We both remained petrified, listening to the echo of these words as to a stone flung into a chasm.
“If I have been mistaken in my life, it is she who is right—she!” added Madame de Mortsauf.
Thus her last indulgence had led to this last struggle.
When the Count came in, she, who never complained, said she felt ill; I implored her to define her pain, but she refused to say more, and went to bed, leaving me a victim to remorse, one regret leading to another.
Madeleine went with her mother, and on the following day I heard from her that the Countess had had an attack of sickness, brought on, as she said, by the violent agitation she had gone through. And so I, who would have given my life for her, was killing her.
“My dear Count,” said I to Monsieur de Mortsauf, who insisted on my playing backgammon, “I think the Countess is very seriously ill; there is yet time to save her. Send for Origet, and entreat her to follow his orders—”
“Origet! Who killed me!” cried he, interrupting me. “No, no. I will consult Charbonneau.”
All through that week, especially during the first day or two, everything was torture to me, an incipient paralysis of the heart, wounded vanity, a wounded soul. Until one has been the centre of everything, of every look and sigh, the vital principle, the focus from which others derived their light, one cannot know how horrible a void can be. The same things were there, but the spirit that animated them was extinct, like a flame that is blown out. I understood now the frightful necessity lovers feel never to meet again when love is dead. Think what it is to be nobody where one has reigned supreme, to find the cold silence of death where the glad days of life had glowed. Such comparisons are crushing. I soon began even to regret the miserable ignorance of every joy that had blighted my youth. My despair was so overpowering, indeed, that the Countess was touched, I believe.
One day, after dinner, when we were all walking by the river, I made a final effort to gain forgiveness. I begged Jacques to take his sister a little way in front; I left the Count to himself, and taking Madame Mortsauf down to the punt:
“Henriette,” said I, “one word of mercy, or I will throw myself into the Indre! I fell, it is true; but am I not like a dog in my devoted attachment? I come back as he does, like him full of shame; if he does wrong he is punished, but he adores the hand that hits him; scourge me, but give me back your heart.”
“Poor boy,” said she. “Are you not as much as ever my son?”
She took my arm and slowly rejoined Jacques and Madeleine with whom she went homewards, leaving me to the Count, who began to talk politics apropos to his neighbors.
“Let us go in,” said I; “you are bareheaded, and the evening dew may do you some harm.”
“You can pity me—you, my dear Félix!” replied he, misapprehending my intentions. “My wife never will comfort me—on principle perhaps.”
Never of old would she have left me alone with her husband; now I had to find excuses for being with her. She was with the children explaining the rules of backgammon to Jacques.
“There,” said the Count, always jealous of the affection she gave to her two children; “there, it is for them that I am persistently neglected. Husbands, my dear Félix, go to the wall; the most virtuous woman on earth finds a way of satisfying her craving to steal the affection due to her husband.”
She still caressed the children, making no reply.
“Jacques,” said he, “come here.”
Jacques made some difficulty.
“Your father wants you—go, my boy,” said his mother, pushing him.
“They love me by order,” said the old man, who sometimes perceived the position.
“Monsieur,” said she, stroking Madeleine’s smooth bands of hair again and again, “do not be unjust to us hapless wives: life is not always easy to bear, and perhaps a mother’s children are her virtues!”
“My dear,” said the Count, who was pleased to be logical, “what you say amounts to this: that, but for their children, women would have no virtue, but would leave their husbands in the lurch.”
The Countess rose hastily, and went out on to the steps with Madeleine.
“Such is marriage, my dear boy,” said the Count. “Do you mean to imply by walking out of the room that I am talking nonsense?” he cried, taking Jacques’ hand and following his wife, to whom he spoke with flashing looks of fury.
“Not at all, monsieur, but you frightened me. Your remark wounded me terribly,” she went on in a hollow voice, with the glance of a criminal at me. “If virtue does not consist in self-sacrifice for one’s children and one’s husband, what is virtue?”
“Self-sa‑cri‑fice!” echoed the Count, rapping out each syllable like a blow on his victim’s heart. “What is it that you sacrifice to your children? What do you sacrifice to me? Whom? What? Answer—will you answer? What is going on then? What do you mean?”
“Monsieur,” said she, “would you be content to be loved for God’s sake, or to know that your wife was virtuous for virtue’s sake?”
“Madame is right,” said I, speaking in a tone of emotion that rang in the two hearts into which I cast my hopes forever ruined, and which I stilled by the expression of the greatest grief of all, its hollow cry extinguishing the quarrel, as all is silence when a lion roars. “Yes, the noblest privilege conferred on us by reason, is that we may dedicate our virtues to those beings whose happiness is of our making, and whom we make happy not out of self-interest or sense of duty, but from involuntary and inexhaustible affection.”
A tear glistened in Henriette’s eye.
“And, my dear Count, if by chance a woman were involuntarily subjugated by some
