Juana

“No, madame,” said Montefiore, at last, striving to gain time, “I desire to marry your daughter.”

“My noble Montefiore!” said Juana, drawing a deep breath.

“Then why did you attempt to fly and cry for help?” asked Perez.

Terrible, revealing light!

Juana said nothing, but she wrung her hands and went to her arm-chair and sat down.

At that moment a tumult rose in the street which was plainly heard in the silence of the room. A soldier of the 6th, hearing Montefiore’s cry for help, had summoned Diard. The quartermaster, who was fortunately in his bivouac, came, accompanied by friends.

“Why did I fly?” said Montefiore, hearing the voice of his friend. “Because I told you the truth; I am married – Diard! Diard!” he shouted in a piercing voice.

But, at a word from Perez, the apprentice closed and bolted the doors, so that the soldiers were delayed by battering them in. Before they could enter, the Marana had time to strike her dagger into the guilty man; but anger hindered her aim, the blade slipped upon the Italian’s epaulet, though she struck her blow with such force that he fell at the very feet of Juana, who took no notice of him. The Marana sprang upon him, and this time, resolved not to miss her prey, she caught him by the throat.

“I am free and I will marry her! I swear it, by God, by my mother, by all there is most sacred in the world; I am a bachelor; I will marry her, on my honor!”

And he bit the arm of the courtesan.

“Mother,” said Juana, “kill him. He is so base that I will not have him for my husband, were he ten times as beautiful.”

“Ah! I recognize my daughter!” cried the mother.

“What is all this?” demanded the quartermaster, entering the room.

“They are murdering me,” cried Montefiore, “on account of this girl; she says I am her lover. She inveigled me into a trap, and they are forcing me to marry her – ”

“And you reject her?” cried Diard, struck with the splendid beauty which contempt, hatred, and indignation had given to the girl, already so beautiful. “Then you are hard to please. If she wants a husband I am ready to marry her. Put up your weapons; there is no trouble here.”

The Marana pulled the Italian to the side of her daughter’s bed and said to him, in a low voice, —

“If I spare you, give thanks for the rest of your life; but, remember this, if your tongue ever injures my daughter you will see me again. Go! – How much ‘dot’ do you give her?” she continued, going up to Perez.

“She has two hundred thousand gold piastres,” replied the Spaniard.

“And that is not all, monsieur,” said the Marana, turning to Diard. “Who are you? – Go!” she repeated to Montefiore.

The marquis, hearing this statement of gold piastres, came forward once more, saying, —

“I am really free – ”

A glance from Juana silenced him.

“You are really free to go,” she said.

And he went immediately.

“Alas! monsieur,” said the girl, turning to Diard, “I thank you with admiration. But my husband is in heaven. To-morrow I shall enter a convent – ”

“Juana, my Juana, hush!” cried the mother, clasping her in her arms. Then she whispered in the girl’s ear. “You must have another husband.”

Juana turned pale. She freed herself from her mother and sat down once more in her arm-chair.

“Who are you, monsieur?” repeated the Marana, addressing Diard.

“Madame, I am at present only the quartermaster of the 6th of the line. But for such a wife I have the heart to make myself a marshal of France. My name is Pierre-Francois Diard. My father was provost of merchants. I am not – ”

“But, at least, you are an honest man, are you not?” cried the Marana, interrupting him. “If you please the Signorina Juana di Mancini, you can marry her and be happy together. – Juana,” she continued in a grave tone, “in becoming the wife of a brave and worthy man remember that you will also be a mother. I have sworn that you shall kiss your children without a blush upon your face” (her voice faltered slightly). “I have sworn that you shall live a virtuous life; expect, therefore, many troubles. But, whatever happens, continue pure, and be faithful to your husband. Sacrifice all things to him, for he will be the father of your children – the father of your children! If you take a lover, I, your mother, will stand between you and him. Do you see that dagger? It is in your ‘dot,’” she continued, throwing the weapon on Juana’s bed. “I leave it there as the guarantee of your honor so long as my eyes are open and my arm free. Farewell,” she said, restraining her tears. “God grant that we may never meet again.”

At that idea, her tears began to flow.

“Poor child!” she added, “you have been happier than you knew in this dull home. – Do not allow her to regret it,” she said, turning to Diard.

The foregoing rapid narrative is not the principal subject of this Study, for the understanding of which it was necessary to explain how it happened that the quartermaster Diard married Juana di Mancini, that Montefiore and Diard were intimately known to each other, and to show plainly what blood and what passions were in Madame Diard.

CHAPTER III. THE HISTORY OF MADAME DIARD

By the time that the quartermaster had fulfilled all the long and dilatory formalities without which no French soldier can be married, he was passionately in love with Juana di Mancini, and Juana had had time to think of her coming destiny.

An awful destiny! Juana, who felt neither esteem nor love for Diard, was bound to him forever, by a rash but necessary promise. The man was neither handsome nor well-made. His manners, devoid of all distinction, were a mixture of the worst army tone, the habits of his province, and his own insufficient education. How could she love Diard, she, a young girl all grace and elegance, born with an invincible instinct for luxury and good taste, her very nature tending toward the sphere of the higher social classes? As for esteeming him, she rejected the very thought precisely because he had married her. This repulsion was natural. Woman is a saintly and noble creature, but almost always misunderstood, and nearly always misjudged because she is misunderstood. If Juana had loved Diard she would have esteemed him. Love creates in a wife a new woman; the woman of the day before no longer exists on the morrow. Putting on the nuptial robe of a passion in which life itself is concerned, the woman wraps herself in purity and whiteness. Reborn into virtue and chastity, there is no past for her; she is all future, and should forget the things behind her to relearn life. In this sense the famous words which a modern poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused with truth, —

“And Love remade me virgin.”

That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially vaudevillist spirit of the pit.

So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart’s legality, which women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the extent of the life before her. Often she turned her eyes, brimming with tears proudly repressed, upon Perez and Dona Lagounia, who fully comprehended, both of them, the bitter thoughts those tears contained. But they were silent: of what good were reproaches now; why look for consolations? The deeper they were, the more they enlarged the wound.

One evening, Juana, stupid with grief, heard through the open door of her little room, which the old couple had thought shut, a pitying moan from her adopted mother.

“The child will die of grief.”

“Yes,” said Perez, in a shaking voice, “but what can we do? I cannot now boast of her beauty and her chastity to Comte d’Arcos, to whom I hoped to marry her.”

“But a single fault is not vice,” said the old woman, pitying as the angels.

“Her mother gave her to this man,” said Perez.

“Yes, in a moment; without consulting the poor child!” cried Dona Lagounia.

“She knew what she was doing.”

“But oh! into what hands our pearl is going!”

“Say no more, or I shall seek a quarrel with that Diard.”

“And that would only lead to other miseries.”

Hearing these dreadful words Juana saw the happy future she had lost by her own wrongdoing. The pure and simple years of her quiet life would have been rewarded by a brilliant existence such as she had fondly dreamed, – dreams which had caused her ruin. To fall from the height of Greatness to Monsieur Diard! She wept. At times she went nearly mad. She floated for a while between vice and religion. Vice was a speedy solution, religion a lifetime of suffering. The meditation was stormy and solemn. The next day was the fatal day, the day for the marriage. But Juana could still remain free. Free, she knew how far her misery would go; married, she was ignorant of where it went or what it might bring her.