“Why did you not tell me sooner? Must I come no more?” asked Calyste, failing to restrain a tear that rolled down his cheek, and touched Félicité deeply.
“You are an angel!” she exclaimed.
Then she lightly sang Mathilde’s strain “Restez” out of William Tell, to efface all gravity from this grand reply of a princess to her subject.
“He thus hopes,” she added, “to make me believe in a greater love for me than he feels. He knows all the regard I feel for him,” she went on, looking narrowly at Calyste, “but he is perhaps humiliated to find himself my inferior in this. Possibly, too, he has formed some suspicions of you, and thinks he will take us by surprise.—But, even if he is guilty of nothing worse than of wishing to enjoy the delights of this expedition in the wilds without me, of refusing to let me share his excursions, and the ideas the scenes may arouse in him, of leaving me in mortal alarms—is not that enough? His great brain has no more love for me than had the musician, the wit, the soldier. Sterne is right: names have a meaning, and mine is the bitterest mockery. I shall die without ever finding in a man such love as I have in my heart, such poetry as I have in my soul.”
She sat with her arms hanging limp, her head thrown back on the cushion, her eyes dull with concentrated thought, and fixed on a flower in the carpet. The sufferings of superior minds are mysteriously grand and imposing; they reveal immense expanses of the soul, to which the spectator’s fancy adds yet greater breadth. Such souls share in the privilege of royalty, whose affections cling to a nation, and then strike a whole world.
“Why did you—?” began Calyste, who could not finish the sentence. Camille Maupin’s beautiful, burning hand was laid on his, and eloquently stopped him.
“Nature has forsworn her laws by granting me five or six years of added youth. I have repelled you out of selfishness. Sooner or later age would have divided us.—I am thirteeen years older than he is, and that is quite enough!”
“You will still be beautiful when you are sixty!” cried Calyste, heroically.
“God grant it!” she replied, with a smile. “But, my dear child, I intend to love him. In spite of his insensibility, his lack of imagination, his cowardly indifference, and the envy that consumes him, I believe that there is greatness under those husks; I hope to galvanize his heart, to save him from himself, to attach him to me. … Alas! I have the brain to see clearly while my heart is blind.”
She was appallingly clear to herself. She could suffer and analyze her suffering, as Cuvier and Dupuytren could explain to their friends the fatal progress of their diseases and the steady advance of death. Camille Maupin knew passion as these two learned men knew anatomy.
“I came here on purpose to form an opinion about him; he is already bored. He misses Paris, as I told him; he is homesick for something to criticise. Here there is no author to be plucked, no system to be undermined, no poet to be driven to despair; he dares not here rush into some excess in which he could unburden himself of the weight of thought. Alas! my love, perhaps, is not true enough to refresh his brain. In short, I cannot intoxicate him!—Tonight you and he must get drunk together; I shall say I am ailing, and stay in my room; I shall know if I am mistaken.”
Calyste turned as red as a cherry, red from his chin to his hair, and his ears tingled with the glow.
“Good God!” she exclaimed, “and here am I depraving your maiden innocence without thinking of what I was doing! Forgive me, Calyste. When you love you will know that you would try to set the Seine on fire to give the least pleasure to ‘the object of your affections,’ as the fortunetellers say.”
She paused.
“There are some proud and logical spirits,” she went on, “who at a certain age can exclaim, ‘If I could live my life again, I would do everything the same.’ Now I—and I do not think myself weak—I say, ‘I would be such a woman as your mother.’
“To have a Calyste of my own! What happiness! If I had had the greatest fool on earth for a husband, I should have been a humble and submissive wife. And yet I have not sinned against society; I have only hurt myself. Alas! dear child, a woman can no longer go into society unprotected excepting in what is called a primitive state. The affections that are not in harmony with social or natural laws, the affections which are not binding, in short, evade us. If I am to suffer for suffering’s sake, I might as well be useful. What do I care for the children of my Faucombe cousins, who are no longer Faucombes, whom I have not seen for twenty years, and who married merchants only! You are a son who has cost me none of the cares of motherhood; I shall leave you my fortune, and you will be happy, at any rate, so far as that is concerned, by my act, dear jewel of beauty and sweetness, which nothing should ever change or fade!”
As she spoke these words in a deep voice, her eyelids fell, that he should not read her eyes.
“You have never chosen to accept anything from me,” said Calyste. “I shall restore your fortune to your heirs.”
“Child!” said Camille, in her rich tones, while the tears fell down her cheeks, “can nothing save me from myself?”
“You have a story to tell me, and a letter to—”
