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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Jacqueline by Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc), v2
+#56 in our series The French Immortals Crowned by the French Academy
+#2 in our series by Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
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+Title: Jacqueline, v2
+
+Author: Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
+
+Release Date: April, 2003  [Etext #3969]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 09/23/01]
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+Edition: 10
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Jacqueline by Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc), v2
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+
+
+
+
+JACQUELINE
+
+By THERESE BENTZON (MME. BLANC)
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE BLUE BAND
+
+Love, like any other human malady, should be treated according to the age
+and temperament of the sufferer.  Madame de Nailles, who was a very keen
+observer, especially where her own interests were concerned, lent herself
+with the best possible grace to everything that might amuse and distract
+Jacqueline, of whom she had by this time grown afraid.  Not that she now
+dreaded her as a rival.  The attitude of coldness and reserve that the
+young girl had adopted in her intercourse with Marien, her stepmother
+could see, was no evidence of coquetry.  She showed, in her behavior to
+the friend of the family, a freedom from embarrassment which was new to
+her, and a frigidity which could not possibly have been assumed so
+persistently.  No!  what struck Madame de Nailles was the suddenness of
+this transformation.  Jacqueline evidently took no further interest in
+Marien; she had apparently no longer any affection for herself--she, who
+had been once her dear little mamma, whom she had loved so tenderly, now
+felt herself to be considered only as a stepmother.  Fraulein Schult,
+too, received no more confidences.  What did it all mean?
+
+Had Jacqueline, through any means, discovered a secret, which, in her
+hands, might be turned into a most dangerous weapon?  She had a way of
+saying before the guilty pair: "Poor papa!"  with an air of pity, as she
+kissed him, which made Madame de Nailles's flesh creep, and sometimes she
+would amuse herself by making ambiguous remarks which shot arrows of
+suspicion into a heart already afraid.  "I feel sure," thought the
+Baroness, "that she has found out everything.  But, no!  it seems
+impossible.  How can I discover what she knows?"
+
+Jacqueline's revenge consisted in leaving her stepmother in doubt.  She
+more than suspected, not without cause, that Fraulein Schult was false to
+her, and had the wit to baffle all the clever questions of her
+'promeneuse'.
+
+"My worship of a man of genius--a great artist?  Oh!  that has all come
+to an end since I have found out that his devotion belongs to an elderly
+lady with a fair complexion and light hair.  I am only sorry for him."
+
+Jacqueline had great hopes that these cruel words would be reported--as
+they were--to her stepmother, and, of course, they did not mitigate the
+Baroness's uneasiness.  Madame de Nailles revenged herself for this
+insult by dismissing the innocent echo of the impertinence--of course,
+under some plausible pretext.  She felt it necessary also to be very
+cautious how she treated the enemy whom she was forced to shelter under
+her own roof.  Her policy--a policy imposed on her by force of
+circumstances--was one of great indulgence and consideration, so that
+Jacqueline, soon feeling that she was for the present under no control,
+took the bit between her teeth.  No other impression can adequately
+convey an idea of the sort of fury with which she plunged into pleasure
+and excitement, a state of mind which apparently, without any transition,
+succeeded her late melancholy.  She had done with sentiment, she thought,
+forever.  She meant to be practical and positive, a little Parisienne,
+and "in the swim."  There were plenty of examples among those she knew
+that she could follow.  Berthe, Helene, and Claire Wermant were excellent
+leaders in that sort of thing.  Those three daughters of the 'agent de
+change' were at this time at Treport, in charge of a governess, who let
+them do whatever they pleased, subject only to be scolded by their
+father, who came down every Saturday to Treport, on that train that was
+called the 'train des maris'.  They had made friends with two or three
+American girls, who were called "fast," and Jacqueline was soon enrolled
+in the ranks of that gay company.
+
+The cure that was begun on the wooden horse at Blackfern's was completed
+on the sea-shore.
+
+The girls with whom she now associated were nine or ten little imps of
+Satan, who, with their hair flying in the wind and their caps over one
+ear, made the quiet beach ring with their boy-like gayety.  They were
+called "the Blue Band," because of a sort of uniform that they adopted.
+We speak of them intentionally as masculine, and not feminine, because
+what is masculine best suited their appearance and behavior, for, though
+all could flirt like coquettes of experience, they were more like boys
+than girls, if judged by their age and their costume.
+
+These Blues lived close to one another on that avenue that is edged with
+chalets, cottages, and villas, whose lower floors are abundantly provided
+with great glass windows, which seem to let the ocean into their very
+rooms, as well as to lay bare everything that passes in them to the
+public eye, as frankly as if their inmates bivouacked in the open street.
+Nothing was private; neither the meals, nor the coming and going of
+visitors.  It must be said, however, that the inhabitants of these glass
+houses were very seldom at home.  Bathing, and croquet, or tennis, at low
+water, on the sands, searching for shells, fishing with nets, dances at
+the Casino, little family dances alternating with concerts, to which even
+children went till nine o'clock, would seem enough to fill up the days of
+these young people, but they had also to make boating excursions to
+Cayeux, Crotoy, and Hourdel, besides riding parties in the beautiful
+country that surrounded the Chateau of Lizerolles, where they usually
+dismounted on their return.
+
+At Lizerolles they were received by Madame d'Argy, who was delighted that
+they provided safe amusement for her son, who appeared in the midst of
+this group of half-grown girls like a young cock among the hens of his
+harem.  Frederic d'Argy, the young naval officer, who was enjoying his
+holiday, as M. de Nailles had said, was enjoying it exceedingly.  How
+often, long after, on board the ship Floye, as he paced the silent
+quarter-deck, far from any opportunity of flirting, did he recall the
+forms and faces of these young girls, some dark, some fair, some rosy-
+half-women and half-children, who made much of him, and scolded him, and
+teased him, and contended for his attentions, while no better could be
+had, on purpose to tease one another.  Oh!  what a delightful time he had
+had!  They did not leave him to himself one moment.  He had to lift them
+into their saddles, to assist them as they clambered over the rocks, to
+superintend their attempts at swimming, to dance with them all by turns,
+and to look after them in the difficult character of Mentor, for he was
+older than they, and were they not entrusted to his care?  What a serious
+responsibility!  Had not Mentor even found himself too often timid and
+excited when one little firm foot was placed in his hand, when his arm
+was round one little waist, when he could render her as a cavalier a
+thousand little services, or accept with gladness the role of her
+consoler.  He did everything he could think of to please them, finding
+all of them charming, though Jacqueline never ceased to be the one he
+preferred, a preference which she might easily have inferred from the
+poor lad's unusual timidity and awkwardness when he was brought into
+contact with her.  But she paid no attention to his devotion, accepting
+himself and all he did for her as, in some sort, her personal property.
+
+He was of no consequence, he did not count; what was he but her comrade
+and former playfellow?
+
+Happily for Fred, he took pleasure in the familiarity with which she
+treated him--a familiarity which, had he known it, was not flattering.
+He was in the seventh heaven for a whole fortnight, during which he was
+the recipient of more dried flowers and bows of ribbon than he ever got
+in all the rest of his life--the American girls were very fond of giving
+keepsakes--but then his star waned.  He was no longer the only one.  The
+grown-up brother of the Wermants came to Treport--Raoul, with his air of
+a young man about town--a boulevardier, with his jacket cut in the latest
+fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on
+salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his
+mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India.
+The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck
+the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see
+and to admire his nautical ability.  They thought all his jokes amusing,
+and they delighted in his way of seizing his partner for a waltz and
+bearing her off as if she were a prize, hardly allowing her to touch the
+floor.
+
+Fred thought him, with his stock of old jokes, very ill-mannered.  He
+laughed at his sculling, and had a great mind to strike him after he saw
+him waltzing with Jacqueline.  But he had to acknowledge the general
+appreciation felt for the fellow whom he called vulgar.
+
+Raoul Wermant did not stay long at Treport.  He had only come to see his
+sisters on his way to Dieppe, where he expected to meet a certain Leah
+Skip, an actress from the 'Nouveautes'.  If he kept her waiting, however,
+for some days, it was because he was loath to leave the handsome Madame
+de Villegry, who was living near her friend Madame de Nailles, recruiting
+herself after the fatigues of the winter season.  Such being the
+situation, the young girls of the Blue Band might have tried in vain to
+make any impression upon him.  But the hatred with which he inspired Fred
+found some relief in the composition of fragments of melancholy verse,
+which the young midshipman hid under his mattresses.  It is not an
+uncommon thing for naval men to combine a love of the sea with a love of
+poetry.  Fred's verses were not good, but they were full of dejection.
+The poor fellow compared Raoul Wermant to Faust, and himself to Siebel.
+He spoke of
+
+               The youth whose eyes were brimming with salt tears,
+               Whose heart was troubled by a thousand fears,
+               Poor slighted lover!-since in his heavy heart
+               All his illusions perish and depart.
+
+Again, he wrote of Siebel:
+
+               O Siebel!--thine is but the common fate!
+               They told thee Fortune upon youth would wait;
+               'Tis false when love's in question-and you may--
+
+Here he enumerated all the proofs of tenderness possible for a woman to
+give her lover, and then he added:
+
+               You may know all, poor Siebel!--all, some day,
+               When weary of this life and all its dreams,
+               You learn to know it is not what it seems;
+               When there is nothing that can cheer you more,
+               All that remains is fondly to adore!
+
+And after trying in vain to find a rhyme for lover, he cried:
+
+               Oh!  tell me--if one grief exceeds another
+               Is not this worst, to feel mere friendship moves
+               To cruel kindness the dear girl he loves?
+
+Fred's mother surprised him one night while he was watering with his
+tears the ink he was putting to so sorry a use.  She had been aware that
+he sat up late at night--his sleeplessness was not the insomnia of
+genius--for she had seen the glare of light from his little lamp burning
+later than the usual bedtime of the chateau, in one of the turret
+chambers at Lizerolles.
+
+In vain Fred denied that he was doing anything, in vain he tried to put
+his papers out of sight; his mother was so persuasive that at last he
+owned everything to her, and in addition to the comfort he derived from
+his confession, he gained a certain satisfaction to his 'amour-propre',
+for Madame d'Argy thought the verses beautiful.  A mother's geese are
+always swans.  But it was only when she said, "I don't see why you should
+not marry your Jacqueline--such a thing is not by any means impossible,"
+and promised to do all in her power to insure his happiness, that Fred
+felt how dearly he loved his mother.  Oh, a thousand times more than he
+had ever supposed he loved her!  However, he had not yet done with the
+agonies that lie in wait for lovers.
+
+Madame de Monredon arrived one day at the Hotel de la Plage, accompanied
+by her granddaughter, whom she had taken away from the convent before the
+beginning of the holidays.  Since she had fully arranged the marriage
+with M. de Talbrun, it seemed important that Giselle should acquire some
+liveliness, and recruit her health, before the fatal wedding-day arrived.
+M. de Talbrun liked ladies to be always well and always lively, and it
+was her duty to see that Giselle accommodated herself to his taste; sea-
+bathing, life in the open air, and merry companions, were the things she
+needed to make her a little less thin, to give her tone, and to take some
+of her convent stiffness out of her.  Besides, she could have free
+intercourse with her intended husband, thanks to the greater freedom of
+manners permitted at the sea-side.  Such were the ideas of Madame de
+Monredon.
+
+Poor Giselle!  In vain they dressed her in fine clothes, in vain they
+talked to her and scolded her from morning till night, she continued to
+be the little convent-bred schoolgirl she had always been; with downcast
+eyes, pale as a flower that has known no sunlight, and timid to a point
+of suffering.  M. de Talbrun frightened her as much as ever, and she had
+looked forward to the comfort of weeping in the arms of Jacqueline, who,
+the last time she had seen her, had been herself so unhappy.  But what
+was her astonishment to find the young girl, who, a few weeks before, had
+made her such tragic confidences through the grille in the convent
+parlor, transformed into a creature bent on excitement and amusement.
+When she attempted to allude to the subject on which Jacqueline had
+spoken to her at the convent, and to ask her what it was that had then
+made her so unhappy, Jacqueline cried: "Oh!  my dear, I have forgotten
+all about it!"  But there was exaggeration in this profession of
+forgetfulness, and she hurriedly drew Giselle back to the game of
+croquet, where they were joined by M. de Talbrun.
+
+The future husband of Giselle was a stout young fellow, short and thick-
+set, with broad shoulders, a large flat face, and strong jaws, ornamented
+with an enormous pair of whiskers, which partly compensated him for a
+loss of hair.  He had never done anything but shoot and hunt over his
+property nine months in the year, and spend the other three months in
+Paris, where the jockey Club and ballet-dancers sufficed for his
+amusement.  He did not pretend to be a man whose bachelor life had been
+altogether blameless, but he considered himself to be a "correct" man,
+according to what he understood by that expression, which implied neither
+talents, virtues, nor good manners; nevertheless, all the Blue Band
+agreed that he was a finished type of gentleman-hood.  Even Raoul's
+sisters had to confess, with a certain disgust, that, whatever people may
+say, in our own day the aristocracy of wealth has to lower its flag
+before the authentic quarterings of the old noblesse.  They secretly
+envied Giselle because she was going to be a grande dame, while all the
+while they asserted that old-fashioned distinctions had no longer any
+meaning.  Nevertheless, they looked forward to the day when they, too,
+might take their places in the Faubourg St. Germain.  One may purchase
+that luxury with a fortune of eight hundred thousand francs.
+
+The croquet-ground, which was underwater at high tide, was a long stretch
+of sand that fringed the shingle.  Two parties were formed, in which care
+was taken to make both sides as nearly equal as possible, after which the
+game began, with screams, with laughter, a little cheating and some
+disputes, as is the usual custom.  All this appeared to amuse Oscar de
+Talbrun--exceedingly.  For the first time during his wooing he was not
+bored.  The Misses Sparks--Kate and Nora--by their "high spirits"
+agreeably reminded him of one or two excursions he had made in past days
+into Bohemian society.
+
+He formed the highest opinion of Jacqueline when he saw how her still
+short skirts showed pretty striped silk stockings, and how her well-
+shaped foot was planted firmly on a blue ball, when she was preparing to
+roquer the red one.  The way in which he fixed his eyes upon her gave
+great offense to Fred, and did it not alarm and shock Giselle?  No!
+Giselle looked on calmly at the fun and talk around her, as unmoved as
+the stump of a tree, spoiling the game sometimes by her ignorance or her
+awkwardness, well satisfied that M. de Talbrun should leave her alone.
+Talking with him was very distasteful to her.
+
+"You have been more stupid than usual," had been what her grandmother had
+never failed to say to her in Paris after one of his visits, which he
+alternated with bouquets.  But at Treport no one seemed to mind her being
+stupid, and indeed M. de Talbrun hardly thought of her existence, up to
+the moment when they were all nearly caught by the first wave that came
+rolling in over the croquet-ground, when all the girls took flight,
+flushed, animated, and with lively gesticulation, while the gentlemen
+followed with the box into which had been hastily flung hoops, balls, and
+mallets.
+
+On their way Count Oscar condescendingly explained to Fred, as to a
+novice, that the only good thing about croquet was that it brought men
+and girls together.  He was himself very good at games, he said, having
+remarkably firm muscles and exceptionally sharp sight; but he went on to
+add that he had not been able to show what he could do that day.  The wet
+sand did not make so good a croquet-ground as the one he had had made in
+his park!  It is a good thing to know one's ground in all circumstances,
+but especially in playing croquet.  Then, dexterously passing from the
+game to the players, he went on to say, under cover of giving Fred a
+warning, that a man need not fear going too far with those girls from
+America--they had known how to flirt from the time they were born.  They
+could look out for themselves, they had talons and beaks; but up to a
+certain point they were very easy to get on with.  Those other players
+were queer little things; the three sisters Wermant were not wanting in
+chic, but, hang it!--the sweetest flower of them all, to his mind, was
+the tall one, the dark one--unripe fruit in perfection!  "And a year or
+two hence," added M. de Talbrun, with all the self-confidence of an
+expert, "every one will be talking about her in the world of society."
+
+Poor Fred kept silent, trying to curb his wrath.  But the blood mounted
+to his temples as he listened to these remarks, poured into his ear by a
+man of thirty-five, between puffs of his cigar, because there was nobody
+else to whom he could make them.  But they seemed to Fred very ill-
+mannered and ill-timed.  If he had not dreaded making himself absurd,
+he would gladly have stood forth as the champion of the Sparks, the
+Wermants, and all the other members of the Blue Band, so that he might
+give vent to the anger raging in his heart on hearing that odious
+compliment to Jacqueline.  Why was he not old enough to marry her?  What
+right had that detestable Talbrun to take notice of any girl but his
+fiancee?  If he himself could marry now, his choice would soon be made!
+No doubt, later--as his mother had said to him.  But would Jacqueline
+wait?  Everybody was beginning to admire her.  Somebody would carry her
+off--somebody would cut him out while he was away at sea.  Oh, horrible
+thought for a young lover!
+
+That night, at the Casino, while dancing a quadrille with Giselle, he
+could not refrain from saying to her, "Don't you object to Monsieur de
+Talbrun's dancing so much with Jacqueline?"
+
+"Who?--I?"  she cried, astonished, "I don't see why he should not."  And
+then, with a faint laugh, she added: "Oh, if she would only take him--
+and keep him!"
+
+But Madame de Monredon kept a sharp eye upon M. de Talbrun.  "It seems to
+me," she said, looking fixedly into the face of her future grandson-in-
+law, "that you really take pleasure in making children skip about with
+you."
+
+"So I do," he replied, frankly and good-humoredly.  "It makes me feel
+young again."
+
+And Madame de Monredon was satisfied.  She was ready to admit that most
+men marry women who have not particularly enchanted them, and she had
+brought up Giselle with all those passive qualities, which, together with
+a large fortune, usually suit best with a 'mariage de convenance'.
