She laughed, as if to efface the melancholy impression she might have made on her adorer.
“But where can I call on you?” asked Calyste.
“I have hidden myself in the Rue de Courcelles, close to the Pare Monceaux, in a tiny house suited to my fortune, and I cram my brain with literature—but for my own satisfaction only, to amuse myself. Heaven preserve me from the mania of writing!—Go, leave me; I do not want to be talked about, and what will not people say if they see us together? And besides, Calyste, I tell you, if you stay a minute longer I shall cry, for I can’t help it.”
Calyste withdrew, after giving his hand to Béatrix, and feeling a second time the deep strange sensation of a pressure on both sides full of suggestive incitement.
“My God! Sabine never stirred my heart like this,” was the thought that assailed him in the corridor.
Throughout the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not look three times straight at Calyste; but she sent him side glances which rent the soul of the man who had given himself up wholly to his first and rejected love.
When the Baron du Guénic was at home again, the magnificence of his rooms reminded him of the sort of mediocrity to which Béatrix had alluded, and he felt a hatred for the fortune that did not belong to that fallen angel. On hearing that Sabine had been in bed some time, he was happy in having a night to himself to live in his emotions.
He now cursed the perspicacity given to Sabine by her affection. When it happens that a man is adored by his wife, she can read his face like a book, she knows the slightest quiver of his muscles, she divines the reason when he is calm, she questions herself when he is in the least sad, wondering if she is in fault, she watches his eyes; to her those eyes are colored by his ruling thought—they love or they love not. Calyste knew himself to be the object of a worship so complete, so artless, so jealous, that he doubted whether he could assume a countenance that would preserve the secret of the change that had come over him.
“What shall I do tomorrow morning?” said he to himself as he fell asleep, fearing Sabine’s scrutiny.
For when they first met, or even in the course of the day, Sabine would ask him, “Do you love me as much as ever?” or, “I don’t bore you?” Gracious questionings, varying according to the wife’s wit or mood, and covering real or imaginary terrors.
A storm will stir up mud and bring it to the top of the noblest and purest hearts. And so, next morning, Calyste, who was genuinely fond of his child, felt a thrill of joy at hearing that Sabine was anxious as to the cause of some symptoms, and, fearing croup, could not leave the infant Calyste. The Baron excused himself on the score of business from breakfasting at home, and went out. He fled as a prisoner escapes, happy in the mere act of walking, in going across the Pont Louis XVI and the Champs-Élysées to a café on the boulevard, where he breakfasted alone.
What is there in love? Does Nature turn restive under the social yoke? Does Nature insist that the spring of a devoted life shall be spontaneous and free, its flow that of a wild torrent tossed by the rocks of contradiction and caprice, instead of a tranquil stream trickling between two banks—the mairie on one side, and the church on the other? Has she schemes of her own when she is hatching those volcanic eruptions to which perhaps we owe our great men?
It would have been difficult to find a young man more piously brought up than Calyste, of purer life, or less tainted by infidelity; and he was rushing towards a woman quite unworthy of him, when a merciful and glorious chance brought to him, in Sabine, a girl of really aristocratic beauty, with a refined and delicate mind, pious, loving, and wholly attached to him; her angelic sweetness still touched with the pathos of love, passionate love in spite of marriage—such love as his for Béatrix.
The greatest men perhaps have still some clay in their composition; the mire still has charms. So, in spite of folly and frailty, the woman would then be the less imperfect creature. Madame de Rochefide in the midst of the crowd of artistic pretenders who surrounded her, and in spite of her fall, belonged to the highest nobility all the same; her nature was ethereal rather than earthborn, and she hid the courtesan she meant to be under the most aristocratic exterior. So this explanation cannot account for Calyste’s strange passion.
The reason may perhaps be found in a vanity so deeply buried that moralists have not yet discerned that side of vice. There are men, truly noble as Calyste was, and as handsome, rich, elegant, and well bred, who weary—unconsciously perhaps—of wedded life with a nature like their own; beings whose loftiness is not amazed by loftiness, who are left cold by a dignity and refinement on a constant level with their own, but who crave to find in inferior or fallen natures a corroboration of their own superiority though they would not ask their praises. The contrast of moral degradation and magnanimity fascinates their sight. What is pure shines so vividly by the side of what is impure! This comparison is pleasing. Calyste found nothing in Sabine to protect; she was irreproachable; all the wasted energies of his heart went forth to Béatrix. And if we have seen great men playing the part of Jesus, raising up the woman taken in adultery, how should commonplace folks be any wiser?
Calyste lived till two o’clock on the thought, “I shall see her again!”—a poem which ere now
