“What is the matter with you, my boy?” said Claude Vignon, stealing quietly in after him and taking his hand. “You are in love, you believe yourself scorned; but it is not so. In a few days the field will be open to you, you will be supreme here, and be loved by more than one woman; in fact, if you know how to manage matters, you will be a Sultan here.”

“What are you saying?” cried Calyste, starting to his feet and dragging Claude away into the library. “Who that is here loves me?”

“Camille,” said Vignon.

“Camille loves me?” said Calyste. “And what of you?”

“I,” said Claude, “I⁠—”

He paused. Then he sat down and rested his head against a pillow, in the deepest melancholy.

“I am weary of life,” he went on, after a short silence, “and I have not the courage to end it. I wish I were mistaken in what I have told you; but within the last few days more than one vivid gleam has flashed upon me. I did not wander about the rocks of le Croisic for my amusement, on my soul! The bitterness of my tone when, on my return, I found you talking to Camille, had its source in the depths of my wounded self-respect. I will have an explanation presently with Camille. Two minds so clear-sighted as hers and mine cannot deceive each other. Between two professional duelists a fight is soon ended. So I may at once announce my departure. Yes, I shall leave les Touches, tomorrow perhaps, with Conti.

“When we are no longer here, some strange⁠—perhaps terrible⁠—things will certainly happen, and I shall be sorry not to look on at these struggles of passion, so rare in France, and so dramatic!⁠—You are very young to enter on so perilous a fight; I am interested in you. But for the deep disgust I feel for women, I would stay to help you to play the game; it is difficult; you may lose it; you have two remarkable women to deal with, and you are already too much in love with one to make use of the other.

“Béatrix must surely have some tenacity in her nature, and Camille has magnanimity. You, perhaps, like some fragile and brittle thing, will be dashed between the two rocks, swept away by the torrent of passion. Take care.”

Calyste’s amazement on hearing these words allowed Claude Vignon to finish his speech and leave the lad, who remained in the position of a traveler in the Alps to whom his guide has proved the depth of an abyss by dropping a stone in.

He had heard from Claude himself that Camille loved him, Calyste, at the moment when he knew that his love for Béatrix would end only with his life. There was something in the situation too much for such a guileless young soul. Crushed by immense regret that weighed upon him for the past, killed by the perplexities of the present, between Béatrix, whom he loved, and Camille, whom he no longer loved, when Claude said that she loved him, the poor youth was desperate; he sat undecided, lost in thought. He vainly sought to guess the reasons for which Félicité had rejected his devotion, to go to Paris and accept that of Claude Vignon.

Now and again Madame de Rochefide’s voice came to his ear, pure and clear, reviving the violent excitement from which he had fled in leaving the drawing-room. Several times he could hardly master himself so far as to restrain a fierce desire to seize her and snatch her away.⁠—What would become of him? Could he ever come again to les Touches? Knowing that Camille loved him, how could he here worship Béatrix?⁠—He could find no issue from his difficulties.

Gradually silence fell on the house. Without heeding it, he heard the shutting of doors. Then suddenly he counted the twelve strokes of midnight told by the clock in the next room, where the voices of Camille and Claude now roused him from the numbing contemplation of the future. A light shone there amid the darkness. Before he could show himself, he heard these dreadful words spoken by Vignon.

“You came back from Paris madly in love with Calyste,” he was saying to Félicité. “But you were appalled at the consequences of such a passion at your age; it would lead you into a gulf, a hell⁠—to suicide perhaps. Love can exist only in the belief that it is eternal, and you could foresee, a few paces before you in life, a terrible parting⁠—weariness and old age putting a dreadful end to a beautiful poem. You remember Adolphe, the disastrous termination of the loves of Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant, who were, nevertheless, much better matched in age than you and Calyste.

“So, then, you took me, as men take fascines, to raise an entrenchment between yourself and the enemy. But while you tried to attach me to les Touches, was it not that you might spend your days in secret worship of your divinity? But to carry out such a scheme, at once unworthy and sublime, you should have chosen a common man, or a man so absorbed by lofty thought that he would be easily deceived. You fancied that I was simple, and as easy to cheat as a man of genius. I am, it would seem, no more than a clever man: I saw through you. When yesterday I sang the praises of women of your age, and explained to you why Calyste loved you, do you suppose that I thought all your ecstatic looks⁠—brilliant, enchanting⁠—were meant for me? Had I not already read your soul? The eyes, indeed, were fixed on mine, but the heart throbbed for Calyste.⁠—You have never been loved, my poor Maupin; and you never will be now, after denying yourself the beautiful fruit which chance put in your way at the very gates of woman’s hell, which must close at the touch of the figure 50.”

“And why has love always avoided me?” she asked, in a broken voice. “You who know everything, tell me.”

“Why, you are unamiable,” said he; “you will not yield to love, you want it to yield to you. You can perhaps be led into the mischief and spirit of a schoolboy; but you have no youth of heart, your mind it too deep, you never were artless and you cannot begin now. Your charm lies in mystery; it is abstract, and not practical. And, again, your power repels very powerful natures; they dread a conflict. Your strength may attract young souls, which, like Calyste’s, love to feel protected; but, in the long run, it is fatiguing. You are superior, sublime! You must accept the disadvantages of these two qualities; they are wearisome.”

“What a verdict!” cried Camille. “Can I never be a woman? Am I a monster?”

“Possibly,” said Claude.

“We shall see,” cried the woman, stung to the quick.

“Good night, my dear. I leave tomorrow.⁠—I owe you no grudge, Camille; I think you the greatest of women; but if I should consent to play the part any longer of a screen or a curtain,” said Claude, with too marked inflections of his voice, “you would despise me utterly. We can part now without grief or remorse; we have no happiness to mourn for, no hopes to disappoint.

“To you, as to some infinitely rare men of genius, love is not what Nature made it⁠—a vehement necessity, with acute but transient delights attached to its satisfaction, and then death; you regard it as what Christianity has made it: an ideal realm full of noble sentiments, of immense small things, of poetry and spiritual sensations, of sacrifices, flowers of morality, enchanting harmonies, placed far above all vulgar grossness, but whither two beings joined to be one angel are carried up on the wings of pleasure. This was what I hoped for; I thought I held one of the keys which open the door that is shut to so many persons, and through which we soar into infinitude. You were there already! And so I was deceived.

“I am going back to misery in my vast prison, Paris. Such a deception at the beginning of my career would have been enough to make me flee from woman; now, it fills my soul with such disenchantment as casts me forever into appalling solitude; I shall be destitute even of the faith which helped the Holy Fathers to people it with sacred visions.⁠—This, my dear Camille, is what a superior nature brings us to. We may each of us sing the terrible chant that a poet has put into the mouth of Moses addressing the Almighty:

“O Lord! Thou hast made me powerful and alone!”

At this moment Calyste came in.

“I ought to let you know that I am here,” said he.

Mademoiselle des Touches looked absolutely terrified; a sudden color flushed her calm features with a fiery red. All through the scene she was handsomer than she had ever been in her life.

“We thought you had gone, Calyste,” said Claude; “but this involuntary indiscretion on both sides will have done no harm; perhaps you will feel more free at les Touches now that you know Félicité so completely. Her silence shows me that I was not mistaken as to the part she intended that I should play. She loves you, as I told you; but she loves you for yourself, and not for herself⁠—a feeling which few women are fitted to conceive of or to cling to: very few of them know the delights of pain kept alive by desire. It is one of the grander passions reserved for men;⁠—but she is somewhat of a man,” he added, with a smile. “Your passion for Béatrix will torture her and make her happy, both at once.”

Tears rose to Mademoiselle des Touches’ eyes; she dared not look either at the merciless Claude or the ingenuous Calyste. She was frightened at having been understood; she had not supposed that any man, whatever his gifts, could divine such a torment of refined feeling, such lofty heroism as hers. And Calyste, seeing her so humiliated at finding her magnanimity betrayed, sympathized with the agitation of the woman he had placed so high, and whom he beheld so stricken. By an irresistible impulse, he fell at Camille’s feet and kissed her hands, hiding his tear-washed face in them.

“Claude!” she cried, “do not desert me; what will become of me?”

“What have you to fear?” replied the critic. “Calyste already loves the Marquise like a madman. You can certainly have no stronger barrier between him and yourself than this passion fanned into life by your own act. It is quite as effectual as I could be. Yesterday there was danger for you and for him; but today everything will give you maternal joys,” and he gave her a mocking glance. “You will be proud of his triumphs.”

Félicité looked at Calyste, who, at these words, raised his head with a hasty movement. Claude Vignon was sufficiently revenged by the pleasure he took in seeing their confusion.

“You pushed him towards Madame de Rochefide,” Vignon went on; “he is now under the spell. You have dug your own grave. If you had but trusted yourself to me, you would have avoided the disasters that await you.”

“Disasters!” cried Camille Maupin, raising Calyste’s head to the level of her own, kissing his hair, and wetting it with her tears. “No, Calyste. Forget all you have just heard, and count me for nothing!”

She stood up in front of the two men, drawn to her full height, quelling them by the lightnings that flashed from her eyes in which all her soul shone.

“While Claude was speaking,” she went on, “I saw all the beauty, the dignity of hopeless love; is it not the only sentiment that brings us near to God?⁠—Do not love me, Calyste; but I⁠—I will love you as no other woman can ever love!”

It was the wildest cry that ever a wounded eagle sent out from his eyrie. Claude, on one knee, took her hand and kissed it.

“Now go, my dear boy,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Calyste; “your mother may be uneasy.”

Calyste returned to Guérande at a leisurely pace, turning round to see the light which shone from the windows of Béatrix’s rooms. He was himself surprised that he felt so little pity for Camille; he was almost annoyed with her for having deprived him of fifteen months of happiness. And again, now and then, he felt the same thrill in himself that Camille had just caused him, he felt the tears she had shed on his hair, he suffered in her suffering, he fancied he could hear the moans⁠—for, no doubt, she was moaning⁠—of this wonderful woman for whom he had so longed a few days since.

As he opened the courtyard gate at home, where all was silent, he saw through the window his mother working by the primitive lamp while waiting for him. Tears rose to his eyes at the sight.

“What more has happened?” asked Fanny, her face expressive of terrible anxiety. Calyste’s only reply was to clasp his mother in his arms and kiss her cheeks, her forehead, her hair, with the passionate effusion which delights a mother, infusing into her the subtle fires of the life she gave.

“It is you that I love!” said Calyste to his mother, blushing, and almost shamefaced; “you who live for me alone, whom I would fain make happy.”

“But you are not in your usual frame of mind, my child,” said the Baroness, looking at her son. “What has happened?”

“Camille loves me,” said he; “and I no longer love her.”

The Baroness drew him towards her and kissed him on the forehead, and in the deep silence of the gloomy old tapestried room he could hear the rapid beating of his mother’s heart. The Irishwoman was jealous of Camille, and had suspected the truth. While awaiting her son night after night she had studied that woman’s passion; led by the light of persistent meditation, she had entered into Camille’s heart; and without being able to account for it, she had understood that in that unwedded soul there was a sort of motherly affection. Calyste’s story horrified this simple and guiless mother.

“Well,” said she, after a pause, “love Madame de Rochefide; she will cause me no sorrow.”

Béatrix was not free; she could not upset any of the plans they had made for Calyste’s happiness, at least so Fanny thought; she saw in her a sort of daughter-in-law to love, and not a rival mother to contend with.

“But Béatrix will never love me!” cried Calyste.

“Perhaps,” replied the Baroness, with a knowing air. “Did you not say that she is to be alone tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my child,” said the mother, coloring, “jealousy lurks in all our hearts, but I did not know that I should ever find it at the bottom of my own, for I did not think that anyone would try to rob me of my Calyste’s affection!” She sighed. “I fancied,” she went on, “that marriage would be to you what it was to me. What lights you have thrown on my mind during these two months! What colors are reflected on your very natural passion, my poor darling!⁠—Well, still seem to love your Mademoiselle des Touches; the Marquise will be jealous of her, and will be yours.”

“Oh, my sweet mother, Camille would never have told me that!” cried Calyste, taking his mother by the waist, and kissing her in the neck.

“You make me very wicked, you bad child,” said she, quite happy at seeing the beaming face hope gave to her son, who gaily went up the winding stairs.

Next morning Calyste desired Gasselin to stand on the road from Guérande to Saint-Nazaire, and watch for Mademoiselle des Touches’ carriage; then, as it went past, he was to count the persons in it.

Gasselin returned just as the family had sat down together at breakfast.

“What can have happened?” said Mademoiselle du Guénic; “Gasselin is running as if Guérande were burning.”

“He must have caught the rat,” said Mariotte, who was bringing in the coffee, milk, and toast.

“He is coming from the town and not from the garden,” replied the blind woman.

“But the rat’s hole is behind the wall to the front by the street,” said Mariotte.

“Monsieur le Chevalier, there were five of them; four inside and the coachman.”

“Two ladies on the back seat?” asked Calyste.

“And two gentlemen in front,” replied Gasselin.

“Saddle my father’s horse, ride after them; be at Saint-Nazaire by the time the boat starts for Paimboeuf; and if the two men go on board, come back and tell me as fast as you can gallop.”

Gasselin went.

“Why, nephew, you have the very devil in you!” exclaimed old aunt Zéphirine.

“Let him please himself, sister,” cried the Baron. “He was as gloomy as an owl, and now he is as merry as a lark.”

“Perhaps you told him that our dear Charlotte was coming,” said the old lady, turning to her sister-in-law.

“No,” replied the Baroness.

“I thought he might wish to go to meet her,” said Mademoiselle du Guénic slyly.

“If Charlotte is to stay three months with her aunt, he has time enough to see her in,” replied the Baroness.

“Why, sister, what has occurred since yesterday?” asked the old lady. “You were so delighted to think that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was going this morning to fetch her niece.”

“Jacquelin wants me to marry Charlotte to snatch me from perdition, aunt,” said Calyste, laughing, and giving his mother a look of intelligence. “I was on the Mall this morning when Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was talking to Monsieur du Halga; she did not reflect that it would be far worse perdition for me to be married at my age.”

“It is written above,” cried the old aunt, interrupting Calyste, “that I am to die neither happy nor at peace. I should have liked to see our family continued, and some of our lands redeemed⁠—but nothing of the kind! Can you, my fine nephew, put anything in the scale to outweigh such duties as these?”

“Why,” said the Baron, “can Mademoiselle des Touches hinder Calyste from marrying in due course? I must go to see her.”

“I can assure you, father, that Félicité will never be an obstacle in the way of my marriage.”

“I cannot make head or tail of it!” said the blind woman, who knew nothing of her nephew’s sudden passion for the Marquise de Rochefide.

The mother kept her son’s secret; in such matters silence is instinctive in all women. The old aunt sank into deep meditation, listening with all her might, spying every voice, every sound, to guess the mystery they were keeping from her.

Gasselin soon returned, and told his young master that he had not needed to go so far as Saint-Nazaire to learn that Mademoiselle des Touches and the lady would return alone; he had heard it in the town, from Bernus, the carrier, who had taken charge of the gentlemen’s baggage.

“They will come back alone?” said Calyste. “Bring out my horse.”

Gasselin supposed from his young master’s voice that there was something serious on hand; he saddled both the horses, loaded the pistols without saying anything, and dressed to ride out with Calyste. Calyste was so delighted to know that Claude and Gennaro were gone, that he never thought of the party he would meet at Saint-Nazaire; he thought only of the pleasure of escorting the Marquise. He took his old father’s hands and pressed them affectionately, he kissed his mother, and put his arm round his old aunt’s waist.

“Well, at any rate, I like him better thus than when he is sad,” said old Zéphirine.

“Where are you off to, Chevalier?” asked his father.

“To Saint-Nazaire.”

“The deuce you are! And when is the wedding to be?” said the Baron, who thought he was in a hurry to see Charlotte de Kergarouët. “I should like to be a grandfather; it is high time.”

When Gasselin showed his evident intention of riding out with Calyste, it occurred to the young man that he might return in Camille’s carriage with Béatrix, leaving his horse in Gasselin’s care, and he clapped the man on the shoulder, saying:

“That was well thought of.”

“So I should think,” replied Gasselin.

“Spare the horses, my boy,” said his father, coming out on the steps with Fanny; “they have twelve leagues before them.”

Calyste exchanged looks full of meaning with his mother, and was gone.

“Dearest treasure!” said she, seeing him bend his head under the top of the gate.

“God preserve him!” replied the Baron, “for we shall never make another.”

This little speech, in the rather coarse taste of a country gentleman, made the Baroness shiver.

“My nephew is not so much in love with Charlotte as to rush to meet her,” said old Mademoiselle to Mariotte, who was clearing the table.

“Oh, a fine lady has come to les Touches, a Marquise, and he is running after her. Well, well, he is young!” said Mariotte.

“Those women will be the death of him,” said Mademoiselle du Guénic.

“That won’t kill him, mademoiselle, quite the contrary,” replied Mariotte, who seemed quite happy in Calyste’s happiness.

Calyste was riding at a pace that might have killed his horse, when Gasselin very happily asked his master whether he wished to arrive before the departure of the boat; this was by no means his purpose; he had no wish to be seen by either Conti or Vignon. The young man reined in his horse and looked complacently at the double furrow traced by the wheels of the carriage on the sandy parts of the road. He was wildly gay merely at the thought: “She passed this way; she will come back this way; her eyes rested on those woods, on these trees!”

“What a pretty road!” said he to Gasselin.

“Yes, sir, Brittany is the finest country in the world,” replied the servant. “Are there such flowers in the hedges, or green lanes that wind like this one, anywhere else to be found?”

“Nowhere, Gasselin.”

“Here comes Bernus’ carriage,” said Gasselin.

“Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël will be in it with her niece; let us hide,” said Calyste.

“Hide here, sir! are you crazy? We are in the midst of the sands.”

The carriage, which was in fact crawling up a sandy hill above Saint-Nazaire, presently appeared, in all the artless simplicity of rude Breton construction. To Calyste’s great astonishment the conveyance was full.

“We have left Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël and her sister and her niece in a great pother,” said the driver to Gasselin; “all the places had been taken by the customhouse.”

“I am done for!” cried Calyste. The vehicle was in fact full of customhouse men on their way, no doubt, to relieve those in charge at the salt-marshes.

When Calyste reached the little esplanade surrounding the Church of Saint-Nazaire, whence there is a view of Paimboeuf and of the majestic estuary of the Loire where it struggles with the tide, he found Camille and the Marquise waiving their handkerchiefs to bid a last farewell to the two passengers borne away by the steam packet. Béatrix was quite bewitching, her face tenderly shaded by the reflection from a rice-straw hat on which poppies were lightly piled, tied by a scarlet ribbon; in a flowered muslin dress, one little, slender foot put forward in a green gaitered shoe, leaning on her slight parasol-stick, and waving her well-gloved hand. Nothing is more strikingly effective than a woman on a rock, like a statue on its pedestal.

Conti could see Calyste go up to Camille.

“I thought,” said the youth to Mademoiselle des Touches, “that you two ladies would be returning alone.”

“That was very nice of you, Calyste,” she replied, taking his hand. Béatrix looked round, glanced at her young adorer, and gave him the most imperious flash at her command. A smile that the Marquise caught on Camille’s eloquent lips made her feel the vulgarity of this impulse, worthy of a mere bourgeoise. Madame de Rochefide then said with a smile to Calyste:

“And was it not rather impertinent to suppose that I could bore Camille on the way?”

“My dear, one man for two widows is not much in the way,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, taking Calyste’s arm, and leaving Béatrix to gaze after the boat.

At this instant Calyste heard in the street of what must be called the port of Saint-Nazaire the voices of Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, Charlotte, and Gasselin, all three chattering like magpies. The old maid was catechising Gasselin, and wanted to know what had brought him and his master to Saint-Nazaire; Mademoiselle des Touches’ carriage had made a commotion.

Before the lad could escape, Charlotte had caught sight of him.

“There is Calyste!” cried the girl.

“Go and offer them my carriage; their woman can sit by my coachman,” said Camille, who knew that Madame de Kergarouët, with her daughter and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, had failed to get places.

Calyste, who could not avoid obeying Camille, went to deliver this message. As soon as she knew that she would have to ride with the Marquise de Rochefide and the famous Camille Maupin, Madame de Kergarouët ignored her elder sister’s objections; Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël refused to avail herself of what she called the devil’s chariot. At Nantes, people lived in rather more civilized latitudes than at Guérande; Camille was admired; she was regarded as the Muse of Brittany and an honor to the country; she excited as much curiosity as jealousy. The absolution granted her in Paris by the fashionable world was consecrated by Mademoiselle des Touches’ fine fortune, and perhaps by her former successes at Nantes, which was proud of having been the birthplace of Camille Maupin.

So the Viscountess, crazy with curiosity, dragged away her old sister, turning a deaf ear to her jeremiads.

“Good morning, Calyste,” said little Charlotte.

“Good morning, Charlotte,” replied Calyste, but he did not offer her his arm.