+
+Meantime Jacqueline piqued herself upon her worldly wisdom, which she
+looked upon as equal to Madame de Monredon's, since the terrible event
+which had filled her mind with doubts.  She thought M. de Talbrun would
+do well enough for a husband, and she took care to say so to Giselle.
+
+"It is a fact," she told her, with all the self-confidence of large
+experience, "that men who are very fascinating always remain bachelors.
+That is probably why Monsieur de Cymier, Madame de Villegry's handsome
+cousin, does not think of marrying."
+
+She was mistaken.  The Comte de Cymier, a satellite who revolved around
+that star of beauty, Madame de Villegry, had been by degrees brought
+round by that lady herself to thoughts of matrimony.
+
+Madame de Villegry, notwithstanding her profuse use of henna and many
+cosmetics, which was always the first thing to strike those who saw her,
+prided herself on being uncompromised as to her moral character.  There
+are some women who, because they stop short of actual vice, consider
+themselves irreproachable.  They are willing, so to speak, to hang out
+the bush, but keep no tavern.  In former times an appearance of evil was
+avoided in order to cover evil deeds, but at present there are those who,
+under the cover of being only "fast," risk the appearance of evil.
+
+Madame de Villegry was what is sometimes called a "professional beauty."
+She devoted many hours daily to her toilette, she liked to have a crowd
+of admirers around her.  But when one of them became too troublesome, she
+got rid of him by persuading him to marry.  She had before this proposed
+several young girls to Gerard de Cymier, each one plainer and more
+insignificant than the others.  It was to tell his dear friend that the
+one she had last suggested was positively too ugly for him, that the
+young attache to an embassy had come down to the sea-side to visit her.
+
+The day after his arrival he was sitting on the shingle at Madame
+de Villegry's feet, both much amused by the grotesque spectacle presented
+by the bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness and
+deformity.  Of course Madame de Villegry did not bathe, being, as she
+said, too nervous.  She was sitting under a large parasol and enjoying
+her own superiority over those wretched, amphibious creatures who waddled
+on the sands before her, comparing Madame X to a seal and Mademoiselle Z
+to the skeleton of a cuttle-fish.
+
+"Well!  it was that kind of thing you wished me to marry," said M. de
+Cymier, in a tone of resentment.
+
+"But, my poor friend, what would you have?  All young girls are like
+that.  They improve when they are married."
+
+"If one could only be sure."
+
+"One is never sure of anything, especially anything relating to young
+girls.  One can not say that they do more than exist till they are
+married.  A husband has to make whatever he chooses out of them.  You are
+quite capable of making what you choose of your wife.  Take the risk,
+then."
+
+"I could educate her as to morals--though, I must say, I am not much used
+to that kind of instruction; but you will permit me to think that, as to
+person, I should at least wish to see a rough sketch of what I may expect
+in my wife before my marriage."
+
+At that moment, a girl who had been bathing came out of the water a few
+yards from them; the elegant outline of her slender figure, clad in a
+bathing-suit of white flannel, which clung to her closely, was thrown
+into strong relief by the clear blue background of a summer sky.
+
+"Tiens!--but she is pretty!" cried Gerard, breaking off what he was
+saying: "And she is the first pretty one I have seen!"
+
+Madame de Villegry took up her tortoiseshell opera-glasses, which were
+fastened to her waist, but already the young girl, over whose shoulders
+an attentive servant had flung a wrapper--a 'peignoir-eponge'--had run
+along the boardwalk and stopped before her, with a gay "Good-morning!"
+
+"Jacqueline!"  said Madame de Villegry.  "Well, my dear child, did you
+find the water pleasant?"
+
+"Delightful!"  said the young girl, giving a rapid glance at M. de
+Cymier, who had risen.
+
+He was looking at her with evident admiration, an admiration at which she
+felt much flattered.  She was closely wrapped in her soft, snow-white
+peignoir, bordered with red, above which rose her lovely neck and head.
+She was trying to catch, on the point of one little foot, one of her
+bathing shoes, which had slipped from her.  The foot which, when well
+shod, M. de Talbrun, through his eyeglass, had so much admired, was still
+prettier without shoe or stocking.  It was so perfectly formed, so white,
+with a little pink tinge here and there, and it was set upon so delicate
+an ankle!  M. de Cymier looked first at the foot, and then his glance
+passed upward over all the rest of the young figure, which could be seen
+clearly under the clinging folds of the wet drapery.  Her form could be
+discerned from head to foot, though nothing was uncovered but the pretty
+little arm which held together with a careless grace the folds of her
+raiment.  The eye of the experienced observer ran rapidly over the
+outline of her figure, till it reached the dark head and the brown hair,
+which rippled in little curls over her forehead.  Her complexion,
+slightly golden, was not protected by one of those absurd hats which many
+bathers place on top of oiled silk caps which fit them closely.  Neither
+was the precaution of oiled silk wanted to protect the thick and curling
+hair, now sprinkled with great drops that shone like pearls and diamonds.
+The water, instead of plastering her hair upon her temples, had made it
+more curly and more fleecy, as it hung over her dark eyebrows, which,
+very near together at the nose, gave to her eyes a peculiar, slightly
+oblique expression.  Her teeth were dazzling, and were displayed by the
+smile which parted her lips--lips which were, if anything, too red for
+her pale complexion.  She closed her eyelids now and then to shade her
+eyes from the too blinding sunlight.  Those eyes were not black, but that
+hazel which has golden streaks.  Though only half open, they had quickly
+taken in the fact that the young man sitting beside Madame de Villegry
+was very handsome.
+
+As she went on with a swift step to her bathing-house, she drew out two
+long pins from her back hair, shaking it and letting it fall down her
+back with a slightly impatient and imperious gesture; she wished,
+probably, that it might dry more quickly.
+
+"The devil!"  said M. de Cymier, watching her till she disappeared into
+the bathing-house.  "I never should have thought that it was all her own!
+There is nothing wanting in her.  That is a young creature it is pleasant
+to see."
+
+"Yes," said Madame de Villegry, quietly, "she will be very good-looking
+when she is eighteen."
+
+"Is she nearly eighteen?"
+
+"She is and she is not, for time passes so quickly.  A girl goes to sleep
+a child, and wakes up old enough to be married.  Would you like to be
+informed, without loss of time, as to her fortune?"
+
+"Oh!  I should not care much about her dot.  I look out first for other
+things."
+
+"I know, of course; but Jacqueline de Nailles comes of a very good
+family."
+
+"Is she the daughter of the deputy?"
+
+"Yes, his only daughter.  He has a pretty house in the Parc Monceau and
+a chateau of some importance in the Haute-Vienne."
+
+"Very good; but, I repeat, I am not mercenary.  Of course, if I should
+marry, I should like, for my wife's sake, to live as well as a married
+man as I have lived as a bachelor."
+
+"Which means that you would be satisfied with a fortune equal to your
+own.  I should have thought you might have asked more.  It is true that
+if you have been suddenly thunderstruck that may alter your calculations
+--for it was very sudden, was it not?  Venus rising from the sea!"
+
+"Please don't exaggerate!  But you are not so cruel, seeing you are
+always urging me to marry, as to wish me to take a wife who looks like a
+fright or a horror."
+
+"Heaven preserve me from any such wish!  I should be very glad if my
+little friend Jacqueline were destined to work your reformation."
+
+"I defy the most careful parent to find anything against me at this
+moment, unless it be a platonic devotion.  The youth of Mademoiselle de
+Nailles is an advantage, for I might indulge myself in that till we were
+married, and then I should settle down and leave Paris, where nothing
+keeps me but--"
+
+"But a foolish fancy," laughed Madame de Villegry.  "However, in return
+for your madrigal, accept the advice of a friend.  The Nailles seem to me
+to be prosperous, but everybody in society appears so, and one never
+knows what may happen any day.  You would not do amiss if, before you go
+on, you were to talk with Wermant, the 'agent de change', who has a
+considerable knowledge of the business affairs of Jacqueline's father.
+He could tell you about them better than I can."
+
+"Wermant is at Treport, is he not?  I thought I saw him--"
+
+"Yes, he is here till Monday.  You have twenty-four hours."
+
+"Do you really think I am in such a hurry?"
+
+"Will you take a bet that by this time to-morrow you will not know
+exactly the amount of her dot and the extent of her expectations?"
+
+"You would lose.  I have something else to think of--now and always."
+
+"What?"  she said, carelessly.
+
+"You have forbidden me ever to mention it."
+
+Silence ensued.  Then Madame de Villegry said, smiling:
+
+"I suppose you would like me to present you this evening to my friends
+the De Nailles?"
+
+And in fact they all met that evening at the Casino, and Jacqueline, in a
+gown of scarlet foulard, which would have been too trying for any other
+girl, seemed to M. de Cymier as pretty as she had been in her bathing-
+costume.  Her hair was not dressed high, but it was gathered loosely
+together and confined by a ribbon of the same color as her gown, and she
+wore a little sailor hat besides.  In this costume she had been called by
+M. de Talbrun the "Fra Diavolo of the Seas," and she never better
+supported that part, by liveliness and audacity, than she did that
+evening, when she made a conquest that was envied--wildly envied--by the
+three Demoiselles Wermant and the two Misses Sparks, for the handsome
+Gerard, after his first waltz with Madame de Villegry, asked no one to be
+his partner but Mademoiselle de Nailles.
+
+The girls whom he neglected had not even Fred to fall back upon, for
+Fred, the night before, had received orders to join his ship.  He had
+taken leave of Jacqueline with a pang in his heart which he could hardly
+hide, but to which no keen emotion on her part seemed to respond.
+However, at least, he was spared the unhappiness of seeing the star of
+De Cymier rising above the horizon.
+
+"If he could only see me," thought Jacqueline, waltzing in triumph with
+M. de Cymier.  "If he could only see me I should be avenged."
+
+But he was not Fred.  She was not giving him a thought.  It was the last
+flash of resentment and hatred that came to her in that moment of
+triumph, adding to it a touch of exquisite enjoyment.
+
+Thus she performed the obsequies of her first love!
+
+Not long after this M. de Nailles said to his wife:
+
+"Do you know, my dear, that our little Jacqueline is very much admired?
+Her success has been extraordinary.  It is not likely she will die an old
+maid."
+
+The Baronne assented rather reluctantly.
+
+"Wermant was speaking to me the other day," went on M. de Nailles.  "It
+seems that that young Count de Cymier, who is always hanging around you,
+by the way, has been making inquiries of him, in a manner that looks as
+if it had some meaning, as to what is our fortune, our position.  But
+really, such a match seems too good to be true."
+
+"Why so?"  said the Baronne.  "I know more about it than you do, from
+Blanche de Villegry.  She gave me to understand that her cousin was much
+struck by Jacqueline at first sight, and ever since she does nothing but
+talk to me of M. de Cymier--of his birth, his fortune, his abilities--
+the charming young fellow seems gifted with everything.  He could be
+Secretary of Legation, if he liked to quit Paris: In the meantime attache
+to an Embassy looks very well on a card.  Attache to the Ministry of the
+Foreign Affairs does not seem so good.  Jacqueline would be a countess,
+possibly an ambassadress.  What would you think of that!"
+
+Madame de Nailles, who understood policy much better than her husband,
+had suddenly become a convert to opportunism, and had made a change of
+base.  Not being able to devise a plan by which to suppress her young
+rival, she had begun to think that her best way to get rid of her would
+be by promoting her marriage.  The little girl was fast developing into a
+woman--a woman who would certainly not consent quietly to be set aside.
+Well, then, it would be best to dispose of her in so natural a way.  When
+Jacqueline's slender and graceful figure and the freshness of her bloom
+were no longer brought into close comparison with her own charms, she
+felt she should appear much younger, and should recover some of her
+prestige; people would be less likely to remark her increasing stoutness,
+or the red spots on her face, increased by the salt air which was so
+favorable to young girls' complexions.  Yes, Jacqueline must be married;
+that was the resolution to which Madame de Nailles had come after several
+nights of sleeplessness.  It was her fixed idea, replacing in her brain
+that other fixed idea which, willingly or unwillingly, she saw she must
+give up--the idea of keeping her stepdaughter in the shade.
+
+"Countess!  Ambassadress!"  repeated M. de Nailles, with rather a
+melancholy smile.  "You are going too fast, my dear Clotilde.  I don't
+doubt that Wermant gave the best possible account of our situation; but
+when it comes to saying what I could give her as a dot, I am very much
+afraid.  We should have, in that case, to fall back on Fred, for I have
+not told you everything.  This morning Madame d'Argy, who has done
+nothing but weep since her boy went away, and who, she says, never will
+get accustomed to the life of misery and anxiety she will lead as a
+sailor's mother, exclaimed, as she was talking to me: 'Ah! there is but
+one way of keeping him at Lizerolles, of having him live there as the
+D'Argys have lived before him, quietly, like a good landlord, and that
+would be to give him your daughter; with her he would be entirely
+satisfied.'"
+
+"Ah! so that is the reason why she asked whether Jacqueline might not
+stay with her when we go to Italy!  She wishes to court her by proxy.
+But I don't think she will succeed.  Monsieur de Cymier has the best
+chance."
+
+"Do you suppose the child suspects--"
+
+"That he admires her?  My dear friend, we have to do with a very sharp--
+sighted young person.  Nothing escapes the observation of Mademoiselle
+'votre fille'."
+
+And Madame de Nailles, in her turn, smiled somewhat bitterly.
+
+"Well," said Jacqueline's father, after a few moments' reflection, "it
+may be as well that she should weigh for and against a match before
+deciding.  She may spend several years that are difficult and dangerous
+trying to find out what she wants and to make up her mind."
+
+"Several years?"
+
+"Hang it!  You would not marry off Jacqueline at once?"
+
+"Bah! many a girl, practically not as old as she, is married at sixteen
+or seventeen."
+
+"Why!  I fancied you thought so differently!"
+
+"Our ways of thinking are sometimes altered by events, especially when
+they are founded upon sincere and disinterested affection."
+
+"Like that of good parents, such as we are," added M. de Nailles, ending
+her sentence with an expression of grateful emotion.
+
+For one moment the Baronne paled under this compliment.
+
+"What did you say to Madame d'Argy?"  she hastened to ask.
+
+"I said we must give the young fellow's beard time to grow."
+
+"Yes, that was right.  I prefer Monsieur de Cymier a hundred times over.
+Still, if nothing better offers--a bird in the hand, you know--"
+
+Madame de Nailles finished her sentence by a wave of her fan.
+
+"Oh! our bird in the hand is not to be despised.  A very handsome
+estate--"
+
+"Where Jacqueline would be bored to death.  I should rather see her
+radiant at some foreign court.  Let me manage it.  Let me bring her out.
+Give me carte blanche and let me have some society this winter."
+
+Madame de Nailles, whether she knew it or not--probably she did, for she
+had great skill in reading the thoughts of others--was acting precisely
+in accordance with the wishes or the will of Jacqueline, who, having
+found much enjoyment in the dances at the Casino, had made up her mind
+that she meant to come out into society before any of her young
+companions.
+
+"I shall not have to beg and implore her," she said to herself,
+anticipating the objections of her stepmother.  "I shall only have
+politely to let her suspect that such a thing may have occurred as having
+had a listener at a door.  I paid dearly enough for this hold over her.
+I have no scruple in using it."
+
+Madame de Nailles was not mistaken in her stepdaughter; she was very far
+advanced beyond her age, thanks to the cruel wrong that had been done her
+by the loss of her trust in her elders and her respect for them.  Her
+heart had had its past, though she was still hardly more than a child--
+a sad past, though its pain was being rapidly effaced.  She now thought
+about it only at intervals.  Time and circumstances were operating on her
+as they act upon us generally; only in her case more quickly than usual,
+which produced in her character and feelings phenomena that might have
+seemed curious to an observer.  She was something of a woman, something
+of a child, something of a philosopher.  At night, when she was dancing
+with Wermant, or Cymier, or even Talbrun, or on horseback, an exercise
+which all the Blues were wild about, she was an audacious flirt, a girl
+up to anything; and in the morning, at low tide, she might be seen, with
+her legs and feet bare, among the children, of whom there were many on
+the sands, digging ditches, making ramparts, constructing towers and
+fortifications in wet sand, herself as much amused as if she had been one
+of the babies themselves.  There was screaming and jumping, and rushing
+out of reach of the waves which came up ready to overthrow the most
+complicated labors of the little architects, rough romping of all kinds,
+enough to amaze and disconcert a lover.
+
+But no one could have guessed at the thoughts which, in the midst of all
+this fun and frolic, were passing through the too early ripened mind of
+Jacqueline.  She was thinking that many things to which we attach great
+value and importance in this world are as easily swept away as the sand
+barriers raised against the sea by childish hands; that everywhere there
+must be flux and reflux, that the beach the children had so dug up would
+soon become smooth as a mirror, ready for other little ones to dig it
+over again, tempting them to work, and yet discouraging their industry.
+Her heart, she thought, was like the sand, ready for new impressions.
+The elegant form of M. de Cymier slightly overshadowed it, distinct among
+other shadows more confused.
+
+And Jacqueline said to herself with a smile, exactly what her father and
+Madame de Nailles had said to each other:
+
+"Countess!--who knows?  Ambassadress!  Perhaps--some day--"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A PUZZLING CORRESPONDENCE
+
+"But I can not see any reason why we should not take Jacqueline with us
+to Italy.  She is just of an age to profit by it."
+
+These words were spoken by M. de Nailles after a long silence at the
+breakfast-table.  They startled his hearers like a bomb.
+
+Jacqueline waited to hear what would come next, fixing a keen look upon
+her stepmother.  Their eyes met like the flash of two swords.
+
+The eyes of the one said: "Now, let us hear what you will answer!"  while
+the other strove to maintain that calmness which comes to some people in
+a moment of danger.  The Baroness grew a little pale, and then said, in
+her softest tones:
+
+"You are quite right, 'mon ami', but Jacqueline, I think, prefers to
+stay."
+
+"I decidedly prefer to stay," said Jacqueline.
+
+Her adversary, much relieved by this response, could not repress a sigh.
