For, indeed, before long the riding lessons became a subject of contention. The Countess, not unreasonably, was afraid of the Count’s hard speeches to his little son. Jacques was already growing thinner, and dark rings came round his blue eyes; to save his mother, he would suffer in silence. I suggested a remedy by advising him to tell his father he was tired when the Count was angry, but this was an insufficient palliative, so the old huntsman was to teach him instead of his father, who would not give up his pupil without many struggles. Outcries and discussions began again; the Count found a text for his perpetual faultfinding in the ingratitude of wives, and twenty times a day he threw the carriage, the horses, and the liveries in her teeth.
Finally, one of those disasters occurred which are a stalking horse for such tempers and such maladies of the brain; the expense of the works at la Cassine and la Rhétorière, where the walls and floors were found to be rotten, amounted to half as much again as the estimate. A clumsy fellow at work there came to report this to Monsieur de Mortsauf, instead of telling the Countess privately. This became the subject of a quarrel, begun mildly, but gradually increasing in bitterness; and the Count’s hypochondria, which for some days had been in abeyance, now claimed arrears from the unfortunate Henriette.
That morning I set out from Frapesle, after breakfast, at half-past ten, to make my nosegays at Clochegourde with Madeleine. The little girl brought out the two vases, setting them on the balustrade of the terrace, and I wandered from the gardens to the fields, seeking the lovely but rare flowers of autumn. As I returned from my last expedition, I no longer saw my little lieutenant in her pink sash and frilled cape, and I heard a commotion in the house.
“The General,” said Madeleine, in tears, and with her the name was one of aversion for her father, “the General is scolding our mother; do go and help her.”
I flew up the steps and went into the drawing-room, where neither the Count nor his wife saw or noticed me. Hearing the madman’s noisy outcries, I first shut all the doors, and then came back, for I had seen that Henriette was as white as her gown.
“Never marry, Félix,” said the Count. “A wife has the Devil for her counselor; the best of them would invent evil if it did not exist. They are all brute beasts.”
Then I had to listen to arguments without beginning and without end. Monsieur de Mortsauf, recurring to his original refusal, now repeated the sottish remarks of the peasants who objected to the new system. He declared that if he had taken the management of Clochegourde, they would have been twice as rich by now. He worded his blasphemies with insulting violence; he swore, he rushed from pillar to post, he moved and banged all the furniture, and in the middle of a sentence he would stop and declare that his marrow was on fire, or his brain running away in a stream, like his money. His wife was ruining him! Wretched man, of the thirty odd thousand francs a year he possessed, she had brought him more than twenty thousand. The fortune of the Duke and Duchess, bringing in fifty thousand francs a year, was entailed on Jacques.
The Countess smiled haughtily, and gazed out at the sky.
“Yes!” he cried; “you, Blanche, are my tormentor. You are killing me! You want to be rid of me! You are a monster of hypocrisy! And she laughs! Do you know why she can laugh, Félix?”
I said nothing, and hung my head.
“This woman,” he went on, answering his own question, “denies me all happiness—she is no more mine than yours, and calls herself my wife! She bears my name, but she fulfils none of the duties which laws, human and divine, require of her; she lies to God and man. She exhausts me with long walks that I may leave her in peace; I disgust her; she hates me, she does all she can to live the life of a girl. And she is driving me mad by imposing privations on me—for everything goes to my poor head. She is burning me at a slow fire, and believes herself a saint—that woman takes the sacrament every month!”
The Countess was by this time weeping bitterly, humiliated by the disgrace of this man, to whom she could only say by way of remonstrance—“Monsieur! Monsieur! Monsieur!”
Although the Count’s words made me blush for him as much as for Henriette, they moved me deeply, for they found a response in the instinct of chastity and delicacy which is, so to speak, the very material of a first love.
“She lives a maiden at my expense!” cried the Count, and again his wife exclaimed:
“Monsieur!”
“What do you mean,” he went on, “by your pertinacious Monsieur? Am not I your master? Must I teach you to know it?”
He went towards her, thrusting out his white, wolf-like face, that was really hideous, for his yellow eyes had an expression that made him look like a ravenous animal coming out of a wood. Henriette slid off her chair on to the floor to avoid the blow which was not struck, for she lost consciousness as she fell, completely broken.
The Count was like an assassin who feels the blood-jet of his victim; he stood amazed. I raised the poor woman in my arms, and the Count allowed me to lift her as if he felt himself unworthy to carry her; but he went first and opened the door of the bedroom next the drawing-room, a sacred spot I had never entered. I set the Countess on her feet, and supported her with my arm round her body, while Monsieur de Mortsauf took off the upper coverlet, the eiderdown quilt, and the bedclothes; then, together, we laid her down just as she was. As
