Finally, in the midst of her coming and going in the labyrinth of her meditations, she remembered a lighted window she had seen from her bed, gleaming through the trees of the two adjoining gardens, when she had happened to wake in the night. … “Then that was his light!” thought she. “I might see him!—I will see him.”
“Monsieur de Grancey, is the Chapter’s lawsuit quite settled?” said Rosalie point-blank to the Vicar-General, during a moment of silence.
Madame de Watteville exchanged rapid glances with the Vicar-General.
“What can that matter to you, my dear child?” she said to Rosalie, with an affected sweetness which made her daughter cautious for the rest of her days.
“It might be carried to the Court of Appeal, but our adversaries will think twice about that,” replied the Abbé.
“I never could have believed that Rosalie would think about a lawsuit all through a dinner,” remarked Madame de Watteville.
“Nor I either,” said Rosalie, in a dreamy way that made everyone laugh. “But Monsieur de Grancey was so full of it, that I was interested.”
The company rose from table and returned to the drawing-room. All through the evening Rosalie listened in case Albert Savaron should be mentioned again; but beyond the congratulations offered by each newcomer to the Abbé on having gained his suit, to which no one added any praise of the advocate, no more was said about it. Mademoiselle de Watteville impatiently looked forward to bedtime. She had promised herself to wake at between two and three in the morning, and to look at Albert’s dressing-room windows. When the hour came, she felt almost pleasure in gazing at the glimmer from the lawyer’s candles that shone through the trees, now almost bare of their leaves. By the help of the strong sight of a young girl, which curiosity seems to make longer, she saw Albert writing, and fancied she could distinguish the color of the furniture, which she thought was red. From the chimney above the roof rose a thick column of smoke.
“While all the world is sleeping, he is awake—like God!” thought she.
The education of girls brings with it such serious problems—for the future of a nation is in the mother—that the University of France long since set itself the task of having nothing to do with it. Here is one of these problems: Ought girls to be informed on all points? Ought their minds to be under restraint? It need not be said that the religious system is one of restraint. If you enlighten them, you make them demons before their time; if you keep them from thinking, you end in the sudden explosion so well shown by Molière in the character of Agnes, and you leave this suppressed mind, so fresh and clear-seeing, as swift and as logical as that of a savage, at the mercy of an accident. This inevitable crisis was brought on in Mademoiselle de Watteville by the portrait which one of the most prudent Abbés of the Chapter of Besançon imprudently allowed himself to sketch at a dinner party.
Next morning, Mademoiselle de Watteville, while dressing, necessarily looked out at Albert Savaron walking in the garden adjoining that of the Hôtel de Rupt.
“What would have become of me,” thought she, “if he had lived anywhere else? Here I can, at any rate, see him.—What is he thinking about?”
Having seen this extraordinary man, though at a distance, the only man whose countenance stood forth in contrast with crowds of Besançon faces she had hitherto met with, Rosalie at once jumped at the idea of getting into his house, of ascertaining the reason of so much mystery, of hearing that eloquent voice, of winning a glance from those fine eyes. All this she set her heart on, but how could she achieve it?
All that day she drew her needle through her embroidery with the obtuse concentration of a girl who, like Agnes, seems to be thinking of nothing, but who is reflecting on things in general so deeply, that her artifice is unfailing. As a result of this profound meditation, Rosalie thought she would go to confession. Next morning, after Mass, she had a brief interview with the Abbé Giroud at Saint-Pierre, and managed so ingeniously that the hour of her confession was fixed for Sunday morning at half-past seven, before the eight o’clock Mass. She committed herself to a dozen fibs in order to find herself, just for once, in the church at the hour when the lawyer came to Mass. Then she was seized with an impulse of extreme affection for her father; she went to see him in his workroom, and asked him for all sorts of information on the art of turning, ending by advising him to turn larger pieces, columns. After persuading her father to set to work on some twisted pillars, one of the difficulties of the turner’s art, she suggested that he should make use of a large heap of stones that lay in the middle of the garden to construct a sort of grotto on which he might erect a little temple or Belvedere in which his twisted pillars could be used and shown off to all the world.
At the climax of the pleasure the poor unoccupied man derived from this scheme, Rosalie said, as she kissed him, “Above all, do not tell mamma who gave you the notion; she would scold me.”
“Do not be afraid!” replied Monsieur de Watteville, who groaned as bitterly as his daughter under the tyranny of the terrible descendant of the Rupts.
So Rosalie had a certain prospect of seeing ere long a charming observatory built, whence her eye would command the lawyer’s private room. And there are men for whose sake young girls can carry out such masterstrokes of diplomacy, while, for the most part, like Albert Savaron, they know it not.
The Sunday so impatiently looked for arrived, and Rosalie dressed with such carefulness as made Mariette, the ladies’-maid, smile.
“It is the first time I ever