+
+"It seems singular," said M. de Nailles.
+
+"What! that I prefer to pass a month or six weeks with Madame d'Argy?
+Besides, Giselle is going to be married during that time."
+
+"They might put it off until we come back, I should suppose."
+
+"Oh!  I don't think they would," cried the Baroness.  "Madame de Monredon
+is so selfish.  She was offended to think we should talk of going away on
+the eve of an event she considers so important.  Besides, she has so
+little regard for me that I should think her more likely to hasten the
+wedding-day rather than retard it, if it were only for the pleasure of
+giving us a lesson."
+
+"I am sorry.  I should have been glad to be, as she wished, one of
+Giselle's witnesses, but people don't take my position into
+consideration.  If I do not take advantage of the recess--"
+
+"Besides," interrupted Jacqueline, carelessly, "your journey must
+coincide with that of Monsieur Marien."
+
+She had the pleasure of seeing her stepmother again slightly change
+color.  Madame de Nailles was pouring out for herself a cup of tea with
+singular care and attention.
+
+"Of course," said M. de Nailles.  His daughter pitied him, and cried,
+with an increasing wish to annoy her stepmother: "Mamma, don't you see
+that your teapot has no tea in it?  Yes," she went on, "it must be
+delightful to travel in Italy in company with a great artist who would
+explain everything; but then one would be expected to visit all the
+picture-galleries, and I hate pictures, since--"
+
+She paused and again looked meaningly at her stepmother, whose soft blue
+eyes showed anguish of spirit, and seemed to say: "Oh, what a cruel hold
+she has upon me!"  Jacqueline continued, carelessly-- "Picture-galleries
+I don't care for--I like nature a hundred times better.  Some day I
+should like to take a journey to suit myself, my own journey!  Oh, papa,
+may I?  A journey on foot with you in the Tyrol?"
+
+Madame de Nailles was no great walker.
+
+"Both of us, just you and I alone, with our alpenstocks in our hands--it
+would be lovely!  But Italy and painters--"
+
+Here, with a boyish flourish of her hands, she seemed to send that
+classic land to Jericho!
+
+"Do promise me, papa!"
+
+"Before asking a reward, you must deserve it," said her father, severely,
+who saw something was wrong.
+
+During her stay at Lizerolles, which her perverseness, her resentment,
+and a repugnance founded on instincts of delicacy, had made her prefer to
+a journey to Italy, Jacqueline, having nothing better to do, took it into
+her head to write to her friend Fred.  The young man received three
+letters at three different ports in the Mediterranean and in the West
+Indies, whose names were long associated in his mind with delightful and
+cruel recollections.  When the first was handed to him with one from his
+mother, whose letters always awaited him at every stopping-place, the
+blood flew to his face, his heart beat violently, he could have cried
+aloud but for the necessity of self-command in the presence of his
+comrades, who had already remarked in whispers to each other, and with
+envy, on the pink envelope, which exhaled 'l'odor di femina'.  He hid his
+treasure quickly, and carried it to a spot where he could be alone; then
+he kissed the bold, pointed handwriting that he recognized at once,
+though never before had it written his address.  He kissed, too, more
+than once, the pink seal with a J on it, whose slender elegance reminded
+him of its owner.  Hardly did he dare to break the seal; then forgetting
+altogether, as we might be sure, his mother's letter, which he knew
+beforehand was full of good advice and expressions of affection, he
+eagerly read this, which he had not expected to receive:
+
+                              "LIZEROLLES, October, 5, 188-
+
+     "MY DEAR FRED:
+
+     "Your mother thinks you would be pleased to receive a letter from
+     me, and I hope you will be.  You need not answer this if you do not
+     care to do so.  You will notice, 'par parenthese', that I take this
+     opportunity of saying you and not thou to you.  It is easier to
+     change the familiar mode of address in writing than in speaking, and
+     when we meet again the habit will have become confirmed.  But, as I
+     write, it will require great attention, and I can not promise to
+     keep to it to the end.  Half an hour's chat with an old friend will
+     also help me to pass the time, which I own seems rather long, as it
+     is passed by your sweet, dear mother and myself at Lizerolles.  Oh,
+     if you were only here it would be different!  In the first place,
+     we should talk less of a certain Fred, which would be one great
+     advantage.  You must know that you are the subject of our discourse
+     from morning to night; we talk only of the dangers of the seas, the
+     future prospects of a seaman, and all the rest of it.  If the wind
+     is a little higher than usual, your mother begins to cry; she is
+     sure you are battling with a tempest.  If any fishing-boat is
+     wrecked, we talk of nothing but shipwrecks; and I am asked to join
+     in another novena, in addition to those with which we must have
+     already wearied Notre Dame de Treport.  Every evening we spread out
+     the map: 'See, Jacqueline, he must be here now--no, he is almost
+     there,' and lines of red ink are traced from one port to another,
+     and little crosses are made to show the places where we hope you
+     will get your letters--'Poor boy, poor, dear boy!' In short,
+     notwithstanding all the affectionate interest I take in you, this is
+     sometimes too much for me.  In fact, I think I must be very fond of
+     thee not to have grown positively to hate thee for all this fuss.
+     There!  In this last sentence, instead of saying you, I have said
+     thee!  That ought to gild the pill for you!
+
+     We do not go very frequently to visit Treport, except to invoke for
+     you the protection of Heaven, and I like it just as well, for since
+     the last fortnight in September, which was very rainy, the beach is
+     dismal--so different from what it was in the summer.  The town looks
+     gloomy under a cloudy sky with its blackened old brick houses!  We
+     are better off at Lizerolles, whose autumnal beauties you know so
+     well that I will say nothing about them. --Oh, Fred, how often I
+     regret that I am not a boy!  I could take your gun and go shooting
+     in the swamps, where there are clouds of ducks now.  I feel sure
+     that if you were in my place, you could kill time without killing
+     game; but I am at the end of my small resources when I have played a
+     little on the piano to amuse your mother and have read her the
+     'Gazette de France'.  In the evening we read a translation of some
+     English novel.  There are neighbors, of course, old fogies who stay
+     all the year round in Picardy--but, tell me, don't you find them
+     sometimes a little too respectable?  My greatest comfort is in your
+     dog, who loves me as much as if I were his master, though I can not
+     take him out shooting.  While I write he is lying on the hem of my
+     gown and makes a little noise, as much as to tell me that I recall
+     you to his remembrance.  Yet you are not to suppose that I am
+     suffering from ennui, or am ungrateful, nor above all must you
+     imagine that I have ceased to love your excellent mother with all my
+     heart.  I love her, on the contrary, more than ever since I passed
+     this winter through a great, great sorrow--a sorrow which is now
+     only a sad remembrance, but which has changed for me the face of
+     everything in this world.  Yes, since I have suffered myself, I
+     understand your mother.  I admire her, I love her more than ever.
+
+     How happy you are, my dear Fred, to have such a sweet mother,--
+     a real mother who never thinks about her face, or her figure, or her
+     age, but only of the success of her son; a dear little mother in a
+     plain black gown, and with pretty gray hair, who has the manners and
+     the toilette that just suit her, who somehow always seems to say:
+     'I care for nothing but that which affects my son.' Such mothers are
+     rare, believe me.  Those that I know, the mothers of my friends, are
+     for the most part trying to appear as young as their daughters--nay,
+     prettier, and of course more elegant.  When they have sons they make
+     them wear jackets a l'anglaise and turn-down collars, up to the age
+     when I wore short skirts.  Have you noticed that nowadays in Paris
+     there are only ladies who are young, or who are trying to make
+     themselves appear so?  Up to the last moment they powder and paint,
+     and try to make themselves different from what age has made them.
+     If their hair was black it grows blacker--if red, it is more red.
+     But there is no longer any gray hair in Paris--it is out of fashion.
+     That is the reason why I think your mother's pretty silver curls so
+     lovely and 'distingues'.  I kiss them every night for you, after I
+     have kissed them for myself.
+
+     "Have a good voyage, come back soon, and take care of yourself, dear
+     Fred."
+
+
+The young sailor read this letter over and over again.  The more he read
+it the more it puzzled him.  Most certainly he felt that Jacqueline gave
+him a great proof of confidence when she spoke to him of some mysterious
+unhappiness, an unhappiness of which it was evident her stepmother was
+the cause.  He could see that much; but he was infinitely far from
+suspecting the nature of the woes to which she alluded.  Poor Jacqueline!
+He pitied her without knowing what for, with a great outburst of
+sympathy, and an honest desire to do anything in the world to make her
+happy.  Was it really possible that she could have been enduring any
+grief that summer when she had seemed so madly gay, so ready for a little
+flirtation?  Young girls must be very skilful in concealing their inmost
+feelings!  When he was unhappy he had it out by himself, he took refuge
+in solitude, he wanted to be done with existence.  Everybody knew when
+anything went wrong with him.  Why could not Jacqueline have let him know
+more plainly what it was that troubled her, and why could she not have
+shown a little tenderness toward him, instead of assuming, even when she
+said the kindest things to him, her air of mockery?  And then, though she
+might pretend not to find Lizerolles stupid, he could see that she was
+bored there.  Yet why had she chosen to stay at Lizerolles rather than go
+to Italy?
+
+Alas!  how that little pink letter made him reflect and guess, and turn
+things over in his mind, and wish himself at the devil--that little pink
+letter which he carried day and night on his breast and made it crackle
+as it lay there, when he laid his hand on the satin folds so near his
+heart!  It had an odor of sweet violets which seemed to him to overpower
+the smell of pitch and of salt water, to fill the air, to perfume
+everything.
+
+"That young fellow has the instincts of a sailor," said his superior
+officers when they saw him standing in attitudes which they thought
+denoted observation, though with him it was only reverie.  He would stand
+with his eyes fixed upon some distant point, whence he fancied he could
+see emerging from the waves a small, brown, shining head, with long hair
+streaming behind, the head of a girl swimming, a girl he knew so well.
+
+"One can see that he takes an interest in nautical phenomena, that he is
+heart and soul in his profession, that he cares for nothing else.  Oh,
+he'll make a sailor!  We may be sure of that!"
+
+Fred sent his young friend and cousin, by way of reply, a big packet of
+manuscript, the leaves of which were of all sizes, over which he had
+poured forth torrents of poetry, amorous and descriptive, under the
+title:  At Sea.
+
+Never would he have dared to show her this if the ocean had not lain
+between them.  He was frightened when his packet had been sent.  His only
+comfort was in the thought that he had hypocritically asked Jacqueline
+for her literary opinion of his verses; but she could not fail, he
+thought, to understand.
+
+Long before an answer could have been expected, he got another letter,
+sky-blue this time, much longer than the first, giving him an account of
+Giselle's wedding.
+
+     "Your mother and I went together to Normandy, where the marriage was
+     to take place after the manner of old times, 'in the fashion of the
+     Middle Ages,' as our friends the Wermants said to me, who might
+     perhaps not have laughed at it had they been invited.  Madame de
+     Monredon is all for old customs, and she had made it a great point
+     that the wedding should not take place in Paris.  Had I been
+     Giselle, I should not have liked it.  I know nothing more elegant or
+     more solemn than the entrance of a bridal party into the Madeleine,
+     but we shall have to be content with Saint-Augustin.  Still, the
+     toilettes, as they pass up the aisle, even there, are very
+     effective, and the decoration of the tall, high altar is
+     magnificent.  Toc!  Toc!  First come the beadles with their
+     halberds, then the loud notes of the organ, then the wide doors are
+     thrown open, making a noise as they turn on their great hinges,
+     letting the noise of carriages outside be heard in the church; and
+     then comes the bride in a ray of sunshine.  I could wish for nothing
+     more.  A grand wedding in the country is much more quiet, but it is
+     old-fashioned.  In the little village church the guests were very
+     much crowded, and outside there was a great mob of country folk.
+     Carpets had been laid down over the dilapidated pavement, composed
+     principally of tombstones.  The rough walls were hung with scarlet.
+     All the clergy of the neighborhood were present.  A Monsignor--
+     related to the Talbruns--pronounced the nuptial benediction; his
+     address was a panegyric on the two families.  He gave us to
+     understand that if he did not go back quite as far as the Crusades,
+     it was only because time was wanting.
+
+     Madame de Monredon was all-glorious, of course.  She certainly
+     looked like an old vulture, in a pelisse of gray velvet, with a
+     chinchilla boa round her long, bare neck, and her big beak, with
+     marabouts overshadowing it, of the same color.  Monsieur de Talbrun
+     --well!  Monsieur de Talbrun was very bald, as bald as he could be.
+     To make up for the want of hair on his head, he has plenty of it on
+     his hands.  It is horrid, and it makes him look like an animal.  You
+     have no idea how queer he looked when he sat down, with his big,
+     pink head just peeping over the back of the crimson velvet chair,
+     which was, however, almost as tall as he is.  He is short, you may
+     remember.  As to our poor Giselle, the prettiest persons sometimes
+     look badly as brides, and those who are not pretty look ugly.  Do
+     you recollect that picture--by Velasquez, is it not? of a fair
+     little Infanta stiffly swathed in cloth of gold, as becomes her
+     dignity, and looking crushed by it?  Giselle's gown was of point
+     d'Alencon, old family lace as yellow as ancient parchment, but of
+     inestimable value.  Her long corsage, made in the fashion of Anne of
+     Austria, looked on her like a cuirass, and she dragged after her,
+     somewhat awkwardly, a very long train, which impeded her movement as
+     she walked.  A lace veil, as hereditary and time-worn as the gown,
+     but which had been worn by all the Monredons at their weddings, the
+     present dowager's included, hid the pretty, light hair of our dear
+     little friend, and was supported by a sort of heraldic comb and some
+     orange-flowers; in short, you can not imagine anything more heavy or
+     more ugly.  Poor Giselle, loaded down with it, had red eyes, a face
+     of misery, and the air of a martyr.  For all this her grandmother
+     scolded her sharply, which of course did not mend matters.  'Du
+     reste', she seemed absorbed in prayer or thought during the
+     ceremony, in which I took up the offerings, by the way, with a young
+     lieutenant of dragoons just out of the military school at Saint Cyr:
+     a uniform always looks well on such occasions.  Nor was Monsieur de
+     Talbrun one of those lukewarm Christians who hear mass with their
+     arms crossed and their noses in the air.  He pulled a jewelled
+     prayerbook out of his pocket, which Giselle had given him.  Speaking
+     of presents, those he gave her were superb: pearls as big as
+     hazelnuts, a ruby heart that was a marvel, a diamond crescent that I
+     am afraid she will never wear with such an air as it deserves, and
+     two strings of diamonds 'en riviere', which I should suppose she
+     would have reset, for rivieres are no longer in fashion.  The stones
+     are enormous.
+
+     "But, poor dear!  she could care little for such things.  All she
+     wanted was to get back as quickly as she could into her usual
+     clothes.  She said to me, again and again: 'Pray God for me that I
+     may be a good wife.  I am so afraid I may not be.  To belong to
+     Monsieur de Talbrun in this world, and in the next; to give up
+     everything for him, seems so extraordinary.  Indeed, I think I
+     hardly knew what I was promising.'  I felt sorry for her; I kissed
+     her.  I was ready to cry myself, and poor Giselle went on: 'If you
+     knew, dear, how I love you!  how I love all my friends!  really to
+     love, people must have been brought up together--must have always
+     known each other.'  I don't think she was right, but everybody has
+     his or her ideas about such things.  I tried, by way of consoling
+     her, to draw her attention to the quantities of presents she had
+     received.  They were displayed on several tables in the smaller
+     drawing-room, but her grandmother would not let them put the name of
+     the giver upon each, as is the present custom.  She said that it
+     humiliated those who had not been able to make gifts as expensive as
+     others.  She is right, when one comes to think of it.  Nor would she
+     let the trousseau be displayed; she did not think it proper, but I
+     saw enough to know that there were marvels in linen, muslin, silks,
+     and surahs, covered all over with lace.  One could see that the
+     great mantua-maker had not consulted the grandmother, who says that
+     women of distinction in her day did not wear paltry trimmings.
+
+     "Dinner was served under a tent for all the village people during
+     the two mortal hours we had to spend over a repast, in which Madame
+     de Monredon's cook excelled himself.  Then came complimentary
+     addresses in the old-fashioned style, composed by the village
+     schoolmaster who, for a wonder, knew what he was about; groups of
+     village children, boys and girls, came bringing their offerings,
+     followed by pet lambs decked with ribbons; it was all in the style
+     of the days of Madame de Genlis.  While we danced in the salons
+     there was dancing in the barn, which had been decorated for the
+     occasion.  In short; lords and ladies and laborers all seemed to
+     enjoy themselves, or made believe they did.  The Parisian gentlemen
+     who danced were not very numerous.  There were a few friends of
+     Monsieur de Talbrun's, however--among them, a Monsieur de Cymier,
+     whom possibly you remember having seen last summer at Treport; he
+     led the cotillon divinely.  The bride and bridegroom drove away
+     during the evening, as they do in England, to their own house, which
+     is not far off.  Monsieur de Talbrun's horses--a magnificent pair,
+     harnessed to a new 'caleche'--carried off Psyche, as an old
+     gentleman in gold spectacles said near me.  He was a pretentious old
+     personage, who made a speech at table, very inappropriate and much
+     applauded.  Poor Giselle!  I have not seen her since, but she has
+     written me one of those little notes which, when she was in the
+     convent, she used to sign Enfant de Marie.  It begged me again to
+     pray earnestly for her that she might not fail in the fulfilment of
+     her new duties.  It seems hard, does it not?  Let us hope that
+     Monsieur de Talbrun, on his part, may not find that his new life
+     rather wearies him!  Do you know what should have been Giselle's
+     fate--since she has a mania about people being thoroughly acquainted
+     before marriage?  What would two or three years more or less have
+     mattered?  She would have made an admirable wife for a sailor; she
+     would have spent the months of your absence kneeling before the
+     altar; she would have multiplied the lamentations and the
+     tendernesses of your excellent mother.  I have been thinking this
+     ever since the wedding-day--a very sad day, after all.