Both speechless with surprise, she at his coldness, he at his own cruelty, they went up the hollow ravine that is called a street at Saint-Nazaire, following the two sisters in silence. In an instant the girl of sixteen saw the castle in the air which her romantic hopes had built and furnished crumble into ruins. She and Calyste had so constantly played together during their childhood, they had been so intimately connected, that she imagined her future life secure. She had hurried on, carried away by heedless happiness, like a bird rushing down on a field of wheat; she was checked in her flight without being able to imagine what the obstacle could be.

“What is the matter, Calyste?” she asked, taking his hand.

“Nothing,” he replied, withdrawing his hand with terrible haste as he thought of his aunt’s schemes and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoëls.

Tears filled Charlotte’s eyes. She looked at the handsome youth without animosity; but she was to feel the first pangs of jealousy and know the dreadful rage of rivalry at the sight of the two Parisian beauties, which led her to suspect the cause of Calyste’s coldness.

Charlotte de Kergarouët was of middle height; she had rustic, rosy cheeks, a round face with wide-awake black eyes that affected intelligence, a quantity of brown hair, a round waist, flat back, and thin arms, and the crisp, decided tone of speech adopted by country-bred girls who do not wish to seem simpletons. She was the spoilt child of the family in consequence of her aunt’s preference for her. At this moment she was wearing the plaid tweed cloak lined with green silk that she had put on for the passage in the steamboat. Her traveling gown of cheap stuff, with a chaste gathered body and a finely pleated collar, would presently strike her as being hideous in comparison with the fresh morning dress worn by Béatrix and Camille. She would be painfully conscious of stockings soiled on the rocks and the boats she had jumped into, of old leather shoes, chosen especially that there might be nothing good to spoil on the journey, as is the manner and custom of provincial folk.

As to the Vicomtesse de Kergarouët, she was typically provincial. Tall, lean, faded, full of covert pretentiousness which only showed when it was wounded, a great talker, and by dint of talk picking up a few ideas as a billiard-player makes a cannon, which gave her a reputation for brilliancy; trying to snub Parisians by a display of blunt country shrewdness, and an assumption of perfect contentment constantly paraded; stooping in the hope of being picked up and furious at being left on her knees; fishing for compliments, as the English have it, and not always catching them; dressing in a style at once exaggerated and slatternly; fancying that a lack of politeness was lofty impertinence, and that she could distress people greatly by paying them no attention; refusing things she wished for to have them offered a second time and pressed on her beyond reason; her head full of extinct subjects, and much astonished to find herself behind the times; finally, hardly able to abstain for one hour from dragging in Nantes, and the small lions of Nantes, and the gossip of the upper ten of Nantes; complaining of Nantes and criticising Nantes, and then regarding as a personal affront the concurrence extorted from the politeness of those who rashly agreed with all she said.

Her manners, her speech, and her ideas had to some extent rubbed off on her four daughters.

To meet Camille Maupin and Madame de Rochefide! Here was fame for the future, and matter for a hundred conversations! She marched on the church as if to take it by storm, flourishing her handkerchief, which she unfolded to show the corners ponderously embroidered at home, and trimmed with worn-out lace. She had a rather stalwart gait, which did not matter in a woman of seven-and-forty.

“Monsieur le Chevalier,” said she, and she pointed to Calyste, who was following sulkily enough with Charlotte, “has informed us of your amiable offer; but my sister, my daughter, and I fear we shall incommode you.”

“Not I, sister; I shall not inconvenience these ladies,” said the old maid sharply. “I can surely find a horse in Saint-Nazaire to carry me home.”

Camille and Béatrix exchanged sidelong looks which Calyste noted, and that glance was enough to annihilate every memory of his youth, all his belief in the Kergarouët-Pen-Hoëls, and to wreck forever the schemes laid by the two families.

“Five can sit quite easily in the carriage,” replied Mademoiselle des Touches, on whom Jacqueline had turned her back. “Even if we were horribly squeezed, which is impossible, as you are all so slight, I should be amply compensated by the pleasure of doing a service to friends of Calyste’s. Your maid, madame, will find a seat; and your bundles, if you have any, can be put in the rumble; I have no servant with me.”

The Viscountess was profusely grateful, and blamed her sister Jacqueline, who had been in such a hurry for her niece that she would not give her time to travel by land in their carriage; to be sure, the post road was not only longer, but expensive; she must return immediately to Nantes, where she had left three more little kittens eager to have her back again⁠—and she stroked her daughter’s chin. But Charlotte put on a little victimized air as she looked up at her mother, which made it seem likely that the Viscountess bored her four daughters most consumedly by trotting them out as persistently as, in Tristram Shandy, Corporal Trim puts his cap on.

“You are a happy mother, and you must⁠—” Camille began; but she broke off, remembering that Béatrix must have deserted her boy to follow Conti.

“Oh!” said the Viscountess, “though it is my misfortune to spend my life in the country and at Nantes, I have the comfort of knowing that my children adore me. Have you any children?” she asked Camille.

“I am Mademoiselle des Touches,” replied Camille. “Madame is the Marquise de Rochefide.”

“Then you are to be pitied for not knowing the greatest happiness we poor mere women can have. Is it not so, madame?” said she to the Marquise, to remedy her blunder. “But you have many compensations.”

A hot tear welled up in Béatrix’s eyes; she turned hastily away and went to the clumsy parapet at the edge of the rock, whither Calyste followed her.

“Madame,” said Camille in a low voice to Madame de Kergarouët, “do you not know that the Marquise is separated from her husband, that she has not seen her son for two years, and does not know when they may meet again?”

“Dear!” cried Madame de Kergarouët. “Poor lady! Is it a judicial separation?”

“No, incompatability,” said Camille.

“I can quite understand that,” replied the Viscountess, undaunted.

Old Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël had entrenched herself a few yards off with her dear Charlotte. Calyste, after assuring himself that no one could see them, took the Marquise’s hand and kissed it, leaving a tear on it. Béatrix turned on him, her eyes dried by anger; some cruel word was on her tongue, but she could say nothing as she saw the tears on the beautiful face of the angelic youth, as deeply moved as she was.

“Good heavens, Calyste!” said Camille, in a whisper, as he rejoined them with Madame de Rochefide, “you will have that for a mother-in-law, and that little gaby for your wife.”

“Because her aunt is rich,” added Calyste, sarcastically.

The whole party now moved towards the inn, and the Viscountess thought it incumbent on her to make some satirical remarks to Camille on the savages of Saint-Nazaire.

“I love Brittany, madame,” replied Félicité, gravely. “I was born at Guérande.”

Calyste could not help admiring Mademoiselle des Touches, who, by the tones of her voice, her steady gaze, and placid manners, put him at his ease, notwithstanding the terrible confessions of the scene that had taken place last night. Still, she looked tired; her features betrayed that she had not slept; they looked thickened, but the forehead suppressed the internal storm with relentless calm.

“What queens!” said he to Charlotte, pointing to Béatrix and Camille, as he gave the girl his arm, to Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoëls great satisfaction.

“What notion was this of your mother’s,” said the old lady, also giving a lean arm to her niece, “to throw us into the company of this wretched woman?”

“Oh, aunt! a woman who is the glory of Brittany.”

“The disgrace, child!⁠—Do not let me see you too cringing to her.”

“Mademoiselle, Charlotte is right,” said Calyste; “you are unjust.”

“Oh, she has bewitched you!” retorted Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“I have the same friendship for her that I have for you,” said Calyste.

“How long have the du Guénics taken to lying?” said the old woman.

“Since the Pen-Hoëls took to being deaf,” retorted Calyste.

“Then you are not in love with her?” asked the aunt, delighted.

“I was, but I am no longer,” he replied.

“Bad boy! Then why have you given us so much anxiety? I knew that love was but a folly; only marriage is to be relied on,” said she, looking at Charlotte.

Charlotte, somewhat reassured, hoped to reconquer her advantages by an appeal to the memories of their childhood, and clung to Calyste’s arm; but he vowed to himself that he would come to a clear understanding with the little heiress.

“On, what famous games of mouche we will have, Calyste,” said she, “and what capital fun!”

The horses were put in; Camille made the Viscountess and Charlotte take the best seats, for Jacqueline had disappeared; then she and the Marquise sat with their backs to the horses. Calyste, forced to give up the pleasure he had promised himself, rode at the side of the carriage; and the horses, all tired, went slowly enough to allow of his gazing at Béatrix.

History has kept no record of the singular conversation of these four persons, so strangely thrown together by chance in this carriage; for it is impossible to accept the hundred and something versions which were current at Nantes as to the stories, the repartees, and the witticisms which Madame de Kergarouët heard from Camille Maupin himself. She took good care not to repeat, nor even understand, the replies made by Mademoiselle des Touches to all her ridiculous inquiries⁠—such as writers so often hear, and by which they are made to pay dearly for their few joys.

“How do you write your books?” asked Madame de Kergarouët.

“Why, just as you do your needlework,” said Camille, “your netting, or cross-stitch.”

“And where did you find all those deep observations and attractive pictures?”

“Where you find all the clever things you say, madame.⁠—Nothing is easier than writing, and if you chose⁠—”

“Ah, it all lies in the choosing? I should never have thought it!⁠—And which of your works do you yourself prefer?”

“It is difficult to have any preference for these little kittens.”

“You are surfeited with compliments; it is impossible to say anything new.”

“Believe me, madame, I appreciate the form you give to yours.”

The Viscountess, anxious not to seem neglectful of the Marquise, said, looking archly at her:

“I shall never forget this drive, sitting between wit and beauty.”

The Marquise laughed,

“You flatter me, madame,” said she. “It is not in nature that wit should be noticed in the company of genius, and I have not yet said much.”

Charlotte, keenly alive to her mother’s absurdity, looked at her, hoping to check her; but the Viscountess still valiantly showed fight against the two laughing Parisian ladies. Calyste, trotting at an easy pace by the carriage, could only see the two women on the back seat, and his eyes fell on them alternately, betraying a very melancholy mood. Béatrix, who could not help being seen, persistently avoided looking at the youth; with a placidity that is maddening to a lover, she sat with her hands folded over her crossed shawl, and seemed lost in deep meditation.

At a spot where the road is shaded and as moist and green as a cool forest path, where the wheels of the carriage were scarcely audible, and the wind brought a resinous scent, Camille remarked on the beauty of the place, and, leaning her hand on Béatrix’s knee, she pointed to Calyste and said:

“How well he rides!”

“Calyste?” said Madame de Kergarouët. “He is a capital horseman.”

“Oh, Calyste is so nice!” said Charlotte.

“There are so many Englishmen just like him⁠—” replied the Marquise, indifferently, without finishing her sentence.

“His mother is Irish⁠—an O’Brien,” said Charlotte, feeling personally attacked.

Camille and the Marquise drove into Guérande with the Vicomtesse de Kergarouët and her daughter, to the great astonishment of the gaping townspeople; they left their traveling companions at the corner of the little Rue du Guénic, where there was something very like a crowd. Calyste had ridden on to announce to his mother the arrival of the party, who were expected to dinner. The meal had been politely put off till four o’clock.

The Chevalier went back to give the ladies his arm; he kissed Canaille’s hand, hoping to touch that of the Marquise, but she firmly kept her arms folded, and he besought her in vain with eyes sparkling through wasted tears.

“You little goose!” said Camille in his ear, with a light, friendly kiss on it.

“True enough!” said Calyste to himself as the carriage turned. “I forget my mother’s counsels⁠—but I believe I always shall forget them.”

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, who arrived valiantly mounted on a hired nag, Madame de Kergarouët, and Charlotte found the table laid, and were cordially, if not luxuriously, received by the du Guénics. Old Zéphirine had sent for certain bottles of fine wine from the depths of the cellar, and Mariotte had surpassed herself in Breton dishes. The Viscountess, delighted to have traveled with the famous Camille Maupin, tried to expatiate on modern literature, and the place held in it by Camille; but as it had been with the game of whist, so it was with literary matters; neither the du Guénics, nor the Curé, who looked in, nor the Chevalier du Halga, understood anything about them. The Abbé and the old naval officer sipped the liqueurs at dessert.

As soon as Mariotte, helped by Gasselin and by Madame de Kergarouët’s maid, had cleared the table, there was an enthusiastic clamor for mouche. Joy prevailed. Everybody believed Calyste to be free, and saw him married ere long to little Charlotte. Calyste sat silent. For the first time in his life he was making comparisons between the Kergarouëts and the two elegant and clever women, full of taste, who, at this very moment, were probably laughing at the two provincials, if he might judge from the first glances they had exchanged. Fanny, knowing Calyste’s secret, noticed his dejection. Charlotte’s coquetting and her mother’s attacks had no effect on him. Her dear boy was evidently bored; his body was in this room, where of yore he could have been amused by the absurdities of mouche, but his spirit was wandering round les Touches.

“How can I send him off to Camille’s?” thought the mother, who loved him and who was bored because he was bored. Her affection lent her inventiveness.

“You are dying to be off to les Touches to see her?” she whispered to Calyste.

The boy’s answer was a smile and a blush that thrilled this devoted mother to her heart’s very core.

“Madame,” said she to the Viscountess, “you will be very uncomfortable tomorrow in the carriage chaise, and obliged to start very early in the morning. Would it not be better if you were to have Mademoiselle des Touches’ carriage? Go over, Calyste,” said she, turning to her son, “and arrange the matter at les Touches; but come back quickly.”

“It will not take ten minutes,” cried Calyste, giving his mother a wild hug out on the steps, whither she followed him.

Calyste flew with the speed of a fawn, and was in the entrance hall of les Touches just as Camille and Béatrix came out of the dining-room after dinner. He had the wit to offer his arm to Félicité.

“You have deserted the Viscountess and her daughter for us,” said she, pressing his arm. “We are able to appreciate the extent of the sacrifice.”

“Are these Kergarouëts related to the Portenduères and old Admiral de Kergarouët, whose widow married Charles de Vandenesse?” Madame de Rochefide asked Camille.

“Mademoiselle Charlotte is the Admiral’s grandniece,” replied Camille.

“She is a charming young person,” said Béatrix, seating herself in a Gothic armchair; “the very thing for Monsieur du Guénic.”

“That marriage shall never be!” cried Camille, vehemently.

Calyste, overwhelmed by the cold indifference of the Marquise, who spoke of the little country girl as the only creature for whom he was a match, sat speechless and bewildered.

“And why not, Camille?” said Madame de Rochefide.

“My dear,” said Camille, seeing Calyste’s despair, “I did not advise Conti to get married, and I believe I was delightful to him⁠—you are ungenerous.”

Béatrix looked at her with surprise mingled with indefinable suspicions. Calyste almost understood Camille’s self-immolation as he saw the pale flush rise in her cheeks, which, in her, betrayed the most violent emotions: he went up to her awkwardly enough, took her hand, and kissed it. Camille sat down to the piano with an easy air, as if equally sure of her friend and of the lover she had claimed, turning her back upon them, and leaving them to each other. She improvised some variations on airs, unconsciously suggested by her thoughts, for they were all deeply sad. The Marquise appeared to be listening; but she was watching Calyste, who was too young and too guileless to play the part suggested to him by Camille, and sat lost in ecstasy before his real idol. At the end of an hour, during which Mademoiselle des Touches gave herself up to her jealous feelings, Béatrix went to her room.

Camille at once led Calyste into her own room, so as not to be overheard, for women have an admirable sense of distrust.

“My child,” said she, “you must pretend to love me or you are lost. You are a perfect child; you know nothing about women, you know only how to love. To love and to be loved are two very different things. You are rushing into terrible suffering. I want you to be happy. If you provoke Béatrix, not in her pride, but in her obstinacy, she is capable of flying off to join Conti at a few leagues from Paris. Then what would become of you?”

“I should love her,” replied Calyste.

“You would not see her again.”

“Oh, yes, I should,” said he.

“Pray how?”

“I should follow her.”

“But you are as poor as Job, my dear child!”

“My father, Gasselin, and I lived in la Vendée for three months on a hundred and fifty francs, marching day and night.”

“Calyste,” said Félicité, “listen to me. I see you are too honest to act a part; I do not wish to corrupt so pure a nature as yours. I will take it all on myself. Béatrix shall love you.”

“Is it possible?” he cried, clasping his hands.

“Yes,” said Camille. “But we must undo the vows she had made to herself. I will lie for you. Only, do not interfere in any way with the arduous task I am about to undertake. The Marquise has much aristocratic cunning; she is intellectually suspicious; no hunter ever had to take more difficult game; so in this case, my poor boy, the sportsman must take his dog’s advice. Will you promise to obey me blindly? I will be your Fox,” said she, naming Calyste’s best hound.

“What, then, am I to do?” replied the young man.

“Very little,” said Camille. “Come here every day at noon. I, like an impatient mistress, shall always be at the window of the corridor that looks out on the Guérande road to see you coming. I shall fly to my room, so as not to be seen⁠—not to let you know the depth of a passion that is a burden on you; but sometimes you will see me and wave your handkerchief to me. Then in the courtyard, and as you come upstairs, you must put on a look of some annoyance. That will be no dissimulation, my child,” said she, leaning her head on his breast, “will it?⁠—Do not hurry up; look out of the staircase window on to the garden to look for Béatrix. When she is there⁠—and she will be there, never fear⁠—if she sees you, come straight, but very slowly, to the little drawing-room, and thence to my room. If you should see me at the window spying your treachery, you must start back that I may not catch you imploring a glance from Béatrix. Once in my room you will be my prisoner.⁠—Yes; we will sit there till four o’clock. You may spend the time in reading; I will smoke. You will be horribly bored by not seeing her, but I will provide you with interesting books. You have read nothing of George Sand’s; I will send a man tonight to buy her works at Nantes, and those of some other writers that are unknown to you.

“I shall be the first to leave the room; you must not put down your book or come into the little drawing-room till you hear Béatrix in there talking to me. Whenever you see a music-book open on the piano, you can ask if you may stay. You may be positively rude to me if you can; I give you leave; all will be well.”

“I know, Camille,” said he, with delightful good faith, “that you have the rarest affection for me; it makes me quite sorry that I ever saw Béatrix; but what do you hope for?”

“In a week Béatrix will be crazy about you.”

“Good God!” cried he, “is that possible?” and, clasping his hands, he fell on his knees before Camille, who was touched and happy to give him such joy at her own cost.

“Listen to me,” said she. “If you speak to the Marquise⁠—not merely in the way of conversation, but if you exchange even a few words with her⁠—if you allow her to question you, if you fail in the wordless part I set you to play, and which is certainly easy enough, understand clearly,” and she spoke in a serious tone, “you will lose her forever.”

“I do not understand anything of all this, Camille,” cried Calyste, looking at her with adorable guilelessness.

“If you understood, you would not be the exquisite child that you are, the noble, handsome Calyste,” said she, taking his hand and kissing it.

And Calyste did what he had never done before; he put his arm round Camille and kissed her gently in the neck, without passion, but tenderly, as he kissed his mother. Mademoiselle des Touches could not restrain a burst of tears.

“Now go, child,” said she, “and tell your Viscountess that my carriage is at her orders.”

Calyste wanted to stay, but he was obliged to obey Camille’s imperious and imperative gesture. He went home in high spirits, for he was sure of being loved within a week by the beautiful Rochefide.

The mouche players found in him the Calyste they had lost these two months. Charlotte ascribed the change to her own presence. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was affectionately teasing. The Abbé Grimont tried to read in the Baroness’ eyes the reason for the calm he saw there. The Chevalier du Halga rubbed his hands.

The two old maids were as lively as a couple of lizards. The Viscountess owed five francs worth of accumulated fines. Zéphirine’s avarice was so keenly excited that she lamented her inability to see the cards, and was sharply severe on her sister-in-law, who was distracted from the game by Calyste’s good spirits, and who asked him a question now and then without understanding his replies.

The game went on till eleven o’clock. Two players had retired; the Baron and du Halga were asleep in their armchairs. Mariotte had made some buckwheat cakes; the Baroness brought out her tea-caddy; and before the Kergarouëts left, the noble house of du Guénic offered its guests a collation, with fresh butter, fruit, and cream, for which the silver teapot was brought out, and the English china tea-service sent to the Baroness by one of her aunts. This air of modern splendor in that antique room, the Baroness’ exquisite grace, accustomed as a good Irishwoman to make and pour out tea, a great business with Englishwomen, were really delightful. The greatest luxury would not have given such a simple, unpretending, and dignified effect as this impulse of glad hospitality.

When there was no one left in the room but the Baroness and her son, she looked inquiringly at Calyste.

“What happened this evening at les Touches?” she asked.

Calyste told her of the hope Camille had put into his heart and of her strange instructions.

“Poor woman!” exclaimed Fanny, clasping her hands, and for the first time pitying Mademoiselle des Touches.

Some minutes after Calyste had left, Béatrix, who had heard him leave the house, came into her friend’s room, and found her sunk on a sofa, her eyes wet with tears.

“What is the matter, Félicité?” asked the Marquise.

