The Mayoress had elaborately worked up this speech, which, in her opinion, showed strong judgment.
“Well, madame, we must be lenient, we have but twenty pages out of a thousand,” said Bianchon, looking at Mademoiselle Gorju, whose figure threatened terrible things after the birth of her first child.
“Well, Monsieur de Clagny,” said Lousteau, “we were talking yesterday of the forms of revenge invented by husbands. What do you say to those invented by wives?”
“I say,” replied the Public Prosecutor, “that the romance is not by a Councillor of State, but by a woman. For extravagant inventions the imagination of women far outdoes that of men; witness Frankenstein by Mrs. Shelley, Léone Léoni by George Sand, the works of Anne Radcliffe, and the Nouveau Prométhée (New Prometheus) of Camille de Maupin.”
Dinah looked steadily at Monsieur de Clagny, making him feel, by an expression that gave him a chill, that in spite of the illustrious examples he had quoted, she regarded this as a reflection on “Paquita la Sevillane.”
“Pooh!” said little La Baudraye, “the Duke of Bracciano, whom his wife puts into a cage, and to whom she shows herself every night in the arms of her lover, will kill her—and do you call that revenge?—Our laws and our society are far more cruel.”
“Why, little La Baudraye is talking!” said Monsieur Boirouge to his wife.
“Why, the woman is left to live on a small allowance, the world turns its back on her, she has no more finery, and no respect paid her—the two things which, in my opinion, are the sum-total of woman,” said the little old man.
“But she has happiness!” said Madame de la Baudraye sententiously.
“No,” said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed, “for she has a lover.”
“For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has some spunk,” said Lousteau.
“Well, he must have something!” replied Bianchon.
Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon’s remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the physician could guess the mystery of this woman’s life; her premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.
But Dinah did not guess, on her part, the ominous prophecy contained for her in her husband’s little speech, which her kind old Abbé Duret, if he had been alive, would not have failed to elucidate. Little La Baudraye had detected in Dinah’s eyes, when she glanced at the journalist returning the ball of his jests, that swift and luminous flash of tenderness which gilds the gleam of a woman’s eye when prudence is cast to the winds, and she is fairly carried away. Dinah paid no more heed to her husband’s hint to her to observe the proprieties than Lousteau had done to Dinah’s significant warnings on the day of his arrival.
Any other man than Bianchon would have been surprised at Lousteau’s immediate success; but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even nettled at Dinah’s marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally more alive to wit than to fame. Love generally prefers contrast to similitude. Everything was against the physician—his frankness, his simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want to love—and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved—have an instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind—“The doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him.”
Then, again, she reflected on his professional duties, wondering whether a woman could ever be anything but a subject to a medical man, who saw so many subjects in the course of a day’s work. The first sentence of the aphorism written by Bianchon in her album was a medical observation striking so directly at woman, that Dinah could not fail to be hit by it. And then Bianchon was leaving on the morrow; his practice required his return. What woman, short of having Cupid’s mythological dart in her heart, could decide in so short a time?
These little things, which lead to such great catastrophes—having been seen in a mass by Bianchon, he pronounced the verdict he had come to as to Madame de la Baudraye in a few words to Lousteau, to the journalist’s great amazement.
While the two friends stood talking together, a storm was gathering in the Sancerre circle, who could not in the least understand Lousteau’s paraphrases and commentaries, and who vented it on their hostess. Far from finding in his talk the romance which the Public Prosecutor, the Sous-préfet, the Presiding Judge, and his deputy, Lebas, had discovered there—to say nothing of Monsieur de la Baudraye and Dinah—the ladies now gathered round the tea-table, took the matter as a practical joke, and accused the Muse of Sancerre of having a finger in it. They had all looked forward to a delightful evening, and had all strained in vain every faculty of their mind. Nothing makes provincial folks so angry as the notion of having been a laughingstock for Paris folks.
Madame Piédefer left the table to say to her daughter, “Do go and talk to the ladies; they are quite annoyed by your behavior.”
Lousteau could not fail to see Dinah’s great superiority over the best women of Sancerre; she was better dressed, her movements were graceful, her complexion was exquisitely white by candlelight—in short, she stood out against this background of old faces, shy and ill-dressed girls, like a queen
