Читать книгу: «Parisians in the Country», страница 14

“And pray, sir, is the mother to die of hunger?”

“Be quite easy,” said the lawyer bitterly, having dragged from Lousteau the expression of feeling he had so long been expecting. “I will undertake to transact the matter with Monsieur de la Baudraye.”

Monsieur de Clagny left the house with a chill at his heart.

Dinah, his idol, was loved for her money. Would she not, when too late, have her eyes opened?

“Poor woman!” said the lawyer, as he walked away. And this justice we will do him – for to whom should justice be done unless to a Judge? – he loved Dinah too sincerely to regard her degradation as a means of triumph one day; he was all pity and devotion; he really loved her.

The care and nursing of the infant, its cries, the quiet needed for the mother during the first few days, and the ubiquity of Madame Piedefer, were so entirely adverse to literary labors, that Lousteau moved up to the three rooms taken on the first floor for the old bigot. The journalist, obliged to go to the first performances without Dinah, and living apart from her, found an indescribable charm in the use of his liberty. More than once he submitted to be taken by the arm and dragged off to some jollification; more than once he found himself at the house of a friend’s mistress in the heart of bohemia. He again saw women brilliantly young and splendidly dressed, in whom economy seemed treason to their youth and power. Dinah, in spite of her striking beauty, after nursing her baby for three months, could not stand comparison with these perishable blossoms, so soon faded, but so showy as long as they live rooted in opulence.

Home life had, nevertheless, a strong attraction for Etienne. In three months the mother and daughter, with the help of the cook from Sancerre and of little Pamela, had given the apartment a quite changed appearance. The journalist found his breakfast and his dinner served with a sort of luxury. Dinah, handsome and nicely dressed, was careful to anticipate her dear Etienne’s wishes, and he felt himself the king of his home, where everything, even the baby, was subject to his selfishness. Dinah’s affection was to be seen in every trifle, Lousteau could not possibly cease the entrancing deceptions of his unreal passion.

Dinah, meanwhile, was aware of a source of ruin, both to her love and to the household, in the kind of life into which Lousteau had allowed himself to drift. At the end of ten months she weaned her baby, installed her mother in the upstairs rooms, and restored the family intimacy which indissolubly links a man and woman when the woman is loving and clever. One of the most striking circumstances in Benjamin Constant’s novel, one of the explanations of Ellenore’s desertion, is the want of daily – or, if you will, of nightly – intercourse between her and Adolphe. Each of the lovers has a separate home; they have both submitted to the world and saved appearances. Ellenore, repeatedly left to herself, is compelled to vast labors of affection to expel the thoughts of release which captivate Adolphe when absent. The constant exchange of glances and thoughts in domestic life gives a woman such power that a man needs stronger reasons for desertion than she will ever give him so long as she loves him.

This was an entirely new phase both to Etienne and to Dinah. Dinah intended to be indispensable; she wanted to infuse fresh energy into this man, whose weakness smiled upon her, for she thought it a security. She found him subjects, sketched the treatment, and at a pinch, would write whole chapters. She revived the vitality of this dying talent by transfusing fresh blood into his veins; she supplied him with ideas and opinions. In short, she produced two books which were a success. More than once she saved Lousteau’s self-esteem by dictating, correcting, or finishing his articles when he was in despair at his own lack of ideas. The secret of this collaboration was strictly preserved; Madame Piedefer knew nothing of it.

This mental galvanism was rewarded by improved pay, enabling them to live comfortably till the end of 1838. Lousteau became used to seeing Dinah do his work, and he paid her – as the French people say in their vigorous lingo – in “monkey money,” nothing for her pains. This expenditure in self-sacrifice becomes a treasure which generous souls prize, and the more she gave the more she loved Lousteau; the time soon came when Dinah felt that it would be too bitter a grief ever to give him up.

But then another child was coming, and this year was a terrible trial. In spite of the precautions of the two women, Etienne contracted debts; he worked himself to death to pay them off while Dinah was laid up; and, knowing him as she did, she thought him heroic. But after this effort, appalled at having two women, two children, and two maids on his hands, he was incapable of the struggle to maintain a family by his pen when he had failed to maintain even himself. So he let things take their chance. Then the ruthless speculator exaggerated the farce of love-making at home to secure greater liberty abroad.

Dinah proudly endured the burden of life without support. The one idea, “He loves me!” gave her superhuman strength. She worked as hard as the most energetic spirits of our time. At the risk of her beauty and health, Didine was to Lousteau what Mademoiselle Delachaux was to Gardane in Diderot’s noble and true tale. But while sacrificing herself, she committed the magnanimous blunder of sacrificing dress. She had her gowns dyed, and wore nothing but black. She stank of black, as Malaga said, making fun mercilessly of Lousteau.

