She conjectured, hoped and doubted, suffered and wept
for more than a year; then she suddenly went to the
capital and appeared unexpectedly in his apartments.
Painful explanations followed, until at last the Count
told her that he no longer loved her, and could not
live with her for the future, and when she wished
to make him do so by legal means, and entrusted her
case to a celebrated lawyer, the Count denied that
she was his wife. She produced her marriage
certificate, when the most infamous fraud came to
light. A confidential servant of the Count had
acted the part of the priest, and the tailor’s
beautiful daughter had, as a matter of fact, merely
been the Count’s mistress, and her children
were bastards.
The virtuous woman then saw, when it was too late,
that it was she who had formed a mesalliance.
Her parents would have nothing to do with her, and
at last it turned out in the bargain that the Count
was married long before he knew her, but that he did
not live with his wife.
Then Fanny applied to the police magistrates; she
wanted to appeal to justice, but she was dissuaded
from taking criminal proceedings; for although they
would certainly lead to the punishment of her daring
seducer, they would also bring about her own total
ruin.
At last, however, her lawyer effected a settlement
between them, which was favorable to Fanny, and which
she accepted for the sake of her children. The
Count paid her a considerable sum down, and gave her
the gloomy castle to live in. Thither she returned
with a broken heart, and from that time she lived
alone, a sullen misanthrope, a fierce despot.
From time to time, a stranger wandering through the
Carpathians, meets a pale woman of demonic beauty,
wearing a magnificent sable skin jacket and with a
gun over her shoulder, in the forest, or in the winter
in a sledge, driving her foaming horses until they
nearly drop from fatigue, while the sleigh bells utter
a melancholy sound, and at last die away in the distance,
like the weeping of a solitary, deserted human heart.
My old friend (one has friends occasionally who are
much older than oneself), my old friend Doctor Bonnet,
had often invited me to spend some time with him at
Riom, and as I did not know Auvergne, I made up my
mind to go in the summer of 1876.
I got there by the morning train, and the first person
I saw on the platform was the doctor. He was
dressed in a gray suit, and wore a soft, black, wide-brimmed,
high-crowned felt hat, which was narrow at the top
like a chimney pot, a hat which hardly any one except
an Auvergnat would wear, and which smacked of the
charcoal burner. Dressed like that, the doctor
had the appearance of an old young man, with his spare
body under his thin coat, and his large head covered
with white hair.
He embraced me with that evident pleasure which country
people feel when they meet long-expected friends,
and stretching out his arm, he said proudly:
