Beatrix by Honoré de Balzac (story books to read TXT) 📖

until the dinner hour, when she rose hastily, and went downstairs without dressing. No sooner did Camille see her, than she felt that a crisis had come. Beatrix, in her morning gown, with a chilling air and a taciturn manner, indicated to an observer as keen as Maupin the coming hostilities of an embittered heart.

Camille instantly left the room and gave the order which so astonished Calyste; she feared that he might arrive in the midst of the quarrel, and she determined to be alone, without witnesses, in fighting this duel of deception on both sides. Beatrix, without an auxiliary, would infallibly succumb. Camille well knew the barrenness of that soul, the pettiness of that pride, to which she had justly applied the epithet of obstinate.

The dinner was gloomy. Camille was gentle and kind; she felt herself the superior being. Beatrix was hard and cutting; she felt she was being managed like a child. During dinner the battle began with glances, gestures, half-spoken sentences,--not enough to enlighten the servants, but enough to prepare an observer for the coming storm. When the time to go upstairs came, Camille offered her arm maliciously to Beatrix, who pretended not to see it, and sprang up the stairway alone. When coffee had been served Mademoiselle des Touches said to the footman, "You may go,"--a brief sentence, which served as a signal for the combat.

"The novels you make, my dear, are more dangerous than those you write," said the marquise.

"They have one advantage, however," replied Camille, lighting a cigarette.

"What is that?" asked Beatrix.

"They are unpublished, my angel."

"Is the one in which you are putting me to be turned into a book?"

"I've no fancy for the role of OEdipus; I know you have the wit and beauty of a sphinx, but don't propound conundrums. Speak out, plainly, my dear Beatrix."

"When, in order to make a man happy, amuse him, please him, and save him from ennui, we allow the devil to help us--"

"That man would reproach us later for our efforts on his behalf, and would think them prompted by the genius of depravity," said Camille, taking the cigarette from her lips to interrupt her friend.

"He forgets the love which carried us away, and is our sole justification--but that's the way of men, they are all unjust and ungrateful," continued Beatrix. "Women among themselves know each other; they know how proud and noble their own minds are, and, let us frankly say so, how virtuous! But, Camille, I have just recognized the truth of certain criticisms upon your nature, of which you have sometimes complained. My dear, you have something of the man about you; you behave like a man; nothing restrains you; if you haven't all a man's advantages, you have a man's spirit in all your ways; and you share his contempt for women. I have no reason, my dear, to be satisfied with you, and I am too frank to hide my dissatisfaction. No one has ever given or ever will give, perhaps, so cruel a wound to my heart as that from which I am now suffering. If you are not a woman in love, you are one in vengeance. It takes a _woman_ of genius to discover the most sensitive spot of all in another woman's delicacy. I am talking now of Calyste, and the trickery, my dear,--that is the word,--_trickery_,--you have employed against me. To what depths have you descended, Camille Maupin! and why?"

"More and more sphinx-like!" said Camille, smiling.

"You want me to fling myself at Calyste's head; but I am still too young for that sort of thing. To me, love is sacred; love is love with all its emotions, jealousies, and despotisms. I am not an author; it is impossible for me to see ideas where the heart feels sentiments."

"You think yourself capable of loving foolishly!" said Camille. "Make yourself easy on that score; you still have plenty of sense. My dear, you calumniate yourself; I assure you that your nature is cold enough to enable your head to judge of every action of your heart."

The marquise colored high; she darted a look of hatred, a venomous look, at Camille, and found, without searching, the sharpest arrows in her quiver. Camille smoked composedly as she listened to a furious tirade, which rang with such cutting insults that we do not reproduce it here. Beatrix, irritated by the calmness of her adversary, condescended even to personalities on Camille's age.

"Is that all?" said Felicite, when Beatrix paused, letting a cloud of smoke exhale from her lips. "Do you love Calyste?"

"No; of course not."

"So much the better," replied Camille. "I do love him--far too much for my own peace of mind. He may, perhaps, have had a passing fancy for you; for you are, you know, enchantingly fair, while I am as black as a crow; you are slim and willowy, while I have a portly dignity; in short, you are _young_!--that's the final word, and you have not spared it to me. You have abused your advantages as a woman against me. I have done my best to prevent what has now happened. However little of a woman you may think me, I am woman enough, my dear, not to allow a rival to triumph over me unless I choose to help her." (This remark, made in apparently the most innocent manner, cut the marquise to the heart). "You take me for a very silly person if you believe all that Calyste tries to make you think of me. I am neither so great nor so small; I am a woman, and very much of a woman. Come, put off your grand airs, and give me your hand!" continued Camille, taking Madame de Rochefide's hand. "You do not love Calyste, you say; that is true, is it not? Don't be angry, therefore; be hard, and cold, and stern to him to-morrow; he will end by submitting to his fate, especially after certain little reproaches which I mean to make to him. Still, Calyste is a Breton, and very persistent; if he should continue to pay court to you, tell me frankly, and I will lend you my little country house near Paris, where you will find all the comforts of life, and where Conti can come out and see you. You said just now that Calyste calumniated me. Good heavens! what of that? The purest love lies twenty times a day; its deceptions only prove its strength."

