“Besides man there is only God!” said the famous woman gravely. “God is the unknown. I should cast myself into it as into a gulf. Calyste has just sworn that he admires you only as he might admire a picture; but you are eight-and-twenty, and in all the splendor of your beauty. So the struggle between him and me has begun by a falsehood. Happily I know how to win.”
“And how is that?”
“That, my dear, is my secret. Leave me the advantages of my age. Though Claude Vignon has cast me into the abyss—me, when I had raised myself to a spot which I believed to be inaccessible—I may at least pluck the pale blossoms, etiolated but delicious, which grow at the foot of the precipice.”
Madame de Rochefide was moulded like wax by Mademoiselle des Touches, who reveled in savage pleasure as she involved her in her meshes. Camille sent her to bed, nettled with curiosity, tossed between jealousy and generosity, but certainly thinking much about the handsome youth.
“She would be delighted if she could betray me,” said Camille to herself, as they kissed and said good night.
Then, when she was alone, the author made way for the woman—she melted into tears; she filled her hookah with tobacco dipped in opium, and spent the greater part of the night smoking, and thus numbing the tortures of her love, while seeing, through the clouds of smoke, Calyste’s charming head.
“What a fine book might be written containing the story of my sorrows!” said she to herself; “but it has been done. Sappho lived before me. Sappho was young! A touching and lovely heroine indeed is a woman of forty! Smoke your hookah, my poor Camille, you have not even the privilege of making a poem out of your woes; this crowns them all!”
She did not go to bed till daybreak, mingling tears, spasms of rage, and magnanimous resolutions in the long meditation wherein she sometimes considered the mysteries of the Catholic religion, of which she had never thought in the course of her reckless life as an artist and an unbelieving writer.
Next day, Calyste, advised by his mother to act exactly on Camille’s instructions, came at noon and stole mysteriously up to Mademoiselle des Touches’ room, where he found plenty of books. Félicité sat in an armchair by the window, smoking, and gazing alternately at the wild marsh landscape, at the sea, and at Calyste, with whom she exchanged a few words concerning Béatrix. At a certain moment, seeing the Marquise walking in the garden, she went to the window to unfasten the curtains, so that her friend should see her, and drew them to shut out the light, leaving only a strip that fell on Calyste’s book.
“I shall ask you to stay to dinner this evening, my child,” said she, tumbling his hair, “and you must refuse, looking at Béatrix; you will have no difficulty in making her understand how deeply you regret being unable to remain here.”
At about four o’clock Camille left him and went to play the dreadful farce of her false happiness to the Marquise, whom she brought back to the drawing-room. Calyste then came out of the adjoining room; at that moment he felt the shame of his position. The look he gave Béatrix, though watched for by Félicité, was even more expressive than she had expected. Béatrix was beautifully dressed.
“How elegant you are, my sweetheart!” said Camille, when Calyste had left.
These manoeuvres went on for six days; they were seconded, without Calyste’s knowledge, by the most ingenious conversations between Camille and her friend. There was between the two women a duel without truce, in which the weapons were cunning, feints, generosity, false confessions, astute confidences, in which one hid her love and the other stripped hers bare, while nevertheless the iron sharpness, red hot with Canaille’s treacherous words, pierced her friend’s heart to the core, implanting some of those evil feelings which good women find it so hard to suppress. Béatrix in the end took offence at the suspicions betrayed by Camille; she thought them dishonoring to both alike; she was delighted to discover in the great authoress the weakness of her sex, and longed for the pleasure of showing her where her superiority ended, how she might be humiliated.
“Well, my dear, what are you going to tell him today?” she asked, with a spiteful glance at her friend, when the imaginary lover asked leave to remain. “On Monday we had something to talk over; on Tuesday you had too poor a dinner; on Wednesday you were afraid of annoying the Baroness; on Thursday we were going out together; yesterday you bid him goodbye as soon as he opened his mouth. Now, I want him to stay today, poor boy!”
“Already, my dear!” said Camille, with biting irony.
Béatrix colored.
“Then stay, Monsieur du Guénic,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, assuming a queenly air, as though she were nettled.
Béatrix turned cold and hard; she was crushing, satirical, and intolerable to Calyste, whom Félicité sent off to play mouche with Mademoiselle de Kergarouët.
“That girl is not dangerous!” said Béatrix, smiling.
Young men in love are like starving people, the cook’s preparations do not satisfy them; they think too much of the end to understand the means. As he turned from les Touches to Guérande, Calyste’s mind was full of Béatrix; he did not know what deep feminine skill Félicité was employing to promote his interests—to use a cant phrase. In the course of this week the Marquise had written but one letter to Conti, a symptom of indifference which had not escaped Camille.
Calyste’s whole life was concentrated in the short moments when he saw Béatrix; this drop of water, far from quenching his thirst, only increased it. The magic words, “You shall be loved,” spoken by Camille and endorsed by his mother, were the talisman by which he checked the fire of his passion. He tried to kill time; he could not sleep, and cheated his sleeplessness
