“Which way did you come?” said Mademoiselle des Touches, coloring with pleasure or surprise.
“In at the door,” replied Claude Vignon, drily.
“Well,” she replied, with a shrug, “I know you are not a man to come in at the window.”
“Scaling a balcony is a sort of cross of honor for the beloved fair.”
“Enough!” said Félicité.
“I am in the way?” said Claude Vignon.
“Monsieur,” said the guileless Calyste, “this letter—”
“Keep it; I ask no questions. At our age such things need no words,” said he, in a satirical tone, interrupting Calyste.
“But, indeed, monsieur—” Calyste began, indignantly.
“Be calm, young man; my indulgence for feelings is boundless.”
“My dear Calyste,” said Camille, anxious to speak.
“Dear?” said Vignon, interrupting her.
“Claude is jesting,” Camille went on, addressing Calyste, “and he is wrong—with you who know nothing of Paris and its ‘chaff.’ ”
“I had no idea that I was funny,” said Vignon, very gravely.
“By what road did you come? For two hours I have never ceased looking out towards le Croisic.”
“You were not incessantly looking,” replied Vignon.
“You are intolerable with your banter.”
“Banter! I?”
Calyste rose.
“You are not so badly off here that you need leave,” said Vignon.
“On the contrary,” said the indignant youth, to whom Camille gave her hand, which he kissed instead of merely taking it, and left on it a scalding tear.
“I wish I were that little young man,” said the critic, seating himself, and taking the end of the hookah. “How he will love!”
“Too much, for then he will not be loved,” said Mademoiselle des Touches. “Madame de Rochefide is coming here.”
“Good!” said Claude; “and with Conti?”
“She will stay here alone, but he is bringing her.”
“Have they quarreled?”
“No.”
“Play me a sonata by Beethoven; I know nothing of the music he has written for the piano.”
Claude filled the bowl of the hookah with tobacco, watching Camille more closely than she knew; a hideous idea possessed him; he fancied that a straightforward woman believed she had duped him. The situation was a new one.
Calyste, as he went away, was thinking neither of Béatrix de Rochefide nor her letter; he was furious with Claude Vignon, full of wrath at what he thought want of delicacy, and of pity for poor Félicité. How could a man be loved by that perfect woman and not worship her on his knees, not trust her on the faith of a look or a smile? After being the privileged spectator of the suffering Félicité had endured while waiting, he felt an impulse to rend that pale, cold spectre. He knew nothing himself, as Félicité had told him, of the sort of deceptive witticisms in which the satirists of the press excel. To him love was a human form of religion.
On seeing him cross the courtyard, his mother could not restrain a joyful exclamation, and old Mademoiselle du Guénic whistled for Mariotte.
“Mariotte, here is the child; give us the lubine.”
“I saw him, mademoiselle,” replied the cook.
His mother, a little distressed by the melancholy that sat on Calyste’s brow, never suspecting that it was caused by what he thought Vignon’s bad treatment of Félicité, took up her worsted work. The old aunt pulled out her knitting. The Baron gave up his easy-chair to his son, and walked up and down the room as if to unstiffen his legs before taking a turn in the garden. No Flemish or Dutch picture represents an interior of richer tone, or furnished with more happily suitable figures. The handsome youth, dressed in black velvet, the mother, still so handsome, and the two old folks, in the setting of ancient paneling, were the expression of the most domestic harmony.
Fanny longed to question Calyste, but he had taken Béatrix’s letter out of his pocket—the letter which was, perhaps, to destroy all the happiness this noble family enjoyed. As he unfolded it, Calyste’s lively imagination called up the Marquise dressed as Camille Maupin had fantastically described her.
“From Béatrix to Félicité.
“Genoa, July 2nd.
“I have not written to you, my dear friend, since our stay at Florence, but Venice and Rome took up all my time; and happiness, as you know, fills a large place in life. We are neither of us likely to take strict account of a letter more or less. I am a little tired; I insisted on seeing everything, and to a mind not easily satiated the repetition of pleasures brings fatigue. Our friend had great triumphs at the Scala, at the Fenice, and these last three days at the San Carlo. Three Italian operas in two years! You cannot say that love has made him idle.
“We have been warmly welcomed everywhere, but I should have preferred silence and solitude. Is not that the only mode of life that suits a woman in direct antagonism with the world? This was what I had expected. Love, my dear, is a more exacting master than marriage; but it is sweet to serve him. After having played at love all my life, I did not know that I must see the world again, even in glimpses, and the attentions paid me on all hands were so many wounds. I was no longer on an equal footing with women of the highest type. The more kindly I was treated, the more was my inferiority marked. Gennaro did not understand these subtleties, but he was so happy that I should have been graceless if I had not sacrificed such petty vanities to a thing so splendid as an artist’s life.
“We live only by love, while men live by love and action—otherwise they would not be men. There are, however, immense disadvantages to a woman in the position in which I
