“Do what you will, Sabine, you will never be anything but a lovely Andalusian!”
“Alas!” said she, sinking onto her sofa, “I can never be fair. But if this goes on, I know that I shall soon be five-and-thirty.”
She refused to go to the Italian opera; she meant to stay in her room all the evening. When she was alone she tore the flowers from her hair and stamped upon them, she undressed, trampled her gown, her sash, all her finery under foot, exactly like a goat caught in a loop of its tether, which never ceases struggling till death. Then she went to bed. The maid presently came in. Imagine her surprise!
“It is nothing,” said Sabine. “It is Monsieur.”
Unhappy wives know this superb vanity, these falsehoods, where, of two kinds of shame both in arms, the more womanly wins the day.
Sabine was growing thin under these terrible agitations, grief ate into her soul; but she never forgot the part she had forced on herself. A sort of fever kept her up, her life sent back to her throat the bitter words suggested to her by grief; she sheathed the lightnings of her fine black eyes, and made them soft, even humble.
Her fading health was soon perceptible. The Duchess, an admirable mother, though her piety had become more and more Portuguese, thought there was some mortal disease in the really sickly condition which Sabine evidently encouraged. She knew of the acknowledged intimacy of Calyste and Béatrix. She took care to have her daughter with her to try to heal her wounded feelings, and, above all, to save her from her daily martyrdom; but Sabine for a long time remained persistently silent as to her woes, fearing some intervention between herself and Calyste. She declared she was happy! Having exhausted sorrow, she fell back on her pride, on all her virtues.
At the end of the month, however, of being petted by her sister Clotilde and her mother, she confessed her griefs, told them all her sufferings, and cursed life, saying that she looked forward to death with delirious joy. She desired Clotilde, who meant never to marry, to be a mother to little Calyste, the loveliest child any royal race need wish for as its heir-presumptive.
One evening, sitting with her youngest sister Athénaïs—who was to be married to the Vicomte de Grandlieu after Lent—with Clotilde, and the Duchess, Sabine uttered the last cry of her anguish of heart, wrung from her by the extremity of her last humiliation.
“Athénaïs,” said she, when at about eleven o’clock the young Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu took his leave, “you are going to be married, profit by my example! Keep your best qualities to yourself, as if they were a crime, resist the temptation to display them in order to please Juste. Be calm, dignified, cold; measure out the happiness you give in proportion to what you receive. It is mean, but it is necessary.—You see, I am ruined by my merits. All I feel within me that is the best of me, that is fine, holy, noble—all my virtues have been rocks on which my happiness is shipwrecked. I have ceased to be attractive because I am not six-and-thirty!—In some men’s eyes youth is a defect! There is no guesswork in a guileless face.
“I laugh honestly, and that is quite wrong when, to be fascinating, you ought to be able to elaborate the melancholy, suppressed smile of the fallen angels who are obliged to hide their long yellow teeth. A fresh complexion is so monotonous; far preferable is a doll’s waxen surface, compounded of rouge, spermaceti, and cold-cream. I am straightforward, and double dealing is more pleasing! I am frankly in love like an honest woman, and I ought to be trained to tricks and manoeuvres like a country actress. I am intoxicated with the delight of having one of the most charming men in France for my husband, and I tell him sincerely how fine a gentleman he is, how gracefully he moves, how handsome I think him; to win him I ought to look away with affected aversion, to hate lovemaking, to tell him that his air of distinction is simply an unhealthy pallor and the figure of a consumptive patient, to cry up the shoulders of the Farnese Hercules, to make him angry, keep him at a distance as though a struggle were needed to hide from him at the moment of happiness some imperfection which might destroy love. I am so unlucky as to be able to admire a fine thing without striving to give myself importance by bitter and envious criticism of everything glorious in poetry or beauty. I do not want to be told in verse and in prose by Canalis and Nathan that I have a superior intellect! I am a mere simple girl; I see no one but Calyste!
“If I had only run all over the world as she has; if, like her, I had said, ‘I love you,’ in every European tongue, I should be made much of, and pitied, and adored, and could serve him up a Macedonian banquet of cosmopolitan loves! A man does not thank you for your tenderness till you have set it off by contrast with malignity. So I, a wellborn wife, must learn all impurity, the interested charms of a prostitute! … And Calyste, the dupe of this grimacing! … Oh, mother! oh, my dear Clotilde! I am stricken to death. My pride is a deceptive aegis; I am defenceless against sorrow; I still love my husband like a fool, and to bring him back to me I need to borrow the keen wit of indifference.”
“Silly child,” whispered Clotilde, “pretend that you are bent on vengeance.”
“I mean to die blameless, without even
