She explained to him the fictions she had just invented. The skilful doctor, sitting by the bed, was studying the patient’s symptoms, and the means of staving off the mischief. While he was prescribing measures, of which the success must depend on their immediate execution, Calyste, at the foot of the bed, kept his eyes fixed on Sabine, trying to give them an expression of tender anxiety.
“Then it is gambling that has given you those dark marks round your eyes?” she said in a feeble voice.
The words startled the doctor, the mother, and Ursule, who looked at each other; Calyste turned as red as a cherry.
“That comes of suckling your child,” said Dommanget cleverly but roughly. “Then husbands are dull, being so much separated from their wives, they go to the club and play high. But do not lament over the thirty thousand francs that Monsieur le Baron lost last night—”
“Thirty thousand francs!” said Ursule like a simpleton.
“Yes, I know it for certain,” replied Dommanget. “I heard this morning at the house of the Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that you lost the money to Monsieur de Trailles,” he added to Calyste. “How can you play with such a man? Honestly, Monsieur le Baron, I understand your being ashamed of yourself.”
Calyste, a kind and generous soul, when he saw his mother-in-law—the pious Duchess, the young Viscountess—a happy wife, and a selfish old doctor all lying like curiosity dealers, understood the greatness of the danger; he shed two large tears, which deceived Sabine.
“Monsieur,” said she, sitting up in bed, and looking wrathfully at Dommanget, “Monsieur du Guénic may lose thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand francs if he chooses without giving anyone a right to find fault with him or lecture him. It is better that Monsieur de Trailles should have won the money from him than that we, we, should have won from Monsieur de Trailles!”
Calyste rose and put his arm round his wife’s neck. Kissing her on both cheeks, he said in her ear, “Sabine, you are an angel!”
Two days later the young Baroness was considered out of danger. On the following day Calyste went to Madame de Rochefide, and making a virtue of his infamy—
“Béatrix,” said he, “you owe me much happiness. I sacrificed my poor wife to you, and she discovered everything. The fatal notepaper on which you made me write, with your initial and coronet on it, which I did not happen to see—I saw nothing but you! The letter B, happily, was worn away; but the scent you left clinging to me, the lies in which I entangled myself like a fool, have ruined my happiness. Sabine has been at death’s door; the milk went to her brain, she has erysipelas, and will perhaps be disfigured for life. …”
Béatrix, while listening to this harangue, had a face of Arctic coldness, enough to freeze the Seine if she had looked at it.
“Well, so much the better; it may bleach her a little, perhaps.” And Béatrix, as dry as her own bones, as variable as her complexion, as sharp as her voice, went on in this tone, a tirade of cruel epigrams.
There can be no greater blunder than for a husband to talk to his mistress of his wife, if she is virtuous, unless it be to talk to his wife of his mistress if she is handsome. But Calyste had not yet had the sort of Parisian education which may be called the good manners of the passions. He could neither tell his wife a lie nor tell his mistress the truth—an indispensable training to enable a man to manage women. So he was obliged to appeal to all the powers of passion for two long hours, to wring from Béatrix the forgiveness he begged, denied him by an angel who raised her eyes to heaven not to see the culprit, and who uttered the reasons peculiar to Marquises in a voice choked with well-feigned tears, that she furtively wiped away with the lace edge of her handkerchief.
“You can talk to me of your wife the very day after I have yielded!—Why not say at once that she is a pearl of virtue? I know, she admires your beauty! That is what I call depravity! I—I love your soul! For I assure you, my dear boy, you are hideous compared with some shepherds of the Roman Campagna,” etc., etc.
This tone may seem strange, but it was a part of a system deliberately planned by Béatrix. In her third incarnation—for a woman completely changes with each fresh passion—she is far advanced in fraud—that is the only word that can describe the result of the experience gained in such adventures. The Marquise de Rochefide had sat in judgment on herself in front of her mirror. Clever women have no delusions about themselves; they count their wrinkles; they watch the beginnings of crows’-feet; they note the appearance of every speck in their skin; they know themselves by heart, and show it too plainly by the immense pains they take to preserve their beauty. And so, to contend against a beautiful young wife, to triumph over her six days a week, Béatrix sought to win by the weapons of the courtesan. Without confessing to herself the baseness of her conduct, and carried away to use such means by a Turklike passion for the handsome young man, she resolved to make him believe that he was clumsy, ugly, ill made, and to behave as if she hated him.
There is no more successful method with men of a domineering nature. To them the conquest of such disdain is the triumph of the first day renewed on every morrow. It is more; it is flattery hidden under the mask of aversion, and owing to it the charm