+
+     "But how I have let my pen run on.  I shall have to put on two
+     stamps, notwithstanding my thin paper.  But then you have plenty of
+     time to read on board-ship, and this account may amuse you.  Make
+     haste and thank me for it.
+                                   "Your old friend,
+                                             "JACQUELINE."
+
+Amuse him!  How could he be amused by so great an insult?  What!  thank
+her for giving him over even in thought to Giselle or to anybody?  Oh,
+how wicked, how ungrateful, how unworthy!
+
+The six pages of foreign-post paper were crumpled up by his angry
+fingers.  Fred tore them with his teeth, and finally made them into a
+ball which he flung into the sea, hating himself for having been so
+foolish as to let himself be caught by the first lines, as a foolish fish
+snaps at the bait, when, apropos to the church in which she would like to
+be married, she had added "But we should have to be content with Saint-
+Augustin."
+
+Those words had delighted him as if they had really been meant for
+himself and Jacqueline.  This promise for the future, that seemed to
+escape involuntarily from her pen, had made him find all the rest of her
+letter piquant and amusing.  As he read, his mind had reverted to that
+little phrase which he now found he had interpreted wrongly.  What a
+fall!  How his hopes now crumbled under his feet!  She must have done it
+on purpose--but no, he need not blacken her!  She had written without
+thought, without purpose, in high spirits; she wanted to be witty, to be
+droll, to write gossip without any reference to him to whom her letter
+was addressed.  That we who some day would make a triumphal entry into
+St. Augustin would be herself and some other man--some man with whom her
+acquaintance had been short, since she did not seem to feel in that
+matter like Giselle.  Some one she did not yet know?  Was that sure?  She
+might know her future husband already, even now she might have made her
+choice--Marcel d'Etaples, perhaps, who looked so well in uniform, or that
+M. de Cymier, who led the cotillon so divinely.  Yes!  No doubt it was
+he--the last-comer.  And once more Fred suffered all the pangs of
+jealousy.  It seemed to him that in his loneliness, between sky and sea,
+those pangs were more acute than he had ever known them.  His comrades
+teased him about his melancholy looks, and made him the butt of all their
+jokes in the cockpit.  He resolved, however, to get over it, and at the
+next port they put into, Jacqueline's letter was the cause of his
+entering for the first time some discreditable scenes of dissipation.
+
+At Bermuda he received another letter, dated from Paris, where Jacqueline
+had rejoined her parents, who had returned from Italy.  She sent him a
+commission.  Would he buy her a riding-whip?  Bermuda was renowned for
+its horsewhips, and her father had decided that she must go regularly to
+the riding-school.  They seemed anxious now to give her, as preliminary
+to her introduction into society, not only such pleasures as horseback
+exercise, but intellectual enjoyment also.  She had been taken to the
+Institute to hear M. Legouve, and what was better still, in December her
+stepmother would give a little party every fortnight and would let her
+sit up till eleven o'clock.  She was also to be taken to make some calls.
+In short, she felt herself rising in importance, but the first thing that
+had made her feel so was Fred's choice of her to be his literary
+confidant.  She was greatly obliged to him, and did not know how she
+could better prove to him that she was worthy of so great an honor than
+by telling him quite frankly just what she thought of his verses.  They
+were very, very pretty.  He had talent--great talent.  Only, as in
+attending the classes of M. Regis she had acquired some little knowledge
+of the laws of versification, she would like to warn him against
+impairing a thought for the benefit of a rhyme, and she pointed out
+several such places in his compositions, ending thus:
+
+"Bravo!  for sunsets, for twilights, for moonshine, for deep silence, for
+starry nights, and silvery seas--in such things you excel; one feels as
+if one were there, and one envies you the fairy scenes of ocean.  But, I
+implore you, be not sentimental.  That is the feeble part of your poetry,
+to my thinking, and spoils the rest.  By the way, I should like to ask
+you whose are those soft eyes, that silky hair, that radiant smile, and
+all that assortment of amber, jet, and coral occurring so often in your
+visions?  Is she--or rather, are they--black, yellow, green, or tattooed,
+for, of course, you have met everywhere beauties of all colors?  Several
+times when it appeared as if the lady of your dreams were white, I
+fancied you were drawing a portrait of Isabelle Ray.  All the girls, your
+old friends, to whom I have shown At Sea, send you their compliments, to
+which I join my own.  Each of them will beg you to write her a sonnet;
+but first of all, in virtue of our ancient friendship, I want one myself.
+
+                                                  "JACQUELINE."
+
+
+So!  she had shown to others what was meant for her alone; what
+profanation!  And what was more abominable, she had not recognized that
+he was speaking of herself.  Ah!  there was nothing to be done now but to
+forget her.  Fred tried to do so conscientiously during all his cruise in
+the Atlantic, but the moment he got ashore and had seen Jacqueline, he
+fell again a victim to her charms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+BEAUTY AT THE FAIR
+
+She was more beautiful than ever, and her first exclamation on seeing him
+was intended to be flattering: "Ah!  Fred, how much you have improved!
+But what a change!  What an extraordinary change!  Why, look at him!  He
+is still himself, but who would have thought it was Fred!"
+
+He was not disconcerted, for he had acquired aplomb in his journeys round
+the globe, but he gave her a glance of sad reproach, while Madame de
+Nailles said, quietly:
+
+"Yes, really--How are you, Fred?  The tan on your face is very becoming
+to you.  You have broadened at the shoulders, and are now a man--
+something more than a man, an experienced sailor, almost an old seadog."
+
+And she laughed, but only softly, because a frank laugh would have shown
+little wrinkles under her eyes and above her cheeks, which were getting
+too large.
+
+Her toilette, which was youthful, yet very carefully adapted to her
+person, showed that she was by no means as yet "laid on the shelf," as
+Raoul Wermant elegantly said of her.  She stood up, leaning over a table
+covered with toys, which it was her duty to sell at the highest price
+possible, for the place of a meeting so full of emotions for Fred was a
+charity bazaar.
+
+The moment he arrived in Paris the young officer had been, so to speak,
+seized by the collar.  He had found a great glazed card, bidding him to
+attend this fair, in a fashionable quarter, and forthwith he had
+forgotten his resolution of not going near the Nailles for a long time.
+
+"This is not the same thing," he said to himself.  "One must not let
+one's self be supposed to be stingy."  So with these thoughts he went to
+the bazaar, very glad in his secret heart to have an excuse for breaking
+his resolution.
+
+The fair was for the benefit of sufferers from a fire--somewhere or
+other.  In our day multitudes of people fall victims to all kinds of
+dreadful disasters, explosions of boilers, explosions of fire-damp, of
+everything that can explode, for the agents of destruction seem to be in
+a state of unnatural excitement as well as human beings.  Never before,
+perhaps, have inanimate things seemed so much in accordance with the
+spirit of the times.  Fred found a superb placard, the work of Cheret,
+a pathetic scene in a mine, banners streaming in the air, with the words
+'Bazar de Charite' in gold letters on a red ground, and the courtyard of
+the mansion where the fair was held filled with more carriages than one
+sees at a fashionable wedding.  In the vestibule many footmen were in
+attendance, the chasseurs of an Austrian ambassador, the great hulking
+fellows of the English embassy, the gray-liveried servants of old
+Rozenkranz, with their powdered heads, the negro man belonging to Madame
+Azucazillo, etc., etc.  At each arrival there was a frou-frou of satin
+and lace, and inside the sales room was a hubbub like the noise in an
+aviary.  Fred, finding himself at once in the full stream of Parisian
+life, but for the moment not yet part of it, indulged in some of those
+philosophic reflections to which he had been addicted on shipboard.
+
+Each of the tables showed something of the tastes, the character, the
+peculiarities of the lady who had it in charge.  Madame Sterny, who had
+the most beautiful hands in the world, had undertaken to sell gloves,
+being sure that the gentlemen would be eager to buy if she would only
+consent to try them on; Madame de Louisgrif, the 'chanoiness', whose
+extreme emaciation was not perceived under a sort of ecclesiastical cape,
+had an assortment of embroideries and objects of devotion, intended only
+for ladies--and indeed for only the most serious among them; for the
+table that held umbrellas, parasols and canes suited to all ages and both
+sexes, a good, upright little lady had been chosen.  Her only thought was
+how much money she could make by her sales.  Madame Strahlberg, the
+oldest of the Odinskas, obviously expected to sell only to gentlemen; her
+table held pyramids of cigars and cigarettes, but nothing else was in the
+corner where she presided, supple and frail, not handsome, but far more
+dangerous than if she had been, with her unfathomable way of looking at
+you with her light eyes set deep under her eyebrows, eyes that she kept
+half closed, but which were yet so keen, and the cruel smile that showed
+her little sharp teeth.  Her dress was of black grenadine embroidered
+with silver.  She wore half mourning as a sort of announcement that she
+was a widow, in hopes that this might put a stop to any wicked gossip
+which should assert that Count Strahlberg was still living, having got a
+divorce and been very glad to get it.  Yet people talked about her, but
+hardly knew what to bring against her, because, though anything might be
+suspected, nothing was known.  She was received and even sought after in
+the best society, on account of her wonderful talents, which she employed
+in a manner as perverse as everything else about her, but which led some
+people to call her the 'Judic des salons'.  Wanda Strahlberg was now
+holding between her lips, which were artificially red, in contrast to the
+greenish paleness of her face, which caused others to call her a vampire,
+one of the cigarettes she had for sale.  With one hand, she was playing,
+graceful as a cat, with her last package of regalias, tied with green
+ribbon, which, when offered to the highest bidder, brought an enormous
+sum.  Her sister Colette was selling flowers, like several other young
+girls, but while for the most part these waited on their customers in
+silence, she was full of lively talk, and as unblushing in her eagerness
+to sell as a 'bouquetiere' by profession.  She had grown dangerously
+pretty.  Fred was dazzled when she wanted to fasten a rose into his
+buttonhole, and then, as he paid for it, gave him another, saying: "And
+here is another thrown in for old acquaintance' sake."
+
+"Charity seems to cover many things," thought the young man as he
+withdrew from her smiles and her glances, but yet he had seen nothing so
+attractive among the black, yellow, green or tattooed ladies about whom
+Jacqueline had been pleased to tease him.
+
+"Fred!"
+
+It was Jacqueline's voice that arrested him.  It was sharp and almost
+angry.  She, too, was selling flowers, while at the same time she was
+helping Madame de Nailles with her toys; but she was selling with that
+decorum and graceful reserve which custom prescribes for young girls.
+"Fred, I do hope you will wear no roses but mine.  Those you have are
+frightful.  They make you look.  like a village bridegroom.  Take out
+those things; come!  Here is a pretty boutonniere, and I will fasten it
+much better in your buttonhole--let me."
+
+In vain did he try to seem cold to her; his heart thawed in spite of
+himself.  She held him so charmingly by the lapel of his coat, touching
+his cheek with the tip end of an aigrette which set so charmingly on the
+top of the most becoming of fur caps which she wore.  Her hair was turned
+up now, showing her beautiful neck, and he could see little rebellious
+hairs curling at their own will over her pure, soft skin, while she,
+bending forward, was engaged in his service.  He admired, too, her
+slender waist, only recently subjected to the restraint of a corset.  He
+forgave her on the spot.  At this moment a man with brown hair, tall,
+elegant, and with his moustache turned up at the ends, after the old
+fashion of the Valois, revived recently, came hurriedly up to the table
+of Madame de Nailles.  Fred felt that that inimitable moustache reduced
+his not yet abundant beard to nothing.
+
+"Mademoiselle Jacqueline," said the newcomer, "Madame de Villegry has
+sent me to beg you to help her at the buffet.  She can not keep pace with
+her customers, and is asking for volunteers."
+
+All this was uttered with a familiar assurance which greatly shocked the
+young naval man.
+
+"You permit me, Madame?"
+
+The Baroness bowed with a smile, which said, had he chosen to interpret
+it, "I give you permission to carry her off now--and forever, if you wish
+it."
+
+At that moment she was placing in the half-unwilling arms of Hubert
+Marien an enormous rubber balloon and a jumping-jack, in return for five
+Louis which he had laid humbly on her table.  But Jacqueline had not
+waited for her stepmother's permission; she let herself be borne off
+radiant on the arm of the important personage who had come for her, while
+Colette, who perhaps had remarked the substitution for her two roses,
+whispered in Fred's ear, in atone of great significance "Monsieur de
+Cymier."
+
+The poor fellow started, like a man suddenly awakened from a happy dream
+to face the most unwelcome of realities.  Impelled by that natural
+longing, that we all have, to know the worst, he went toward the buffet,
+affecting a calmness which it cost him a great effort to maintain.  As he
+went along he mechanically gave money to each of the ladies whom he knew,
+moving off without waiting for their thanks or stopping to choose
+anything from their tables.  He seemed to feel the floor rock under his
+feet, as if he had been walking the deck of a vessel.  At last he reached
+a recess decorated with palms, where, in a robe worthy of 'Peau d'Ane'
+in the story, and absolutely a novelty in the world of fashions robe all
+embroidered with gold and rubies, which glittered with every movement
+made by the wearer--Madame de Villegry was pouring out Russian tea and
+Spanish chocolate and Turkish coffee, while all kinds of deceitful
+promises of favor shone in her eyes, which wore a certain tenderness
+expressive of her interest in charity.  A party of young nymphs formed
+the court of this fair goddess, doing their best to lend her their aid.
+Jacqueline was one of them, and, at the moment Fred approached, she was
+offering, with the tips of her fingers, a glass of champagne to M. de
+Cymier, who at the same time was eagerly trying to persuade her to
+believe something, about which she was gayly laughing, while she shook
+her head.  Poor Fred, that he might hear, and suffer, drank two mouthfuls
+of sherry which he could hardly swallow.
+
+"One who was really charitable would not hesitate," said M. de Cymier,
+"especially when every separate hair would be paid for if you chose.
+Just one little curl--for the sake of the poor.  It is very often done:
+anything is allowable for the sake of the poor."
+
+"Maybe it is because, as you say, that it is very often done that I shall
+not do it," said Jacqueline, still laughing.  "I have made up my mind
+never to do what others have done before me."
+
+"Well, we shall see," said M. de Cymier, pretending to threaten her.
+
+And her young head was thrown back in a burst of inextinguishable
+laughter.
+
+Fred fled, that he might not be tempted to make a disturbance.  When he
+found himself again in the street, he asked himself where he should go.
+His anger choked him; he felt he could not keep his resentment to
+himself, and yet, however angry he might be with Jacqueline, he would
+have been unwilling to hear his mother give utterance to the very
+sentiments that he was feeling, or to harsh judgments, of which he
+preferred to keep the monopoly.  It came into his mind that he would pay
+a little visit to Giselle, who, of all the people he knew, was the least
+likely to provoke a quarrel.  He had heard that Madame de Talbrun did not
+go out, being confined to her sofa by much suffering, which, it might be
+hoped, would soon come to an end; and the certainty that he should find
+her if he called at once decided him.  Since he had been in Paris he had
+done nothing but leave cards.  This time, however, he was sure that the
+lady upon whom he called would be at home.  He was taken at once into the
+young wife's boudoir, where he found her very feeble, lying back upon her
+cushions, alone, and working at some little bits of baby-clothes.  He was
+not slow to perceive that she was very glad to see him.  She flushed with
+pleasure as he came into the room, and, dropping her sewing, held out to
+him two little, thin hands, white as wax.  "Take that footstool--sit down
+there--what a great, great pleasure it is to see you back again!"  She
+was more expansive than she had been formerly; she had gained a certain
+ease which comes from intercourse with the world, but how delicate she
+seemed!  Fred for a moment looked at her in silence, she seemed so
+changed as she lay there in a loose robe of pale blue cashmere, whose
+train drawn over her feet made her look tall as it stretched to the end
+of the gilded couch, round which Giselle had collected all the little
+things required by an invalid--bottles, boxes, work-bag, dressing-case,
+and writing materials.
+
+"You see," she said, with her soft smile, "I have plenty to occupy me,
+and I venture to be proud of my work and to think I am creating marvels."
+
+As she spoke she turned round on her closed hand a cap that seemed
+microscopic to Fred.
+
+"What!"  he cried, "do you expect him to be small enough to wear that!"
+
+"Him! you said him; and I am sure you will be right.  I know it will be a
+boy," replied Giselle, eagerly, her fair face brightened by these words.
+"I have some that are still smaller.  Look!" and she lifted up a pile of
+things trimmed with ribbons and embroidery.  "See; these are the first!
+Ah!  I lie here and fancy how he will look when he has them on.  He will
+be sweet enough to eat.  Only his papa wants us to give him a name that I
+think is too long for him, because it has always been in the family--
+Enguerrand."
+
+"His name will be longer than himself, I should say, judging by the
+dimensions of this cap," said Fred, trying to laugh.
+
+"Bah!"  replied Giselle, gayly, "but we can get over it by calling him
+Gue-gue or Ra-ra.  What do you think?  The difficulty is that names of
+that kind are apt to stick to a boy for fifty years, and then they seem
+ridiculous.  Now a pretty abbreviation like Fred is another matter.  But
+I forget they have brought up my chocolate.  Please ring, and let them
+bring you a cup.  We will take our luncheon together, as we used to do."
+
+"Thank you, I have no appetite.  I have just come from a certain buffet
+where I lost it all."
+
+"Oh!  I suppose you have been to the Bazaar--the famous Charity Fair!
+You must have made a sensation there on your return, for I am told that
+the gentlemen who are expected to spend the most are likely to send their
+money, and not to show themselves.  There are many complaints of it."
+
+"There were plenty of men round certain persons," replied Fred, dryly.
+"Madame de Villegry's table was literally besieged."
+
+"Really!  What, hers!  You surprise me!  So it was the good things she
+gave you that make you despise my poor chocolate," said Giselle, rising
+on her elbow, to receive the smoking cup that a servant brought her on a
+little silver salver.