By the end of 1839, Etienne, following the example of Louis XV., had, by dint of gradual capitulations of conscience, come to the point of establishing a distinction between his own money and the housekeeping money, just as Louis XV. drew the line between his privy purse and the public moneys. He deceived Dinah as to his earnings. On discovering this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of jealousy. She wanted to live two lives – the life of the world and the life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-night performance, and could detect in him many impulses of wounded vanity, for her black attire rubbed off, as it were, on him, clouding his brow, and sometimes leading him to be quite brutal. He was really the woman of the two; and he had all a woman’s exacting perversity; he would reproach Dinah for the dowdiness of her appearance, even while benefiting by the sacrifice, which to a mistress is so cruel – exactly like a woman who, after sending a man through a gutter to save her honor, tells him she “cannot bear dirt!” when he comes out.

Dinah then found herself obliged to gather up the rather loose reins of power by which a clever woman drives a man devoid of will. But in so doing she could not fail to lose much of her moral lustre. Such suspicions as she betrayed drag a woman into quarrels which lead to disrespect, because she herself comes down from the high level on which she had at first placed herself. Next she made some concession; Lousteau was allowed to entertain several of his friends – Nathan, Bixiou, Blondet, Finot, whose manners, language, and intercourse were depraving. They tried to convince Madame de la Baudraye that her principles and aversions were a survival of provincial prudishness; and they preached the creed of woman’s superiority.

Before long, her jealousy put weapons into Lousteau’s hands. During the carnival of 1840, she disguised herself to go to the balls at the Opera-house, and to suppers where she met courtesans, in order to keep an eye on all Etienne’s amusements.

On the day of Mid-Lent – or rather, at eight on the morning after – Dinah came home from the ball in her fancy dress to go to bed. She had gone to spy on Lousteau, who, believing her to be ill, had engaged himself for that evening to Fanny Beaupre. The journalist, warned by a friend, had behaved so as to deceive the poor woman, only too ready to be deceived.

As she stepped out of the hired cab, Dinah met Monsieur de la Baudraye, to whom the porter pointed her out. The little old man took his wife by the arm, saying, in an icy tone:

“So this is you, madame!”

This sudden advent of conjugal authority, before which she felt herself so small, and, above all, these words, almost froze the heart of the unhappy woman caught in the costume of a debardeur. To escape Etienne’s eye the more effectually, she had chosen a dress he was not likely to detect her in. She took advantage of the mask she still had on to escape without replying, changed her dress, and went up to her mother’s rooms, where she found her husband waiting for her. In spite of her assumed dignity, she blushed in the old man’s presence.

“What do you want of me, monsieur?” she asked. “Are we not separated forever?”

“Actually, yes,” said Monsieur de la Baudraye. “Legally, no.”

Madame Piedefer was telegraphing signals to her daughter, which Dinah presently observed and understood.

“Nothing could have brought you here but your own interests,” she said, in a bitter tone.

“Our interests,” said the little man coldly, “for we have two children. – Your Uncle Silas Piedefer is dead, at New York, where, after having made and lost several fortunes in various parts of the world, he has finally left some seven or eight hundred thousand francs – they say twelve – but there is stock-in-trade to be sold. I am the chief in our common interests, and act for you.”

“Oh!” cried Dinah, “in everything that relates to business, I trust no one but Monsieur de Clagny. He knows the law, come to terms with him; what he does, will be done right.”

“I have no occasion for Monsieur de Clagny,” answered Monsieur de la Baudraye, “to take my children from you – ”

“Your children!” exclaimed Dinah. “Your children, to whom you have not sent a sou! Your children!” She burst into a loud shout of laughter; but Monsieur de la Baudraye’s unmoved coolness threw ice on the explosion.

“Your mother has just brought them to show me,” he went on. “They are charming boys. I do not intend to part from them. I shall take them to our house at Anzy, if it were only to save them from seeing their mother disguised like a – ”

“Silence!” said Madame de la Baudraye imperatively. “What do you want of me that brought you here?”

“A power of attorney to receive our Uncle Silas’ property.”

Dinah took a pen, wrote two lines to Monsieur de Clagny, and desired her husband to call again in the afternoon.