“That I am forty and in love, my dear!” said Mademoiselle des Touches, in a tone of terrible fury, her eyes suddenly dry and hard. “If only you could know, Béatrix, how many tears I shed daily over the lost days of my youth! To be loved out of pity, to know that one’s pittance of happiness is earned by painful toil, by catlike tricks, by snares laid for the innocence and virtue of a mere boy⁠—is not that shameful? Happily, we find a sort of absolution in the infinitude of passion, in the energy of happiness, in the certainty of being forever supreme above other women in a young heart, on which our name is graven by unforgettable pleasure and insane self-sacrifice. Yet, if he asked it of me, I would throw myself into the sea at his least signal. Sometimes I catch myself wishing that he would desire it; it would be a sacrifice, and not suicide.

“Oh! Béatrix, in coming here you set me a cruel task! I know how difficult it is to triumph against you; but you love Conti, you are noble and generous, and you will not deceive me; on the contrary, you will help me to preserve my Calyste. I was prepared for the impression you would make on him, but I have not been so foolish as to seem jealous; that would but add fuel to the fire. On the contrary, I announced your arrival, depicting you in such bright colors that you could never come up to the portrait, and unluckily you are handsomer than ever.”

This vehement lament, in which truth and untruth were mingled, completely deceived Madame de Rochefide. Claude Vignon had told Conti his reasons for leaving; Béatrix was, of course, informed, so she showed magnanimity by behaving coldly to Calyste; but at this instant there awoke in her that thrill of joy which every woman feels at the bottom of her heart on hearing that she is loved. The love she inspires in any man implies an unfeigned flattery which it is impossible not to appreciate; but when the man belongs to another woman, his homage gives more than joy, it is heavenly bliss. Béatrix sat down by her friend, and was full of little coaxing ways.

“You have not a white hair,” said she; “you have not a wrinkle; your temples are smooth still, while I know many a woman of thirty obliged to cover hers. Look, my dear,” she added, raising her curls, “what my journey cost me.” She showed the faintest pucker that ruffled the surface of her exquisite skin; she turned up her sleeve and displayed the same wrinkles on her wrists, where the transparent texture already showed lines, and a network of swollen veins, and three deep marks made a bracelet of furrows.

“Are not these the two spots which can tell no lies, as a writer, investigating our miseries, has said? We must suffer much before we see the truth of his terrible shrewdness; but, happily for us, most men know nothing about it, and do not read that atrocious writer.”

“Your letter told me all,” replied Camille. “Happiness is not fatuous; you boasted too much of yours. In love, truth is deaf, dumb, and blind. And I, knowing you had reasons for throwing over Conti, dreaded your visit here. My dear, Calyste is an angel; he is as good as he is handsome; the poor innocent will not resist one look from you, he admires you too much not to love on the smallest encouragement; your disdain will preserve him to me. I confess it with the cowardice of true passion: If you take him from me, you kill me. Adolphe, that terrible book by Benjamin Constant, has told us of Adolphe’s sufferings; but what of the woman’s, heh? He did not study them enough to depict them, and what woman would dare reveal them? They would discredit our sex, humiliate our virtues, add to our vices. Ah! if I may measure them by my fears, these tortures are like the torments of hell. But if he deserts me, my determination is fixed.”

“And what have you determined?” asked Béatrix, with an eagerness that was a shock to Camille.

On this the two friends looked at each other with the keenness of two Venetian inquisitors of State, a swift glance, in which their souls met and struck fire like two flints. The Marquise’s eyes fell.

“Besides man there is only God!” said the famous woman gravely. “God is the unknown. I should cast myself into it as into a gulf. Calyste has just sworn that he admires you only as he might admire a picture; but you are eight-and-twenty, and in all the splendor of your beauty. So the struggle between him and me has begun by a falsehood. Happily I know how to win.”

“And how is that?”

“That, my dear, is my secret. Leave me the advantages of my age. Though Claude Vignon has cast me into the abyss⁠—me, when I had raised myself to a spot which I believed to be inaccessible⁠—I may at least pluck the pale blossoms, etiolated but delicious, which grow at the foot of the precipice.”

Madame de Rochefide was moulded like wax by Mademoiselle des Touches, who reveled in savage pleasure as she involved her in her meshes. Camille sent her to bed, nettled with curiosity, tossed between jealousy and generosity, but certainly thinking much about the handsome youth.

“She would be delighted if she could betray me,” said Camille to herself, as they kissed and said good night.

Then, when she was alone, the author made way for the woman⁠—she melted into tears; she filled her hookah with tobacco dipped in opium, and spent the greater part of the night smoking, and thus numbing the tortures of her love, while seeing, through the clouds of smoke, Calyste’s charming head.

“What a fine book might be written containing the story of my sorrows!” said she to herself; “but it has been done. Sappho lived before me. Sappho was young! A touching and lovely heroine indeed is a woman of forty! Smoke your hookah, my poor Camille, you have not even the privilege of making a poem out of your woes; this crowns them all!”

She did not go to bed till daybreak, mingling tears, spasms of rage, and magnanimous resolutions in the long meditation wherein she sometimes considered the mysteries of the Catholic religion, of which she had never thought in the course of her reckless life as an artist and an unbelieving writer.

Next day, Calyste, advised by his mother to act exactly on Camille’s instructions, came at noon and stole mysteriously up to Mademoiselle des Touches’ room, where he found plenty of books. Félicité sat in an armchair by the window, smoking, and gazing alternately at the wild marsh landscape, at the sea, and at Calyste, with whom she exchanged a few words concerning Béatrix. At a certain moment, seeing the Marquise walking in the garden, she went to the window to unfasten the curtains, so that her friend should see her, and drew them to shut out the light, leaving only a strip that fell on Calyste’s book.

“I shall ask you to stay to dinner this evening, my child,” said she, tumbling his hair, “and you must refuse, looking at Béatrix; you will have no difficulty in making her understand how deeply you regret being unable to remain here.”

At about four o’clock Camille left him and went to play the dreadful farce of her false happiness to the Marquise, whom she brought back to the drawing-room. Calyste then came out of the adjoining room; at that moment he felt the shame of his position. The look he gave Béatrix, though watched for by Félicité, was even more expressive than she had expected. Béatrix was beautifully dressed.

“How elegant you are, my sweetheart!” said Camille, when Calyste had left.

These manoeuvres went on for six days; they were seconded, without Calyste’s knowledge, by the most ingenious conversations between Camille and her friend. There was between the two women a duel without truce, in which the weapons were cunning, feints, generosity, false confessions, astute confidences, in which one hid her love and the other stripped hers bare, while nevertheless the iron sharpness, red hot with Canaille’s treacherous words, pierced her friend’s heart to the core, implanting some of those evil feelings which good women find it so hard to suppress. Béatrix in the end took offence at the suspicions betrayed by Camille; she thought them dishonoring to both alike; she was delighted to discover in the great authoress the weakness of her sex, and longed for the pleasure of showing her where her superiority ended, how she might be humiliated.

“Well, my dear, what are you going to tell him today?” she asked, with a spiteful glance at her friend, when the imaginary lover asked leave to remain. “On Monday we had something to talk over; on Tuesday you had too poor a dinner; on Wednesday you were afraid of annoying the Baroness; on Thursday we were going out together; yesterday you bid him goodbye as soon as he opened his mouth. Now, I want him to stay today, poor boy!”

“Already, my dear!” said Camille, with biting irony.

Béatrix colored.

“Then stay, Monsieur du Guénic,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, assuming a queenly air, as though she were nettled.

Béatrix turned cold and hard; she was crushing, satirical, and intolerable to Calyste, whom Félicité sent off to play mouche with Mademoiselle de Kergarouët.

“That girl is not dangerous!” said Béatrix, smiling.

Young men in love are like starving people, the cook’s preparations do not satisfy them; they think too much of the end to understand the means. As he turned from les Touches to Guérande, Calyste’s mind was full of Béatrix; he did not know what deep feminine skill Félicité was employing to promote his interests⁠—to use a cant phrase. In the course of this week the Marquise had written but one letter to Conti, a symptom of indifference which had not escaped Camille.

Calyste’s whole life was concentrated in the short moments when he saw Béatrix; this drop of water, far from quenching his thirst, only increased it. The magic words, “You shall be loved,” spoken by Camille and endorsed by his mother, were the talisman by which he checked the fire of his passion. He tried to kill time; he could not sleep, and cheated his sleeplessness by reading, bringing home a barrow-load of books every evening, as Mariotte expressed it. His aunt cursed Mademoiselle des Touches; but the Baroness, who had often gone up to her son’s room on seeing a light there, knew the secret of his wakefulness. Though Fanny had never got beyond her timidity as an ignorant girl, and love’s books had remained closed to her, her motherly tenderness guided her to certain notions; still, the abysses of the sentiment were dark to her and hidden by clouds, and she was very much alarmed at the state in which she saw her son, terrifying herself over the one absorbing and incomprehensive desire that was consuming him.

Calyste had, in fact, but one idea; the image of Béatrix was always before him. During the evening, over the cards, his absence of mind was like his father’s slumbers. Finding him so unlike what he had been when he had believed himself in love with Camille, his mother recognized with a sort of terror the symptoms of a genuine passion, a thing altogether unknown in the old family home. Feverish irritability and constant dreaming made Calyste stupid. He would often sit for hours gazing at one figure in the tapestry. That morning she had advised him to go no more to les Touches, but to give up these two women.

“Not go to les Touches!” cried he.

“Nay, go, my dear, go; do not be angry, my darling,” replied she, kissing his eyes, which had flashed flame at her.

In this state Calyste was within an ace of losing the fruits of Camille’s skilled manoeuvres by the Breton impetuosity of his love, which he could no longer master. In spite of his promises to Félicité, he vowed that he would see and speak to Béatrix. He wanted to read her eyes, to drown his gaze in their depths, to study the little details of her dress, to breathe its fragrance, to hear the music of her voice, follow the elegant deliberateness of her movements, embrace her figure in a glance⁠—to contemplate her, in short, as a great general studies the field on which a decisive battle is to be fought. He wanted her, as lovers want; he was the prey of such desire as closed his ears, dulled his intellect, and threw him into a morbid condition, in which he no longer saw obstacles or distance, and was not even conscious of his body.

It struck him that he might go to les Touches before the hour agreed upon, hoping to find Béatrix in the garden. He knew that she walked there while waiting for breakfast. Mademoiselle des Touches and her friend had been in the morning to see the salt-marshes, and the basin with its shore of fine sand, into which the sea oozes, looking like a lake in the midst of the sand-hills; they had come home, and were talking as they wandered about the yellow gravel paths in the garden.

“If this landscape interests you,” said Camille, “you should go to le Croisic with Calyste. There are some very fine rocks there, cascades of granite, little bays with natural basins, wonders of capricious variety, and the seashore with thousands of fragments of marble, a whole world of amusement. You will see women making wood, that is to say, plastering masses of cow-dung against the wall to dry, and then piling them to keep, like peat in Paris; then in the winter they warm themselves by that fuel.”

“And you will trust Calyste?” said the Marquise, laughing, in a tone which plainly showed that Camille, by sulking with Béatrix the night before, had obliged her to think of Calyste.

“Oh, my dear, when you know the angelic soul of a boy like him you will understand me. In him beauty is as nothing, you must know that pure heart, that guilelessness that is amazed at every step taken in the realm of love. What faith! what candor! what grace! The ancients had good reason to worship Beauty as holy.

“Some traveler, I forget who, tells us that horses in a state of freedom take the handsomest of them to be their leader. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of matter; it is the hallmark set by Nature on her most perfect creations; it is the truest symbol, as it is the greatest chance. Did anyone ever imagine a deformed angel? Do not they combine grace and strength? What has kept us standing for hours together before certain pictures in Italy, in which genius has striven for years to realize one of these caprices of nature? Come, with your hand on your conscience, was it not the ideal of beauty which we combined in our minds with moral grandeur? Well, and Calyste is one of those dreams made real; he has the courage of the lion, who remains quiet without suspecting his sovereignty. When he feels at his ease he is brilliant; I like his girlish diffidence. In his heart, my soul is refreshed after all the corruption, the ideas of science, literature, the world, politics⁠—all the futile accessories under which we stifle happiness. I am now what I never was before⁠—I am a child! I am sure of him, but I like to pretend jealousy; it makes him happy. Besides, it is part of my secret.”

Béatrix walked on, silent and pensive; Camille was enduring unspoken martyrdom, and flashing side glances at her that looked like flames.

“Ah, my dear, you⁠—you are happy,” said Béatrix, leaning her hand on Camille’s arm like a woman weary of some covert resistance.

“Yes! very happy!” replied poor Félicité, with savage bitterness.

The women sank on to a bench, both exhausted. No creature of her sex was ever subjected to more elaborate seduction or more clear-sighted Machiavelism than Madame de Rochefide had been during the last week.

“But I⁠—I who see Conti’s infidelities, who swallow them, who⁠—”

“And why do you not give him up?” said Camille, discerning a favorable moment for striking a decisive blow.

“Can I?”

“Oh! poor child⁠—”

They both sat stupidly gazing at a clump of trees.

“I will go and hasten breakfast,” said Camille, “this walk has given me an appetite.”

“Our conversation has taken away mine,” said Béatrix.

Béatrix, a white figure in a morning dress, stood out against the green masses of foliage. Calyste, who had stolen into the garden through the drawing-room, turned down a path, walking slowly to meet the Marquise by chance, as it were; and Béatrix could not help starting a little when she saw him.

“How did I displease you yesterday, madame?” asked Calyste, after a few commonplace remarks had been exchanged.

“Why, you neither please me nor displease me,” said she gently.

Her tone, her manner, her delightful grace encouraged Calyste.

“I am indifferent to you?” said he, in a voice husky with the tears that rose to his eyes.

“Must we not be indifferent to each other?” replied Béatrix. “Each of us has a sincere attachment⁠—”

“Oh!” said Calyste eagerly, “I did love Camille; but I do not love her now.”

“Then what do you do every day, all the morning long?” asked she, with a perfidious smile. “I cannot suppose that, in spite of her passion for tobacco, Camille prefers her cigar to you; or that, in spite of your admiration for authoresses, you spend four hours in reading novels by women.”

“Then you know?” said the innocent boy, his face flushed with the joy of gazing at his idol.

“Calyste!” cried Camille violently, as she appeared on the scene, seizing him by the arm and pulling him some steps; “Calyste, is this what you promised me?”

The Marquise heard this reproof, while Mademoiselle des Touches went off scolding, and leading away Calyste; she stood mystified by Calyste’s avowal, and unable to understand it. Madame de Rochefide was not so clear-sighted as Claude Vignon. The truth of the terrible and sublime comedy performed by Camille is one of those parts of magnanimous infamy which a woman can conceive of only in the last extremity. It means a breaking heart, the end of her feelings as a woman, and the beginning of a sacrifice, which drags her down to hell or leads her to heaven.

During breakfast, to which Calyste was invited, Béatrix, whose feelings were lofty and proud, had already undergone a revulsion, stifling the germs of love that were sprouting in her heart. She was not hard or cold to Calyste, but her mild indifference wrung his heart. Félicité proposed that they should go on the next day but one to make an excursion through the strange tract of country lying between les Touches, le Croisic, and le Bourg de Batz. She begged Calyste to spend the morrow in finding a boat and some men, in case they should wish to go out by sea. She undertook to supply provisions, horses, and everything necessary to spare them any fatigue in this party of pleasure.

Béatrix cut her short by saying that she would not take the risk of running about the country. Calyste’s face, which had expressed lively delight, was suddenly clouded.

“Why, what are you afraid of, my dear?” said Camille.

“My position is too delicate to allow of my compromising, not my reputation, but my happiness,” she said with meaning, and she looked at the lad. “You know how jealous Conti is; if he knew⁠—”

“And who is to tell him?”

“Will he not come back to fetch me?”

At these words Calyste turned pale. Notwithstanding Félicité’s arguments, and those of the young Breton, Madame de Rochefide was inexorable, and showed what Camille called her obstinacy. Calyste, in spite of the hopes Félicité gave him, left les Touches in one of those fits of lovers’ distress of which the violence often rises to the pitch of madness.

On his return home, Calyste did not quit his room till dinnertime, and went back again soon after. At ten o’clock his mother became uneasy, and went up to him; she found him writing in the midst of a quantity of torn papers and rough copy. He was writing to Béatrix, for he distrusted Camille; the Marquise’s manner during their interview in the garden had encouraged him strangely.

Never did a first love-letter spring in a burning fount from the soul, as might be supposed. In all youths as yet uncorrupted, such a letter is produced with a flow too hotly effervescent not to be the elixir of several letters begun, rejected, and rewritten.

Here is that sent by Calyste, which he read to his poor, astonished mother. To her, the old house was on fire; her son’s love blazed up in it like the flare of a conflagration.

Calyste to Béatrix.

“Madame⁠—I loved you when as yet you were but a dream to me; imagine the fervor assumed by my love when I saw you. The dream was surpassed by the reality. My regret is that I have nothing to tell you that you do not know, when I say how beautiful you are; still, perhaps your beauty never gave rise to so many feelings in anyone as in me. You are beautiful in so many ways; I have studied you so thoroughly by thinking of you day and night, that I have penetrated the mystery of your personality, the secrets of your heart, and your misprized refinements. Have you ever been loved as you deserve?

“Let me tell you, then, that there is nothing in you which has not its interpretation in my heart: your pride answers to mine, the dignity of your looks, the grace of your mien, the elegance of your movements⁠—everything in you is in harmony with the thoughts and wishes hidden in your secret soul; and it is because I can read them that I think myself worthy of you. If I had not become, within these few days, your second self, should I dare speak to you of myself? To read myself would be egotistic; it is you I speak of here, not Calyste.

“To write to you, Béatrix, I have set my twenty years aside; I have stolen a march on myself and aged my mind⁠—or, perhaps, you have aged it by a week of the most horrible torments, caused, innocently indeed, by you. Do not take me for one of those commonplace lovers at whom you laugh with such good reason. What merit is there, indeed, in loving a young, beautiful, clever, noble woman! Alas, I cannot even dream of deserving you! What am I to you? A boy attracted by beauty and moral worth, as an insect is attracted by light. You cannot do anything else than trample on the flowers of my soul, yet all my happiness lies in seeing you spurn them under foot. Absolute devotion, unlimited faith, the maddest passion⁠—all these treasures of a true and loving heart are nothing; they help me to love, they cannot win love.

“Sometimes I wonder that such fervid fanaticism should fail to warm the idol; and when I meet your severe, cold eye, I feel myself turn to ice. Your disdain affects me then, and not my adoration. Why? You cannot possibly hate me so much as I love you; so ought the weaker feeling to get the mastery over the stronger?

“I loved Félicité with all the strength of my heart; I forgot her in a day, in an instant, on seeing you. She was a mistake, you are the truth. You, without knowing it, have wrecked my happiness, and you owe me nothing in exchange. I loved Camille without hope, and you give me no hopes; nothing is changed but the divinity. I was a Pagan, I am a Christian; that is all. Only, you have taught me to love⁠—to be loved does not come till later. Camille says it is not love that loves only for a few days: the love that does not grow day by day is a contemptible passion; to continue growing, it must not foresee its end, and she could see the setting of our sun.

“On seeing you, I understood these sayings which I had struggled against with all my youth, all the rage of my desires, all the fierce despotism of my twenty years. Then our great and sublime Camille mingled her tears with mine. So I may love you on earth and in heaven, as we love God. If you loved me, you could not meet me with the reasoning by which Camille annihilated my efforts. We are both young, we can fly on the same wings, under the same sky, and never fear the storm that threatened that eagle.

“But what am I saying? I am carried far beyond the modesty of my hopes. You will cease to believe in the submission, the patience, the mute worship which I implore you not to wound needlessly. I know, Béatrix, that you cannot love me without falling in your own esteem. And I ask for no return.

“Camille said once that there was an innate fatality in names, as in her own. I felt this fatality in yours when on the pier at Guérande it struck my eyes on the seashore: you will come into my life as Beatrice came into Dante’s. My heart will be the pedestal for a white statue⁠—vindictive, jealous, and tyrannous. You are prohibited from loving me; you would endure a thousand deaths; you would be deceived, mortified, unhappy. There is in you a diabolical pride which binds you to the pillar you have laid hold on; you will perish while shaking the temple like Samson. I did not discover all these things; my love is too blind; Camille told me. Here it is not my mind that speaks, but hers; I have no wits when you are in question, a tide of blood comes up from my heart, darkening my intellect with its waves, depriving me of my powers, paralyzing my tongue, making my knees quake and bend. I can only adore you, whatever you do. Camille calls your firmness obstinacy; I defend you; I believe it to be dictated by virtue. You are only all the more beautiful in my eyes. I know my fate; the pride of Brittany is a match for the woman who has made a virtue of hers.

“And so, dear Béatrix, be kind and comforting to me. When the victims were chosen, they were crowned with flowers; you owe me the garlands of compassion, and music for the sacrifice. Am I not the proof of your greatness, and will you not rise to the height of my love, scorned in spite of its sincerity, in spite of its undying fires?