+
+"I didn't take much at her table," said Fred, ready to enter on his
+grievances.  "If you wish to know the reason why, I was too indignant to
+eat or drink."
+
+"Indignant?"
+
+"Yes, the word is not at all too strong.  When one has passed whole
+months away from what is unwholesome and artificial, such things as make
+up life in Paris, one becomes a little like Alceste, Moliere's
+misanthrope, when one gets back to them.  It is ridiculous at my age, and
+yet if I were to tell you--"
+
+"What?--you puzzle me.  What can there be that is unwholesome in selling
+things for the poor?"
+
+"The poor!  A pretty pretext!  Was it to benefit the poor that that
+odious Countess Strahlberg made all those disreputable grimaces?  I have
+seen kermesses got up by actresses, and, upon my word, they were good
+form in comparison."
+
+"Oh!  Countess Strahlberg!  People have heard about her doings until they
+are tired of them," said Giselle, with that air of knowing everything
+assumed by a young wife whose husband has told her all the current
+scandals, as a sort of initiation.
+
+"And her sister seems likely to be as bad as herself before long."
+
+"Poor Colette!  She has been so badly brought up.  It is not her fault."
+
+"But there's Jacqueline," cried Fred, in a sudden outburst, and already
+feeling better because he could mention her name.
+
+"Allons, donc!  You don't mean to say anything against Jacqueline?"
+cried Giselle, clasping her hands with an air of astonishment.  "What can
+she have done to scandalize you--poor little dear?"
+
+Fred paused for half a minute, then he drew the stool in the form of an
+X, on which he was sitting, a little nearer to Giselle's sofa, and,
+lowering his voice, told her how Jacqueline had acted under his very
+eyes.  As he went on, watching as he spoke the effect his words produced
+upon Giselle, who listened as if slightly amused by his indignation, the
+case seemed not nearly so bad as he had supposed, and a delicious sense
+of relief crept over him when she to whom he told his wrongs after
+hearing him quietly to the end, said, smiling:
+
+"And what then?  There is no great harm in all that.  Would you have had
+her refuse to go with the gentleman Madame de Villegry had sent to fetch
+her?  And why, may I ask, should she not have done her best to help by
+pouring out champagne?  An air put on to please is indispensable to a
+woman, if she wishes to sell anything.  Good Heavens!  I don't approve
+any more than you do of all these worldly forms of charity, but this kind
+of thing is considered right; it has come into fashion.  Jacqueline had
+the permission of her parents, and I really can't see any good reason why
+you should complain of her.  Unless--why not tell me the whole truth,
+Fred?  I know it--don't we always know what concerns the people that we
+care for?  And I might possibly some day be of use to you.  Say!  don't
+you think you are--a little bit jealous?"
+
+Less encouragement than this would have sufficed to make him open his
+heart to Giselle.  He was delighted that some woman was willing he should
+confide in her.  And what was more, he was glad to have it proved that he
+had been all wrong.  A quarter of an hour later Giselle had comforted
+him, happy herself that it had been in her power to undertake a task of
+consolation, a work in which, with sweet humility, she felt herself at
+ease.  On the great stage of life she knew now she should never play any
+important part, any that would bring her greatly into view.  But she felt
+that she was made to be a confidant, one of those perfect confidants who
+never attempt to interfere rashly with the course of events, but who wait
+upon the ways of Providence, removing stones, and briers and thorns, and
+making everything turn out for the best in the end.  Jacqueline, she
+said, was so young!  A little wild, perhaps, but what a treasure!  She
+was all heart!  She would need a husband worthy of her, such a man as
+Fred.  Madame d'Argy, she knew, had already said something on the subject
+to her father.  But it would have to be the Baroness that Fred must bring
+over to their views; the Baroness was acquiring more and more influence
+over her husband, who seemed to be growing older every day.  M. de
+Nailles had evidently much, very much upon his mind.  It was said in
+business circles that he had for some time past been given to
+speculation.  Oscar said so.  If that were the case, many of Jacqueline's
+suitors might withdraw.  Not all men were so disinterested as Fred.
+
+"Oh!  As to her dot--what do I care for her dot?"  cried the young man.
+"I have enough for two, if she would only be satisfied to live quietly at
+Lizerolles!"
+
+"Yes," said the judicious little matron, nodding her head, "but who would
+like to marry a midshipman?  Make haste and be a lieutenant, or an
+ensign."
+
+She smiled at herself for having made the reward depend upon exertion,
+with a sort of maternal instinct.  It was the same instinct that would
+lead her in the future to promise Enguerrand a sugar-plum if he said his
+lesson.  "Nobody will steal your Jacqueline till you are ready to carry
+her off.  Besides, if there were any danger I could give you timely
+warning."
+
+"Ah!  Giselle, if she only had your kind heart--your good sense."
+
+"Do you think I am better and more reasonable than other people?  In what
+way?  I have done as so many other girls do; I have married without
+knowing well what I was doing."
+
+She stopped short, fearing she might have said too much, and indeed Fred
+looked at her anxiously.
+
+"You don't regret it, do you?"
+
+"You must ask Monsieur de Talbrun if he regrets it," she said, with a
+laugh.  "It must be hard on him to have a sick wife, who knows little of
+what is passing outside of her own chamber, who is living on her reserve
+fund of resources--a very poor little reserve fund it is, too!"
+
+Then, as if she thought that Fred had been with her long enough, she
+said: "I would ask you to stay and see Monsieur de Talbrun, but he won't
+be in, he dines at his club.  He is going to see a new play tonight which
+they say promises to be very good."
+
+"What!  Will he leave you alone all the evening?"
+
+"Oh!  I am very glad he should find amusement.  Just think how long it is
+that I have been pinned down here!  Poor Oscar!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+GISELLE'S CONSOLATION
+
+The arrival of the expected Enguerrand hindered Giselle from pleading
+Fred's cause as soon as she could have wished.  Her life for twenty-four
+hours was in great danger, and when the crisis was past, which M. de
+Talbrun treated very indifferently, as a matter of course, her first cry
+was "My baby!"  uttered in a tone of tender eagerness such as had never
+been heard from her lips before.
+
+The nurse brought him.  He lay asleep swathed in his swaddling clothes
+like a mummy in its wrappings, a motionless, mysterious being, but he
+seemed to his mother beautiful--more beautiful than anything she had seen
+in those vague visions of happiness she had indulged in at the convent,
+which were never to be realized.  She kissed his little purple face, his
+closed eyelids, his puckered mouth, with a sort of respectful awe.  She
+was forbidden to fatigue herself.  The wet-nurse, who had been brought
+from Picardy, drew near with her peasant cap trimmed with long blue
+streamers; her big, experienced hands took the baby from his mother, she
+turned him over on her lap, she patted him, she laughed at him.  And the
+mother-happiness that had lighted up Giselle's pale face died away.
+
+"What right," she thought, "has that woman to my child?"  She envied the
+horrid creature, coarse and stout, with her tanned face, her bovine
+features, her shapeless figure, who seemed as if Nature had predestined
+her to give milk and nothing more.  Giselle would so gladly have been in
+her place!  Why wouldn't they permit her to nurse her baby?
+
+M. de Talbrun said in answer to this question:
+
+"It is never done among people in our position.  You have no idea, of all
+it would entail on you--what slavery, what fatigue!  And most probably
+you would not have had milk enough."
+
+"Oh!  who can tell?  I am his mother!  And when this woman goes he will
+have to have English nurses, and when he is older he will have to go to
+school.  When shall I have him to myself?"
+
+And she began to cry.
+
+"Come, come!"  said M. de Talbrun, much astonished, "all this fuss about
+that frightful little monkey!"
+
+Giselle looked at him almost as much astonished as he had been at her.
+Love, with its jealousy, its transports, its anguish, its delights had
+for the first time come to her--the love that she could not feel for her
+husband awoke in her for her son.  She was ennobled--she was transfigured
+by a sense of her maternity; it did for her what marriage does for some
+women--it seemed as if a sudden radiance surrounded her.
+
+When she raised her infant in her arms, to show him to those who came to
+see her, she always seemed like a most chaste and touching representation
+of the Virgin Mother.  She would say, as she exhibited him: "Is he not
+superb?"  Every one said: "Yes, indeed!"  out of politeness, but, on
+leaving the mother's presence, would generally remark: "He is Monsieur de
+Talbrun in baby-clothes: the likeness is perfectly horrible!"
+
+The only visitor who made no secret of this impression was Jacqueline,
+who came to see her cousin as soon as she was permitted--that is, as soon
+as her friend was able to sit up and be prettily dressed, as became the
+mother of such a little gentleman as the heir of all the Talbruns.  When
+Jacqueline saw the little creature half-smothered in the lace that
+trimmed his pillows, she burst out laughing, though it was in the
+presence of his mother.
+
+"Oh, mon Dieu!"  she cried, "how ugly!  I never should have supposed we
+could have been as ugly as that!  Why, his face is all the colors of the
+rainbow; who would have imagined it?  And he crumples up his little face
+like those things in gutta-percha.  My poor Giselle, how can you bear to
+show him!  I never, never could covet a baby!"
+
+Giselle, in consternation, asked herself whether this strange girl, who
+did not care for children, could be a proper wife for Fred; but her
+habitual indulgence came to her aid, and she thought:
+
+"She is but a child herself, she does not know what she is saying," and
+profiting by her first tete-a-tete with Jacqueline's stepmother, she
+spoke as she had promised to Madame de Nailles.
+
+"A matchmaker already!"  said the Baroness, with a smile.  "And so soon
+after you have found out what it costs to be a mother!  How good of you,
+my dear Giselle!  So you support Fred as a candidate?  But I can't say I
+think he has much chance; Monsieur de Nailles has his own ideas."
+
+She spoke as if she really thought that M. de Nailles could have any
+ideas but her own.  When the adroit Clotilde was at a loss, she was
+likely to evoke this chimerical notion of her husband's having an opinion
+of his own.
+
+"Oh!  Madame, you can do anything you like with him!"
+
+The clever woman sighed:
+
+"So you fancy that when people have been long married a wife retains as
+much influence over her husband as you have kept over Monsieur de
+Talbrun?  You will learn to know better, my dear."
+
+"But I have no influence," murmured Giselle, who knew herself to be her
+husband's slave.
+
+"Oh!  I know better.  You are making believe!"
+
+"Well, but we were not talking about me, but--"
+
+"Oh!  yes.  I understood.  I will think about it.  I will try to bring
+over Monsieur de Nailles."
+
+She was not at all disposed to drop the meat for the sake of the shadow,
+but she was not sure of M. de Cymier, notwithstanding all that Madame de
+Villegry was at pains to tell her about his serious intentions.  On the
+other hand, she would have been far from willing to break with a man so
+brilliant, who made himself so agreeable at her Tuesday receptions.
+
+"Meantime, it would be well if you, dear, were to try to find out what
+Jacqueline thinks.  You may not find it very easy."
+
+"Will you authorize me to tell her how well he loves her?  Oh, then, I am
+quite satisfied!"  cried Giselle.
+
+But she was under a mistake.  Jacqueline, as soon as she began to speak
+to her of Fred's suit, stopped her:
+
+"Poor fellow!  Why can't he amuse himself for some time longer and let me
+do the same?  Men seem to me so strange!  Now, Fred is one who, just
+because he is good and serious by nature, fancies that everybody else
+should be the same; he wishes me to be tethered in the flowery meads of
+Lizerolles, and browse where he would place me.  Such a life would be an
+end of everything--an end to my life, and I should not like it at all.
+I should prefer to grow old in Paris, or some other capital, if my
+husband happened to be engaged in diplomacy.  Even supposing I marry--
+which I do not think an absolute necessity, unless I can not get rid
+otherwise of an inconvenient chaperon--and to do my stepmother justice,
+she knows well enough that I will not submit to too much of her
+dictation!"
+
+"Jacqueline, they say you see too much of the Odinskas."
+
+"There!  that's another fault you find in me.  I go there because Madame
+Strahlberg is so kind as to give me some singing-lessons.  If you only
+knew how much progress I am making, thanks to her.  Music is a thousand
+times more interesting, I can tell you, than all that you can do as
+mistress of a household.  You don't think so?  Oh! I know Enguerrand's
+first tooth, his first steps, his first gleams of intelligence, and all
+that.  Such things are not in my line, you know.  Of course I think your
+boy very funny, very cunning, very--anything you like to fancy him, but
+forgive me if I am glad he does not belong to me.  There, don't you see
+now that marriage is not my vocation, so please give up speaking to me
+about matrimony."
+
+"As you will," said Giselle, sadly, "but you will give great pain to a
+good man whose heart is wholly yours."
+
+"I did not ask for his heart.  Such gifts are exasperating.  One does not
+know what to do with them.  Can't he--poor Fred--love me as I love him,
+and leave me my liberty?"
+
+"Your liberty!"  exclaimed Giselle; "liberty to ruin your life, that's
+what it will be."
+
+"Really, one would suppose there was only one kind of existence in your
+eyes--this life of your own, Giselle.  To leave one cage to be shut up in
+another--that is the fate of many birds, I know, but there are others who
+like to use their wings to soar into the air.  I like that expression.
+Come, little mother, tell me right out, plainly, that your lot is the
+only one in this world that ought to be envied by a woman."
+
+Giselle answered with a strange smile:
+
+"You seem astonished that I adore my baby; but since he came great things
+seem to have been revealed to me.  When I hold him to my breast I seem to
+understand, as I never did before, duty and marriage, family ties and
+sorrows, life itself, in short, its griefs and joys.  You can not
+understand that now, but you will some day.  You, too, will gaze upon the
+horizon as I do.  I am ready to suffer; I am ready for self-sacrifice.
+I know now whither my life leads me.  I am led, as it were, by this
+little being, who seemed to me at first only a doll, for whom I was
+embroidering caps and dresses.  You ask whether I am satisfied with my
+lot in life.  Yes, I am, thanks to this guide, this guardian angel,
+thanks to my precious Enguerrand."
+
+Jacqueline listened, stupefied, to this unexpected outburst, so unlike
+her cousin's usual language; but the charm was broken by its ending with
+the tremendously long name of Enguerrand, which always made her laugh, it
+was in such perfect harmony with the feudal pretensions of the Monredons
+and the Talbruns.
+
+"How solemn and eloquent and obscure you are, my dear," she answered.
+"You speak like a sibyl.  But one thing I see, and that is that you are
+not so perfectly happy as you would have us believe, seeing that you feel
+the need of consolations.  Then, why do you wish me to follow your
+example?"
+
+"Fred is not Monsieur de Talbrun," said the young wife, for the moment
+forgetting herself.
+
+"Do you mean to say--"
+
+"I meant nothing, except that if you married Fred you would have had the
+advantage of first knowing him."
+
+"Ah!  that's your fixed idea.  But I am getting to know Monsieur de
+Cymier pretty well."
+
+"You have betrayed yourself," cried Giselle, with indignation.  "Monsieur
+de Cymier!"
+
+"Monsieur de Cymier is coming to our house on Saturday evening, and I
+must get up a Spanish song that Madame Strahlberg has taught me, to charm
+his ears and those of other people.  Oh!  I can do it very well.  Won't
+you come and hear me play the castanets, if Monsieur Enguerrand can spare
+you?  There is a young Polish pianist who is to play our accompaniment.
+Ah, there is nothing like a Polish pianist to play Chopin!  He is
+charming, poor young man!  an exile, and in poverty; but he is cared for
+by those ladies, who take him everywhere.  That is the sort of life I
+should like--the life of Madame Strahlberg--to be a young widow, free to
+do what I pleased."
+
+"She may be a widow--but some say she is divorced."
+
+"Oh! is it you who repeat such naughty scandals, Giselle?  Where shall
+charity take refuge in this world if not in your heart?  I am going--your
+seriousness may be catching.  Kiss me before I go."
+
+"No," said Madame de Talbrun, turning her head away.
+
+After this she asked herself whether she ought not to discourage Fred.
+She could not resolve on doing so, yet she could not tell him what was
+false; but by eluding the truth with that ability which kind-hearted
+women can always show when they try to avoid inflicting pain, she
+succeeded in leaving the young man hope enough to stimulate his ambition.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FRED ASKS A QUESTION
+
+Time, whatever may be said of it by the calendars, is not to be measured
+by days, weeks, and months in all cases; expectation, hope, happiness and
+grief have very different ways of counting hours, and we know from our
+own experience that some are as short as a minute, and others as long as
+a century.  The love or the suffering of those who can tell just how long
+they have suffered, or just how long they have been in love, is only
+moderate and reasonable.
+
+Madame d'Argy found the two lonely years she passed awaiting the return
+of her son, who was winning his promotion to the rank of ensign, so long,
+that it seemed to her as if they never would come to an end.  She had
+given a reluctant consent to his notion of adopting the navy as a
+profession, thinking that perhaps, after all, there might be no harm in
+allowing her dear boy to pass the most dangerous period of his youth
+under strict discipline, but she could not be patient forever!  She
+idolized her son too much to be resigned to living without him; she felt
+that he was hers no longer.  Either he was at sea or at Toulon, where she
+could very rarely join him, being detained at Lizerolles by the necessity
+of looking after their property.  With what eagerness she awaited his
+promotion, which she did not doubt was all the Nailles waited for to give
+their consent to the marriage; of their happy half-consent she hastened
+to remind them in a note which announced the new grade to which he had
+been promoted.  Her indignation was great on finding that her formal
+request received no decided answer; but, as her first object was Fred's
+happiness, she placed the reply she had received in its most favorable
+light when she forwarded it to the person whom it most concerned.  She
+did this in all honesty.  She was not willing to admit that she was being
+put off with excuses; still less could she believe in a refusal.