At five o’clock, Monsieur de Clagny – who had been promoted to the post of Attorney-General – enlightened Madame de la Baudraye as to her position; still, he undertook to arrange everything by a bargain with the old fellow, whose visit had been prompted by avarice alone. Monsieur de la Baudraye, to whom his wife’s power of attorney was indispensable to enable him to deal with the business as he wished, purchased it by certain concessions. In the first place, he undertook to allow her ten thousand francs a year so long as she found it convenient – so the document was worded – to reside in Paris; the children, each on attaining the age of six, were to be placed in Monsieur de la Baudraye’s keeping. Finally, the lawyer extracted the payment of the allowance in advance.

Little La Baudraye, who came jauntily enough to say good-bye to his wife and his children, appeared in a white india-rubber overcoat. He was so firm on his feet, and so exactly like the La Baudraye of 1836, that Dinah despaired of ever burying the dreadful little dwarf. From the garden, where he was smoking a cigar, the journalist could watch Monsieur de la Baudraye for so long as it took the little reptile to cross the forecourt, but that was enough for Lousteau; it was plain to him that the little man had intended to wreck every hope of his dying that his wife might have conceived.

This short scene made a considerable change in the writer’s secret scheming. As he smoked a second cigar, he seriously reviewed the position.

His life with Madame de la Baudraye had hitherto cost him quite as much as it had cost her. To use the language of business, the two sides of the account balanced, and they could, if necessary, cry quits. Considering how small his income was, and how hardly he earned it, Lousteau regarded himself, morally speaking, as the creditor. It was, no doubt, a favorable moment for throwing the woman over. Tired at the end of three years of playing a comedy which never can become a habit, he was perpetually concealing his weariness; and this fellow, who was accustomed to disguise none of his feelings, compelled himself to wear a smile at home like that of a debtor in the presence of his creditor. This compulsion was every day more intolerable.

Hitherto the immense advantages he foresaw in the future had given him strength; but when he saw Monsieur de la Baudraye embark for the United States, as briskly as if it were to go down to Rouen in a steamboat, he ceased to believe in the future.

He went in from the garden to the pretty drawing-room, where Dinah had just taken leave of her husband.

“Etienne,” said Madame de la Baudraye, “do you know what my lord and master has proposed to me? In the event of my wishing to return to live at Anzy during his absence, he has left his orders, and he hopes that my mother’s good advice will weigh with me, and that I shall go back there with my children.”

“It is very good advice,” replied Lousteau drily, knowing the passionate disclaimer that Dinah expected, and indeed begged for with her eyes.

The tone, the words, the cold look, all hit the hapless woman so hard, who lived only in her love, that two large tears trickled slowly down her cheeks, while she did not speak a word, and Lousteau only saw them when she took out her handkerchief to wipe away these two beads of anguish.

“What is it, Didine?” he asked, touched to the heart by this excessive sensibility.

“Just as I was priding myself on having won our freedom,” said she – “at the cost of my fortune – by selling – what is most precious to a mother’s heart – selling my children! – for he is to have them from the age of six – and I cannot see them without going to Sancerre! – and that is torture! – Ah, dear God! What have I done – ?”

Lousteau knelt down by her and kissed her hands with a lavish display of coaxing and petting.

“You do not understand me,” said he. “I blame myself, for I am not worth such sacrifices, dear angel. I am, in a literary sense, a quite second-rate man. If the day comes when I can no longer cut a figure at the bottom of the newspaper, the editors will let me lie, like an old shoe flung into the rubbish heap. Remember, we tight-rope dancers have no retiring pension! The State would have too many clever men on its hands if it started on such a career of beneficence. I am forty-two, and I am as idle as a marmot. I feel it – I know it” – and he took her by the hand – “my love can only be fatal to you.

“As you know, at two-and-twenty I lived on Florine; but what is excusable in a youth, what then seems smart and charming, is a disgrace to a man of forty. Hitherto we have shared the burden of existence, and it has not been lovely for this year and half. Out of devotion to me you wear nothing but black, and that does me no credit.” – Dinah gave one of those magnanimous shrugs which are worth all the words ever spoken. – “Yes,” Etienne went on, “I know you sacrifice everything to my whims, even your beauty. And I, with a heart worn out in past struggles, a soul full of dark presentiments as to the future, I cannot repay your exquisite love with an equal affection. We were very happy – without a cloud – for a long time. – Well, then, I cannot bear to see so sweet a poem end badly. Am I wrong?”

Madame de la Baudraye loved Etienne so truly, that this prudence, worthy of de Clagny, gratified her and stanched her tears.

“He loves me for myself alone!” thought she, looking at him with smiling eyes.

