Since the scene of her mortification at the Italiens, Béatrix had adhered to one formula:
“You preferred the world and your wife to me, so you do not love me. If you wish to prove that you do love me, sacrifice your wife and the world. Give up Sabine, leave her, and let us go to live in Switzerland, in Italy, or in Germany.”
Justifying herself by this cool ultimatum, she had established the sort of blockade which women carry into effect by cold looks, scornful shrugs, and a face like a stone citadel. She believed herself rid of Calyste; she thought he would never venture on a breach with the Grandlieus. To give up Sabine, to whom Mademoiselle des Touches had given her fortune, meant poverty for him.
However, Calyste, mad with despair, had secretly procured a passport, and begged his mother to forward him a considerable sum. While waiting for the money to reach him, he kept watch over Béatrix, himself a victim to the jealousy of a Breton. At last, nine days after the fateful communication made by la Palférine to Maxime at the club, the Baron, to whom his mother had sent thirty thousand francs, flew to the Rue de Courcelles, determined to force the blockade, to turn out la Palférine, and to leave Paris with his idol appeased.
This was one of those fearful alternatives when a woman who has preserved a fragment of self-respect may sink forever into the depths of vice, but may, on the other hand, return to virtue. Hitherto Madame de Rochefide had regarded herself as a virtuous woman, whose heart had been invaded by two passions; but to love Charles-Édouard, and allow herself to be loved by Calyste, would wreck her self-esteem; for where falsehood begins, infamy begins. She had granted rights to Calyste, and no human power could hinder the Breton from throwing himself at her feet and watering them with the tears of abject repentance. Many persons wonder to see the icy insensibility under which women smother their passions; but if they could not thus blot out the past, life for them would be bereft of dignity; they could never escape from the inevitable collusion to which they had once succumbed.
In her entirely new position Béatrix would have been saved if la Palférine had come to her; but old Antoine’s alertness was her ruin.
On hearing a carriage stop at the door, she exclaimed to Calyste, “Here are visitors!” and she hurried away to prevent a catastrophe.
Antoine, a prudent man, replied to Charles-Édouard, who had called solely to hear these very words, “Madame is gone out.”
When Béatrix heard from the old servant that the young Count had called, and what he had been told, she said, “Quite right,” and returned to the drawing-room, saying to herself, “I will be a nun!”
Calyste, who had made so bold as to open the window, caught sight of his rival.
“Who was it?” he asked.
“I do not know; Antoine has not come up yet.”
“It was la Palférine—”
“Very possibly.”
“You love him, and that is why you find fault with me.—I saw him!”
“You saw him?”
“I opened the window.”
Béatrix dropped half dead on the sofa. Then she tried to temporize to save the future; she put off their departure for ten days on the plea of business, and vowed to herself that she would close her door against Calyste if only she could pacify la Palférine, for these are the horrible compromises and burning torments that underlie lives that have gone off the rails on which the great train of Society runs.
As soon as Béatrix was alone she felt so miserable, so deeply humiliated, that she went to bed; she was ill; the fearful struggle that rent her heart seemed to leave a horrible reaction, and she sent for the doctor; but, at the same time, she despatched to la Palférine the following note, in which she avenged herself on Calyste with a sort of frenzy:—
“Come to see me, my friend, I am in desperation. Antoine turned you away when your visit would have put an end to one of the most horrible nightmares of my life, by rescuing me from a man I hate, whom I hope never to see again. I love no one on earth but you, and I never shall love anyone but you, though I am so unhappy as not to please you so much as I could wish …”
She covered four pages, which, having begun thus, ended in a rhapsody far too poetical to be reproduced in print, in which Béatrix so effectually compromised herself, that in conclusion she said:
“Am I not wholly at your mercy? Ah, no price would be too great for me to prove how dearly you are loved!”
And she signed her name, a thing she had never done for either Calyste or Conti.
On the following day, when the young Count called on the Marquise, she was taking a bath. Antoine begged him to wait. But he dismissed Calyste in his turn, when, starving with passion, he also came early; and la Palférine could see him as he got into his carriage again in despair.
“Oh, Charles,” said the Marquise coming into the drawing-room, “you have ruined me!”
“I know it, madame,” replied he coolly. “You swore that you loved me alone, you offered to give me a letter in which you will set down the reasons you would have had for killing yourself, so that in the event of your being unfaithful to me I might poison you without fear of human justice—as if superior souls needed to resort to poison to avenge themselves!—You wrote, ‘No price would be too great for me to prove how dearly you are loved!’—Well, I find a contradiction between these closing words of your letter and your speech, ‘You have ruined me.’ I will know now whether you have had the courage to break with du Guénic.”
“You are revenged on him beforehand,” said she throwing her
