In fact, that handsome Thuillier was never at home except at dinner, after which meal he went out, returning very late at night.  He went to balls and other social festivities by himself, precisely as if he were still a bachelor.  Thus the two women were always alone together.  Celeste insensibly fell into a passive attitude, and became what Brigitte wanted her,—­a helot.  The Queen Elizabeth of the household then passed from despotism to a sort of pity for the poor victim who was always sacrificed.  She ended by softening her haughty ways, her cutting speech, her contemptuous tones, as soon as she was certain that her sister-in-law was completely under the yoke.  When she saw the wounds it made on the neck of her victim, she took care of her as a thing of her own, and Celeste entered upon happier days.  Comparing the end with the beginning, she even felt a sort of love for her torturer.  To gain some power of self-defence, to become something less a cipher in the household, supported, unknown to herself, by her own means, the poor helot had but a single chance, and that chance never came to her.

Celeste had no child.  This barrenness, which, from month to month, brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of Brigitte’s scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit for nothing, not even to bear children.  The old maid, who had longed to love her brother’s child as if it were her own, was unable, for years, to reconcile herself to this irremediable sterility.

At the time when our history begins, namely, in 1840, Celeste, then forty-six years old, had ceased to weep; she now had the certainty of never being a mother.  And here is a strange thing.  After twenty-five years of this life, in which victory had ended by first dulling and then breaking its own knife, Brigitte loved Celeste as much as Celeste loved Brigitte.  Time, ease, and the perpetual rubbing of domestic life, had worn off the angles and smoothed the asperities; Celeste’s resignation and lamb-like gentleness had brought, at last, a serene and peaceful autumn.  The two women were still further united by the one sentiment that lay within them, namely, their adoration for the lucky and selfish Thuillier.

Moreover, these two women, both childless, had each, like all women who have vainly desired children, fallen in love with a child.  This fictitious motherhood, equal in strength to a real motherhood, needs an explanation which will carry us to the very heart of our drama, and will show the reason of the new occupation which Mademoiselle Thuillier provided for her brother.

CHAPTER III

Colleville

Thuillier had entered the ministry of finance as supernumerary at the same time as Colleville, who has been mentioned already as his intimate friend.  In opposition to the well-regulated, gloomy household of Thuillier, social nature had provided that of Colleville; and if it is impossible not to remark that this fortuitous contrast was scarcely moral, we must add that, before deciding that point, it would be well to wait for the end of this drama, unfortunately too true, for which the present historian is not responsible.