“Ask Camille what my conduct has been since the day when she told me that she loved Claude Vignon. I was mute; I suffered in silence. Well, then, for you I could find yet greater strength, if you do not drive me to desperation, if you understand my heroism. One word of praise from you would enable me to bear the torments of martyrdom. If you persist in this cold silence, this deadly disdain, you will make me believe that I am to be feared. Oh, be to me all you can be⁠—charming, gay, witty, affectionate. Talk to me of Gennaro as Camille did of Claude. I have no genius but that of love; there is nothing formidable in me, and in your presence I will behave as though I did not love you.

“Can you reject the prayer of such humble devotion, of a hapless youth who only asks that his sun should give him light and warm him? The man you love will always see you; poor Calyste has but a few days before him, you will soon be rid of him. So I may go to les Touches again tomorrow, may I not? You will not refuse my arm to guide you round the shores of le Croisic and le Bourg de Batz?⁠—If you should not come, that will be an answer, and understood by Calyste.”

There were four pages more of close small writing, in which Calyste explained the terrible threat contained in these last words, by relating the story of his boyhood and life; but he told it in exclamatory phrases; there were many of those dots and dashes lavishly scattered through modern literature in perilous passages, like planks laid before the reader to enable him to cross the gulf. This artless picture would be a repetition of our narative: if it did not touch Madame de Rochefide, it could scarcely interest those who seek strong sensations; but it made his mother weep and say:

“Then you have not been happy?”

This terrible poem of feeling that had come like a storm on Calyste’s heart, and was to be sent like a whirlwind to another, frightened the Baroness; it was the first time in her life that she had ever read a love-letter.

Calyste was standing up; there was one great difficulty; he did not know how to send his letter.

The Chevalier du Halga was still in the sitting-room, where they were playing off the last pool of a very lively mouche. Charlotte de Kergarouët, in despair at Calyste’s indifference, was trying to charm the old people in the hope of thus securing her marriage. Calyste followed his mother, and came back into the room with the letter in his breast-pocket⁠—it seemed to scorch his heart; he wandered about and up and down the room like a moth that had come in by mistake. At last the mother and son got Monsieur du Halga into the hall, whence they dismissed Mariotte and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël’s little servant.

“What do they want of the Chevalier?” said old Zéphirine to the other old maid.

“Calyste seems to me to be out of his mind,” replied she. “He pays no more heed to Charlotte than if she were one of the marsh-girls.”

The Baroness had very shrewdly supposed that the Chevalier du Halga must, somewhere about the year 1780, have sailed the seas of gallant adventure, and she advised Calyste to consult him.

“What is the best way to send a letter secretly to a lady?” said Calyste to the Chevalier in a whisper.

“You can give the note to her lady’s-maid, with a few louis in her hand, for sooner or later the maid is in the secret, and it is best to let her know it from the first,” replied the Chevalier, who could not suppress a smile; “but it is better to deliver it yourself.”

“A few louis!” exclaimed the Baroness.

Calyste went away and fetched his hat; then he flew off to les Touches, and walked like an apparition into the little drawing-room, where he heard Béatrix and Camille talking. They were sitting on the divan, and seemed on the best possible terms. Calyste, with the sudden wit that love imparts, flung himself heedlessly on the divan by the Marquise, seized her hand, and pressed the letter into it, so that Félicité, watchful as she might be, could not see it done. Calyste’s heart fluttered with an emotion that was at once acute and delightful, as he felt Béatrix’s hand grasp his, and without even interrupting her sentence or seeming surprised, she slipped the letter into her glove.

“You fling yourself on a woman as if she were a divan,” said she with a laugh.

“He has not, however, adopted the doctrine of the Turks!” said Félicité, who could not forbear from this retort.

Calyste rose, took Camille’s hand, and kissed it; then he went to the piano and made every note sound in a long scale by running one finger over them. This glad excitement puzzled Camille, who told him to come to speak to her.

“What is it?” she asked in his ear.

“Nothing,” said he.

“There is something between them,” said Mademoiselle des Touches to herself.

The Marquise was impenetrable. Camille tried to make Calyste talk, hoping that he might betray himself; but the boy made an excuse of the uneasiness his mother would feel, and he left les Touches at eleven o’clock, not without having stood the fire of a piercing look from Camille, to whom he had never before made this excuse.

After the agitations of a night filled with Béatrix, after he had been into the town twenty times in the course of the morning, in the hope of meeting the answer which did not come, the Marquise’s maid came to the Hôtel du Guénic, and gave the following reply to Calyste, who went off to read it in the arbor at the end of the garden:⁠—

Béatrix to Calyste.

“You are a noble boy, but you are a boy. You owe yourself to Camille, who worships you. You will not find in me either the perfections that distinguish her, or the happiness she lavishes on you. Whatever you may think, it is she who is young and I who am old; her heart is full of treasures, and mine is empty. She is devoted to you in a way you do not appreciate enough; she has no selfishness, and lives wholly in you. I should be full of doubts; I should drag you into a life that is weariful, ignoble, and spoiled by my own fault. Camille is free, she comes and goes at her will; I am a slave. In short, you forget that I love and am loved. The position in which I find myself ought to protect me against any homage. To love me, to tell me that you love me, is an insult. Would not a second lapse place me on the level of the most abandoned woman?

“You, who are young and full of delicate feeling, how can you compel me to say things which the heart cannot utter without being torn?

“I prefer the scandal of an irreparable disaster to the shame of perpetual deceit, my own ruin to the loss of my self-respect. In the eyes of many people whose esteem I value, I stand still high; if I should change, I should fall some steps lower. The world is still merciful to women whose constancy cloaks their illicit happiness, but it is pitiless to a vicious habit.

“I feel neither scorn nor anger; I am answering you with frank simplicity. You are young, you know nothing of the world, you are carried away by imagination, and, like all men of pure life, you are incapable of the reflections induced by disaster. I will go further: If I should be of all women the most mortified; if I had horrible misery to hide; if I were deceived and deserted at last⁠—and, thank God, nothing of that is possible⁠—if, I say, by the vengeance of Heaven these things were, no one in the world would ever see me again. And then I could find it in me to kill the man who should speak to me of love, if a man could still find me where I should be. There you have the whole of my mind.

“Perhaps I have to thank you for having written to me. After your letter, and especially after my reply, I may be quite at my ease with you at les Touches, follow the bent of my humor, and be what you ask me to be. I say nothing of the bitter ridicule I should incur if my eyes should cease to express the sentiments of which you complain. To rob Camille a second time would be an evidence of weakness to which no woman could twice resign herself. If I loved you madly, if I were blind, if I were forgetful of everything else, I should always see Camille. Her love for you is a barrier too high to be crossed by any force, even with the wings of an angel; only lemons would not recoil from such base treachery.

“In this, my child, lies a world of reasons which noble and refined women keep to themselves, of which you men know nothing, even when a man is so like a woman as you are at this moment.

“Finally, you have a mother who has shown you what a woman’s life ought to be; pure and spotless, she has fulfilled her fate nobly; all I know of her has filled my eyes with tears of envy which has risen from the depths of my heart. I might have been like her! Calyste, this is what your wife ought to be; this what her life ought to be.

“I will not again cast you back maliciously, as I have done, on little Charlotte, who would bore you from the first, but on some exquisite girl who is worthy of you. If I gave myself to you, I should spoil your life. Either you would fail in faithfulness, in constancy, or you would resolve to devote your life to me: I will be honest⁠—I should take it; I should carry you off I know not whither, far from the world; I should make you very unhappy; I am jealous. I see monsters in a drop of water; I am in despair over odious trifles which many women put up with; there are even inexorable thoughts, originating in myself, not caused by you, which would wound me to death. When a man is not as respectful and as delicate in the tenth year of his happiness as he was on the eve of the day when he was a beggar for a favor, he seems to me a wretch, and degrades me in my own eyes. Such a lover no longer believes in the Amadis and Cyrus of my dreams. In our day love is purely mythical; and in you I find no more than the fatuity of a desire which knows not its end. I am not forty; I cannot yet bring my pride to bend to the authority of experience; I know not the love that could make me humble; in fact, I am a woman whose nature is still too youthful not to be detestable. I cannot answer for my moods; all my graciousness is on the surface. Perhaps I have not suffered enough yet to have acquired the indulgent ways, the perfect tenderness that we owe to cruel deceptions. Happiness has its impertinence, and I am very impertinent. Camille will always be your devoted slave, I should be an unreasonable tyrant.

“Indeed, is not Camille set by your side by your good angel, to guard you till you have reached the moment when you must start on the life that is in store for you, and which you must not fail in? I know Félicité! Her tenderness is inexhaustible; she may perhaps lack some of the graces of her sex, but she shows that vivifying strength, that genius for constancy, and that lofty courage which make everything acceptable. She will see you marry while suffering tortures; she will find you a free Béatrix, if Béatrix fulfils your ideal of woman and answers to your dreams; she will smooth out all the difficulties in your future life. The sale of a single acre of her land in Paris will redeem your estates in Brittany; she will make you her heir⁠—has she not already adopted you as a son? And I, alas! What can I do for your happiness? Nothing.

“Do not be false to an immeasurable affection which has made up its mind to the duties of motherliness. To me she seems most happy⁠—this Camille! The admiration you feel for poor Béatrix is such a peccadillo as women of Camille’s age view with the greatest indulgence. When they are sure of heing loved they will allow constancy a little infidelity; nay, one of their keenest pleasures is triumph over the youth of their rivals.

“Camille is superior to other women, all this does not bear upon her; I only say it to reassure your conscience. I have studied Camille well; she is in my eyes one of the grandest figures of our time. She is both clever and kind, two qualities rarely united in a woman; she is generous and simple, two more great qualities seldom found together. I have seen trustworthy treasures in the depth of her heart; it would seem as though Dante had written for her in the Paradiso the beautiful lines on eternal happiness which she was interpreting to you the other evening, ending with Senza drama sicura richezza.

“She has talked to me of her fate in life, told me all her experience, and proved to me that love, the object of our desires and dreams, had always evaded her; I replied that she seemed to me a proof of that difficulty of matching anything sublime, which accounts for much unhappiness. Yours is one of the angelic souls whose sister-soul it seems impossible to find. This misfortune, dear child, is what Camille will spare you; even if she should die for it, she will find you a being with whom you may live happy as a husband.

“I offer you a friend’s hand, and trust, not to your heart, but to your sense, to find that we are henceforth to each other a brother and sister, and to terminate our correspondance, which, between les Touches and Guérande, is odd, to say the least of it.

The Baroness, in the highest degree excited by the details and progress of her son’s love affairs with the beautiful Rochefide, could not sit still in the room, where she was working at her cross-stitch, looking up at every stitch to watch Calyste; she rose from her chair and came up to him with a mixture of diffidence and boldness. The mother had all the graces of a courtesan about to ask a favor.

“Well?” said she, trembling, but not actually asking to see the letter.

Calyste showed it her in his hand, and read it aloud to her. The two noble souls, so simple and ingenuous, discovered in this astute and perfidious reply none of the treachery and snares infused into it by the Marquise.

“She is a noble and high-minded woman!” said the Baroness, whose eyes glistened with moisture. “I will pray to God for her. I never believed that a mother could desert her husband and child and preserve so much virtue. She deserves to be forgiven.”

“Am I not right to worship her?” cried Calyste.

“But whither will this love lead you?” said his mother. “Oh! my child, how dangerous are these women of noble sentiments! Bad women are less to be feared.⁠—Marry Charlotte de Kergarouët, and release two-thirds of the family estates. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël can achieve this great end by selling a few farms, and the good soul will devote herself to improving the property. You may leave your children a noble name, a fine fortune⁠—”

“What, forget Béatrix?” said Calyste, in a hollow voice, his eyes fixed on the floor.

He left his mother, and went up to his room to reply to this letter.

Madame du Guénic had Madame de Rochefide’s words stamped on her heart: she wanted to know on what Calyste founded his hopes. At about this hour the Chevalier would be exercising his dog on the Mall; the Baroness, sure of finding him there, put on a bonnet and shawl and went out. It was so extraordinary an event to see Madame du Guénic out, excepting at church, or in one of the two pretty alleys that were frequented on fête-days, when she would accompany her husband and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, that, within two hours, everyone was saying to everyone else, “Madame du Guénic was out today; did you see her?” Thus before long the news came to Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël’s ears, and she said to her niece:

“Something very strange is happening at the du Guénics’.”

“Calyste is madly in love with the beautiful Marquise de Rochefide,” said Charlotte. “I should do better to leave Guérande and go back to Nantes.”

At this moment the Chevalier du Halga, surprised at being sought out by the Baroness, had released Thisbe from her word, recognizing the impossibility of attending to two ladies it once.

“Chevalier, you have had some experience in love affairs?” said the Baroness.

Captain du Halga drew himself up with not a little of the airs of a coxcomb. Madame du Guénic, without naming her son or the Marquise, told him the contents of the love letter, asking him what could be the meaning of such an answer. The Chevalier stood with his nose in the air caressing his chin; he listened with little grimaces; and at last he looked keenly at the Baroness.

“When a thoroughbred horse means to leap a fence, it goes up to it first to smell it and examine it,” he said. “Calyste will be the happiest young rogue⁠—”

“Hush!” said the Baroness.

“I am dumb. In old times that was my only point,” said the old man. “It is fine weather,” he went on, after a pause, “the wind is northeasterly. By Heaven! how the Belle-Poule danced before that wind on the day⁠—But,” he went on, interrupting himself, “I have a singing in my ears, and pains in the false-ribs; the weather will change.⁠—You know that the fight of the Belle-Poule was so famous that ladies wore caps à la Belle-Poule. Madame de Kergarouët was the first to appear at the opera in such a headdress. ‘You are dressed for conquest,’ I said to her. The words were repeated in every box.”

The Baroness listened politely to the old man, who, faithful to the laws of old-world etiquette, escorted her back to the little street, neglecting Thisbe. He let out the secret of Thisbe’s birth. She was the granddaughter of that sweet Thisbe that had belonged to Madame la Comtesse de Kergarouët, the Admiral’s first wife. This Thisbe the third was eighteen years old.

The Baroness ran lightly up to Calyste’s room, as gleeful as if she were in love herself. Calyste was not there, but Fanny saw a letter on the table addressed to Madame de Rochefide, folded, but not sealed. Irresistible curiosity prompted the anxious mother to read her son’s answer. The indiscretion was cruelly punished; she felt horrible anguish when she saw the precipice towards which love was driving Calyste.

Calyste to Béatrix.

“What do I care for the family of du Guénic in such times as we live in, dearest Béatrix! My name is Béatrix, the happiness of Béatrix is my happiness, her life is my life, and all my fortune is in her heart. Our lands have been in pledge these two hundred years, and may remain so for two hundred more; our farmers have them, no one can take them away. To see and love you! That is my religion.

“Marry! The idea has made me heartsick. Are there two such as Béatrix? I will marry no one but you; I will wait twenty years if I must; I am young, and you will always be beautiful. My mother is a saint, and it is not for me to judge her. She never loved! I know now how much she has lost, and what sacrifices she has made. You, Béatrix, have taught me to love my mother better; she dwells in my heart with you⁠—there will never be anyone else; she is your only rival. Is not this as much as to say that no one shares your throne? So your reassuring letter has no effect on my mind.

“As to Camille, you have only to give me a hint, and I will beg her to tell you herself that I do not love her; she is the mother of my intelligence; nothing more, nothing less. As soon as I saw you, she became a sister to me, my friend⁠—my man friend⁠—what you will; but we have no claims on each other beyond those of friendship. I thought she was a woman till the moment when I first saw you. But you show me that Camille is a man; she swims, hunts, rides; she smokes and drinks; she writes, she can analyze a book or a heart; she has not the smallest weakness; she walks on in her strength; she has not your free grace, your step like the flight of a bird, your voice⁠—the voice of love⁠—your arch looks, your gracious demeanor. She is Camille Maupin, and nothing else; she has nothing of the woman about her, and you have everything that I love in woman; I felt from the day when I first saw you that you were mine.

“You will laugh at this feeling, but it has gone on increasing; it strikes me as monstrous that we should be divided; you are my soul, my life, and I cannot live where you are not. Let me love you! We will fly, we will go far, far from the world, into some country where you will know nobody, and where you will have no one but me and God in your heart. My mother, who loves you, will come some day to live with us. Ireland has many country houses, and my mother’s family will surely lend us one. Great God! Let us be off! A boat, some sailors, and we shall be there before anyone can guess whither we have fled from the world you dread so greatly.

“You have never been loved; I feel it as I reread your letter, and I fancy I can perceive that if none of the reasons of which you speak existed you would allow yourself to be loved by me. Béatrix, a holy love will wipe out the past.

“Is it possible in your presence to think of anything but you? Oh! I love you so much that I could wish you a thousand times disgraced, so as to prove to you the power of my love by adoring you as if you were the holiest of creatures. You call my love for you an insult. Oh, Béatrix, you do not think that! The love of a ‘noble’ child⁠—you call me so⁠—would do honor to a queen.

“So tomorrow we will wander lover-like along by the rocks and the sea, and yon shall tread the sands of old Brittany and consecrate them anew for me. Give me that day of joy, and the transient alms⁠—leaving perhaps, alas! no trace on your memory⁠—will be a perennial treasure to Calyste⁠—”

The Baroness dropped the letter unfinished; she knelt on a chair and put up a silent prayer to God, imploring Him to preserve her son’s wits, to deliver him from madness and error, and snatch him back from the ways in which she saw him rushing.

“What are you doing, mother?” said Calyste’s voice.

“Praying for you,” she replied, looking at him with eyes full of tears. “I have been so wrong as to read this letter.⁠—My Calyste is gone mad.”

“It is the sweetest form of madness,” said the youth, kissing his mother.

“I should like to see this woman, my child.”

“Well, mamma, we shall take a boat tomorrow to cross over to le Croisic; come to the jetty.”

He sealed his letter and went off to les Touches. The thing which above all others appalled the Baroness was to see that, by sheer force of instinct, feeling could acquire the insight of consummate experience. Calyste had written to Béatrix as he might have done under the guidance of Monsieur du Halga.

One of the greatest joys, perhaps, that a small mind can know is that of duping a great soul and catching it in a snare. Béatrix knew herself to be very inferior to Camille Maupin. This inferiority was not merely in the sum-total of intellectual qualities known as talent, but also in those qualities of the heart that are called passion. At the moment when Calyste arrived at les Touches, with the impetuous haste of first love borne on the pinions of hope, the Marquise was conscious of keen satisfaction in knowing herself to be loved by this charming youth. She did not go so far as to wish to be his accomplice in this feeling; she made it a point of heroism to repress this capriccio, as the Italians say, and fancied she would thus be on a par with her friend; she was happy to be able to make her some sacrifice. In short, the vanities peculiar to a Frenchwoman, which constitute the famous coquetterie whence she derives her superiority, were in her flattered and amply satisfied: she was tempted by the utmost seduction, and she resisted it; her virtues sang a sweet concert of praise in her ear.

The two women, apparently indolent, were lounging on the divan in that little drawing-room so full of harmony, in the midst of a world of flowers, with the window open, for the north winds had ceased to blow. A melting southerly breeze dimpled the saltwater lake that they could see in front of them, and the sun scorched the golden sands. Their spirits were as deeply tossed as Nature lay calm, and not less burning. Camille, broken on the wheel of the machinery she was working, was obliged to keep a guard over herself, the friendly foe she had admitted into her cage was so prodigiously keen; not to betray her secret she gave herself up to observing the secrets of nature; she cheated her pain by seeking a meaning in the motions of the spheres, and found God in the sublime solitude of the sky.

When once an infidel acknowledges God, he throws himself headlong into Catholicism, which, viewed as a system, is perfect.

That morning Camille had shown the Marquise a face still radiant with the light of her research, carried on during a night spent in lamentation. Calyste was always before her like a heavenly vision. She regarded this beautiful youth, to whom she devoted herself, as her guardian angel. Was it not he who was leading her to the supernal regions where sufferings have an end under the weight of incomprehensible immensity? Still, Camille was made uneasy by Béatrix’s triumphant looks. One woman does not gain such an advantage over another without allowing it to be guessed, while justifying herself for having taken it. Nothing could be stranger than this covert moral struggle between the two friends, each hiding a secret from the other, and each believing herself to be the creditor for unspoken sacrifices.

Calyste arrived holding his letter under his glove, ready to slip it into Béatrix’s hand. Camille, who had not failed to mark the change in her guest’s manner, affected not to look at her, but studied her in a mirror just when Calyste made his entrance. That is the sunken rock for every woman. The cleverest and the most stupid, the most frank and the most astute, are not then mistress of their secret; at that moment it blazes out to another woman’s eyes. Too much reserve or too much freedom, an open and a beaming glance, or a mysterious droop of the eyelids⁠—everything then reveals the feeling above all others difficult to conceal, for indifference is so absolutely cold that it can never be well acted. Women have the genius of shades of manner⁠—they use them too often not to know them all⁠—and on these occasions they take in a rival from head to foot at a glance; they see the slightest twitch of a foot under a petticoat, the most imperceptible start in the figure, and know the meaning of what to a man seems to have none. Two women watching one another play one of the finest comedies to be seen.

