is no burden on you, if
+  my fears are chimerical, if I am still your Eve--the one woman in
+  the world for you--come to me as soon as you have read this
+  letter, come quickly! Ah, in one moment I will love you more than
+  I have ever loved you, I think, in these nine years. After
+  enduring the needless torture of these doubts of which I am
+  accusing myself, every added day of love, yes, every single day,
+  will be a whole lifetime of bliss. So speak, and speak openly; do
+  not deceive me, it would be a crime. Tell me, do you wish for your
+  liberty? Have you thought of all that a man's life means? Is there
+  any regret in your mind? That /I/ should cause you a regret! I
+  should die of it. I have said it: I love you enough to set your
+  happiness above mine, your life before my own. Leave on one side,
+  if you can, the wealth of memories of our nine years' happiness,
+  that they may not influence your decision, but speak! I submit
+  myself to you as to God, the one Consoler who remains if you
+  forsake me."
+
+When Mme. de Beauseant knew that her letter was in M. de Nueil's
+hands, she sank in such utter prostration, the over-pressure of many
+thoughts so numbed her faculties, that she seemed almost drowsy. At
+any rate, she was suffering from a pain not always proportioned in its
+intensity to a woman's strength; pain which women alone know. And
+while the unhappy Marquise awaited her doom, M. de Nueil, reading her
+letter, felt that he was "in a very difficult position," to use the
+expression that young men apply to a crisis of this kind.
+
+By this time he had all but yielded to his mother's importunities and
+to the attractions of Mlle. de la Rodiere, a somewhat insignificant,
+pink-and-white young person, as straight as a poplar. It is true that,
+in accordance with the rules laid down for marriageable young ladies,
+she scarcely opened her mouth, but her rent-roll of forty thousand
+livres spoke quite sufficiently for her. Mme. de Nueil, with a
+mother's sincere affection, tried to entangle her son in virtuous
+courses. She called his attention to the fact that it was a flattering
+distinction to be preferred by Mlle. de la Rodiere, who had refused so
+many great matches; it was quite time, she urged, that he should think
+of his future, such a good opportunity might not repeat itself, some
+day he would have eighty thousand livres of income from land; money
+made everything bearable; if Mme. de Beauseant loved him for his own
+sake, she ought to be the first to urge him to marry. In short, the
+well-intentioned mother forgot no arguments which the feminine
+intellect can bring to bear upon the masculine mind, and by these
+means she had brought her son into a wavering condition.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant's letter arrived just as Gaston's love of her was
+holding out against the temptations of a settled life conformable to
+received ideas. That letter decided the day. He made up his mind to
+break off with the Marquise and to marry.
+
+"One must live a man's life," said he to himself.
+
+Then followed some inkling of the pain that this decision would give
+to Mme. de Beauseant. The man's vanity and the lover's conscience
+further exaggerated this pain, and a sincere pity for her seized upon
+him. All at once the immensity of the misery became apparent to him,
+and he thought it necessary and charitable to deaden the deadly blow.
+He hoped to bring Mme. de Beauseant to a calm frame of mind by
+gradually reconciling her to the idea of separation; while Mlle. de la
+Rodiere, always like a shadowy third between them, should be
+sacrificed to her at first, only to be imposed upon her later. His
+marriage should take place later, in obedience to Mme. de Beauseant's
+expressed wish. He went so far as to enlist the Marquise's nobleness
+and pride and all the great qualities of her nature to help him to
+succeed in this compassionate design. He would write a letter at once
+to allay her suspicions. /A letter!/ For a woman with the most
+exquisite feminine perception, as well as the intuition of passionate
+love, a letter in itself was a sentence of death.
+
+So when Jacques came and brought Mme. de Beauseant a sheet of paper
+folded in a triangle, she trembled, poor woman, like a snared swallow.
+A mysterious sensation of physical cold spread from head to foot,
+wrapping her about in an icy winding sheet. If he did not rush to her
+feet, if he did not come to her in tears, and pale, and like a lover,
+she knew that all was lost. And yet, so many hopes are there in the
+heart of a woman who loves, that she is only slain by stab after stab,
+and loves on till the last drop of life-blood drains away.
+
+"Does madame need anything?" Jacques asked gently, as he went away.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+"Poor fellow!" she thought, brushing a tear from her eyes, "he guesses
+my feelings, servant though he is!"
