Part 7

“‘Oh, yes, yes,’ she continued quickly, in answer to this mute dissent. ‘I know all about it, du Bruel, my dear, I that have been like a queen in my house all my life till I married you. My wishes were guessed, fulfilled, and more than fulfilled. After all, I am thirty-five, and at five-and-thirty a woman cannot expect to be loved. Ah, if I were a girl of sixteen, if I had not lost something that is dearly bought at the Opera, what attention you would pay me, M. du Bruel! I feel the most supreme contempt for men who boast that they can love and grow careless and neglectful in little things as time grows on. You are short and insignificant, you see, du Bruel; you love to torment a woman; it is your only way of showing your strength. A Napoleon is ready to be swayed by the woman he loves; he loses nothing by it; but as for such as you, you believe that you are nothing apparently, you do not wish to be ruled.--Five-and-thirty, my dear boy,’ she continued, turning to me, ‘that is the clue to the riddle.--“No,” does he say again?--You know quite well that I am thirty-seven. I am very sorry, but just ask your friends to dine at the Rocher de Cancale. I could have them here, but I will not; they shall not come. And then perhaps my poor little monologue may engrave that salutary maxim, “Each is master at home,” upon your memory. That is our character,’ she added, laughing, with a return of the opera girl’s giddiness and caprice.

“‘Well, well, my dear little puss; there, there, never mind. We can manage to get on together,’ said du Bruel, and he kissed her hands, and we came away. But he was very wroth.

“The whole way from the Rue de la Victoire to the boulevard a perfect torrent of venomous words poured from his mouth like a waterfall in flood; but as the shocking language which he used on occasion was quite unfit to print, the report is necessarily inadequate.

“‘My dear fellow, I will leave that vile, shameless opera dancer, a worn-out jade that has been set spinning like a top to every operatic air; a foul hussy, an organ-grinder’s monkey! Oh, my dear boy, you have taken up with an actress; may the notion of marrying your mistress never get a hold on you. It is a torment omitted from the hell of Dante, you see. Look here! I will beat her; I will give her a thrashing; I will give it to her! Poison of my life, she sent me off like a running footman.’

“By this time we had reached the boulevard, and he had worked himself up to such a pitch of fury that the words stuck in his throat.

“‘I will kick the stuffing out of her!’

“‘And why?’

“‘My dear fellow, you will never know the thousand-and-one fancies that slut takes into her head. When I want to stay at home, she, forsooth, must go out; when I want to go out, she wants me to stop at home; and she spouts out arguments and accusations and reasoning and talks and talks till she drives you crazy. Right means any whim that they happen to take into their heads, and wrong means our notion. Overwhelm them with something that cuts their arguments to pieces--they hold their tongues and look at you as if you were a dead dog. My happiness indeed! I lead the life of a yard-dog; I am a perfect slave. The little happiness that I have with her costs me dear. Confound it all. I will leave her everything and take myself off to a garret. Yes, a garret and liberty. I have not dared to have my own way once in these five years.’

“But instead of going to his guests, Cursy strode up and down the boulevard between the Rue de Richelieu and the Rue du Mont Blanc, indulging in the most fearful imprecations, his unbounded language was most comical to hear. His paroxysm of fury in the street contrasted oddly with his peaceable demeanor in the house. Exercise assisted him to work off his nervous agitation and inward tempest. About two o’clock, on a sudden frantic impulse, he exclaimed:

“‘These damned females never know what they want. I will wager my head now that if I go home and tell her that I have sent to ask my friends to dine with me at the Rocher de Cancale, she will not be satisfied though she made the arrangement herself.--But she will have gone off somewhere or other. I wonder whether there is something at the bottom of all this, an assignation with some goat? No. In the bottom of her heart she loves me!’”

The Marquise could not help smiling.

“Ah, madame,” said Nathan, looking keenly at her, “only women and prophets know how to turn faith to account.--Du Bruel would have me go home with him,” he continued, “and we went slowly back. It was three o’clock. Before he appeared, he heard a stir in the kitchen, saw preparations going forward, and glanced at me as he asked the cook the reason of this.

“‘Madame ordered dinner,’ said the woman. ‘Madame dressed and ordered a cab, and then she changed her mind and ordered it again for the theatre this evening.’

“‘Good,’ exclaimed du Bruel, ‘what did I tell you?’

“We entered the house stealthily. No one was there. We went from room to room until we reached a little boudoir, and came upon Tullia in tears. She dried her eyes without affectation, and spoke to du Bruel.

“‘Send a note to the Rocher de Cancale,’ she said, ‘and ask your guests to dine here.’

“She was dressed as only women of the theatre can dress, in a simply-made gown of some dainty material, neither too costly nor too common, graceful and harmonious in outline and coloring; there was nothing conspicuous about her, nothing exaggerated--a word now dropping out of use, to be replaced by the word ‘artistic,’ used by fools as current coin. In short, Tullia looked like a gentlewoman. At thirty-seven she had reached the prime of a Frenchwoman’s beauty. At this moment the celebrated oval of her face was divinely pale; she had laid her hat aside; I could see a faint down like the bloom of fruit softening the silken contours of a cheek itself so delicate. There was a pathetic charm about her face with its double cluster of fair hair; her brilliant gray eyes were veiled by a mist of tears; her nose, delicately carved as a Roman cameo, with its quivering nostrils; her little mouth, like a child’s even now; her long queenly throat, with the veins standing out upon it; her chin, flushed for the moment by some secret despair; the pink tips of her ears, the hands that trembled under her gloves, everything about her told of violent feeling. The feverish twitching of her eyebrows betrayed her pain. She looked sublime.

“Her first words had crushed du Bruel. She looked at us both, with that penetrating, impenetrable cat-like glance which only actresses and great ladies can use. Then she held out her hand to her husband.

“‘Poor dear, you had scarcely gone before I blamed myself a thousand times over. It seemed to me that I had been horribly ungrateful. I told myself that I had been unkind.--Was I very unkind?’ she asked, turning to me.--‘Why not receive your friends? Is it not your house? Do you want to know the reason of it all? Well, I was afraid that I was not loved; and indeed I was half-way between repentance and the shame of going back. I read the newspapers, and saw that there was a first night at the Varietes, and I thought you had meant to give the dinner to a collaborator. Left to myself, I gave way, I dressed to hurry out after you--poor pet.’

“Du Bruel looked at me triumphantly, not a vestige of a recollection of his orations contra Tullia in his mind.

“‘Well, dearest, I have not spoken to any one of them,’ he said.

“‘How well we understand each other!’ quoth she.

“Even as she uttered those bewildering sweet words, I caught sight of something in her belt, the corner of a little note thrust sidewise into it; but I did not need that indication to tell me that Tullia’s fantastic conduct was referable to occult causes. Woman, in my opinion, is the most logical of created beings, the child alone excepted. In both we behold a sublime phenomenon, the unvarying triumph of one dominant, all-excluding thought. The child’s thought changes every moment; but while it possesses him, he acts upon it with such ardor that others give way before him, fascinated by the ingenuity, the persistence of a strong desire. Woman is less changeable, but to call her capricious is a stupid insult. Whenever she acts, she is always swayed by one dominant passion; and wonderful it is to see how she makes that passion the very centre of her world.

“Tullia was irresistible; she twisted du Bruel round her fingers, the sky grew blue again, the evening was glorious. And ingenious writer of plays as he is, he never so much as saw that his wife had buried a trouble out of sight.

“‘Such is life, my dear fellow,’ he said to me, ‘ups and downs and contrasts.’

“‘Especially life off the stage,’ I put in.

“‘That is just what I mean,’ he continued. ‘Why, but for these violent emotions, one would be bored to death! Ah! that woman has the gift of rousing me.’

“We went to the Varietes after dinner; but before we left the house I slipped into du Bruel’s room, and on a shelf among a pile of waste papers found the copy of the Petites-Affiches, in which, agreeably to the reformed law, notice of the purchase of the house was inserted. The words stared me in the face--‘At the request of Jean Francois du Bruel and Claudine Chaffaroux, his wife----’ Here was the explanation of the whole matter. I offered my arm to Claudine, and allowed the guests to descend the stairs in front of us. When we were alone--‘If I were La Palferine,’ I said, ‘I would not break an appointment.’