第58章

He therefore addressed a letter to his wife, dictated by Monsieur de Clagny, begging her to live under his roof and to furnish the house, giving play to the taste of which the evidences, he said, had charmed him at the Chateau d'Anzy. The newly made Count pointed out to his wife that while the interests of their property forbade his leaving Sancerre, the education of their boys required her presence in Paris.

The accommodating husband desired Monsieur de Clagny to place sixty thousand francs at the disposal of Madame la Comtesse for the interior decoration of their mansion, requesting that she would have a marble tablet inserted over the gateway with the inscription: /Hotel de la Baudraye/.

He then accounted to his wife for the money derived from the estate of Silas Piedefer, told her of the investment at four and a half per cent of the eight hundred thousand francs he had brought from New York, and allowed her that income for her expenses, including the education of the children. As he would be compelled to stay in Paris during some part of the session of the House of Peers, he requested his wife to reserve for him a little suite of rooms in an /entresol/ over the kitchens.

"Bless me! why, he is growing young again--a gentleman!--a magnifico!

--What will he become next? It is quite alarming," said Madame de la Baudraye.

"He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty," replied the lawyer.

The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had turned her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the Chamarolles' school.

"I am a countess," said Dinah to herself. "I shall have the peer's blue hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary world in my drawing-room--and I will look at her!"--And it was this little triumph that told with all its weight at the moment of her rehabilitation, as the world's contempt had of old weighed on her happiness.

One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:

"I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the pleasure of your company at the /Rocher de Cancale/."She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy manners assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave of his least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months past.

"Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night," said he --/une premiere/, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.

"Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye," said Dinah gravely. "I do not mean to understand such a word as /figged out/.""Didine a rebel!" said he, putting his arm round her waist.

"There is no such person as Didine; you have killed her, my dear," she replied, releasing herself. "I am taking you to the first performance of /Madame la Comtesse de la Baudraye/.""It is true, then, that our insect is a peer of France?""The nomination is to be gazetted in this evening's /Moniteur/, as Iam told by Monsieur de Clagny, who is promoted to the Court of Appeal.""Well, it is quite right," said the journalist. "The entomology of society ought to be represented in the Upper House.""My friend, we are parting for ever," said Madame de la Baudraye, trying to control the trembling of her voice. "I have dismissed the two servants. When you go in, you will find the house in order, and no debts. I shall always feel a mother's affection for you, but in secret. Let us part calmly, without a fuss, like decent people.

"Have you had a fault to find with my conduct during the past six years?""None, but that you have spoiled my life, and wrecked my prospects,"said he in a hard tone. "You have read Benjamin Constant's book very diligently; you have even studied the last critique on it; but you have read with a woman's eyes. Though you have one of those superior intellects which would make a fortune of a poet, you have never dared to take the man's point of view.

"That book, my dear, is of both sexes.--We agreed that books were male or female, dark or fair. In /Adolphe/ women see nothing but Ellenore;young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and Adolphe; political men see the whole of social existence. You did not think it necessary to read the soul of Adolphe--any more than your critic indeed, who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my dear, is that he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never can be what he might have been--an ambassador, a minister, a chamberlain, a poet--and rich. He gives up six years of his energy at that stage of his life when a man is ready to submit to the hardships of any apprenticeship--to a petticoat, which he outstrips in the career of ingratitude, for the woman who has thrown over her first lover is certain sooner or later to desert the second. Adolphe is, in fact, a tow-haired German, who has not spirit enough to be false to Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare their Ellenores all ignominious quarreling and reproaches, who say to themselves, 'I will not talk of what I have sacrificed; I will not for ever be showing the stump of my wrist to let that incarnate selfishness I have made my queen,' as Ramorny does in /The Fair Maid of Perth/. But men like that, my dear, get cast aside.

"Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright, his blighted position.--You, at this moment, are playing both parts.