Oh, I have thought a great deal about
that! Just think that every day women are
dying who have been loved; every day the traces and
proofs of their fault fall into the hands of their
husbands, and that there is never a scandal, never
a duel.
Think, my dear, of what a man’s
heart is. He avenges himself on a living woman;
he fights with the man who has dishonored her, kills
him while she lives, because, well, why? I
do not know exactly why. But, if, after her
death, he finds similar proofs, he burns them and
no one is the wiser, and he continues to shake hands
with the friend of the dead woman, and feels quite
at ease that these letters should not have fallen
into strange hands, and that they are destroyed.
Oh, how many men I know among my friends
who must have burned such proofs, and who pretend
to know nothing, and yet who would have fought
madly had they found them when she was still alive!
But she is dead. Honor has changed. The
tomb is the boundary of conjugal sinning.
Therefore, I can safely keep our
letters, which, in your hands,
would be a menace to both of us.
Do you dare to say that I am not
right?
I love you and kiss you.
I raised my eyes to the portrait of Aunt Rose, and
as I looked at her severe, wrinkled face, I thought
of all those women’s souls which we do not know,
and which we suppose to be so different from what they
really are, whose inborn and ingenuous craftiness
we never can penetrate, their quiet duplicity; and
a verse of De Vigny returned to my memory:
“Always this comrade
whose heart is uncertain.”
The old-fashioned chateau was built on a wooded knoll
in the midst of tall trees with dark-green foliage;
the park extended to a great distance, in one direction
to the edge of the forest, in another to the distant
country. A few yards from the front of the house
was a huge stone basin with marble ladies taking a
bath; other, basins were seen at intervals down to
the foot of the slope, and a stream of water fell in
cascades from one basin to another.
From the manor house, which preserved the grace of
a superannuated coquette, down to the grottos incrusted
with shell-work, where slumbered the loves of a bygone
age, everything in this antique demesne had retained
the physiognomy of former days. Everything seemed
to speak still of ancient customs, of the manners
of long ago, of former gallantries, and of the elegant
trivialities so dear to our grandmothers.
In a parlor in the style of Louis XV, whose walls
were covered with shepherds paying court to shepherdesses,
beautiful ladies in hoop-skirts, and gallant gentlemen
in wigs, a very old woman, who seemed dead as soon
as she ceased to move, was almost lying down in a large
easy-chair, at each side of which hung a thin, mummy-like
hand.
