“These caricatures of Cham are very funny, are they not?”
“Yes.”
Then they relapsed into silence once more.
All of a sudden, a fierce gust of wind shook the windowpanes.
“What weather!” said Frederick.
“It was very good of you, indeed, to come here in the midst of this dreadful rain.”
“Oh! what do I care about that? I’m not like those whom it prevents, no doubt, from going to keep their appointments.”
“What appointments?” she asked with an ingenuous air.
“Don’t you remember?”
A shudder ran through her frame and she hung down her head.
He gently laid his hand on her arm.
“I assure you that you have given me great pain.”
She replied, with a sort of wail in her voice:
“But I was frightened about my child.”
She told him about Eugène’s illness, and all the tortures which she had endured on that day.
“Thanks! thanks! I doubt you no longer. I love you as much as ever.”
“Ah! no; it is not true!”
“Why so?”
She glanced at him coldly.
“You forget the other! the one you took with you to the races! the woman whose portrait you have—your mistress!”
“Well, yes!” exclaimed Frederick, “I don’t deny anything! I am a wretch! Just listen to me!”
If he had done this, it was through despair, as one commits suicide. However, he had made her very unhappy in order to avenge himself on her with his own shame.
“What mental anguish! Do you not realise what it means?”
Madame Arnoux turned away her beautiful face while she held out her hand to him; and they closed their eyes, absorbed in a kind of intoxication that was like a sweet, ceaseless rocking. Then they stood face to face, gazing at one another.
“Could you believe it possible that I no longer loved you?”
She replied in a low voice, full of caressing tenderness:
“No! in spite of everything, I felt at the bottom of my heart that it was impossible, and that one day the obstacle between us two would disappear!”
“So did I; and I was dying to see you again.”
“I once passed close to you in the Palais-Royal!”
“Did you really?”
And he spoke to her of the happiness he experienced at coming across her again at the Dambreuses’ house.
“But how I hated you that evening as I was leaving the place!”
“Poor boy!”
“My life is so sad!”
“And mine, too! If it were only the vexations, the anxieties, the humiliations, all that I endure as wife and as mother, seeing that one must die, I would not complain; the frightful part of it is my solitude, without anyone.”
“But you have me here with you!”
“Oh! yes!”
A sob of deep emotion made her bosom swell. She spread out her arms, and they strained one another, while their lips met in a long kiss.
A creaking sound on the floor not far from them reached their ears. There was a woman standing close to them; it was Rosanette. Madame Arnoux had recognised her. Her eyes, opened to their widest, scanned this woman, full of astonishment and indignation. At length Rosanette said to her:
“I have come to see Monsieur Arnoux about a matter of business.”
“You see he is not here.”
“Ah! that’s true,” returned the Maréchale. “Your nurse is right! A thousand apologies!”
And turning towards Frederick:
“So here you are—you?”
The familiar tone in which she addressed him, and in her own presence, too, made Madame Arnoux flush as if she had received a slap right across the face.
“I tell you again, he is not here!”
Then the Maréchale, who was looking this way and that, said quietly:
“Let us go back together! I have a cab waiting below.”
He pretended not to hear.
“Come! let us go!”
“Ah! yes! this is a good opportunity! Go! go!” said Madame Arnoux.
They went off together, and she stooped over the head of the stairs in order to see them once more, and a laugh—piercing, heartrending, reached them from the place where she stood. Frederick pushed Rosanette into the cab, sat down opposite her, and during the entire drive did not utter a word.
The infamy, which it outraged him to see once more flowing back on him, had been brought about by himself alone. He experienced at the same time the dishonour of a crushing humiliation and the regret caused by the loss of his newfound happiness. Just when, at last, he had it in his grasp, it had forever more become impossible, and that through the fault of this girl of the town, this harlot. He would have liked to strangle her. He was choking with rage. When they had got into the house he flung his hat on a piece of furniture and tore off his cravat.
“Ha! you have just done a nice thing—confess it!”
She planted herself boldly in front of him.
“Ah! well, what of that? Where’s the harm?”
“What! You are playing the spy on me?”
“Is that my fault? Why do you go to amuse yourself with virtuous women?”
“Never mind! I don’t wish you to insult them.”
“How have I insulted them?”
He had no answer to make to this, and in a more spiteful tone:
“But on the other occasion, at the Champ de Mars—”
“Ah! you bore us to death with your old women!”
“Wretch!”
He raised his fist.
“Don’t kill me! I’m pregnant!”
Frederick staggered back.
“You are lying!”
“Why, just look at me!”
She seized a candlestick, and pointing at her face:
“Don’t you recognise the fact there?”
Little yellow spots dotted her skin, which was strangely swollen. Frederick did not deny the evidence. He went to the window, and opened it, took a few steps up and down the room, and then sank into an armchair.
This event was a calamity which, in the first place, put off their rupture, and, in the next place, upset all his plans. The notion of being a father, moreover, appeared to him grotesque, inadmissible. But why? If, in place of the Maréchale—And his reverie became so deep that he had a kind of hallucination. He saw there, on the carpet, in front of the chimneypiece, a little girl. She resembled Madame Arnoux and himself
