“Socialist rascals! If it were only possible, this time, to exterminate them!”
Frederick could not, for the life of him, understand the necessity of so much rancour and vituperative language. His feeling of disgust against Paris was intensified by these occurrences, and two days later he set out for Nogent by the first train.
The houses soon became lost to view; the country stretched out before his gaze. Alone in his carriage, with his feet on the seat in front of him, he pondered over the events of the last few days, and then on his entire past. The recollection of Louise came back to his mind.
“She, indeed, loved me truly! I was wrong not to snatch at this chance of happiness. Pooh! let us not think any more about it!”
Then, five minutes afterwards: “Who knows, after all? Why not, later?”
His reverie, like his eyes, wandered afar towards vague horizons.
“She was artless, a peasant girl, almost a savage; but so good!”
In proportion as he drew nearer to Nogent, her image drew closer to him. As they were passing through the meadows of Sourdun, he saw her once more in imagination under the poplar-trees, as in the old days, cutting rushes on the edges of the pools. And now they had reached their destination; he stepped out of the train.
Then he leaned with his elbows on the bridge, to gaze again at the isle and the garden where they had walked together one sunshiny day, and the dizzy sensation caused by travelling, together with the weakness engendered by his recent emotions, arousing in his breast a sort of exaltation, he said to himself:
“She has gone out, perhaps; suppose I were to go and meet her!”
The bell of Saint-Laurent was ringing, and in the square in front of the church there was a crowd of poor people around an open carriage, the only one in the district—the one which was always hired for weddings. And all of a sudden, under the church-gate, accompanied by a number of well-dressed persons in white cravats, a newly-married couple appeared.
He thought he must be labouring under some hallucination. But no! It was, indeed, Louise! covered with a white veil which flowed from her red hair down to her heels; and with her was no other than Deslauriers, attired in a blue coat embroidered with silver—the costume of a prefect.
How was this?
Frederick concealed himself at the corner of a house to let the procession pass.
Shamefaced, vanquished, crushed, he retraced his steps to the railway-station, and returned to Paris.
The cabman who drove him assured him that the barricades were erected from the Château d’Eau to the Gymnase, and turned down the Faubourg Saint-Martin. At the corner of the Rue de Provence, Frederick stepped out in order to reach the boulevards.
It was five o’clock. A thin shower was falling. A number of citizens blocked up the footpath close to the Opera House. The houses opposite were closed. No one at any of the windows. All along the boulevard, dragoons were galloping behind a row of wagons, leaning with drawn swords over their horses; and the plumes of their helmets, and their large white cloaks, rising up behind them, could be seen under the glare of the gas-lamps, which shook in the wind in the midst of a haze. The crowd gazed at them mute with fear.
In the intervals between the cavalry-charges, squads of policemen arrived on the scene to keep back the people in the streets.
But on the steps of Tortoni, a man—Dussardier—who could be distinguished at a distance by his great height, remained standing as motionless as a caryatide.
One of the police-officers, marching at the head of his men, with his three-cornered hat drawn over his eyes, threatened him with his sword.
The other thereupon took one step forward, and shouted:
“Long live the Republic!”
The next moment he fell on his back with his arms crossed.
A yell of horror arose from the crowd. The police-officer, with a look of command, made a circle around him; and Frederick, gazing at him in open-mouthed astonishment, recognised Sénécal.
XIX
A Bittersweet Reunion
He travelled.
He realised the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill one feels on waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of landscapes and ruins, and the bitterness of ruptured sympathies.
He returned home.
He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to other women. But the constant recollection of his first love made these appear insipid; and besides the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had vanished. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker. Years passed; and he was forced to support the burden of a life in which his mind was unoccupied and his heart devoid of energy.
Towards the end of March, 1867, just as it was getting dark, one evening, he was sitting all alone in his study, when a woman suddenly came in.
“Madame Arnoux!”
“Frederick!”
She caught hold of his hands, and drew him gently towards the window, and, as she gazed into his face, she kept repeating:
“ ’Tis he! Yes, indeed—’tis he!”
In the growing shadows of the twilight, he could see only her eyes under the black lace veil that hid her face.
When she had laid down on the edge of the mantelpiece a little pocketbook bound in garnet velvet, she seated herself in front of him, and they both remained silent, unable to utter a word, smiling at one another.
At last he asked her a number of questions about herself and her husband.
They had gone to live in a remote part of Brittany for the sake of economy, so as to be able to pay their debts. Arnoux, now almost a chronic invalid, seemed to have become quite an old man. Her daughter had been married and was living at Bordeaux, and her son was in garrison at Mostaganem.
Then she raised her head to look at him again:
“But I see you once more! I am happy!”
He did not fail to let her know that, as soon as he heard of
