The glee that filled all my sails hindered me from discerning the insuperable obstacles placed between her and me by this imperturbable life of solitude in the country. I sat by her, at her right, I poured out her wine and water. Yes! Unhoped for joy! I could touch her gown, I ate her bread. Only three hours had gone by, and my life was mingling with hers! And we were bound together, too, by that terrible kiss, a sort of secret which filled us alike with shame.
I was defiantly base; I devoted myself to pleasing the Count, who met all my civilities halfway; I would have fondled the dog, have been subservient to the children’s least whim; I would have bought them hoops or marbles, have been their horse to drive; I was only vexed that they had not already taken possession of me as a thing of their own. Love has its intuition as genius has, and I dimly perceived that his violence and surliness and hostility would be the ruin of my hopes. This dinner was to me a time of exquisite raptures. Finding myself under her roof, I forgot her real coldness, and the indifference that lay beneath the Count’s politeness. In love, as in life, there is a period of full growth where it is self-sufficient. I made some blundering answers, in keeping with the secret tumult of my passions; but no one could guess this, much less she who knew nothing of love. The rest of the evening was as a dream.
This beautiful dream came to an end when, by the light of the moon, in the hot fragrant night, I again crossed the Indre amid the white visions that hung over the fields and shore and hills, hearing the thin, monotonous call on one note, melancholy and incessant, at equal intervals, uttered by some tree-frog of which I know not the scientific name, but which, since that fateful day, I never hear but with extreme delight.
Here, again, though rather late, I discerned, as elsewhere, the stony insensibility against which all my feelings had hitherto been blunted; I wondered whether it would be always thus; I believed myself to be under some fatal influence; the gloomy incidents of my past life struggled with the purely personal joys I had just experienced.
Before reentering Frapesle, I looked back at Clochegourde and saw below a boat, a punt such as in Touraine is called a toue, moored to an ash-tree, and rocking in the stream. This boat belonged to Monsieur de Mortsauf, who used it for fishing.
“Well,” said Monsieur de Chessel, when there was no danger of our being overheard, “I need not ask you if you have found the lady with the beautiful shoulders. You may be congratulated on the welcome you received from Monsieur de Mortsauf. The deuce! Why, you have taken the citadel at a blow.”
This speech, followed up by the remarks I before mentioned, revived my downcast spirit. I had not spoken a word since leaving Clochegourde, and my host ascribed my silence to happiness.
“How so?” said I, with a touch of irony, which might have seemed to be the outcome of restrained passion.
“He never in his life received anyone so civilly.”
“I may confess that I was myself astounded at his politeness,” said I, feeling what bitterness lay behind his words.
Though I was too much inexperienced in the ways of the world to understand the cause of Monsieur de Chessel’s animus, I was struck by the tone which betrayed it. My host was so unlucky as to be named Durand, and he made himself ridiculous by renouncing his father’s name—that of a noted manufacturer who had made an immense fortune during the Revolution, and whose wife was the sole heiress of the Chessel family, an old connection of lawyers risen from the citizen class under Henry IV, like most of the Paris magistracy.
Monsieur de Chessel, ambitious of the highest flight, wished to kill the primitive Durand to attain to the realms he dreamed of. He first called himself Durand de Chessel, then D. de Chessel, then he was Monsieur de Chessel. After the Restoration he endowed an entail with the title of Count under letters-patent granted by Louis XVIII. His children culled the fruits of his audacity without knowing its magnitude. A speech made by a certain satirical prince long clung to his heels: “Monsieur de Chessel generally has something of the Durand about him,” said His Highness. And this witticism was long a joy in Touraine.
Parvenus are like monkeys, and not less dexterous. Seen from above we admire their agility in climbing; but when they have reached the top, nothing is to be seen but their more shameful side. The wrong side of my entertainer was made of meanness puffed up with envy. He and a peerage are to this day points that cannot meet. To be pretentious and justify it is the insolence of strength; but a man who is beneath the pretensions he owns to is in a constantly ridiculous position, which affords a feast to petty minds. Now, Monsieur de Chessel has never walked in the straight path of a strong man; he has twice been elected deputy, twice rejected of the electors; one day Director-General, the next nothing at all, not ever Préfet; and his successes and defeats have spoiled his temper and given him the acrid greed of an ambitious failure. Though a fine fellow, intelligent, and capable of high achievement, the spirit of envy perhaps—which gives zest to existence in Touraine, where the natives waste their brains in jealous spite—was fatal to him in the higher social spheres, where faces that frown at others’ fortune are rarely popular, or sulky lips unready to pay compliments but apt at sarcasm. If he had wished for less, he might perhaps