After four years of intimacy, this woman’s love now combined every shade of affection which our powers of analysis can discern, and which modern society has created; one of the most remarkable men of our age, whose death is a recent loss to the world of letters, Beyle (Stendhal), was the first to delineate them to perfection.

Lousteau could produce in Dinah the acute agitation which may be compared to magnetism, that upsets every power of the mind and body, and overcomes every instinct of resistance in a woman. A look from him, or his hand laid on hers, reduced her to implicit obedience. A kind word or a smile wreathed the poor woman’s soul with flowers; a fond look elated, a cold look depressed her. When she walked, taking his arm and keeping step with him in the street or on the boulevard, she was so entirely absorbed in him that she lost all sense of herself. Fascinated by this fellow’s wit, magnetized by his airs, his vices were but trivial defects in her eyes. She loved the puffs of cigar smoke that the wind brought into her room from the garden; she went to inhale them, and made no wry faces, hiding herself to enjoy them. She hated the publisher or the newspaper editor who refused Lousteau money on the ground of the enormous advances he had had already. She deluded herself so far as to believe that her bohemian was writing a novel, for which the payment was to come, instead of working off a debt long since incurred.

This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the love of the heart and of the head – passion, caprice, and taste – to accept Beyle’s definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in certain moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and constantly exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to read to the bottom of Lousteau’s soul, sense was still too much for reason, and suggested excuses.

“And what am I?” she replied. “A woman who has put herself outside the pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman’s honor, why should you not sacrifice to me some of a man’s honor? Do we not live outside the limits of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan can accept from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and only death can part us – you know. My happiness is your honor, Etienne, as my constancy and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you happy, all is at an end. If I cause you a pang, condemn me.

“Our debts are paid; we have ten thousand francs a year, and between us we can certainly make eight thousand francs a year – I will write theatrical articles. – With fifteen hundred francs a month we shall be as rich as Rothschild. – Be quite easy. I will have some lovely dresses, and give you every day some gratified vanity, as on the first night of Nathan’s play – ”

“And what about your mother, who goes to Mass every day, and wants to bring a priest to the house and make you give up this way of life?”

“Every one has a pet vice. You smoke, she preaches at me, poor woman! But she takes great care of the children, she takes them out, she is absolutely devoted, and idolizes me. Would you hinder her from crying?”

“What will be thought of me?”

“But we do not live for the world!” cried she, raising Etienne and making him sit by her. “Besides, we shall be married some day – we have the risks of a sea voyage – ”

“I never thought of that,” said Lousteau simply; and he added to himself, “Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back again.”

From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris. Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.

“Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from Dinah! But no one ever can!” said he. “She loves me enough to throw herself out of the window if I told her.”

The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against Dinah’s jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her – “You are betrayed,” and she only replied, “I know it.”

The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.

Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a word.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.

“I would lose my soul for you!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet.

The hapless man’s eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf, his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he was so blessed as to be accepted as his idol’s avenger, and this poor joy filled him with rapture.

“Why are you so startled?” said she, making him sit down again. “That is how I love him.”

The lawyer understood this argument ad hominem. And there were tears in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!

Lousteau’s satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations, had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where those who love dwell and dream. These grains of sand, which grow to be pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big as rocks. Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood Lousteau’s character.

“He is,” she said to her mother, “a poet, defenceless against disaster, mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate. What would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he has no prospects. His talent would perish in privations.”

“Oh, my Dinah!” Madame Piedefer had exclaimed, “what a hell you live in! What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?”

“I will be a mother to him!” she had replied.

There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor. We accept compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to play prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had been torturing Dinah.

“To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to preserve her power,” said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was becoming a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a pleasure.

The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made it no easier to play. When he wanted to go out after dinner he would perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he had bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate would say, “Did I wound you?”

These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere plaything in the man’s hands, and at last she confessed to herself:

“Well, then, I will be his plaything!” finding joy in it – the rapture of damnation.

When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living in solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated and inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the joys, which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the midst of remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a No persuaded to be Yes. At every moment she seemed to come across the pool of bitter water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish than the traveler would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince’s table.

When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:

“Will he come home, or will he not?” she was not alive again till she heard the familiar sound of Lousteau’s boots, and his well-known ring at the bell.

She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that agitated heart. How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of Le Dernier Jour d’un condamne, saying to herself, “To-morrow we part.” And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently artless feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!

It was terrible. More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed. In fact, she had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a loving woman bears in her heart.

