In October 1839 the young Baronne du Guénic had a son, and was so foolish as to nurse him herself, like almost every woman under similar circumstances. How can she help being wholly a mother when her child is the child of a husband so truly idolized? Thus by the end of the following summer Sabine was preparing to wean her first child.
In the course of a two years’ residence in Paris, Calyste had entirely shed the innocence which had cast the light of its prestige on his first experience in the world of passion. Calyste, as the comrade of the young Duc de Maufrigneuse—like himself, lately married to an heiress, Bertha de Cinq-Cygne—of the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduère, of the Duc and Duchesse de Rhétoré, the Duc and Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the company that met in his mother-in-law’s drawing-room, learnt to see the differences that divide provincial from Paris life. Wealth has its dark hours, its tracts of idleness, for which Paris, better than any other capital, can provide amusement, diversion, and interest. Hence, under the influence of these young husbands, who would leave the noblest and most beautiful creatures for the delights of the cigar or of whist, for the sublime conversation at a club or the absorbing interests of the turf, many of the domestic virtues were undermined in the young Breton husband. The maternal instinct in a woman who cannot endure to bore her husband is always ready to support young married men in their dissipations. A woman is so proud of seeing the man she leaves perfectly free come back to her side.
One evening, in October this year, to escape the cries of a weaned child, Calyste—on whose brow Sabine could not bear to see a cloud—was advised by her to go to the Théâtre des Variétés, where a new piece was being acted. The servant sent to secure a stall had taken one quite near to the stage-boxes. Between the first and second acts, Calyste, looking about him, saw in one of these boxes on the ground tier, not four yards away, Madame de Rochefide.
Béatrix in Paris! Béatrix in public! The two ideas pierced Calyste’s brain like two arrows. He could see her again after nearly three years!—Who can describe the commotion in the soul of this lover who, far from forgetting, had sometimes so completely identified Béatrix with his wife that Sabine had been conscious of it? Who can understand how this poem of a lost and misprized love, ever living in the heart of Sabine’s husband, overshadowed the young wife’s dutiful charms and ineffable tenderness? Béatrix became light, the daystar, excitement, life, the unknown; while Sabine was duty, darkness, the familiar! In that instant one was pleasure, the other satiety. It was a thunderbolt.
Sabine’s husband in a loyal impulse felt a noble prompting to leave the house. As he went out from the stalls, the door of the box was open, and in spite of himself his feet carried him in. He found Béatrix between two very distinguished men, Canalis and Nathan—a politician and a literary celebrity. During nearly three years, since Calyste had last seen Madame de Rochefide, she had altered very much; but though the metamorphosis had changed the woman’s nature, she seemed all the more poetical and attractive in Calyste’s eyes. Up to the age of thirty, clothing is all a pretty Parisian demands of dress; but when she has crossed the threshold of the thirties, she looks to finery for armor, fascinations, and embellishment; she composes it to lend her graces; she finds a purpose in it, assumes a character, makes herself young again, studies the smallest accessories—in short, abandons nature for art.
Madame de Rochefide had just gone through the changing scenes of the drama which, in this history of the manners of the French in the nineteenth century, is called “The Deserted Woman.” Conti having thrown her over, she had naturally become a great artist in dress, in flirtation, and in artificial bloom of every description.
“How is it that Conti is not here,” asked Calyste of Canalis in a whisper, after the commonplace greetings which begin the most momentous meeting when it takes place in public.
The erewhile poet of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, twice minister, and now for the fourth time a speaker hoping for fresh promotion, laid his finger with meaning on his lips. This explained all.
“I am so glad to see you,” said Béatrix, in a kittenish way. “I said to myself as soon as I saw you, before you saw me, that you, at any rate, would not disown me! Oh, my Calyste,” she murmured in his ear, “why are you married?—and to such a little fool, too!”
As soon as a woman whispers to a newcomer in her box, and makes him sit down by her, men of breeding always find some excuse for leaving them together.
“Are you coming, Nathan?” said Canalis; “Madame la Marquise will excuse me if I go to speak a word to d’Arthez, whom I see with the Princesse de Cadignan. I must talk about a combination of speakers for tomorrow’s sitting.”
This retreat, effected with good taste, gave Calyste a chance of recovering from the shock he had sustained; but he lost all his remaining strength and presence of mind as he inhaled the, to him, intoxicating and poisonous fragrance of the poem called Béatrix.
Madame de Rochefide, who had grown bony and stringy, whose complexion was almost ruined, thin, faded, with dark circles round her eyes, had that evening wreathed the untimely ruin with the most ingenious devices of Parisian frippery. Like all deserted women, she had tried to give herself a virgin grace, and by the effect
