Beatrix Part 34

"Don't you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved the child of that woman more than mine--Oh! that's the end of my patience and all my resignation."

She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in her heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like that iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay,--it supports, it is a force.

"Come, go home, dear sufferer. In view of such misery the abbe will surely give me absolution for the venial sins which the deceits of the world compel us to commit. Leave me now, my daughter," she said, going to her _prie-Dieu_. "I must pray to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin for you, with special supplication. Good-bye, my dear Sabine; above all things, do not neglect your religious duties if you wish us to succeed."

"And if we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste has killed within me the holy fervor of love,--killed it by sickening me with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!"

The next day, about two in the afternoon, one of the vicars of the faubourg Saint-Germain appointed to a vacant bishopric in 1840 (an office refused by him for the third time), the Abbe Brossette, one of the most distinguished priests in Paris, crossed the court-yard of the hotel de Grandlieu, with a step which we must needs call the ecclesiastical step, so significant is it of caution, mystery, calmness, gravity, and dignity. He was a thin little man about fifty years of age, with a face as white as that of an old woman, chilled by priestly austerities, and hollowed by all the sufferings which he espoused.

Two black eyes, ardent with faith yet softened by an expression more mysterious than mystical, animated that truly apostolical face. He was smiling as he mounted the steps of the portico, so little did he believe in the enormity of the cases about which his penitent sent for him; but as the hand of the d.u.c.h.ess was an open palm for charity, she was worth the time which her innocent confessions stole from the more serious miseries of the parish.

When the vicar was announced the d.u.c.h.ess rose, and made a few steps toward him in the salon,--a distinction she granted only to cardinals, bishops, simple priests, d.u.c.h.esses older then herself, and persons of royal blood.

"My dear abbe," she said, pointing to a chair and speaking in a low voice, "I need the authority of your experience before I throw myself into a rather wicked intrigue, although it is one which must result in great good; and I desire to know from you whether I shall make hindrances to my own salvation in the course I propose to follow."

"Madame la d.u.c.h.esse," replied the abbe, "do not mix up spiritual things with worldly things; they are usually irreconcilable. In the first place, what is this matter?"

"You know that my daughter Sabine is dying of grief; Monsieur du Guenic has left her for Madame de Rochefide."

"It is very dreadful, very serious; but you know what our dear Saint Francois de Sales says on that subject. Remember too how Madame Guyon complained of the lack of mysticism in the proofs of conjugal love; she would have been very willing to see her husband with a Madame de Rochefide."

"Sabine is only too gentle; she is almost too completely a Christian wife; but she has not the slightest taste for mysticism."

"Poor young woman!" said the abbe, maliciously. "What method will you take to remedy the evil?"

"I have committed the sin, my dear director, of thinking how to launch upon Madame de Rochefide a little man, very self-willed and full of the worst qualities, who will certainly induce her to dismiss my son-in-law."

"My daughter," replied the abbe, stroking his chin, "we are not now in the confessional; I am not obliged to make myself your judge. From the world's point of view, I admit that the result would be decisive--"

"The means seem to me odious," she said.

"Why? No doubt the duty of a Christian woman is to withdraw a sinning woman from an evil path, rather than push her along it; but when a woman has advanced upon that path as far as Madame de Rochefide, it is not the hand of man, but that of G.o.d, which recalls such a sinner; she needs a thunderbolt."

"Father," replied the d.u.c.h.ess, "I thank you for your indulgence; but the thought has occurred to me that my son-in-law is brave and a Breton. He was heroic at the time of the rash affair of that poor MADAME. Now, if the young fellow who undertook to make Madame de Rochefide love him were to quarrel with Calyste, and a duel should ensue--"

"You have thought wisely, Madame la d.u.c.h.esse; and it only proves that in crooked paths you will always find rocks of stumbling."

"I have discovered a means, my dear abbe, to do a great good; to withdraw Madame de Rochefide from the fatal path in which she now is; to restore Calyste to his wife, and possibly to save from h.e.l.l a poor distracted creature."

"In that case, why consult me?" asked the vicar, smiling.

"Ah!" replied the d.u.c.h.ess, "Because I must permit myself some rather nasty actions--"

"You don't mean to rob anybody?"

"On the contrary, I shall apparently have to spend a great deal of money."

"You will not calumniate, or--"

"Oh! oh!"

"--injure your neighbor?"

"I don't know about that."