The romance of Adolphe was her Bible, her study, for above all else she would not be an Ellenore. She allowed herself no tears, she avoided all the bitterness so cleverly described by the critic to whom we owe an analysis of this striking work; whose comments indeed seemed to Dinah almost superior to the book. And she read again and again this fine essay by the only real critic who has written in the Revue des Deux Mondes, an article now printed at the beginning of the new edition of Adolphe.

“No,” she would say to herself, as she repeated the author’s fateful words, “no, I will not ‘give my requests the form of an order,’ I will not ‘fly to tears as a means of revenge,’ I will not ‘condemn the things I once approved without reservation,’ I will not ‘dog his footsteps with a prying eye’; if he plays truant, he shall not on his return ‘see a scornful lip, whose kiss is an unanswerable command.’ No, ‘my silence shall not be a reproach nor my first word a quarrel.’ – I will not be like every other woman!” she went on, laying on her table the little yellow paper volume which had already attracted Lousteau’s remark, “What! are you studying Adolphe?” – “If for one day only he should recognize my merits and say, ‘That victim never uttered a cry!’ – it will be all I ask. And besides, the others only have him for an hour; I have him for life!”

Thinking himself justified by his private tribunal in punishing his wife, Monsieur de la Baudraye robbed her to achieve his cherished enterprise of reclaiming three thousand acres of moorland, to which he had devoted himself ever since 1836, living like a mouse. He manipulated the property left by Monsieur Silas Piedefer so ingeniously, that he contrived to reduce the proved value to eight hundred thousand francs, while pocketing twelve hundred thousand. He did not announce his return; but while his wife was enduring unspeakable woes, he was building farms, digging trenches, and ploughing rough ground with a courage that ranked him among the most remarkable agriculturists of the province.

The four hundred thousand francs he had filched from his wife were spent in three years on this undertaking, and the estate of Anzy was expected to return seventy-two thousand francs a year of net profits after the taxes were paid. The eight hundred thousand he invested at four and a half per cent in the funds, buying at eighty francs, at the time of the financial crisis brought about by the Ministry of the First of March, as it was called. By thus securing to his wife an income of forty-eight thousand francs he considered himself no longer in her debt. Could he not restore the odd twelve hundred thousand as soon as the four and a half per cents had risen above a hundred? He was now the greatest man in Sancerre, with the exception of one – the richest proprietor in France – whose rival he considered himself. He saw himself with an income of a hundred and forty thousand francs, of which ninety thousand formed the revenue from the lands he had entailed. Having calculated that besides this net income he paid ten thousand francs in taxes, three thousand in working expenses, ten thousand to his wife, and twelve hundred to his mother-in-law, he would say in the literary circles of Sancerre:

“I am reputed miserly, and said to spend nothing; but my outlay amounts to twenty-six thousand five hundred francs a year. And I have still to pay for the education of my two children! I daresay it is not a pleasing fact to the Milauds of Nevers, but the second house of La Baudraye may yet have as noble a center as the first. – I shall most likely go to Paris and petition the King of the French to grant me the title of Count – Monsieur Roy is a Count – and my wife would be pleased to be Madame la Comtesse.”

And this was said with such splendid coolness that no one would have dared to laugh at the little man. Only Monsieur Boirouge, the Presiding Judge, remarked:

“In your place, I should not be happy unless I had a daughter.”

“Well, I shall go to Paris before long – ” said the Baron.

In the early part of 1842 Madame de la Baudraye, feeling that she was to Lousteau no more than a reserve in the background, had again sacrificed herself absolutely to secure his comfort; she had resumed her black raiment, but now it was in sign of mourning, for her pleasure was turning to remorse. She was too often put to shame not to feel the weight of the chain, and her mother found her sunk in those moods of meditation into which visions of the future cast unhappy souls in a sort of torpor.

Madame Piedefer, by the advice of her spiritual director, was on the watch for the moment of exhaustion, which the priest told her would inevitably supervene, and then she pleaded in behalf of the children. She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically – in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common sense, the law of social proprieties, family interest – all the mixed elements which, since the Restoration, have been dignified by the name of Public Morals, out of sheer aversion to the name of the Catholic religion – where this is seconded by a sense of insults a little too offensive; when the fatigue of constant self-sacrifice has almost reached the point of exhaustion; and when, under these circumstances, a too cruel blow – one of those mean acts which a man never lets a woman know of unless he believes himself to be her assured master – puts the crowning touch to her revulsion and disenchantment, the moment has come for the intervention of the friend who undertakes the cure. Madame Piedefer had no great difficulty now in removing the film from her daughter’s eyes.