第29章

"Six months after the revolution of July I received this letter,which concludes the story of this couple:--"'MONSIEUR MAURICE,--I am dying though I am a mother--perhaps because I am a mother.I have played my part as a wife well;I have deceived my husband.I have had happiness not less genuine than the tears shed by actresses on the stage.I am dying for society,for the family,for marriage,as the early Christians died for God!I know not of what Iam dying,and I am honestly trying to find out,for I am not perverse;but I am bent on explaining my malady to you--you who brought that heavenly physician your uncle,at whose word I surrendered.He was my director;I nursed him in his last illness,and he showed me the way to heaven,bidding me persevere in my duty.

"'And I have done my duty.

"'I do not blame those who forget.I admire them as strong and necessary natures;but I have the malady of memory!I have not been able twice to feel that love of the heart which identifies a woman with the man she loves.To the last moment,as you know,I cried to your heart,in the confessional,and to my husband,"Have mercy!"But there was no mercy.Well,and I am dying,dying with stupendous courage.No courtesan was ever more gay than I.My poor Octave is happy;I let his love feed on the illusions of my heart.I throw all my powers into this terrible masquerade;the actress is applauded,feasted,smothered in flowers;but the invisible rival comes every day to seek its prey--a fragment of my life.I am rent and I smile.Ismile on two children,but it is the elder,the dead one,that will triumph!I told you so before.The dead child calls me,and I am going to him.

"'The intimacy of marriage without love is a position in which my soul feels degraded every hour.I can never weep or give myself up to dreams but when I am alone.The exigencies of society,the care of my child,and that of Octave's happiness never leave me a moment to refresh myself,to renew my strength,as I could in my solitude.The incessant need for watchfulness startles my heart with constant alarms.I have not succeeded in implanting in my soul the sharp-eared vigilance that lies with facility,and has the eyes of a lynx.It is not the lip of one I love that drinks my tears and kisses them;my burning eyes are cooled with water,and not with tender lips.It is my soul that acts a part,and that perhaps is why I am dying!I lock up my griefs with so much care that nothing is to be seen of it;it must eat into something,and it has attacked my life.

"'I said to the doctors,who discovered my secret,"Make me die of some plausible complaint,or I shall drag my husband with me.""'So it is quite understood by M.Desplein,Bianchon,and myself that I am dying of the softening of some bone which science has fully described.Octave believes that I adore him,do you understand?So Iam afraid lest he should follow me.I now write to beg you in that case to be the little Count's guardian.You will find with this a codicil in which I have expressed my wish;but do not produce it excepting in case of need,for perhaps I am fatuously vain.My devotion may perhaps leave Octave inconsolable but willing to live.--Poor Octave!I wish him a better wife than I am,for he deserves to be well loved.

"'Since my spiritual spy is married,I bid him remember what the florist of the Rue Saint-Maur hereby bequeaths to him as a lesson:May your wife soon be a mother!Fling her into the vulgarest materialism of household life;hinder her from cherishing in her heart the mysterious flower of the Ideal--of that heavenly perfection in which Ibelieved,that enchanted blossom with glorious colors,and whose perfume disgusts us with reality.I am a Saint-Theresa who has not been suffered to live on ecstasy in the depths of a convent,with the Holy Infant,and a spotless winged angel to come and go as she wished.

"'You saw me happy among my beloved flowers.I did not tell you all: