Béatrix seconded her use of contempt as a moral incitement by a constant comparison between her comfortable poetic home and the Hôtel du Guénic. Every deserted wife neglects her home out of deep discouragement. Foreseeing this, Madame de Rochefide began covert innuendoes as to the luxury of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which she stigmatized as absurd. The reconciliation scene, when Béatrix made Calyste swear to hate the wife who, as she said, was playing the farce of spilt milk, took place in a perfect bower, where she put herself into attitudes in the midst of beautiful flowers and jardinieres of lavish costliness. She carried the art of trifles, of fashionable toys, to an extreme. Béatrix, sunk into contempt since Conti’s desertion, was bent on gaining such fame as may be had by sheer perversity. The woes of a young wife, a Grandlieu, rich and lovely, were to build her a pedestal.
When a woman reappears in society after nursing her first child, she comes out again improved in charm and beauty. If this phase of maternity can rejuvenate even women no longer in their first youth, it gives young wives a splendid freshness, a cheerful activity, a brio of life—if we may apply to the body a word which the Italians have invented for the mind. But while trying to resume the pleasant habits of the honeymoon, Sabine did not find the same Calyste. The unhappy girl watched him instead of abandoning herself to happiness. She expected the fatal perfume, and she smelt it; and she no longer confided in Ursule, nor in her mother, who had so charitably deceived her. She wanted certainty, and she had not long to wait for it. Certainty is never coy; it is like the sun, we soon need to pull down the blinds before it. In love it is a repetition of the fable of the Woodman calling on Death. We wish that certainty would blind us.
One morning, a fortnight after the first catastrophe, Sabine received this dreadful letter:—
To Madame la Baronne du Guénic.
“Guérande.
“My dear Daughter—My sister Zéphirine and I are lost in conjectures as to the dressing-table mentioned in your letter; I am writing about it to Calyste, and beg your forgiveness for my ignorance. You cannot doubt our affection. We are saving treasure for you. Thanks to Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoëls advice as to the management of your land, you will in a few years find yourself possessed of a considerable capital without having to diminish your expenditure.
“Your letter, dearest daughter—whom I love as much as if I had borne you and fed you at my own breast—surprised me by its brevity, and especially by your making no mention of my dear little Calyste; you had nothing to tell me about the elder Calyste; he, I know, is happy,” etc.
Sabine wrote across this letter, “Brittany is too noble to lie with one accord!” and laid it on Calyste’s writing-table. He found it and read it. After recognizing Sabine’s writing in the line across it, he threw it into the fire, determined never to have seen it. Sabine spent a whole week in misery, of which the secret may be understood by those celestial or hermit souls that have never been touched by the wing of the fallen angel. Calyste’s silence terrified Sabine.
“I, who ought to be all sweetness, all joy to him—I have vexed him, hurt him! My virtue is become hateful; I have perhaps humiliated my idol,” said she to herself.
These thoughts ploughed furrows in her soul. She thought of asking forgiveness for this fault, but certainty brought her fresh proofs.
Béatrix, insolently bold, wrote to Calyste one day at his own house. The letter was put into Madame du Guénic’s hands; she gave it to her husband unopened, but she said, with death in her soul, and in a broken voice:
“My dear, this note is from the Jockey Club; I know the scent and the paper.”
Calyste blushed and put the letter in his pocket.
“Why do you not read it?”
“I know what they want.”
The young wife sat down. She did not get an attack of fever, she did not cry, but she felt one of those surges of rage which in such feeble creatures bring forth monsters of crime, which arm them with arsenic for themselves or for their rivals. Little Calyste was presently brought to her, and she took him on her lap; the child, but just weaned, turned to find the breast under her dress.
“He remembers!” said she in a whisper.
Calyste went to his room to read the letter. When he was gone the poor young creature burst into tears, such tears as women shed when they are alone. Pain, like pleasure, has its initiatory stage; the first anguish, like that of which Sabine had so nearly died, can never recur, any more than a first experience of any kind. It is the first wedge of the torture of the heart; the others are expected, the wringing of the nerves is a known thing, the capital of strength has accumulated a deposit for firm resistance. And Sabine, sure now of the worst, sat by the fire for three hours with her boy on her knee, and was quite startled when Gasselin, now their house-servant, came to announce that dinner was on the table.
“Let Monsieur know.”
“Monsieur is not dining at home, Madame la Baronne.”
Who can tell all the misery for a young woman of three-and-twenty, the torture of finding herself alone in the midst of a vast dining-room, in an ancient house, served by silent men,