+
+She read: "My beloved, you are inventing idle terrors for
+yourself . . ." The Marquise gazed at the words, and a thick mist
+spread before her eyes. A voice in her heart cried, "He lies!"--Then
+she glanced down the page with the clairvoyant eagerness of passion,
+and read these words at the foot, "/Nothing has been decided as
+yet . . ./" Turning to the other side with convulsive quickness, she
+saw the mind of the writer distinctly through the intricacies of the
+wording; this was no spontaneous outburst of love. She crushed it in
+her fingers, twisted it, tore it with her teeth, flung it in the fire,
+and cried aloud, "Ah! base that he is! I was his, and he had ceased to
+love me!"
+
+She sank half dead upon the couch.
+
+
+
+M. de Nueil went out as soon as he had written his letter. When he
+came back, Jacques met him on the threshold with a note. "Madame la
+Marquise has left the chateau," said the man.
+
+M. de Nueil, in amazement, broke the seal and read:--
+
+  "MADAME,--If I could cease to love you, to take the chances of
+  becoming an ordinary man which you hold out to me, you must admit
+  that I should thoroughly deserve my fate. No, I shall not do as
+  you bid me; the oath of fidelity which I swear to you shall only
+  be absolved by death. Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not
+  fear to carry a remorse all through your own . . ."
+
+It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out for
+Geneva nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de Bourgogne had
+written, "Monsieur, you are free."
+
+M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less than three weeks
+he married Mlle. Stephanie de la Rodiere.
+
+
+
+If this commonplace story of real life ended here, it would be to some
+extent a sort of mystification. The first man you meet can tell you a
+better. But the widespread fame of the catastrophe (for, unhappily,
+this is a true tale), and all the memories which it may arouse in
+those who have known the divine delights of infinite passion, and lost
+them by their own deed, or through the cruelty of fate,--these things
+may perhaps shelter the story from criticism.
+
+Mme. la Marquise de Beauseant never left Valleroy after her parting
+from M. de Nueil. After his marriage she still continued to live
+there, for some inscrutable woman's reason; any woman is at liberty to
+assign the one which most appeals to her. Claire de Bourgogne lived in
+such complete retirement that none of the servants, save Jacques and
+her own woman, ever saw their mistress. She required absolute silence
+all about her, and only left her room to go to the chapel on the
+Valleroy estate, whither a neighboring priest came to say mass every
+morning.
+
+The Comte de Nueil sank a few days after his marriage into something
+like conjugal apathy, which might be interpreted to mean happiness or
+unhappiness equally easily.
+
+"My son is perfectly happy," his mother said everywhere.
+
+Mme. Gaston de Nueil, like a great many young women, was a rather
+colorless character, sweet and passive. A month after her marriage she
+had expectations of becoming a mother. All this was quite in
+accordance with ordinary views. M. de Nueil was very nice to her; but
+two months after his separation from the Marquise, he grew notably
+thoughtful and abstracted. But then he always had been serious, his
+mother said.
+
+After seven months of this tepid happiness, a little thing occurred,
+one of those seemingly small matters which imply such great
+development of thought and such widespread trouble of the soul, that
+only the bare fact can be recorded; the interpretation of it must be
+left to the fancy of each individual mind. One day, when M. de Nueil
+had been shooting over the lands of Manerville and Valleroy, he
+crossed Mme. de Beauseant's park on his way home, summoned Jacques,
+and when the man came, asked him, "Whether the Marquise was as fond of
+game as ever?"
+
+Jacques answering in the affirmative, Gaston offered him a good round
+sum (accompanied by plenty of specious reasoning) for a very little
+service. Would he set aside for the Marquise the game that the Count
+would bring? It seemed to Jacques to be a matter of no great
+importance whether the partridge on which his mistress dined had been
+shot by her keeper or by M. de Nueil, especially since the latter
+particularly wished that the Marquise should know nothing about it.
+
+"It was killed on her land," said the Count, and for some days Jacques
+lent himself to the harmless deceit. Day after day M. de Nueil went
+shooting, and came back at dinner-time with an empty bag. A whole week
+went by in this way. Gaston grew bold enough to write a long letter to
+the Marquise, and had it conveyed to her. It was returned to him
+unopened. The Marquise's servant brought it back about nightfall. The
+Count, sitting in the drawing-room listening, while his wife at the
+piano mangled a /Caprice/ of Herold's, suddenly sprang up and rushed
+out to the Marquise, as if he were flying to an assignation. He dashed
+through a well-known gap into the park, and went slowly along the
+avenues, stopping now and again for a little to still the loud beating
+of his heart. Smothered sounds as he came nearer the chateau told him
+that the servants must be at supper, and he went straight to Mme. de
+Beauseant's room.