“Calyste has committed some folly,” thought Camille, observing in both of them the indefinable look of persons who understand each other.

There was no formality or affected indifference in the Marquise now; she looked at Calyste as if he belonged to her. Calyste explained matters; he reddened like a guilty creature, like a happy lover. He had just settled everything for their excursion on the morrow.

“Then you are really going, my dear?” said Camille.

“Yes,” said Béatrix.

“How did you know that?” said Mademoiselle des Touches to Calyste.

“I have come to ask,” he replied, at a glance shot at him by Madame de Rochefide, who did not wish her friend to have any suspicion of their correspondence.

“They have already come to an understanding,” said Camille to herself, catching this look by a side-glance from the corner of her eye. “It is all over; there is nothing left to me but to disappear.”

And under the pressure of this thought, a deathlike change passed over her face that gave Béatrix a chill.

“What is the matter, dear?” said she.

“Nothing.⁠—Then, Calyste, will you send on my horses and yours, so that we may find them ready on the other side of le Croisic and ride back through le Bourg de Batz? We will breakfast at le Croisic and dine here. You will undertake to find boatmen. We will start at half-past eight in the morning.⁠—Such fine scenery!” she added to Béatrix. “You will see Cambremer, a man who is doing penance on a rock for having murdered his son. Oh! you are in a primitive land where men do not feel like the common herd. Calyste will tell you the story.”

She went into her room; she was stifling. Calyste delivered his letter and followed Camille.

“Calyste, she loves you, I believe; but you are hiding something; you have certainly disobeyed my injunctions.”

“She loves me!” said he, dropping into a chair.

Camille looked out at the door. Béatrix had vanished. This was strange. A woman does not fly from a room where the man is whom she loves and whom she is certain to see again, unless she has something better to do. Mademoiselle des Touches asked herself, “Can she have a letter from Calyste?” But she thought the innocent lad incapable of such audacity.

“If you have disobeyed me, all is lost by your own fault,” said she gravely. “Go and prepare for the joys of tomorrow.”

She dismissed him with a gesture which Calyste could not rebel against. There are silent sorrows that are despotically eloquent. As he went to le Croisic to find the boatmen, Calyste had some qualms of fear. Camille’s speech bore a stamp of doom that revealed the foresight of a mother. Four hours later, when he returned, very tired, counting on dinner at les Touches, he was met at the door by Camille’s maid, who told him that her mistress and the Marquise could not see him this evening. Calyste was surprised, and wanted to question the maid, but she shut the door and vanished.

Six o’clock was striking by the clocks of Guérande. Calyste went home, asked for some dinner, and then played mouche, a prey to gloomy meditations. These alternations of joy and grief, the overthrow of his hopes following hard upon what seemed the certainty that he was loved, crushed the young soul that had been soaring heavenward to the sky, and had risen so high that the fall must be tremendous.

“What ails you, my Calyste?” his mother whispered to him.

“Nothing,” said he, looking at her with eyes whence the light of his soul and the flame of love had died out.

It is not hope, but despair, that gives the measure of our ambitions. We give ourselves over in secret to the beautiful poems of hope, while grief shows itself unveiled.

“Calyste, you are not at all nice,” said Charlotte, after vainly wasting on him those little provincial teasing ways which always degenerate into annoyance.

“I am tired,” he said, rising and bidding the party goodnight.

“Calyste is much altered,” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“We haven’t fine gowns covered with lace; we don’t flourish our sleeves like this; we don’t sit so, or know how to look on one side and wriggle our heads,” said Charlotte, imitating and caricaturing the Marquise’s airs and attitude and looks. “We haven’t a voice with a squeak in the head, or a little interesting cough, heugh! heugh! like the sigh of a ghost; we are so unfortunate as to have robust health and be fond of our friends without any nonsense; when we look at them we do not seem to be stabbing them with a dart, or examining them with a hypocritical glance. We don’t know how to droop our heads like a weeping willow, and appear quite affable merely by raising it, so!”

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël could not help laughing at her niece’s performance; but neither the Chevalier nor the Baron understood this satire of the country on Paris.

“But the Marquise de Rochefide is very handsome,” said the old lady.

“My dear,” said the Baroness to her husband, “I happen to know that she is going tomorrow to le Croisic; we will walk down there. I should very much like to meet her.”

While Calyste was racking his brain to divine why the door of les Touches should have been closed in his face, a scene was taking place between the two friends which was to have its effect on the events of the morrow. Calyste’s letter had given birth to unknown emotions in Madame de Rochefide’s heart. A woman is not often the object of a passion so youthful, so guileless, so sincere and absolute as was this boy’s. Béatrix had loved more than she had been loved. After being a slave she felt an unaccountable longing to be the tyrant in her turn.

In the midst of her joy, as she read and reread Calyste’s letter, a cruel thought pierced her like a stab. What had Calyste and Camille been about together since Claude Vignon’s departure? If Calyste did not love Camille, and Camille knew it, what did they do in those long mornings? The memory of her brain insidiously compared this remark with all Camille had said. It was as though a smiling devil held up before her, as in a mirror, the portrait of her heroic friend, with certain looks, certain gestures, which finally enlightened Béatrix. Far from being Félicité’s equal, she was crushed by her; far from deceiving her, it was she who was deceived; she herself was but a toy that Camille wanted to give the child she loved with an extraordinary and never vulgar passion.

To a woman like Béatrix this discovery was a thunderbolt. She recalled every detail of the past week. In an instant Camille’s part and her own lay before her in their fullest development; she saw herself strangely abased. In the rush of her jealous hatred she fancied she detected in Camille some plot of revenge on Conti. All the events of the past two years had perhaps led up to these two weeks. Once started on the downward slope of suspicions, hypotheses, and anger, Béatrix did not check herself; she walked up and down her rooms, spurred by impulses of passion, or, sitting down now and again, tried to make a plan; still, until the dinner-hour she remained a prey to indecision, and only went down when dinner was served without changing her dress.

On seeing her rival come in, Camille guessed everything. Béatrix, in morning dress, had a cold look and an expression of reserve, which to an observer so keen as Camille betrayed the animosity of embittered feelings. Camille immediately left the room and gave the order that had so greatly astonished Calyste; she thought that if the guileless lad, with his insane adoration, came into the middle of the quarrel he might never see Béatrix again, and compromise the future of his passion by some foolish bluntness. She meant to fight out this duel of dupery without any witness. Béatrix, with no one to uphold her, must certainly yield. Camille knew how shallow her soul was, and how mean her pride, to which she had justly given the name of obstinacy.

The dinner was gloomy. Both the women had too much spirit and good taste to have any explanation before the servants, or when they might listen at the doors. Camille was gentle and kind; she felt herself so much the superior! The Marquise was hard and biting; she knew she was being fooled like a child. There was, all through dinner, a warfare of looks, shrugs, half-spoken words, to which the servants could have no clue, but which gave warning of a terrible storm. When they were going upstairs again Camille mischievously offered Béatrix her arm; the Marquise affected not to see, and rushed forward alone. As soon as coffee was served, Mademoiselle des Touches said to her servant, “You can go,” and this was the signal for battle.

“The romances you act out, my dear, are rather more dangerous than those you write,” said the Marquise.

“They have, however, one great merit,” said Camille, taking a cigarette.

“What is that?” asked Béatrix.

“They are unpublished, my angel.”

“Will that in which you have plunged me make a book?”

“I have no genius for the task of Oedipus; you have the wit and beauty of the Sphinx, I know, but do not ask me any riddles; speak out, my dear Béatrix.”

“When, in order to make men happy, to amuse them, please them, dispel their annoyances, we appeal to the devil to help us⁠—”

“The men blame us afterwards for our endeavor, and believe it to be dictated by a spirit of depravity,” said Camille, taking her cigarette from her lips to interrupt her friend.

“They forget the love which carried us away, and which justified our excesses⁠—for whither may we not be carried?⁠—But they are only playing out their part as men, they are ungrateful and unjust,” said Béatrix. “Women know each other; they know how truly lofty and noble their attitude is under all circumstances⁠—nay, I may say how virtuous.

“Still, Camille, I have begun to perceive the truth of certain remarks I have heard you complain of. Yes, my dear, there is something of the man in you; you behave like men; nothing checks you; and if you have not all their merits, your mind conducts itself like theirs, and you share their contempt for us women. I have no reason to be pleased with you, my dear, and I am too frank to conceal the fact. Nobody, perhaps, will ever inflict so deep a wound on my heart as that I am now suffering from. Though you are not always a woman in love matters, you become one again in revenge. Only a woman of genius could have discovered the tenderest spot in our delicate sentiments⁠—I am speaking of Calyste, and of the trickery, my dear, for that is the right word, that you have employed against me. How low you have fallen, you, Camille Maupin; and to what end?”

“Still and still more the sphinx,” said Camille, smiling.

“You wanted to make me throw myself at Calyste’s head; I am still too young for such doings. To me love is love, with its intolerable jealousy and despotic demands. I am not a writer; it is not possible to me to find ideas in feelings⁠—”

“You think yourself capable of loving foolishly?” Camille asked her. “Be quite easy, you still have all your wits about you. You malign yourself, my dear; you are cold enough for your head always to remain supreme judge of the achievements of your heart.”

This epigram brought the color to the Marquise’s face; she shot a look full of hatred, an envenomed look, at Camille; and at once, without stopping to choose them, let fly all the sharpest arrows in her quiver. Camille, smoking her cigarette, listened calmly to this furious attack, bristling with such virulent abuse that it is impossible to record it. Béatrix, provoked by her adversary’s imperturbable manner, fell back on odious personalities and Mademoiselle des Touches’ age.

“Is that all?” asked Camille, blowing a cloud of smoke. “Are you in love with Calyste?”

“Certainly not.”

“So much the better,” replied Camille. “I am, and far too much for my happiness. He has, no doubt, a fancy for you. You are the loveliest blonde in the world, and I am as brown as a mole; you are slim and slender, my figure is too dignified. In short, you are young; that is the great fact, and you have not spared me. You have made an abuse of your advantages over me as a woman, neither more nor less than as a comic paper makes an abuse of humor. I have done all in my power to prevent what is now inevitable,” and she raised her eyes to the ceiling. “However little I may seem to be a woman, I still have enough of the woman in me for a rival to need my help in order to triumph over me!” This cruel speech, uttered with an air of perfect innocence, went to the Marquise’s heart. “You must think me a very idiotic person if you believe all that Calyste tries to make you believe about me. I am neither lofty nor mean; I am a woman, and very much a woman. Throw off your airs and give me your hand,” said Camille, taking possession of Béatrix’s hand. “You do not love Calyste, that is the truth⁠—is it not? Then do not get in a rage! Be stern with him tomorrow, cold and hard, and he will end by submitting after the scolding I shall give him, for I have not exhausted the resources of our arsenal, and, after all, pleasure always gets the better of desire.

“But Calyste is a Breton. If he persists in paying you his addresses, tell me honestly, and you can go at once to a little country-house of mine at six leagues from Paris, where you will find every comfort, and where Conti can join you. If Calyste slanders me! Why, good heavens! The purest love lies six times a day; its illusions prove its strength.”

There was a proud coldness in Camille’s expression that made the Marquise uneasy and afraid. She did not know what answer to make.

Camille struck the final blow.

“I am more trusting and less bitter than you,” she went on. “I do not imagine that you intended to hide under recrimination an attack which would imperil my life; you know me; I should not survive the loss of Calyste, and I must lose him sooner or later. But, indeed, Calyste loves me, and I know it.”

“Here is his answer to a letter from me in which I wrote only of you,” said Béatrix, holding out Calyste’s letter.

Camille took it and read it. As she read, her eyes filled with tears; she wept, as all women weep in acute suffering.

“Good God!” said she. “He loves her. Then I must die without ever having been understood or loved!”

She sat for some minutes with her head resting on her friend’s shoulder; her pain was genuine; she felt in her own soul the same terrible blow that Madame du Guénic had received on reading this letter.

“Do you love him?” said she, sitting up and looking at Béatrix. “Do you feel for him that infinite devotion which triumphs over all suffering, and survives scorn, betrayal, even the certainty of never being loved again? Do you love him for himself, for the very joy of loving?”

“My dearest friend!” said the Marquise, much moved. “Well, be content, I will leave tomorrow.”

“Do not go away; he loves you, I see it! And I love him so well that I should be in despair if I saw him miserable and unhappy. I had dreamed of many things for him; but if he loves you, that is all at an end.”

“Yes, Camille, I love him,” said the Marquise with delightful simplicity, but coloring.

“You love him, and you can resist him!” cried Camille. “No, you do not love him!”

“I do not know what new virtues he has aroused in me, but he has certainly made me ashamed of myself,” said Béatrix. “I could wish to be virtuous and free, so as to have something else to sacrifice to him besides the remnants of a heart and disgraceful bonds. I will not accept an incomplete destiny either for him or for myself.”

“Cold brain! it can love and calculate!” cried Camille, with a sort of horror.

“Whatever you please, but I will not blight his life or be a stone round his neck, an everlasting regret. As I cannot be his wife, I will not be his mistress. He has⁠—you will not laugh at me? No?⁠—Well, then, his beautiful love has purified me.”

Camille gave Béatrix a look⁠—the wildest, fiercest look that ever a jealous woman flung at her rival.

“On that ground,” said she, “I fancied I stood alone. Béatrix, that speech has parted us forever; we are no longer friends. We are at the beginning of a hideous struggle. Now, I tell you plainly, you must succumb or fly.”

Félicité rushed away into her own room after showing to Béatrix, who was amazed, a face like an infuriated lioness.

“Are you coming to le Croisic tomorrow?” said Camille, lifting the curtain.

“Certainly,” said the Marquise, loftily; “I will not fly⁠—nor will I succumb.”

“I play with my hand on the table,” retorted Camille; “I shall write to Conti.”

Béatrix turned as white as her gauze scarf.

“For each of us life is at stake,” replied Béatrix, who did not know what to decide on.

The violent passions to which this scene had given rise between the two women subsided during the night. They both reasoned with themselves, and came back to a reliance on the perfidious temporizing which fascinates most women⁠—an excellent system between them and men, but a bad one between woman and woman. It was in the midst of this last storm that Mademoiselle des Touches heard the great voice which dominates even the bravest. Béatrix listened to the counsels of worldly wisdom; she feared the contempt of society. So Félicité’s last masterstroke, weighted with the accents of intense jealousy, was perfectly successful. Calyste’s blunder was remedied, but any fresh mistake might ruin his hopes forever.

The month of August was drawing to a close, the sky was magnificently clear. On the horizon the ocean, like a southern sea, had a hue as of molten silver, and fluttered to the strand in sparkling ripples. A sort of glistening vapor, produced by the sun’s rays falling directly on the sand, made an atmosphere at least equal to that of the tropics. The salt blossomed into little white stars on the surface of the salt-pans. The laborious marshmen, dressed in white on purpose to defy the heat of the sun, were at their post by daybreak armed with their long rakes, some leaning against the mud-walls dividing the plots, and watching this process of natural chemistry, familiar to them from their infancy; others playing with their little ones and wives. Those green dragons called excisemen smoked their pipes in peace. There was something Oriental in the picture, and certainly a Parisian, suddenly dropped there, would not have believed that he was in France.

The Baron and Baroness, who had made a pretext of their wish to see how the salt-raking was going on, were on the jetty, admiring the silent scene, where no sound was to be heard but the sea moaning with regular rhythm, where boats cut through the water, and the green belt of cultivated land was all the more lovely in its effect because it is so uncommon on the desert shores of the ocean.

“Well, my friends, I shall have seen the marshes of Guérande once more before I die,” said the Baron to the marshmen, who stood in groups at the fringe of the marsh to greet him.

“As if the du Guénics died!” said one of the men.

At this moment the little party from les Touches came down the narrow road. The Marquise led the way alone, Calyste and Camille followed arm-in-arm. About twenty yards behind them came Gasselin.

“There are my father and mother,” said Calyste to Camille.

The Marquise stopped. Madame du Guénic felt the most vehement repulsion at the sight of Béatrix, though she was dressed to advantage, in a broad-brimmed Leghorn hat trimmed with blue cornflowers, her hair waved beneath it; a dress of gray linen stuff, and a blue sash with long ends: in short, the garb of a princess disguised as a shepherdess.

“She has no heart!” said Fanny to herself.

“Mademoiselle,” said Calyste to Camille, “here are Madame du Guénic and my father.”

Then he added to his parents:

“Mademoiselle des Touches and Madame la Marquise de Rochefide, née de Casteran⁠—my father.”

The Baron bowed to Mademoiselle des Touches, who bowed with an air of humble gratitude to the Baroness.

“She,” thought Fanny, “really loves my boy; she seems to be thanking me for having brought him into the world.”

“You, like me, are come to see if the yield is good; but you have more reasons than I for curiosity, mademoiselle,” said the Baron to Camille, “for you have property here.”

“Mademoiselle is the richest owner of them all,” said one of the marshmen; “and God preserve her, for she is a very good lady!”

The two parties bowed and went their way.

“You would never suppose Mademoiselle des Touches to be more than thirty,” said the good man to his wife. “She is very handsome. And Calyste prefers that jade of a Parisian Marquise to that good daughter of Brittany?”

“Alas, yes!” said the Baroness.

A boat was lying at the end of the jetty; they got in, but not in high spirits. Béatrix was cold and dignified. Camille had scolded Calyste for his disobedience, and explained to him the position of his love affair. Calyste, sunk in gloomy despair, cast eyes at Béatrix, in which love and hatred struggled for the upper hand.

Not a word was spoken during the short passage from the jetty of Guérande to the extreme point of the harbor of le Croisic, the spot where the salt is shipped, being brought down to the shore by women in large earthen pans, which they carry on their heads, holding them in such a way as to look like caryatides. These women are barefoot, and wear a very short skirt. Many of them leave the kerchief that covers their shoulders to fly loose, and several wear only a shift, and are the proudest, for the less clothes they wear the more they display their modest beauties.

The little Danish bark was taking in her cargo. Thus the landing of these two beautiful ladies excited the curiosity of the salt-carriers; and partly to escape them, as well as to do Calyste a service, Camille hurried on towards the rocks, leaving him with Béatrix. Gasselin lingered at least two hundred yards behind his master.

On the seaward side the peninsula of le Croisic is fringed with granite rocks so singularly grotesque in form that they can only be appreciated by travelers who are able from experience to make comparisons between the different grand spectacles of wild nature. The rocks of le Croisic have, perhaps, the same superiority over other similar scenes that the road to the Grande Chartreuse is admitted to have over other narrow gorges. Neither the Corsican shore, where the granite forms very remarkable reefs, nor that of Sardinia, where nature has reveled in grand and terrible effects, nor the basaltic formations of northern seas, have quite so distinctive a character. Fancy seems to have disported itself there in endless arabesques, where the most grotesque shapes mingle or stand forth. Every form may be seen there. Imagination may, perhaps, be weary of this vast collection of monsters, among which, in furious weather, the sea rushes in, and has at last polished down all the rough edges.

Under a natural vault, arched with a boldness only faintly imitated by Brunelleschi⁠—for the greatest efforts of art are but a timid counterpart of some work of nature⁠—you will find a basin polished like a marble bath, and strewn with smooth, fine white sand, in which you may bathe in safety in four feet of tepid water. As you walk on you admire the cool little creeks, under shelter of porticoes rough-hewn but stately, like those of the Pitti palace⁠—another imitation of the freaks of nature. The variety is infinite; nothing is lacking that the most extravagant fancy could invent or wish for.

There is even a large shrub of box,2 a thing so rare on the shore of the Atlantic that perhaps this is the only specimen. This box-shrub, the greatest curiosity in le Croisic, where trees cannot grow, is at about a league from the port, on the utmost headland of the coast. On one of the promontories formed by the granite, rising so high above the sea that the waves cannot reach it even in the wildest storms, and facing the south, the floods have worn a hollow shelf about four feet deep. In this cleft, chance, or perhaps man, has deposited soil enough to enable a box, sown by some bird, to grow thick and closely shorn. The gnarled roots would indicate an age of at least three hundred years. Below it the rock falls sheer.

Some shock, of which the traces are stamped in indelible characters on this coast, has swept off the fragments of granite I know not whither. The sea comes, without breaking over any shoals, to the bottom of this cliff, where the water is more than five hundred feet deep. On either hand some reefs, just beneath the surface, form a sort of large cirque, traceable by the foaming breakers. It needs some courage and resolution to climb to the top of this little Gibraltar; its cap is almost spherical, and a gust of wind might carry the inquirer into the sea, or, which would be worse, on to the rocks below. This giant sentinel is like the lantern towers of old châteaux, whence miles of country could be scanned and attacks guarded against; from its height are seen the steeple and the thrifty fields of le Croisic, the sand-hills that threaten to encroach on the arable land, and which have invaded the neighborhood of le Bourg de Batz. Some old men declare that there was, long ago, a castle on this spot. The sardine fishers have a name for this headland, which can be seen from afar at sea; but I must be forgiven for having forgotten that Breton name, as hard to pronounce as it is to remember.