Camille's face wore an air of such superb disdain that the marquise grew fearful and anxious. She knew not how to answer. Camille dealt her a last blow.

"I am more confiding and less bitter than you," she said. "I don't suspect you of attempting to cover by a quarrel a secret injury, which would compromise my very life. You know me; I shall never survive the loss of Calyste, but I must lose him sooner or later. Still, Calyste loves me now; of that I am sure."

"Here is what he answered to a letter of mine, urging him to be true to you," said Beatrix, holding out Calyste's last letter.

Camille took it and read it; but as she read it, her eyes filled with tears; and presently she wept as women weep in their bitterest sorrows.

"My God!" she said, "how he loves her! I shall die without being understood--or loved," she added.

She sat for a few moments with her head leaning against the shoulder of her companion; her grief was genuine; she felt to the very core of her being the same terrible blow which the Baronne du Guenic had received in reading that letter.

"Do you love him?" she said, straightening herself up, and looking fixedly at Beatrix. "Have you that infinite worship for him which triumphs over all pains, survives contempt, betrayal, the certainty that he will never love you? Do you love him for himself, and for the very joy of loving him?"

"Dear friend," said the marquise, tenderly, "be happy, be at peace; I will leave this place to-morrow."

"No, do not go; he loves you, I see that. Well, I love him so much that I could not endure to see him wretched and unhappy. Still, I had formed plans for him, projects; but if he loves you, all is over."

"And I love him, Camille," said the marquise, with a sort of _naivete_, and coloring.

"You love him, and yet you cast him off!" cried Camille. "Ah! that is not loving; you do not love him."

"I don't know what fresh virtue he has roused in me, but certainly he has made me ashamed of my own self," said Beatrix. "I would I were virtuous and free, that I might give him something better than the dregs of a heart and the weight of my chains. I do not want a hampered destiny either for him or for myself."

"Cold brain!" exclaimed Camille, with a sort of horror. "To love and calculate!"

"Call it what you like," said Beatrix, "but I will not spoil his life, or hang like a millstone round his neck, to become an eternal regret to him. If I cannot be his wife, I shall not be his mistress. He has--you will laugh at me? No? Well, then, he has purified me."

Camille cast on Beatrix the most sullen, savage look that female jealousy ever cast upon a rival.

"On that ground, I believed I stood alone," she said. "Beatrix, those words of yours must separate us forever; we are no longer friends. Here begins a terrible conflict between us. I tell you now; you will either succumb or fly."

So saying, Camille bounded into her room, after showing her face, which was that of a maddened lioness, to the astonished Beatrix. Then she raised the portiere and looked in again.

"Do you intend to go to Croisic to-morrow," she asked.

"Certainly," replied the marquise, proudly. "I shall not fly, and I shall not succumb."

"I play above board," replied Camille; "I shall write to Conti."

Beatrix became as white as the gauze of her scarf.

"We are staking our lives on this game," she replied, not knowing what to say or do.

The violent passions roused by this scene between the two women calmed down during the night. Both argued with their own minds and returned to those treacherously temporizing courses which are so attractive to the majority of women,--an excellent system between men and women, but fatally unsafe among women alone. In the midst of this tumult of their souls Mademoiselle des Touches had listened to that great Voice whose counsels subdue the strongest will; Beatrix heard only the promptings of worldly wisdom; she feared the contempt of society.

Thus Felicite's last deception succeeded; Calyste's blunder was repaired, but a fresh indiscretion might be fatal to him.


XIV. AN EXCURSION TO CROISIC

It was now the end of August, and the sky was magnificently clear. Near the horizon the sea had taken, as it is wont to do in southern climes, a tint of molten silver; on the shore it rippled in tiny waves. A sort of glowing vapor, an effect of the rays of the sun falling plumb upon the sands, produced an atmosphere like that of the tropics. The salt shone up like bunches of white violets on the surface of the marsh. The patient _paludiers_, dressed in white to resist the action of the sun, had been from early morning at their posts, armed with long rakes. Some were leaning on the low mud-walls that divided the different holdings, whence