But the Martignac ministry was now established—the second victory which upset the Villèle administration. Vinet’s party held their head high in Provins. Vinet, now the leading advocate of la Brie, carried all before him, to use a colloquialism. Vinet was a personage; the Liberals prophesied his advancement; he would certainly be a deputy or public prosecutor. As to the Colonel, he would be Mayor of Provins. Oh! to reign as Madame Garceland reigned, to be the Mayoress! Sylvie could not resist this hope; she determined to consult a doctor, though it might cover her with ridicule. The two women, one triumphant, and the other sure of having her in leading-strings, invented one of those stratagems which women advised by a priest are so clever in planning. To consult Monsieur Néraud, the Liberal physician, Monsieur Martener’s rival, would be a blunder. Céleste Habert proposed to Sylvie to hide her in a dressing-closet while she, Mademoiselle Habert, consulted Monsieur Martener, who attended the school, on her own account. Whether he were Céleste’s accomplice or no, Martener told his client that there was some, though very little, danger for a woman of thirty. “But with your constitution,” he added, “you have nothing to fear.”
“And if a woman is past forty?” asked Mademoiselle Céleste Habert.
“A woman of forty who has been married and had children need fear nothing.”
“But an unmarried woman, perfectly well conducted—for example. Mademoiselle Rogron?”
“Well conducted! There can be no doubt,” said Monsieur Martener. “In such a case the safe birth of a child is a miracle which God certainly works sometimes, but rarely.”
“And why?” asked Céleste Habert.
Whereupon the doctor replied in a terrific pathological description, explaining that the elasticity bestowed by Nature on the muscles and joints in youth ceased to exist at a certain age, particularly in women whose occupations had made them sedentary for some years, like Mademoiselle Rogron.
“And so, after forty no respectable woman ought to marry?”
“Or she should wait,” replied the doctor. “But then it is hardly a marriage; it is a partnership. What else could it be?”
In short, it was proved by this consultation, clearly, scientifically, seriously, and rationally, that after the age of forty a virtuous maiden should not rush into matrimony.
When Monsieur Martener had left, Mademoiselle Céleste Habert found Mademoiselle Rogron green and yellow, her eyes dilated—in fact, in a frightful state.
“Then you truly love the Colonel?” said she.
“I still hoped,” said the old maid.
“Well, then, wait,” said Mademoiselle Habert, who knew that time would be avenged on the Colonel.
The morality of this marriage was also doubtful. Sylvie went to sound her conscience in the confessional. The stem director expounded the views of the Church, which regards marriage only as a means of propagating the race, reprobates second marriages, and scorns passions that have no social aim. Sylvie Rogron’s perplexity was great. These mental struggles gave strange force to her passion, and lent it the unaccountable charm which forbidden joys have always had for women since the time of Eve.
Mademoiselle Rogron’s disturbed state could not escape the lawyer’s keen eye. One evening, after cards, Vinet went up to his dear friend Sylvie, took her hand, and led her to sit down with him on one of the sofas.
“Something ails you,” he said in her ear.
She gloomily bent her head. The pleader let Rogron leave the room, sat alone with the old maid, and got her to make a clean breast of it.
“Well played, Abbé! But you have played my game for me,” he said to himself after hearing of all the private consultations Sylvie had held, of which the last was the most alarming.
This sly legal fox was even more terrible in his explanations than the doctor had been; he advised the marriage, but only ten years hence for greater safety. The lawyer vowed that all the Rogron fortune should be Bathilde’s. He rubbed his hands, and his very face grew sharper as he ran after Madame and Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf, whom he had left to start homewards with their servant armed with a lantern. The influence exerted by Monsieur Habert, the physician of the soul, was entirely counteracted by Vinet, the physician of the purse. Rogron was by no means devout, so the man of the Church and the man of the Law, the two black gowns, pulled him opposite ways. When he heard of the victory carried off by Mademoiselle Habert, who hoped to marry Rogron, over Sylvie, hanging between the fear of death and the joy of becoming a baroness, Vinet perceived the possibility of removing the Colonel from the scene of battle. He knew Rogron well enough to find some means of making him marry the fair Bathilde. Rogron had not been able to resist the blandishments of Mademoiselle de Chargeboeuf; Vinet knew that the first time Rogron should be alone with Bathilde and himself their engagement would be settled. Rogron had come to the point of staring at Mademoiselle Habert, so shy was he of looking at Bathilde.
Vinet had just seen how much Sylvie was in love with the Colonel. He understood the depth of such a passion in an old maid, no less eaten up by bigotry, and he soon hit on a plan for ruining at one blow both Pierrette and the Colonel, getting rid of one by means of the other.
Next morning, on coming out of Court, he met the Colonel and Rogron walking together, their daily habit.
When these three men were seen together, their conjunction always made the town talk. This triumvirate, held in horror by the Sous-préfet, the Bench, and the Tiphaine partisans, made a triad of which the Liberals of Provins were proud. Vinet edited the Courrier single-handed; he was the head of the party; the Colonel, the responsible manager of the paper, was its arm; Rogron, with his money, formed the sinews; he was considered as the link between the