Calyste led Béatrix towards this height, whence the view is superb, and where the forms of the granite surpass all the surprises they can have caused along the sandy margin of the shore.

It is vain to explain why Camille had hurried on in front; like a wounded animal, she longed for solitude; she lost herself in the grottoes, reappeared on the boulders, chased the crabs out of their holes, or discovered them in the very act of their eccentric behavior. Not to be inconvenienced by her women’s skirts, she had put on Turkish trousers with embroidered frills, a short blouse, and a felt hat; and, by way of a traveler’s staff, she carried a riding-whip, for she was always vain of her strength and agility. Thus attired, she was a hundred times handsomer than Béatrix; she had tied a little red China silk shawl across her bosom and knotted behind, as we wrap a child. For some little time Béatrix and Calyste saw her flitting over rocks and rifts like a will-o’-the-wisp, trying to stultify grief by facing perils.

She was the first to arrive at the box cliff, and sat down in the shade of one of the clefts, lost in meditation. What could such a woman as she do in old age, after drinking the cup of fame which all great talents, too greedy to sip the dull driblets of vanity, drain at one draught? She has since confessed that then and there, one of the coincidences suggested by a mere trifle, by one of the accidents which count for nothing with ordinary people, though they open a gulf of meditation to a great soul, brought her to a decision as to the strange deed, which was afterwards the close of her social career. She drew out of her pocket a little box in which she had brought, in case of thirst, some strawberry pastilles; she ate several; but as she sucked them, she could not help reflecting that the strawberries, which were no more, yet lived by their qualities. Hence she concluded that it might be the same with us. The sea offered her an image of the infinite. No great mind can get away from the infinite, granting the immortality of the soul, without being brought to infer some religious future. This idea still haunted her when she smelt at her scent-bottle of Eau de Portugal.

Her manoeuvres for handing Béatrix over to Calyste then struck her as very sordid; she felt the woman die in her, and she emerged the noble angelic being hitherto veiled in the flesh. Her vast intellect, her learning, her acquirements, her spurious loves had brought her face to face with what? Who could have foretold it? With the yearning mother, the consoler of the sorrowing⁠—the Roman Church, so mild towards repentance, so poetical to poets, so artless with children, so deep and mysterious to wild and anxious spirits, that they can forever plunge deeper into it and still satisfy their inextinguishable curiosity, which is constantly excited.

She glanced back at the devious ways to which she had been led by Calyste, comparing them to the tortuous paths among these rocks. Calyste was still in her eyes the lovely messenger from heaven, a divine leader. She smothered earthly in sacred love.

After walking on for some time in silence, Calyste, at an exclamation from Béatrix at the beauty of the ocean, very different from the Mediterranean, could not resist drawing a comparison between that sea and his love, in its purity and extent, its agitations, its depth, its eternity.

“It has a rock for its shore,” said Béatrix with a laugh.

“When you speak to me in that tone,” replied he with a heavenly flash, “I see you and hear you, and I can find an angel’s patience; but when I am alone, you would pity me if you could see me. My mother cries over my grief.”

“Listen, Calyste, this must come to an end,” said the Marquise, stepping down on to the sandy path. “Perhaps we are now in the one propitious spot for the utterance of such things, for never in my life have I seen one where nature was more in harmony with my thoughts. I have seen Italy, where everything speaks of love; I have seen Switzerland, where all is fresh and expressive of true happiness, laborious happiness, where the verdure, the calm waters, the most placid outlines are overpowered by the snow-crowned Alps; but I have seen nothing which more truly paints the scorching barrenness of my life than this little plain, withered by sea-gales, corroded by salt mists, where melancholy tillage struggles in the face of the immense ocean and under the hedgerows of Brittany, whence rise the towers of your Guérande.

“Well, Calyste, that is Béatrix. Do not attach yourself to that. I love you, but I will never be yours, for I am conscious of my inward desolation. Ah! you can never know how cruel I am to myself when I tell you this. No, you shall never see your idol⁠—if I am your idol⁠—stoop; it shall not fall from the height where you have set it. I have now a horror of a passion which the world and religion alike reprobate; I will be humbled no more, nor will I steal happiness. I shall remain where I am; I shall be the sandy, unfertile desert, without verdure or flowers, which lies before you.”

“And if you should be deserted?” said Calyste.

“Then I should go and beg for mercy. I would humble myself before the man I have sinned against, but I would never run the risk of rushing into happiness which I know would end.”

“End?” cried Calyste.

“End,” repeated the Marquise, interrupting the rhapsody into which her lover was plunging, by a tone which reduced him to silence.

This contradiction gave rise in the youth’s soul to one of those wordless rages which are known only to those who have loved without hope. He and Béatrix walked on for about three hundred yards in utter silence, looking neither at the sea, nor the rocks, nor the fields of le Croisic.

“I should make you so happy!” said Calyste.

“All men begin by promising us happiness, and they bequeath to us shame, desertion, disgust. I have nothing of which to accuse the man to whom I ought to be faithful; he made me no promises; I went to him. But the only way to make my fault less is to make it eternal.”

“Say at once, madame, that you do not love me! I who love you, know by myself that love does not argue, it sees nothing but itself, there is no sacrifice I could not make for it. Command me, and I will attempt the impossible. The man who, of old, scorned his mistress for having thrown her glove to the lions and commanding him to rescue it, did not love! He misprized your right to test us, to make sure of our love, and never to lay down your arms but to superhuman magnanimity. To you I would sacrifice my family, my name, my future life.”

“What an insult lies in that word sacrifice!” replied she in a reproachful tone, which made Calyste feel all the folly of his expression.

Only women who love wholly, or utter coquettes, can take a word as a fulcrum, and spring to prodigious heights; wit and feeling act on the same lines; but the woman who loves is grieved, the coquette is contemptuous.

“You are right,” said Calyste, dropping two tears, “the word can only be applied to the achievement you demand of me.”

“Be silent,” said Béatrix, startled by a reply in which for the first time Calyste really expressed his love. “I have done wrong enough.⁠—Do not tempt me.”

They had just reached the base of the box-cliff. Calyste felt intoxicating joys in helping the Marquise to climb the rock; she was bent on mounting to the very top. The poor boy thought it the height of rapture to support her by the waist, to feel her slightly tremulous: she needed him! The unhoped-for joy turned his brain, he saw nothing, he put his arm round her body.

“Well!” said she with an imperious look.

“You will never be mine?” he asked in a voice choked by a storm in his blood.

“Never, my dear,” said she. “To you I can only be Béatrix⁠—a dream. And is not a dream sweet? We shall know no bitterness, no regrets, no repentance.”

“And you will return to Conti?”

“There is no help for it.”

“Then you shall never more be any man’s,” cried Calyste, flinging her from him with mad violence.

He listened for her fall before throwing himself after her, but he only heard a dull noise, the harsh rending of stuff, and the heavy sound of a body falling on earth. Instead of tumbling head-foremost, Béatrix had turned over; she had fallen into the box-tree; but she would have rolled to the bottom of the sea nevertheless if her gown had not caught on a corner, and, by tearing, checked the force of her fall on the bush.

Mademoiselle des Touches, who had witnessed the scene, could not call out, for she was aghast, and could only signal to Gasselin to hasten up. Calyste leaned over, prompted by a fierce sort of curiosity; he saw Béatrix as she lay, and shuddered. She seemed to be praying; she thought she must die, she felt the box-tree giving away. With the sudden presence of mind inspired by love, and the supernatural agility of youth in the face of danger, he let himself down the nine feet of rock by his hands, clinging to the rough edges, to the little shelf, where he was in time to rescue the Marquise by taking her in his arms, at the risk of their both falling into the sea. When he caught Béatrix she became unconscious; but he could dream that she was his, wholly his, in this aerial bed where they might have to remain a long time, and his first feeling was an impulse of gladness.

“Open your eyes, forgive me!” said Calyste. “Or we die together.”

“Die?” said she, opening her eyes, and unsealing her pale lips.

Calyste received the word with a kiss, and then was aware of a spasmodic thrill in the Marquise, which was ecstasy to him. At that instant Gasselin’s nailed shoes were audible above them. Camille followed the Breton, and they were anxiously considering the means of saving the lovers.

“There is but one way, mademoiselle,” said Gasselin. “I will let myself down; they will climb up on my shoulders, and you will give them your hand.”

“And you?” said Camille.

The man seemed astonished at being held of any account when his young master was in danger.

“It will be better to fetch a ladder from le Croisic,” said Camille.

“She is a knowing one, she is!” said Gasselin to himself, as he went off. Béatrix, in a feeble voice, begged to be laid on the ground; she felt faint. Calyste laid her down on the cool earth between the rock and the box-tree.

“I saw you, Calyste,” said Camille. “Whether Béatrix dies or is saved, this must never be anything but an accident.”

“She will hate me!” he cried, his eyes full of tears.

“She will worship you,” replied Camille. “This is an end to our excursion; she must be carried to les Touches.⁠—What would have become of you if she had been killed?” she said.

“I should have followed her.”

“And your mother?⁠—and,” she softly added after a pause, “and me?”

Calyste stood pale, motionless, and silent, his back against the granite. Gasselin very soon returned from one of the little farms that lie scattered among the fields, running with a ladder he had borrowed. Béatrix had somewhat recovered her strength. When Gasselin had fixed the ladder, the Marquise, helped by Gasselin, who begged Calyste to put Camille’s red shawl round Béatrix under her arms, and to give him up the ends, climbed up to the little plateau, where Gasselin took her in his arms like a child, and carried her down to the shore.

“Death I would not say nay to⁠—but pain!” said she in a weak voice to Mademoiselle des Touches.

The faintness and shock from which Béatrix was suffering made it necessary that she should be carried as far as the farm whence Gasselin had borrowed the ladder. Calyste, Gasselin, and Camille took off such garments as they could dispense with, and made a sort of mattress on the ladder, on which they laid Béatrix, carrying it like a litter. The farm-people offered their bed. Gasselin hurried off to the spot where the horses were waiting for them, took one, and fetched a surgeon from le Croisic, after ordering the boatmen to come up the creek that lay nearest to the farm. Calyste, sitting on a low stool, answered Camille’s remarks with nods and rare monosyllables, and Mademoiselle des Touches was equally uneasy as to Béatrix’s condition and Calyste’s.

After being bled, the patient felt better; she could speak; she consented to go in the boat; and at about five in the afternoon they crossed to Guérande, where the town doctor was waiting for her. The news of the accident had spread in this deserted and almost uninhabited land with amazing rapidity.

Calyste spent the night at les Touches at the foot of Béatrix’s bed with Camille. The doctor promised that by next morning the Marquise would suffer from nothing worse than stiffness. Through Calyste’s despair a great happiness beamed. He was at the foot of Béatrix’s bed watching her asleep or waking; he could study her pale face, her lightest movements. Camille smiled bitterly as she recognized in the lad all the symptoms of a passion such as tinges the soul and mind of a man by becoming a part of his life at a time when no thought, no cares counteract this torturing mental process.

Calyste would never discern the real woman in Béatrix. How guilelessly did the young Breton allow her to read his most secret soul!⁠—Why, he fancied she was his, merely because he found himself here, in her room, admiring her in the disorder of the bed. He watched Béatrix in her slightest movement with rapturous attention; his face expressed such sweet curiosity, his ecstasy was so artlessly betrayed, that there was a moment when the two women looked at each other with a smile. As Calyste read in the invalid’s fine sea-green eyes a mixed expression of confusion, love, and amusement, he blushed and looked away.

“Did I not say to you, Calyste, that you men promised us happiness and ended by throwing us over a precipice?”

As he heard this little jest, spoken in a charming tone of voice, which betrayed some change in Béatrix’s heart, Calyste knelt down, took one of her moist hands, which she allowed him to hold, and kissed it very submissively.

“You have every right to reject my love forever,” said he, “and I have no right ever to say a single word to you again.”

“Ah!” cried Camille, as she saw the expression of her friend’s face, and compared it with that she had seen after every effort of diplomacy; “love unaided will always have more wit than all the world beside.⁠—Take your draught, my dear, and go to sleep.”

This evening spent by Calyste with Mademoiselle des Touches, who read books on mystical theology, while Calyste read Indiana⁠—the first work of Camille’s famous rival, in which he found the captivating picture of a young man who loved with idolatry and devotion, with mysterious rapture, and for his whole life⁠—a book of fatal teaching for him!⁠—this evening left an ineffaceable mark on the heart of the unhappy youth, for Félicité at last convinced him that any woman who was not a monster could only be happy and flattered in every vanity, by knowing herself to be the object of a crime.

“You would never, never, have thrown me into the sea!” said poor Camille, wiping away a tear.

Towards morning Calyste, quite worn out, fell asleep in his chair. It was now the Marquise’s turn to look at the pretty boy, pale with agitation and his first love-watch; she heard him murmuring words in his sleep.

“He loves in his very dreams!” said she to Camille.

“We must send him home to bed,” said Félicité, awaking him.

No one was alarmed at the du Guénics’; Mademoiselle des Touches had written a few words to the Baroness.

Calyste dined at les Touches next day. He found Béatrix up, pale, languid, and tired. But there was no hardness now in her speech or looks. After that evening, which Camille filled with music, seating herself at the piano to allow Calyste to hold and press Béatrix’s hands while they could say nothing to each other, there was never a storm at les Touches. Félicité completely effaced herself.

Women like Madame de Rochefide, cold, fragile, hard, and thin⁠—such women, whose throat shows a form of collarbone suggestive of the feline race⁠—have souls as pale and colorless as their pale gray or green eyes; to melt them, to vitrify these flints, a thunderbolt is needed. To Béatrix this thunderbolt had fallen in Calyste’s rage of love and attempt on her life; it was such a flame as nothing can resist, changing the most stubborn nature. Béatrix felt herself softened; pure and true love flooded her soul with its soothing lapping glow. She floated in a mild and tender atmosphere of feeling hitherto unknown, in which she felt ennobled, elevated; she had entered into the heaven where, in all ages, woman has dwelt, in Brittany. She enjoyed the respectful worship of this boy, whose happiness cost her so little; for a smile, a look, a word was enough for Calyste. Such value set by feeling on such trifles touched her extremely. To this angelic soul, the glove she had worn could be more than her whole body was to the man who ought to have adored her. What a contrast!

What woman could have resisted this persistent idolatry? She was sure of being understood and obeyed. If she had bid Calyste to risk his life for her smallest whim, he would not even have paused to think. And Béatrix acquired an indescribable air of imposing dignity; she looked at love on its loftiest side, and sought in it a footing, as it were, which would enable her to remain, in Calyste’s eyes, the supreme woman; she wished her power over him to be eternal. She coquetted all the more persistently because she felt herself weak.

For a whole week she played the invalid with engaging hypocrisy. How many times did she walk round and round the green lawn that spread on the garden side of the house, leaning on Calyste’s arm, and reviving in Camille the torments she had caused her during the first week of her visit.

“Well, my dear, you are taking him the Grand Tour!” said Mademoiselle des Touches to the Marquise.

One evening, before the excursion to le Croisic, the two women had been discussing love, and laughing over the various ways in which men made their declarations, confessing that the most skilful, and, of course, therefore the least devoted, did not waste time in wandering through the mazes of sentimentality, and were right; so that those who loved best were, at a certain stage, the worst used.

“They set to work as la Fontaine did to get into the Academy,” said Camille.

Her remark now recalled this conversation to Béatrix’s memory while reproving her Machiavelian conduct. Madame de Rochefide had absolute power over Calyste, and could keep him within the bounds she chose, reminding him by a look or a gesture of his horrible violence by the seashore. Then the poor martyr’s eyes would fill with tears; he was silent, swallowing down his arguments, his hopes, his griefs, with a heroism that would have touched any other woman.

Her infernal coquetting brought him to such desperation that he came one day to throw himself into Camille’s arms and ask her advice. Béatrix, armed with Calyste’s letter, had picked out the passage in which he said that loving was the chief happiness, that being loved was second to it, and she had made use of this axiom to suppress his passion to such a degree of respectful idolatry as she chose to permit. She reveled in having her spirit soothed by the sweet concert of praise and adoration which nature suggests to youth; and there is so much art too, though unconscious, so much innocent seductiveness in their cries, their prayers, their exclamations, their appeals to themselves, in their readiness to mortgage the future, that Béatrix took care not to answer him. She had told him she doubted! Happiness was not yet in question, only the permission to love that the lad was constantly asking for, persistently bent on taking the citadel from the strongest side⁠—that of the mind and heart.

The woman who is bravest in word is often weak in action. After seeing what progress he had made by his attempt to push Béatrix into the sea, it is strange that Calyste should not have continued the pursuit of happiness through violence; but love in these young lads is so ecstatic and religious that it insists on absolute conviction. Hence its sublimity.

However, one day Calyste, driven to bay by desire, complained vehemently to Camille of Madame de Rochefide’s conduct.

“I wanted to cure you by enabling you to know her from the first,” replied Mademoiselle des Touches, “but you spoilt all by your impetuosity. Ten days since you were her master; now you are her slave, my poor boy. So you would never be strong enough to carry out my orders.”

“What must I do?”

“Quarrel with her on the ground of her cruelty. A woman is always carried away by talk; make her treat you badly, and do not return to les Touches till she sends for you.”

There is a moment in every severe disease when the patient accepts the most painful remedies, and submits to the most horrible operations. Calyste was at this crisis. He took Camille’s advice; he stayed at home for two days; but on the third he was tapping at Béatrix’s door and telling her that he and Camille were waiting breakfast for her.

“Another chance lost!” said Camille, seeing him sneak back so tamely.

During those two days Béatrix had stopped frequently at the window whence the Guérande road could be seen. When Camille found her there she said that she was studying the effect of the gorse by the roadside, its golden bloom blazing under the September sun. Thus Camille had read her friend’s secret; she had only to say the word for Calyste to be happy. But she did not speak it; she was still too much a woman to urge him to the deed so dreaded by young hearts, who seem aware of all that their ideal must lose by it.

Béatrix kept Camille and Calyste waiting some little time; if he had been any other man, the delay would have seemed significant, for the Marquise’s dress suggested her wish to fascinate Calyste and prevent his absenting himself again. After breakfast she went to walk in the garden, and enchanted him with joy, as she enchanted him with love, by expressing her wish to go with him again to see the spot where she had so nearly perished.

“Let us go alone,” said Calyste in a broken voice.

“If I refused,” said she, “I might give you reason to think that you were dangerous. Alas! as I have told you a thousand times, I belong to another, and must forever be his alone. I chose him, knowing nothing of love. The fault was twofold, and the punishment double.”

When she spoke thus, her eyes moist with the rare tears such women can shed, Calyste felt a sort of pity that cooled his furious ardor; he worshiped her then as a Madonna. We must not expect that different natures should resemble each other in the expression of their feelings, any more than we look for the same fruits from different trees. Béatrix at this moment was torn in her mind; she hesitated between herself and Calyste; between the world, where she hoped some day to be seen again, and perfect happiness; between ruining herself finally by a second unpardonable passion and social forgiveness. She was beginning to listen without even affected annoyance to the language of blind love; she allowed herself to be soothed by the gentle hands of pity. Already, many times, she had been moved to tears by hearing Calyste promising her love enough to make up for all she could lose in the eyes of the world, and pitying her for being bound to such an evil genius, to a man as false as Conti. More than once she had not silenced Calyste when she had told him of the misery and sufferings that overwhelmed her in Italy when she found that she did not reign alone in Conti’s heart. Camille had given Calyste more than one lecture on this subject, and Calyste had profited by them.

“I,” said he, “love you wholly; you will find in me none of the triumphs of art, nor the pleasures derived from seeing a crowd bewildered by the wonders of talent; my only talent is for loving you, my only joys will be in yours; no woman’s admiration will seem to me worthy of consideration; you need fear no odious rivals. You are misprized; and wherever you are accepted I desire also to be accepted every day.”

She listened to his words with a drooping head, allowing him to kiss her hands, and confessing to herself silently but very readily that she was perhaps a misunderstood angel.

“I am too much humiliated,” she replied; “my past deprives me of all security for the future.”

It was a great day for Calyste when, on reaching les Touches at seven in the morning, he saw from between two gorse bushes Béatrix at a window, wearing the same straw hat that she had worn on the day of their excursion. He felt quite dazzled. These small details of passion make the world wider.

Only Frenchwomen, perhaps, have the secret of these theatrical touches; they owe them to their graceful wit, of which they infuse just so much into feeling as it can bear without losing its force.

Ah! how lightly she leaned on Calyste’s arm. They went out together by the garden gate leading to the sand-hills. Béatrix thought their wildness pleasing; she saw the little rigid plants that grow there with their pink blossoms, and gathered several, with some of the Carthusian pinks, which also thrive on barren sands, and divided the flowers significantly with Calyste, to whom these blossoms and leaves were to have an eternally sinister association.

