A Second Home

Her tears suddenly ceased.

“Caroline, let us hope,” cried Roger. “Do not be frightened by anything that priest may have said to you. Though my wife’s confessor is a man to be feared for his power in the congregation, if he should try to blight our happiness I would find means – ”

“What could you do?”

“We would go to Italy: I would fly – ”

A shriek that rang out from the adjoining room made Roger start and Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille quake; but she rushed into the drawing-room, and there found Madame de Granville in a dead faint. When the Countess recovered her senses, she sighed deeply on finding herself supported by the Count and her rival, whom she instinctively pushed away with a gesture of contempt. Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille rose to withdraw.

“You are at home, madame,” said Granville, taking Caroline by the arm. “Stay.”

The Judge took up his wife in his arms, carried her to the carriage, and got into it with her.

“Who is it that has brought you to the point of wishing me dead, of resolving to fly?” asked the Countess, looking at her husband with grief mingled with indignation. “Was I not young? you thought me pretty – what fault have you to find with me? Have I been false to you? Have I not been a virtuous and well-conducted wife? My heart has cherished no image but yours, my ears have listened to no other voice. What duty have I failed in? What have I ever denied you?”

“Happiness, madame,” said the Count severely. “You know, madame, that there are two ways of serving God. Some Christians imagine that by going to church at fixed hours to say a Paternoster, by attending Mass regularly and avoiding sin, they may win heaven – but they, madame, will go to hell; they have not loved God for himself, they have not worshiped Him as He chooses to be worshiped, they have made no sacrifice. Though mild in seeming, they are hard on their neighbors; they see the law, the letter, not the spirit. – This is how you have treated me, your earthly husband; you have sacrificed my happiness to your salvation; you were always absorbed in prayer when I came to you in gladness of heart; you wept when you should have cheered my toil; you have never tried to satisfy any demands I have made on you.”

“And if they were wicked,” cried the Countess hotly, “was I to lose my soul to please you?”

“It is a sacrifice which another, a more loving woman, has dared to make,” said Granville coldly.

“Dear God!” she cried, bursting into tears, “Thou hearest! Has he been worthy of the prayers and penance I have lived in, wearing myself out to atone for his sins and my own? – Of what avail is virtue?”

“To win Heaven, my dear. A woman cannot be at the same time the wife of a man and the spouse of Christ. That would be bigamy; she must choose between a husband and a nunnery. For the sake of future advantage you have stripped your soul of all the love, all the devotion, which God commands that you should have for me, you have cherished no feeling but hatred – ”

“Have I not loved you?” she put in.

“No, madame.”

“Then what is love?” the Countess involuntarily inquired.

“Love, my dear,” replied Granville, with a sort of ironical surprise, “you are incapable of understanding it. The cold sky of Normandy is not that of Spain. This difference of climate is no doubt the secret of our disaster. – To yield to our caprices, to guess them, to find pleasure in pain, to sacrifice the world’s opinion, your pride, your religion even, and still regard these offerings as mere grains of incense burnt in honor of the idol – that is love – ”

“The love of ballet-girls!” cried the Countess in horror. “Such flames cannot last, and must soon leave nothing but ashes and cinders, regret or despair. A wife ought, in my opinion, to bring you true friendship, equable warmth – ”

“You speak of warmth as negroes speak of ice,” retorted the Count, with a sardonic smile. “Consider that the humblest daisy has more charms than the proudest and most gorgeous of the red hawthorns that attract us in spring by their strong scent and brilliant color. – At the same time,” he went on, “I will do you justice. You have kept so precisely in the straight path of imaginary duty prescribed by law, that only to make you understand wherein you have failed towards me, I should be obliged to enter into details which would offend your dignity, and instruct you in matters which would seem to you to undermine all morality.”

“And you dare to speak of morality when you have but just left the house where you have dissipated your children’s fortune in debaucheries?” cried the Countess, maddened by her husband’s reticence.

“There, madame, I must correct you,” said the Count, coolly interrupting his wife. “Though Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille is rich, it is at nobody’s expense. My uncle was master of his fortune, and had several heirs. In his lifetime, and out of pure friendship, regarding her as his niece, he gave her the little estate of Bellefeuille. As for anything else, I owe it to his liberality – ”

“Such conduct is only worthy of a Jacobin!” said the sanctimonious Angelique.

“Madame, you are forgetting that your own father was one of the Jacobins whom you scorn so uncharitably,” said the Count severely. “Citizen Bontems was signing death-warrants at a time when my uncle was doing France good service.”

Madame de Granville was silenced. But after a short pause, the remembrance of what she had just seen reawakened in her soul the jealousy which nothing can kill in a woman’s heart, and she murmured, as if to herself – “How can a woman thus destroy her own soul and that of others?”

“Bless me, madame,” replied the Count, tired of this dialogue, “you yourself may some day have to answer that question.” The Countess was scared. “You perhaps will be held excused by the merciful Judge, who will weigh our sins,” he went on, “in consideration of the conviction with which you have worked out my misery. I do not hate you – I hate those who have perverted your heart and your reason. You have prayed for me, just as Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille has given me her heart and crowned my life with love. You should have been my mistress and the prayerful saint by turns. – Do me the justice to confess that I am no reprobate, no debauchee. My life was cleanly. Alas! after seven years of wretchedness, the craving for happiness led me by an imperceptible descent to love another woman and make a second home. And do not imagine that I am singular; there are in this city thousands of husbands, all led by various causes to live this twofold life.”

“Great God!” cried the Countess. “How heavy is the cross Thou hast laid on me to bear! If the husband Thou hast given me here below in Thy wrath can only be made happy through my death, take me to Thyself!”

“If you had always breathed such admirable sentiments and such devotion, we should be happy yet,” said the Count coldly.

