“ ‘No,’ said the Marquis; ‘if you have only a few words to say to her, I will wait in the carriage; it is only half-past seven.’
“If Béatrix had said to her husband, ‘Go to the Opera and leave me alone,’ he would have obeyed her quite calmly. Like every clever woman, knowing herself guilty, she was afraid of rousing his suspicions, and resigned herself. Thus, when she gave up the Opera to come to my house, her husband accompanied her. She came in scarlet with rage and impatience. She walked straight up to me, and said in a low voice, with the calmest manner in the world:
“ ‘My dear Félicité, I shall start for Italy tomorrow evening with Conti; beg him to make his arrangements, and wait for me here with a carriage and passport.’
“Then she left with her husband.—Violent passions insist on liberty at any cost. Béatrix had for a year been suffering from want of freedom and the rarity of their meetings, for she considered herself one with Gennaro. So nothing could surprise me. In her place, with my temper, I should have acted as she did. Conti’s happiness broke my heart; only his vanity was engaged in this matter.
“ ‘That is, indeed, being loved!’ he exclaimed, in the midst of his transports. ‘How few women would thus forego their whole life, their fortune, their reputation!’
“ ‘Oh, yes, she loves you,’ said I; ‘but you do not love her!’
“He flew into a fury and made a scene; he harangued, he scolded, he described his passion, saying he had never thought it possible that he could love so much. I was immovably cool, and lent him the money he might want for the journey that had taken him by surprise.
“Béatrix wrote a letter to her husband, and set out for Italy the next evening. She stayed there two years; she wrote to me several times. Her letters are bewitchingly friendly; the poor child clings to me as the only woman that understands her. She tells me she adores me. Want of money compelled Gennaro to write an opera; he did not find in Italy the pecuniary resources open to a composer in Paris.—Here is her last letter; you can understand it now if, at your age, you can analyze the emotions of the heart,” she added, handing him the letter.
At this moment Claude Vignon came in. At the unexpected sight, Calyste and Félicité sat silent for a minute, she from surprise, he from vague dissatisfaction. Claude’s vast, high, and wide forehead, bald at seven-and-thirty, was dark with clouds. His firm, judicious lips expressed cold irony. Claude Vignon is an imposing person, in spite of the changes in a face that was splendid and is now grown livid. From the age of eighteen to five-and-twenty he had a strong likeness to the divine young Raphael; but his nose, the human feature which most readily alters, has grown sharp; his countenance has, as it were, sunk under mysterious hollows, the outlines have grown puffy, and with a bad color; leaden grays predominate in the worn complexion, though no one knows what the fatigues can be of a young man, aged, perhaps, by crushing loneliness, and an abuse of keen discernment. He is always examining other men’s minds, without object or system; the pickaxe of his criticism is always destroying, and never constructing anything. His weariness is that of the laborer, not of the architect.
His eyes, light blue and once bright, are dimmed with unconfessed suffering, or clouded by sullen sadness. Dissipation has darkened the eyelids beneath the brows; the temples have lost their smoothness. The chin, most nobly moulded, has grown double without dignity. His voice, never very sonorous, has grown thin; it is not hoarse, not husky, but something between the two. The inscrutability of this fine face, the fixity of that gaze, cover an irresolution and weakness that are betrayed in the shrewd and ironical smile. This weakness affects his actions, but not his mind; the stamp of encyclopaedic intellect is on that brow and in the habit of that face, at once childlike and lofty.
One detail may help to explain the eccentricities of this character. The man is tall and already somewhat bent, like all who bear a world of ideas. These tall, long frames have never been remarkable for tenacious energy, for creative activity. Charlemagne, Narses, Belisarius, and Constantine have been, in this particular, very noteworthy exceptions. Claude Vignon, no doubt, suggests mysteries to be solved. In the first place, he is at once very simple and very deep. Though he rushes into excess with the readiness of a courtesan, his mind remains unclouded. The intellect which can criticise art, science, literature, and politics is inadequate to control his outer life. Claude contemplates himself in the wide extent of his intellectual realm, and gives up the form of things with Diogenes-like indifference. Content with seeing into everything, understanding everything, he scorns material details; but, being beset with hesitancy as soon as creation is needed, he sees obstacles without being carried away by beauties, and by dint of discussing means, he sits, his hands hanging idle, producing no results. Intellectually he is a Turk in whom meditation induces sleep. Criticism is his opium, and his harem of books has disgusted him with any work he might do.
He is equally indifferent to the smallest and to the greatest things, and is compelled by the mere weight of his brain to throw himself into debauchery to abdicate for a little while the irresistible power of his omnipotent analysis. He is too much absorbed by the seamy side of genius, and you may now conceive that Camille Maupin should try to show him the right side.
The task was a fascinating one. Claude Vignon believed himself no less great as a politician than he was as a writer; but this Machiavelli of private life laughs in his sleeve at ambitious persons, he knows all he can ever know, he instinctively measures his future life