“We will add a sprig of box!” said she with a smile.

She stood for some time waiting for the boat on the jetty, where Calyste told her of his childish eagerness the day of her arrival.

“That expedition, which I heard of, was the cause of my severity that first day,” said she.

Throughout their walk Madame de Rochefide talked in the half-jesting tone of a woman who loves, and with tenderness and freedom of manner. Calyste might believe himself loved. But when, as they went along the strand under the rocks, and down into one of those pretty bays where the waves have thrown up a marvelous mosaic of the strangest marbles, with which they played like children at picking up the finest specimens⁠—when Calyste, at the height of intoxication, proposed in so many words that they should fly to Ireland, she assumed a dignified and mysterious air, begged to take his arm, and went on towards the cliff she had called her Tarpeian rock.

“My dear fellow,” said she, as they slowly climbed the fine block of granite she meant to take as her pedestal, “I have not courage enough to conceal all you are to me. For the last ten years I have known no happiness to compare with that we have just enjoyed in hunting for shells among those tide-washed rocks, in exchanging pebbles, of which I shall have a necklace made, more precious in my eyes than if it were composed of the finest diamonds. I have been a child again, a little girl such as I was at thirteen or fourteen, when I was worthy of you. The love I have been so happy as to inspire you with has elevated me in my own eyes. Understand this in all its magical meaning. You have made me the proudest, the happiest of my sex, and you will live longer in my memory than I probably shall in yours.”

At this moment she had reached the summit of the cliff, whence the vast ocean was seen spreading on one side, and on the other the Brittany coast with its golden islets, its feudal towers, and its clumps of gorse. Never had a woman a finer stage on which to make a grand avowal.

“But,” she went on, “I am not my own; I am more firmly bound by my own act than I was by law. So you are punished for my misfortune; you must be content to know that we suffer together. Dante never saw Beatrice again, Petrarch never possessed his Laura. Such disasters befall none but great souls.

“Oh! if ever I should be deserted, if I should fall a thousand degrees lower in shame and infamy, if your Béatrix is cruelly misunderstood by a world that will be loathsome to her, if she should be the most despised of women!⁠ ⁠… Then, beloved child,” she added, taking his hand, “you will know that she is the foremost of them all, that she could rise to heaven with your support. But then, my friend,” she added, with a lofty glance at him, “when you want to throw her down, do not miss your stroke; after your love, death!”

Calyste had his arm round her waist; he clasped her to his heart. To confirm her tender words, Madame de Rochefide sealed Calyste’s forehead with the most chaste and timid kiss. Then they went down the path and returned slowly, talking like two people who perfectly understand and enter into each other’s minds; she believing she had secured peace, he no longer doubting that he was to be happy⁠—and both deceived. Calyste hoped from what Camille had observed that Conti would be delighted to seize the opportunity of giving up Béatrix. The Marquise on her part abandoned herself to the uncertainty of things, waiting on chance. Calyste was too deeply in love and too ingenuous to create the chance. They both reached les Touches in the most delightful frame of mind, going in by the garden gate, of which Calyste had taken the key. It was now about six o’clock. The intoxicating perfumes, the mild atmosphere, the golden tones of the evening light were all in harmony with their tender mood and talk. Their steps were matched and equal as those of lovers are; their movements betrayed the unison of their minds. Such silence reigned at les Touches that the sound of the opening and closing gate echoed distinctly, and must have been heard all over the grounds. As Calyste and Béatrix had said all they had to say, and their agitating walk had tired them, they came in slowly and without speaking.

Suddenly, as she turned an angle, Béatrix was seized with a spasm of horror⁠—the infectious dread that is caused by the sight of a reptile, and that chilled Calyste before he saw its occasion. On a bench under a weeping-ash Conti sat talking to Camille Maupin. Madame de Rochefide’s convulsive interval trembling was more evident than she wished. Calyste now knew how dear he was to this woman who had just built up the barrier between herself and him, no doubt with a view to securing a few days more for coquetting before overleaping it.

In one instant a tragical drama in endless perspective was felt in each heart.

“You did not expect me so soon, I dare say,” said the artist, offering Béatrix his arm.

The Marquise could not avoid relinquishing Calyste’s arm and taking Conti’s. This undignified transition, so imperatively demanded, so full of offence to the later love, was too much for Calyste, who went to throw himself on the bench by Camille, after exchanging the most distant greeting with his rival. He felt a hundred contending sensations. On discerning how much Béatrix loved him, his impulse was to rush at the artist and declare that she was his; but the poor woman’s moral convulsion, betraying her sufferings⁠—for she had in that one moment paid the forfeit of all her sins⁠—had startled him so much that he remained stupefied, stricken, like her, by relentless necessity. These antagonistic impulses produced the most violent storm of feeling he had yet known since he had loved Béatrix.

Madame de Rochefide and Conti went past the seat where Calyste had thrown himself by Camille’s side; the Marquise looking at her rival with one of those terrible flashes by which a woman can convey everything. She avoided Calyste’s eye, and seemed to listen to Conti, who was talking lightly.

“What can they be saying?” asked Calyste of Camille.

“Dear child, you have no idea yet of the terrible hold a man has over a woman on the strength of a dead passion. Béatrix could not refuse him her hand. He is laughing at her, no doubt, over her fresh love affair; he guessed it, of course, from your behavior, and the way in which you came in together when he saw you.”

“He is laughing at her!” cried the vehement youth.

“Keep calm,” said Camille, “or you will lose the few chances that remain to you. If he wounds Béatrix too much in her vanities, she will trample him under foot like a worm. But he is astute; he will know how to do it cleverly. He will not suppose that the haughty Madame de Rochefide could possibly be false to him! It would be too base to love a young man for his beauty! He will no doubt speak of you to her as a mere boy bewitched by the notion of possessing a Marquise and of ruling the destinies of two women. Finally, he will thunder with the rattling artillery of insulting insinuations. Then Béatrix will be obliged to combat him with false denials, of which he will take advantage, and remain master of the field.”

“Ah!” cried Calyste, “he does not love. I should leave her free. Love demands a choice renewed every minute, confirmed every day. The morrow is the justification of yesterday, and increases our hoard of joys.⁠—A few days later, and he would not have found us here. What brought him back?”

“A journalist’s taunt,” said Camille. “The opera on whose success he had counted is a failure⁠—a dead failure. These words spoken in the greenroom, perhaps by Claude Vignon, ‘It is hard to lose your reputation and your mistress both at once!’ stung him, no doubt, in all his vanities. Love based on mean sentiments is merciless.

“I questioned him; but who can trust so false and deceitful a nature? He seemed weary of poverty and of love, disgusted with life. He regretted having connected himself so publicly with the Marquise, and in speaking of their past happiness fell into a strain of poetic melancholy rather too elegant to be genuine. He hoped, no doubt, to extract the secret of your love from the joy his flattery must give me.”

“Well?” said Calyste, looking at Béatrix and Conti returning, and listening no longer to Camille.

Camille had prudently kept on the defensive; she had not betrayed either Calyste’s secret or Béatrix’s. The artist was a man to dupe anyone in the world, and Mademoiselle des Touches warned Calyste to be on his guard with him.

“My dear child,” said she, “this is for you the most critical moment; such prudence and skill are needed as you have not, and you will be fooled by the most cunning man on earth; for I can do no more for you.”

A bell announced that dinner was served. Conti offered his arm to Camille, Béatrix took that of Calyste. Camille let the Marquise lead the way; she had a moment to look at Calyste and enjoin prudence by putting her finger to her lips.

All through dinner Conti was in the highest spirits. This was perhaps a way of gauging Madame de Rochefide, who played her part badly. As a coquette she might have deceived Conti; but, being seriously in love, she betrayed herself. The wily musician, far from watching her, seemed not to observe her embarrassment. At dessert he began talking of women and crying up their noble feelings.

“A woman who would desert us in prosperity will sacrifice everything to us in adversity,” said he. “Women have the advantage of men in constancy; a woman must be deeply offended, indeed, to throw over a first lover; she clings to him as to her honor; a second love is a disgrace⁠—” and so forth.

He was astoundingly moral; he burnt incense before the altar on which a heart was bleeding pierced by a thousand stabs. Only Camille and Béatrix understood the virulence of the acrid satire he poured out in the form of praises. Now and again they both colored, but they were obliged to control themselves; they went up to Camille’s sitting-room arm-in-arm, and with one consent passed through the larger drawing-room, where there were no lights, and they could exchange a few words.

“I cannot endure to let Conti walk over my prostrate body, to give him a right over me,” said Béatrix in an undertone. “The convict on the hulks is always at the mercy of the man he is chained to. I am lost! I must go back to the hulks of love!⁠—And it is you who have sent me back. Ah, you made him come a day too late⁠—or too soon. I recognize your infernal gift of romance. Yes, the revenge is complete, the climax perfect.”

“I could threaten you that I would write to Conti, but as to doing it!⁠—I am incapable of such a thing!” cried Camille. “You are miserable, so I forgive you.”

“What will become of Calyste?” said the Marquise, with the exquisite artlessness of vanity.

“Then is Conti taking you away?” cried Camille.

“Ah! you expect to triumph?” retorted Béatrix.

The Marquise spoke the hideous words with rage, her beautiful features distorted, while Camille tried to conceal her gladness under an assumed expression of regret; but the light in her eyes gave the lie to the gravity of her face, and Béatrix could see through the mask! When they saw each other by candlelight, sitting on the divan where during the last three weeks so many comedies had been played out, where the secret tragedy of so many thwarted passions had had its beginning, the two women studied each other for the last time; they saw that they were divided by a deep gulf of hatred.

“I leave you Calyste,” said Béatrix, seeing her rival’s eyes. “But I am fixed in his heart, and no woman will oust me.”

Camille retorted by quoting, in a tone of subtle irony which stung the Marquise to the quick, the famous speech of Mazarin’s niece to Louis XIV: “You reign, you love him, and you are going!”

Neither of them throughout this scene, which was a stormy one, noticed the absence of Calyste and Conti. The artist had remained at table with his rival, desiring him to keep him company, and finish a bottle of champagne.

“We have something to say to each other,” said Conti, to anticipate any refusal.

In the position in which they stood to each other, the young Breton was obliged to obey the behest.

“My dear boy,” said the singer in a soothing voice when Calyste had drunk two glasses of wine, “we are a couple of good fellows; we may be frank with each other. I did not come here because I was suspicious. Béatrix loves me.” And he assumed a fatuous air. “For my part, I love her no longer; I have come, not to carry her off, but to break with her and leave her the credit of the rupture. You are young; you do not know how necessary it is to seem the victim when you feel that you are the executioner. Young men spout fire and flame, they make a parade of throwing over a woman, they often scorn her and make her hate them; but a wise man gets himself dismissed, and puts on a humiliated expression which leaves the lady some regrets and a sweet sense of superiority. The displeasure of the divinity is not irremediable, while abdication is past all reparation.

“You, happily for you, do not yet know how our lives may be hampered by the senseless promises which women are such fools as to accept, when gallantry requires us to tie such slipknots to divert the idle hours of happiness. The pair then swear eternal fidelity. A man has some adventure with a woman⁠—he does not fail to assure her politely that he hopes to live and die with her; he pretends to be impatiently awaiting the demise of a husband while earnestly wishing him perfect health. If the husband should die, there are women so provincial or so tenacious, so silly or so wily, as to rush on the man, crying, ‘I am free⁠—here I am!’

“Not one of us is free. The spent ball recoils and falls into the midst of our best-planned triumph or happiness.

“I foresaw that you would love Béatrix; I left her in a situation in which she must need flirt with you without abdicating her sacred majesty, were it only to annoy that angel, Camille Maupin. Well, my dear fellow, love her; you will be doing me a service. I only want her to behave atrociously to me. I dread her pride and her virtue.⁠—Perhaps, in spite of goodwill on my side, some time will be required for this manoeuvre. On such occasions the one who does not take the first step wins. Just now, as we walked round the lawn, I tried to tell her that I knew all, and wished her joy of her happiness. Well, she was very angry.

“I, at this moment, am in love with the youngest of our singers, Mademoiselle Falcon, of the Opera, and I want to marry her. Yes, I have got so far as that! But when you come to Paris, you will say I have exchanged a Marquise for a Queen!”

Joy shed its glory on Calyste’s candid face; he confessed his love; this was all that Conti wanted.

There is not a man in the world, however blasé, however depraved, whose love does not revive as soon as it is threatened by a rival. We may wish to be rid of a woman; we do not wish that she should throw us over. When lovers have come to this extremity, men and women alike try to be first in the field, so cruel is the wound to their self-respect. Perhaps what is at stake is all that Society has thrown into that feeling; it is indeed less a matter of self-respect than of life itself, the whole future is in the balance; we feel as if we were losing not the interest, but the capital.

Calyste, cross-examined by the artist, related all that had happened during these three weeks at les Touches, and was delighted with Conti, who concealed his rage under a semblance of delightful good-nature.

“Let us go upstairs,” said he. “Women are not trustful; they will not understand how we can have sat together for so long without clutching at each other’s hair; they might come down to listen.⁠—I will do all I can for you, my dear child. I will be odious, rude, and jealous with the Marquise; I will constantly suspect her of deceiving me⁠—there is nothing more certain to lead a woman to a betrayal; you will be happy, and I shall be free. You, this evening, must assume the part of a disconcerted lover; I shall play the suspicious and jealous man. Pity the angel for her enthralment to a man without fine feelings⁠—weep! You can weep, you are young. I, alas, can no longer weep; it is a great advantage lost.”

Calyste and Conti went upstairs. The musician, requested to sing by his young rival, chose the greatest test known to musical executants, the famous “Pria che spunti l’aurora,” which Rubini himself never attempts without a qualm, and in which Conti had often triumphed. Never had he been more wonderful than at this moment when so many feelings were seething in his breast. Calyste was in ecstasies. At the first note of the cavatina the singer fired a glance at the Marquise which gave cruel significance to the words, and which was understood. Camille, playing the accompaniment, guessed that it was a command that made Béatrix bow her head. She looked at Calyste, and suspected that the boy had fallen into some snare in spite of her warnings. She was certain of it when the youth went gleefully to bid Béatrix goodnight, kissing her hand and pressing it with a little knowing and confident look.

By the time Calyste had reached Guérande the ladies’ maid and servants were packing Conti’s traveling carriage; and “before the dawn,” as he had sung, he had carried off Béatrix, with Camille’s horses, as far as the first posting-house.

Under cover of the darkness, Madame de Rochefide was able to look back at Guérande, whose tower, white in the daybreak, stood out in the gray light. She gave herself up to melancholy, for she was leaving there one of the fairest flowers of life⁠—love such as the purest girls may dream of. Respect of persons was crushing the only true love this woman had ever known, or could ever know, in all her life. The woman of the world was obeying the laws of the world, sacrificing love to appearances, as some women sacrifice it to religion or to duty. From this point of view, this terrible story is that of many women.

Next day, at about noon, Calyste arrived at les Touches. When he reached the turn in the road whence, yesterday, he had seen Béatrix at the window, he caught sight of Camille, who hurried out to meet him. At the bottom of the stairs she said this cruel word:

“Gone!”

“Béatrix?” cried Calyste, stunned.

“You were duped by Conti. You told me nothing; I could do nothing.”

She led the poor boy to her little drawing-room; he sank on the divan in the place where he had so often seen the Marquise, and melted into tears. Félicité said nothing; she smoked her hookah, knowing that nothing can stem the first rush of such suffering, which is always deaf and speechless. Calyste, since there was nothing to be done, stayed there all day in a state of utter torpor. Just before dinner, Camille tried to say a few words to him, after begging that he would listen to her.

“My dear boy,” said she, “you have been the cause to me of intense suffering, and I have not, as you have, a fair future life in which to recover. To me the earth has no further springtime, the soul no further love. So I, to find comfort, must look higher.

“Here, the day before Béatrix came, I painted her portrait; I would not darken it, you would have thought that I was jealous. Now, listen to the truth. Madame de Rochefide is as far as possible from being worthy of you. The display of her fall was not necessary, but she would have been nobody but for that scandal; she made it on purpose to have a part to play. She is one of those women who prefer the parade of wrongdoing to the calm peace of happiness; they affront Society to wring from it the evil gift of a slander; they must be talked about, at whatever cost. She was eaten up by vanity. Her fortune and wit had not availed to give her the feminine dominion which she had tried to conquer by presiding over a salon; she had fancied that she could achieve the celebrity of the Duchesse de Langeais and the Vicomtesse de Beauséant; but the world is just, it bestows the honors of its interest only on genuine passion.

“Her flight was not justified by any obstacles. Damocles’ sword did not hang glittering over her festivities; and besides, in Paris, those who love truly and sincerely may easily be happy in a quiet way. In short, if she could be tender and loving, she would not have gone off last night with Conti.”

Camille talked for a long time, and very eloquently, but this last effort was in vain; she ceased on seeing a shrug, by which Calyste conveyed his entire belief in Béatrix, and she insisted on his coming down and sitting with her at dinner, for he found it impossible to eat.

It is only while we are very young that these spasmodic symptoms occur. At a later period the organs have formed habits, and are, as it were, hardened. The reaction of the moral system on the physical is never strong enough to induce mortal illness unless the constitution preserves its original delicacy. A man can resist a violent grief which kills a youth, less because his feelings are not so strong, than because his organs are stronger. Mademoiselle des Touches was indeed alarmed from the first by Calyste’s calm and resigned attitude after the first flood of tears. Before leaving the house, he begged to see Béatrix’s room once more, and hid his face in the pillow on which hers had rested.

“This is folly!” said he, shaking hands with Camille and leaving her, sunk in melancholy.

He returned home, found the usual party engaged in playing mouche, and sat by his mother all the evening. The curé, the Chevalier du Halga, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël all knew of Madame de Rochefide’s departure, and were all glad. Calyste would now come back to them, and they all watched, almost by stealth, seeing that he was silent. Nobody in that old house could conceive of all that this death of a first love must be to a heart as true and artless as Calyste’s.

For some days Calyste went regularly to les Touches; he would wander round the grass-plot where he had sometimes walked arm-in-arm with Béatrix. He often went as far as le Croisic, and climbed the rock whence he had tried to throw her into the sea; he would sit for hours leaning on the box-shrub, for by examining the projections on the riven rock he had learnt to climb up and down the face of it. His solitary expeditions, his silence, and his lack of appetite at last made his mother uneasy. At the end of a fortnight, while these proceedings lasted⁠—a good deal like those of an animal in its cage, and the despairing lover’s cage was, to adopt la Fontaine’s phrase, “the spots honored by the footstep, illuminated by the eyes” of Béatrix⁠—Calyste could no longer cross the little inlet; he had only strength enough to drag himself as far on the Guérande road as the spot whence he had seen Béatrix at the window.

The family, glad at the departing of “the Parisians,” to use the provincial phrase, discerned nothing ominous or sickly in Calyste. The two old maids and the curé, following up their plan, had kept Charlotte de Kergarouët, who, in the evening, made eyes at Calyste, and got nothing in return but advice as to her game of mouche. All through the evening Calyste would sit between his mother and his provincial fiancée, under the eye of the curé and of Charlotte’s aunt, who, on their way home, would comment on his greater or less dejection. They took the unhappy boy’s indifference for acquiescence in their plans.

One evening, when Calyste, being tired, had gone early to bed, the players all left their cards on the table, and looked at each other as the young man shut his bedroom door. They had listened anxiously to his footsteps.

“Something ails Calyste,” said the Baroness, wiping her eyes.

“There is nothing the matter with him,” replied Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël; “we must get him married as soon as may be.”

“Do you think that will divert him?” said the Chevalier.

Charlotte looked sternly at Monsieur du Halga, whom she thought in very bad taste this evening, immoral, depraved, irreligious, and quite ridiculous with his dog, in spite of her aunt, who always took the old sailor’s part.

“Tomorrow morning I will lecture Calyste,” said the Baron, whom they had thought asleep; “I do not want to go out of this world without having seen my grandson, a little pink-and-white du Guénic, with a Breton hood on in his cradle.”

“He never speaks a word,” said old Zéphirine, “no one knows what ails him; he never ate less in his life; what does he live on? If he eats at les Touches, the devil’s cookery does him no good.”

“He is in love,” said the Chevalier, proffering this opinion with extreme timidity.

“Now, then, old dotard, you have not put into the pool,” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël. “When you are thinking of your young days, you forget everything else.”

“Come to breakfast with us tomorrow morning,” said old Zéphirine to Charlotte and Jacqueline; “my brother will talk to his son, and we will settle everything. One nail drives out another.”

“Not in a Breton,” said the Chevalier.