+
+She accepted the excuse that M. de Nailles gave for returning no decided
+answer, viz.: that "Jacqueline was too young," though she answered him
+with some vehemence: "Fred was born when I was eighteen."  But she had to
+accept it.  Her ensign would have to pass a few more months on the coast
+of Senegal, a few more months which were made shorter by the
+encouragement forwarded to him by his mother, who was careful to send him
+everything she could find out that seemed to be, or that she imagined
+might be, in his favor; she underlined such things and commented upon
+them, so as to make the faintest hypothesis seem a certainty.  Sometimes
+she did not even wait for the post.  Fred would find, on putting in at
+some post, a cablegram: "Good news," or "All goes well," and he would be
+beside himself with joy and excitement until, on receiving his poor, dear
+mother's next letter, he found out on how slight a foundation her
+assurance had been founded.
+
+Sometimes, she wrote him disagreeable things about Jacqueline, as if she
+would like to disenchant him, and then he said to himself: "By this, I am
+to understand that my affairs are not going on well; I still count for
+little, notwithstanding my promotion."  Ah!  if he could only have had,
+so near the beginning of his career, any opportunity of distinguishing
+himself!  No brilliant deed would have been too hard for him.  He would
+have scaled the very skies.  Alas!  he had had no chance to win
+distinction, he had only had to follow in the beaten track of ordinary
+duty; he had encountered no glorious perils, though at St. Louis he had
+come very near leaving his bones, but it was only a case of typhoid
+fever.  This fever, however, brought about a scene between M. de Nailles
+and his mother.
+
+"When," she cried, with all the fury of a lioness, "do you expect to come
+to the conclusion that my son is a suitable match for Jacqueline?  Do you
+imagine that I shall let him wait till he is a post-captain to satisfy
+the requirements of Mademoiselle your daughter--provided he does not die
+in a hospital?  Do you think that I shall be willing to go on living--
+if you can call it living!--all alone and in continual apprehension?  Why
+do you let him keep on in uncertainty?  You know his worth, and you know
+that with him Jacqueline would be happy.  Instead of that--instead of
+saying once for all to this young man, who is more in love with her than
+any other man will ever be: 'There, take her, I give her to you,' which
+would be the straightforward, sensible way, you go on encouraging the
+caprices of a child who will end by wasting, in the life you are
+permitting her to lead, all the good qualities she has and keeping
+nothing but the bad ones."
+
+"Mon Dieu! I can't see that Jacqueline leads a life like that!"  said M.
+de Nailles, who felt that he must say something.
+
+"You don't see, you don't see!  How can any one see who won't open his
+eyes?  My poor friend, just look for once at what is going on around you,
+under your own roof--"
+
+"Jacqueline is devoted to music," said her father, good-humoredly.
+Madame d'Argy in her heart thought he was losing his mind.
+
+And in truth he was growing older day by day, becoming more and more
+anxious, more and more absorbed in the great struggle--not for life; that
+might exhaust a man, but at least it was energetic and noble--but for
+superfluous wealth, for vanity, for luxury, which, for his own part, he
+cared nothing for, and which he purchased dearly, spurred on to exertion
+by those near to him, who insisted on extravagances.
+
+"Oh! yes, Jacqueline, I know, is devoted to music," went on Madame
+d'Argy, with an air of extreme disapproval, "too much so!  And when she
+is able to sing like Madame Strahlberg, what good will it do her?  Even
+now I see more than one little thing about her that needs to be reformed.
+How can she escape spoiling in that crowd of Slavs and Yankees, people of
+no position probably in their own countries, with whom you permit her to
+associate?  People nowadays are so imprudent about acquaintances!  To be
+a foreigner is a passport into society.  Just think what her poor mother
+would have said to the bad manners she is adopting from all parts of the
+globe?  My poor, dear Adelaide!  She was a genuine Frenchwoman of the old
+type; there are not many such left now.  Ah!" continued Madame d'Argy,
+without any apparent connection with her subject, "Monsieur de Talbrun's
+mother, if he had one, would be truly happy to see him married to
+Giselle!"
+
+"But," faltered M. de Nailles, struck by the truth of some of these
+remarks, "I make no opposition--quite the contrary--I have spoken several
+times about your son, but I was not listened to!"
+
+"What can she say against Fred?"
+
+"Nothing.  She is very fond of him, that you know as well as I do.  But
+those childish attachments do not necessarily lead to love and marriage."
+
+"Friendship on her side might be enough," said Madame d'Argy, in the tone
+of a woman who had never known more than that in marriage.  "My poor Fred
+has enthusiasm and all that, enough for two.  And in time she will be
+madly in love with him--she must!  It is impossible it should be
+otherwise."
+
+"Very good, persuade her yourself if you can; but Jacqueline has a pretty
+strong will of her own."
+
+Jacqueline's will was a reality, though the ideas of M. de Nailles may
+have been illusion.
+
+"And my wife, too!"  resumed the Baron, after a long sigh.  "I don't know
+how it is, but Jacqueline, as she has grown up, has become like an
+unbroken colt, and those two, who were once all in all to each other, are
+now seldom of one mind.  How am I to act when their two wills cross mine,
+as they often do?  I have so many things on my mind.  There are times
+when--"
+
+"Yes, one can see that.  You don't seem to know where you are.  And do
+you think that the disposition she shows to act, as you say, like an
+unbroken colt, is nothing to me?  Do you think I am quite satisfied with
+my son's choice?  I could have wished that he had chosen for his wife--
+but what is the use of saying what I wished?  The important thing is that
+he should be happy in his own way.  Besides, I dare say the young thing
+will calm down of her own accord.  Her mother's daughter must be good at
+heart.  All will come right when she is removed from a circle which is
+doing her no good; it is injuring her in people's opinion already, you
+must know.  And how will it be by-and-bye?  I hear people saying
+everywhere: 'How can the Nailles let that young girl associate so much
+with foreigners?'  You say they are old school-fellows, they went to the
+'cours' together.  But see if Madame d'Etaples and Madame Ray, under the
+same pretext, let Isabelle and Yvonne associate with the Odinskas!  As to
+that foolish woman, Madame d'Avrigny, she goes to their house to look up
+recruits for her operettas, and Madame Strahlberg has one advantage over
+regular artists, there is no call to pay her.  That is the reason why she
+invites her.  Besides which, she won't find it so easy to marry Dolly."
+
+"Oh! there are several reasons for that," said the Baron, who could see
+the mote in his neighbor's eye, "Mademoiselle d'Avrigny has led a life so
+very worldly ever since she was a child, so madly fast and lively, that
+suitors are afraid of her.  Jacqueline, thank heaven, has never yet been
+in what is called the world.  She only visits those with whom she is on
+terms of intimacy."
+
+"An intimacy which includes all Paris," said Madame d'Argy, raising her
+eyes to heaven.  "If she does not go to great balls, it is only because
+her stepmother is bored by them.  But with that exception it seems to me
+she is allowed to do anything.  I don't see the difference.  But, to be
+sure, if Jacqueline is not for us, you have a right to say that I am
+interfering in what does not concern me."
+
+"Not at all," said the unfortunate father, "I feel how much I ought to
+value your advice, and an alliance with your family would please me more
+than anything."
+
+He said the truth, for he was disturbed by seeing M. de Cymier so slow in
+making his proposals, and he was also aware that young girls in our day
+are less sought for in marriage than they used to be.  His friend
+Wermant, rich as he was, had had some trouble in capturing for Berthe a
+fellow of no account in the Faubourg St. Germain, and the prize was not
+much to be envied.  He was a young man without brains and without a sou,
+who enjoyed so little consideration among his own people that his wife
+had not been received as she expected, and no one spoke of Madame de
+Belvan without adding: "You know, that little Wermant, daughter of the
+'agent de change'."
+
+Of course, Jacqueline had the advantage of good birth over Berthe, but
+how great was her inferiority in point of fortune!  M. de Nailles
+sometimes confided these perplexities to his wife, without, however,
+receiving much comfort from her.  Nor did the Baroness confess to her
+husband all her own fears.  In secret she often asked herself, with the
+keen insight of a woman of the world well trained in artifice and who
+possessed a thorough knowledge of mankind, whether there might not be
+women capable of using a young girl so as to put the world on a wrong
+scent; whether, in other words, Madame de Villegry did not talk
+everywhere about M. de Cymier's attentions to Mademoiselle de Nailles in
+order to conceal his relations to herself?  Madame de Villegry indeed
+cared little about standing well in public opinion, but rather the
+contrary; she would not, however, for the world have been willing, by too
+openly favoring one man among her admirers, to run the risk of putting
+the rest to flight.  No doubt M. de Cymier was most assiduous in his
+attendance on the receptions and dances at Madame de Nailles's, but he
+was there always at the same time as Madame de Villegry herself.  They
+would hold whispered conferences in corners, which might possibly have
+been about Jacqueline, but there was no proof that they were so, except
+what Madame de Villegry herself said.  "At any rate," thought Madame de
+Nailles, "if Fred comes forward as a suitor it may stimulate Monsieur de
+Cymier.  There are men who put off taking a decisive step till the last
+moment, and are only to be spurred up by competition."
+
+So every opportunity was given to Fred to talk freely with Jacqueline
+when he returned to Paris.  By this time he wore two gold-lace stripes
+upon his sleeve.  But Jacqueline avoided any tete-a-tete with him as if
+she understood the danger that awaited her.  She gave him no chance of
+speaking alone with her.  She was friendly--nay, sometimes affectionate
+when other people were near them, but more commonly she teased him,
+bewildered him, excited him.  After an hour or two spent in her society
+he would go home sometimes savage, sometimes desponding, to ponder in his
+own room, and in his own heart, what interpretation he ought to put upon
+the things that she had said to him.
+
+The more he thought, the less he understood.  He would not have confided
+in his mother for the world; she might have cast blame on Jacqueline.
+Besides her, he had no one who could receive his confidences, who would
+bear with his perplexities, who could assist in delivering him from the
+network of hopes and fears in which, after every interview with
+Jacqueline, he seemed to himself to become more and more entangled.
+
+At last, however, at one of the soirees given every fortnight by Madame
+de Nailles, he succeeded in gaining her attention.
+
+"Give me this quadrille," he said to her.
+
+And, as she could not well refuse, he added, as soon as she had taken his
+arm: "We will not dance, and I defy you to escape me."
+
+"This is treason!"  she cried, somewhat angrily.  "We are not here to
+talk; I can almost guess beforehand what you have to say, and--"
+
+But he had made her sit down in the recess of that bow-window which had
+been called the young girls' corner years ago.  He stood before her,
+preventing her escape, and half-laughing, though he was deeply moved.
+
+"Since you have guessed what I wanted to say, answer me quickly."
+
+"Must I?  Must I, really?  Why didn't you ask my father to do your
+commission?  It is so horribly disagreeable to do these things for one's
+self."
+
+"That depends upon what the things may be that have to be said.  I should
+think it ought to be very agreeable to pronounce the word on which the
+happiness of a whole life is to depend."
+
+"Oh!  what a grand phrase!  As if I could be essential to anybody's
+happiness?  You can't make me believe that!"
+
+"You are mistaken.  You are indispensable to mine."
+
+"There!  my declaration has been made," thought Fred, much relieved that
+it was over, for he had been afraid to pronounce the decisive words.
+
+"Well, if I thought that were true, I should be very sorry," said
+Jacqueline, no longer smiling, but looking down fixedly at the pointed
+toe of her little slipper; "because--"
+
+She stopped suddenly.  Her face flushed red.
+
+"I don't know how to explain to you;" she said.
+
+"Explain nothing," pleaded Fred; "all I ask is Yes, nothing more.  There
+is nothing else I care for."
+
+She raised her head coldly and haughtily, yet her voice trembled as she
+said:
+
+"You will force me to say it?  Then, no!  No!"  she repeated, as if to
+reaffirm her refusal.
+
+Then, alarmed by Fred's silence, and above all by his looks, he who had
+seemed so gay shortly before and whose face now showed an anguish such as
+she had never yet seen on the face of man, she added:
+
+"Oh, forgive me!--Forgive me," she repeated in a lower voice, holding out
+her hand.  He did not take it.
+
+"You love some one else?"  he asked, through his clenched teeth.
+
+She opened her fan and affected to examine attentively the pink landscape
+painted on it to match her dress.
+
+"Why should you think so?  I wish to be free."
+
+"Free?  Are you free?  Is a woman ever free?"
+
+Jacqueline shook her head, as if expressing vague dissent.
+
+"Free at least to see a little of the world," she said, "to choose, to
+use my wings, in short--"
+
+And she moved her slender arms with an audacious gesture which had
+nothing in common with the flight of that mystic dove upon which she had
+meditated when holding the card given her by Giselle.
+
+"Free to prefer some other man," said Fred, who held fast to his idea
+with the tenacity of jealousy.
+
+"Ah!  that is different.  Supposing there were anyone whom I liked--not
+more, but differently from the way I like you--it is possible.  But you
+spoke of loving!"
+
+"Your distinctions are too subtle," said Fred.
+
+"Because, much as it seems to astonish you, I am quite capable of seeing
+the difference," said Jacqueline, with the look and the accent of a
+person who has had large experience.  "I have loved once--a long time
+ago, a very long time ago, a thousand years and more.  Yes, I loved some
+one, as perhaps you love me, and I suffered more than you will ever
+suffer.  It is ended; it is over--I think it is over forever."
+
+"How foolish!  At your age!"
+
+"Yes, that kind of love is ended for me.  Others may please me, others do
+please me, as you said, but it is not the same thing.  Would you like to
+see the man I once loved?"  asked Jacqueline, impelled by a juvenile
+desire to exhibit her experience, and also aware instinctively that to
+cast a scrap of past history to the curious sometimes turns off their
+attention on another track.  "He is near us now," she added.
+
+And while Fred's angry eyes, under his frowning brows, were wandering all
+round the salon, she pointed to Hubert Marien with a movement of her fan.
+
+Marien was looking on at the dancing, with his old smile, not so
+brilliant now as it had been.  He now only smiled at beauty collectively,
+which was well represented that evening in Madame de Nailles's salon.
+Young girls 'en masse' continued to delight him, but his admiration as an
+artist became less and less personal.
+
+He had grown stout, his hair and beard were getting gray; he was
+interested no longer in Savonarola, having obtained, thanks to his
+picture, the medal of honor, and the Institute some months since had
+opened its doors to him.
+
+"Marien?  You are laughing at me!" cried Fred.
+
+"It is simply the truth."
+
+Some magnetic influence at that moment caused the painter to turn his
+eyes toward the spot where they were talking.
+
+"We were speaking of you," said Jacqueline.
+
+And her tone was so singular that he dared not ask what they were saying.
+With humility which had in it a certain touch of bitterness he said,
+still smiling:
+
+"You might find something better to do than to talk good or evil of a
+poor fellow who counts now for nothing."
+
+"Counts for nothing!  A fellow to be pitied!"  cried Fred, "a man who has
+just been elected to the Institute--you are hard to satisfy!"
+
+Jacqueline sat looking at him like a young sorceress engaged in sticking
+pins into the heart of a waxen figure of her enemy.  She never missed an
+opportunity of showing her implacable dislike of him.
+
+She turned to Fred: "What I was telling you," she said, "I am quite
+willing to repeat in his presence.  The thing has lost its importance now
+that he has become more indifferent to me than any other man in the
+world."
+
+She stopped, hoping that Marien had understood what she was saying and
+that he resented the humiliating avowal from her own lips that her
+childish love was now only a memory.
+
+"If that is the only confession you have to make to me," said Fred, who
+had almost recovered his composure, "I can put up with my former rival,
+and I pass a sponge over all that has happened in your long past of
+seventeen years and a half, Jacqueline.  Tell me only that at present you
+like no one better than me."
+
+She smiled a half-smile, but he did not see it.  She made no answer.
+
+"Is he here, too--like the other!"  he asked, sternly.
+
+And she saw his restless eyes turn for an instant to the conservatory,
+where Madame de Villegry, leaning back in her armchair, and Gerard de
+Cymier, on a low seat almost at her feet, were carrying on their platonic
+flirtation.
+
+"Oh! you must not think of quarrelling with him," cried Jacqueline,
+frightened at the look Fred fastened on De Cymier.
+
+"No, it would be of no use.  I shall go out to Tonquin, that's all."
+
+"Fred!  You are not serious."
+
+"You will see whether I am not serious.  At this very moment I know a man
+who will be glad to exchange with me."
+
+"What!  go and get yourself killed at Tonquin for a foolish little girl
+like me, who is very, very fond of you, but hardly knows her own mind.
+It would be absurd!"
+
+"People are not always killed at Tonquin, but I must have new interests,
+something to divert my mind from--"
+
+"Fred!  my dear Fred"--Jacqueline had suddenly become almost tender,
+almost suppliant.  "Your mother!  Think of your mother!  What would she
+say?  Oh, my God!"
+
+"My mother must be allowed to think that I love my profession better than
+all else.  But, Jacqueline," continued the poor fellow, clinging in
+despair to the very smallest hope, as a drowning man catches at a straw,
+"if you do not, as you said, know exactly your own mind--if you would
+like to question your own heart--I would wait--"
+
+Jacqueline was biting the end of her fan--a conflict was taking place
+within her breast.  But to certain temperaments there is pleasure in
+breaking a chain or in leaping a barrier; she said:
+
+"Fred, I am too much your friend to deceive you."
+
+At that moment M. de Cymier came toward them with his air of assurance:
+"Mademoiselle, you forget that you promised me this waltz," he said.
+
+"No, I never forget anything," she answered, rising.
+
+Fred detained her an instant, saying, in a low voice:
+
+"Forgive me.  This moment, Jacqueline, is decisive.  I must have an
+answer.  I never shall speak to you again of my sorrow.  But decide now--
+on the spot.  Is all ended between us?"
+
+"Not our old friendship, Fred," said Jacqueline, tears rising in her
+eyes.
+
+"So be it, then, if you so will it.  But our friendship never will show
+itself unless you are in need of friendship, and then only with the
+discretion that your present attitude toward me has imposed."