"Come, tell me your plan," said the abbe, now becoming curious.

"Suppose, instead of driving out one nail by another,--this is what I thought at my _prie-Dieu_ after imploring the Blessed Virgin to enlighten me,--I were to free Calyste by persuading Monsieur de Rochefide to take back his wife? Instead of lending a hand to evil for the sake of doing good to my daughter, I should do one great good by another almost as great--"

The vicar looked at the Portuguese lady, and was pensive.

"That is evidently an idea that came to you from afar," he said, "so far that--"

"I have thanked the Virgin for it," replied the good and humble d.u.c.h.ess; "and I have made a vow--not counting a novena--to give twelve hundred francs to some poor family if I succeed. But when I communicated my plan to Monsieur de Grandlieu he began to laugh, and said: 'Upon my honor, at your time of life I think you women have a devil of your own.'"

"Monsieur le duc made as a husband the same reply I was about to make when you interrupted me," said the abbe, who could not restrain a smile.

"Ah! Father, if you approve of the idea, will you also approve of the means of execution? It is necessary to do to a certain Madame Schontz (a Beatrix of the quartier Saint-Georges) what I proposed to do to Madame de Rochefide."

"I am certain that you will not do any real wrong," said the vicar, cleverly, not wis.h.i.+ng to hear any more, having found the result so desirable. "You can consult me later if you find your conscience muttering," he added. "But why, instead of giving that person in the rue Saint-Georges a fresh occasion for scandal, don't you give her a husband?"

"Ah! my dear director, now you have rectified the only bad thing I had in my plan. You are worthy of being an archbishop, and I hope I shall not die till I have had the opportunity of calling you Your Eminence."

"I see only one difficulty in all this," said the abbe.

"What is that?"

"Suppose Madame de Rochefide chooses to keep your son-in-law after she goes back to her husband?"

"That's my affair," replied the d.u.c.h.ess; "when one doesn't often intrigue, one does so--"

"Badly, very badly," said the abbe. "Habit is necessary for everything.

Try to employ some of those scamps who live by intrigue, and don't show your own hand."

"Ah! monsieur l'abbe, if I make use of the means of h.e.l.l, will Heaven help me?"

"You are not at confession," repeated the abbe. "Save your child."

The worthy d.u.c.h.ess, delighted with her vicar, accompanied him to the door of the salon.

XXII. THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLa.s.s GRISETTE

A storm was gathering, as we see, over Monsieur de Rochefide, who enjoyed at that moment the greatest amount of happiness that a Parisian can desire in being to Madame Schontz as much a husband as he had been to Beatrix. It seemed therefore, as the duke had very sensibly said to his wife, almost an impossibility to upset so agreeable and satisfactory an existence. This opinion will oblige us to give certain details on the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide after his wife had placed him in the position of a _deserted husband_. The reader will then be enabled to understand the enormous difference which our laws and our morals put between the two s.e.xes in the same situation. That which turns to misery for the woman turns to happiness for the man. This contrast may inspire more than one young woman with the determination to remain in her own home, and to struggle there, like Sabine du Guenic, by practising (as she may select) the most aggressive or the most inoffensive virtues.

Some days after Beatrix had abandoned him, Arthur de Rochefide, now an only child in consequence of the death of his sister, the first wife of the Marquis d'Ajuda-Pinto, who left no children, found himself sole master of the hotel de Rochefide, rue d'Anjou Saint-Honore, and of two hundred thousand francs a year left to him by his father. This rich inheritance, added to the fortune which Arthur possessed when he married, brought his income, including that from the fortune of his wife, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman endowed with a nature such as Mademoiselle des Touches had described it in a few words to Calyste, such wealth was happiness enough. While his wife continued in her home and fulfilled the duties of maternity, Rochefide enjoyed this immense fortune; but he did not spend it any more than he expended the faculties of his mind. His good, stout vanity, gratified by the figure he presented as a handsome man (to which he owed a few successes that authorized him to despise women), allowed itself free scope in the matter of brains. Gifted with the sort of mind which we must call a reflector, he appropriated the sallies of others, the wit of the stage and the _pet.i.ts journaux_, by his method of repeating them, and applied them as formulas of criticism. His military joviality (he had served in the Royal Guard) seasoned conversation with so much point that women without any intellects proclaimed him witty, and the rest did not dare to contradict them.

This system Arthur pursued in all things; he owed to nature the convenient genius of imitation without mimicry; he imitated seriously.