As for her pose, one word will suffice--it was worthy of the pains she had taken to arrange it. Her arms, now thin and hard, were scarcely visible within the puffings of her very large sleeves. She presented that mixture of false glitter and brilliant fabrics, of silken gauze and craped hair, of vivacity, calmness, and motion which goes by the term of the /Je ne sais quoi/. Everybody knows in what that consists, namely: great cleverness, some taste, and a certain composure of manner. Beatrix might now be called a decorative scenic effect, changed at will, and wonderfully manipulated. The presentation of this fairy effect, to which is added clever dialogue, turns the heads of men who are endowed by nature with frankness, until they become possessed, through the law of contrasts, by a frantic desire to play with artifice. It is false, though enticing; a pretence, but agreeable; and certain men adore women who play at seduction as others do at cards. And this is why: The desire of the man is a syllogism which draws conclusions from this external science as to the secret promises of pleasure. The inner consciousness says, without words: "Awoman who can, as it were, create herself beautiful must have many other resources for love." And that is true. Deserted women are usually those who merely love; those who retain love know the /art/ of loving. Now, though her Italian lesson had very cruelly maltreated the self-love and vanity of Madame de Rochefide, her nature was too instinctively artificial not to profit by it.
"It is not a question of loving a man," she was saying a few moments before Calyste had entered her box; "we must tease and harass him if we want to keep him. That's the secret of all those women who seek to retain you men. The dragons who guard treasures are always armed with claws and wings.""I shall make a sonnet on that thought," replied Canalis at the very moment when Calyste entered the box.
With a single glance Beatrix divined the state of Calyste's heart; she saw the marks of the collar she had put upon him at Les Touches, still fresh and red. Calyste, however, wounded by the speech made to him about his wife, hesitated between his dignity as a husband, Sabine's defence, and a harsh word cast upon a heart which held such memories for him, a heart which he believed to be bleeding. The marquise observed his hesitation; she had made that speech expressly that she might know how far her empire over Calyste still extended. Seeing his weakness, she came at once to his succor to relieve his embarrassment.
"Well, dear friend, you find me alone," she said, as soon as the two gentlemen had left the box,--"yes, alone in the world!""You forget me!" said Calyste.
"You!" she replied, "but you are married. That was one of my griefs, among the many I have endured since I saw you last. Not only--I said to myself--do I lose love, but I have lost a friendship which Ithought was Breton. Alas! we can make ourselves bear everything. Now Isuffer less, but I am broken, exhausted! This is the first outpouring of my heart for a long, long time. Obliged to seem proud before indifferent persons, and arrogant as if I had never fallen in presence of those who pay court to me, and having lost my dear Felicite, there was no ear into which I could cast the words, /I suffer!/ But to you Ican tell the anguish I endured on seeing you just now so near to me.
Yes," she said, replying to a gesture of Calyste's, "it is almost fidelity. That is how it is with misery; a look, a visit, a mere nothing is everything to us. Ah! you once loved me--you--as I deserved to be loved by him who has taken pleasure in trampling under foot the treasures I poured out upon him. And yet, to my sorrow, I cannot forget; I love, and I desire to be faithful to a past that can never return."Having uttered this tirade, improvised for the hundredth time, she played the pupils of her eyes in a way to double the effect of her words, which seemed to be dragged from the depths of her soul by the violence of a torrent long restrained. Calyste, incapable of speech, let fall the tears that gathered in his eyes. Beatrix caught his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.
"Thank you, Calyste, thank you, my poor child; that is how a true friend responds to the grief of his friend. We understand each other.
No, don't add another word; leave me now; people are looking at us; it might cause trouble to your wife if some one chanced to tell her that we were seen together,--innocently enough, before a thousand people!
There, you see I am strong; adieu--"
She wiped her eyes, making what might be called, in woman's rhetoric, an antithesis of action.
"Let me laugh the laugh of a lost soul with the careless creatures who amuse me," she went on. "I live among artists, writers, in short the world I knew in the salon of our poor Camille--who may indeed have acted wisely. To enrich the man we love and then to disappear saying, 'I am too old for him!' that is ending like the martyrs,--and the best end too, if one cannot die a virgin."She began to laugh, as it to remove the melancholy impression she had made upon her former adorer.
"But," said Calyste, "where can I go to see you?""I am hidden in the rue de Chartres opposite the Parc de Monceaux, in a little house suitable to my means; and there I cram my head with literature--but only for myself, to distract my thoughts; God keep me from the mania of literary women! Now go, leave me; I must not allow the world to talk of me; what will it not say on seeing us together!
Adieu--oh! Calyste, my friend, if you stay another minute I shall burst into tears!"Calyste withdrew, after holding out his hand to Beatrix and feeling for the second time that strange and deep sensation of a double pressure--full of seductive tingling.
"Sabine never knew how to stir my soul in that way," was the thought that assailed him in the corridor.