+
+Mme. de Beauseant never left her bedroom. M. de Nueil could gain the
+doorway without making the slightest sound. There, by the light of two
+wax candles, he saw the thin, white Marquise in a great armchair; her
+head was bowed, her hands hung listlessly, her eyes gazing fixedly at
+some object which she did not seem to see. Her whole attitude spoke of
+hopeless pain. There was a vague something like hope in her bearing,
+but it was impossible to say whither Claire de Bourgogne was looking--
+forwards to the tomb or backwards into the past. Perhaps M. de Nueil's
+tears glittered in the deep shadows; perhaps his breathing sounded
+faintly; perhaps unconsciously he trembled, or again it may have been
+impossible that he should stand there, his presence unfelt by that
+quick sense which grows to be an instinct, the glory, the delight, the
+proof of perfect love. However it was, Mme. de Beauseant slowly turned
+her face towards the doorway, and beheld her lover of bygone days.
+Then Gaston de Nueil came forward a few paces.
+
+"If you come any further, sir," exclaimed the Marquise, growing paler,
+"I shall fling myself out of the window!"
+
+She sprang to the window, flung it open, and stood with one foot on
+the ledge, her hand upon the iron balustrade, her face turned towards
+Gaston.
+
+"Go out! go out!" she cried, "or I will throw myself over."
+
+At that dreadful cry the servants began to stir, and M. de Nueil fled
+like a criminal.
+
+When he reached his home again he wrote a few lines and gave them to
+his own man, telling him to give the letter himself into Mme. de
+Beauseant's hands, and to say that it was a matter of life and death
+for his master. The messenger went. M. de Nueil went back to the
+drawing-room where his wife was still murdering the /Caprice/, and sat
+down to wait till the answer came. An hour later, when the /Caprice/
+had come to an end, and the husband and wife sat in silence on
+opposite sides of the hearth, the man came back from Valleroy and gave
+his master his own letter, unopened.
+
+M. de Nueil went into a small room beyond the drawing-room, where he
+had left his rifle, and shot himself.
+
+The swift and fatal ending of the drama, contrary as it is to all the
+habits of young France, is only what might have been expected. Those
+who have closely observed, or known for themselves by delicious
+experience, all that is meant by the perfect union of two beings, will
+understand Gaston de Nueil's suicide perfectly well. A woman does not
+bend and form herself in a day to the caprices of passion. The
+pleasure of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful
+ingenuity of culture. Time alone, and two souls attuned each to each,
+can discover all its resources, and call into being all the tender and
+delicate delights for which we are steeped in a thousand
+superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the heart that
+lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful response of one nature to
+another, this religious belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or
+excessive happiness in the presence of one we love, that accounts in
+part for perdurable attachments and long-lived passion. If a woman
+possesses the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of
+use and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes her
+tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her most natural
+moments, or so much nature in her art, that in absence her memory is
+almost as potent as her presence. All other women are as shadows
+compared with her. Not until we have lost or known the dread of losing
+a love so vast and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if
+a man who has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by
+his own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some
+incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom
+he hoped to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never
+be revived for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his
+lips, he has dealt a deadly wound to /her/, his wife in truth, whom he
+forsook for a social chimera,--then he must either die or take refuge
+in a materialistic, selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which
+impassioned souls shrink in horror.
+
+
+
+As for Mme. de Beauseant, she doubtless did not imagine that her
+friend's despair could drive him to suicide, when he had drunk deep of
+love for nine years. Possibly she may have thought that she alone was
+to suffer. At any rate, she did quite rightly to refuse the most
+humiliating of all positions; a wife may stoop for weighty social
+reasons to a kind of compromise which a mistress is bound to hold in
+abhorrence, for in the purity of her passion lies all its
+justification.
+
+
+
+ANGOULEME, September 1832.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Beauseant, Marquis and Comte de
+  Father Goriot
+  An Episode under the Terror
+
+Beauseant, Marquise de
+  Letters of Two Brides
+
+Beauseant, Vicomte de
+  Father Goriot
+
+Beauseant, Vicomtesse de
+  Father Goriot
+  Albert Savarus
+
+Champignelles, De
+  The Seamy Side of History
+
+Jacques (M. de Beauseant's butler)
+  Father Goriot
+
+Nueil, Gaston de
+  The Deserted Woman
+  Albert Savarus
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext The Deserted Woman, by Honore de Balzac
+