“Indeed,” cried Angelique, melting into a flood of tears, “forgive me if I have done any wrong. Yes, monsieur, I am ready to obey you in all things, feeling sure that you will desire nothing but what is just and natural; henceforth I will be all you can wish your wife to be.”

“If your purpose, madame, is to compel me to say that I no longer love you, I shall find the cruel courage to tell you so. Can I command my heart? Can I wipe out in an instant the traces of fifteen years of suffering? – I have ceased to love. – These words contain a mystery as deep as lies the words I love. Esteem, respect, friendship may be won, lost, regained; but as to love – I might school myself for a thousand years, and it would not blossom again, especially for a woman too old to respond to it.”

“I hope, Monsieur le Comte, I sincerely hope, that such words may not be spoken to you some day by the woman you love, and in such a tone and accent – ”

“Will you put on a dress a la Grecque this evening, and come to the Opera?”

The shudder with which the Countess received the suggestion was a mute reply.

Early in December 1833, a man, whose perfectly white hair and worn features seemed to show that he was aged by grief rather than by years, was walking at midnight along the Rue Gaillon. Having reached a house of modest appearance, and only two stories high, he paused to look up at one of the attic windows that pierced the roof at regular intervals. A dim light scarcely showed through the humble panes, some of which had been repaired with paper. The man below was watching the wavering glimmer with the vague curiosity of a Paris idler, when a young man came out of the house. As the light of the street lamp fell full on the face of the first comer, it will not seem surprising that, in spite of the darkness, this young man went towards the passer-by, though with the hesitancy that is usual when we have any fear of making a mistake in recognizing an acquaintance.

“What, is it you,” cried he, “Monsieur le President? Alone at this hour, and so far from the Rue Saint-Lazare. Allow me to have the honor of giving you my arm. – The pavement is so greasy this morning, that if we do not hold each other up,” he added, to soothe the elder man’s susceptibilities, “we shall find it hard to escape a tumble.”

“But, my dear sir, I am no more than fifty-five, unfortunately for me,” replied the Comte de Granville. “A physician of your celebrity must know that at that age a man is still hale and strong.”

“Then you are in waiting on a lady, I suppose,” replied Horace Bianchon. “You are not, I imagine, in the habit of going about Paris on foot. When a man keeps such fine horses – ”

“Still, when I am not visiting in the evening, I commonly return from the Courts or the club on foot,” replied the Count.

“And with large sums of money about you, perhaps!” cried the doctor. “It is a positive invitation to the assassin’s knife.”

“I am not afraid of that,” said Granville, with melancholy indifference.

“But, at least, do not stand about,” said the doctor, leading the Count towards the boulevard. “A little more and I shall believe that you are bent of robbing me of your last illness, and dying by some other hand than mine.”

“You caught me playing the spy,” said the Count. “Whether on foot or in a carriage, and at whatever hour of the night I may come by, I have for some time past observed at a window on the third floor of your house the shadow of a person who seems to work with heroic constancy.”

The Count paused as if he felt some sudden pain. “And I take as great an interest in that garret,” he went on, “as a citizen of Paris must feel in the finishing of the Palais Royal.”

“Well,” said Horace Bianchon eagerly, “I can tell you – ”

“Tell me nothing,” replied Granville, cutting the doctor short. “I would not give a centime to know whether the shadow that moves across that shabby blind is that of a man or a woman, nor whether the inhabitant of that attic is happy or miserable. Though I was surprised to see no one at work there this evening, and though I stopped to look, it was solely for the pleasure of indulging in conjectures as numerous and as idiotic as those of idlers who see a building left half finished. For nine years, my young – ” the Count hesitated to use a word; then he waved his hand, exclaiming – “No, I will not say friend – I hate everything that savors of sentiment. – Well, for nine years past I have ceased to wonder that old men amuse themselves with growing flowers and planting trees; the events of life have taught them disbelief in all human affection; and I grew old within a few days. I will no longer attach myself to any creature but to unreasoning animals, or plants, or superficial things. I think more of Taglioni’s grace than of all human feeling. I abhor life and the world in which I live alone. Nothing, nothing,” he went on, in a tone that startled the younger man, “no, nothing can move or interest me.”

“But you have children?”

“My children!” he repeated bitterly. “Yes – well, is not my eldest daughter the Comtesse de Vandenesse? The other will, through her sister’s connections, make some good match. As to my sons, have they not succeeded? The Viscount was public prosecutor at Limoges, and is now President of the Court at Orleans; the younger is public prosecutor in Paris. – My children have their own cares, their own anxieties and business to attend to. If of all those hearts one had been devoted to me, if one had tried by entire affection to fill up the void I have here,” and he struck his breast, “well, that one would have failed in life, have sacrificed it to me. And why should he? Why? To bring sunshine into my few remaining years – and would he have succeeded? Might I not have accepted such generosity as a debt? But, doctor,” and the Count smiled with deep irony, “it is not for nothing that we teach them arithmetic and how to count. At this moment perhaps they are waiting for my money.”

“O Monsieur le Comte, how could such an idea enter your head – you who are kind, friendly, and humane! Indeed, if I were not myself a living proof of the benevolence you exercise so liberally and so nobly – ”

“To please myself,” replied the Count. “I pay for a sensation, as I would to-morrow pay a pile of gold to recover the most childish illusion that would but make my heart glow. – I help my fellow-creatures for my own sake, just as I gamble; and I look for gratitude from none. I should see you die without blinking; and I beg of you to feel the same with regard to me. I tell you, young man, the events of life have swept over my heart like the lavas of Vesuvius over Herculaneum. The town is there – dead.”

“Those who have brought a soul as warm and as living as yours was to such a pitch of indifference are indeed guilty!”

“Say no more,” said the Count, with a shudder of aversion.