This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the love of the heart and of the head—passion, caprice, and taste—to accept Beyle’s definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in certain moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and constantly exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to read to the bottom of Lousteau’s soul, sense was still too much for reason, and suggested excuses.
“And what am I?” she replied. “A woman who has put herself outside the pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman’s honor, why should you not sacrifice to me some of a man’s honor? Do we not live outside the limits of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan can accept from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and only death can part us—you know. My happiness is your honor, Étienne, as my constancy and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you happy, all is at an end. If I cause you a pang, condemn me.
“Our debts are paid; we have ten thousand francs a year, and between us we can certainly make eight thousand francs a year—I will write theatrical articles.—With fifteen hundred francs a month we shall be as rich as Rothschild.—Be quite easy. I will have some lovely dresses, and give you every day some gratified vanity, as on the first night of Nathan’s play—”
“And what about your mother, who goes to Mass every day, and wants to bring a priest to the house and make you give up this way of life?”
“Everyone has a pet vice. You smoke, she preaches at me, poor woman! But she takes great care of the children, she takes them out, she is absolutely devoted, and idolizes me. Would you hinder her from crying?”
“What will be thought of me?”
“But we do not live for the world!” cried she, raising Étienne and making him sit by her. “Besides, we shall be married some day—we have the risks of a sea voyage—”
“I never thought of that,” said Lousteau simply; and he added to himself, “Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back again.”
From that day forth Étienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.
“Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from Dinah! But no one ever can!” said he. “She loves me enough to throw herself out of the window if I told her.”
The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against Dinah’s jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her—“You are betrayed,” and she only replied, “I know it.”
The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.
Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a word.
“Do you still love me?” she asked.
“I would lose my soul for you!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet.
The hapless man’s eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf, his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he was so blessed as to be accepted as his idol’s avenger, and this poor joy filled him with rapture.
“Why are you so startled?” said she, making him sit down again. “That is how I love him.”
The lawyer understood this argument ad hominem. And there were tears in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!
Lousteau’s satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations, had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where those who love dwell and dream. These grains of sand, which grow to be pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big as rocks. Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood Lousteau’s character.
“He is,” she said to her mother, “a poet, defenceless against disaster, mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate. What would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he has no prospects. His talent would perish in privations.”
“Oh, my Dinah!” Madame Piédefer had exclaimed, “what a hell you live in! What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?”
“I will be a mother to him!” she had replied.
There are certain horrible situations in which we come to