+
+"Are you ready, Mademoiselle," said Gerard, who, to allow them to end
+their conversation, had obligingly turned his attention to some madrigals
+that Colette Odinska was laughing over.
+
+Jacqueline shook her head resolutely, though at that moment her heart
+felt as if it were in a vise, and the moisture in her eyes looked like
+anything but a refusal.  Then, without giving herself time for further
+thought, she whirled away into the dance with M. de Cymier.  It was over,
+she had flung to the winds her chance for happiness, and wounded a heart
+more cruelly than Hubert Marien had ever wounded hers.  The most horrible
+thing in this unending warfare we call love is that we too often repay to
+those who love us the harm that has been done us by those whom we have
+loved.  The seeds of mistrust and perversity sown by one man or by one
+woman bear fruit to be gathered by some one else.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+A COMEDY AND A TRAGEDY
+
+The departure of Frederic d'Argy for Tonquin occasioned a break in the
+intercourse between his mother and the family of De Nailles.  The wails
+of Hecuba were nothing to the lamentations of poor Madame d'Argy; the
+unreasonableness of her wrath and the exaggeration in her reproaches
+hindered even Jacqueline from feeling all the remorse she might otherwise
+have felt for her share in Fred's departure.  She told her father, who
+the first time in her life addressed her with some severity, that she
+could not be expected to love all the young men who might threaten to go
+to the wars, or to fling themselves from fourth-story windows, for her
+sake.
+
+"It was very indelicate and inconsiderate of Fred to tell any one that it
+was my fault that he was doing anything so foolish," she said, with true
+feminine deceit, "but he has taken the very worst possible means to make
+me care for him.  Everybody has too much to say about this matter which
+concerns only him and me.  Even Giselle thought proper to write me a
+sermon!"
+
+And she gave vent to her feelings in an exclamation of three syllables
+that she had learned from the Odinskas, which meant: "I don't care!"
+(je m'en moque).
+
+But this was not true.  She cared very much for Giselle's good opinion,
+and for Madame d'Argy's friendship.  She suffered much in her secret
+heart at the thought of having given so much pain to Fred.  She guessed
+how deep it was by the step to which it had driven him.  But there was in
+her secret soul something more than all the rest, it was a puerile, but
+delicious satisfaction in feeling her own importance, in having been able
+to exercise an influence over one heart which might possibly extend to
+that of M. de Cymier.  She thought he might be gratified by knowing that
+she had driven a young man to despair, if he guessed for whose sake she
+had been so cruel.  He knew it, of course.  Madame de Nailles took care
+that he should not be ignorant of it, and the pleasure he took in such a
+proof of his power over a young heart was not unlike that pleasure
+Jacqueline experienced in her coquetry--which crushed her better
+feelings.  He felt proud of the sacrifice this beautiful girl had made
+for his sake, though he did not consider himself thereby committed to any
+decision, only he felt more attached to her than ever.  Ever since the
+day when Madame de Villegry had first introduced him at the house of
+Madame de Nailles, he had had great pleasure in going there.  The
+daughter of the house was more and more to his taste, but his liking for
+her was not such as to carry him beyond prudence.  "If I chose," he would
+say to himself after every time he met her, "if I chose I could own that
+jewel.  I have only to stretch out my hand and have it given me."  And
+the next morning, after going to sleep full of that pleasant thought, he
+would awake glad to find that he was still as free as ever, and able to
+carry on a flirtation with a woman of the world, which imposed no
+obligations upon him, and yet at the same time make love to a young girl
+whom he would gladly have married but for certain reports which were
+beginning to circulate among men of business concerning the financial
+position of M. de Nailles.
+
+They said that he was withdrawing money from secure investments to repair
+(or to increase) considerable losses made by speculation, and that he
+operated recklessly on the Bourse.  These rumors had already withdrawn
+Marcel d'Etaples from the list of his daughter's suitors.  The young
+fellow was a captain of Hussars, who had no scruple in declaring the
+reason of his giving up his interest in the young lady.  Gerard de
+Cymier, more prudent, waited and watched, thinking it would be quite time
+enough to go to the bottom of things when he found himself called upon to
+make a decision, and greatly interested meantime in the daily increase of
+Jacqueline's beauty.  It was evident she cared for him.  After all, it
+was doing the little thing no harm to let her live on in the intoxication
+of vanity and hope, and to give her something to dwell upon in her
+innocent dreams.  Never did Gerard allow himself to overstep the line he
+had marked out for himself; a glance, a slight pressure of the hand,
+which might have been intentional, or have meant nothing, a few ambiguous
+words in which an active imagination might find something to dream about,
+a certain way of passing his arm round her slight waist which would have
+meant much had it not been done in public to the sound of music, were all
+the proofs the young diplomatist had ever given of an attraction that was
+real so far as consisted with his complete selfishness, joined to his
+professional prudence, and that systematic habit of taking up fancies at
+any time for anything, which prevents each fancy as it occurs from
+ripening into passion.
+
+He alluded indirectly to Fred's departure in a way that turned it into
+ridicule.  While playing a game of 'boston' he whispered into
+Jacqueline's ear something about the old-fashionedness and stupidity of
+Paul and Virginia, and his opinion of "calf-love," as the English call an
+early attachment, and something about the right of every girl to know a
+suitor long before she consents to marry him.  He said he thought that
+the days of courtship must be the most delightful in the life of a woman,
+and that a man who wished to cut them short was a fellow without delicacy
+or discretion!
+
+From this Jacqueline drew the conclusion that he was not willing to
+resemble such a fellow, and was more and more persuaded that there was
+tenderness in the way he pressed her waist, and that his voice had the
+softness of a caress when he spoke to her.  He made many inquiries as to
+what she liked and what she wished for in the future, as if his great
+object in all things was to anticipate her wishes.  As for his intimacy
+with Madame de Villegry, Jacqueline thought nothing of it,
+notwithstanding her habitual mistrust of those she called old women.
+In the first place, Madame de Villegry was her own mistress, nothing
+hindered them from having been married long ago had they wished it;
+besides, had not Madame de Villegry brought the young man to their house
+and let every one see, even Jacqueline herself, what was her object in
+doing so?  In this matter she was their ally, a most zealous and kind
+ally, for she was continually advising her young friend as to what was
+most becoming to her and how she might make herself most attractive to
+men in general, with little covert allusions to the particular tastes of
+Gerard, which she said she knew as well as if he had been her brother.
+
+All this was lightly insinuated, but never insisted upon, with the tact
+which stood Madame de Villegry in stead of talent, and which had enabled
+her to perform some marvellous feats upon the tight-rope without losing
+her balance completely.  She, too, made fun of the tragic determination
+of Fred, which all those who composed the society of the De Nailles had
+been made aware of by the indiscreet lamentations of Madame d'Argy.
+
+"Is not Jacqueline fortunate?"  cried.  Colette Odinska, who, herself
+always on a high horse, looked on love in its tragic aspect, and would
+have liked to resemble Marie Stuart as much as she could, "is she not
+fortunate?  She has had a man who has gone abroad to get himself killed
+--and all for her!"
+
+Colette imagined herself under the same circumstances, making the most of
+a slain lover, with a crape veil covering her fair hair, her mourning
+copied from that of her divorced sister, who wore her weeds so
+charmingly, but who was getting rather tired of a single life.
+
+As for Miss Kate Sparks and Miss Nora, they could not understand why the
+breaking of half-a-dozen hearts should not be the prelude to every
+marriage.  That, they said with much conviction, was always the case in
+America, and a girl was thought all the more of who had done so.
+
+Jacqueline, however, thought more than was reasonable about the dangers
+that the friend of her childhood was going to encounter through her
+fault.  Fred's departure would have lent him a certain prestige, had not
+a powerful new interest stepped in to divert her thoughts.  Madame
+d'Avrigny was getting up her annual private theatricals, and wanted
+Jacqueline to take the principal part in the play, saying that she ought
+to put her lessons in elocution to some use.  The piece chosen was to
+illustrate a proverb, and was entirely new.  It was as unexceptionable as
+it was amusing; the most severe critic could have found no fault with its
+morality or with its moral, which turned on the eagerness displayed by
+young girls nowadays to obtain diplomas.  Scylla and Charybdis was its
+name.  Its story was that of a young bride, who, thinking to please a
+husband, a stupid and ignorant man, was trying to obtain in secret a high
+place in the examination at the Sorbonne--'un brevet superieur'.  The
+husband, disquieted by the mystery, is at first suspicious, then jealous,
+and then is overwhelmed with humiliation when he discovers that his wife
+knows more of everything than himself.  He ends by imploring her to give
+up her higher education if she wishes to please him.  The little play had
+all the modern loveliness and grace which Octave Feuillet alone can give,
+and it contained a lesson from which any one might profit; which was by
+no means always the case with Madame d'Avrigny's plays, which too often
+were full of risky allusions, of critical situations, and the like;
+likely, in short, to "sail too close to the wind," as Fred had once
+described them.  But Madame d'Avrigny's prime object was the amusement of
+society, and society finds pleasure in things which, if innocence
+understood them, would put her to the blush.  This play, however, was an
+exception.  There had been very little to cut out this time.  Madame de
+Nailles had been asked to take the mother's part, but she declined, not
+caring to act such a character in a house where years before in all her
+glory she had made a sensation as a young coquette.  So Madame d'Avrigny
+had to take the part herself, not sorry to be able to superintend
+everything on the stage, and to prompt Dolly, if necessary--Dolly, who
+had but four words to say, which she always forgot, but who looked lovely
+in a little cap as a femme de chambre.
+
+People had been surprised that M. de Cymier should have asked for the
+part of the husband, a local magistrate, stiff and self-important, whom
+everybody laughed at.  Jacqueline alone knew why he had chosen it: it
+would give him the opportunity of giving her two kisses.  Of course those
+kisses were to be reserved for the representation, but whether
+intentionally or otherwise, the young husband ventured upon them at every
+rehearsal, in spite of the general outcry--not, however, very much in
+earnest, for it is well understood that in private theatricals certain
+liberties may be allowed, and M. de Cymier had never been remarkable for
+reserve when he acted at the clubs, where the female parts were taken by
+ladies from the smaller theatres.  In this school he had acquired some
+reputation as an amateur actor.  "Besides," as he remarked on making his
+apology, "we shall do it very awkwardly upon the stage if we are not
+allowed to practise it beforehand."  Jacqueline burst out laughing, and
+did not make much show of opposition.  To play the part of his wife, to
+hear him say to her, to respond with the affectionate and familiar 'toi',
+was so amusing!  It was droll to see her cut out her husband in
+chemistry, history, and grammar, and make him confound La Fontaine with
+Corneille.  She had such a little air while doing it!  And at the close,
+when he said to her: "If I give you a pony to-morrow, and a good hearty
+kiss this very minute, shall you be willing to give up getting that
+degree?"  she responded, with such gusto: "Indeed, I shall!"  and her
+manner was so eager, so boyish, so full of fun, that she was wildly
+applauded, while Gerard embraced her as heartily as he liked, to make up
+to himself for her having had, as his wife, the upper hand.
+
+All this kissing threw him rather off his balance, and he might soon have
+sealed his fate, had not a very sad event occurred, which restored his
+self-possession.
+
+The dress rehearsal was to take place one bright spring day at about four
+o'clock in the afternoon.  A large number of guests was assembled at the
+house of Madame d'Avrigny.  The performance had been much talked about
+beforehand in society.  The beauty, the singing, and the histrionic
+powers of the principal actress had been everywhere extolled.  Fully
+conscious of what was expected of her, and eager to do herself credit in
+every way, Jacqueline took advantage of Madame Strahlberg's presence to
+run over a little song, which she was to--sing between the acts and in
+which she could see no meaning whatever.  This little song, which, to
+most of the ladies present, seemed simply idiotic, made the men in the
+audience cry "Oh!"  as if half-shocked, and then "Encore!  Encore!"  in a
+sort of frenzy.  It was a so-called pastoral effusion, in which Colinette
+rhymed with herbette, and in which the false innocence of the eighteenth
+century was a cloak for much indelicate allusion.
+
+"I never," said Jacqueline in self-defense, before she began the song,
+"sang anything so stupid.  And that is saying much when one thinks of all
+the nonsensical words that people set to music!  It's a marvel how any
+one can like this stuff.  Do tell me what there is in it?" she added,
+turning to Gerard, who was charmed by her ignorance.
+
+Standing beside the grand piano, with her arms waving as she sang,
+repeating, by the expression of her eyes, the question she had asked and
+to which she had received no answer, she was singing the verses she
+considered nonsense with as much point as if she had understood them,
+thanks to the hints given her by Madame Strahlberg, who was playing her
+accompaniment, when the entrance of a servant, who pronounced her name
+aloud, made a sudden interruption.  "Mademoiselle de Nailles is wanted at
+home at once.  Modeste has come for her."
+
+Madame d'Avrigny went out to say to the old servant: "She can not
+possibly go home with you!  It is only half an hour since she came.
+The rehearsal is just beginning."
+
+But something Modeste said in answer made her give a little cry, full of
+consternation.  She came quickly back, and going up to Jacqueline:
+
+"My dear," she said, "you must go home at once--there is bad news, your
+father is ill."
+
+"Ill?"
+
+The solemnity of Madame d'Avrigny's voice, the pity in her expression,
+the affection with which she spoke and above all her total indifference
+to the fate of her rehearsal, frightened Jacqueline.  She rushed away,
+not waiting to say good-by, leaving behind her a general murmur of "Poor
+thing!"  while Madame d'Avrigny, recovering from her first shock, was
+already beginning to wonder--her instincts as an impresario coming once
+more to the front--whether the leading part might not be taken by
+Isabelle Ray.  She would have to send out two hundred cards, at least,
+and put off her play for another fortnight.  What a pity!  It seemed as
+if misfortunes always happened just so as to interfere with pleasures.
+
+The fiacre which had brought Modeste was at the door.  The old nurse
+helped her young lady into it.
+
+"What has happened to papa?"  cried Jacqueline, impetuously.
+
+There was something horrible in this sudden transition from gay
+excitement to the sharpest anxiety.
+
+"Nothing--that is to say--he is very sick.  Don't tremble like that, my
+darling-courage!"  stammered Modeste, who was frightened by her
+agitation.
+
+"He was taken sick, you say.  Where?  How happened it?"
+
+"In his study.  Pierre had just brought him his letters.  We thought we
+heard a noise as if a chair had been thrown down, and a sort of cry.
+I ran in to see.  He was lying at full length on the floor."
+
+"And now?  How is he now?"
+
+"We did what we could for him.  Madame came back.  He is lying on his
+bed."
+
+Modeste covered her face with her hands.
+
+"You have not told me all.  What else?"
+
+"Mon Dieu!  you knew your poor father had heart disease.  The last time
+the doctor saw him he thought his legs had swelled--"
+
+"Had!"  Jacqueline heard only that one word.  It meant that the life of
+her father was a thing of the past.  Hardly waiting till the fiacre could
+be stopped, she sprang out, rushed into the house, opened the door of her
+father's chamber, pushing aside a servant who tried to stop her, and fell
+upon her knees beside the bed where lay the body of her father, white and
+rigid.
+
+"Papa!  My poor dear--dear papa!"
+
+The hand she pressed to her lips was as cold as ice.  She raised her
+frightened eyes to the face over which the great change from life to
+death had passed.  "What does it mean?"  Jacqueline had never looked on
+death before, but she knew this was not sleep.
+
+"Oh, speak to me, papa!  It is I--it is Jacqueline!"
+
+Her stepmother tried to raise her--tried to fold her in her arms.
+
+"Let me alone!"  she cried with horror.
+
+It seemed to her as if her father, where he was now, so far from her, so
+far from everything, might have the power to look into human hearts, and
+know the perfidy he had known nothing of when he was living.  He might
+see in her own heart, too, her great despair.  All else seemed small and
+of no consequence when death was present.
+
+Oh! why had she not been a better daughter, more loving, more devoted?
+why had she ever cared for anything but to make him happy?
+
+She sobbed aloud, while Madame de Nailles, pressing her handkerchief to
+her eyes, stood at the foot of the bed, and the doctor, too, was near,
+whispering to some one whom Jacqueline at first had not perceived--the
+friend of the family, Hubert Marien.
+
+Marien there?  Was it not natural that, so intimate as he had always been
+with the dead man, he should have hastened to offer his services to the
+widow?
+
+Jacqueline flung herself upon her father's corpse, as if to protect it
+from profanation.  She had an impulse to bear it away with her to some
+desert spot where she alone could have wept over it.
+
+She lay thus a long time, beside herself with grief.
+
+The flowers which covered the bed and lay scattered on the floor, gave a
+festal appearance to the death-chamber.  They had been purchased for a
+fete, but circumstances had changed their destination.  That evening
+there was to have been a reception in the house of M. de Nailles, but the
+unexpected guest that comes without an invitation had arrived before the
+music and the dancers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE STORM BREAKS
+
+Monsieur de Nailles was dead, struck down suddenly by what is called
+indefinitely heart-failure.  The trouble in that organ from which he had
+long suffered had brought on what might have been long foreseen, and yet
+every one seemed, stupefied by the event.  It came upon them like a
+thunderbolt.  It often happens so when people who are really ill persist
+in doing all that may be done with safety by other persons.  They
+persuaded themselves, and those about them are easily persuaded, that
+small remedies will prolong indefinitely a state of things which is
+precarious to the last degree.  Friends are ready to believe, when the
+sufferer complains that his work is too hard for him, that he thinks too
+much of his ailments and that he exaggerates trifles to which they are
+well accustomed, but which are best known to him alone.  When M. de
+Nailles, several weeks before his death, had asked to be excused and to
+stay at home instead of attending some large gathering, his wife, and
+even Jacqueline, would try to convince him that a little amusement would
+be good for him; they were unwilling to leave him to the repose he
+needed, prescribed for him by the doctors, who had been unanimous that he
+must "put down the brakes," give less attention to business, avoid late
+hours and over-exertion of all kinds.  "And, above all," said one of the
+lights of science whom he had consulted recently about certain feelings
+of faintness which were a bad symptom, "above all, you must keep yourself
+from mental anxiety."
