which would be fraught with danger, but that you are kindness itself.”
The Marquise looked at the young Baron with considerable astonishment, but she replied with dignity.
“On your part, monsieur, silence will be the best excuse. On my side I promise you to forget entirely—a forgiveness you scarcely merit.”
“Forgiveness is needless, madame, when there has been no offence.—The letter you received,” he added in an undertone, “and which you must have thought so unseemly, was not intended for you.”
The Marquise smiled in spite of herself; she wished to appear offended.
“Why tell a falsehood?” she replied with an air of disdainful amusement, but in a very friendly tone. “Now that I have scolded you enough, I am quite ready to laugh at a stratagem not devoid of skill. I know some poor women who would be caught by it. ‘Good heavens, how he loves me!’ they would say.” She forced a laugh, and added with an indulgent air, “If we are to remain friends, let me hear nothing more of mistakes of which I cannot be the dupe.”
“On my honor, madame, you are far more so than you fancy,” Eugène eagerly replied.
“What are you talking about?” asked Monsieur de Listomère, who for a minute had been listening to the conversation, without being able to pierce the darkness of its meaning.
“Oh, nothing that will interest you,” said Madame de Listomère.
The Marquis quietly returned to his paper, saying, “I see Madame de Mortsauf is dead; your poor brother is at Clochegourde no doubt.”
“Do you know, monsieur,” said the Marquise, addressing Eugène, “that you have just made a very impertinent speech?”
“If I did not know the strictness of your principles,” he replied simply, “I should fancy you either meant to put ideas into my head which I dare not allow myself, or to wring my secret from me; or perhaps, indeed, you wish to make fun of me.”
The Marquise smiled. This smile put Eugène out of patience.
“May you always believe, madame, in the offence I did not commit!” said he. “And I fervently hope that chance may not lead you to discover in society the person who was intended to read that letter—”
“What! Still Madame de Nucingen?” cried Madame de Listomère, more anxious to master the secret than to be revenged on the young man for his retort.
Eugène reddened. A man must be more than five-and-twenty not to redden when he is blamed for the stupid fidelity which women laugh at only to avoid betraying how much they envy its object. However, he said, calmly enough, “Why not, madame?”
These are the blunders we commit at five-and-twenty. This confession agitated Madame de Listomère violently; but Eugène was not yet able to analyze a woman’s face as seen in a glimpse, or from one side. Only her lips turned white. She rang to have some wood put on the fire, and so obliged Eugène to rise to take leave. “If that is the case,” said the Marquise, stopping Eugène by her cold, precise manner, “you will find it difficult, monsieur, to explain by what chance my name happened to come to your pen. An address written on a letter is not like the first-come crush hat which a man may heedlessly take for his own on leaving a ball.”
Eugène, put quite out of countenance, looked at the Marquise with a mingled expression of stupidity and fatuousness; he felt that he was ridiculous, stammered out some schoolboy speech, and left. A few days later Madame de Listomère had indisputable proof of Eugène’s veracity.
For more than a fortnight she has not gone into society.
The Marquis tells everyone who asks him the reason of this change:
“My wife has a gastric attack.”
I, who attend her, and who know her secret, know that she is only suffering from a little nervous crisis, and takes advantage of it to stay quietly at home.
In the month of September 1835, one of the richest heiresses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Mademoiselle du Rouvre, the only child of the Marquis du Rouvre, married Count Adam Mitgislas Laginski, a young Polish exile.
I allow myself to spell the names as they are pronounced, to spare the reader the sight of the fortifications of consonants by which, in the Slav languages, the vowels are protected, no doubt to secure them against loss, seeing how few they are.
The Marquis du Rouvre had dissipated almost the whole of one of the finest fortunes of the nobility, to which he had formerly owed his alliance with a Mademoiselle de Ronquerolles. Hence Clémentine had for her uncle, on her mother’s side, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, and for her aunt Madame de Sérizy. On her father’s side she possessed another uncle in the eccentric person of the Chevalier du Rouvre, the younger son of the house, an old bachelor who had grown rich by speculations in lands and houses.
The Marquis de Ronquerolles was so unhappy as to lose both his children during the visitation of cholera. Madame de Sérizy’s only son, a young officer of the highest promise, was killed in Africa at the fight by the Macta. In these days rich families run the risk of ruining their children if they have too many, or of becoming extinct if they have but one or two, a singular result of the Civil Code not foreseen by Napoleon. Thus, by accident, and in spite of Monsieur du Rouvre’s reckless extravagances for Florine, one of the most charming of Paris actresses, Clémentine had become an heiress. The Marquis de Ronquerolles, one of the most accomplished diplomats of the new dynasty, his sister, Madame de Sérizy, and the Chevalier du Rouvre agreed that, to rescue their fortunes from the Marquis’ clutches, they would leave them to their niece, to whom they each promised ten thousand francs a year on her marriage.
It is quite unnecessary to say that the Pole, though a refugee, cost the French Government absolutely nothing. Count Adam belonged to one of the
