“Your wife contributed largely to our coolness. She was talked over by her mother, to whom she wrote twice a week, and you never heeded it. I recognized my friend Paul as I heard this detail.
“Within a month I will be on such terms with your mother-in-law that she herself will tell me the reason for the Hispano-Italian vendetta she has evidently vowed on you—you, the best fellow in the world. Did she hate you before her daughter was in love with Félix de Yandenesse? or has she driven you to the Indies that her daughter may be free, as a woman is in France when completely separated from her husband? That is the problem.
“I can see you leaping and howling when you read that your wife is madly in love with Félix de Yandenesse. If I had not taken it into my head to make a tour in the East with Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and certain other jolly fellows of your acquaintance, I could have told you more about this intrigue, which was incipient when I left. I could then see the first sprouting seed of your catastrophe. What gentleman could be scurvy enough to open such a subject without some invitation, or dare to blow on a woman? Who could bear to break the witch’s mirror in which a friend loves to contemplate the fairy scenes of a happy marriage? Are not such illusions the wealth of the heart?—And was not your wife, my dear boy, in the widest sense of the word, a woman of the world? She thought of nothing but her success, her dress; she frequented the Bouffons, the Opera, and balls; rose late, drove in the Bois, dined out or gave dinner-parties. Such a life seems to me to women what war is to men; the public sees only the victorious, and forgets the dead. Some delicate women die of this exhausting round; those who survive must have iron constitutions, and consequently very little heart and very strong stomachs. Herein lies the reason of the want of feeling, the cold atmosphere of drawing-room society. Nobler souls dwell in solitude; the tender and weak succumb. What are left are the boulders which keep the social ocean within bounds by enduring to be beaten and rolled by the breakers without wearing out. Your wife was made to withstand this life; she seemed inured to it; she was always fresh and beautiful. To me the inference was obvious—she did not love you, while you loved her to distraction. To strike the spark of love in this flinty nature a man of iron was required.
“After being caught by Lady Dudley, who could not keep him (she is the wife of my real father), Félix was obviously the man for Natalie. Nor was there any great difficulty in guessing that your wife did not care for you. From indifference to aversion is but a step; and, sooner or later, a discussion, a word, an act of authority on your part, a mere trifle, would make your wife overleap it.
“I myself could have rehearsed the scene that took place between you every night in her room. You have no child, no boy. Does not that fact account for many things to an observer? You, who were in love, could hardly discern the coldness natural to a young woman whom you have trained to the very point for Félix de Vandenesse. If you had discovered that your wife was cold-hearted, the stupid policy of married life would have prompted you to regard it as the reserve of innocence. Like all husbands, you fancied you could preserve her virtue in a world where women whisper to each other things that men dare not say, where all that a husband would never tell his wife is spoken and commented on behind a fan, with laughter and banter, apropos to a trial or an adventure. Though your wife liked the advantages of a married life, she found the price a little heavy; the price, the tax, was yourself!
“You, seeing none of these things, went on digging pits and covering them with flowers, to use the time-honored rhetorical figure. You calmly submitted to the rule which governs the common run of men, and from which I had wished to protect you.
“My dear boy, nothing was wanting to make you as great an ass as any tradesman who is surprised when his wife deceives him; nothing but this outcry to me about your sacrifices and your love for Natalie: ‘How ungrateful she would be to betray me; I have done this and that and the other, and I will do more yet, I will go to India for her sake,’ etc., etc.—dear Paul, you have lived in Paris, and you have had the honor of the most intimate friendship of one Henri de Marsay, and you do not know the commonest things, the first principles of the working of the female mechanism, the alphabet of a woman’s heart!—You may slave yourself to death, you may go to Sainte-Pélagie, you may kill two-and-twenty men, give up seven mistresses, serve Laban, cross the Desert, narrowly escape the hulks, cover yourself with disgrace; like Nelson, refuse to give battle because you must kiss Lady Hamilton’s shoulder, or, like Bonaparte, fight old Wurmser, get yourself cut up on the Bridge of Arcole, rave like Rolando, break a leg in splints to dance with a woman for five minutes!—But, my dear boy, what has any of these things to do with her loving you?
