She was the first to arrive at the box cliff, and sat down in the shade of one of the clefts, lost in meditation. What could such a woman as she do in old age, after drinking the cup of fame which all great talents, too greedy to sip the dull driblets of vanity, drain at one draught? She has since confessed that then and there, one of the coincidences suggested by a mere trifle, by one of the accidents which count for nothing with ordinary people, though they open a gulf of meditation to a great soul, brought her to a decision as to the strange deed, which was afterwards the close of her social career. She drew out of her pocket a little box in which she had brought, in case of thirst, some strawberry pastilles; she ate several; but as she sucked them, she could not help reflecting that the strawberries, which were no more, yet lived by their qualities. Hence she concluded that it might be the same with us. The sea offered her an image of the infinite. No great mind can get away from the infinite, granting the immortality of the soul, without being brought to infer some religious future. This idea still haunted her when she smelt at her scent-bottle of Eau de Portugal.
Her manoeuvres for handing Béatrix over to Calyste then struck her as very sordid; she felt the woman die in her, and she emerged the noble angelic being hitherto veiled in the flesh. Her vast intellect, her learning, her acquirements, her spurious loves had brought her face to face with what? Who could have foretold it? With the yearning mother, the consoler of the sorrowing—the Roman Church, so mild towards repentance, so poetical to poets, so artless with children, so deep and mysterious to wild and anxious spirits, that they can forever plunge deeper into it and still satisfy their inextinguishable curiosity, which is constantly excited.
She glanced back at the devious ways to which she had been led by Calyste, comparing them to the tortuous paths among these rocks. Calyste was still in her eyes the lovely messenger from heaven, a divine leader. She smothered earthly in sacred love.
After walking on for some time in silence, Calyste, at an exclamation from Béatrix at the beauty of the ocean, very different from the Mediterranean, could not resist drawing a comparison between that sea and his love, in its purity and extent, its agitations, its depth, its eternity.
“It has a rock for its shore,” said Béatrix with a laugh.
“When you speak to me in that tone,” replied he with a heavenly flash, “I see you and hear you, and I can find an angel’s patience; but when I am alone, you would pity me if you could see me. My mother cries over my grief.”
“Listen, Calyste, this must come to an end,” said the Marquise, stepping down on to the sandy path. “Perhaps we are now in the one propitious spot for the utterance of such things, for never in my life have I seen one where nature was more in harmony with my thoughts. I have seen Italy, where everything speaks of love; I have seen Switzerland, where all is fresh and expressive of true happiness, laborious happiness, where the verdure, the calm waters, the most placid outlines are overpowered by the snow-crowned Alps; but I have seen nothing which more truly paints the scorching barrenness of my life than this little plain, withered by sea-gales, corroded by salt mists, where melancholy tillage struggles in the face of the immense ocean and under the hedgerows of Brittany, whence rise the towers of your Guérande.
“Well, Calyste, that is Béatrix. Do not attach yourself to that. I love you, but I will never be yours, for I am conscious of my inward desolation. Ah! you can never know how cruel I am to myself when I tell you this. No, you shall never see your idol—if I am your idol—stoop; it shall not fall from the height where you have set it. I have now a horror of a passion which the world and religion alike reprobate; I will be humbled no more, nor will I steal happiness. I shall remain where I am; I shall be the sandy, unfertile desert, without verdure or flowers, which lies before you.”
“And if you should be deserted?” said Calyste.
“Then I should go and beg for mercy. I would humble myself before the man I have sinned against, but I would never run the risk of rushing into happiness which I know would end.”
“End?” cried Calyste.
“End,” repeated the Marquise, interrupting the rhapsody into which her lover was plunging, by a tone which reduced him to silence.
This contradiction gave rise in the youth’s soul to one of those wordless rages which are known only to those who have loved without hope. He and Béatrix walked on for about three hundred yards in utter silence, looking neither at the sea, nor the rocks, nor the fields of le Croisic.
“I should make you so happy!” said Calyste.
“All men begin by promising us happiness, and they bequeath to us shame, desertion, disgust. I have nothing of which to accuse the man to whom I ought to
