“I will receive and introduce your wife,” said the Duchess solemnly, “and my family shall never turn their back on her, I give you my word.”
“Oh, Madame la Duchesse,” exclaimed Maxime, visibly touched, “if Monsieur le Duc will also condescend to treat me kindly, I promise you on my part to make your plan succeed with no great loss to yourself.—But,” he went on, after a pause, “you must pledge yourself to obey my instructions. … This is the last intrigue of my bachelor life; it must be carried through with all the more care because it is a good action,” he said, smiling.
“Obey?” said the Duchess. “But must I appear in all this?”
“Indeed, madame, I will not compromise you,” cried Maxime, “and I respect you too implicitly to ask for security. You have only to follow my advice. Thus, for instance, du Guénic must be carried off by his wife like a sacred object, and kept away for two years; she must take him to see Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the more strange lands the better—”
“Ah, that answers a fear expressed by my director,” exclaimed the Duchess guilelessly, as she remembered the Abbé Brossette’s judicious observation. Maxime and d’Ajuda could not help smiling at the idea of this coincidence of heaven and hell.
“To prevent Madame de Rochefide from ever seeing Calyste again,” she added, “we will all travel, Juste and his wife, Calyste and Sabine, and I. I will leave Clotilde with her father—”
“Do not let us shout ‘Victory’ just yet, madame,” said Maxime. “I foresee immense difficulties; I shall conquer them, no doubt. Your esteem and favor are a prize for which I will plunge through much dirt; but it will be—”
“Dirt!” said the Duchess, interrupting the modern condottière with a face equally expressive of disgust and surprise.
“Ay, and you will have to step in it, madame, since I act for you. Are you really so ignorant of the pitch of blindness to which Madame de Rochefide has brought your son-in-law? I know it, through Nathan and Canalis, between whom she was hesitating when Calyste threw himself into that lioness’ maw. Béatrix has made the noble Breton believe that she never loved anyone but him, that she is virtuous, that her attachment to Conti was of the head only, and that her heart and the rest had very little to do with it—a musical passion, in short. As to Rochefide, that was a matter of duty.
“So, you understand, she is virginal. And she proves it by forgetting her son; for a year past she has not made the smallest attempt to see him. The little Count is, in point of fact, nearly twelve years old, and he has found a mother in Madame Schontz; motherhood is the mania, as you know, of women of that stamp.
“Du Guénic would be cut in pieces, and let his wife be cut in pieces, for Béatrix. And do you suppose that it is easy to drag a man back from the depths of the abyss of credulity? Why, madame, Shakespeare’s Iago would waste all his handkerchiefs in such a task. It is generally imagined that Othello, his younger brother Orosmane, and Saint-Preux, and René, and Werther, and other lovers who are famous, typify love! Their icy-hearted creators never knew what was meant by an absorbing passion, Molière alone had a suspicion of it.—Love, Madame la Duchesse, is not an attachment to a noble woman, to a Clarissa; a great achievement that, on my word!—Love is to say to one’s self: ‘The woman I worship is a wretch; she is deceiving me, she will deceive me again, she is an old hand, she smells of the burning pit!’—and to fly to her, to find the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise. That is how Molière loved, and how we love, we scamps and rips; for I can cry at the great scene in Arnolphe! That is how your son-in-law loves Béatrix!
“I shall have some difficulty in getting Rochefide from Madame Schontz; however, Madame Schontz can, no doubt, be got to abet us; I will study her household. As to Calyste and Béatrix, it will need an axe to divide them, treachery of the best quality, infamy so base that your virtuous imagination could not go so low unless your director held your hand. —You have asked for the impossible, you shall have it. Still, in spite of my determination to employ the sword and fire, I cannot absolutely pledge myself to success. I know lovers who do not shrink under the most entire disenchantment. You are too virtuous to understand the power of women who have no virtue.”
“Do not attempt these infamies till I shall have consulted the Abbé Brossette, to know how far I am involved in them,” cried the Duchess, with an artlessness that revealed how selfish religion can be.
“You know nothing about it, my dear mother,” said the Marquis d’Ajuda.
On the steps, while waiting for Ajuda’s carriage to come up, the Marquis said to Maxime:
“You have frightened our good Duchess.”
“But she has no idea of the difficulty of the thing she wants done!—Are we going to the Jockey Club? Rochefide must ask me to dine tomorrow at Schontz’s rooms; in the course of tonight my plans will be laid, and I shall have chosen the pawns in my chessboard that are to move in the game I mean to play. In the days of her splendor Béatrix would have nothing to say to me; I will settle accounts with her, and avenge your sister-in-law so cruelly, that perhaps she will think I have overdone it.”
On the following day Rochefide told Madame Schontz that Maxime de Trailles was coming to dinner. This was to warn her to display the utmost luxury, and prepare the very best fare for this distinguished connoisseur, who was the terror of every woman of Madame Schontz’s class; and she gave
