“To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to preserve her power,” said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was becoming a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a pleasure.
The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made it no easier to play. When he wanted to go out after dinner he would perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he had bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate would say, “Did I wound you?”
These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere plaything in the man’s hands, and at last she confessed to herself:
“Well, then, I will be his plaything!” finding joy in it—the rapture of damnation.
When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living in solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated and inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the joys, which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the midst of remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a No persuaded to be Yes. At every moment she seemed to come across the pool of bitter water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish than the traveler would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince’s table.
When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:
“Will he come home, or will he not?” she was not alive again till she heard the familiar sound of Lousteau’s boots, and his well-known ring at the bell.
She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that agitated heart. How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of “Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné,” saying to herself, “Tomorrow we part.” And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently artless feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!
It was terrible. More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed. In fact, she had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a loving woman bears in her heart.
The romance of Adolphe was her Bible, her study, for above all else she would not be an Ellénore. She allowed herself no tears, she avoided all the bitterness so cleverly described by the critic to whom we owe an analysis of this striking work; whose comments indeed seemed to Dinah almost superior to the book. And she read again and again this fine essay by the only real critic who has written in the Revue des Deux Mondes, an article now printed at the beginning of the new edition of Adolphe.
“No,” she would say to herself, as she repeated the author’s fateful words, “no, I will not ‘give my requests the form of an order,’ I will not ‘fly to tears as a means of revenge,’ I will not ‘condemn the things I once approved without reservation,’ I will not ‘dog his footsteps with a prying eye’; if he plays truant, he shall not on his return ‘see a scornful lip, whose kiss is an unanswerable command.’ No, ‘my silence shall not be a reproach nor my first word a quarrel.’—I will not be like every other woman!” she went on, laying on her table the little yellow paper volume which had already attracted Lousteau’s remark, “What! are you studying Adolphe?”—“If for one day only he should recognize my merits and say, ‘That victim never uttered a cry!’—it will be all I ask. And besides, the others only have him for an hour; I have him for life!”
Thinking himself justified by his private tribunal in punishing his wife, Monsieur de la Baudraye robbed her to achieve his cherished enterprise of reclaiming three thousand acres of moorland, to which he had devoted himself ever since 1836, living like a mouse. He manipulated the property left by Monsieur Silas Piédefer so ingeniously, that he contrived to reduce the proved value to eight hundred thousand francs, while pocketing twelve hundred thousand. He did not announce his return; but while his wife was enduring unspeakable woes, he was building farms, digging trenches, and ploughing rough ground with a courage that ranked him among the most remarkable agriculturists of the province.
The four hundred thousand francs he had filched from his wife were spent in three years on this undertaking, and the estate of Anzy was expected to return seventy-two thousand francs a year of net profits after the taxes were paid. The eight hundred thousand he invested at four and a half percent in the funds, buying at eighty francs, at the time of the financial crisis brought about by the Ministry of the First of March, as it was called. By thus securing to his wife an income of forty-eight thousand francs he considered himself no longer in her debt. Could he not restore the odd twelve hundred thousand as soon as the four and a half percents had risen above a hundred? He was now the greatest man in Sancerre, with the exception of one—the richest proprietor in France—whose rival he considered himself. He saw himself with an income of a hundred and forty thousand francs, of which ninety thousand formed the revenue from the lands he
