Little La Baudraye, who came jauntily enough to say goodbye to his wife and his children, appeared in a white india-rubber overcoat. He was so firm on his feet, and so exactly like the La Baudraye of 1836, that Dinah despaired of ever burying the dreadful little dwarf. From the garden, where he was smoking a cigar, the journalist could watch Monsieur de la Baudraye for so long as it took the little reptile to cross the forecourt, but that was enough for Lousteau; it was plain to him that the little man had intended to wreck every hope of his dying that his wife might have conceived.
This short scene made a considerable change in the writer’s secret scheming. As he smoked a second cigar, he seriously reviewed the position.
His life with Madame de la Baudraye had hitherto cost him quite as much as it had cost her. To use the language of business, the two sides of the account balanced, and they could, if necessary, cry quits. Considering how small his income was, and how hardly he earned it, Lousteau regarded himself, morally speaking, as the creditor. It was, no doubt, a favorable moment for throwing the woman over. Tired at the end of three years of playing a comedy which never can become a habit, he was perpetually concealing his weariness; and this fellow, who was accustomed to disguise none of his feelings, compelled himself to wear a smile at home like that of a debtor in the presence of his creditor. This compulsion was every day more intolerable.
Hitherto the immense advantages he foresaw in the future had given him strength; but when he saw Monsieur de la Baudraye embark for the United States, as briskly as if it were to go down to Rouen in a steamboat, he ceased to believe in the future.
He went in from the garden to the pretty drawing-room, where Dinah had just taken leave of her husband.
“Étienne,” said Madame de la Baudraye, “do you know what my lord and master has proposed to me? In the event of my wishing to return to live at Anzy during his absence, he has left his orders, and he hopes that my mother’s good advice will weigh with me, and that I shall go back there with my children.”
“It is very good advice,” replied Lousteau drily, knowing the passionate disclaimer that Dinah expected, and indeed begged for with her eyes.
The tone, the words, the cold look, all hit the hapless woman so hard, who lived only in her love, that two large tears trickled slowly down her cheeks, while she did not speak a word, and Lousteau only saw them when she took out her handkerchief to wipe away these two beads of anguish.
“What is it, Didine?” he asked, touched to the heart by this excessive sensibility.
“Just as I was priding myself on having won our freedom,” said she—“at the cost of my fortune—by selling—what is most precious to a mother’s heart—selling my children!—for he is to have them from the age of six—and I cannot see them without going to Sancerre!—and that is torture!—Ah, dear God! What have I done—?”
Lousteau knelt down by her and kissed her hands with a lavish display of coaxing and petting.
“You do not understand me,” said he. “I blame myself, for I am not worth such sacrifices, dear angel. I am, in a literary sense, a quite second-rate man. If the day comes when I can no longer cut a figure at the bottom of the newspaper, the editors will let me lie, like an old shoe flung into the rubbish heap. Remember, we tightrope dancers have no retiring pension! The State would have too many clever men on its hands if it started on such a career of beneficence. I am forty-two, and I am as idle as a marmot. I feel it—I know it”—and he took her by the hand—“my love can only be fatal to you.
“As you know, at two-and-twenty I lived on Florine; but what is excusable in a youth, what then seems smart and charming, is a disgrace to a man of forty. Hitherto we have shared the burden of existence, and it has not been lovely for this year and half. Out of devotion to me you wear nothing but black, and that does me no credit.”—Dinah gave one of those magnanimous shrugs which are worth all the words ever spoken.—“Yes,” Étienne went on, “I know you sacrifice everything to my whims, even your beauty. And I, with a heart worn out in past struggles, a soul full of dark presentiments as to the future, I cannot repay your exquisite love with an equal affection. We were very happy—without a cloud—for a long time.—Well, then, I cannot bear to see so sweet a poem end badly. Am I wrong?”
Madame de la Baudraye loved Étienne so truly, that this prudence, worthy of de Clagny, gratified her and stanched her tears.
“He loves me for myself alone!” thought she, looking at him with smiling eyes.
After four years of intimacy, this woman’s love now combined every shade of affection which our powers of analysis can discern, and which modern society has created; one of the most remarkable men of our age, whose death is a recent loss to the world of letters, Beyle (Stendhal), was the first to delineate them to perfection.
Lousteau could produce in Dinah the acute agitation which may be compared to magnetism, that upsets every power of the mind and body,
