Old and young men and women, spoke of her with something
like devotion, and all said how kind and charitable
she was, and as merry as a bird on a bright day; they
said she pitied their wretchedness and their troubles,
and was still the young girl in spite of her long dresses,
and fearing nothing, while even the animals loved
her.
She was almost always alone, and was never troubled
with any companions; she seemed to shun the house,
hide herself in the park when the bell announced some
unexpected visits, and when one of her aunts, Madame
de Pleissac, said to her one day:
“Do you think that you will ever find a husband
with your stand-offish manners?”
She replied with a burst of laughter:
“Oh! Very well, then, Auntie, I shall do
without one!”
She had never given a hand to spiteful chatter or
to slander, and had not flirted with the best looking
young man in the neighborhood, any more than she had
with the officers who stayed at the chateau
during the maneuver, or the neighbors, who came to
see her parents. And some of them even old men,
whom years of work had bent like vine-stalks and had
tanned like the leather bottles which are used by caravans
in the East, used to say with tears in their dim eyes:
“Ah! When you married our young lady, we
all said that there would not be a happier man in
the whole world than you!”
Ought I to have believed them? Were they not
simple, frank souls, who were ignorant of wiles and
of lies, who had no interest in deceiving me, who
had lived near Elaine while she was growing up and
becoming a woman, and who had been familiar with her?
Could I be the only one who doubted Elaine, the only
one who accused her and suspected her, I who loved
her so madly, I, whose only hope, only desire, only
happiness she was? May heaven guide me on this
bad road on which I have lost my way, where I am calling
for help and where my misery is increasing every day,
and grant me the infinite pleasure of being able to
enjoy her caresses without any ill feeling, and to
be able to love her, as she loves me. And if
I must expiate my old faults, and this infamous doubt
which I am ashamed of not being immediately able to
cast from me, if I must pay for my unmerited happiness
with usury, I hope that I may be given to death as
a prey, only provided that I might belong to her,
idolize her, believe in her kisses, believe in her
beauty and in her love, for one hour, for even a few
moments!
To-day I suddenly remembered a funny evening which
I spent when I was a bachelor, at Madame d’Ecoussens,
where all of us, some with secret and insurmountable
agony, and others with absolute indifference, went
into one of the small rooms where a female professor
of palmistry, who was then in vogue, and whose name
I have forgotten, had installed herself.
When it came to my turn to sit opposite to her, as
if I had been going to make my confession, she took
my hands into her long, slender fingers, felt them,
squeezed them and triturated them, as if they had been
a lump of wax, which she was about to model into shape.