+
+How could he, when his fortune, already much impaired, hung on chances as
+uncertain as those in a game of roulette?  What nonsense!  The failure of
+a great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse.  The
+news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his
+engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles.  Not only
+death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before,
+luxury and opulence had seemed to reign.
+
+"We don't know whether there will be anything left for us to live upon,"
+cried Madame de Nailles, with anguish, even while her husband's body lay
+in the chamber of death, and Jacqueline, kneeling beside it, wept,
+unwilling to receive comfort or consolation.
+
+She turned angrily upon her stepmother and cried:
+
+"What matter?  I have no father--there is nothing else I care for."
+
+But from that moment a dreadful thought, a thought she was ashamed of,
+which made her feel a monster of selfishness, rose in her mind, do what
+she would to hinder it.  Jacqueline was sensible that she cared for
+something else; great as was her sense of loss, a sort of reckless
+curiosity seemed haunting her, while all the time she felt that her great
+grief ought not to give place to anything besides.  "How would Gerard de
+Cymier behave in these circumstances?"  She thought about it all one
+dreadful night as she and Modeste, who was telling her beads softly,
+sat in the faint light of the death-chamber.  She thought of it at dawn,
+when, after one of those brief sleeps which come to the young under all
+conditions, she resumed with a sigh a sense of surrounding realities.
+Almost in the same instant she thought: "My dear father will never wake
+again," and "Does he love me?--does he now wish me to be his wife?--
+will he take me away?"  The devil, which put this thought into her heart,
+made her eager to know the answer to these questions.  He suggested how
+dreadful life with her stepmother would be if no means of escape were
+offered her.  He made her foresee that her stepmother would marry again--
+would marry Marien.  "But I shall not be there!"  she cried, "I will not
+countenance such an infamy!"  Oh, how she hoped Gerard de Cymier loved
+her!  The hypocritical tears of Madame de Nailles disgusted her.  She
+could not bear to have such false grief associated with her own.
+
+Men in black, with solemn faces, came and bore away the body, no longer
+like the form of the father she had loved.  He had gone from her forever.
+Pompous funeral rites, little in accordance with the crash that soon
+succeeded them, were superintended by Marien, who, in the absence of near
+relatives, took charge of everything.  He seemed to be deeply affected,
+and behaved with all possible kindness and consideration to Jacqueline,
+who could not, however, bring herself to thank him, or even to look at
+him.  She hated him with an increase of resentment, as if the soul of her
+dead father, who now knew the truth, had passed into her own.
+
+Meantime, M. de Cymier took care to inform himself of the state of
+things.  It was easy enough to do so.  All Paris was talking of the
+shipwreck in which life and fortune had been lost by a man whose
+kindliness as a host at his wife's parties every one had appreciated.
+That was what came, people said, of striving after big dividends!  The
+house was to be sold, with the horses, the pictures, and the furniture.
+What a change for his poor wife and daughter!  There were others who
+suffered by the Wermant crash, but those were less interesting than the
+De Nailles.  M. de Belvan found himself left by his father-in-law's
+failure with a wife on his hands who not only had not a sou, but who was
+the daughter of an 'agent de change' who had behaved dishonorably.
+
+This was a text for dissertations on the disgrace of marrying for money;
+those who had done the same thing, minus the same consequences, being
+loudest in reprobating alliances of that kind.  M. de Cymier listened
+attentively to such talk, looking and saying the right things, and as he
+heard more and more about the deplorable condition of M. de Nailles's
+affairs, he congratulated himself that a prudent presentiment had kept
+him from asking the hand of Jacqueline.  He had had vague doubts as to
+the firm foundation of the opulence which made so charming a frame for
+her young beauty; it seemed to him as if she were now less beautiful than
+he had imagined her; the enchantment she had exercised upon him was
+thrown off by simple considerations of good sense.  And yet he gave a
+long sigh of regret when he thought she was unattainable except by
+marriage.  He, however, thanked heaven that he had not gone far enough
+to have compromised himself with her.  The most his conscience could
+reproach him with was an occasional imprudence in moments of
+forgetfulness; no court of honor could hold him bound to declare himself
+her suitor.  The evening that he made up his mind to this he wrote two
+letters, very nearly alike; one was to Madame d'Avrigny, the other to
+Madame de Nailles, announcing that, having received orders to join the
+Embassy to which he was attached at Vienna, he was about to depart at
+once, with great regret that he should not be able to take leave of any
+one.  To Madame d'Avrigny he made apologies for having to give up his
+part in her theatricals; he entreated Madame de Nailles to accept both
+for herself and for Mademoiselle Jacqueline his deepest condolences and
+the assurance of his sympathy.  The manner in which this was said was all
+it ought to have been, except that it might have been rather more brief.
+M. de Cymier said more than was necessary about his participation in
+their grief, because he was conscious of a total lack of sympathy.  He
+begged the ladies would forgive him if, from feelings of delicacy and a
+sense of the respect due to a great sorrow, he did not, before leaving
+Paris, which he was about do to probably for a long time, personally
+present to them 'ses hommages attristes'.  Then followed a few lines in
+which he spoke of the pleasant recollections he should always retain of
+the hospitality he had enjoyed under M. de Nailles's roof, in a way that
+gave them clearly to understand that he had no expectation of ever
+entering their family on a more intimate footing.
+
+Madame de Nailles received this letter just as she had had a conversation
+with a man of business, who had shown her how complete was the ruin for
+which in a great measure she herself was responsible.  She had no longer
+any illusions as to her position.  When the estate had been settled there
+would be nothing left but poverty, not only for herself, who, having
+brought her husband no dot, had no right to consider herself wronged by
+the bankruptcy, but for Jacqueline, whose fortune, derived from her
+mother, had suffered under her father's management (there are such men--
+unfaithful guardians of a child's property, but yet good fathers) in
+every way in which it was possible to evade the provisions of the Code
+intended to protect the rights of minor children.  In the little salon
+so charmingly furnished, where never before had sorrow or sadness been
+discussed, Madame de Nailles poured out her complaints to her
+stepdaughter and insisted upon plans of strict economy, when M. de
+Cymier's letter was brought in.
+
+"Read!"  said the Baroness, handing the strange document to Jacqueline,
+after she had read it through.
+
+Then she leaned back in her chair with a gesture which signified: "This
+is the last straw!"  and remained motionless, apparently overwhelmed,
+with her face covered by one hand, but furtively watching the face of the
+girl so cruelly forsaken.
+
+That face told nothing, for pride supplies some sufferers with necessary
+courage.  Jacqueline sat for some time with her eyes fixed on the
+decisive adieu which swept away what might have been her secret hope.
+The paper did not tremble in her hand, a half-smile of contempt passed
+over her mouth.  The answer to the restless question that had intruded
+itself upon her in the first moments of her grief was now before her.
+Its promptness, its polished brutality, had given her a shock, but not
+the pain she had expected.  Perhaps her great grief--the real, the true,
+the grief death brings--recovered its place in her heart, and prevented
+her from feeling keenly any secondary emotion.  Perhaps this man, who
+could pay court to her in her days of happiness and disappear when the
+first trouble came, seemed to her not worth caring for.
+
+She silently handed back the letter to her stepmother.
+
+"No more than I expected," said the Baroness.
+
+"Indeed?"  replied Jacqueline with complete indifference.  She wished to
+give no opening to any expressions of sympathy on the part of Madame de
+Nailles.
+
+"Poor Madame d'Avrigny," she added, "has bad luck; all her actors seem to
+be leaving her."
+
+This speech was the vain bravado of a young soldier going into action.
+The poor child betrayed herself to the experienced woman, trained either
+to detect or to practise artifice, and who found bitter amusement in
+watching the girl's assumed 'sang-froid'.  But the mask fell off at the
+first touch of genuine sympathy.  When Giselle, forgetful of a certain
+coolness between them ever since Fred's departure, came to clasp her in
+her arms, she showed only her true self, a girl suffering all the
+bitterness of a cruel, humiliating desertion.  Long talks ensued between
+the friends, in which Jacqueline poured into Giselle's ear her sad
+discoveries in the past, her sorrows and anxieties in the present, and
+her vague plans for the future.  "I must go away," she said; "I must
+escape somewhere; I can not go on living with Madame de Nailles--I should
+go mad, I should be tempted every day to upbraid her with her conduct."
+
+Giselle made no attempt to curb an excitement which she knew would resist
+all she could say to calm it.  She feigned agreement, hoping thereby to
+increase her future influence, and advised her friend to seek in a
+convent the refuge that she needed.  But she must do nothing rashly; she
+should only consider it a temporary retreat whose motive was a wish to
+remain for a while within reach of religious consolation.  In that way
+she would give people nothing to talk about, and her step mother could
+not be offended.  It was never of any use to get out of a difficulty by
+breaking all the glass windows with a great noise, and good resolutions
+are made firmer by being matured in quietness.  Such were the lessons
+Giselle herself had been taught by the Benedictine nuns, who, however
+deficient they might be in the higher education of women, knew at least
+how to bring up young girls with a view to making them good wives.
+Giselle illustrated this day by day in her relations to a husband as
+disagreeable as a husband well could be, a man of small intelligence,
+who was not even faithful to her.  But she did not cite herself as an
+example.  She never talked about herself, or her own difficulties.
+
+"You are an angel of sense and goodness," sobbed Jacqueline.  "I will do
+whatever you wish me to do."
+
+"Count upon me--count upon all your friends," said Madame de Talbrun,
+tenderly.
+
+And then, enumerating the oldest and the truest of these friends, she
+unluckily named Madame d'Argy.  Jacqueline drew herself back at once:
+
+"Oh, for pity's sake!"  she cried, "don't mention them to me!"
+
+Already a comparison between Fred's faithful affection and Gerard de
+Cymier's desertion had come into her mind, but she had refused to
+entertain it, declaring resolutely to herself that she never should
+repent her refusal.  She was sore, she was angry with all men, she wished
+all were like Cymier or like Marien, that she might hate every one of
+them; she came to the conclusion in her heart of hearts that all of them,
+even the best, if put to the proof, would turn out selfish.  She liked to
+think so--to believe in none of them.  Thus it happened that an
+unexpected visit from Fred's mother, among those that she received
+in her first days of orphanhood, was particularly agreeable to her.
+
+Madame d'Argy, on hearing of the death and of the ruin of M. de Nailles,
+was divided by two contradictory feelings.  She clearly saw the hand of
+Providence in what had happened: her son was in the squadron on its way
+to attack Formosa; he was in peril from the climate, in peril from
+Chinese bullets, and assuredly those who had brought him into peril could
+not be punished too severely; on the other hand, the last mail from
+Tonquin had brought her one of those great joys which always incline us
+to be merciful.  Fred had so greatly distinguished himself in a series of
+fights upon the river Min that he had been offered his choice between the
+Cross of the Legion of Honor or promotion.  He told his mother now that
+he had quite recovered from a wound he had received which had brought him
+some glory, but which he assured her had done him no bodily harm, and he
+repeated to her what he would not tell her at first, some words of praise
+from Admiral Courbet of more value in his eyes than any reward.
+
+Triumphant herself, and much moved by pity for Jacqueline, Madame d'Argy
+felt as if she must put an end to a rupture which could not be kept up
+when a great sorrow had fallen on her old friends, besides which she
+longed to tell every one, those who had been blind and ungrateful in
+particular, that Fred had proved himself a hero.  So Jacqueline and her
+stepmother saw her arrive as if nothing had ever come between them.
+There were kisses and tears, and a torrent of kindly meant questions,
+affectionate explanations, and offers of service.  But Fred's mother
+could not help showing her own pride and happiness to those in sorrow.
+They congratulated her with sadness.  Madame d'Argy would have liked to
+think that the value of what she had lost was now made plain to
+Jacqueline.  And if it caused her one more pang--what did it matter?
+He and his mother had suffered too.  It was the turn of others.  God was
+just.  Resentment, and kindness, and a strange mixed feeling of
+forgiveness and revenge contended together in the really generous heart
+of Madame d'Argy, but that heart was still sore within her.  Pity,
+however, carried the day, and had it not been for the irritating coldness
+of "that little hard-hearted thing," as she called Jacqueline, she would
+have entirely forgiven her.  She never suspected that the exaggerated
+reserve of manner that offended her was owing to Jacqueline's dread
+(commendable in itself) of appearing to wish in her days of misfortune
+for the return of one she had rejected in the time of prosperity.
+
+In spite of the received opinion that society abandons those who are
+overtaken by misfortune, all the friends of the De Nailles flocked to
+offer their condolences to the widow and the orphan with warm
+demonstrations of interest.  Curiosity, a liking to witness, or to
+experience, emotion, the pleasure of being able to tell what has been
+seen and heard, to find out new facts and repeat them again to others,
+joined to a sort of vague, commonplace, almost intrusive pity, are
+sentiments, which sometimes in hours of great disaster, produce what
+appears to wear the look of sympathy.  A fortnight after M. de Nailles's
+death, between the acts of Scylla and Charybdis, the principal parts in
+which were taken by young d'Etaples and Isabelle Ray, the company, as it
+ate ices, was glibly discussing the real drama which had produced in
+their own elegant circle much of the effect a blow has upon an ant-hill--
+fear, agitation, and a tumultuous rush to the scene of the disaster.
+
+Great indignation was expressed against the man who had risked the
+fortune of his family in speculation.  Oh! the thing had been going on
+for a long while.  His fortune had been gradually melting away;
+Grandchaux was loaded down with mortgages and would bring almost nothing
+at a forced sale.
+
+Everybody forgot that had M. de Nailles's speculations been successful
+they would have been called matters of business, conducted with great
+ability on a large scale.  When a performer falls from the tightrope, who
+remembers all the times he has not failed?  It is simply said that he
+fell from his own carelessness.
+
+"The poor Baroness is touchingly resigned," said Madame de Villegry, with
+a deep sigh; "and heaven knows how many other cares she has besides the
+loss of money!  I don't mean only the death of her husband--and you know
+how much they were attached to each other--I am speaking of that
+unaccountable resolution of Jacqueline's."
+
+Madame d'Avrigny here came forward with her usual equanimity which
+nothing disturbed, unless it were something which interfered with the
+success of her salon.
+
+She was of course very sorry for her friends in trouble, but the
+vicissitudes that had happened to her theatricals she had more at heart.
+
+"After all," she said, "the first act did not go off badly, did it?  The
+musical part made up for the rest.  That divine Strahlberg is ready for
+any emergency.  How well she sang that air of 'La Petite Mariee!' It was
+exquisite, but I regretted Jacqueline.  She was so charming in that
+lively little part.  What a catastrophe!
+
+What a terrible catastrophe!  Were you speaking of the retreat she wishes
+to make in a convent?  Well, I quite understand how she feels about it!
+I should feel the same myself.  In the bewilderment of a first grief one
+does not care to see anything of the world.  'Mon Dieu'!  youth always
+has these exaggerated notions.  She will come back to us.  Poor little
+thing!  Of course it was no fault of hers, and I should not think of
+blaming Monsieur de Cymier.  The exigencies of his career--but you all
+must own that unexpected things happen so suddenly in this life that it
+is enough to discourage any one who likes to open her house and provide
+amusement for her friends."
+
+Every one present pitied her for the contretemps over which she had
+triumphed so successfully.  Then she resumed, serenely:
+
+"Don't you think that Isabelle played the part almost as well as
+Jacqueline?  Up to the last moment I was afraid that something would go
+wrong.  When one gets into a streak of ill-luck--but all went off to
+perfection, thank heaven!"
+
+Meantime Madame Odinska was whispering to one of those who sat near her
+her belief that Jacqueline would never get over her father's loss.
+"It would not astonish me," she said, "to hear that the child, who has
+a noble nature, would remain in the convent and take the veil."
+
+Any kind of heroic deed seemed natural to this foolish enthusiast, who,
+as a matter of fact, in her own life, had never shown any tendency to
+heroic virtues; her mission in life had seemed to be to spoil her
+daughters in every possible way, and to fling away more money than
+belonged to her.
+
+"Really?  Was she so very fond of her father!"  asked Madame Ray,
+incredulously.  "When he was alive, they did not seem to make much of
+him in his own house.  Maybe this retreat is a good way of getting over
+a little wound to her 'amour-propre'."
+
+"The proper thing, I think," said Madame d'Etaples, "would be for the
+mother and daughter to keep together, to bear the troubles before them
+hand in hand.  Jacqueline does not seem to think much of the last wishes
+of the father she pretends to be so fond of.  The Baroness showed me,
+with many tears, a letter he left joined to his will, which was written
+some years ago, and which now, of course, is of no value.  He told mother
+and daughter to take care of each other and hoped they would always
+remain friends, loving each other for love of him.  Jacqueline's conduct
+amazes me; it looks like ingratitude."
+
+"Oh! she is a hard-hearted little thing!  I always thought so!"  said
+Madame de Villegry, carelessly.
+
+Here the rising of the curtain stopped short these discussions, which
+displayed so much good-nature and perspicacity.  But some laid the blame
+on the influence of that little bigot of a Talbrun, who had secretly
+blown up the fire of religious enthusiasm in Jacqueline, when Madame
+d'Avrigny's energetic "Hush!"  put an end to the discussion.  It was time
+to come back to more immediate interests, to the play which went on in
+spite of wind and tide.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A mother's geese are always swans
+Bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness
+Fred's verses were not good, but they were full of dejection
+Hang out the bush, but keep no tavern
+A familiarity which, had he known it, was not flattering
+His sleeplessness was not the insomnia of genius
+Importance in this world are as easily swept away as the sand
+Natural longing, that we all have, to know the worst
+Notion of her husband's having an opinion of his own
+Pride supplies some sufferers with necessary courage
+Seemed to enjoy themselves, or made believe they did
+This unending warfare we call love
+Unwilling to leave him to the repose he needed
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Jacqueline, v2
+by Therese Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)