Lucien began the strife by a piece of vehement petulence, at which a woman laughs so long as she is heart-free, and saddens only when she loves; whereupon Louise took a lofty tone, and began one of her long orations, interlarded with high-sounding words.
“Was that your promise to me, Lucien?” she said, as she made an end. “Do not sow regrets in the present time, so sweet as it is, to poison my after life. Do not spoil the future, and, I say it with pride, do not spoil the present! Is not my whole heart yours? What more must you have? Can it be that your love is influenced by the clamor of the senses, when it is the noblest privilege of the beloved to silence them? For whom do you take me? Am I not your Beatrice? If I am not something more than a woman for you, I am less than a woman.”
“That is just what you might say to a man if you cared nothing at all for him,” cried Lucien, frantic with passion.
“If you cannot feel all the sincere love underlying my ideas, you will never be worthy of me.”
“You are throwing doubts on my love to dispense yourself from responding to it,” cried Lucien, and he flung himself weeping at her feet.
The poor boy cried in earnest at the prospect of remaining so long at the gate of paradise. The tears of the poet, who feels that he is humbled through his strength, were mingled with childish crying for a plaything.
“You have never loved me!” he cried.
“You do not believe what you say,” she answered, flattered by his violence.
“Then give me proof that you are mine,” said the disheveled poet.
Just at that moment Stanislas came up unheard by either of the pair. He beheld Lucien in tears, half reclining on the floor, with his head on Louise’s knee. The attitude was suspicious enough to satisfy Stanislas; he turned sharply round upon Châtelet, who stood at the door of the salon. Mme. de Bargeton sprang up in a moment, but the spies beat a precipate retreat like intruders, and she was not quick enough for them.
“Who came just now?” she asked the servants.
“M. de Chandour and M. du Châtelet,” said Gentil, her old footman.
Mme. de Bargeton went back, pale and trembling, to her boudoir.
“If they saw you just now, I am lost,” she told Lucien.
“So much the better!” exclaimed the poet, and she smiled to hear the cry, so full of selfish love.
A story of this kind is aggravated in the provinces by the way in which it is told. Everybody knew in a moment that Lucien had been detected at Naïs feet. M. de Chandour, elated by the important part he played in the affair, went first to tell the great news at the club, and thence from house to house, Châtelet hastening to say that he had seen nothing; but by putting himself out of court, he egged Stanislas on to talk, he drew him on to add fresh details; and Stanislas, thinking himself very witty, added a little to the tale every time that he told it. Everyone flocked to Amélie’s house that evening, for by that time the most exaggerated versions of the story were in circulation among the Angoulême nobility, every narrator having followed Stanislas’ example. Women and men were alike impatient to know the truth; and the women who put their hands before their faces and shrieked the loudest were none other than Mesdames Amélie, Zéphirine, Fifine, and Lolotte, all with more or less heavy indictments of illicit love laid to their charge. There were variations in every key upon the painful theme.
“Well, well,” said one of the ladies, “poor Naïs! have you heard about it? I do not believe it myself; she has a whole blameless record behind her; she is far too proud to be anything but a patroness to M. Chardon. Still, if it is true, I pity her with all my heart.”
“She is all the more to be pitied because she is making herself frightfully ridiculous; she is old enough to be M. Lulu’s mother, as Jacques called him. The little poet it twenty-two at most; and Naïs, between ourselves, is quite forty.”
“For my own part,” said M. du Châtelet, “I think that M. de Rubempré’s position in itself proves Naïs’ innocence. A man does not go down on his knees to ask for what he has had already.”
“That is as may be!” said Francis, with levity that brought Zéphirine’s disapproving glance down on him.
“Do just tell us how it really was,” they besought Stanislas, and formed a small, secret committee in a corner of the salon.
Stanislas, in the long length, had put together a little story full of facetious suggestions, and accompanied it with pantomime, which made the thing prodigiously worse.
“It is incredible!”
“At midday?”
“Naïs was the last person whom I should have suspected!”
“What will she do now?”
Then followed more comments, and suppositions without end. Châtelet took Mme. de Bargeton’s part; but he defended her so ill, that he stirred the fire of gossip instead of putting it out.
Lili, disconsolate over the fall of the