The next morning Calyste saw Charlotte arrive, dressed with unusual care, though it was still early, just as his father had ended giving him, in the dining-room, a discourse on matrimony, to which the lad could find nothing to say. He knew how ignorant his aunt, his father, and his mother were, and all their friends; he was gathering the fruits of knowledge; he found himself isolated, no longer speaking the language of the household. So he only begged a few days’ respite, and his father rubbed his hands with joy, and gave new life to the Baroness by whispering the good news in her ear.

Breakfast was a cheerful meal. Charlotte, to whom the Baron had given a wink, was in high spirits. A rumor filtered through Gasselin, by which all the town knew that the du Guénics and the Kergarouëts had come to an understanding. After breakfast Calyste went out of the hall by the steps on the garden side, and was followed by Charlotte; he offered her his arm, and led her to the arbor at the bottom of the garden. The old folks, standing at the window, looked at them with a sort of pathos. Charlotte looked back at the pretty house, somewhat uneasy at her companion’s silence, and took advantage of their presence to begin the conversation by saying to Calyste, “They are watching us!”

“They cannot hear us,” he replied.

“No, but they can see us.”

“Let us sit down,” said Calyste gently, as he took her hand.

“Is it true that your banner once floated from that twisted pillar?” asked Charlotte, looking at the house as if it were her own. “It would look well there!⁠—How happy one might be here! You will make some alterations in the arrangement of your house, will you not, Calyste?”

“I shall have no time for it, my dear Charlotte,” said the young man, taking her hands and kissing them. “I will tell you my secret. I love a woman whom you have seen, and who loves me⁠—love her too well to make any other woman happy; and I know that from our infancy you and I have always been intended to marry.”

“But she is married, Calyste,” said Charlotte.

“I will wait,” said the boy.

“And so will I,” said Charlotte, her eyes full of tears. “You cannot love that woman for long; she has gone off with a singer, they say.⁠ ⁠…”

“Marry someone else, my dear Charlotte,” said Calyste. “With such a fortune as your aunt has to leave you, which is enormous in Brittany, you can find a better match than I. You will find a man with a title.⁠—I have not brought you out here to tell you what you already know, but to entreat you in the name of our long friendship to take the matter upon yourself and to refuse me. Say that you can have nothing to say to a man whose heart is not free, and my passion will at least have been so far serviceable that I shall have done you no wrong. You cannot think how life weighs upon me! I cannot endure any struggle, I am as weak as a body deserted by its soul, by the very element of life. But for the grief that my death would be to my mother and my aunt, I should have thrown myself into the sea ere now, and I have never gone to the rocks of le Croisic since the day when the temptation began to be irresistible.⁠—Say nothing of this.⁠—Charlotte, farewell!”

He took the girl’s head in his hands, kissed her hair, went out of the path under the gable, and made his escape to Camille’s, where he remained till midnight.

On returning at about one in the morning, he found his mother busy with her tapestry, waiting for him. He crept in softly, took her hand, and asked:

“Is Charlotte gone?”

“She is going tomorrow with her aunt; they are both in despair.⁠—Come to Ireland, my Calyste,” she added.

“How many times have I dreamed of flying thither!” said he.

“Really!” exclaimed the Baroness.

“With Béatrix,” he added.

Some days after Charlotte’s departure, Calyste was walking with the Chevalier du Halga on the Mall, and he sat down in the sun on a bench whence his eye could command the whole landscape, from the weathercocks of les Touches to the shoals marked out by the foaming breakers which dance above the reefs at high tide. Calyste was thin and pale, his strength was diminishing, he was beginning to have little periodical shivering fits, symptomatic of fever. His eyes, with dark marks round them, had the hard glitter which a fixed idea will give to lonely persons, or which the ardor of the struggle imparts to the bold leaders of the civilization of our age. The Chevalier was the only person with whom he sometimes exchanged his ideas; he had discerned in this old man an apostle of his religion, and found in him the traces of a never-dying love.

“Have you loved many women in your life?” he asked, the second time that he and the old navy man sailed in company, as the Captain called it, up and down the Mall.

“Only one,” said the Captain.

“Was she free?”

“No,” said the Chevalier. “Ah, I suffered much! She was my best friend’s wife⁠—my patron’s, my chief’s; but we loved each other so much!”

“She loved you, then?”

“Passionately,” replied du Halga, with unwonted vehemence.

“And you were happy?”

“Till her death. She died at the age of forty-nine, an émigrée at Saint-Petersburg; the climate killed her. She must be very cold in her coffin! I have often thought of going to bring her away and lay her in our beloved Brittany, near me! But she rests in my heart!”

The Chevalier wiped his eyes; Calyste took his hands and pressed them.

“I cling to that dog more than to my life,” said he, pointing to Thisbe. “That little creature is in every particular exactly like the dog she used to fondle with her beautiful hands, and to take on her knees. I never look at Thisbe without seeing Madame de Kergarouët’s hands.”

“Have you seen Madame de Rochefide?” asked Calyste.

“No,” replied du Halga. “It is fifty-eight years now since I looked at a woman, excepting your mother; there is something in her coloring that is like the Admiral’s wife.”

Three days later the Chevalier said to Calyste as they met on the Mall:

“My boy, all I have in the world is a hundred and eighty louis. When you know where to find Madame de Rochefide, come and ask me for them, to go to see her.”

Calyste thanked the old man, whose life he envied. But day by day he became more morose; he seemed to care for no one; he was gentle and kind only to his mother. The Baroness watched the progress of this mania with increasing anxiety; she alone, by much entreaty, could persuade Calyste to take some nourishment.

By the beginning of October the young fellow could no longer walk on the Mall with the Chevalier, who came in vain to ask him out with an old man’s attempts at coaxing.

“We will talk about Madame de Rochefide,” said he. “I will tell you the history of my first adventure.⁠—Your son is very ill,” said he to the Baroness, on the day when his urgency proved useless.

Calyste replied to all who questioned him that he was perfectly well, and, like all melancholy youths, relished the notion of death; but he never left the house now; he sat in the garden on the seat, warming himself in the pale, mild autumn sunshine, alone with his thoughts, and avoiding all company.

After the day when Calyste no longer went to call on her, Félicité begged the curé of Guérande to go to see her. The Abbé Grimont’s regularity in going to les Touches almost every morning, and dining there from time to time, became the news of the moment; it was talked of in all the neighborhood, and even at Nantes. However, he never missed spending the evening at Guérande, where despair reigned. Masters and servants, all were grieved by Calyste’s obstinacy, though they did not think him in any danger. It never occurred to any one of these good people that the poor youth could die of love. The Chevalier had no record of such a death in all his travels or reminiscences. Everybody ascribed Calyste’s emaciation to want of nutrition. His mother would go on her knees to beseech him to eat. To please her, Calyste tried to overcome his repugnance, and the food thus taken against his will added to the low fever that was consuming the handsome boy.

At the end of October the beloved son no longer went up to his room on the second floor; he had his bed brought down into the sitting-room, and lay there generally, in the midst of the family, who at last sent for the Guérande doctor.

The medical man tried to check the fever by quinine, and for a few days it yielded to the treatment. The doctor also ordered Calyste to take exercise, and to amuse himself. The Baron rallied his strength, and shook off his torpor; he grew young as his son grew old. He took out Calyste, Gasselin, and the two fine sporting dogs. Calyste obeyed his father, and for a few days the three men went out together; they went through the forest and visited his friends in neighboring châteaux; but Calyste had no spirit, no one could beguile him of a smile, his pale rigid face revealed a perfectly passive creature.

The Baron, broken by fatigue, fell into a state of collapse, and was forced to come home, bringing Calyste with him in the same condition. Within a few days both father and son were so ill that, at the request of the Guérande doctor himself, the two first physicians of Nantes were called in. The Baron had been quite knocked over by the visible alteration in Calyste. With the terrible prescience that nature bestows on the dying, he trembled like a child at the thought that his family would be extinct; he said nothing, he only clasped his hands, praying as he sat in his chair, to which he was tied by weakness. He sat facing the bed occupied by Calyste, and watched him constantly. At his child’s slightest movement he was greatly agitated, as if the flame of his life were fluttered by it.

The Baroness never left the room, and old Zéphirine sat knitting by the fire in a state of agonizing anxiety. She was constantly being asked for wood, for the father and son both felt the cold, and her stores were invaded. She had made up her mind to give up her keys, for she was no longer brisk enough to go with Mariotte; but she insisted on knowing everything; every minute she questioned Mariotte or her sister-in-law, and would take them aside to hear about the state of her brother and nephew.

One evening, when Calyste and his father were dozing, old Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël remarked that they would no doubt have to resign themselves to losing the Baron, whose face was quite white, and had assumed a waxen look. Mademoiselle du Guénic dropped her knitting, fumbled in her pocket, and pulled out an old rosary of black wooden beads, which she proceeded to tell with a fervency that gave such a glory of energy to her ancient parched features, that the other old maid followed her example; and then, at a sign from the curé, they all united in the silent exaltation of the old blind lady.

“I was the first to pray to God,” said the Baroness, remembering the fateful letter written by Calyste, “but He did not hear me!”

“Perhaps,” said the Abbé Grimont, “we should be wise to beg Mademoiselle des Touches to come to see Calyste.”

“She!” cried old Zéphirine, “the author of all our woes, she who lured him away from his family, who tore him from us, who made him read impious books, who taught him the language of heresy! Curse her, and may God never forgive her! She has crushed the du Guénics!”

“She may perhaps raise them up again,” said the curé in a mild voice. “She is a saintly and virtuous woman: I am her warranty. She has none but good intentions as regards Calyste. May she be able to realize them!”

“Give me notice the day she is to set foot here, and I will go out,” cried the old lady. “She has killed both father and son. Do you suppose I cannot hear how weak Calyste’s voice is?⁠—he hardly has strength to speak.”

Just then the three physicians came in. They wearied Calyste with questions. As to his father, their examination was brief; they knew all in a moment; the only wonder was that he still lived. The Guérande doctor quietly explained to the Baroness that it would probably be necessary to take Calyste to Paris to consult the most eminent authorities, for that it would cost more than a hundred louis to bring them to Guérande.

“A man must die of something, but love is nothing,” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“Alas, whatever the cause may be, Calyste is dying,” said his mother. “I recognize every symptom of consumption, the most horrible malady of my native land.”

“Calyste is dying?” said the Baron, opening his eyes, whence trickled two large tears which, caught in the many furrows of his face, slowly fell to the bottom of his cheeks⁠—the only tears, no doubt, that he had ever shed in his life.

He dragged himself on to his feet, shuffled to his son’s bed, took his hands, and looked at him.

“What do you want, father?” said the boy.

“I want you to live!” cried the Baron.

“I cannot live without Béatrix,” said Calyste to the old man, who sank back into his chair.

“Where can I find a hundred louis to fetch the doctors from Paris?” cried the Baroness. “We have yet time.”

“A hundred louis!” exclaimed Zéphirine. “Will they save him?”

Without waiting for her sister-in-law’s reply, the old woman put her hands into her pocket-holes and untied an under petticoat, which fell with a heavy sound. She knew so well where she had sewn in her louis, that she ripped them out with a rapidity that seemed magical. The gold pieces rang as they dropped one by one. Old Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël looked on with stupefied amazement.

“They can see you!” she whispered in her friend’s ear.

“Thirty-seven,” said Zéphirine, counting the gold.

“Everyone will know how much you have.”

“Forty-two.”

“Double louis, and all new! how did you get them, you who cannot see them?”

“I could feel them.⁠—Here are a hundred and four louis,” cried Zéphirine. “Is that enough?”

“What are you doing?” asked the Chevalier du Halga, coming in, and unable to imagine what was the meaning of the old lady’s holding out her lap full of louis d’or.

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël explained the case in two words.

“I had heard of it,” said he, “and I came to bring you a hundred and forty louis I had kept at Calyste’s service, as he knows.”

The Chevalier took out of his pocket two rolls of coin, which he showed them. Mariotte, seeing all these riches, bid Gasselin lock the door.

“Gold will not restore him to health,” said the Baroness, in tears.

“But it may enable him to run after his Marquise,” said du Halga. “Come, Calyste!”

Calyste sat up in bed, and exclaimed gleefully:

“Let us be off!”

“Then he will live,” said the Baron, in a stricken voice, “and I may die.⁠—Go and fetch the curé.”

These words struck them all with terror. Calyste, seeing his father turn ghastly pale from the painful agitation of this scene, could not restrain his tears. The curé, who knew the decision the doctors had come to, had gone off to fetch Mademoiselle des Touches; for at this moment he displayed as much admiration for her as he had not long since felt repugnance, and could defend her as a pastor defends one of the favorites of his flock.

On hearing of the Baron’s desperate extremity, a crowd gathered in the little street; the peasants, the marshmen, and the townsfolk all kneeling in the courtyard, while the priest administered the last sacrament to the old Breton warrior. Everybody was deeply touched to think of the father dying by the bed of his sick son. The extinction of the old family was regarded as a public calamity.

The ceremony struck Calyste; for a while his grief silenced his passion. All through the death struggles of this heroic defender of the Monarchy he remained on his knees, watching the approach of death, and weeping.

The old man died in his chair, in the presence of the assembled family.

“I die faithful to the King and religion. Great God, as the reward of my efforts, let Calyste live!” he said.

“I will live, father, and obey you,” replied the young man.

“If you would make my death as easy as Fanny has made my life, swear that you will marry.”

“I promise it, father.”

It was touching to see Calyste, or rather his ghost, leaning on the old Chevalier, a spectre leading a shade, following the Baron’s bier as chief mourner. The church and the little square before the porch were full of people, who had come from ten leagues round.

The Baroness and Zéphirine were deeply grieved when they saw that, in spite of his efforts to obey his father, Calyste was still sunk in an ominous stupor. On the first day of their mourning the Baroness led her son to the seat at the bottom of the garden, and questioned him. Calyste replied with gentle submissiveness, but his answers were heartbreaking.

“Mother,” said he, “there is no life left in me; what I eat does not nourish me, the air I breathe into my lungs does not renew my blood; the sun seems cold to me, and when it shines for you on the front of the house as at this moment, where you see carvings bathed in light, I see dim forms wrapped in mist. If Béatrix were here, all would be bright once more. There is but one thing in the world that has her color and form⁠—this flower and these leaves,” and he drew out of his bosom the withered blossoms that the Marquise had given him.

The Baroness dared ask him no more; the madness betrayed by his replies seemed worse than the sorrow of his silence.

But Calyste was thrilled as he caught sight of Mademoiselle des Touches through the windows at opposite ends of the room. Félicité reminded him of Béatrix. Thus it was to her that the two women owed the one gleam of joy that lightened their griefs.

“Well, Calyste,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, when she saw him, “the carriage is ready; we will go together and find Béatrix. Come.”

The pale, thin face of the boy, all in black, was brightened by a flush, and a smile dawned on his features.

“We will save him!” said Mademoiselle des Touches to the mother, who wrung her hand, shedding tears of joy.

A week after the Baron’s death, Mademoiselle des Touches, the Baronne du Guénic, and Calyste set out for Paris, leaving the business matters in the hands of old Mademoiselle.

Félicité’s affection for Calyste had planned a brilliant future for the poor boy. She was connected with the Grandlieus, and the ducal branch was ending in a family of five daughters. She had written to the Duchesse de Grandlieu, telling her the whole story of Calyste, and announcing her intention of selling her house in the Rue du Mont-Blanc, for which a company of speculators had offered two million five hundred thousand francs. Her business manager had already bought for her one of the finest houses in the Rue de Bourbon, at a cost of seven hundred thousand francs. Out of the surplus money from the sale of the house in the Rue du Mont-Blanc she meant to devote one million to repurchasing the estates of the du Guénics, and would leave the rest of her fortune among the five de Grandlieu girls.

Félicité knew the plans made by the Duke and Duchess, who intended that their youngest daughter should marry the Vicomte de Grandlieu, the heir to their titles; Clotilde-Frédérique, the second, meant, she knew, to remain unmarried, without taking the veil, however, as her eldest sister had done; so the only one to be disposed of was Sabine, a pretty creature just twenty years of age, on whom she counted to cure Calyste of his passion for Madame de Rochefide.

During their journey Félicité told Madame du Guénic of all these plans. The house in the Rue de Bourbon was now being furnished, and in it Calyste was to live if these schemes should succeed.

They all three went straight to the Hôtel Grandlieu, where the Baroness was received with all the respect due to her name as a girl and as a wife. Mademoiselle des Touches, of course, advised Calyste to see all he could of Paris while she made inquiries as to where Béatrix might be, and she left him to the fascinations of every kind which awaited him there. The Duchess, her daughters, and their friends did the honors of the capital for Calyste just at the season when it was beginning to be gayest.

The bustle of Paris entirely diverted the young Breton’s mind. He fancied there was some likeness in the minds of Madame de Rochefide and Sabine de Grandlieu, who at that time was certainly one of the loveliest and most charming girls in Paris society, and he thenceforward paid an amount of attention to her advances which no other woman would have won from him. Sabine de Grandlieu played her part all the more successfully because she liked Calyste.

Matters were so skilfully managed that in the course of the winter of 1837 the young Baron, who had recovered his color and youthful beauty, could listen without disgust when his mother reminded him of his promise to his dying father, and spoke of his marrying Sabine de Grandlieu. Still, while keeping his promise, he concealed an indifference which the Baroness could discern, while she hoped it might be dispelled by the satisfactions of a happy home.

On the day when the Grandlieu family and the Baroness, supported on this occasion by her relations from England, held a sitting in the large drawing-room of the Duke’s house, while Leopold Hannequin, the family notary, explained the conditions of the marriage contract before reading it through, Calyste, whose brow was clouded, as all could see, refused point-blank to accept the benefactions offered to him by Mademoiselle des Touches. He still trusted to Félicité’s devotion, and believed that she was seeking Béatrix.

At this, moment, in the midst of the dismay of both families, Sabine came in, dressed so as to remind Calyste of the Marquise de Rochefide, though her complexion was dark, and she placed in Calyste’s hand the following letter:⁠—

Camille to Calyste.

“Calyste, before retiring into my cell as a novice, I may be allowed to glance back at the world I am quitting to enter the world of prayer. This glance is solely for you, who in these later days have been all the world to me. My voice will reach you, if I have calculated exactly, in the middle of a ceremony which I could not possibly witness. On the day when you stand before the altar, to give your hand to a young and lovely girl who is free to love before Heaven and the world, I shall be in a religious house at Nantes⁠—before the altar too, but plighted forever to Him who can never deceive nor disappoint.

“I write, not to sadden you, but to beseech you not to allow any false delicacy to hinder the good I have always wished to do you since our first meeting. Do not deny the right I have so hardly earned. If love is suffering, then I have loved you well, Calyste; but you need feel no remorse. The only pleasures I have known in my life I owe to you, and the pain has come from myself. Compensate me for all this past suffering by giving me one eternal joy. Let me, dear, be in some sort a perfume in the flowers of your life, and mingle with it always without being importunate. I shall certainly owe to you my happiness in life eternal; will you not let me pay my debt by the offering of some transient and perishable possessions? You will not fail in generosity? You will not regard this as the last subterfuge of scorned love?

“Calyste, the world was nothing to me without you; you made it a fearful desert, and you have led the infidel Camille Maupin, the writer of books and dramas, which I shall solemnly disown⁠—you have led that audacious and perverted woman, tied hand and foot, to the throne of God. I am now, what I ought always to have been, an innocent child. Yes, I have washed my robes in the tears of repentance, and I may go to the altar presented by an angel⁠—by my dearly-loved Calyste! How sweet it is to call you so⁠—now that my resolution has sanctified the word. I love you without self-interest, as a mother loves her son, as the Church loves her children. I can pray for you and yours without the infusion of a single desire but that for your happiness.

“If you knew the supreme peace in which I live after having lifted myself by thought above the petty interests of the world, and how exquisite is the feeling of having done one’s duty, in accordance with your noble motto, you would enter on your happy life with a firm step, nor glance behind nor around you. So I am writing to beseech you to be true to yourself and to your family.

“My dear, the society in which you must live cannot exist without the religion of duty; and you will misunderstand life, as I have misunderstood it, if you give yourself up to passion and to fancy as I have done. Woman can only be equal with man by making her life a perpetual sacrifice, as man’s must be perpetual action. Now my life has been, as it were, one long outbreak of egoism. God perhaps brought you in its evening to my door, as a messenger charged with my punishment and pardon. Remember this confession from a woman to whom fame was a pharos whose light showed her the right way. Be great! sacrifice your fancy to your duties as the head of a house, as husband and father. Raise the downtrodden banner of the old du Guénics; show the present age, when principles and religion are denied, what a gentleman may be in all his glory and distinction.

“Dear child of my soul, let me play the mother a little: the angelic Fanny will not be jealous of a woman dead to the world, of whom you will henceforth know nothing but that her hands are always raised to Heaven. In these days the nobility need fortune more than ever, so accept a part of mine, dear Calyste, and make a good use of it. It is not a gift; it is trust-money. I am thinking more of your children and your old Breton estate than of yourself when I offer you the interest which time has accumulated for me on my Paris property.”

“I am ready to sign,” said the young Baron, to the great delight of the assembly.